The Halloween season is upon us again!
This video features a complete play-through of Isle of Eras, which starts out as a search for a missing brother and quickly morphs into a weird cosmic horror/time travel game with giant monsters and nods to everything from Donnie Darko to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s amazingly elaborate for an indie game put together by a tiny team. The monster design is particularly impressive.
Available for PS4/5 and PC (but not, alas, Mac).
Holkins, Jerry and Mike Krahulik. Lexcalibur II: The Word in the Stone. Penny Arcade, 2021 (i.e., 2022). First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. More fantasy-gaming themed humorous poetry, and sequel to the first Lexcalibur.
I’ve been watching a fair number of YouTube videos of survival horror video game play-throughs over the last few months. One reason is that there aren’t a lot of those games available for the Mac, and another is that most seem less like games than an exercise in wandering around until you trigger jump scares, and where your actions have almost no effect on the game’s outcome.
But here’s a video of a van-life guy who decided to play a horror game alone, at night, in a creepy abandoned tunnel, which really takes things to the next level.
The game he’s playing is Pacify, which involves burning evil dolls to lay the ghost of a possessed girl. (Note: If your business plan involves making your daughter a vessel for demonic possession, I’d advise going into another line of work.) I checked to see if this game was available through Amazon, but I bet it’s one of those direct steam sort of things. But would you believe there’s a coloring book for it?
Brilliant on a whole lot of levels:
One funny thing: The video game obviously has Kirk 2.0 rather than the Shatner version.
I suspect that someday Shatner’s later commercials may come to be seen as one of his most substantial bodies of work…
Although I was a tiny bit disappointed by Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (I didn’t think the “Versus A.I.” single-player maps were as interesting as those in Brood War, and I was pissed that not all of the units were available for those, even if you weren’t playing online; damn it, I want my medic!), I’ll still pick this up. Pretty much everything Blizzard does is first rate.
And yes, you can preorder it.
Also: What the Hell?
Sounds like a bonus-ish, heroes-and-tower-defense type thing. Hmmm. I could really see myself getting sucked into that. Or would, if there were a way to avoid getting pwned by 17-year old Koreans…
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Written by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright (based on the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Brandon Routh, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza
I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World recently, and enjoyed what I thought I would enjoy about it, and was slightly less annoyed than I thought I would be annoyed by.
The setup (for those of you who didn’t watch a single film in theaters for the first half of 2010; the trailers were pretty ubiquitous) is that schluby Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, about which there shall be much more anon) splits time between sharing a tiny efficiency with his gay friend and playing bass with his band, Sex Bomb Omb, before he meets Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, and has to fight her seven evil exes to win her affections. Actually, Pilgrim doesn’t seem quite as schluby as the trailer makes him out to be, because he previously dated a hot girl named Envy (Brie Larson) who’s now a pop superstar, and when the movie opens, he’s just started dating a 17-year old Chinese schoolgirl “with the uniform and everything” (Ellen Wong). I should point out that his schoolgirl girlfriend is cute as a button, and looks absolutely nothing like Korean model Hwang Mi Hee in the following picture:
Scott Pilgrim's 17-year old Chinese schoolgirl girlfriend looks absolutely nothing like this
Hmmmm….where was I? Oh yeah. She looks nothing like that. Anyway, Pilgrim soon throws her over for Ramona, whose evil exes come out of the woodwork to fight him in flat-out-impossible video game battles in real life. All of it is good, over-the-top fun. If you’ve ever watched a Coyote-Roadrunner cartoon and gone “Hey, wait a minute, there’s no way he could have survived that long a drop,” well then, this movie isn’t for you. I’ve never read the graphic novel it’s based on, but I’m guessing it’s very true to it.
All the evil ex fights are filled with amusing and completely insane action. The best is probably the fight with Envy’s bassist (Brandon Routh), which is not only high on the splat-fu, but also combines the absurdity of veganism giving you supernatural powers with the even more amusing absurdity of Vegan Police stripping away those same powers (“Chicken isn’t vegan?”).
The movie has a lot going for it. Edgar Wright is a hell of a director. Hot Fuzz is one of the funniest (and most underrated) movies of the last ten years, and he’s a master at keeping the action moving along at a steady clip. That aesthetic serves him well in a movie designed for Generation Twitch, in which almost every aspect of the characters “real” life has been speed up and Nintendofied. Also, although I didn’t grow up Nintendo, I’ve played enough video games that the antirealism of it (when Pilgrim dispatches an evil ex, coins rain to the floor; when he gets in a particularly good blow, a voice announces “Combo!”) was amusing rather than annoying. And the acting is almost uniformly excellent. Except…except…
(sigh)
Except for the Michael Cera Problem.
There are many actors in Hollywood with a broad range of characters. Michael Cera is not one of them. While he was fine in Superbad, he wasn’t any better than McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) or the fat kid (Jonah Hill), and while he was also fine in Juno, he was probably the weakest link in an otherwise exceptionally strong cast. After watching both, I got the distinct impression that Cera’s range extended from teenage awkwardness to awkward teenageness. “Do you…want an actor…who can…pause………awkwardly?” He does the awkward pause thing even more frequently than Topher Grace does his “slight pause before the…eyerolling delivery” thing, and it’s considerably more annoying. There’s no reason he should have become this generation’s Hollywood go-to guy for male teenager leads over the likes of, say, Zombieland‘s Jesse Eisenberg, who looks a little bit like him. (Then again, since The Social Network is a serious Oscar contender and Scott Pilgrim wasn’t quite the hit the studio was hoping for, we all know who got the better end of that decision…)
In Juno he had a supporting role, but here he’s the center of the film. Fortunately, the nature of the film tends to accentuate his strengths and (generally) mask his weaknesses. You don’t notice his flatness of range nearly as much when everything around him is exploding. But he’s still the weakest actor here, except…
Except that his love interest, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, is if anything even flatter. Maybe this was a conscious decision on Edgar’s part, given the source material and the film’s overriding aesthetic. Maybe Ramona’s anime-hair colors are suppose to indicate that she’s every bit as useless and ornamental as the Princess in Donkey Kong. She’s a goal with a backstory, not a person.
So, can you enjoy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World if the actors playing the two central characters aren’t that great? I did. Your mileage may vary.
If you can buy into the cartoonish nature of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this is quite an enjoyable movie (though nowhere near as good as Hot Fuzz). If you’ve ever mastered the art of mashing six controller buttons at the same time to rip off an opponent’s head, this is the movie for you.
While I wasn’t looking, Blizzard announced the drop date for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. You know, the game I (and about ten million other people) have been waiting for for three years.
It may come as a shock to some readers that I play video games, since I haven’t talked about it much here. That’s because: A.) I’ve been busy, B.) I don’t have a dedicated gaming console, and C.) there hasn’t been a “must-have” title that runs on my home machine (a 24″ Core-2 duo iMac) for a while. (I avoid MMORPGs because I know what huge timesinks those would be, and I prefer not to see my writing productivity drop to zero.)
But the Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games are among the ones that I played fairly fervently in their previous installments. Also, Blizzard’s commitment to quality control means that they’ve avoided releasing half-backed “shove it out the door” games the way many other developers have.
So I expect that I will spend a significant portion of the summer killing Protoss and Zerg.
Casual gamers may not be aware of just how big StarCraft is in South Korea. How big? “Professional leagues competing in custom-built arenas for spectators” big.
There are two versions of the game being sold: a regular edition going for $59.99 (the standard price-point for A-list titles these days), and a collector’s edition. The collector’s edition has a pretty nifty array of special features:
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Collector’s Edition Features:
- The Art of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, a 176-page book featuring artwork from the game
- An exclusive 2GB USB flash drive replica of Jim Raynor’s dog tag, which comes preloaded with the original StarCraft and the StarCraft: Brood War expansion set
- A behind-the-scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, cinematics with director’s commentary, and more
- The official StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty soundtrack CD, containing 14 epic tracks from the game along with exclusive bonus tracks
- StarCraft comic book issue #0, a prequel to the comic series
- A World of Warcraft mini Thor in-game pet that can be applied to all World of Warcraft characters on a single Battle.net account
- Exclusive Battle.net downloadable content, including special portraits for your Battle.net profile, decals to customize your units in-game, and a visually unique version of the terran Thor unit
I can see that being tempting, especially if you play WoW. (I don’t; see above.) Unfortunately, the current price for the collector’s edition is more than a little breathtaking: $299. Now, I’ve bought more expensive books before, but not many (I’m guessing about 20 or so), and they tend to hold their value better than a collectible video game box. (I’m not an expert, but looking at eBay, I didn’t see any “collectors” editions selling for more than cover price, and certainly none over a few years old.)
And Blizzard: You might want to update that FAQ.