J Marv
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Posts posted by J Marv
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Another X-Men cast member? And this one's a biggie.
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It's a new comic by a friend of Scott Kurtz' (th guy who writes PvP) and it's pretty funny.
Don't read it if you're an animal activist with no sense of humor. You'll probably flame me for posting this and harass the author of the comic until he ends the strip.
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Okay, I just got back from the screening, and let me say, if airport security was 1/2 as tight as security was there, terrorism would not be a problem.
Anyway, I liked it. Not a classic, but it was good. Reeves actually turns in one of the better performances of the film, and while Reeves isn't a good enough actor to carry the film, he doesn't detract from it, either. Shia LeBouf (I have no idea if that's how you spell his name) and the guy who plays Midnite turn in the scene stealing performances, but their roles are relatively small.
If the movie has one major weakness, it's that most of the supporting cast are just too dry and unemotional. It's hard to explain why its such a distraction while refraining from spoilers, so I won't elaborate on it anymore than that.
So, if you're not a fan of Hellblazer, I'd actually reccomend you go see it. I think it's worth the $6-7 price of admission. I think it was worth the hour wait in the cold.
If you are, I'm not really sure what to say. I read "Hunger" and flipped through the rest of the Original Sins TPB, and read a bit of "Newcastle" in B&N tuesday, but really it wasn't enough for me to become a fan or even get familiar enough with the story to judge the movie as being based on the book. I'm pretty sure fans of the book won't be satisfied with Reeves if for no other reason than he's not a blonde Brit. If you think you could turn off your inner geek and actually sit back and just watch it, you might enjoy it. If you can't, I'm not sure.
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Official French Site The French trailer is cooler than anything on IGN.
Basically it's a Thai martial arts movie. It's supposed to be opening in America sometime this month, but I don't know when. Tony Jaa is being hailed as the next Bruce Lee, and if the trailers and preview clips are any indication, that's true.
Just watch the videos, cuz :OMG: :twitch: .
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I am going to see this tomorrow night. Expect some kind of review then.
I haven't read Hellblazer though, so at this point any failures to stick to the source material won't really bother me. I am trying to get a hold of a copy, if only to familiarize myself with the story.
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Some Screenies:
Yep. It's gonna be a Mafia clone.
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They're kicking Marsden off of the cast? I hope not. I actually kinda liked him.
That doesn't make any sense. Superman Returns begins filming March 3rd. Even if it took 3 months to film, none of the X-Men cast would miss any time, because filming of X-Men 3 isn't scheduled to begin filming until June. And it's not like Marsden has a huge role in Superman either.
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$250, with no game. Wow. The headphones and Spider-Man 2 are nice, but the headphones are probably crap and there's no way the industry even bothers to adopt this UMD standard.
None of those titles is a killer app, either (except for MAYBE Metal Gear Acid, people love card games for whatever reason).
Right now, I'd rather get an N-Gage QD than this.
It's sad when it's cheaper to import.
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Mark Ecko Challenges the Game Development Community
What's a fashion designer doing at a game conference? Trying to shake the place up, that's what.
By Dave Kosak | Feb. 1, 2005
The DICE convention kicked off with a roof-raiser from graffiti artist turned fashion maven Mark Ecko. Hold up! Who? Why is he talking to game developers about their business? This guy hasn't even released a game yet (he's working on one with Atari -- an urban counter-culture game called Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure). To be fair, Ecko said as much at the beginning of his talk: he knew people were squinting their eyes skeptically. But he's used to being the outsider. When he was trying to sell his tee-shirts to chain stores, fashion industry executives rankled or told him he didn't know the business and didn't know what he was doing. Mark Ecko thrives on conflict.
His message was the perfect opening to the conference because it came out and told game developers that they were in trouble, that they needed to seriously change how they looked at what they did. Maybe that's the perfect message for someone outside the industry to deliver; or maybe Ecko was just an obnoxious blowhard who didn't belong. Talking with people after the speech, opinions ran the gamut: Some people thought he was right on, others thought he wasn't saying anything they didn't already know, some dismissed it with a wave of the hand, others resented the talk. Among us GameSpy editors he generated some passionate arguments. That's the whole point. So whether you think Ecko belonged on stage or not, it's worth it to at least look at his message.
Who Killed Jabba the Hutt?
Ecko peppered his speech with classic Star Wars references, beginning with the issue of who killed Jabba. Was it the blind luck of Han Solo? The mind tricks of Luke Skywalker? The masked voodoo of Lando? Leia strangling him with the chain? Ecko says it was none of these: it was Jabba sitting around, fat, getting complacent, thinking he understood what was going on. Ecko says the game development is in danger of being in a similar rut: Focused on budgets, contracts, producers, wrestling with publishers, feature creep, milestones, and the works they're losing sight of what the real problem is. "Life sucks. Business sucks. The consumer doesn't care!" he asserts.
Are people making games that are culturally relevant to the audience?
Just who is the audience, anyways? The new generation has grown up in a world with its own set of issues. Columbine haunts their schools. Music is something you download. 911 lingers. The terror alert zings between yellow and orange. TiVo and peer-to-peer networks give them the entertainment they want whenever they want it. Ecko described it as a world of "Television, Technology, and Terrorism."
This audience, aside from wanting bite-sized pieces of entertainment on demand, doesn't care about the mechanics of a game. They don't care about pixel shaders, dynamic shadows, or real-time physics. They care about the end product, which is simply an alternate way of spending some of their free time.
A New Way of Thinking About Games
Ecko railed against developers who are developing products for themselves, or for publishers, or for retailers. He wants to see people making games that are culturally relevant. He wants designers to "use the force..." and that force is culture. It's the force that made his line of clothes take off while designer labels struggled to figure out why they weren't reaching people.
"Godzilla is here," he announced. "He's hungry. What are you going to feed him?" Your typical player who goes out and buys Grand Theft Auto but doesn't consider himself a 'gamer' is a powerful part of the market. Ecko nicknamed this consumer "Kenny." "Kenny doesn't want code" when he buys a game, Ecko says. "He wants history!"
Five Massive Trends
Ecko identified the five most influential things in consumer culture today that have a potential impact on the games industry.
Popstalgia: This is all about making products feel like history. It's a trend where savvy marketers harken back to greatness. Look at what's happening in the car industry: Ford's new Mustang has classic lines and they brought back the GT. Chrysler is bringing back giant bad-ass grilles. They're realizing that the car isn't the thing: it's our idea of cars, our concept of cars when they were awesome. Muscle and power and speed. Tricked out 70s hot-rod babe magnets. Everyone wants to relive that history, even if they weren't a part of it.
Instant Gratification: The music industry has been turned upside down because they weren't delivering the product the way that consumers wanted it. People today expect entertainment on demand. They save programs on TiVo to watch them when they please, they download their favorite songs for 99-cents and carry them around on their iPod with their whole music collection. Nobody wants to wait for anything.
Apocalyptic Marketing: Consumers are driven by fear these days. What's going on in Iraq? What are the terrorists doing next? A lot of stuff is out of everyone's control. What they can control is what they buy. The latest trends? How about the new Hummer? It's popular because it's this ironclad cocoon of safety in an unsure world. People are spending more money on their houses. Home Depot is taking off. People want to be in control of their world, and they're afraid of what's going on outside it.
Customization: Toyota's Scion brand is taking off in part because people make it their own car, tricking it out right off the showroom. Ring tones? They're huge. Everyone wants to look different, sound different, be different.
Democratization of Design: This cryptic set of terms means that everything has to be designed well at all price points. If you go to a store, everything from the cheapest radio in the place to the monster sound system all look cool. Apple's iPod crushed the competition in part because it simply looks sweet.
What Next?
Ecko saw these trends as part of our youth culture today. There will be others. His point is that the gaming industry has to recognize them and creatively build off of them. He looked at the movie industry of the 1960s: it was a stagnant era, where studios dominated production and cranked out formula pieces on schedule. Then along came a new generation of directors who had something to say -- the Francis Ford Coppolas and Martin Scorseses of the world -- and they shook up the world with powerful films that resonated with people who went to the movies. Ecko says that this can happen -- that it needs to happen! -- in the gaming industry.
Someone needs to develop a game as relevant as Apocalypse Now, he asserts, because "until you do you'll be chained to Jabba in a bra and panties."
Ecko was an awesome speaker who peppered his talk with zingers and really kept the audience with him. But did the message hit the mark? It's hard to say. Immediately after his talk, shortly into the next panel, an executive producer at a major game company said something along the lines of "we're all trying to market to that 18-35 year old demographic, and we all understand it..." But it's clear that some games tap into that cultural consciousness more than others.
Ecko's talk may not have been news to everyone. For some developers struggling to bring an edgy vision to life, he might have been preaching to the choir. But even if it's a message that's been said before it's probably one that could never be repeated too often, and it made a great kickoff to the conference.
We'll see if Ecko is able to practice what he preaches when his own game is released.
I'm scared by how right he, an outsider in the industry, is about some things and might be about others.
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It depends on what you want in your anime. I've never been really big on comedy anime. It's not that it's bad, it's just often too weird for me.
So for comedy anime, listen to other people, though I should probably mention FLCL, since none of them have, and its generally well loved.
Anyway, good stuff that's worth getting your hands on:
Cowboy Bebop
Trigun
Rurouni Kenshin
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Akira
Vandread
Hellsing
Vampire Hunter D and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
Macross and Macross Plus
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Monday's Penny Arcade:
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Are sure about the SMB3 numbers, because I've heard that the Sims was the best selling game of all time (PC or console). And you're right, it's not fair to count the numbers that way, but it really is one game -- not eight. It's the same as downloading new content, but at a price. Same game, more sales.
Well, not 100%. But here's where I got the Mario numbers from.
Yeah, I realize that expansion packs are merely new content. However, a person buying the expansion pack has already bought the game, and therefore the purchase of an expansion pack does not really indicate a new customer, merely a loyal one. The sale of expansion pack doesn't represent more market saturation or bring new players into the community. What bothers me even more about counting the expansion packs is that the expansion packs sold more copies than the original game did.
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The Sims sold a lot more than that. The third expansion pack broke the 13 million point, but I don't think thats the right way of doing things, buying an expansion pack is not buying the game. I'd estimate that the original Sims probably sold about 8 million units itself (a fantastic number on the PC and certainly the best selling game on that platform, ironically the gaming platform with the largest market saturation).
SMB3 sold 17.28 million units worldwide and appears to be the best-selling game of all time not bundled with the release of a console (a.e. SMB, SML and SMW).
If you count games that were bundled with consoles, the original SMB sold over 40 million units. But its not fair to say that since most NES' sold came with one.
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I've played the first one, but have yet to beat it. So I'll be waiting awhile before I get my hands on this one.
You need to beat the first twice. Once as light, once as dark. Believe me, you're missing a ton if you don't go through as both.
Anyway, I'll probably get this around my birthday for the PC, seeing as how I don't have an XBox.
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Soul Calibur 2 did. In fact in the first 6 months of its release it out sold the XBox and PS2 versions. The PS2 version later passed it, but I'm still pretty sure it outsold the XBox all together.
EDIT: Actually, as of its price drop in the middle of last year the GC version had sold over 550,000 units in the States alone. And Namco had sold over 2 million copies of the game on all platforms (worldwide). So I might be wrong on that.
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It's rated: R.
'Hellblazed' alerted us that the MPAA has rated Constantine R for violence and demonic images. The "Hellblazer" adaptation, starring Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz, opens in theaters on February 18.So, there you go.
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I have a bad feeling this is just gonna be a Mafia clone. I really don't think it would lend itself to a video game anyway, but I'm probably alone in that.
Would a Mafia clone be a bad thing?
Not necessarily. But it's (Mafia) over 3 years old now, and it would need some serious graphics enhancement, even on the consoles. Plus, I don't really appreciate EA ripping off GOD games, whether they're defunct or not.
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I have a bad feeling this is just gonna be a Mafia clone. I really don't think it would lend itself to a video game anyway, but I'm probably alone in that.
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Wolverine is short and ripped. Not like a bodybuilder, but like a shoot fighter. Spidey's leaner, but he's taller. When drawn together they are about the same overall size. He shouldn't look like a midget next to Logan.
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Um...I still get Batman Begins with my link...
Weird.
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I don't mind a bodybuilder playing Thor. I can accept that one plays Captain America, but I don't have to like it.
That they actually got a bodybuilder to play Wolverine pisses me off to no end. Fucking idiots. That guy doesn't look like Wolverine at all.
Spidey's gonna look like a shrimp.
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http://www.detnews.com/pix/2005/01/10/auto...icane-0105y.jpg
The Jeep Hurricane concept unveiled Sunday is Chrysler's answer to critics who say the rugged brand has gone soft.
Photo by Daniel Mears / The Detroit News
This baby's got 2 HemisBy Brett Clanton / The Detroit News
Yeah, that thang's got a Hemi. In fact, it's got two.
In a surprise move Sunday, DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group unveiled the Jeep Hurricane concept, a brawny off-roader powered by two of the automaker's famous V-8 engines and an answer to critics who believe the famously rugged Jeep brand is going soft.
"We haven't forgotten, nor will we ever forget, what makes a Jeep a Jeep," said Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche, standing next to the open-top monster at the 2005 North American International Auto Show.
Chrysler will more than double the Jeep lineup by 2007, beginning this year with a luxury SUV and later with expected car-based models, but Hurricane makes clear that Jeep is not ready to abandon its off-road heritage.
The Hurricane's two engines -- one in front, one back -- combine to make 670 horsepower, and offer 740 foot-pounds of torque. It has 14 inches of ground clearance, and does 0 to 60 in less than 5 seconds. The signature feature is a steering system that allows it to turn in a complete circle in the same spot.
While Hurricane is a concept, Zetsche said patents developed could show up on future Jeeps.
:twitch: :~ :twitch:
EDIT: Important stuff is now bolded.
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Superman. He's much faster and more agile, giving him a huge advantage over Cain. Plus, Supes could just fly into space and grab that gem thing and turn himself into the Juggernaut. Which would be extremely hilarious.
Loonatics
in Cartoons
Posted
Bugs Bunny and his pals are shown updated for the future. The characters' descendants, Buzz Bunny and the like, will be superhero action figures for a cartoon set in the year 2772.
So, uh, when did Bugs Bunny cease to be entertaining to children?
Kids these days, no taste at all.