Browsing Kickstarter is addicting.

It’s amazing that Kickstarter rejects 40% of the requests they get. Kicktraq is nice because you can see where a project will likely end up and lately a lot of kickstarters have had been pushing their luck with the stretch goals, so it’s good to know how likely they are to meet them. I like this robot kickstarter but nothing between 64K and 200K? On a side note, there’s some fun, although useless, Arduino-based ones like this one or this one. The animation section isn’t actually full of anime crap like expected (maybe that’s the 40%? Although a ton of steampunk stuff gets through) but is full of stop motion. And it’s depressing that LICD is the third most funded animation section after he left the last animation studio since they wanted him to make a black character. The fashion ones are still all terrible

Carmageddon is all funded but wants 600K for a linux/mac version and it looks like it’ll end up around 570K, unless it gets a huge push at the end from the linux horde. Interestingly, it’s probably going to end up around the same spot at the Tex Murphy one, despite ridiculously more PR. The Space Quest guys don’t look likely to meet their goal either. With the amount of money they’ve gotten, they’ll probably just start another one if this one fails, but with lower expectations and they didn’t overestimate their nostalgia value nearly as much as the Portal Reborn guys did. Also, procedural generation and ipad/phone games seem popular, maybe because they usually ask for less money.

What I really want to bitch talk about is Word Realms. It’s by the Kingdom of Loathing guys. KoL was a web MMORPG that was all the rage with the SA crowd years ago full of nerd humor and died down when the idea of role-playing a seal clubber killing ninja snowmen lost it’s novelty. Jumping on the kickstarter craze, They went 6x over their funding goals when they put up a kickstarter for a comic book they wanted to make about their MMO. This was without a video or any preview panels. Realizing that people would throw money at them for a fucking comic book, they made a kickstarter for their upcoming word game.

Word Realms wrote:

The time has come to wrap it up, and get started on the real goal — making an MMO. And this is where you come in! If we’re going to commit to making a Word Realms MMO, we need to know that people are as psyched about the idea as we are. Show your support by pledging at least $11, and you’ll be able to download the single-player Word Realms game before it goes on sale to the riff-raff known as the “general public”. Or, if you want to leave a personal mark on Word Realms, you can back us at a higher level, and get some cool shwag in the process!

So the entire thing is a fucking preorder PR campaign. Next, the gameplay mechanics are essentially Scrabble with avatars. This barely has merit as an MMO in the age of Words with Friends let alone as a single player campaign. It also suffers from the type of humor that’s not funny, except to other nerds trying to out-ironic each other. Making jokes about how many deadlines you’ve missed while being in charge of a game isn’t funny when you’re dealing with a product people pay money for. They also list stretch goals before the damn thing’s even funded.

Word Realms wrote:

If we reach 200% funding, we will add some awesome Easter eggs to the game. I don’t want to spoil too much, but maybe these mock-ups will give you an idea of what we’re thinking:

And this is the most obvious problem with the whole thing – it’s incredibly, almost aggressively, ugly. They look like old, misshapen dwarves with floating hands clenched in fists. It’s not that hard to find games that look much prettier asking for less money. And they’ll actually give you a finished product as opposed to a precursor to their real game. They’ll probably make their goal and they’ll probably ship a product so they don’t alienate the people left playing their MMO, but it’ll be mediocre to terrible. Unlikely shitty kickstarters which don’t get funded, these ones are almost guaranteed to. If unfulfilled projects are the dark side of kickstarter, this is the depressing Their products that just get by based on a type of internet celebrity, maybe even nostalgia. The Yogscast and PA games are basically brand extensions – the equivalent of Disney games but for nerds. The games are usually boring and I find it worse they can find so much funding for such average, unambitious outcomes. Since nothing screams “average, unambitious” like webcomics, I predict kickstarter will have loads of webcomic kickstarters. I found OoTS, LICD, Diesel Sweeties, SMBC, Schlock Mercenary is already on it. Dominic Deegan, QC, Dresden Codak, Achewood, CAD are all likely. PA is a toss-up since their fans already buy so much junk on their site.

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skip

Sometimes it’s nice to destroy every living creature in a dungeon without having to remember that the Polish octal characters on your screen translates to pink dragon.

Two such games are Diablo 3 and Torchlight.

Here’s what I like about these video reviews: the Cable Bruddas (twin gamers bred specifically to game and game well) show you the gameplay while they talk about what they’re playing. So even if you disagree with a certain point, they are showing you the experience you’d be in for if you purchased the thing. I can’t figure out how to record anything on my desktop as an AVI file, so this is magic to me. Much more interesting magic than the rainbow skittle magic going on in D3, even.

Enjoy the video review, everybody. Focus on adventure!!

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The original Grand Theft Auto games had a top-down perspective that faked 3D pretty well. It wasn’t until Grand Theft Auto 3 that everyone’s world changed and parents again had to wonder if video games were going to call out a lot of their shitty parenting. But what of those two original GTA games? They still come up in Steam and Good old Game promotions. Twin gamers Jhoh and Jsoh Cable walk you through them, determining once and for all if they stand the test of time!

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Easily one of the best 2D platformers ever. Artwork is absolutely gorgeous. Music is also pretty great (for a cartoon) and catchy, although some tracks are completely ruined because somebody thought there was anything redeemable about Yoshi’s Story.

I hate to sound like I’m making excuses, but the real challenge [*fine oak pipe*] is in collecting the little lightning bugs on each level to reach the 350 target. Rather than being about tediously scouring every square inch of a level to collect them all, they’re usually set up in a way that reveals some incredibly tight level design and platforming gameplay. If you just try to finish the levels you’ll probably blow through the game in a few hours. The final levels (and the treasure chase levels) at first feel like they’ve gone into bullshit Super Meat Boy level design territory where you need impossibly precise timing to get through them, but the game controls much much better than Super Meat Boy and all of the hazards really just wind up being perfectly placed timing markers telling you to jump. For example, (spoilers) this level (5:15 to 6:15) seems like impossible bullshit at first, but then it turns out to be pretty easy and you feel like a million bucks when everything clicks. Also unlike Super Meat Boy, you can still make minor mistakes and live. I did the last half of that segment slightly differently and still survived pretty easily.

In addition to platforming levels, there’s also old arcade-style side-scrolling shooter levels which are all very solid and fun. Breakout, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Centipede also make some gameplay cameo appearances.

Worst part of the game are that there’s some puzzle bosses that all but require you to die as you figure out the patterns / stages of the fight. The game resets you pretty quick so it’s not too bad.

(Oh and I think just over 400,000 people worked on this game. Credits are 18 minutes long.)

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Rafiki

Best Worst Movie is a documentary about the resurgent popularity of the “Worst Movie of All Time,” Troll 2. I had not seen Troll 2 before seeing Best Worst Movie, and you don’t have to see it either. After viewing BWM, I watched T2, and then I went back and watched BWM again. The experience wasn’t really different; T2 just made me want to see BWM.

Short version of this review:

Troll 2 is an entertaining piece of trash cinema that fans of trash cinema will enjoy. Best enjoyed with a group.

Best Worst Movie is an essential documentary about what it means to be an amateur, and what it means to be a fan of outsider art.

For those who haven’t seen either, here’s basically what happened: Troll 2 was an ultra-low-budget horror movie made by an Italian filmmaker back in the 80s, using an American cast of amateur actors who had no idea what the movie was supposed to be about (due to the language barrier). The result was a weirdly enjoyable high-energy horror movie which resides somewhere between the first Troll movie and a John Waters film. Troll 2 gained a cult following on VHS, culminating in an arthouse revival tour where the original cast got to go out and give autographs and do Q&A sessions about what it’s like to have been in the “Worst Movie Of All Time.”

The biggest thing that I noticed while watching Best Worst Movie is that there really are two kinds of fans of trash cinema. The 1st kind likes watching a lot of movies and appreciates that really low-budget filmmakers are like independent bands: freed of the constraints placed on a filmmaker by “budgets” and “craftsmanship,” low-budget filmmakers are free to make movies that are nothing at all like any other movie. The 2nd kind is this kind of reprehensible disgusting hipster video store clerk guy who likes talking shit about things.

The documentary, I think, does a really good job of contrasting the two types of fan. On the one hand, you’ve got the people who put on the revivals, a movie critic guy, and a group out in Canada that have a yearly party where they play Troll 2 games and have a good time. These are the first kind of fan. The critic says something that I think is really important: Troll 2 gets called the worst movie of all time, but it can’t be the worst movie of all time because it’s not boring and it has tons of fans. I AGREE WITH THAT GUY. This is a complaint that I’ve always had with the people that call Ed Wood a bad filmmaker. Watch Glen Or Glenda? sometime, and then watch The Story of Us some time, and ask yourself which one you would ever watch again. QUESTION: Does that mean that Rob Reiner is the worst filmmaker of all time, because he made a movie that was worse than a movie made by history’s worst director? Explain yourself with well-reasoned sentences.

The Q&A sessions at the revival viewings are full of the awful 2nd type. These guys all showed up to stick it to the cast and the director, to say “what’s in God’s name were you thinking when you made this piece of garbage?” They say this shit to the director of a movie that they just watched and enjoyed. The director is a total blowhard, and much is made of this, but his basic statement is “I’ve made 40 fucking movies. Where’s *your* movies, dickwad?” I AGREE WITH HIM, TOO. Maybe he’s got no talent (not maybe: he’s got no talent), but he is a filmmaker, what is this guy? A guy who goes to viewings of movies just to talk shit? Fuck you, buddy!

That’s not really the emphasis of the movie. That’s just what I took away from it; I had to have a moment of introspection as I thought about how much I hated some of the “fans” in this movie despite being a trash movie fan myself. Huh. LET’S TALK ABOUT ME, THIS MOVIE IS REALLY ABOUT ME. No, it’s not.

The real emphasis of the movie – which really makes it kind of fit as a piece with the set of movies like Chasing Ghosts and King of Kong is that it deals most with how the actors and actresses in Troll 2 have dealt with their brush with fame. All of the actors that were in the movie are always thinking of ways to get back in the show, despite the fact that they were never really in it. In particular, it deals with the father in the movie (played by George Hardy). George (and the documentarian, who was a child actor in Troll 2) go to a lot of conventions in the film, and we get to sit with George as he realizes that most of the people in the booths are people like him who never really made it. It’s kind of heartbreaking to think about because you really get the sense that George feels like he missed his calling; he really thinks of himself as a failed actor, despite the fact that he is a well-respected dentist and a very, VERY beloved member of his community. His ex-wife is in the movie and she says it best when she says something along the lines of “You know he’s a good guy when I really like him a lot and I’m his ex-wife.” He is an outrageous success by various measurements, but he measures himself against his success in show business, and comes up a failure.

It’s hard not to look askance at your rack of synthesizers and wall of guitar amps when every single one of these movies has a guy that hopes to make it as a musician someday, including Walter Day.

Anyways, I probably spoiled too much or something, Best Worst Movie is definitely worth seeing, it has interesting things to say about the human condition. Also, the end credits music (“My Only Offer” by Mates of State) is the most perfectly-selected end credits music of all time.

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FullofKittens

American Scary

I came by my love of horror movies via a Saturday afternoon block called Thriller Double Feature that played on a local UHF station. We’d spend every Saturday when I was a kid lazily watching the TV as it played and replayed TV-safe versions of what would later be known as classic cult films (The Incredible Melting Man, One Dark Night, and Zombie Lake were regulars that spring to mind). It was just fantastic, and I’ve often wondered why I try so hard to recreate that vibe by watching modern day horror films without succeeding.

American Scary proposes that the difference was the commercials. As MFFE mentioned in another thread, a little break now and again isn’t a bad thing. American Scary is a doc about the history of late-night horror movie hosts: the countercultural precursors to Elvira and the Cryptkeeper that worked nights at local stations and leavened the weirdness with stupid comedy bits where they’d make jokes about doing medical experiments on bikini girls. It’s an interesting topic and they get a lot of good interviews. They also get a lot of bad interviews – like everything old that was interesting, there is now a horrific fan culture around it – and the thing was clearly made for like a thousand bucks. Still, it kept my attention throughout and I can’t help but wonder whether Count Scary wouldn’t have made my experiences with modern day horror more enjoyable.

Weakly recommended to all, strongly recommended if you’re like me and remember a weekly horror show on TV.

American Grindhouse

This is a doc all about the history of grindhouse cinema. It presents a good overview of cult films and it has a lot of cultural context that I (a genre fan) didn’t know much about, so that’s good. They score a lot of good interviews here, too. I saw this a couple of weeks ago and I don’t remember it too well but I watched it all the way through; it’s the one that inspired me to watch the rest of these movies.

Recommended for fans of trashy films. At the very least you’ll find out about some new movies you want to see.

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

PAYDIRT. This is a doc all about Filipino exploitation films of the 60s and 70s. Apparently a lot of the “women in cages” movies that are somewhat well-known (The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage) were part of a larger scheme being run by Roger Corman at the time: he hired Filipino directors to make these hugely explicit, prurient, violent movies on a shoestring budget, and Imelda Marcos wanted so badly to have a domestic film industry that the army got involved. Fantastic stuff. BONUS: lots of interviews with the ladies who starred in the films, who simultaneously disown the films and are obviously proud to have been SO STONKING HOT back in the 70s. Also: interviews with Quentin Tarantino and John Landis (who was interviewed for literally all five of these movies).

Recommended to everybody who likes violence, nudity, and documentaries.

Not Quite Hollywood

Holy shit! I figured I would have peaked out at Machete Maidens Unleashed! but this one is even better. The style between MMU! and Not Quite Hollywood is extremely similar, because they were both done by the same guy. The same awesome guy, whom I now love.

NQH is about the Australian film industry, specifically with regards to its origin as an exploitation film machine. Apparently, when things got started in Australia back in the 60s, the only thing their film industry had to differentiate themselves from the US (besides price) was the absence of a Motion Picture Production Code. Roger Corman gets wind of this (of course), blows into town and blam: the first wave of Australian is all porn movies. It’s really fascinating: these were big hit movies over there, polite grownups were going out to theaters and watching softcore porn. Their first national film star was a guy who starred in a series of films that was basically Arthur except instead of a stupid drunk, it was some Australian redneck walking around with his dick hanging out.

There are a TON of amazing movies shown in this one that I had never heard of; of course, because Corman was involved, there was tons of blood and guts interspersed with the nudity and sex. Why did I not know about these movies?!

Strongly recommended to everybody but probably not to watch with your significant other.

Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue

This is not only the worst documentary out of the five, it’s the worst documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s like 90 minutes long, and they must discuss over a hundred movies. They blow past EVERYTHING. It’s a real shame because it seems like they got tons of great interviews, and everything, EVERYTHING got cut. You’ve got John Carpenter starting to talk about The Thing, you’ve got Romero talking about Night of The Living Dead… they both get ten seconds. WHAT ELSE DID THEY SAY

Ultra-frustrating. If you’re a horror movie fan you will already know about 100% of the movies shown here and then be teased by a 10-second interview with each movie’s director. I’d watch a half hour about any of these movies! Instead I just get to know that the documentarian found out a bunch of interesting shit and didn’t share. It’s like Gates of Heaven in reverse: an interesting topic made uninteresting by not letting people stay onscreen long enough.

Nobody should watch this movie, it sucks.

OVERALL

• Everybody should watch Machete Maidens Unleashed! and Not Quite Hollywood (in that order), and then if you liked those consider the other two decent ones, knowing they’re not as good.
• Roger Corman is a total fucking badass and a national treasure.
• John Landis will be in your documentary, call him up, he’s not busy.

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FullofKittens

Jsoh and Jhoh Cable are time men, men who go through time and tell you whether or not games stand the test of time. Since this isn’t 4chan, you can see their work without it being deleted almost fucking immediately. Here’s the Caltrops Test of Time review for Super Mario 64, for the Nintendo 64.

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Editor’s note: The year is 2003. Web comic creator Roop Dirnup developed Melted Brain, a MMORPG-based strip that used, for the most part, actual posts by prospective MMORPG fans as comic dialogue. Thought lost in time, Caltrops will be posting a Melted Brain strip every Friday until we run out of strips. Click for the huge version.

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Roop

Editor’s note: The year is 2003. Web comic creator Roop Dirnup developed Melted Brain, a MMORPG-based strip that used, for the most part, actual posts by prospective MMORPG fans as comic dialogue. Thought lost in time, Caltrops will be posting a Melted Brain strip every Friday until we run out of strips. Click for the huge version.

Link to comments.

Roop

Editor’s note: The year is 2003. Web comic creator Roop Dirnup developed Melted Brain, a MMORPG-based strip that used, for the most part, actual posts by prospective MMORPG fans as comic dialogue. Thought lost in time, Caltrops will be posting a Melted Brain strip every Friday until we run out of strips. Click for the huge version.

Link to comments.

Roop