見たmorphosis

So San Diego Comic Con finished recently, and with it brought a whole bunch of stuff. E3 was before that, and most people now remember it for “Wtf? Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360?”. There’s been a huge influx of geeky news. And there’s some news I find interesting that I haven’t written about anywhere, so it’ll all go here.

• 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.

Tags: adaptations, Anime, ARG, bloody yanks, gaming, internet, movies, Playstation 3, Sony, sucks to be me, sucks to be you

So I kind of want an Xbox. One of the old ugly big ones.

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.

Tags: apple, boring, gaming, Microsoft, ramblings, sucks to be me, Xbox

So Fallout 3 has been refused classification in Australia because of their stupid rating system from the Atari era that doesn’t take into account anything with any more depth than Pac-man. Officially, because of too much drug use. Unfortunately because our local distributors get their stock from Australia, with many games a nasty side effect is that our local stores only get supplies of the censored Australian version of the game, regardless of the game’s legal status here. It’s been that way for a while and until they get their fucking act together, we’ll continue to get fucked along with them. Sad really.

There was a better article on this, but I can’t find it anymore so have this one – The Gamesman bought out by EB/Gamestop. I kept meaning to write about it back when it first broke, but… I’m lazy. It’s kind of a big deal because it means that the only game specialist stores in New Zealand with more than one branch will be EB stores, which are in a strange quantum state of being overpriced yet constantly on sale. I’m a bit surprised by this, because the management of GDE, which ran The Gamesman, seemed pretty anti-EB.

As in, it was not unheard of for staff in the course of a normal trip out to the mall to feel compelled to enter an EB store for the sole purpose of making disparaging comments about the decor, hygiene of the staff and general inferiority of the chain. Sure, the first few times it was amusing, but every single mall trip got to be a bit excessive, and wound up with this writer dragging said staff member out of the store forcibly and trying to avoid future mall visits. Talking to the girlfriend of another staff member dispelled the notion that this was an individual quirk. An entire company full of people who do this seems a bit weird, but I suppose their corporate culture was kinda weird anyway…

Plus there seemed to be a bit of bad blood due to EB’s decision to stock Madman DVDs from Madman Australia rather than the (now formerly) GDE-run Madman NZ, the reason for which was, from what I remember, that they suspected a conflict of interest due to their running of The Gamesman chain. While that’s ancient history due to EB no longer stocking DVDs and GDE no longer distributing Madman, I do wonder how much it cost to get Phil to swallow his pride and accept this offer. I’m also a bit wary that they seem to be setting the online business to compete directly with GP Store, but hey, I’m not telling anyone how to run their business.

The Vodafone iPhone pricing came out and wow, 1GB per month for $250 a month? Mmm, price gouging. There’s little else to say other than “Are you exploiting a monopoly here?” Gah this makes me remember why I hate marketing types.

So tl;dr – Australia fucking us over, America fucking us over, corporations fucking us over. Sucks living in a small country. The answer is always import.

Via Kotaku and video from Campbell Live

Tags: antipodes, apple, bloody australians, bloody yanks, mobile, rant, sucks to be me

It’s that time of year again. Programmes are out for this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. Listings are also available online at the site here.

To be honest, this year I’m pretty underwhelmed by the range of films. I’m usually pretty big on seeing anime at the cinema, but there isn’t even very much of that. But this is a long entry nonetheless…

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Tags: Anime, antipodes, movies, sucks to be me

So I need a new laptop. I dropped my old G4 iBook and managed to break both USB ports, yay. Sooo..

1. Non-functional USB ports.
2. It’s 4 years old. Old computer is ooooold.
3. Non-Intel, and that’s going to limit a lot of things I do from here on out. Fewer and fewer programmers will bother making things for PPC – kind of like after OSX came out.
4. The wireless card is buggered – I have to be in the same room as the base station, if not only several meters away.
5. The fan makes this horrible grinding noise that doesn’t sound healthy at all.
6. A 1.07Ghz single core processor is far below spec for doing anything these days.
7. The graphics card makes me cry (System Profiler tells me VRAM (Total): 32 MB). Running anime raws is iffy. Playing DVDs: iffy. Using Dashboard: sometimes iffy. Scrolling quickly/changing between windows/Expose: also iffy at times. Playing solitaire- You get the picture.
8. On a related note: 1024×768 resolution. Not cool.
9. 30GB of hard drive space. I have an external hard drive, but I can’t use that now due to the USB ports dying.
10. Battery down to 57% life, and 306 cycles. Apparently a lithium ion battery has a life of around 300-500 cycles.
11. The only audio in is the internal microphone, which means I need to use a USB headset. See item 1 of the list.
12. It doesn’t meet the minimum standards required for Mac OSX Leopard, and I figure I might as well get a new laptop with it included in the price rather than pay for it.

Basically the only saving grace is that I have 1.25GB of RAM installed (that’s the maximum it takes. It started off with 256MB of RAM, which is pitiful indeed), which is stopping it from failing completely when trying to do things. That being said, it’s served me faithfully and well these past 4 years constantly.

So I’m thinking one of those new 2.4GHz 13 inch Macbooks. In white, because the black one is just $120 extra for a black finish. I think I’ll get 4GB of RAM installed when I get it, because otherwise I just won’t get around to it (Yay laziness!). Built in Bluetooth will be useful for syncing with my cellphone. Built in iSight will be useful indeed. I guess I’ll make an XP partition too, I dunno maybe Parallels 3 would be worth investing in.

I’ve been looking up refurbished, secondhand, etc options too, but new looks like the best bet, particularly with the Academic discount. Unfortunately, I can’t really afford it, given I’ve just been overseas and all. Luckily, Course Related Costs can help me out there… Oh Student Loans, what would I do without you?

Tags: apple, boring, sucks to be me

Here’s a review of the game Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles I wrote for a local gaming site. I kinda gave up on the whole game reviewing gig when I realised that I don’t play nearly enough games to be trustworthy when writing about them. I know that doesn’t stop most people (free games, woot!), but most people suck. I care about these things dammit. And I doubt I’ll ever write another proper review like this again.

Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles

5.0 / 10

The game is worth a play for the diehard Naruto fan who wants further adventures of the characters,but proves an unrewarding experience for everyone else.

Ups: The game has an easy to use combat system and the ninja powers are fun to play with. The appearance of many familiar characters from the TV show gives a real sense of immersion in the Naruto series. The stats system gives a unique way of levelling up that rewards experimentation.

Downs: The random battles and the non-essential missions get repetitive and boring, and that isn’t helped by the bad enemy AI. The lack of explorable areas means the game gets quite old quickly, and there is very little replay value in the game.

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Tags: boring, gaming, Playstation 2, Sony, sucks to be me