Scrivener

With the exception of the wild crazy heavy metal music in the newest trailer, I hold high hopes for AvP. Everything I've seen so far hints that it could be a pretty true to form Aliens/Predator movie. Good atmosphere, reasonably good actors, high body count... and the Synthetic Guy (except he's playing the real person this time). My only concern is that the new trailer makes it seem a lot more Freddy vs Jason than Alien or Predator - so long as the lousy music stays in the trailer and out of the movie, all should be well with the world.

quote: But once you've seen one or two of his reviews, you tend to just ignore him if you so choose; Ouch ;[ Anyhoo, have you seen Pitch Black? Or for that matter 'Below'? Both are David Twohy films - and he has a very distinct style. Those movies were water tight, never a wasted second. Riddick, being the sequel to Pitch Black - and also a Twohy movie, had certain expectations to live up to. Although I still enjoyed it Riddick just wasn't as clean a film as Twohy normally produces. I'm positive this is 100% due to studio pressure - Twohy films are a little more cerebral and conservative - unfortunately that dosn't equate summer blockbuster. That's where my complaints come from. There's just a better, tighter, more Twohy movie underneath the studio cut in theatres right now. When I evaluate a movie I think in terms of 'Could this film be improved upon?' Could be Riddick be improved? You bet it could. Like the new upcoming Exorcist movie, I'm bummed that there's another better cut of the film waiting around in a vault somewhere for the Extended Edition DVD - one we wont get to see on the glorious big screen =(

http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004323.html#more For those of you who think this is 'fair', here's how most publishers handle Cafe licensing: You buy one copy of the game for each computer you will running it on. That's it. But Valve takes it across a very distinct line - one copy per computer isn't good enough. They want royalties on top of that. Since CyberCafes aren't very profitable buisnesses to begin with, the idea is just absurd. It shouldn't matter who plays or even how many people play it in a day - there's one copy per computer and the cafes are selling time on their computers, including the legitimately purchased games installed on said computers. Valve has been playing it dirty since they lied about HL2s status and slept with the ATI monster. But this is a new low, even for them. Before long they could start making Microsoft look like a Red Cross Soup Kitchen.

quote: ...damn, I gotta make a space flight sim of this!!!. Have you tried Echelon: Wind Warriors? It's pretty close - just needs the freaky Necromonger ship designs and stuff. Unfortunately there's no space combat in Echelon. SLIGHT SPOILER WARNING AHEAD: They didn't really go into specifics but if the sun were to have such horrible effects on the surface, the only safe way to approach the planet at all would be a carefully plotted course through the planet's shadow - ensuring the sun always remains eclipsed as much as possible. Is that a scary thought or what?

Yeah, I know there's a 'Riddick' thread, but with all the other stuff in there I figured we'd need a regular old review thread as well. So, what's the verdict? That's hard to explain. It just does so much extraordinarily well - and yet it still manages to muck itself up all over the place. Ultimately, it's worth seeing, but read on if you want more info. For starters, the imagery is simply fantastic. Abso-friggin-lutely wonderful. The technology, the geography, the sets, costumes - all of it - was the most fantastic and yet believable scifi fare I have ever seen. George Lucas should be forced to watch this over and over with eyelids pinned open until he gets physically ill every time he tries to watch his Star Wars remakes. Now for the bad - this movie is chock full of some of the worst, and most poorly delivered one-liners you have ever heard. Stuff like "Damn, I hate when we're not the bad guys." It will make you cringe, squirm, and feel genuinely embarassed for the actor delivering. Most of the fight scenes are so unchoreographed that you are hardly able to follow what is happening on screen. There is motion - and shapes that could be people... maybe... and Twohy's editing is so terrible in these instances that you wonder if the projector is malfunctioning. That is just bad bad bad directing. Also, Vin Diesel does the exact same 'jump-ten-feet-in-the-air-about-to-stab-you' pose no less than THREE times. You wont miss it either, I'm positive they used the same greenscreen footage of him in all three instances. For that matter, he also did the 'hand-behind-the-back-choking-the-badguy-in-the-air' thing about as much. It's like the same fight footage is recycled every time there's a fight scene. Also, Dame Vaako, played by Thandie Newton (contrary to popular belief) had all the skill and acting prowess of a high school drama queen - the kind of drama queen that the entire troupe wishes would just leave and take up tennis. She absolutely rapes her role, ruining every line she delivers with the kind of ability that only comes from naturally being able to suck an egg through a garden hose. That's how much she sucked. Vin Diesel has about four poses - and in the space of two hours he manages to use them all at least a dozen times a piece. Then there's *his* one-liners (all of the characters have them, Vin's just got more) like 'It's been a long time since I smelled beautiful.' *cringe* Twohy also manages to steal great sweeping story elements (and even some dialogue) directly from Shakespear - including MacBeth, Coriolanus, and Othello. To some extent, it works... but several of the characters really screw up when it's their turn to deliver. Despite all this awefulness, it's sad to think that 99% of the film's problems could be solved by better editing. Actually cutting about 10mins worth of lame material would make Riddick an immeasurably better film. Adding back in some footage (about 30min was cut two weeks before release - largely to attain a PG13 rating) in addition to the necessary cuts would make this a marvelous film. There's just a lot of extraneous crap in there. Like gangrene, it oughta be cut out. The only problem that editing wont fix, is Thandie Newton. Seriously, someone needs to a get a restraining order to keep her away from movies. In conclusion: It's worth seeing if only for the spectacle of it. It *is* a marvelous looking movie and has a ton of great story ideas. Ultimately, though - the film suffers from some poor editing and some bad dialogue. It's really a mixed bag. Fortunately there a few spectacular performances - Linus Roache ("The Purifier") and Karl Urban ("Vaako") for instance. It's really a credit to Urban considering his having to play next to Nasty Newton in almost every scene. Hopefully the Extended Unrated DVD will be better cut, but Riddick is still worth your $10, if just barely. It's not like we get much scifi these days anyway. 6.9/10

Whoops. My bad ;]

Played the Xbox version briefly at work. Was kinda neat, like a Hellraiser videogame. However, I've made a vow to never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever buy another console-PC port again so long as I live and may that be a very long time.

And I mean that in the same way as the Special Olympics are 'special.' This picture just showed up on AICN and Digital Bits: Yes, what you are looking at is 100% authentic. That is a YOUNG Anakin standing next to the OLD spirits of Yoda and Obi Wan. Apparently Lucas wasn't happy with his Special Edition versions of the films, so he went back started raping the footage all over again. That's it - I officially give up on Star Wars. Why is it so hard to release the classic versions on DVD alongside the ruined ones?

The trailers really make me think of a modernized David Lynch's Dune. I think the necromongers don't exactly assimilate people like Start Trek. From what I've been able to piece together I think it works like this: 1) They invade your planet. 2) You are given the option to convert (think religious conversion, I think religion may play a very big part in the film) 3) If you don't convert, they kill you. Then (complements of high futuristic technology) use your body as fodder in their ever growing army of animated undead - think tleilaxu. Sounds fun. And the early previews on AICN are beaming that this is a thinking man's sci fi and not some mindless action movie. On that I'll remain sceptical, but I hold out hope that we'll yet get something like a fantastic and wonderful mix of Alien, Dune, and Star Wars.

Originally I wasn't planning on seeing this one at all - I really didn't like the first Shrek at all. I thought it was silly, over-the-top, and the jokes, while ever-stretching for a certain amount of pop wit, fell short. Based on the nonstop barrage of good reviews from people I thought I trusted, I saw Shrek 2. The good news: It's better than Shrek 1. The bad news: I still don't like it. Ok, so it's actually half decent movie. And it managed to get about ten times more giggles than the first movie (that makes about ten giggles) but the kind of pop-culture comedy that the movie relies on so heavily will be outdated in just a few years. Ultimately this will sink to the level of slapstick comedy for the very very young. Fart, burp, and general bodily function gags also earn negative points. Eddy Murphey's annoying voice - more negative points. Really great computer animation - some positive points. Some genuinely funny material - more bonus points. An audience that laughs at tons of things that I dont find remotely funny at all - chalk up a whole truckload of negative points. So, yeah - Shrek 2 is way better than the first one. But for the guy that thinks Kill Bill is the most incredible cinematic feat ever projected onto a big screen... sorry. 5/10

And here's the message I sent to all three categories: "According to GameSpot, the PC version of Spider-Man 2 is going to be a "kid-friendly mass-market" game. I'm not quite sure I believe that - it sounds too increadibly stupid to be true. The PC market is dominated (95%) by gamers over the age of 25. Why the heck would Activision want to release a retarded version of a hit game franchise to a 25+ audience? All I can say is that I hope this isn't true at all. Hundreds of thousands of PC gamers everywhere have been waiting a long time to play a Grand-Theft-Auto style Spiderman game - screwing that crowd could be VERY bad for your buisness."

If you played the recent demo then you know that something was horribly wrong with that game. Well, it turns out that the PC version will NOT be even remotely related to the console version of the game. The PC version (By god-aweful 'Hobbit' developer Fizz Factor) is going to be "a child-oriented, mass-market game along the lines of Finding Nemo, instead of the open-ended, Grand Theft Auto-style console game." Check the link: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/spiderma...ws_6100018.html Join me in sending complaints and applicable death threats to: http://www.activision.com/en_US/corporate/contact.jsp

Check this out: http://www.gamemethod.com/archive/394.php THAT'S why I am not going to take any of my skills into the interactive market. I saw this kind of thing happening during my short time with Interplay. There's at least a good market for independant films - a medium for the creative who don't want to worry about anyone else mucking up our ideas. Fortunately I've learned all these lessons before I got into the real world. Unfortunately they've made me a cold, spiteful, bitter, and angry old man at age 22.

Thief 3 dosn't really look that great and it runs aweful. After a couple hours of SERIOUS tweaking I was able to push 16fps. What's bizarre is that I get the same framerate regardless of resolution and most graphic sliders. The game engine is, simply put, one of the worst I have EVER seen. It killed Deus Ex 2 (although that had other problems too) and, for me, it kills Thief. I'm wondering now if $163 is worth upgrading my Ti4600 to a Radeon 9800Pro. That's a lot of money for a starving-college-graphic-arts-student-who-desperately-needs-a-good-DV-camera. I think I'll go play through Far Cry again at 29fps.

Interplay paid the price of selling out to consoles. They've made some of the most notoriously STUPID decisions in the entire history of buisness. Decisions like cancelling a near-complete Baldur's Gate 3 to renew their console Baldur's Gate licence instead the PC license. Decisions like deciding to focus on development of Fallout Brotherhood of Steel instead of Fallout 3. Indeed, I miss the heyday of Interplay. But they brought this on themselves. I just hope somebody somewhere *cough* Troika *cough* picks up the Fallout license and does us all proud with a great sequel. I've noticed something - or rather, noticed something that proves a prediction I made years ago - developing for a simultaneous cross-platform release is stupid and hurts the game. Likewise, trying to sell PC franchises to console markets is ultimately professional suicide. Obvious Examples: ()Drakan 2 ()Fallout BOS ()D&D Heros ()Baldur's Gate DA 2 ()MYST ()Red Alert ()Diablo ()Arx Fatalis Less obvious examples: ()Hitman - now officially on the Tomb-Raider fast-track to videogame hell. One game a year, every other game a 'greatest hits' title, zero evolution. Proof: Hitman Contracts. Also - Hitman 2 is actually technologically inferior to Hitman 1. Graphics do NOT equal technology. ()Morrowind - A relative success on Xbox, the followup GOTYE bombed out hard. Noone knew about it, and those who did didn't care. Because of the simultaneous Xbox development, they nixed features like 'people who follow daily scheduals' and mature content [to appeal to a broader audience]. All the previous Elder Scrolls games were notoriously mature-oriented, and was part of the reason they achieved such cult status. Consoles and censorship are LITERALLY killing the game industry. If still don't believe me, start paying more attention to the game industry and you'll start noticing what I'm talking about.

I thought SEGA was already owned by Sammy? Weren't they founded by the same person?

Just look: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/0.../234/726q1.html and http://www.hollywoodpulse.com/story3.html

I've been using that Mac for Final Cut and DVD Studio for a little over a year. When i bought it, it was underpowered, overpriced, but it sure was purty. Now that I've been using them for a while (my school focuses mainly on Apple as their platform of choice-so the labs are full of G5s) I have truely and completely comprehended how superior PCs are in every way. Now I will grant two concessions to Macs... Final Cut is slightly better than Premier 7... slightly... Premiere has come a long, long, long way in the last couple years and I am just as comfortable working with Premiere on a PC as Final Cut on a Mac. The other concessions is DVD Studio... PC users now have Adobe's DVD Encore but, while not a bad program, it's still in it's fledgling stages. DVD Studio kills Encore in the features department, but Encore plugs into After Effects, Premiere, and Photoshop so effortlessly that it nearly makes up the difference. Did I mention how well Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere work together on a PC? You need a special $500 plugin to export After Effects to Final Cut with all your layers and effects intact. Then there's the whole stability issue... Macs are NOT more stable than PCs. Not at all... not even a little bit. Not only do they crash just as often, they are more likely to take important work with them when they do. In a freak accident, my Mac deleted an entire folder full of work when Photoshop crashed while saving a file. The whole folder... all my backups... gone. And the user interface is nowhere near as streamlined and productive as Windows. It's 1000x more aesthetically pleasing, but it's clunky... and you do a lot more Window-juggling than on a PC (where everything is tab-based). Also, Mac's are WAY WAY WAY overpriced. I admit that they are capable of reaching higher top speeds than PCs... but that is done by simply plugging in multiple CPUs and ungodly ammounts of RAM... but when we're talking 1 CPU and 4 RAM slots... PCs are not only WAY faster... but WAY cheaper as well. When it comes to laptops you cant have multiple processors and 8GB of RAM (thats 8 1GB chips), so almost any PC laptop will blow a Powerbook out of the water. I rest my case... for now.

I just bought a new eMachines laptop at Best Buy. Ha, don't laugh. I think this review at HardwareHell sums it up nicely... http://www.hwhell.com/articles/emachines_6...ptop/index.html E-Machines 6805: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 512MB PC2700 RAM ATI Radeon 9600 Mobile 15.4" Crystal-clear Screen DVD/CDRW Built in wireless networking Heavy-as-all-get-out It's an AWESOME laptop. I paid $1499 for it, plus a $250 3-year warranty... and there's $250 in mail-in rebates fif you use their Best Buy card. There's also no interest for 18months and I'm selling my worthless Apple Powerbook to pay for it. Finally... no more P.O.S. Mac to deal with. You will never be able to understand exactly HOW superior PCs are to Macs until you use them both extensively for a year. Anyone want a fully loaded like-new Powerbook G4 867Mhz 15" w/ 2yrs Applecare left for $1500? Heh.

It's entirely likely that it was preloaded. Didn't even think about it not actually being online. The actual game was quite playable, tho (on at *least* one system). A friend and I seem to have walked away having reached entirely different conclusions about their subscription policies, tho. We heard the same speech, but somehow came up with two entirely different translations. Will need more info on that. In other news: 1) The Singles - Aparently Eidos is still fighting for an M, and I would have to agree. Although there *is* nudity in the game (You'll read 'full frontal' on many sites, but the guys in the game don't have any plumbing, so it's not entirely true) it's definately not egregious enough to warrant an Ao. It's like the sims with breasts. 2) Almost nothing on show in the way of CRPGs. That's very, very sad. Apparently only Bioware and Obsidian are working on real RPGs... although there's also the Troika pseudo-rpg Vampire Bloodlines, which uses the Source engine. 3) DISCover systems were on show in several locations. These seem to be a bit bigger than an Xbox, and apparently start at around $500. Nevertheless, the concept alone was pretty impressive. 4) Prince of Persia 2 - Looks to impress just as much, if not more, than the last one. We saw the prince jump up on a giant's back and start slashing away at it's neck... eventually driving his sword into it's spine. It was like a really cool animated cartoon movie... but 100% playable. 5) Blood and gore seemed to be out of style this year... only Bloodrayne 2 and Brothers in Arms showing any ammount of mature-oriented violence. However, sex was in big time. Liesure Suit Larry, Playboy Mansion, and The Singles were all huge titles this year. About 80% of the games at the show were TEEN targetted or less. That always miffs me. The industry (Read: ESRB) is putting the same stigma on games that they put on animation: it's a kids medium. Despite the fact that 90% of all gamers are over the age of 21... ratings are starting to get unreasonable regardless of medium. Fantastic family films like Whale Rider are getting PG13s, and games like Medal of Honor get TEENS... if these were movies 20 years ago, they would have been PG. Think about that. 6) New Zelda is in the works, this time no cell-shading. The video just said "The Legend of Zelda"... based on the video, a lot of folks were whispering rumours of a remake of classic Zelda. 7) Sega was supposed to make a big announcement... apparently noone knows what that is yet. 8) E3 food is nasty and expensive. $17.95 for a chicken breast sandwich with fresh vegetables. Instead, I bought a $2 rat-dog from the hotdog vendors across the street. That's good stuff. 9) Looks like LucasArts is now concentrating SOLELY on Star Wars games now. With the exception of KOTOR2, I won't be sad if I never saw another Star Wars game so long as I lived... especially since this contrived BS is being paid for instead of Full Throttle or Sam & Max. Conclusion: Looks to be a very, very weak year for PC games. Almost no RPGs, a few promising strategy games (Including Codemaster's bizarre PERIMETER), and more shooters... especially WW2/Vietnam/Modern shooters... than you could possibly imagine. What's REALLY unnerving, is that almost all of those shooters are 'shooting' for Teen ratings. You've got guns! And you shoot people for chrissakes! What's with all the TEEN ratings!?!? I don't hate games... I only hate bad games. It just happens that most games are bad.

Well, this years E3 was a far cry better than last years. Gotta stick my hand in an aquarium full of cockroaches hoping to win an Alienware notebook (I didnt)... I then offered to eat all of the roaches for the notebook. They said no. Bummer. This year's highlights: 1) Operation Flashpoint for XBox... looks FANTASTIC. Everything made it in, and it has Xbox live support. 2) Phantom gaming system - increadible. I take back everything i said about their little system. It was running UT 2004 at 60fps easy, with all the options on, at 1080i... with a specially designed keyboard and mouse... that sits on your lap! Strangest of all - they will GIVE you the system if you sign a 2-year service contract ($30/month). That $30 gets you access to a ton of games at any time (streamed live over your broadband) like TV channels. There *will* be premium content, but that will be cheap. And $30 a month for a bunch of games is cheaper than $50+ per game seperately. 3) Fight Club the game... it was awesome. Like a cross between Tekken, Tau Feng, and DOA... the devs really did their homework. Super-interactive environments (The guy did a special move where the guy slams the other guy's head in a car door multiple times), blood... and painful looking bone-breaking (Well placed kick snaped this guys arm, bending it the wrong way). Will definately be picking it up for my XB. 4) Doom 3 - especially impressive since it was playable on Xbox. All the graphics, all the features, 60fps... on Xbox. It put everything else in the Microsoft area to shame. 5) Soldiers: Heros of WW2 - FINALLY a real spiritual successor to Close Combat. Pretty graphics, 3D everything, destructable terrain, real physics, great tactical gameplay. 6) Superpower 2 - the only thing that DIDNT suck at Dreamcatcher's arena. This looks great, definately worlds beyond the first Superpower. The guy demonstrated a neat feature whereby you can make Languages/Religions or a number of other things legal/illegal. Watching him deal with a resulting uprising was quite entertaining. 7) Rome: Total War - Oh-my-God. Screenshots don't do this justice. Seeing it in action is like seeing history happen in front of you... 8) Battle for Middle Earth - and so is this. The battles were every bit as great as the films, and they smoothed out some of the things I was upset about... (poor scale, etc). 9) Dreamfall: Longest Journey 2 - Funcom is aiming for a TEEN on this. I enarly strangled the guy when he told me that. Fortunately, he also said they were planning a mature "International version." Meaning I will have to get the game from my usual overseas sources. Other stuff: A) More WW2 games than you could possibly imagine. I started ignoring them after a few minutes. No Richard Burns ralley. Bummer! I really wanted to see this in action. C) Shellshock: Nam 67 looked really, really lame. Eidos claimed it is supposed to be the most brutally realistic (See: gory) wargame of all time. If little pink puffs = gore, then yeah. This looks like a 3rd person Medal of Honor with the TINIEST ammount of blood. D) The Singles - already available in Europe, the ESRB (Electronic Software Raping Beurocracy) slapped this with an AO for it's full frontal nudity. Not impressed. Played the Euro version and this is NOT that bad. More later...

I'm card carrying member of the CatWoman movie haters society. Halle Berry is not a very skilled actor, she just pushed all the right buttons to get where she is. Ie - she's cute as a button. That just dosn't get anywhere with me. And that costume looks TERRIBLE. Where'd she get that? Condom Revolution? Prediction - another movie as lame as Daredevil (Hate that movie also)... but with Halle Berry. She should stick to magazine spreads, she just dosnt have the skill to make anyone care about her characters. No, not even in Monster's Ball.

It's two hours of Hugh Jackman getting thrown the air by various computer-generated monsters. The acting is bad bad bad (especially Dracula's speech about love) , the plot is silly, and there are flying midget baby vampires... what is with that director anyway? Did flying midget baby mummies help Mummy returns? No, Brendan Frasier's quirkiness did. Unlike the silly-campy Mummy movies, Van Helsing is a terrible, terrible film that hurts to watch and dosn't realize how bad it is. At least Punisher had it's saving graces, Helsing just sucks. I know some people thought Van Helsing was "fun"... *cough* Ebert *cough* but poor, amateur, big-budget-CG-fests will never, ever get a passing grade in my class. 1/10 P.S. There's good camp (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Dead Alive) and there's BAD camp (Freddy vs. Jason, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)... Van Helsing is a shining example of BAD camp. Interpret that as you will.

Go to cbs.com and vote for "Who should have won the $1,000,000." The winner gets... $1,000,000. Nows your chance to give Rupert what he rightly deserves. Go vote now!

I will refrain from poking fun at you for asking such a silly question. Widescreen is ALWAYS superior to fullscreen (One exception - Time Bandits) since Fullscreen means that the sides of the image are cut off to maintain TV's 3:4 aspect ratio. In widescreen you get the full image as it was recorded. I said Time Bandits was an exception - as it was actually filmed in 3:4 then cropped for the big screen, which is 16:9 - which is widescreen ratio. Still, widescreen offers a more interesting shape on which to paint one's images... and is still more interesting than Full screen. In sum: Always, always, always, always, always, always, always go Widescreen. Full screen has been mutilated to fill the TV... there's action happening off the sides of the screen that you will never see in fullscreen. For a long time my friends had never seen Star Wars widescreen, and when we finally watched it at my house they thought for sure there was some new aliens. Not so, they were off-frame in the full screen version. They had always missed half the movie.