Editorials
Hands-On With ‘The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’
Until about a week ago, I had spent maybe an hour total with the Witcher series. It’s not that the games didn’t look appealing to me, they simply fell into the always-growing list of intriguing games I never get around to playing. This changed when I was invited by CD Projekt Red to spend some time with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in a bar in San Francisco.
This trip, by the way, was made possible by the developer. They paid to get me there, offered me a place to stay, and I even got a swag bag, the contents of which I’ll be handing out to some of you in the near future.
I had only a very superficial understanding of what this series was about, and even that knowledge was limited to “this game is going to be pretty,” and “it’ll likely have boobs.” Five minutes into the demo and both had already proven true.
The Witcher 3 is currently slated for a May release, but even that’s not set in stone. CD Projekt Red has already proven willing to push the game back should they deem it necessary, and they seem open to doing it again if they have to.
After spending just over three hours with it, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. It’s still very much a work in progress, but it’s far enough along that I can’t see them moving its release date again unless something bad happens.
Have I mentioned that this is a stunning game, because it is. Unless their initials spell GTA, open-world games of this size tend to make sacrifices in their visuals. If The Witcher 3 did this, I didn’t notice. It’s pretty.
The game follows Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher and cat-eyed anti-hero from the first two games, who has been tasked with finding his apprentice, Ciri. Something about a prophecy that claims this Witcheress is the one who can stop the Wild Hunt — essentially a gang of all-powerful, human-hating war gods — from enslaving humanity.
Or maybe they want to eradicate humanity? It’s one of the two, I’m sure.
I only briefly got acquainted with the Wild Hunt when they descended from the heavens on a massive flying ghost ship (no joke), but they were sufficiently intimidating. The guy with the skull helmet was a real dick, too, in case you were wondering.
I have to say I was not at all prepared for how willfully incompetent this game would make me feel. It’s not that complicated, but each fight does require a certain amount of strategy — more than say, Dragon Age or The Elder Scrolls might require of you — and there’s a number of complex systems that demanded I get familiar with them right away.
The thing I had the most trouble getting comfortable with was Geralt’s arsenal of magical abilities that can be used to set enemies ablaze, slow them down, or deploy a protective shield around Geralt, if you’re feeling defensive.
If that doesn’t sound complicated, it’s because it isn’t. It’s only when you combine it with the rest of Geralt’s arsenal, which includes a number of consumables (bombs and whatnot) as well as his basic abilities, such as counter attacks, guarding, etc.
Creatures behave realistically, even intelligently. Larger enemies tend to use their size to try and overpower Geralt, while smaller enemies, which I usually found in packs, would often try and flank Geralt in an effort to surround him. Their unpredictable movements combined with how deadly they can be even for a veteran player makes every fight a challenge.
It would’ve been terrifying for a novice like me had I not been controlling Geralt, Monster Slayer Extraordinaire.
As I mentioned earlier, I only spent a little over three hours with The Witcher 3, and that’s nothing when you’re talking about a game that promises over a 100 hours worth of things to do. The world is massive and brimming with content, events, and places to explore.
I tried to do a little of everything before my time was up, partly because I wanted to glean as much info about this game as I could for this preview, but also because I was hooked.
Eventually, I had to set down the controller, but not before I had accomplished a fair amount.
I played a couple rounds of a Dwarven card game called Gwent, I brought an arsonist to justice, I felt bad when the arsonist was executed for a drunken mistake, I aided a man in his search for his missing brother, and I even killed a Griffon.
I also helped an elderly woman reclaim her lost cookware. I’m not above good deeds, however small they may be.
I was only able to bludgeon a few of the many critters who roam the world of The Witcher 3. I would’ve slayed more, but I have this problem when I play open-world games where I get distracted so unbelievably easy, so I often got sidetracked by mysterious markers on my map. I couldn’t not investigate, because doing so would let the Wild Hunt win, and no one wants that.
When I wasn’t investigating its stunning world, I would spend my time taking on packs of rabid dogs, mowing down creatures that scour charred battlefields for corpses to eat — I think they were called Ghouls — and clearing out nests of Drowners, which may or may not be the distant cousins of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I knew this series had epic fights, and my hunt for the Griffon did not disappoint. It was my primary objective, aside from finding a young woman named Yennefer, and it was so much more involved than finding the creature’s nest so I could murder it in front of any offspring it might have. This fight took preparation, I had to get to know my prey before I could engage in fisticuffs with it, and that made bringing it down exponentially more satisfying.
This game has sold me on The Witcher. I almost feel obligated to try the second game so I can go into Wild Hunt with a better understanding of this rich world that CD Projekt Red has created. It’s a beautiful game with a rewarding combat system, an engrossing story and some truly fantastic writing. Even the option side quests were well-written and interesting. That’s important.
If you’re new to this series, it’s about time you acquaint yourself with it. That’s what I’ll be doing.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is slated to release on May 19 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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