Hollywood Reporterand AV Clubhave exclusive photos from the first of tomorrow's three Community episode and they look super cool (the rest are after the jump). For obvious reasons, video games are such a perfect fit for Community that it's surprising they've never done it before. Apparently, in an attempt to save Pierce's inheritance, the gang plays this video game against Giancarlo Esposito (aka Breaking Bad's Gus Fring!). Sounds like the Community and the best.
The announcement that a big-time South Park RPG is currently under development at Obsidian Studios was like catnip for a very specific type of nerd, one whose Venn Diagram of obsessions contains both comedy and video games. You will actually get to control what will look almost exactly like an episode of South Park! You will be able to select "Jew" as your user class (a "paladin/monk type character") and then attack a roving pack of gingers with a golf club! And now we get to see the first screenshots of actual gameplay, and lordy does it look just like the show.
There have been a few South Park video games before, and there's even a relatively minor-looking Xbox Live Arcade game coming out soon called South Park: Tenorman's Revenge, but there's a new game in the works that looks to be far more ambitious. Simply titled South Park: The Game, this is going to be a vast open-world RPG set in the world of South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are writing it, performing the voices, and overseeing the development, which I assume is more than they've done for past games.
And there's reason to believe it'll be good: it's being developed by THQ and Obsidian, the latter [...]
The Binding of Isaac is an incredibly strange game. Loosely based on the Bible story, The Binding of Isaac follows a little boy who escapes into a horrible fantasy world to escape being murdered by his crazed, religious mother.
The opening cinematic sets the Adult Swim-esque tone of the game. The music is too creepy and the drawing style is too tragic to let the audience take the story, well, too seriously. And it's this balance that sets up the humor of the game. It's a game about child abuse, and never wants you to forget how silly that is.
Funny games are something of a rarity. There are lots of games that try to be funny, sure. But with games still in their infancy and many game writers just imitating their favorite movies and viral videos, humor in electronic media has a tendency to fall on its face and then slide into the seventh layer of Hell. Yes, “Double Rainbow” was funny. No, you don't need to slip it into your action adventure.
Yet 2010 was an amazing year for video games. New Super Mario, StarCraft, Fallout and Civilization games made this an expensive year for fans. And the explosion of the indie scene with successful games like [...]
Tyrus Smackey and the Scoot-Tootin' Bunch 're hotter'n a pair of wet mackerels in an Alabama noon, and this here's their latest single, "Arcade Daze." (Odds are they may've had but a lick of help from Scott Gairdner and Funny or Die.) Corral the youngin's, cook up a can o' beans, stroke yer mutton-chops and enjoy, hoss.
Now, there wasn't a Bridesmaids video game, but we are required by the Splitsider style guide to mention it in all year-in-review articles. It was a great movie. Have you seen it? Melissa McCarthy was the best.
With that out of the way, let's talk about the magical world of video games, where anything is possible except for not being called a racist thing by a child. 2011 was a grand old year for interactive entertainment. While there wasn't a lot of innovation, there was a ton of polishing that turned sequels such as Skyrim and The Legend of Zelda: [...]
Attention, Simpsons/video game fans of a certain age: The Simpsons Arcade Game, in which you get to beat up Fat Tony as a vacuum-cleaner-weilding Marge Simpson, appears to be coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Is it the best button-mashing arcade game like this? Not even close! But is it the only one featuring the goddamned Simpsons? Yes, yes it is. Which alone will probably make it a popular impulse purchase.
One of this season's standout episodes of Community was "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," in which the study group comes together to play the classically nerdy fantasy role playing game. But that was not Dan Harmon's first foray into D&D humor! No, sir. Back in 2000, he was hired to make a short video to promote the game Summoner. Kind of a weird thing, seeing as that this was well before the YouTube era of online video.
In any case, he wrote it and also did one of the voices in this short made using game characters. I don't remember Summoner at all, but I assume this video helped it [...]
Here's a bit more info on the upcoming South Park RPG in the form of an interview with Feargus Urquhart, CEO of developer Obsidian Entertainment. The big takeaway: the game looks exactly like the show, with Trey and Matt playing an early demo and feeling like they were controlling the show in real-time. So no 3D Cartmans or anything like that — the game will be made to look like the construction-paper cutouts we know and love. Expect more info, and hopefully some actual screenshots/videos, soon as Game Informer milks the hell out of this exclusive for the rest of the week.
As hard as it is to admit, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has lost a lot of star power in recent years.
The mediocre 2005 movie killed dozens of years of fan speculation and interest. And the less said about And Another Thing…, the 2009 non-Douglas Adams sequel, the better. Without the magic of Douglas Adams behind it, The Hitchhiker's Guide series became a bland imitation of itself, all wackiness and no heart.
With so many bad turns in the last decade, it's hard to remember that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a major multimedia franchise in the 1980s. Besides the novels, there was the radio [...]
As an art form, video games are often valued somewhere between college admissions essays and Stalin. Dismissed as either insipid or evil, they have long languished out of the critical spotlight. But games can be creative. They can be interesting. They can be thought-provoking. And most importantly for this site, they can be funny. In this column, I’ll be looking at the games that make players laugh. Whether through clever writing or hilarious gameplay, these titles are a wonderful look into what the medium can do after you save the princess.
Zork, Infocom — 1980
“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”
