Author: Sonic Rob

Starting Something

Jim Sterling announces that anyone who thinks Left 4 Dead 2 is an expansion pack is a fucking idiot.

Yahtzee announces that Left 4 Dead 2 is “little more than an expansion pack that dreams of the stars”.

…

Foul-mouthed angry British nerd fight! Foul-mouthed angry British nerd fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!

With the obvious caveat that I played L4D exactly once and may be completely out of my element, the new game sounds like a proper sequel to me. Similar gameplay with new environments, characters, and weapons has been a staple way of progressing franchises that find success and don’t want to monkey with it since time immemorial. Off the top of my head: God of War, Resident Evil, Gears of War, Phoenix Wright, Armored Core, The Sims, and Tomb Raider all have stuck by the formulae that brought them their respective successes without too much complaint from the game-buying public that their ongoing installments were really more like expansion packs than true sequels. I’d honestly be really amused to see a discussion among the gaming community about what constitutes a “real” sequel versus an expansion pack; I suspect you’d see the sort of logical contortions that usually accompany arguments about whether a band is “real” punk rock.

I think Jim’s probably on to something when he says that gamers have been spoiled by Valve and their way of doing things. Up to this point, they’ve tended to eschew yearly punchings of their franchises’ udders in favor of long development times tided over (especially in the case of TF2) with relatively frequent free content updates. If the original Left 4 Dead had been published by Microsoft, Activision, or EA nobody would have batted an eye when a sequel came out a year later, and frankly I think they’d have been pretty shocked at how much seems to have been added.

Certainly nobody would be saying “You owe us all of the work you’ve done this year – for free – as thanks for the server load we’ve inflicted on you.” I’m a bit of a Valve fan, I’ll admit it; I like the games they make. I think they deserve more for their hard work than a double standard.

-ssr

M.U.L.E Remake Issued, Made Mandatory for All Corporate CEOs

ShackNews reports that remake of M.U.L.E has been launched by an indie dev with updated graphics. I’m absolutely flummoxed by this. M.U.L.E. was one of the best games I played back in the 8-bit era (I had the NES port); it wasn’t graphically special, but it was the first game I played with a functioning economy that was so well-modeled that you could actually collapse it by being too successful. If you completely cornered the market on a resource, all of which are required for survival, you could demand literally any price and the AI players would pay it. If you gouged them badly enough, the other characters would go bankrupt and the entire economy would go down the tubes – at which point there would be nobody left to buy your product and you’d fail too.

M.U.L.E. was one of the only multiplayer games I’ve played where players are competing with one another, but also have to work together at the same time to reach a shared goal – in this case economic survival. I’ll download the client and let you know how it is, but fans of build-em-up games like Civ and SimCity should have a look as well.

-ssr

[h/t Destructoid]

Death at a Funeral: The Bionic Movie

Frank Oz’ Death at a Funeral (a movie I only recall because of Naked Wash) is being remade by Neil Labute, a mere 2 years after its release. As unneccessary as most American remakes are, this one seems even worse. I get that there’s a language barrier that lots of US moviegoers just aren’t willing to hop over; subtitles are surely repellant to folks who head to the movies specifically because reading doesn’t entertain them. I get that there are occasionally cultural differences portrayed in films that can be confusing or even scary to people who are uncurious about the rest of the world or uninterested in seeing characters who aren’t exactly like themselves.

But for fuck’s sake, this is a remake of a movie that was filmed in English just two years ago. There are no subtitles to hold people back. I guess you could argue on the “cultural differences” front that the original was a bit British, but the best thing about British farces is the contrast between old-timey propriety and ludicrously inappropriate behavior. How can that dynamic possibly be improved by the addition of Martin Lawrence cringing “Ohhhhh Daddy!”?

Aboslutely the only interesting thing I can imagine coming out of attempting to remake this British black comedy as an African American slapstick farce is the possibility of exploring the Black community’s attitudes toward homosexuality and race mixing. And I’m not talking about some bullshit feel-good thing where everyone just suddenly decides hey it’s not such a big deal if Dad was gay and had a white lover. With the amount of homophobia pervading Black pop culture, trying to just breeze through the gay dad angle without a really violent confrontation would take this film beyond “unrealistic” to a realm more like “a dimension of existence so utterly foreign that you kinda can’t conceive of it anymore”; it’ll be like the moviegoing equivalent of what happens to Dave Bowman at the end of 2001.

Hit the jump to watch both trailers and compare for yourself.

Continue reading Death at a Funeral: The Bionic Movie

Film Century 1.5

I’d been worried that December would be a crunch, but we’re heading into that final stretch with a strong head of steam and only a couple more movies to thrash.

Dec. 4 Red Cliff – Impossibly luscious but with an odd quality of being not-quite-there, like a cinematic version of Megan Fox. 129/150
Dec. 5 The Nightmare Before Christmas – So what’s St. Patrick’s Town, some kind of green-beer brewery full of belligerent leprechauns? 130/150
Dec. 6 Identity – For all you budding Shyamalans out there, a quick primer on twists: a good twist recontextualizes past events in a way that’s suprising, entertaining, and still makes sense. 131/150
Dec. 7 Four Christmases – American studio filmmaking is based around the fact that the lower you aim, the more likely you are to hit your target. 132/150

Film Century 1.5

Nov. 25 The Andromeda Strain – It’s not said enough, so: thank you, Richard Nixon, for helping to create the phenomenally paranoid and anti-authoritarian era that spawned this and so many other screwed up 70’s movies. 124/150
Nov. 29 Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island – Watching these movies, you really get a sense of what might make people think that Dragonball is a good idea. 125/150
Nov. 29 Ninja Assassin – 300 II: Shurikens ‘n’ Shit. 126/150
Nov. 30 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid – With only one or two exceptions, this movie’s gag is pulled off entirely with editing, and there’s no way an old film school jerkoff like me can’t love that. 127/150
Dec. 3 Soylent Green – It’s kind of a shame that the more we as a culture love a twist ending, the more likely we are to ruin it for absolutely everyone forever by making it fucking famous. 128/150

Film Century 1.5

Nov. 11 Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto – Having been raised on a steady diet of Shogun and Seven Samurai, I’m gonna go ahead and pretend this is Toshiro Mifune’s autobiography. 118/150
Nov. 12 Bart Got a Room – I tried writing a script for a romantic comedy where the protagonist quickly realizes that his quirky best friend who is not-at-all-secretly in love with him would be a good match and they get together without any antics or confusion, but it turned out to only be 5 minutes long, so we get stuff like this. 119/150
Nov. 13 A Christmas Carol – Startlingly expressive in its quiet moments, it eventually drowns them out with needless roller coaster antics. 120/150
Nov. 15 Ghost World – Where do teenagers get the idea that being a sarcastic, judgmental bitchass makes them more grown up? 121/150
Nov. 17 Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple – Cranks the combat, chivalry, and cinematic misogyny from the first film up to 11. 122/150
Nov. 24 Barbarella – Say what you will about Altamont, but at least it put an end to this sort of thing. 123/150

RE5: Don’t You Feel Stupid Now Edition confirmed for March

See, this is why I don’t buy games right when they come out – because I’ll be kicking my own ass six months later when the version that’s actually complete is issued. You have to hand it to Capcom, though: they don’t fuck around like those amateurs at Bethesda. Sure, there’s a Game of the Year edition of FO3, but it’s really just the game with all of the DLC in one convenient package at a bargain price. RE5 Gold has all of the game’s launch content and DLC, but it also has an entire new prequel scenario with fan favorites Chris, Jill, and Wesker romping around in (Sweet Buddha Are We Back in) the Spenser Mansion. And the evil genius part? Reports are mixed, but it sounds like you can’t get the new scenario as DLC; you have to buy the entire package, RE Fanboy, and pay full price for all the download content you already would have bought if you hadn’t read this post.

In a beautiful and perfect world, this would come back to bite sales of the DLC (which will be on the disc that everyone’s buying in March anyway) in the ass. There will probably be a few hardcore fans who buy the DLC to have it as soon as possible, then nab the disc for the new story. I’ll probably get the big enchilada version when it comes out, but only because it’s a pretty good deal for someone who hasn’t actually spent anything on RE5 yet.

Between this sort of shit and making people pay on day 1 for “DLC” that’s already on the disc, Capcom is getting close to the edge of my tolerance for being soaked. I like Resident Evil, it massages the nostalgia centers of my gamer lobe, but they’re taking too much advantage of that with all this soaking. I’ve already been voting with my dollars, and now I’m looking askance at pretty much everything they put out.

[h/t Destructoid]

-ssr