Saturday!
If you’re lucky enough to have watched Mad Max: Fury Road in the theaters this summer (and if you aren’t, it’s still in the dollar theaters! 98% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes!), you may have thought at one point “Huh. It’s like it’s some kind of video game movie.”
The garish characters, the utilitarian dialog, the gorgeous set pieces, the driving sections, the shooting sections, THE EXPLOSIONS!!!!
Man, that was a good movie.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. The video game.
They’re making one.
This is, in itself, no big surprise. Doritos releases a new “Bonito Doritos!” flavor and it comes with a free “video game” ap download where you drive a car over Bonito Doritos* so hearing that any other multi-million dollar franchise is coming out with a game is not particularly noteworthy.
But then I heard that the people who are making Mad Max: The Vidya Game are also the people who made Just Cause 2.
If you remember Just Cause 2, you remember a video game that had a sprawling world filled with all sorts of garish characters, utilitarian dialog, gorgeous set pieces, driving sections, shooting sections, and explosions. Also: Parachutes.
Now, it’s not a game where you would really have the option of just re-skinning everything, doing a find/replace on all of the names, and painting the environment with all of the colors on the color palate that exist between russet and taupe… but it is a game that does inspire confidence that, maybe, the game is not intended to be one of the pieces of birdshot shovelware as part of a media synergy shotgun blast.
As such, I am tentatively considering being cautiously optimistic about it.
So… what are you playing?
*Note: I do not know whether there is an ap related to Bonito Doritos** where you drive a car over them but, seriously, that is the sort of thing that happens these days.
** I am not making Bonito Doritos up. They merely aren’t available in the US.***
*** Yet.
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
And see, here I would have said that the selling point of the movie was that it felt like a MOVIE, and NOT like a video game, which is par for the course in most action movies today.
(I started, but did not finish, a viewing of the Road Warrior Blu-Ray. It looked sharp, but I didn’t recall the score being so intrusive. I also fear… I may actually like Fury Road better. If this turns out to be true, my whole world may be rocked).Report
At the behest of my oldest surviving friend(*) I finally took the plunge into the XCOM “Long War” mod. It’s Exactly What It Says On The Tin – the rules are modified so that (1) you don’t have to be perfect in the Earth-level metagame and aren’t punished for evolving your own strategy rather than reading it from a website, (2) a number of the irritations caused by engine limitations in the tactical game have workarounds.
(*) Quote is from “Silverado”, the only 80s Western that tried to reconstruct the genre while everyone else was gleefully deconstructing. And how can you complain about John Cleese as the Sheriff of an Old West town?Report
I am looking forward to Xcom 2.Report
I love long war despite the fact that I’ll probably never beat it. My latest run is just about over as I’m now having trouble keeping my experienced soldiers alive, but I survived long enough to know that I love Gauss weapons.Report
A friend of mine is reading Harry Potter for work. At least it’s not Twilight…Report
I started Torchlight 2. It’s fun, so far, but I’m hoping either the story will get better, or the gameplay will, or that it’ll be a damn short game, because as it stands, I’ll start to lose interest at some point before the end.Report