You saw The Thing, right? Well, this is the adaptation of the board game.

Serious fans of the film already know this of course, since Who Goes There? is the name of the original 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novel that the film is based on, but I just wanted to clarify that, as a working knowledge of either will help move forward here .

Who’s there? (the game), named after the book but with plenty of visual clues taken straight from the 1982 John Carpenter film, originally came out in 2018 and was fairly well received, albeit with a few fairly common complaints. It returned a few years later in 2020 with a Second Edition that, like a video game needing post-launch care, sought to address some of the issues with the original version.

I never played that first edition, so I’m not going to be able to compare it to that. I’m not sure I want to play it someday, as even this more recent revised version has glaring issues that I would have thought would be fixed in a reissue (and I’ll get to those later).

So what is the game really like? Its official summary does a great job of getting across the basics:

Who’s there? is a cooperative game of growing paranoia. At the start of the game all players are human and there is no reason not to trust each other completely, but as the temperature drops and mistakes are made players start to doubt everything and everything. the world around them.

You have to build, trade and upgrade to prepare for the Antarctic terrain, the rabid dog attacks, the crazed fools … and most importantly, the alien entity that is now roaming free in the camp. Everything you build and improve has one goal: to keep you alive and human! Throughout the game, you’ll want to trade with other players and help build more powerful weapons and better equipment, while also passing food and medicine kits. However, be sure to trust them as trading is a huge opportunity for The Thing.

Staying indoors can keep you from freezing to death, but it won’t help you or your fellow humans win. The only way to win is to venture out of the camp! The problem with this is that being away from the camp is the best way to find out about The Thing … leaving you vulnerable and exposed to infection. Whether it’s fixing the boiler, fixing the door, or battling the freezing temperatures outside, you’ll all need each other to survive. But trust is a hard thing to find when you have to beware of … Who’s going?

Basically it’s a game where everyone works together and trust each other to try to overcome a perilous situation, until they don’t, and instead becomes a game where everyone suspects everyone else. world is secretly a murderous alien life form disguised as freezing human flesh.

The goal is for each player to try to survive a set number of rounds (normally 15), and then, at the end of that, board a helicopter and get away with it. Who wins, however, depends on who exactly gets on that helicopter, with human players trying to keep the alien monsters infected, while anyone infected tries to pretend not to be infected and smiles and gets on the helicopter. alongside humans like everything was quite fine. Then there’s a whole bunch of depressing math and luck to find the winner, and I’m not going to talk about that just yet because it gets me down, and I want to talk about all the good stuff first.

Everything until the end of the Who Goes There? Game, which really is 98% of your time, is fantastic. It’s a wonderful adaptation of The Thing, which really nails both the source’s desperation as survival becomes more and more desperate, as well as the growing suspicion everyone is feeling as it becomes clear that an alien is potentially hiding under anyone’s skin.

The conditions are so brutal that it is often difficult to survive in the first place, with dog attacks, terrible weather conditions and exploding boilers making each round more dangerous than the last. Add to that the fact that you have to go out all the time to get the things you need for the escape from the helicopter, then secretly watch and worry about everyone at the table at all times, and things become quite stressful as you get closer to finishing it!

This is all very tense, and the fact that you all have to work together while trying not to work together – cooperating is essential for survival, but cooperating is also the easiest way for alien players to infect humans. – really feels like you’re playing through the second half of the movie, juggling survival with descent into madness.

The game’s comic book-style art is reflected in its miniatures, which is a great touch.Photo: Kotaku

It’s such a shame, then, that when the end finally comes, it sucks. If the players are able to survive until all the turns are over, a helicopter comes to rescue you, and it’s time for the table – you can play with 3-6 players, but you really want it to be 4 to 6 – to make decisions a little difficult. The party leader, who throughout the game has determined the turn order, can be removed from his post if other players suspect they are The Thing, and whoever ends up at work is responsible for choosing who can get on. on the chopper and left to die.

Everyone who enters the helicopter then adds up the number of helicopter points they have collected throughout the game by braving the weather and exiting, and finally rolls a special dice to generate more helicopter points and see if he exceeds the points threshold required for victory. . There is a catch, however: if an infected entered the helicopter, you must deduct their points from the total.

To win, humans must beat this scoring requirement, even if they … leave The Thing (or several things!) On the chopper with them? And in order for the infected to win, they need to have at least one alien in the helicopter and see the humans not getting the required score.

It’s an incredibly deflating way to end an otherwise great game for two reasons. Firstly, it’s hard to get an idea of ​​who is infected just by gambling (unlike other similar games, like Battlestar Galactica), so the voting at the end often felt like it was just guessing, rather than being the result of any kind of long-term detective work.

And second, a big part of hitting your required point total comes from a dice roll! I’ve played this game twice, and the first time humans lost because an infected person got on the helicopter rolling a 6 and I, the human, got a 1. It doesn’t. It didn’t matter that in the last two hours I had frozen my Ass off, getting three bonus helicopter points, fighting aliens, and suffering from frostbite, as a single dice roll canceled it all.

This is bullshit! To take with their own hands such an important part of the player’s agency at the end of the playing hours sucks. Add the weirdness of being able to win despite letting aliens get on the helicopter with you, and the arbitrary nature of having to consult a flowchart to see if you won or not and who is going? really works overtime to slice any pleasure or satisfaction out of her end.

I still think it’s a really cool co-op survival game, and the parts where everyone works together – which is the vast majority of your time at the table with Who Goes There? – are really unique and enjoyable. Just know that this is a game for people who are much more interested in the journey than the destination.

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In the eponymous level “Storm of Violence”, you must kill more than 900 enemies before the time runs out. Screenshot: Anachronia / Kotaku

I’ve never owned an Amiga, but I’m obsessed with Enemy: Tempest Of Violence, an Amiga game developed in Switzerland released in 1997. Buckle up, it’s about to be a ride.

My partner and I have a ritual where we watch Twitch on the weekends before bed. My partner is a staunch old man (even though he’s only 34) and has no desire to watch popular streamers or games. He’ll only watch streamers on the Retro channel, the Twitch channel dedicated to games as old as us. There we found Ara45, an Australian streamer with a penchant for playing the most obscure dark games. One weekend we watched Macaw45 play an ancient game in which a lone security guard armed with a simple pistol mowed down an army of aliens while leading his human allies to safety. This game was Enemy: Tempest Of Violence, and every weekend for the past month my partner and I religiously watched Macaw45 make their way through this game and it was fucking fascinating.

I will do my best to explain Enemy: Tempest of Violence and I will fail. Simple words cannot fully express its awesomeness but I will try anyway.

Enemy: Tempest of Violence is an action-puzzle game in which you play as a handful of characters trapped on three huge alien ships. There are 34 time-limited levels, each with their own objective of trying to survive and outsmart your alien opponents. Sometimes you will be responsible for guiding civilians from one part of the ship to another, managing them so that they do not die of traps or alien enemies. There are also times when your goal will be to complete a task like defending a room, negotiating with aliens, or destroying their eggs. Other times you will be given a huge pistol, 1000 enemies, and the simple imperative to survive.

Your human allies are dumb and will frequently enter bullets as pictured here.

The different configurations of time and resources make each level a puzzle to solve, and this is where the subtle genius of Enemy lies. Watching Macaw trial and error through them made Enemy a captivating watch. The game gives general clues as to what to do before each mission, but beyond that, Macaw was on his own. Watching his reactions as he worked his way through the puzzles and story was just as entertaining as the action taking place on the screen.

During the Egg Mission, since you are given so little ammo, there were situations where Macaw used all of his bullets to shoot the eggs and then had nothing left to kill the aliens and vice versa. To get by, Macaw had to figure out how to make every bullet count. It meant shooting eggs hanging from the ceiling to fall and smash eggs on the floor, or dropping a grenade through a grid in the floor to smash eggs he couldn’t reach.

During the final mission, Macaw – trapped on the last remaining ship – had to find a way through a room filled with aliens who could, at any moment, blow him and his alien ally Fix to pieces. Through heartbreaking trial and error, Macaw determined he needed to empty one of his most powerful guns of its ammo, leaving it with only a pistol. He then had to go through the following rooms full of enemies, their weapons aimed at him, until he reached the alien queen whom he then had to shoot, kill and quickly pick up the scepter she dropped. before the aliens shoot him and fix it. to death.

The other missions weren’t that complex. During the self-titled “Storm of Violence” level, Macaw and his 400 allies fought their way through an attack of 929 enemies before time ran out. The comedic number of enemies filling the screen to be nothing but bloody traces on the wall and rotting bodies on the floor was pretty darn entertaining.

The attraction of the enemy also lies in its history. There’s no dialogue or cutscene, so the story is delivered only through long scribbles of text that reads like a 1950s pulp novel.

The text is littered with awkward sentences and misspellings, but the mistakes only add to Enemy’s charm. What started out as mere “failed scientists fighting bloodthirsty aliens” has taken so many wild turns. Throughout the game, you ally with a number of alien NPCs with names like Bumbum (so named for the dual pistols he uses) and Bigboss. You are committing war crimes by destroying alien eggs. One of the three ships is destroyed. The other disappears with all his human crew. Hackers present themselves one way or another. One of your alien allies tragically dies offscreen (RIP Foxy). Finally, at the end of the game, through a comedy of errors that defy description, the last human survivor has become the alien queen.

Macaw finished the game last night, and I’m so glad I got to see his final moments. The last handful of missions – from the last 300 Spartans-esque clash against an army of 900 aliens to the absolutely wacky Chronicles Of Riddick style ending “You Keep What You Kill” – has been such a blast to watch live that I don’t regret giving up the ritual of watching Ara’s streams with my partner to watch for myself. I enthusiastically told him the highlights, but he’s disappointed that he missed it. (Our weekday schedules are so different that we only watch the streams together on the weekends.) He won’t be disappointed for long; Enemy: Tempest of Violence has a sequel, and Macaw’s has said he plans to play it in the future. I look forward.

Lots of happy returns to a hero with a lot more depth than we often attribute to him.

March 22 – and in a little over two centuries in the fictional world of Star Trek– it’s Captain Kirk’s birthday. The iconic captain of the Enterprise (which shares a birthday with actor William Shatner) is loved for many reasons – reasons that are often at odds with the idealized world of Trek. But what is Star Trek can we turn to really define James Tiberius Kirk?

To celebrate, we’ve put together the Ultimate Episode Guide to the aspects of Kirk that we and the generations of Starfleet heroes beyond him and his team admire the most. These aren’t just episodes of the original Star Trek TV series in which Kirk takes center stage; these are episodes that speak nuanced, often contradictory aspects of the character which, taken as a whole, paint the image of a hero with much more depth than we often attribute to him.

Kirk the Captain – “The Corbomite Maneuver”

It’s not just about Kirk’s ability to bypass his ship in a dangerous encounter, though this episode – one of the first shots – certainly has plenty of it. The Enterprise meets the mysterious forward “First Federation” and their seemingly sinister agent, Commander Balok, but it’s about Kirk as the commander, knowing when (and when not) to push people under him as the captain, how to engage and outwit an enemy, and how to ultimately trust the people around him.

Kirk the Idealist – “Mirror, Mirror”

The idea that Kirk must survive a accidental lateral walking in an alternate reality where the Federation is more of a tyrannical and human supremacist empire displaying its idealism might seem strange at first. But watching him struggle to keep his best nature hidden when he is transposed into a world of occasional, horrific cruelty – the people who look like the ones he cares about most are terrible monsters – is a remarkable act of tension that shows how good a man Kirk is, and how horrible he feels to have to hide it.

Kirk the Trickster – “A Piece of the Action”

It’s a more polite way of saying that, to his delight, Kirk is a delicious bullshitter. “A Piece of the Action” gets to see the Captain at its happiest as the crew encounter what is essentially a 1920s Americana plant. But when he, Bones and Spock are captured by thugs, on the spot Kirk arrives and wins the “Fizzbin” card game to merrily assault their captors. Clever action, quick thinking, but most of all a jerk that would impress even the most insidious of hawkers.

Kirk the Smartass – “The Trouble With Tribbles”

“Problem with TribblesIs a delight for many reasons, and one of them is the full-fledged comic charm offensive that Shatner continues here. But it’s also a great episode to see Kirk bristle under Federation rule, dancing around Under Secretary Baris with wonderfully arrogant effect.

Kirk the strategist – “Balance of Terror”

We have said it before, and we will say it again: it may still be the best Star Trek episode never done. This is where Kirk’s quick and analytical mind comes into play, pushing and pushing the unseen foe the Romulans and their masked bird of prey, a truly remarkable and tense cat-and-mouse game. For the captain to wrest victory from intelligent guesses and mutual respect from his opponent is just the icing on a gloriously rich cake.

Kirk the Debater – “The Changeling”

While we’ve covered some of the more intoxicating aspects of Kirk already, one of the dumbest aspects that still is in essence is therefore: the ability to get out of a debate with a computer until said computer literally thinks of himself as a failure. He does it so many times, but maybe the biggest one comes from his verbal argument with Nomad.

Kirk the Romantic – “City on the edge of eternity”

Kirk and women go together a lot in the original Star Trek, teammates, aliens, random passers-by or whatever. As much as we should roll our eyes at his womanly ways, what ultimately speaks to Kirk the most as a romance man is his tragic relationship with Edith Keeler, reunited on the streets of New York City. 1930s through time travel shenanigans. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure, her pain of leaving her to a tragic fate is the finest example of the character’s romantic side more than any of her fleeting jokes and kisses.

Kirk the Warrior – “Arena”

To mark Kirk’s birthday in the past, we watched “Arena” and its infamous snatch between Captain Gorn and Captain Starfleet and how that reflected the intricate texture of what makes Kirk the man he is, warts and everything. He’s still one of the finest examples of man in action – literally, as he battles his way with both hands in martial combat with a powerful foe, but also ethically, as he grabs hold of it. the inherent violence of humanity’s primitive self, recognizing that its civilization’s path to utopia is a constant struggle with its past.

Kirk the Bro – “Amok Time”

These episodes are all about aspects of Kirk’s interior, but you can’t really have Jim Kirk as Jim Kirk without recognizing his closest friend of all, Spock. “Amok Time” is Spock’s episode, indeed, but it’s also the ultimate reflection of how far Kirk is willing to go for his number one, as a comrade and most importantly as a friend, ready to go. almost get killed to save Spock from horny, dangerous Vulcan ritual by Pon Farr. Brothers aren’t brothers until they’ve fought each other in a battle to the fake death, really.

Kirk the Defective – “Race of Mercy”

We often think of Kirk as the kind of old school and classic TV hero, cut out of the fabric of Übermensch pulp history, who is here to save the day and look good doing it. But what made Kirk so special in Star Trek, and what would continue to define the series’ tracks as the franchise lasted, was actually his deep vulnerability. Kirk was a man who boasted of getting into a dangerous situation and thinking and talking and getting out of it, yes, but he was also a man constantly in conversation with himself ethically and morally, wondering if he was making the right choices, going with the right instinct – and vitally, embracing that he won’t always be right, as he realizes in “Errand of Mercy” when he rushes into conflict with the Klingons.

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Image: Ubisoft

When I think of Assassin’s Creed games, I often remember big cities, cool assassinations, climbing high towers, and maybe a few sea songs. I rarely remember how these games end because they often have forgettable or boring endings, sometimes with bad boss fights. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate therefore stands out as an exception with its fantastic final mission and boss fight.

Oh, and in case it’s not obvious, spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate below.

I’m not going to explain the whole story of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, but here’s a quick recap to get you up to speed. A bad Templar controls London and is an asshole. Twins Evie and Jacob Frye come to London, meet another stabbed man, Henry Green, and work together to defeat the big bad Templar, Crawford Starrick. (He’s got a bad mustache and things.)

Finally, after many missions and side quests, you reach the end of the game. Starrick goes to attack and kill the Queen of England in her palace during a grand ball and the two twins and Green must sneak, stop him and find an ancient Isu artifact buried under Buckingham Palace. (It’s an Assassin’s Creed game, so it’s legally required to be part of the ending.)

What makes this mission so wonderful is the way Syndicate uses both twins at the same time. For most of the game, the twins are separate characters that you swap between whenever you want. But this final mission brings them together and creates one grand final mission that uses them both in different ways. Evie, clad in a full dress, must rely on social stealth to reach the blueprints that will reveal the location of the vault, which is located somewhere below the palace. Meanwhile, Jacob must climb around the palace, taking out the impostor guards and freeing the kidnapped and tied up real royal guards.

Allowing you to play with both twins at the same time is not only a great way to use Syndicate’s two main characters, but it also helps the entire final mission feel bigger and more exciting than any other mission in the game. game. You even meet the queen. It’s a big problem.

Finally, after the wily Starrick obtains the key to Isu’s Hidden Vault, Jacob and Evie pursue him and a grand final boss fight ensues. But again, like the first part of the mission, this final fight alternates between the two twins. You attack Starrick as such, then get knocked back, then the other twin dodges Isu’s magical walls of light and attacks again. On paper, this may seem repetitive. But in practice, you tend to feel like you and your twin are working together. And that makes Starrick a more intimidating and interesting villain.

Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku

This is the biggest criticism I have with this ending. Starrick is supposed to be the big bad in the game, but he’s so far removed from what’s going on while you’re playing that I didn’t really care about him or his goals. But the final mission works despite this by using the twins as tandem weapons. Maybe it would have been nice if more of the game used them as partners like this, but holding back until the end makes the final mission and the fight more exciting and compelling.

While more recent Assassin’s Creed games have allowed players to choose between male and female main characters, neither succeed as well as Syndicate. By having the two characters playable and fully realized as separate people, with their own goals and personalities, it allows the story to better build on them and it allows Ubisoft to cast them both into the final mission to create. the best ending of the series to date. .

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