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Dead or Alive Flick Goes Straight To DVD?
In a move that surprise just about no one, it appears that Corey Yuen's "film" adaptation of the Dead or Alive series of video games will not make it to US theaters. Instead, the film will see its DVD premiere this April. Lucky Europeans have already had the good fortune to see the $21 million T&A; martial arts flick, as it premiered across the Atlantic in a number of countries as early as September of 2006. I'm off to hug my Kasumi pillow and cry myself to sleep over this horrible news.I loved this movie. It doesnt take itself seriously for one nanosecond, and the fights are surprisingly good.
Don't you dare compare it to Boll. This movie loves its subject matter and doesn't attempt to rape it anally with a steam pipe.
Halo 3: Mind Blowing Moss and Grass!
It may not be number one on your list of things you'd like to see added to the Xbox 360 Halo sequel, but you'll probably still be excited to read about the horticulture upgrades coming from Bungie. At least, I was after reading the weekly update from the Bungie crew: But our grass is prettier than our moss. It animates, for one thing. Wind blows it, and it's affected by other things. Like explosions.Nonsense. With any properly simulated environment, if an action takes place repeatedly in one position with a specific magnitude, its effects on the environment will forever be identical. In such a fashion, the only information needed to synch up is positions and triggers. In no way was Halo 2 "too much" in this regard.
Game worlds are not "chaotic" like the real world. In the real world, building a machine that accurately throws a die to any given location and consistently makes it land on a six is an empiric impossibility, whereas in a programmed physics engine, it is completely possible, and rather easy to reproduce.
Player 1 doesn't need to know where AI 1 through 6 is. It needs to know what Player 2 has been doing. What bungie would have to do to make online co-op work is simply plan for it. It's not something you can just latch on, especially if you use a lot of random numbers for behaviors.
There have been so many online co-op games man.. It's silly. Gears of war, Perfect dark Zero... The 360 has that market nailed. This is why i'll be monster disappointed if they haven't sussed it out for Halo 3.
My uh.. "dislike" for Halo comes from knowing Bungie used to do so much more. They used to be frontline, now, frankly, they're a one-franchise company, and their one franchise is through and through derivative scifi with an uninteresting protagonist and a saturday morning cartoon quality villain.
I just wish they'd regain some measure of their previous grace. I have such a hard time dealing with the basic run+gun halo gameplay when we've just been shot up with GoW and Vegas. I love love love the cover mechanics, they make so much more sense to me, and a part of me wishes Bungie would take it to heart and include something like it in H3. Never once did i feel connected to the environment in halos 1 and 2, and right now, after recent games, i don't know how i could really dig without it.
As much as i want to be excited about H3, H2 has been surpassed to an incredible degree by competitors, both technically and in terms of gameplay, both on and offline. I mean that game is borderline unplayable now if you've been eating any recent goods, especially online. So, if H3 plays like H2 with knobs on, in my mind they have a problem right there.
I know it is sacrilegious, but i'd like to see Bungie pull a stunt with H3. Do something spectacularly different to enhance the gameplay experience. Add cover mechanics, add some evasive action, make melee a more complicated ordeal than simply bashing (let us block, let us counter). Give us configurable guns. Give us vehicles we can modify in the field (ala Lost planet). Please, please please, don't just dump us in a "combat scenario" and claim if it's fun for 10 seconds it's fun for hours, because that just isn't true. Don't put us in a room with enemies and have us fight intelligent dynamic AI, and then march us on into another encounter like it, because FEAR and Gears have given us that to a spectacular extent, and i'd love to see something new. Don't just make it bigger, make it MEAN something. Don't put more chaos on screen for the sake of dick measurement, make that chaos MEAN something. Give us interactive spaceship-to-spaceship boarding style combat. I mean come on, give us a knife to cut wires with. Give us tools, give us more than just fucking shooting.
And for fucks sake give us online co-op.
Kotaku Magu: Game Creator New Year's Cards
In Japan, New Year's postcards are the equivalent of Christmas cards. Called "nengajou," they are sent in late December. Nintendo Dream has a bunch of New Year's cards from famous game creators. Actually, most of them seem to just be autographs with New Year's messages scribbled in, but they're still pretty neat. Above is Shigeru Miyamoto's, complete with a self-portrait and drawing of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Hit the jump for the rest!Shiggy's card is awesome. I love those little charicatures, so accurate
Clip: Wii Charge Stations, New PS3 Controller
Nyko shows off some of their cool upcoming accessories in this clip. My favorite two, I think are the Wii charging station and new PS3 controller. Though some of that DS Lite stuff is cool too. Brian Crecenteredslime, either way air passes, whatever it passes by is cooled. You want tust and particulare *out* of the device, not in. You definitely do not want to continuously blow dusty room temperature air into the unit.
That Wii charging station wouldve been neat if it hadn't utterly destroyed the form factor of the controllers. Lame. Ass.
Carmack Prefers 360 to PS3
PS3 or Xbox 360? Quickly, which do you like? John Carmack (creator of Doom, Quake ) has been "pulling" for Microsoft. While he likes the PS3 better than the PS2 and doesn't think the new console is ugly, Carmack just isn't crazy about the PS3 dev tools. He says: But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony's. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3... they're not helpful to the developers...I dunno. When both Gabe Newell and John Carmack say multicore consoles with unpredictable hardware configurations are nails in the backside for developers, i guess that's just flat out confirmed. That goes for both 360 and PS3 mind you.
In other news, apparently Valve are busy pwning multicore dev: Ars technica article
Apple's Steve Jobs "Trash-Talks" PSP
So, the iPhone is coming. If you are American, soon. For those living in other countries (like me), you'll have to wait longer (like me). The phone's portable game possibilities once again stir up talk of Apple expanding further into the market. Apple honcho Steve Jobs seems to be adding his two cents as well. From Time: All technologists believe their products are better than other people's, or at least they say they do, but Jobs believes it a little more than most.This debate is hilarious.
As cool as the device is, those apple keynotes have a serious reality distortion field thing going on. I wish they'd be less.. pompous.
Something really bothers me about a company that consistently claims innovation and revolution, and never once give their competitors or predecessors any kind of recognition at all. Especially considering they're wearing laurels of open source.
Hands On: Lair For PS3
Last time I was presented with the opportunity to get my hands on Factor 5 and Sony's Lair, I had to rush it. Not out of disinterest, mind you, but pure time crunch. The Tokyo Game Show floor is thicker with meaty gamers than even E3 was during its busiest days. Later, during my time at the PlayStation Lounge at Sony HQ, I opted to hound Phil Harrison and Ken Kutaragi for caught-on-tape potential embarrassment instead of actual gaming. What I had played, I'd liked.Factor 5, from way back when, have been extremely good at wrangling solid A/V out of hardware. Doesn't say much for their games, but these are solid developers.
I think it is abso fucking lutely bizarre to start racking on F5 for "being bad developers" when there's nary a game on the system without framerate attitude problems.
Like someone said, the PS3 will most probably even out, framerates will improve, and the world will be a happy place. As is, there's clearly some idiocratic element to PS3 dev that makes solid framerates a tough cookie. One that will be eaten, deliciously probably, but right now denying that the thing is rough riding for devs speaks of riding with blinds.
How you liking these horse and cookie metaphors so far?
This Day in Gaming: January 9th
1998: 20th Century Fox announces they have cast Wing Commander. And what a cast it is! My favorite choice was Fredie Prinze Jr. Because nothing captures the original blue-haired stoic pilot like an aging frat boy. Wing Commander is my official greatest video game movie disappointment, and what I still don't understand is why the movie would even be produced. Wing Commander, as a game, was successful.I saw that movie. Me and my buddy were ALONE in the theater. The Kilrathi are positively *raped* by the production designers, and the asteroid submarine/depthcharge scene is hilarity of astronomical proportions