Legendary Hollywood producer Benjamin Melniker, who helped bring Batman to the realm of movies, has passed away at the age of 104.
The news was shared in a Facebook post from Melniker’s long time collaborator Michael E. Uslan.
“It is with such sadness that I tell you of the passing of my Batman partner, the legendary Benjamin Melniker (1913-2018),” he wrote.
“‘Legendary’ is the only word capable of describing the man who started work at MGM in late 1939 and came to be known as ‘The MGM Lion’ for his forcefulness in negotiating the deals for the studio while building his reputation for integrity at the same time,” Uslan wrote. “It was Ben who taught me, ‘The only thing you get to take with you when you die AND leave behind is your good name.'”
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine defies any sort of comparison to other games. You’re tasked with collecting stories and building up folklore across Dust Bowl America, wandering across the land and briefly involving yourself in other people’s lives. You’re collecting tales so that you can share them with other wanderers who are moving across the country and eventually appease an anthropomorphic Dire Wolf (played, amazingly, by Sting) who, in the game’s opening cutscene, beats you in a card game and sets you to work collecting these folk stories as payment for the debt you now owe. It’s a wholly unique premise for a game, but not necessarily one that reaches its full potential.
You guide a skeleton avatar around the map, moving between states by foot, by train, or by hitchhiking, and collect stories when you encounter them. These are folktales by and large: animals will talk to you, children will be all-knowing (and often touched by evil in some way), you’ll meet ghosts and dying men and people capable of impossible feats. Some will stick with you, offering creepy imagery or neat twists, and others will fade from your memory soon after you hear them, but the hit-to-miss ratio of the 219 stories on offer is pretty high.
The tales you collect fit into one of four basic descriptors: hopeful, tragic, funny, or adventurous. These categories become important as you work your way through the game’s main objective–uncovering the life stories of various fellow wanderers. Campfires around the map house other travelers who will exchange their own life stories for some of your collected tales. The characters cover a spectrum of gender, race, sexuality, and your goal is to visit each person as they move between campfires, telling them stories they like, and eventually encounter their “true” selves, having learned everything you can about them. The real reward isn’t so much the folktales themselves as the artwork of these final encounters–seeing each figure twist into an artistic representation of their own character’s struggles or values is a highlight.
Once you’ve spread your tales among these campfires, they start to mutate, and you’ll begin to encounter retellings of your tales that add or change details as you travel. Telling someone who asks for a scary tale about a demon you met might end in you being chastised for telling a “cheerful” story, while a seemingly hopeful tale about a journalist who always sees the bright side is classified as funny, but as these stories evolve, they become more cheerful and funny, respectively. These versions will have a more significant impact on your future campfire visits and will make it easier to appease wanderers and unlock the next chapter in their story. It can also cause the tale’s classification–which you have to decipher–clearer, which is helpful, because it’s frequently hard to tell and remember.
After a few hours you get into a good rhythm of uncovering and sharing stories, and the way the game works eventually becomes clear (it’s light on instruction). But there’s a problem here–you soon realize that wandering the map, listening to stories, and slowly heading towards the next destination is really all there is to do, and with no satisfying overarching narrative to keep you going, the excitement of the process quickly begins to diminish. The game opens by spreading North America out in front of you to explore, and suddenly starts to look incredibly narrow as it becomes clear that you’re going to spend the rest of the game just clicking through other people’s stories and slowly trudging between campfires.
It doesn’t help that getting around the map can be an extremely time-consuming process. Your avatar walks slowly–you can speed up by whistling a song, but this involves a “press direction keys in order” mini-game that ultimately feels like busywork. You can hitchhike, but roads only go one way, and the controls for hitching a ride are inconsistent–sometimes I could hail down a car, while other times my avatar refused to stick its thumb out. Rivers will slow you down, and using trains requires either money or hopping on one without paying. Doing the latter usually ends with you getting injured and dying, and although death isn’t a big deal here, it will reset you to the last town you visited, which usually undoes the train ride’s progress.
Once you’ve heard half the game’s stories, you start to see where each tale is going from the first paragraph, and it’s much easier to find and identify sad or scary stories than hopeful or adventurous ones. When you’ve had a few dozen tales retold and figure out which classification they fit into, you don’t really need to worry about gathering more, either. You can rely on the same handful of tales, both because they’re the easiest to remember the details of and because the game doesn’t really incentivize diversifying your repertoire, especially since the stores you accumulate at campfires act as wildcards during future encounters. If you’re asked for a tragic story, for instance, selecting any of the tales told by someone you encountered at another campfire will make you tell that story while “focusing on the tragic parts.” I cleared almost every final encounter by just telling stories from other wanderers, and you don’t get to experience this retelling–you just select the option from the menu and get a brief reaction in response.
Over time, even the best parts of the game start to grate. Ryan Ike’s soundtrack, which mixes elements of jazz, bluegrass, and folk music, is excellent, and a great companion for the first few hours. But when you’re engaged in yet another long trek across the plains, it’s hard to resist switching over to your own music. By the end, I was rushing through the stories of the remaining campfires because I just wanted to see what happened when I’d collected them all, and I was skipping over new stories because it had become difficult to keep caring about them.
I spent 12 hours working my way around the America of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, but after the first six hours I felt like I had gotten everything I wanted out of the game. Most of the rest of the time was spent checking the map to figure out where the next campfire was, holding W to move forward, and then clicking through dialog (all of it brilliantly voice-acted, but patience only stretches so far) until I was able to appease the Wolf.
If the basic premise of gathering folk stories across a version of 1930s America strongly appeals to you, then Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is worth a look, but it’s probably not worth finishing. Perhaps one day I’ll feel the urge to jump back in and encounter a few more tales, but Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, for all its interesting ideas and unique elements, outstays its welcome.
Since its release one year ago, Horizon Zero Dawn has sold over 7.6 million copies, and is the “most successful new first-party franchise” to launch on PlayStation 4.
“We are incredibly grateful that Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds have been received so positively by so many gamers,” said Shawn Layden, Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios, “and it is a testament to the fantastic work of the entire team at Guerrilla.
“The combination of beautiful story-telling and great characters, with excellent gameplay mechanics, has resonated well with fans and led to this exceptional sales milestone.”
Other brand new, PS4-exclusive franchises have included Until Dawn, FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, The Order: 1886 and the long-awaited The Last Guardian (although maybe don’t hold your breath for a sequel to that one).
H1Z1 has been in early access on Steam since 2015, but the game officially releases with version 1.0 today, February 28. Originally, H1Z1 was a survival game with a separate battle royale mode, but was eventually split the two games in 2016 between Just Survive (survival) and King of the Kill (battle royale). However, battle royale spawned a huge following and the mode was rebranded as just H1Z1, which is now out of early access.
One of the more notable features is the all-new Auto Royale mode; a twist on traditional battle royale that sticks a team of four players into a vehicle against up to 29 other teams (limit of 120 players total). Players cannot leave the vehicle and must take down enemy teams by shooting out of the car while one person drives. The result is a hectic car combat game in the normal H1Z1 map, but with power-ups, weapon pick-ups, and high-flying ramps scattered across the map. Think of it as Twisted Metal meets team-based battle royale.
Teams choose between an armored vehicle (ARV) or a more nimble sedan at the start, and then drive across the map to find color-coded pick ups for fuel, land mines, smoke screens, oil slicks, and weapons (like the brand new light machine gun) that spice up the fight. Just like battle royale, this mode features an ever-shrinking circle that forces players into smaller zones. Developer Daybreak Games stated that it tweaked the map so a few more objects and structures are easier to drive through which helps prevent vehicles from getting stuck. In addition, ramps provide a way to jump between buildings and land atop structures for even more power-ups.
Although Auto Royale is a separate queue in H1Z1, the car combat mode is currently in beta and will be tweaked based on community feedback, according to Daybreak. With the standard battle royale game officially released, however, comes a slew of gameplay tweaks and quality-of-life improvements. One new feature in the base game is tactical deployment, which lets players choose where to parachute in at the start in addition to providing a heat map that gives players an idea of where others chose to spawn. Airdrops have also increased in frequency and will contain more valuable loot. There’s a new in-game scoring algorithm to reward aggressive play-styles, not just top 10 match placements, which wraps into the start of the first in-game competitive season for H1Z1.
In a move that nobody was quite expecting, Square Enix has revealed a Sims 4 Costume pack for the upcoming Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition.
Those who buy the Windows version of the game from EA’s Origin Store before May 1 will receive the pack.
A trailer (below) showcases male and female variants of Llama and Plumbob superheroes firing crossbows and adeptly using the Armiger, whilst also enjoying some leisure time in Lestallum.
Players with the pack will be able to use the cosmetics in both the single-player campaign and the multiplayer expansion Comrades, which allows full character customization.
In return, Sims 4 players will be able to dress their avatars in a “crowned prince Noctis Lucis Caelum outfit”, available from March 8.
The Blackout Club is a cooperative horror game from Question, a studio built by industry veterans whose work includes BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite, and Dishonored.
The game follows a group of teens in a small town who “band together after learning they’ve all been temporarily losing consciousness.” None of the adult members of the community will speak to the kids about the incidents, including the disappearance of one of their close friends. Instead, the group launches its own investigation.
What they discover is “a hostile underworld” beneath their town, “populated by a clandestine group of adults.”
Characters are customizable, each “with a variety of powers and equipment loadouts.” Group members each have their own roles to play in gathering evidence to prove the crimes of the adults, including deploying drones and traps.
Orphan Black’s co-creator, Graeme Manson, is the new showrunner for TNT’s Snowpiercer series.
Variety reports that Manson will be replacing Josh Friedman, who left the show in January due to creative differences after writing the pilot.
“Graeme’s extensive background in the sci-fi genre coupled with his brilliant work behind Orphan Black made him the perfect choice for this series,” said executive vice president of original programming for TNT, Sarah Aubrey. “He is the best conductor to navigate the thought provoking and delicate themes of the series while bringing this frozen, futuristic world to life.”
