“What did you do with the body?” Horror filmmaker Eli Roth is presenting this IFC Midnight release of The Stranger, an indie film from Uruguayan filmmaker Guillermo Amoedo. The horror-thriller story follows a mysterious man who ends up in a small town to find his wife but discovers that it seems to be overtaken by the supernatural, or something like that. The cast includes Cristobal Tapia Montt, Ariel Levy, Nicolas Duran, Lorenza Izzo and Aaron Burns. This wasn’t one of the films with lots of buzz at Fantastic Fest where it first premiered last year, but if horror (or genre films) is your jam, you might want to check it out. Beware the blood. ›››
“No one sees the world the same way you do.” Wow! Universal has debuted the first trailer for the Steve Jobs movie, directed by Danny Boyle, starring Michael Fassbender as Jobs, and it’s quite something to behold. In fact, if you’re been anxiously awaiting this, you might as well hold your breath – it’s only about 60 seconds long. Remember, this is the film with the Aaron Sorkin screenplay, supposedly taking place in 3 distinct scenes, one of them being the iPod unveiling which I believe this cheering moment might be from. Fassbender plays Steve Jobs and we get a good look at him. The cast includes Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Katherine Waterston and Jeff Daniels. I’m really, really looking forward to this – great first look so far. ›››
Here’s Jonny! Oh so much fun. We’ve featured plenty of YouTube video versions of movies turned into 8-bitvideo games, but how about one you can actually play? Game maker/critic Pippin Barr has created a tiny browser game called Let’s Play: The Shining, which is kind of like an 8-bit version of Kubrick’s The Shining. He takes you through various scenes of the movie and you get to play through most of it (the maze, the hotel, riding the tricycle) complete with retro sound effects. It’s pretty rad. It’s just an experiment and fan-made game creation, but it is unique and worth a quick play, especially if you’re a big fan of the movie. ›››
“Do yourself a favor and pretend to care!” As usual, the Alamo Drafthouse often whips up new PSA videos about theater etiquette (no talking, no texting!) when the stars roll into town to promote a new release. This time it’s Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller, but most of all, it’s badass Australian actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, who plays Immortan Joe, telling you to “shut your face” and have a lovely day at the movies. Keays-Byrne is the same actor who played bad guy “Toecutter” in the original 1979 Mad Max, also directed by George Miller, and he’s kind of amazing in this clip below. I’m glad he seems to be having so much fun promoting this. Nothing like combining old & new Mad Max, plus theater etiquette reminders, in one video. ›››
Gather round for your first look at a new film starring Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams. Out of Cannes, THR has posted the first three photos from Manchester-by-the Sea, the latest feature written & directed by Kenneth Lonergan about a man who returns to his small Massachusetts hometown to deal with both his estranged wife and the consequences of his brother’s death. Casey Affleck plays the lead, while Michelle Williams plays his estranged wife, and the cast includes Kyle Chandler (seen in one of the photos). This is a very early tease as they’re still shooting and looking to drum up sales buzz. We’ll keep an eye out for it. ›››
2K and Firaxis Games on Monday announced the first expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth. Called Rising Tide, the $30 expansion adds new biomes, introduces more diplomatic options, welcomes new factions, and more. The add-on launches this fall for PC and you can read our new preview right here.
As its name suggests, Rising Tide lets players colonize the ocean, while introducing new aquatic gameplay and alien beasts to take on. 2K and Firaxis also promise an “overhauled diplomacy system,” while a new Artifact System will allow players to collect and combine alien relics.
One of the new factions is the Al Falah, which Firaxis describes as a “group of nomad explorers descended from wealthy and resilient Middle Eastern states.” Another new system will allow players to invest in multiple Affinities as part of their effort to unlock hybrid Affinity units, a first for the series.
As for the worlds players will explore, one is the Primordial world. Firaxis describes this place as an “untamed biome rife with volcanic activity and indicative of a chaotic landscape still forming in the new world.”
“It’s not just moving things out to the water; it’s not just blue terrain,” co-lead designer David McDonough told GameSpot about Rising Tide’s new gameplay features. “We really changed some of the very fundamental ways in which you build cities, capture territory, develop, and grow, so that if you play at sea, you have a whole different strategic landscape.”
Rising Tide is also coming to Mac and Linux, by way of ports from Aspyr. For lots more on Rising Tide, check out GameSpot’s new preview and some images in the gallery below.
Video games have offered us some compelling visions of the future of human habitation. Some seem idyllic, like the glistening arcologies of SimCity 2000. Others imagine a darker fate, like the makeshift subway settlements of Metro 2033. But perhaps the most intriguing have been those that look to that which covers the majority of our planet’s surface for inspiration. The underwater metropolis of Rapture captured our imaginations in BioShock, and now, Civilization: Beyond Earth is preparing to challenge our intellect by asking: “What if you could build cities on water?”
The Rising Tide is the first expansion for Beyond Earth and the first time in the long history of Civilization that water tiles will present the same opportunities as land tiles. Well, not exactly the same. As Co-Lead Designer of Beyond Earth, David McDonough, put it during a recent phone interview, “It’s not just moving things out to the water; it’s not just blue terrain. We really changed some of the very fundamental ways in which you build cities, capture territory, develop, and grow, so that if you play at sea, you have a whole different strategic landscape.”
Nice try, alien fish demons. We’ve seen Jaws and we’re not going out like that.
He then went on describe the litany of core Civilization elements that they marshaled to create “a whole catalog of unique gameplay.” Resources, tile improvements, wonders, units, aliens, and territorial control all have to be adapted to make water gameplay viable. You can get a sense of how water cities will start out from the screenshot above, which shows a few new friendly and alien unit types squaring off in battle. And note the new resources that are visible below the surface of the water; though there will be important features at surface level, in shallow water, and in the deeps, McDonough confirmed that “oceanic gameplay is happening on one seamless layer.” There’s to be no deep sea counterpart to the orbital layer, it seems, but how depth will affect different units and resources remains to be seen.
Historically in the Civilization series, bodies of water have served as barriers to development–areas to be explored, traversed, and patrolled militarily, but not controlled outright. From the screenshot above, it seems that aquatic cities will be able to exert areas of control similar to those of terrestrial cities, but there may be new systems in play as well.
“We’re playing with the idea that the ocean is a fundamentally different space, where we build structures differently and we move differently, and ownership and control mean a little bit of a different thing. [Control is] sort of like an area of force that you need to project, rather than staking a claim, fortifying, and digging in.” Jockeying for geographical position is an important strategy in early-game Civ, whether you’re racing to research the right tech to beat your opponents to new islands, or parking a unit on a narrow isthmus to shut off a whole continent from unwelcome explorers. Without these kinds of bounds, won’t oceanic settlement just be a frantic free-for-all land grab?
The strategic richness of terrain is something the developers at Firaxis are keenly aware of, and they are working to make sure that Rising Tide’s oceans present a similar density of opportunities and obstacles. Will there be such a thing as impassable water tiles? What will replace roads and magrails as city connectors? Can you land your first outpost at sea? Will resource-agnostic improvements like nodes, domes, and academies have aquatic equivalents? My mind reels with all the strategic implications of expanding to water, but Firaxis is keeping its cards close to the chest for now and McDonough assured me that “just about everything has been slightly moved, in some cases significantly moved, in order to account for water gameplay.”
The continental shelf extends only so far, and then, the deep.
I guess that would have to be true for any in-game system connected with developing cities and moving units around, but what about that most detached and ephemeral of Civilization systems, diplomacy? Has that been tweaked in any way? In the words of producer Andrew Frederiksen, “I think tweaked would undersell it. Diplomacy has been, for lack of a better term, completely ripped out and rebuilt from the ground up.” So, that’s a yes, then.
The goal, Frederiksen elaborates, is to make diplomacy a more active part of the Civ experience. To that end, The Rising Tide will introduce traits, dynamic descriptors of a given leader’s mindset that will change as they adapt to the evolving geopolitical situation. “You might have a leader who has a trait that favors diplomacy and energy, and then, as they move on, they get backed into a corner, so they start swapping out their traits to become more aggressive and more militaristic.”
From Frederiksen’s description, traits seem like a more flexible version of policies from Civilization V. Where the cost of policies and the fact that only a few policy trees were mutually exclusive often discouraged switching them mid-game, traits are meant to be managed more actively. Like policies, they will come with unique perks and benefits for your civilization, but they will also fuel different kinds of diplomatic interactions. The development team wants to extend your diplomatic dealing beyond war, peace, and trade agreements, and having complementary traits will be a big factor in determining your options with a given leader. What these traits might be, how you manage them, what kind of benefits you’ll see, and how they will interact with each other all remain to be seen.
The Rising Tide will also herald the arrival of four new factions; the only leader announced thus far is Arshia Kishk, head of the Al Falah (pictured at right). As Beyond Earth’s story tells it, the Middle East was mostly depopulated after The Great Mistake. In the years that followed, a tenacious group of resilient survivors held on and refused to desert their homeland. When they finally managed to fund a spaceship send forth colonists, it wasn’t the cryogenic variety that most other civilizations sent. It was a generation ship, meaning that those who boarded it knew they would never see their destination, and those who touch down at the end of the journey have never set foot on a planet before. The three other factions will apparently have similarly fraught origin stories, and each one of them will bring disruptive new strategies into play.
There are a few other changes that The Rising Tide is bringing to Beyond Earth, though details on them are fairly scant at this point. In order to further enrich and incentivize the exploration processes, you will now be able to find artifacts through resource pods, expeditions, and other means. Whether it’s alien in origin or a relic from Old Earth, each artifact will have its own story and its own possibilities. You could keep it as is or combine it into a set, provided you find the others needed, and the rewards might include new perks or new buildings.
Toasty.
Along with the new units developed to accomodate aquatic and amphibious gameplay will be new hybrid units that require a blend of different affinity levels to unlock. Spreading your affinity points around may keep you from unlocking the highest level perks and units until very late in the game, but if these new hybrids are powerful in the mid-game, perhaps it’ll be a more viable strategy to play the field. And finally, two new biomes are on their way, including the primordial world pictured above. With so much volcanic activity, I asked McDonough if the environment was going to pose a threat beyond that of native aliens and miasma clouds. He said only that they are “in the process of making each biome more unique, and will share more soon.”
There are certainly more questions to be resolved, but even what’s been shared so far seems to portend a serious shift in the Beyond Earth landscape. In a panel during the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this year, McDonough and the other Co-Lead Designer, Will Miller, lamented that they hadn’t been bolder in their divergence from the core Civilization formula. The oceanic gameplay of The Rising Tide holds the promise of radically changing the way Beyond Earth plays when it is released in fall of this year, and hopefully we’ll get a clearer sense of how it all works in a few weeks at E3.
Bringing more JRPGs to Xbox One is a popular topic on the Xbox Feedback site, attracting more than 3,500 votes. For his part, Spencer said in previous interviews that Japan is a “soulful” place for games, and one that is “critical” for Microsoft to support.
With just a matter of hours to go before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s release, developer CD Projekt Red has released the official patch notes for the open-world RPG’s day-one update.
There are also changes to quests, improvements to AI, and UI optimizations, among other things. What’s more, the Xbox One edition will be updated to support dynamic 1080p scaling.
The full Witcher 3 day-one patch notes are printed below, via wccftech.com.
The Witcher 3’s official release date is May 19. The game unlocks at 1 AM CET tomorrow, which actually is 4 PM PDT / 7 PM EDT today, May 18.
The creators of HonorBuddy, a popular World of Warcraft bot that was recently detected by Blizzard, has admitted defeat and apologised to its users.
Posting on the official Honorbuddy forum, staff member “Bossland” reminded users of the risk associated with using bots in Blizzard’s MMO.
“It seems like Honorbuddy was detected, we are not sure, but looking at the BAN THREADS, we think that its the most likely option at the moment,” said Bossland.
“We are sorry for all your lost WOW Accounts, hopefully you can use them again after the 6 month ban is lifted. I have read here in the forums a bit, a lot of the accounts were 10 years old. This is a pity. We always say, do not use your valuable accounts as the risk is always there.”
Bossland also reminded users of Glider, another popular bot that suffered a similar fate, and emphasised that the team hadn’t considered its bot immune to being caught in Blizzard’s detection net.
“Some of us seem to forget the Gilder times. With Glider you knew that there where 2 software detections a year, it just happened,” Bossland continued.
“With Honorbuddy you thought that we are unbeatable, [but] we never thought that, we’ve succeeded since 2010 – HonorBuddy had not a single software detection. It seems there is one now.”
Currently, the company hasn’t reflected the bot’s vulnerabilities on the front of its website and, it seems, HonorBuddy can still be purchased. By using it, players can automate the process of running around collecting honour in PvP.
Blizzard issued temporary bans to a large number of World of Warcraft bot users on May 14, and HonorBuddy users were one of the main groups affected.
“We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in World of Warcraft,” said Blizzard.
“[We] will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use. Cheating of any form will not be tolerated.”
