Posts Tagged: movies

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30
Aug 10

Cartoon: So Sue Me

If you own a big tech firm, you aren’t Microsoft, and you weren’t named in the patent lawsuit filed this week by Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing, well… you’re probably looking deep into your soul today and asking where it all went wrong. If you aren’t a defendant - which includes AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! - why not

…Craig, click on the legal status tab for something perhaps even more intriguing: if I’m reading it correctly, that patent appears to be collateral, put up by AOL and currently held by the Bank of America. (Bear in mind that I have precisely zero legal expertise in this area. In fact, I have what I would describe as negative legal expertise: I am capable of reducing the net legal knowledge of a room simply by walking into it. It’s my admittedly meh superpower.)

Doug, that’s an interesting but unintended read of the first one-third of the sentence. (Anyone else reach the same conclusion?) If you grasp the nettle, steel your nerves and follow the sentence all the way to the end, though, then:

1) you should be sure to rehydrate after the long journey (my old J-school profs would flay me for writing such a lengthy lead), and

2) you’ll probably realize that these are three conditions followed by a conclusion: if (a) and (b) and (c) then (d). You apparently read it instead as “If (a) then (b) and (c), and Error:…

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Cartoon: So Sue Me

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24
Aug 10

The 10 Most Overblown Video Game Controversies

So-called “responsible” adults have always tried to find scapegoats for bad behavior since the dawn of time. These days, video games take the most heat, even though some controversies just aren’t very well thought out.

…Source: Atari

Turning a villain into the hero of a video game was unheard of in the days of the Atari 2600. So when horror movie auteur Charles Band got his bloody hands in the video game market, he caused a bigger stink than your Dad in the bathroom on Thanksgiving.

He turned the classic slasher masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into a grind-’em-up game that puts the player behind the human skin mask of Leatherface and lets them chase down innocents with a gear-grinding chainsaw for points. Stores either refused to stock the game or hid it behind the counter where only adults could purchase it.

The concept of the game may have sounded violent, but the rest was far from bloody. Thanks to the limited graphics and extremely crude sounds, Leatherface just looked like a walking Jack-o-Lantern with a hot dog shaped tumor sticking out of his gut. So really, the only people who had a right to be offended by it were people with encephalitis or victims of kielbasa impalement….

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The 10 Most Overblown Video Game Controversies

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20
Aug 10

San Francisco Threatens to Sue Zynga for Vandalism

It’s all fun and Mafia games until someone pisses off the city attorney, who is going after social-gaming company Zynga — maker of such popular Facebook applications as FarmVille and Mafia Wars — for what it calls an “illegal and actionable” marketing campaign to promote the company’s latest product, Mafia Wars: Las Vegas.

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San Francisco Threatens to Sue Zynga for Vandalism

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16
Aug 10

BioWare’s Daniel Erickson Talks on Star Wars History

Creating a MMOG for a franchise such as Star Wars is likely to be quite the balancing act. For the writers of Star Wars: The Old Republic, they must draw their knowledge and inspiration from so many sources and you can be certain that if a mistake is made, one of the many SW fans will find it!

…Creating a MMOG for a franchise such as Star Wars is likely to be quite the balancing act. For the writers of Star Wars: The Old Republic, they must draw their knowledge and inspiration from so many sources and you can be certain that if a mistake is made, one of the many SW fans will find it!

So where does a SWTOR writer get their inspiration? Techland.com interviewed BioWare’s Daniel Erickson, the Writing Director of SWTOR to learn more about his Star Wars background and what it’s like to write for a game with such a rich storyline.

Writing for Star Wars is always a delicate piece of surgery. We must carefully carve out the archetypes, rhythms and overlaying themes of the movies and then place them in a completely new body of work. Players want to feel what it’s like to live as Han Solo did but they don’t want to be constrained to his experience or attitudes. The miracle of the MMORPG is that we can allow them to do just that by making their own decision and crafting a very personal story.
You can read…

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BioWare’s Daniel Erickson Talks on Star Wars History

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14
Aug 10

Zombies Return to Call of Duty

Best Buy has let the undead cat out of the bag by revealing that Treyarch will be bringing the wildly popular zombie mode to its Call of Duty: World at War follow up, Call of Duty: Black Ops.

…I’m sure Treyarch/Activision would’ve wanted to announce this in some spectacular fashion, but because they wanted to get a high level of consistent news throughout the pre-release period, they sat on the announcement. And this is what you get when you do that. They should have told us about this months ago, because if they just recently became sure it’s going to happen, it’s going to suck….

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Zombies Return to Call of Duty

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12
Aug 10

10 Video Games Series That Have Not Modernized Well

The following games were once well-known and renowned by gamers, but are now struggling to compete against the more popular Halos and Starcrafts of modern gaming.

…As much as it pains me to place the Zelda series on this list, I am left with little choice after my hands-on experience with the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Hoping that the new Zelda game would introduce something new and fresh to the series, I was disappointed to see that the game played and felt much too identical to 2006’s Twilight Princess, except now with less responsive Wii Motion Plus controls and outdated graphics. Somehow, the Gamecube game from 4 years ago looked better than the upcoming Wii game! The Zelda “formula” throughout the years have remained unchanged as well. How many times must we collect boomerangs, bombs, and heart pieces to stop Ganondorf from doing some kind of evil? Sure, the introduction of Zelda to 3D with Ocarina of Time was revolutionary at the time, but every subsequent entry in the series has been the almost same game. Not enough has been added to the Zelda series lately to create a fresh experience for longtime Zelda fans.4….

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10 Video Games Series That Have Not Modernized Well

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11
Aug 10

Exclusive Look at Double Fine’s New Game: ‘Costume Quest’

The latest game from Tim Schafer’s Double Fine studio is Costume Quest, a DL adventure for XBLA and PSN.

…the first of which is Costume Quest, an adventure/RPG published by THQ and scheduled for a fall release on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.
Dreamt to life by Double Fine lead animator Tasha Harris, Costume Quest marks Double Fine’s departure from triple-A brick-and-mortar Schafer-led titles. Harris is now one of a handful of Double Fine employees who will lead their own projects, with Schafer providing a supporting role where needed.

Make no mistake, though, Costume Quest is very much a Double Fine, or
Schafer-esque, game. Set on Halloween night across spookified suburbs,
rundown carnival rides, and a local mall, the story follows a young boy
searching for his little sister. Costume Quest feels familiar — like a
lost SNES role-playing adventure ported in high-definition 3D — and
laugh out loud funny — like Double Fine’s catalogue.
Similar to Monkey Island’s Guybrush
Threepwood and Brutal Legend’s Eddie Riggs, Costume Quest’s hero is an
everyman caught in delusions of grandeur. Or, in this…

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Exclusive Look at Double Fine’s New Game: ‘Costume Quest’

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8
Aug 10

Good Endings Make Great Games

We’ve all been there. You pour 10-20 hours into a game, master the mechanics, approach the final conflict…

…You want to talk about disappointing endings? Lets Explore Alan Wakes lack luster attempt at a boss fight. I don’t want to say what it is just in case any one reading has not played through it yet but come on really? You have what is pretty much one of the best games i have ever played paired with an ending pretty much equivalent to ODST’s where your left feeling as if this should of just been a mid point in the game. After the ending in odst i honestly had no idea i beat the game until i got the achievement for it. It was also very disappointing in Alan wake after everything you just experienced to have such a weak ending point…

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Good Endings Make Great Games

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7
Aug 10

The Top Ten RPGs of All Time

​Breaking down the greatest role-playing games of all time is a tricky task. There are many games that have RPG characteristics, but don’t really fall into the genre. There are some franchises that constantly put out great products, and it is difficult to separate one from the rest.

…I agree with the rest. WoW shouldn’t be on the list.

1) It’s a completely different genre.
2) It didn’t innovate anything. It’s a refined version of Everquest, which happened to grow ridiculously popular because it came from Blizzard. That’s not innovation, or even noteworthy on a top 10 list of all time for RPG’s.

I guess it’s noteworthy, due to the popularity, but I still feel it belongs on a different list. Again, I don’t feel it’s noteworthy for innovation, that’s for sure. For all of the things it refined, it actually took out some important aspects as well, that most people are too young or new to MMO’s to realize.

Other than that, I like the list. It’s too hard to narrow it down to a top 10 though. There’s no way to please everyone with only listing 10 games from the RPG genre….

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The Top Ten RPGs of All Time

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6
Aug 10

Will Portal 2 Scare Off Casual Gamers?

It came as no surprise that something as good as Portal appealed not only to a hardcore audience, but also casual gamers. The wait for Portal 2 is getting shorter, but as more information is revealed one thing keeps coming up: is Portal 2 going to be too hard? Will it scare off the casual fans Portal was able to pick up?

…is getting shorter and shorter, but as more information is revealed about the game one thing keeps crossing my mind: is Portal 2 going to be too hard? Will it scare off the casual fans Portal was able to pick up?

For some people, Portal served as their introduction into the era of modern gaming. It offered an easy transition by giving players who hadn t picked up a controller since the NES the chance to learn how to use dual-analogue sticks and offered visceral rewards for outsmarting the puzzles without a bunch of rummaging and collecting. You could explore as much or as little as you wanted in Portal and that appealed to people without a ton of prior videogame…

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Will Portal 2 Scare Off Casual Gamers?

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