• Ghost in the Shell remake rights picked up by Dreamworks – pushed ahead by Steven Spielberg and with no one but producer Steven Paul (of SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Bratz and Ghost Rider fame) attached to the project so far. And before you laugh at the hapless Shirow fans – he’s also attached to the Tekken and Castlevania remakes.
• Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse – Cowboy Bebop remake announced, with Keanu Reeves attached to play Spike Spiegel. It does say it’s just a rumour, but the previously announced info, with Keanu’s agent/manager Erwin Stoff as producer attached points in that direction. Really now. It’ll be horrible.
• Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation has teaser footage released. I don’t care, to be honest. I saw the trailer ahead of The Dark Knight and it was a confusing mess. Calling Zack Snyder visionary is a joke. Dawn of the Dead came on the heels of 28 Days Later, 300 was after Sin City and Watchmen is coming after basically every single other goddamn comicbook movie. He’s a hack who makes technically sound but incredibly shallow and unsatisfying films – calling him Michael Bay for fanboys does Michael Bay a disservice. His films have the potential to be so much more, but I have this feeling that he’s sitting there in the background going “Oh shit, the audience is about to start thinking! Quick! Stop them! Spoonfeed them some more information!”.
• Just when you thought Singstar couldn’t get any gayer after Singstar Anthems (probably the best of the Singstar games out there along with Singstar 90s), Singstar: Hits from the Musicals is allegedly in development. I do like that they’re going an anti-Rock Band/Guitar Hero route with these games, and I admit, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” is damn tempting.
• Mythological Veterinarian sounds like an incredibly cute concept, though the whole point of comedies is that they’re cheap to make and this sounds like it’ll need a lot of creature effects. Still, gonna keep my eye on it.
• Spiderman Musical wtf. Directed by Julie Taymor, so obviously they want to recapture the magic of The Lion King Musical (interesting trivia – Timon and Pumbaa’s dialogue is localised for the various regions, even within countries. In the Japanese run, the Nagoya, Tokyo and Fukuoka productions each had different regional accents for the characters). But yeah.
  

  Arache, a beautiful, boastful young woman turned into a spider for her hubris and lack of respect for the gods. She subsequently appears to Peter Parker and the audience as in turn a powerful spider-woman who comes from another time to inspire Peter; an otherworldly lover; a bride; a terrifying (and sexy) dark goddess of vengeance; a dance partner in a charged and violent spiders dance of death; and, finally, a lonely, fragile young woman.”

  This just doesn’t make sense.

As well as all that, the success of The Dark Knight – currently number 1 on IMDB, breaking records left and right. And of course, the viral marketing campaign was a huge success. Indeed, even just Gotham Cable News is a good watch to prepare for the film or to watch later as a supplement.

So naturally, everyone and their dog wants to start viral marketing or an ARG of some kind.

• What looks like it’s trying to be this year’s Halo 2 Ilovebees – Resistance 2 has a game going on at http://www.getawarjob.com/, where you can sign up to join their army (but I wouldn’t recommend it – they’ll test drugs on you).
• Need for Speed has a viral site up at http://www.whichroadtotake.com/, which is… kinda lame really. You click around and find video clips. The weird numbers spell out “Undercover” when inputted into a cellphone with predictive text.
• The game Too Human has a weird one up, apparently about the Goblin Man of Norway. Yeah I don’t know what the fuck.
• Apparently there’ll be some sort of Watchmen related viral material – naturally, they’re all about the bandwagon. The source for this is apparently somewhere within G4’s coverage of SDCC, but… ugh, don’t want to touch that shit.
• Lost is starting up again, apparently. They had a fairly successful campaign a few years back, and at this year’s Comic Con was recruiting for the Dharma initiative.
• Tropic Thunder, the comedy about a group of actors filming a war film (Kung Fu Panda and Iron Man go to the Jungle), has a few viral marketing sites up which are rather giggle-worthy. http://www.tuggspeedman.com/ and http://www.kirklazarus.com/ are both up, as are the various websites for the movies they’ve been in. I tried emailing the Panda Relocation Foundation regarding a panda, but they haven’t gotten back to me…
• Can probably expect something from the upcoming Star Trek film as well – the creator JJ Abrams is big on the viral thing, what with Lost and Cloverfield both having big online campaigns.

Whew, I think that’s it for now.

Anyway, I read this, and was rather irked by the whole thing. If you don’t care to follow a link, basically it’s full of stories about people playing co-op Pixeljunk Monsters with their girlfriends/wives/fiancées.

I guess it’s the condescending “Wow, my silly little girlfriend didn’t like videogames and now she sees the light!” tone that goes through every story. Every time they mention “cute” and even at one point “maternal instincts” it makes me a bit nauseous.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking to play videogames – that’s most people for you. Likewise, I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with playing them – some people are into that kind of stuff. But when the two meet, and one assumes some sense of superiority over the other, that’s where the problems begin.

I really don’t think these people should be together, to be honest. You’d think a small matter of differing hobbies wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but the more people I talk to the more I realise it might be. The problem is that it’s a bigger divide than most hobbies – it shows differing attitudes towards entertainment, technology, information, productive use of time and money and in general, having fun.

If your partner doesn’t like your games, they probably won’t like your comic collection, or the amount of money you spend on graphics cards, or they won’t understand why you want to go to a midnight screening of The Dark Knight, or they won’t stop feeling threatened by the amount of time you spend playing WoW (to be fair, the last one gets unhealthy fairly quickly). But the best you can hope for is that they simply won’t care, and that’s already a wedge between the two of you.

It gets worse though. What happens when they actively object? Often, it’s on the grounds of the whole “Grow up why don’t you?” argument – the idea that games are for teenagers. Maybe that’s true – maybe kids are in effect turning into teenagers more quickly, and that people are trying to stay teenagers longer, or whatever. Maybe we’re just more aware of the need to have some fun in our lives, and that the fast pace of modern life requires time to just sit down and relax. Whatever – I’m not too concerned with arguing for either side. My concern is that you like to play games.

But your partner objects. Which leads to situations like this:

Early this year, I purchased a PS3 under the pretense of playing games of all sorts with my girlfriend.

There’s a lot wrong with this. Why does he feel he can’t be honest about what he wants? Why does she control his purchases, in effect infantilising him? And why does that work as an agreement between them? I mean sure, part of him probably wants to be infantilised – the number of guys out there who want to be mothered is a bit scary really. And certainly a lot of girls see dating as a DIY improvement project (and of course, for both situations, it can work with the genders reversed).

So you wind up seeing situations where one party is forbidden to buy [x], or do [x] or whatever by their partner. This is quite common, and it leads to resentment on both sides. It effectively turns it into fishing/drinking/playing poker/buying shoes/going out with the “girls”/”boys” from our parents’ generation, when one of the purposes of hobbies was to get away from your partner. This is the 21st century, and I think nowadays the drive towards forming relationships is less and less for procreation and more for mutual company. And so, if you’re lucky, the relationship ends.

But why date these people in the first place? I mean, I’m not advocating finding someone with absolutely identical hobbies to you, but at the same time, I think hobbies and interests are something important that people neglect. There’s nothing like the experience of talking about something you enjoy to someone who understands it as well as you do (unless you’re one of those troglodytes who can’t enjoy something if their partner is better at it or knows more than them), and not being able to share that with a partner isn’t a good sign.

Unfortunately, people settle. And maybe this person seems okay apart from everything else. But while some differences can be worked out, I think this one goes fairly deep. Deep enough that you end up arguing, and unhappy, and both resentful of the other. And then you find me, but that’s another story altogether.

Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. Maybe I’m just overly disillusioned at the number of people I’ve seen unhappy because of these things (myself included). I’m certainly not discounting the idea that people can get along despite a lack of common interests. I just think internet/gaming/geek culture is a wider divide than most people give it credit for. Not only a cultural or interest divide, but a fundamental difference in mindset and priorities, and I don’t think enough people recognise it as such.

And so I don’t think those relationships are going to last. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but for the most part it looks like too little too late.

Edit: You’re so vain you think this post is about you.

That being said, you know, there was E3 and there was San Diego Comic Con, so all sorts of interesting shit out of there. So I guess I’ll write about those.

I’m kind of looking forward to playing Soul Calibur 4 at some point, for some reason I’m not entirely sure of. Maybe it’s the idea of laying the smackdown with Darth Vader, I don’t know. Still need to get my hands on Civilization: Revolution, and tentatively looking forward to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. That and I need more money. Maybe I’ll buy up on games in September. I apparently have a Rock Band mic waiting for me in September too, which should be interesting. My Singstar skills are pretty poor as it is…

Ben X is about a boy called Ben with Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism). Online, he’s a powerful warrior called Ben X, but in real life he’s a shy, misunderstood bullied teenager, and the film details his struggles.

Personally, while it was ambitious, I thought it failed on a number of levels. There were a few neat factors – most notably the incorporation of the MMORPG ArchLord and it was reasonably competent, but it just wasn’t mindblowing on any level. And I expect mindblowing from my festival films dammit!

So our poor Ben is played by an actor at least 10 years too old. He’s perhaps a bit too effective in his acting his part as a scary loser, because I thoroughly lost sympathy for him partway through and starting hoping the bullies would beat the crap out of him at one point. I guess it doesn’t help that I’m used to watching Asian films, which can be pretty extreme with the bullying scenes (even in comedies like Shaolin Soccer), and comparatively while Ben’s situation sucks, I find it hard to feel sorry for him (though part of that is because I’m just a bitch). Though it was well acted – I was especially taken by the fact that the same nervous tic is repeated by both the actor playing the young Ben and the older ben – and there are other instances of similar attention to detail.

Ben uses way too much internal monologue, because the director also wrote the novel upon which it was based. I had a writing teacher who said that we shouldn’t be afraid to slaughter our sacred cows (those being special, beautiful lines we love and don’t want to get rid of), and this guy really needed that advice. Internal monologues should be saved for bad TV.

The relationship between the guy and the girl kinda pissed me off. Anti-social internet guy winds up with a girlfriend who looks like this:

I really do hate watching movies where the guy gets a girl way too attractive for him. Their relationship overall was poorly depicted. Why would she know his cellphone number but not have his photo after a year? More importantly, why would a guy like that who doesn’t understand normal social interaction find anything attractive in a normal girl? Hell, is she a normal girl? Her personality is far too poorly defined. I feel the movie didn’t establish their relationship at all beyond a cursory conventional romantic thing, so there was a major lack of believability there.

For that matter, his online life wasn’t really defined beyond being “Level 80″ which was a shame, because it’s always quite interesting to see people’s online double lives, especially when contrasted against their real lives. Basically I think the writer was bluffing his way through the entire online aspect of the film (fucking noobs), which means that the main hook of the plot was… toothless (yay mixed metaphors!). The director also doesn’t know when to show and don’t tell, and I saw the ending coming a mile away.

The structure of the film is really disjointed as it’s intercut with “documentary” type interview footage with various characters – all of this is meant to convey some sense of dread, but instead cluttered up the film with largely empty dialogue (”It was only a matter of when.” “It’s sad when kids like this do things like this.” type stuff) and the desired effect could have been achieved more subtly (though it’s possible some parts to make it make more sense were cut during editing, or were from the original novel). But instead all it did was slow the film down at strange points, and could have been cut entirely, I think.

What I did like was the visual linking of the game world to the real world – the HUD would appear, the game mechanics would be mentioned as a metaphor for Ben’s life and so on, but these are applied pretty haphazardly. There’s also a weird Christian element that meshes poorly overall.

Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t a terrible film by any means – it was competently done. Just it fell short of the expectations I had of it given its presence in the Film Festival, plus my standards are absurdly high. The old man sitting a few seats down from me walked out, though I think there was an element of generation gap in that. I think to its target audience, it’ll hit its mark no matter what, but personally for me I feel it was lacking.

Kind of weird, but then it’s mostly because I got a massive urge to play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic again. And while I’m at it, Knights of the Old Republic 2. And Jade Empire, also by Bioware and apparently very similar.

Mostly I just want to beat the shit out of stuff as a Sith lord (actually, probably lady – I’d rather be hitting on Carth than Bastila is all), which I suppose can wait till the release of Force Unleashed, but it’s just not the same.

I like the excessive amount of customisation – the lightsaber crystals, the armour options, the various force skills and all that. The characters aren’t ugly like in Oblivion and the combat is fun as hell. Plus you know, actual characterisation. Good stuff *thumbs up*

But yeah, I also want to know what happens next, hence the desire to play the sequel. I know it all goes to shit in the middle when they needed to complete the game to a deadline and so on, but I like the first game enough to warrant playing the second, I think. And Jade Empire is apparently similar, but outside the Star Wars universe. Which is cool – I’m not a huge Star Wars geek by any means.

And then I was thinking I might play around with XBMC too – I was thinking of just getting a Macbook and playing the PC versions of all those games, and then installing XBMC for Mac on it, but would my hypothetical laptop even be able to handle doing all of that?

But yeah, none of that happening as of yet. Just idle ideas still floating around, waiting to be realised. Meanwhile, I just sit here and feel like killing things with lightsabers, and am sad because I don’t have a proper media center.

Unfortunately, I don’t own any first party games that have trophy or soundtrack support currently. Which leaves my PSN account at Level 1 with no trophies, and still listening to the same old music. Just like everyone else on my PSN friends list (all two of them, one of which is my US account). But I can access the XMB in-game.

And at least I have the clock! Which is 5 minutes fast and thinks I’m on daylight saving time. *sigh* Hopefully Assassin’s Creed and Ratchet and Clank patch in trophies soon.

So yeah, that’s it from me this month. Not so much quantity, but I did finish one whole complete game and enjoyed the fuck out of it. Yay me!

The environments are really nicely done and ever so immersive, and I love the little touches like the multilingual voice acting – at one stage I had people chasing me and shouting in three different languages. I especially liked making random townspeople think I was crazy – all the “What does he think he’s doing?” and “He must be crazy!” (and my favourite, “If he falls and hurts himself, I won’t help him!”) dialogues never got old for me. The beggar women drove me insane though. I might go on a beggar/drunkard/crazy person killing spree next time I play *cackles maniacally*.

Bad points: the tasks get repetitive and boring, the combat perhaps a bit too easy through combos (though some of the bosses still held plenty of challenge), and there weren’t subtitles, which made things more difficult for a game with that many accents.

I didn’t mind the futuristic component so much. I enjoyed the really clean, modern urban design of it to the extent that it was a welcome break from the medieval stuff. The conceit of the Animus meant that all the stuff like quests resetting, the HUD, health bars, GPS and so on were nicely explained away, which most games don’t bother with. I actually really liked that they bothered, because it was one less suspension of disbelief I had to make on my part (and it’s also consistent with the HUD not appearing in the modern sections, which is clever). The modern section also meant the introduction of more characters, which was good. Graphically I really enjoyed the game, and the controls were fairly good – though it kind of sucked that you didn’t have much control over all the cool stuff he did.

The parkour element was excellent, though the simplicity of the controls meant it consisted of just holding down R1+[x] and the left analog stick, which compromised the sense of doing any cool shit yourself (ditto these comments regarding combat).

I would have liked more historical notes. Maybe an Altaïropedia, or something – the whole Animus conceit would have made it fairly simple to slip in as a “guide to acclimatising to the memory” or something. Or maybe as unlockable bonuses for collecting the flags – which on the PS3 version I played, was pointless apart from something in and of itself to do. Surely they’d have a shitload of source material sitting around, after all.

I did like that they went the whole PC “Kill equal numbers of Muslims and Christians” route. Fighting for either side would have just been awkward, and having both factions attack us was appropriate given Altaïr was the lone wolf outsider type. Templars as bad guys makes sense – no one likes those guys anyway (though it was kind of a pain having them lurking around in alleyways waiting to attack you). I guess you could say it’s a half-assed Kingdom of Heaven way to go about it, but I think it’s the approach that works best for the modern player.

The weapons were pretty cool, though it would have been neat to have special weapons for each major assassination or for particular missions, to make the game slightly less repetitive perhaps. But I did enjoy the hell out of the hidden blade assassinations, sword combos were fun to watch (I especially liked the computerised voice of the Animus telling you in a cool voice “Breaking your opponents’ legs then selecting the hidden blade will kill them quickly.” – paraphrased a bit), throwing blades were useful as hell and the interrogation missions were probably some of my favourites. Fighting was fairly fun, in other words. Which was good, because if the entire game had been stealth that would have bored me eventually.

I understand why you can’t enter buildings, because programming all of that would have been an insane amount of effort, but it still kind of sucks that the buildings are in effect giant blocks sitting in the environment. The roofs are wonderfully detailed though, which almost makes up for it. I also understand why you can’t interact with the background so much other than in running/jumping/killing ways, but it would have been cool to be able to talk to random NPCs and stuff. Maybe I’d been playing too much Oblivion beforehand, because I wanted so bad to pick up and examine everything as well as loot the fuck out of everyone I killed.

I’m definitely looking forward to a sequel. It went a bit Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life at the end (I paid money to see that at the movie theatre, shut up), and admittedly it did seem like half-assing it with regards to an ending. Certainly it was a blatant sequel grab, but it worked. It also makes me curious for the game Mirror’s Edge, another parkour style game (this time set in a future city). Though I don’t think I’ve played a character that looks like me to that extent before, and that includes the avatar I made for Oblivion which is based on myself (I screwed with the head settings too much so it’s a bit pea-headed). Or my Knights of the Old Republic character either, come to think of it. Though neither game makes an allowance to make an Asian avatar, which I think is the problem… and that’s a post for another time.

My most random observation is that Altaïr is actually a kind of a bad assassin. He’s really quite distinctive and isn’t too good at the whole stealth thing. Plus he can jump over rooftops, climb church towers, kill 12 men at once and is effectively the medieval Jason Bourne, yet he can’t swim? What’s up with that? They even have a nice big river in Masyaf to practice in.

Anyway, this is of course my own personal bias speaking, but I’d love to see something like this set in Japan, with ninja. I’m thinking the Sengoku period, with a variety of urban centers to travel to and with a sense of variety and conflict. Certainly running around on Japanese style castle rooftops and stuff would be exciting. The only problem being that most buildings were rarely built taller than one story due to risk of fires and earthquakes, so it might lack a bit of variety. Still, I think it would be fun.

Oh shit, this turned into an actual review almost.

He picks up on most of the bad things, though I haven’t noticed the landscapes so much because I’ve been hanging around in a reasonably small area. I don’t mind the lack of immersion too much, because I like the slightly artificial “I’m off to play a fantasy RPG full of numbers and hit points and goblins and so on” feel.

Though I’m having a rather unique problem in that I’m playing a North American PS3 version on a Japanese PS3. I hit [X] to talk to a character, then I have to hit [O] pick a menu item to say, because if I hit [X] again I exit out of the menu. Basically at times it’s [X] to use/talk/pick up and other times it’s [O] and it makes for a bit of a mess, though I guess it’s kind of my fault.

And yeah, the NPC voices do drive me a bit nutty at times.

This is just an amusing mistake:

We’ll probably get a Naruto guest to round things out *sigh*

No, didn’t think so, that’s why I included it. Turns out the American voice of Kakashi, Dave Wittenberg, has been confirmed for the October event. Also Grey Delisle, aka Mandy of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Useful since Richard Horvitz, the voice of Billy (and Zim and so on), came over last year.

So my only purpose in posting this was to prove myself right. Mind you, it’s a hollow victory, given the size of the Naruto cast compared to the size of the pool of American voice actors.

Demo for Civilization Revolution coming out on PSN tomorrow. Only on the US PSN, but a PAL gamer should already have at least 2 PSN accounts anyway. Time to see whether it sucks or not!

Lastly, Red PS2 and Blue PSP for Japan. I want both, which is ridiculous because I only want them for the pretty colours. Such pretty colours.

Via Armageddon Official Site, Eurogamer and Kotaku