PaigeFTW: A Quiet SDCC For Gamers
Truthfully, I’m not quite prepared for this week’s column. I have a problem, you see — Stardew Valley. Two straight weeks of farming madness have consumed me. I haven’t watched TV. I haven’t watched a movie. I haven’t touched any other games. I just spend all my conceivable free time farming away.
This is a problem because I am a writer obligated to present readers with something other than ruminations on farming every week.
(On the bright side, I have a very prosperous farm, and my romance of Penny is going very well, thank you.)
So let’s spend this week discussing the biggest, gaming-relevant news out of Sand Diego Comic Con, while I attend a meeting of Stardew Valley Addicts Anonymous.
Telltale Games announced new installments in its comic-related series: Batman: The Enemy Within, The Walking Dead: The Final Season and The Wolf Among Us: Season 2. Telltale’s Bats game was praised last year (though I am a cheapo who hasn’t gotten it yet), so their second Dark Knight game should be quite good. And I loved The Wolf Among Us — one of the few Telltale franchises that seems well suited to the clunky, comic-shaded graphic style they favor. They really need to update that engine…
While it’s assumed to a certain degree that gamers love superhero and sci-fi movies, of particular note among the deluge of movie/TV trailers this year is Ready Player One, a Steven Spielberg adaptation of the very popular Ernest Cline novel about ’80s-drenched pop culture in a worldwide digital scavenger hunt in a dystopian 2024.
The trailer, which features blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos of everything from The Iron Giant to Tron, is jam-packed with the kind of wide-eyed homage to nostalgia that I spend half these column inches fretting against on a regular basis.
However, since it will be the definitive “video game” movie of the next year or two, we are obligated to pay attention to where this Rainbow Road goes.
A final note: Westworld’s season two trailer offers an apocalyptic suggestion of what happens when an open-world game totally falls into anarchy.
