22 results for "classic game club"
This used to be a video. I would ask my $10 or more Patreon supporters to request reviews. Then I would sit in front of a video camera, read the requests, offer a counter-recommendation for each of them, and draw a winner. But my ability to do video is limited these days, so as you can see, this is not a video.
On one hand, that’s a shame, because I liked to think of these as informal conversations. “Hey, you should check this out and write about it,” you would say, and I would reply, “You know, that makes me think you might be interested in this other thing.” I guess they’re still informal conversations, but written. On the other hand, perhaps written is better. Perhaps written is more accessible to people who wouldn’t watch a half hour of some dude holding forth in front of a camera. Perhaps written means the reader can just skim along until something catches his eye.
At any rate, here are the review requests from my $10 and up Patreon supporters in July. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do. I like to think of them as lists of the cool things Quarter to Three’s supporters are into. As you’ll see, we’re an eclectic bunch. I learn a lot from these.
In case it’s not clear from the formatting, everything after the Patreon supporter’s name is what he or she has written, and then everything after the word “counter-recommendation” is my reply. There will be a video drawing of the winner posted tomorrow, followed by a review posted within 30 days. And shortly thereafter, we’ll do it all over again!
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Although the 1977 horror movie The Car belongs in the killer car genre, the template was Jaws. Move Amity from a coastal town into the desert. Change the shark to a demonic driverless car. Otherwise, pretty much everything else is the same. A small-town sheriff, mysterious casualties, Fourth of July celebrations interrupted by a public attack, an old man with unique insight enlisted for a third act hunt, and everything resolved by an explosion. The Car ended with the car vanquished. Or did it? The credits played over footage of the car driving around a city. Hmm. So it wasn’t buried forever in a desert canyon?
That’s where I come in.
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Republican Congressman Mike Bost invoked something called “struggle sessions” last month. While talking to journalists, he explained why he wasn’t holding any town hall meetings, which have provided angry constituents a forum to make themselves heard by their Republican representatives. Bost felt holding such a meeting wasn’t a good use of his time. He compared it to “the cleansing that the Orientals used to do where you’d put one person out in front and 900 people yell at them.” That’s how I learned about “struggle sessions”, a form of public humiliation used in Communist Russia and China. Bost later apologized for using the word “Oriental”, but not for shirking his duty as a representative.
The Three-Body Problem, an award-winning “Oriental” science fiction novel, begins with a struggle session during China’s Cultural Revolution. It is the catalyst for everything that happens in the book, which might include the end of the world. It is also an example of the novel’s uniquely Chinese cultural identity.
You’d never know from its beginnings that despite this identity, The Three-Body Problem is literally universal. Continue reading →
Tomb Raider, one of the best games of this generation and a reboot every bit as exciting as Arkham Asylum or Skyfall, is a dire threat to all wallets. The game diary starts here. It’s one of the few games I’ve ever 100%ed and now that it’s over for me — the multiplayer is pretty much a non-issue — I look forward to vicariously re-enjoying it through your comments.
I’m not sure what to make of Sim City yet. It’s clearly taking a page from the Anno 2070 book, which is a great book to take pages from. But for better and worse, it leans heavily on EA’s forced social gaming shenanigans by presenting tiny pocket cities that rely on other nearby pocket cities, either your own or those of other players. Is this really the best way to do a city builder? Stay tuned.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — Mirror of Fate can’t make up its mind about whether to use colons or dashes, but it sure knows how to use the Nintendo 3DS for some classic Castlevania. Here’s one of those rare 3DS games where I really like keeping that 3D slider dialed all the way up. And it doesn’t just look great. I wasn’t sure what Konami and developer Mercury Steam were doing with the previous Lords of Shadow other than God of Warring it up. But this handheld version I can really get into for how it feels like a traditional Castlevania with latter day production values. I like the 2D movement (ironic!), the relatively simple combat, and the exploration. Now this is more like it!
The University add-on for The Sims 2 is a gold standards for add-ons. It inserted a new age stage between children and adults, creating in that new stage a rich playful world of college life. Can University Life do the same for The Sims 3, which is already piled high with playful add-on content? Will college be lost in the shuffle with spellcasting, winter wonderlands, and nightclubbing?
Speaking of nightclubbing, the Citadel add-on for Mass Effect 3 is a single-player adventure that gives Commander Shepherd more adventuring on everyone’s favorite space station MacGuffin.
Leisure reading about history makes me want to play wargames. This is what makes wargamers “wargamers,” as has been definitively proven in at least one scholarly journal article somewhere. I’m sure of it. Michael Korda’s With Wings Like Eagles, a fast-reading, intelligent history of the Battle of Britain published in 2009, got me thinking that I’d like to, you know, play some kind of Battle of Britain simulation. That’s how it always works. But which one? SPI’s Battle Over Britain? Haha, no. That’s what you think this is, right? Another excuse to explain why boardgames are better than computer wargames, and that everything totally sucks in computer game land? I’m sorry if I seem that predictable. But I did really want to get historically involved with the subject matter in some way, and thanks to my previous search through boxes of old games looking for Rails Across America, I knew exactly where my old Talonsoft games were. So pulling out Gary Grigsby’s Battle of Britain* wasn’t hard.
After the jump, what my RPG experience over Europe taught me about the Battle of Britain Continue reading →
The only thing consistent about Rockstar’s games is that they’re wildly inconsistent. There’s something manic about the company’s swings from excellence to amateurish, from smart to clumsy, from transcendent to boorish, often in the same game. Red Dead Redemption, for instance, is a sprawling saga of uneven brilliance that I wouldn’t dream of commenting on without acknowledging that the conclusion is very nearly one of the most brilliant conclusions ever to grace a videogame, except for the fact that it turns out it isn’t at all. Grand Theft Auto IV is a collapsing triumph of storytelling, presenting one of the most vividly realized videogame characters before dropping him into some low-rent goombah yarn and then abandoning him entirely for two middling add-ons, presumably because Rockstar is too arrogant to concede the importance of their fantastic voice actors. San Andreas was a stunning technical achievement undermined by an absurd Bond in the Hood endgame. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is one of the most amazing virtual cities ever created and then hidden away in a goofy arcade racing game that no one played because it didn’t have the marketing confidence that went into, say, Electronic Arts’ lousy Need for Speed franchise. As for that ping pong game, well, who ever even played that thing, much less realized it was a Rockstar game? Then there’s Bully, which is a work of unadulterated genius.
So when LA Noire arrived at 9am this morning, I greeted it with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. And now, having spent an entire Monday with it, I’m ready to pronounce it…
After the jump, I’ll finish that sentence Continue reading →
Take a beautiful woman. A classically beautiful woman, not some latter day slattern. Convince her to stretch out on a big fluffy bed. Nothing raunchy. Something tasteful enough to paint on the nose of a bomber. Now send her home. Carefully analyze the topography of the bed where she has just lain. Calculate a track over that topography. Now you have the Glendale Raceway.
After the jump, Shift 2’s greatest track Continue reading →
