On occasion, usually during App Store visits, the question whether Fireproof Games had released the (by my standards) highly anticipated third entry of The Room series bubbles up. Admittedly and shamefully, I don’t follow Pocket Gamer or Touch Arcade with any sort of regularity. (Changing that now.) To my surprise, I had come to find out about the release of The Room Three in Ben Kuchera’s argument as a gamer for switching to iOS:

The release of The Room 3 finally broke me. Last night I went to my local AT&T store, suffered through the inevitable awful wait, and traded in my Galaxy Note 4 for an iPhone 6S Plus.

Let this in-and-of-itself give credence to The Room. And not just the third entry, but the series as a whole.

The Room series stakes its claim on connected hyper-schewmorphic puzzles, set in a Myst-style photorealistic environment, all for the sake of solving a mystery. You crank gears, adjust mirrors, light fires, slide latches, and flick switches in an attempt to find out where the hell you are, how the hell you got there, what all of these cryptic symbols and anicent references mean, how deep the rabbit goes, and what pathological nut case is stringing you along. For a symbolic, deep-meaning, puzzle junkie such as myself, it’s perfect.

In the first entry, the player was tasked with getting to the center of a box. Said box rests in “the room”. To open the box, you must solve the puzzles of the box. The more the player digs, the tricker puzzles become; the deeper the mystery gets.

The Room Two expands beyond the box, donning the player with a special eyepiece to see hidden messages scattered about. This sequel also expands movement, allowing the player to scour rooms for clues and secrets. It dabbles deeper into the classical elements (earth, wind, water, fire) to find The Null.

The Room Three takes movement and depth one step further with the addition of areas (levels) to explore and a new lens addition for your eyepiece; one that allows the player to dive deep into the miniature mechanics of the machines seen about. To use a mechanism for one puzzle, you must solve the puzzle within the mechanism.

I found there to be a bit of repetition with the puzzles, not to mention some overly obvious and seemingly pointless tasks. (Yes, I will slide that thing to the left because I have no other option to do anything else.) But that’s the charm of The Room. It always has been. Sticking a key in a whole won’t do anything unless you turn the key, right?

The mysticism and cryptic nature of The Room Three felt a bit lackluster. Not many otherworldly references or hair-raising messages. (Granted, it’s been two years since I’ve spent time with The Room Two. Maybe this was the case there as well.) It felt hallow. Not necessarily that the dark charm and personality had been altogether lost, but maybe that the developer was too fatigued with adding puzzles to a world so large that depth took a backseat to time.

Which brings me to the awe inspiring essence of The Room series. Regardless of the charm falling flat or the occasional overt obviousness, the mind-bending  machines and realism Fireproof Games continues to dream up is inspiring to the point that it’s excruciating. There is dazzle and surprise around every corner; astonishing cleaverness in every puzzle; perfectionism in art direction and machanics.

Predictably, The Room Three was a delight to solve. Truly a treasure through to the end. Though sadly, it was the end that finally kicked the cleverness up to my desired notch. I continue to think on what mad scientists and otherworldly designers continue to craft such detailed experiences.

Polygon:

Review events are a reality of the industry, and in the case of multiplayer-oriented titles, they make sense — it’s very difficult to organize 20-40 people in different locations remotely at the same time, and we introduced provisional reviews this year to account for server uncertainty. We’ve attended review events this year when it made sense to do so, including events for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and even Battlefield Hardline.

But we will not participate in review events that tie our hands in ways that restrict us well after the general public has full access to the game in question. With that in mind, we’ll be playing the full version of Star Wars Battlefront on EA Access this week, along with many of you, without support from EA. As we have not agreed to any advance access or accepted any coverage restrictions, our provisional review will be live once we are confident in the opinions of our pair of reviewers.

Nerdist nabbed an answer to a question in my previous post. It’s Garona.

From WoWWiki:

Garona Halforcen is a half-orc half-draenei quest giver for the Horde in the Twilight Highlands. Like most others, she believed she was half-human until the truth was revealed to her. She is an assassin and a spymistress.

From the Nerdist interview, it appears Garona is half-orc half-human, which, in the visual language of the Warcraft Movie, seems to justify her unanimated self. I don’t think it works and still lends itself to an awkward visual balance.

Daniel Wu, playing the part of Gul’dan:

If they don’t seem real, it’s going to be hard as an audience to get into the character. But they are very real. And they are very compelling as CG characters. Like two minutes into the film, you forget that they’re actually CG characters.

They don’t seem real. However, I said the same of Avatar. And after a few minutes into that film, I was onboard.

Wikipedia:

Azeroth stands on the brink of war as its civilisation, led by the humans, faces a fearsome race of invaders: orc warriors fleeing their dying world, Draenor, to find their place in another. As a portal opens to connect the two worlds, known as the Dark Portal, the humans face destruction while the orcs face extinction. Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), leader of the humans, and Durotan (Toby Kebbell), leader of the orcs, are then sent on a collision course that will decide the fate of their family, their people and their home, in which war has many faces and everyone fights for something.

Maybe the trailer wouldn’t have been such a miss if they stuck to this description?

Regarding my last post, how come one of the female orcs (Garona? Draka?) doesn’t get the GCI treatment? Seems to heighten the awkward balance between the animated and unanimated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rxoz13Bthc

News of a Warcraft movie with the involvement of Duncan Jones and Legendary Pictures has had me excited for years now. Unfortunately, this trailer does not.

I’ve eagerly awaited every Blizzard in-house cinematic since Starcraft’s in 1998. (If I recall correctly, it shipped on the Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal disc.) I don’t believe Blizzard’s in-house cinematic team had much to do with this film. And if true, that is a sad fact.

In the games, the orcs’ robust physique is met with nearly as robust human physique. Blizzard’s own in-house cinematics reflect this as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzF_rU1Fqg

Physique aside, the use of real actors against what appears to be a solely computer-generated backdrop and animated rivals is jarring. (See also the Star Wars prequel trilogy and The Hobbit) I thought we were working passed this. I thought the gag of cartoons working in Hollywood was in the process of being shuddered. Confused about how real actors would look in either the orc or human role, I figured they’d both be bolstered by CGI. I figured wrong. On the upside, the close-ups of the orcs look great.

I’m not a World of Warcraft player, but within an hour or so of the Warcraft Movie trailer premier, a cinematic trailer for World of Warcraft: Legion, the upcoming WoW expansion was released. This is the kind of visual consistency I was hoping for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYNCCu0y-Is

All I’m saying is the unbelievable visual inconsistency of animated characters and backdrops alongside real actors is tired. Give me real or fake. If both, let’s stick to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam gags.