• 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.

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

It also makes sense when you know that I’ve started playing Oblivion, which is a huge time sink. It’s been a lot of fun in the sense that I’ve been missing playing a generally well thought out open ended RPG for a fair while. I’ve been puttering along with my usual talky tank RPG character (Strength, Speech, Stamina and some kind of healing spell, with heavy armour and a large pointy weapon is the way to go for me. None of this magic bullshit) and doing a number of quests and for the most part it’s been fun. Raising some of the skills has been a pain while for others it’s too easy.

Most of the quests have been pretty good difficulty-wise, though I’m currently trapped in a quest which is kind of hard, which sucks.

Most of the NPC interaction is ok except there have been a few weird points – for example I broke into one guy’s house in the middle of the night thinking it was empty. He was home, told me to “Take your time” and to “Take care”, instead of shouting for the guards like most of the NPCs do. I broke into his basement only to find a room dedicated to demon worship complete with bones and skulls and blood, went back upstairs fully expecting to be attacked and instead he was still polite to me. So I left.

Graphics are pretty in parts and horribly ugly in other parts – mostly the landscapes and stuff look nice from a distance (I particularly like the sky). On the other hand, the people are generally pretty weird looking. I made a female character like I usually do, and it walks and sits and stands like a man (mind you, I was attacked by a bear that moved like a man, so comparatively I suppose it’s not too bad). Luckily you don’t see any of this because it’s in first person, but that in itself makes me rather uneasy as I generally don’t play games in first person. Like Bioshock coming out for PS3 soon. On one hand I like the concept and so on, but the idea of actually playing it doesn’t really appeal to me.

I’m strangely excited about the upcoming Civilization Revolution. The brightly coloured screencaps are a bit reminiscent of Ikariam (well, I guess it’s the other way round really), and I’m really digging that style. Plus I’m really beginning to feel the limits of Ikariam as a game, so I’m just in the mood for something a bit meatier. And the idea of going back to the older Civilization games seems like too much effort. So I’m looking forward to it.

Aaand I’ve run out of things to say. That’s it for now.

• Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core – bought it while in Japan in January, and have been horribly distracted by the missions, enough so that I haven’t progressed in the main plot for a month or so. Yeah, I’m lazy. Really enjoying what I have been playing though; the cut scenes are pretty and the gameplay is comfortable. It’s that and Lumines II which are really making my PSP worth it, currently.
• Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for PS3. It’s the first Ratchet and Clank game I’ve played actually, but I was a big fan of the Insomniac Spyro games so I wanted to see how it would go. It’s great fun so far. I’m really enjoying level design that plays nicely between “too big and confusing, where the fuck am I going next” and “stop making me go that way, I want to go the other way”. The graphics and design aesthetic are great too, and I can’t wait to go back to playing it.
• Ikariam – an online browser-based MMO I found via Kotaku. Basically just Civilization with an online element, but it’s fairly easy to pick up and doesn’t take too much of your time, so I’ve been playing around with it in recent days. It helps that I got my RTS playing friend addicted to it so I have friends to make alliances with, and stuff.
• PMOG, also seen on Kotaku. To be honest, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to voluntarily let anyone track your browsing history, particularly when their Privacy Policy includes this:

GameLayers may disclose player data in limited circumstances if we believe in good faith that doing so would: comply with legal process, prevent fraud or imminent harm, and/or help ensure the integrity of PMOG.

But so far it’s been reasonably fun, in a sort of RPG del.icio.us kind of way. I’ve found some interesting sites through it already, and it certainly adds a bit of spice to visiting places like 4chan, Kotaku or xkcd. Plus I get to do stuff like this:



All in good fun. I understand it’s still in beta, so if you want an invite just hit the “Contact” button up the top and I can sort you out.

I still have a whole bunch of games waiting for me, like Oblivion, Assassin’s Creed, God of War: Chains of Olympus and so on, so I’m going to be a bit busy with all that in upcoming weeks I guess. Busy in the best way possible though. Good thing I don’t care about GTA IV.