Wild Target: Bill Nighy the non-science ghuy

I have somehow managed to once again put off watching Tucker and Dale vs. Evil another week. I’m not sure how I keep doing, but it’s troubling. I really want to see that movie. At any rate, I was having trouble sleeping the other night and decided to watch “just one more movie” to fall asleep. Such is the life of an insomniac. This particular film was Wild Target. It’s probably been in my instant queue for a year or so and I couldn’t tell you how it got there in the first place but here I was watching a British movie about an assassin chasing a con artist through London.

Realm of the Mad God: Hyperactive perma-death

In a world of pixel art and animation, only ONE god is powerful enough to have circles as eyes. Coming soon to a theater near you...

I am poor.  This is a fact that is immutable that I am stating for the record, and also so maybe you’ll understand just a little bit about why I play the games that I do.  Shelling out $60 for a game that will inevitably drop in price and be available for a fraction of that cost just seems silly.  Games under $6 have become a favorite of mine, mostly out of sheer penny-pinching force of will.  Some of these games end up being infinitely fun, and others…  well, most of the time, Elrood ends up laughing at how it seems that all I play these days are “terrible games.”

I like to think I’m not the only gamer with a tight fist kept on his budget, however, so over the past few months I’ve been trying to review cheaper games for all.  Realm of the Mad God, which popped on Steam not too long ago, hit all the right boxes.  One: Retro Nintendo-style graphics.  Two:  FREE TO PLAY.  FREE I TELL YOU.  FREE.

Maybe it’s not exactly…  a great game.  So what?  IT’S FREE YEAAAH!!

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

I was worried about Assassins Creed.  I started worrying about it when Brotherhood came out.  The first one was a mediocre game with an incredible story.  Two is where everything clicked, with the gameplay catching up to the story in terms of awesomeness.  I remember thinking after finishing the second, “Wow!  What could three possibly have in store!”.    As it turns out, it’s about three years later and I don’t have an answer to that question (although Ubisoft recently confirmed that yes, Assassins Creed 3 is coming.)  What Ubisoft thought after finishing the second was apparently “Hey this sells really well, let’s make these all the time!”  The continuing story of Ezio Auditore, now spread across three whole games, was risking getting old and boring.  Luckily for AC fans this turned out to not be the case.  I definitely believe it’s time to move on from Ezio, but Revelations is a fitting end to this chapter of the franchise. 

Faceplant 300! MILESTONES ON THE INTERNET!

Hello Faceplant readers, it’s that time again.  Where as we hit our 300th post, we stop writing articles that you know, MEAN something and instead turn to you.  The dear folks who happen to visit our site.  All of us have visions of people coming to Faceplant for the amazing prose we string together three times a week.  But, if this many articles has taught us anything, that is not to be.  How do most of you end up getting here?  Easy….really dumb search terms.  Seriously.  I remain amazed by some of the bizarre things people search for and I’m even more disturbed that the search engine gods somehow sent you HERE.  But there you are, cautiously wandering the internet, only looking for 300 faceplants.  What the hell does that mean?  I don’t know.  I’d like to think that the picture above represents that yes, life can hurt sometimes, but you CAN overcome.  But I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a sweet picture of a dude totally ramming his face into the ground that has a silly spelling of the word factory in the background.  So here we go into the world of the weird stuff people searched for on the internet to find us.  Onward!

The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom: You gotta use that head, you buttwit

Into ETERNITY. For pie.

As video games go, we don’t often get to play the part of the villain.  Sure, every now and then we’re given a dark character like, say, Nico Bellick from Grand Theft Auto 4 or Alex Mercer from Prototype who are so driven by revenge they’re willing to tell the world and everyone in it to get bent during their own personal crusade of wrath.  But how often do you get to play as a 1920s era dapper scoundrel who is obsessed with finding and eating all of the pies that ever existed?  The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom went on sale on Steam last week, and I’ve been slowly helping the lovable buttwit through level after level of pie consuming platforming.

The only problem here is that I’m apparently too dense to solve any puzzles ever.

The Descendants

The Oscars are almost here!  …..Yep, I don’t really care either.  Most of the nominees I haven’t seen.  I did manage to see The Descendants though, for a couple of reasons.  One is that I like a good drama.  It’s easy to blow things up, it’s somewhat easier to make people laugh, but for a drama to be good it has to capture your attention for every second of the movie.  Two is that I like George Clooney.  What do you want me to say, the dude has charisma and he can act.  This film did indeed capture my attention for the duration.  It has a fun location coupled with plot scenario that’s so strange that I couldn’t help but want to know how it plays out.  While I do not feel it’s a film that deserves to be seriously considered for Best Picture, it is most definitely a film that is worthy of your eyeballs.

Lilyhammer: Just when I thought I was out…

Netflix and I have had a rough relationship over the last six months. First she develops split personality disorder, then she says I never take her anywhere nice or buy her expensive presents, then finally she becomes nearly impossible to communicate with. But we’re committed to one another. She knows what I like and I know how to push most of her buttons. Now.

This fickle creature is taking a serious step towards legitimacy in the entertainment business. Like HBO did to cable, so Netflix is trying to do to the internet. She is trying to bring premium, exclusive, and more importantly, profitable programming to the internet, and her first endeavor, Lilyhammer, is a spiritual spin-off of HBO’s long-time bread-winner The Sopranos.

Super Mario DS: A remake to remind you of your failures

BEST BUDS

Here’s a little known fact about my younger days: I went through a bit of a rocky patch in my gaming ability around the same time that Nintendo 64 was released, which inevitably unleashed 3D gaming upon a poor, 2D-centric world.  At the time when Mario 64 was released, I was feeling pretty good about myself.  I had chased Dr. Robotnic out of town with Sonic and Tails, and Elrood and I were taking the fight to some jerkface aliens in Contra Hard Corps.  But, the moment Mario sprung that third dimension on me without warning, it felt like any ability I might once have had was suddenly and horribly leeched out of me by some cartoony aliens who…  you know what?  No.  I’m not going to make a Space Jam reference.  You’re welcome.

Mario 64 is one of my first failures as a gamer.  I was bad at it.  I was so incredibly bad at it.  So when Nintendo re-released it for DS as the creatively named Super Mario DS, I picked it up. Because apparently it wasn’t embarrassing enough the first time.

Time Gentlemen, Please!: An adventurer’s guide for the distinguished gentleman

Mistakes have been made. I am man enough to admit that.

The title of this game?  It’s false.  Also, instead of reviewing one game, I’m actually reviewing two, since Ben There Dan That is a direct precursor to the game Time Gentlemen, Please!, and is required gaming if you want to have any idea what is going on in the story.  Actually, that’s not strictly true.  The main characters give you a brief run down of what they’re doing and why at the beginning of Time Gentlemen, Please!, though honestly it enhances the experience if you’ve been there through it all.

Ben There Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please! are both adventure games in the same vein of Sam and Max and Monkey Island.  That is, they are incredibly funny point and click adventures with an increasingly bizarre plot, involving characters that can usually get a chuckle out of you with their antics.  Actually, when I was talking about this article with Elrood not more than like twenty minutes ago, I told him these games were like playing Sam and Max, if there were a lot of dick jokes in Sam and Max.

Bastion

I was tempted to just act like a narrator for this entire article.  Heck, Tophat told me too, although I think that was a joke.  Actually it probably wasn’t because Tophat is insane.  Bastion has a narrator! He is the hook of the game, the idea of having a dude say everything you do on-screen somehow makes it more interesting.  It’s an interesting premise for sure but it’s not one that sold me.  When Bastion went on sale a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it a shot, weird narrator and all.  It turns out that the narrator isn’t anything like I thought he would be.  Bastion at its core is an action RPG, but the real heart of the game is the atmosphere and cryptic story.  The narrator?  He’s important, but he is not a gimmick.  Neither is the game.  It’s the real deal, kid.