• 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.

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.

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

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…

Anime is represented by Evangelion 1.0 and Vexille. I’d never heard of Vexille so I looked it up – it’s by the director of the live action Ping Pong. It’s also already been out in the States on DVD for the past month, ugh. So shit, basically – I’m pretty pissed that Madman NZ have screwed us out of any chance of seeing anything good. I’ll still wind up seeing Evangelion, but… eh. It’s at the Skycity cinemas, for one, which is highly unatmospheric (for any non-locals reading this, the main screenings are done in the theatre from the modern King Kong movie – you know, where they’re exhibiting Kong and he breaks free and escapes into New York).

There’s Sukiyaki Western Django, for the Takashi Miike fans here (the guy who did Audition). It sounds… kind of odd, but that’s Miike for you. I still have no idea what it’s about, so read the synopsis for yourself.

The new movie by Nobuhiro Yamashita (directed Linda Linda Linda, and The Matsugane Potshot Affair from last year’s film fest), which is apparently based on a shoujo manga series. It’s been given the horribly bland English title of A Gentle Breeze in the Village. A good watch if you like boring tedium/slice of life stories, I imagine – Linda Linda Linda was worth seeing for the opening tracking shot through the high school festival preparations alone. Also I Just Didn’t Do It, which won a boatload of things at the Japanese Academy Awards. Still looks… eh.

Lots of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese film for those of you who are into that sort of thing, including a retrospective on Edward Yang. Top of my list there is probably Stephen Chow’s CJ7 – it’ll be interesting to see him do something a bit different to his older work (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer). Also Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, relegated to the ghetto of the Skycity theatre. I didn’t even know he did wuxia. Only two Korean films this year, and both look rapeful, so I think I’ll skip that.

Lots of American and French film, especially docos like King of Kong, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Doctor Hunter S. Thompson and Standard Operating Procedure. Personally I want to see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind, partially because of this video (Probably best to watch the official trailer first though).

Zombies (though I haven’t been able to get into Romero), Nazis (Best Foreign Film at the Oscars last year), Das Experiment Lite, Turkmenistan, Ben X and Boy A both showing on the same day in Auckland (bound to cause confusion), the world’s most descriptive title, The Next Karate Kid, among others. Also lots of European torture porn in the Incredibly Strange Film Festival section, if you’re into that sort of thing.

There doesn’t seem to be anything too horribly pretentiously indie, which is a relief, but still seems like slim pickings this year. Especially The Incredible Film Festival section – I expected more than splatter movies, and it did not deliver.

So anyway, so a list of what I’m interested in.

A Gentle Breeze in the Village

Yeah, what the hell, might as well. If it isn’t boring as hell, it might not be so bad.

Be Kind, Rewind

Michel Gondry is an imperfect director, but I forgive him. Plus I like Jack Black and I think Mos Def is a highly underrated.

CJ7

Stephen Chow hasn’t steered me wrong so far.

Earth

Apparently the BBC’s Planet Earth is one of the best things on bluray right now, and this is derived from it. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a grandiose nature doco, though it remains to be seen whether I’ll feel this way in a few weeks’ time.

Evangelion 1.0

Because it’s a moneygrubbing attempt to leech money out of a classic series, and I’m stupid enough to fall for that shit.

Flight of the Red Balloon

The director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s earlier film Cafe Lumiere holds a firm place in my heart – the main character in the film lives a few steps away from my grandparents’ house in Tokyo, and while the film’s slow pace is definitely not for everyone, for me it managed to perfectly capture a certain time and place that’s very special to me. If he can manage the same for the city of Paris, it’s definitely something I want to see.

In Bruges

Must see Irish humour, apparently.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

This film apparently manages to make downtown Los Angeles look romantic. Kind of curious as to how that goes…

Obscene

One of my favourite poems is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (along with Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, if you must know) and this film covers, among other things, the legal battle to publish it in Britain. Plus censorship is something I’ve been fairly uneducated about and feel I should care more about.

The Orphanage

Apparently a great spooky Spanish horror film, strong on atmosphere. It’s a Spanish blockbuster too, which I like – I generally go to the festival to see popular foreign films, rather than stuff that’s niche even in its own country. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, and apparently it’s got that creepy Pan’s Labyrinth vibe. Plus, you know, orphanages are scary as shit.

Persepolis

It lost out on the Best Animated Feature Oscar to Ratatouille last year. Plus you know, Iranian Revolution black and white animated coming of age film in French… deep. It looks interesting, even though the last animation I saw in French was The Triplets of Belleville. I won’t hold that against it.

Standard Operating Procedure

I read this blog entry by the director Errol Morris regarding the Abu Ghraib photographs and immediately realised that I’d been doing the same kneejerk reaction. I don’t agree with everything he says, but from reading some of the other stuff he’s blogged, I admire his depth of analysis. Go read that article!

The Visitor

The director Tom McCarthy made The Station Agent, which was all sorts of things I should hate – Sundance acclaimed full of self-absorbed Americans wandering around doing nothing, yet McCarthy managed to make me thoroughly enjoy his film. While the synopsis worries me, I hope he can do the same this time around.

So like I said, slim pickings this year, heh.

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?

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.

I pity the unwary gamer who picks up Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles drawn solely by the lure of ninjas. The main character is, after all, not some shadowy black clad assassin, but a preteen boy in an orange hoodie with a somewhat grating voice and an attitude to match. While there are ninjas aplenty, they draw not upon the traditional image of stealthy assassins, but rather from the ninja mythology created in the Japanese anime/manga series Naruto.

N:UC assumes previous knowledge of the original work, to the extent that it’s confusing, if not downright impenetrable to the uninitiated. What is a Hokage? Why is one of my ninja’s powers the ability to turn into a semi-naked woman? Eight trigrams 64 what?

However, if you’re an prior Naruto fan, however, you’ll be pleased to know that a large number of your favourite ninjas and favourite ninja jutsu are included in this game. The use of the voice actors from the TV show help the experience feel immersive and make the game feel like a valid extension of the world created in the anime. The game does suffer at times from some awkward English phrasing, though no translations seem downright wrong or too ridiculous.

A lot of terms are left untranslated though, which, depending on your perspective, either enriches the experience or is a result of lazy localisation. Either way, you should go into this game knowing your Sensei from your Genin. It would be ideal to go into this game having seen at least the first 20 or so episodes of the anime, as the game appears to be set sometime around the Chuunin exam story arc.

The game is split up into missions, with only a few of them being compulsory to complete the game and the rest essentially excuses to put Naruto into battle. No matter how quirky the mission descriptions can be (one mission involves fighting monkeys in order to take back a man’s gambling equipment, for example), the non-essential missions boil down to random battles with grunts, and while they increase the length of the game, they also increase the tedium.

Luckily, the controls for N:UC are assured and intuitive, allowing you to easily unleash various ninja powers at the touch of a button and enabling you to mow through packs of no-name ninjas (or monkeys). The skills, including the Clone jutsu, the Sexy jutsu, the Substitution jutsu and the Power Strike are all well implemented and easy to use during combat. Naruto powers up into his Nine Tailed Fox mode when a combo gauge is filled, which is perhaps overpowered, but the boss fights can be challenging enough to require that. The moves are all introduced at the start via a rather hefty tutorial section, which can also be accessed from the main menu. Having virtually all of the abilities unlocked at the start instead of working to unlock and upgrade them removes some of the incentive to keep playing and level up, however.

While the fights can be fought well, there isn’t much point. As mentioned before, the random battles are all against very generic, boring enemy ninjas. The AI controlling these is poor to the point where the enemy will quite often stand still and stare at you instead of fighting. The fun in the fights is instead with the boss fights against the other characters. Here they show off their signature moves, which look good and are adapted well into video game form. It’s also possible to create a party and take control of the other characters. This occurs in a tag-team format, with the L2 button switching in the alternative character. Given the scarcity of healing items, it’s probably for the best that each character has a time gauge for how long he can remain in combat rather than an HP meter. Being able to fight alongside a teammate would have been better, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the existing method. A two-player fight mode would have been a fun inclusion, but is only slated to be included in the sequel.

N:UC goes the Kingdom Hearts route of having the enemies burst into brightly coloured balls upon death. “Virtue” balls are dropped, which are part of a rather unique levelling up system. Virtue is used to buy pieces which enable stats upgrades, and those pieces are fitted, puzzle-like, onto a board in order to be activated. Upon filling the board completely, a bonus is obtained, and different boards can be won through completing different missions. This forces the player to play more strategically, and for RPG players who love tweaking character stats it should add an extra dimension to the game.

Despite being called an action RPG, apart from the fighting style there is little action about it. Everything takes place within tiny combat environments, cut scenes or on the world map, and none of these encourage any sort of exploration. The game was first released in Japan in 2005 and it shows. The combat arenas are mostly drab, grey-green slightly blocky forests and grasslands that look more like they were inspired by an FPS than a vibrantly coloured anime.

Unlike the fellow PS2 Naruto game Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, N:UC is not cel-shaded, and thus visually it appears out of place when compared to the rest of the franchise. For a game that relies so heavily on cut scenes, the cut scenes are awkwardly animated, with stiff movements and sharp edges everywhere. The varying levels of voice acting can also get irritating after playing for too long. As a slight aside, it’s interesting to note that Naruto swings his arms when he runs in battle, but has them stuck out like in the anime in the cut scenes. The world map is nice, but hardly a pinnacle of design.

The soundscape of the game lacks the signature sound of Toshiro Masuda, the composer for the anime. The generic oriental background music is acceptable, but means the game lacks the aural punch of the TV show. The lack of the catchy Japanese pop-rock tunes from the anime may also be a disappointment to fans.

N:UC is a game targetted purely at fans of the existing franchise. While the game has many faults and many aspects which could have been improved, it offers a reasonably entertaining and immersive extension to the world of Naruto. The game’s main strength is in the appearances of characters that fans know and love, and the way the game, for the most part, feels like it’s part of the franchise. The RPG elements are generally well handled, despite the fact that the action aspect is lacking in certain parts. Provided you have completed all the missions though, N:UC has almost zero replay value, due to unskippable cut scenes, little interactivity and repetitive gameplay.

For a while, the Naruto TV show went through a phase of playing endless “monster-of-the-week” type filler episodes where the characters never developed and nothing ever really changed, in order to allow the original author to catch up and write more plot to animate. In a similar way, N:UC is unsatisfying. N:UC is an action RPG that is both a halfhearted action game and to a lesser extent a halfhearted RPG, and the two halves do not make a whole. Overall as a game it is neither truly excellent nor godawful, and thus the deciding factor on the amount enjoyment you’ll take from it is whether you love the franchise and the characters enough to play interactive filler material.