Archive for July, 2008
‘08: The year people plug in their PS3?
TinyURL'd
On this second day of e3′ness, Nintendo and Sony both had their first speaches. I wont lie to anyone here, I just did not catch the Nintendo one, so let’s just talk PS3.
I admit myself impressed this year. At least by the pricing. SCEA has just announced a they will now be selling an 80GB PS3 for the price of a current 40GB PS3 - $399. Thumbs up for that one.
For the Microsoft speach I did not cover the entire thing, just Fable . And in that article I commented on Peter’s lack of speach goodness. I mean, there was no “Riiiiiiidge Raceeeeeeeeer”, but Sony was pretty bad either way. He did have some good quotes tho…
“If you have really creative developers [...] you can create stuff”
Sony Home has been something they have been barking about for ages. Something I never saw much reason in, as it is just a Second Life for the PS3. They did add game rooms that are particular/ out of a certain game, and in the video it appeared you can start/ join games from there. So it is slightly less pointless.
The next is… disheartening, in some aspects. For years I have been a rabid fan of the Sly Cooper series. Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves was the single best ‘impulse buy’ I have ever had. It is a cartoony stealth platformer game with some hilarious characters and witty inside jokes. That game was created by the developers SuckerPunch (I thought that was just a sound effect on the poster I have for Sly 2) and they showed off their new game. It involved no Raccoons, Sly or non 
. That being said, Infamous looks really damn cool. I mean, even for the fact it is an FPS about a super hero, it is actually unique in ways. From what I have seen and heard, it appears to be a combination of Crackdown gameplay, Fable good/ evil’ness and the FPSness of every other game made these days. Only for PS3 though.
There was even more praise for GT5: Prologue, but with that they added and apparently “revolutionizing” idea: GT: TV. Its kinda like Sony at Home, but only in the sense that it is retarded. Pretty much, you get to download some GT5 videos. Yeah, revolutionary, eh?
The last part of their show was actually really damn cool. I think it made up, almost, for a lack of actual game footage in their whole show. That being said, there was still no game footage of MAG either. The exciting part? It’s sporting 256-player battles. Teams are split up respectively and, in the end, you are in a team of 8. But each part of the original team is run by other human players. It is apparently “not possible anywhere else” but really, is it not but an issue of server load than anything else?
All in all, the PS3 looks nicer, but they are still thinking too highly of themselves.
True Fable
TinyURL'd
I just got off my falling-apart-ish couch seething with joy. After about one hundred commericals in ten minutes, X-Play (on G4 Tech TV, Canada) showed the Microsoft spotlight video at E3 2008. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were the reps for Gears of War 2 and Resident Evil 5 (which seems a lot like a chapter in Max Brooks’ World War Z book) and that is all fine and dandy. But the thing is, I have no aim, especially with the new-fangled dual analog stick shindig. What I am good with, compared to myself, is a good ol’ fashioned button press.
Ask anyone I know and they will profess (or confess) what gigantic fantasy nerd I am. I am far too fat, and far too human to defeat dragons and elves and othe creatures and beings that are far more interesting then those buggers in your so called ‘real life’. One of the most unique and awesome (albeit short) videogames portraying to that fondness of mine is Fable. It was just plain awesome. The mechanics were awesome. The animation was awesome. The obvious sequel, Fable 2 (or II, because Roman numerals are so fantasy-genre) has been in my mind for years to come.
You see where i am going with this? What do E3 confences, button pressing and obviusly-sequelled video games usually turn into? Effin’ sequels, thats what. I must admit, at least in this case, Peter Molyneux gave a really crummy , but freaking awesome, show on Fable II.
For a while, actually, they have been releasing Diary videos on Xbox Live documenting the game productin. I do not write this because I am excited that it is coming out, I write this because I am excited becaus of something Peter said, and I horribly paraphrased;
The game is done, Fable 2 is done
It was something of that nature, I promise. So, we have a finished game, the whole plygamy idea, the pet thing and the customization has been talked about previously, and I am sure you can Google all that stuff. But Peter threw in a new, and really clever, piece of gameplay into the mix.
It is kinda like an MMO, except not. As shown in his gameplay, when playing through their single-player capaign, a user will often see little purple orbs floating around, and no they are not mana replenishers. It is the in-game, PvP ‘room’. You would just walk up to a floaty, invite it into your quest, battle him or hit on his wife, and if they accept they appear in your world. I mean, you have the same worlds, but yours has your house and your wife, so you can do the same quests together, but he has his own house and woman and the like. Yeah, pree’ freakin’ cool.
Due date? October 2008
He Can’t Sense a Meteor, But He Can Sense a Fourth
TinyURL'd
I saw Spider-man when it first came out and I thought it pretty damn cool. Take in mind, this is before I got that far into comics, and before Batman: Begins came out and set the immeasurably high standard for comic-book movies. As much a fan I was of the revious Bat-movies (Returns, Forever and Robin) they were never how I envisioned him in the books, and saw him on the cartoons. Spider-man was the first comic-book movie that took the character seriously, or… it was.
Then Spider-man 2 came out, the first one set a reasonably high standard, at least in this medium of comic, and I felt that Doc Oc helped reach that. There were some really good battle sequences, some really interesting characters shown as well. I was always a fan of that relationship between Oc and Spidey (as well was I, Conners and Spidey) with the whole, protege/ friend/ student/ foe thing. But more awesome than that, J. Jonah Jameson’s son, John Jameson was introduced as well. This excited the crap out of my pants as that was, in the cartoon, how a certain villain was introduced, and a few story arcs of their own.
I spent a few hours that summer debating what would happen in the next movies. Venom was excitingly obvious and awesome. An idea I had was, in tune with the cartoon, either start or end the third movie with John Jameson’s ship being hit by the asteroid from the Symbiote planet. It was from that interaction that Venom caught a ride back down to Earth, took over Parker for a bit and then found a suitable host in Eddie Brock. I mean, there was no way I could see two major villains in one episode, right? Totally.
My raging disappointment with the Spider-man 3 story was… well, raging as Rhino after drinking a truck of Red Bull. The movie started out with a bloody meteor crashing into the park right behind Parker. As insinuated by the title that I am sure you read intently, my piss-off was about the obvious fact that, as a super-human being with powers that include a bloody Spider-sense and enhanced reflexes he still missed it. I got this stuff straight ouf of Wikipedia. The most ass-drunk hobo would be able to tell a flying and flaming rock landed in his park, why was Parker not? Just another thing I am going to blame on MJ (Watson), who, as a character, is not bad, but whos acting by Kirsten Dunst caused involuntary stomach cramps and acidic expulsion from my stomach, through my esophogus and onto the face of the then de-God’d Sam Raimi.
Even the most non-nerdy relatives of mine were disgusted by Spider-man 3. There were many expletives sworn when I mentioned the topic of this thread. The money that Hollywood raked in was a horrible example of the quality in this movie; there was lots and not much at all. It was not the fact that the comic book story was so horribly represented, in itself, it’s that the story was just horrible. Spider-man has a history of 40+ years, that gives you 40+ years of stories you can pick through.
Wolverine: Origins is, I hope, proof that a spin-off/ sequel that a previously-established comic-book franchise can still be taken back by the production team at Marvel. Iron Man was the first movie produced entirely by Marvel, and Iron Man just kicked a whole bunch of tail. The Incredible Hulk was, to a lesser degree, the same case. Marvel is just proving to the fan boys that they can do a damn good job. So why is this news exciting? Because the biggest problem, as stated before, with the Spider-man series was how horribly it was written. Now we have the chance to have our favorite web slinger backed, finally, by some semi-canon ‘facts’ and tell a story that has been perfected over the last 50 years. Well, 4o+ years. In the video, a re-boot was mentioned, a la Batman: Begins, but even if that sort of thing does not happen, there is a plethora of villains yet to be defeated on the Silver screen. They even mentioned the probabilty of the aformentioned Lizard and Carnage, how damn cool would that be?
Whichever way this goes, as a re-boot, a defrag or just a CCleaner sweep, I am damn excited for this. Not so much excited about the time I will have to wait for the release of Spider-man 4, but even Bruce Campbell would agree that a lack of his presence (he has been an extra in all three) could be compensated for by Marvel doing their job properly.
The Wiggity-Wackness
TinyURL'd
I am so amazingly excited for this movie, starring Josh Peck, of old Drake and Josh fame. That is, to say, before he lost a trillion pounds. First of all, look at the date here, you know what July 8 means? It means 10 days before July 18. You know what July 18 means? Friggin’ Batman: The Dark Knight. Batman is the movie I am more excited for than I ever have before. Batman is the movie that is making me not give a crap about any movie coming out now. Hell, I was rather indifferent about Wall-E, even.
But you know what? As said before, I am so amazingly excited for this movie. Even with Batman coming out in a week and a half, I am unexplainably still excited for Josh Peck to grow up. The Wackness is a ‘coming-of-age’ story based in the 1990s starring Josh Peck who’s career is now ‘coming-of-age’, co-starring the king-awesome Ben Kingsley. I am so jealous of the weight Josh lost, and in the most heterosexual way possible, he looks awesome in this movie. Just that look he gives in some of his profiles looks like he has a crap-load going to happen to him.
This trailer, more than anything, is what excites me about this movie. I was not quite there in the 90s… but do I ever love the time that I missed. The music is fantastic in this, the acting looks fantastic, the lines he spits out sound fantastic. In an interview, Josh admitted actually spending a long time ‘training’ himself to speak 90s-ish. This looks like the Marvel 1602 of… well, North America 1994.
Someone in the local paper asked, “how old does it have to be before its ‘old school’ (or something to that extent). With the semi-exception of the SNL movie, Kickin It Old Skool, the 90s have not really been talked about. The answer my paper was looking for, judging by the release date of the movie, is roughly 10 years.
I have recently gotten into Hip-Hop, and by Wikipedia’ing the Wu-Tang Clan, they are most indefinately from the 90s. Not this crappy new stuff. And that is how this movie is premised;
Propelled by an exuberant hip hop score, The Wackness captures the spell of 1994–a time of pagers, not cell phones; a time when Tupac and Biggie were alive but Kurt Cobain had just died. Funny and moving, The Wackness is an offbeat tale of two lost souls stumbling towards maturity.
These were great years; Kurt Cobain is dead and Tupac is not. Music is awesome and women fall for lines like “I got mad love for you, shorty” - and that is awesome.
I don’t even have a lot to say about this movie, as I have not actually seen it. This is about the trailer and how awesome it looks, how excited I am and how damn tall I am…
I am 6′9″
jus’ sayin’
Marvel 1602
TinyURL'd
I am absolutely in love with this TPB. I always loved Neil Gaiman as a writer, but only read him in other comics (I just recently picked up Anasi Boys) but I never knew why. I mean, I loved his stories and all that, I always finished a comic feeling great about it, but I was never able to actively critique a writing style in an actual comic.
Well, he most definitely writes this series in ‘character’ of the time, and I love it. The artist did a fantastic job on environments, I love the way the characters are adapted to the time and I especially love the same-but-different shit they go through.
I have actually, on many a time, close my Anansi book because I really wanted to see what happened with “Javier” and “Scoticus”
It is even written with gender-roles of the time in mind. The reactions to the powers of the “witchbreed” are constant with how you would think of them in the time and there is an actual excuse, that is semi-canon with the rest of Marvel, as to why it is written in the 1600s.
It apparently won the 2004 “Quill Award”, but fuck that shit, it has just won the “2008 Andrew Likes Comics Award”
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