• 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.

Well ok, there never was a Nintendo New Zealand technically – instead, there is a company that distributes their product locally under licence. Or rather, was a company. See, it turns out Softprint Interactive who used to do this (and Activision and also Logitech and a whole raft of other brand names) has gone under, with no replacements yet in sight. Which means no Wii Fit and no Super Smash Bros Brawl in New Zealand for the foreseeable future.

Most people would consider this bad news, but then, I’ve never really been a big fan of Nintendo. So much so that I’m currently doing the Sony fangirl jig of delight.

This isn’t the first time Nintendo distribution has failed epically in New Zealand, of course. The previous distributor Monaco threw in the towel right before the release of the Wii, which I think left things up in the air for us a bit back then (hey, I didn’t really want a Wii so I wasn’t following the news too carefully). And even when distribution has been functional, Nintendo consoles and handhelds haven’t been hugely popular – the DS was being beaten by the PSP fairly regularly even back when the rest of the world had written the PSP off, the N64 did poorly and so on and so forth back through all the generations. So really, it’s just another chapter in a book of failure.

Anyway, recommence jig of schadenfreude!

Via Geekpulp, Kotaku and NZGamer

First off, a big fuck you Australia! Turns out they’re just a bunch of uptight pricks after all.

Basically, our local distributors rely on Australian distribution channels and ended up with the censored Australian version of GTAIV which was rated R18 (i.e restricted to people 18 and over). However, the uncensored version was recently submitted to the Office of Film and Literature Classification, and passed with the same R18 rating. Unfortunately our lazy major retailers will no doubt keep importing from Australia, but it means you won’t be arrested for importing it from the States or UK, or paying someone else to import it. After all, it doesn’t make sense banning the uncensored version on the basis of prostitution scenes in a country where you can legally go out and get a prostitute at that age.

Madman AU being bought out again? After being bought out by Australian toy company Funtastic, it turns out Funtastic has been going down the shitter ever since. Buying another company only tangentially related to your main business might not be such a good idea after all! I should have guessed something was up when they lost the bidding war for Evangelion 1.0. But yes, right when Funtastic were considering setting Madman adrift again, the Archer consortium is trying to buy Funtastic out.

Certainly the Funtastic takeover seemed like a bit of a shambles from the New Zealand consumer perspective – Funtastic bought out Planet Fun, a local toy distributor and transferred control of Madman NZ to them while they were at it, whereas previously it was operated by Gamewizz Digital Entertainment (which had its own problems, but we should probably let bygones be bygones). While we only really see our monopolistic distributors at the Armageddon conventions, the changeover was immediately obvious with a rather glaring and disappointing change in policy (spearheaded by the folk of Madman AU) – that of DVD convention pricing being little different from RRP, which led to some rather annoyed customers.

From what I understand, Madman NZ distribution and so on is controlled as a smaller piece of the larger Funtastic machinery in operation here – which puts Urotsukidoji right next to the High School Musical game, and of magnitudes less importance. It doesn’t help that Gamesplus (a local gaming chain and anime retailer) closed down last year, leaving far fewer retail stores stocking anime DVDs and generally fucking over their plan of getting their DVDs into the Sounds music stores run by the same folks. Not all the business set-backs are their fault. But at the same time, the word from their existing retailers seems to be that things are still a mess on their DVD distribution front – do they even have a dedicated manager for the DVD part of their NZ business? It doesn’t seem so, given they still have Sylvester Ip from the Australian arm of the business coming over to manage con events. Like I said, a mess.

If you live in Auckland, you might want to try JB Hi-Fi instead – I’m under the impression they get their stock direct from Australia (like EB Games used to until they stopped distributing DVDs altogether). Last I saw they had plenty of Death Note Limited Edition Vol 1 and 2 boxes, which Madman NZ has apparently long run out of. Of if you aren’t already, consider importing. It really makes more sense, particular given our whole DVD region free thing.

About the only good thing Planet Fun have achieved is managing to get the Madman DVDs into The Warehouse chain, which is effectively the largest DVD retailer in the country, from memory. Yet their business still appears haphazard and ill-managed, with the New Zealand fan ultimately losing out. So will this buyout improve things? Somehow I doubt it – Madman NZ is now a small part of Madman Australia, which in turn is a small part of Funtastic, which is in the process of being swallowed by a progressively larger whale. Doesn’t seem good. And they still need to make the shift over to Blu-ray.

Sorry, this turned a bit ranty. Hmm.

Also, because there’s always so little local news, there’s this: Warhammer Online worldwide simultaneous release actually including us, with a dedicated server even. I was rather excited about this bit of local news until I realised that I honestly couldn’t give a shit about Warhammer.

Via Stuff.co.nz, Anime News Network (ugh, I need a better source) and Kotaku

Maybe I’m just being a bit optimistic about their intentions, but it looks to me like a slightly shortsighted and misguided way for them to cut down on spam accounts, rather than any particular hate for foreigners – like a more extreme version of how US sites occasionally ask for a zip code (12345 and 90210 is how I roll). Still, the end result is that it prevents anyone outside of Japan from registering, and that sucks. Go whore yourself on Stickam instead.

via Tofugu