Proyas says this will be different as it is "sort of the origin tale that mixes [the historical] Prince Vlad of Transylvania with sort of [fictionalized] Bram Stoker [story]."
I was also a little concerned with his tooth fetish after this comment, "Oh, you've got to have teeth, I mean, the teeth are really important. I think Frank Langella in the 'Dracula' movie that was made in the 70s, I think he didn't want to have teeth in the movie. But, no, I like the teeth. I want to see girls with a lot of teeth." Riiiiight.
He may like teeth but he doesn't so much like the garlic stating that it was "kind of weird" but do not fret Drac fanboys as he went on to say that there will be "stakes and teeth. And lots and lots of blood!"
The last time we saw old Pale-n-Fangy was in Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula" starring Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder (before her "5 finger discount" problems) and Gary Oldman in 1992.
Here it is folks! The first shots showing more than just a tease of GM's saviour, the Chevy Volt.
Autoblog alerted me to the spy shots taken on and around the set of the new Transformers movie today and I must say it's a relief to see the Volt dressed in something other than the silver we've seen so many times before although I'm not a huge fan of the purply blue either.
The official coming-out isn't far off but it's still exciting to see what could herald in a new era for the US car market, if not the world car market. Remember, the Volt uses only the electric motor for propulsion with the secondary internal combustion engine kicking in to recharge batteries when they dip below a certain limit. Other, older hybrids rely on their internal combustion engines for propulsion and only use the electric motor when idling or driving slowly around carparks etc. This means if you only drive 50-odd miles between charges you may never use petroleum again. It's also based on the E-Flex architecture where the secondary "recharge" motor can be swapped out at a later date for something completely different.
Here's another shot of the Volt where you can actually read the word "VOLT" just next to the side mirror (click for a higher res image).
More photos are available over at AutoblogGreen but they're mostly fuzzy mobile phone camera shots.
I'll be the first to admit that the Audi R8 is one mean machine. Not only does it look great and goes like the clappers but it recently beat off four other supercars on Top Gear to run the furthest on a gallon of fuel.
Well, Audi have now developed the R8 GT3 dubbed "R16" internally at Audi Sport . This rear-drive racer features a six-speed sequential gearbox, mostly production-spec suspension components, plus an updated front end and a large rear wing designed to keep it planted to the tarmac.
The best thing about it is this car will be on sale to the general public (well, the general RICH public anyway) by mid-2009. More pics and info over at CarAdvice.com.au.
From the WTF section of the human race comes news today that Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, Studio 60, Charlie Wilson's War) is currently writing a movie about the inception of Facebook. No, you didn't misread that, a movie about Facebook.
"I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)"
Sorry to harp on about this game but amazingly "Yahtzee" of Zero Punctuation fame found Braid to be a mostly decent game. There's not much I can say other than watch the video review... enjoy!
You may have heard of Braid and its "ridiculous" price of a whopping 1200 points on Xbox Live Arcade (that's just under $20 AUD) in a time when most other XBLA games cost only 800 points (around $13 AUD). Well, I'm here to tell you it's well worth it.
I finished the game last night and I must say I was mightily impressed, especially considering it's an XBLA game. It looks and sounds like nothing else and the gameplay, while appearing deceptively simple, is quite a brain buster.
At the time of writing, Braid is the highest rated XBLA game ever with a metascore of 92/100. But it doesn't stop there, it's the 10th highest rated Xbox 360 game ever. That's right, a $20 game kicks the butt of huge budget extravaganzas like Mass Effect and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfare.
The Story
Before I get into the nitty gritties I first have to mention the story in Braid. To quote Wikipedia, "Braid features Tim, a man searching for a princess. His relationship with this princess is vague at best, and the only clear part of this relationship is that Tim has made some sort of mistake which he hopes to reconcile or, if possible, erase. As one progresses through the six worlds in Braid, storyline text at the beginning of each world provides further insight into Tim's quest for his princess."
Yes, there's a princess and you play as the hero battling through the game to save her. But you're no knight in shining armour but just a guy in a suit and there's mention of locations in modern US cities and other less-than-fairy tale happenings that lead the player to believe this is Tim's glossing over of real world happenings.
The story progresses as you traverse the various worlds starting at World #2 and finishing at World #1. The final world is treated differently to the rest of the game leaving the player to just get through each area without worrying about picking up the jigsaw puzzle pieces. It also plays out in a rather ambiguous way leaving the player to decide what really happened to Tim in the real world.
The thing I like most about the story is it doesn't intrude one bit. You can just walk straight past all the story books and press the (A) button to shut the little dinosaur up at the end of each world. After playing through Halo 3 recently where cut scenes look like Hollywood movies and other characters in the game keep interrupting you while you're playing, Braid was a relief.
Gameplay and Game Mechanics
If there was one thing people who have played Braid will mention it's the ability to manipulate the flow of time. At any point during the game you hold down the (X) button and everything you've just done runs backwards. If you want to go back faster you can hit the left shoulder or trigger to speed it up. Having this mechanic in the game means you cannot die as you do in traditional platformers.
You may think this makes the game a cakewalk, well think again. Each area in each world presents you with a different and unique challenge which often requires you to use your ability to manipulate time just to make it through. Also, you find that each world obeys its own laws of time. For example the first world is a straight up platforming world where you only use the time-rewind to un-die but the second world introduces you to certain objects (they glow green) that don't obey your time manipulation. You need to use this objects to achieve your goals. Take a look at the screenshot (above/left) and guess how you might get that green glowing key over to the door. Another is a world where time stops if you stop, runs backwards if you move to the left of the screen and forward if you move to the right. Wikipedia has a complete list and short description of each of the worlds.
As you'd expect each progressive world gets more difficult than the previous but that's only if you want to solve the jigsaw puzzles. You can wander through each area of each world almost untouched to progress through the game. This is another example of letting the player choose how they wish to play... I'm looking at you console games with your checkpoints "just to make it more difficult".
So while appearing on the surface to be a regular old platformer Braid plays more like a puzzle solving game a la Portal than a red-overalled jumping and plumbing game.
The Visuals
As you can see from the screenshots and video below this game looks like a work of art. The painted backdrops are constantly changing and flowing giving you a wonderful sense of life while remaining abstract and "in" Tim's imagination. If there is one example you would look to in the argument of "can video games be art" it's Braid. I was so taken aback by the visuals that it took me a while to figure out that the opening title (seen at the top of this post) was actually part of the game where you had to run to the right of the screen.
The character design is very simple and keeps to the platformer roots of Braid where the animations only have a few frames each for different movements (if any). I enjoyed seeing the little pink rabbits go flying off the screen. The characters were redrawn (not redesigned) after the backdrop artist had done his work. Again, to quote Wikipedia, "The worlds and backgrounds were designed by David Hellman, who was responsible for the art in the critically-acclaimed webcomic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. The character visuals were originally created by Edmund Mcmillen, but were later redrawn by Hellman "to better match the now-predominant style of the backgrounds".
Personally I can't think of another game that even looks remotely like Braid and in doing so brings a much needed break from the overbearing "gritty realism" that seems to plague the current generation of games.
The Audio
The first thing that strikes you when listening to Braid is there's no huge orchestral score, no Matrix-esque techno soundtrack, not even a layer of Corporate Rock. What you get is music to match the visuals, calming, beautifully haunting celtic-like instrumentals (I'm not talking about Enya here). Each world has different music which plays in accordance with the current passage of time. This means if you rewind time the music plays in reverse or if you're in the world where time is backwards then when you reverse time the music plays forwards. The music was all licensed from Magnatune which has a complete list of the tracks used.
As with the character design the sound effects are kept to a minimum so as not to interfere with the mood of the game. Some of the more notable sounds are the pink rabbits that sound like cats (weird!), the clapping hand sound of the man-eating plants that appear out of Mario-esque green pipes and the strange groans the balloon-head guys make when they get knocked off platforms.
The music and sparse sound effects all come together to produce a very calming game that's wonderful just to sit and listen to.
The Problems
My only real problem with the game overall is Tim's pants. Yes, his pants. His pants are white and some ladders are white so in the heat of the moment your brain registers the edge of Tim as the bottom of his jacket rather than his feet. I don't know how many times I tried jumping off ladders too soon due to this issue but thanks to the very handy (X) button rewind it was just a matter of going back a few seconds and trying again.
One thing I'd like to see added to Braid is the ability to pause the game leaving the current level visible. As it stands when you press pause you're presented with the full screen menu screen hiding what you were just looking at. The reason I would like to see this is so you can study the layout of the land without fear of being blasted by a fireball or attacked by a pink rabbit. One way around this is to hit the (X) button then the right shoulder or trigger button which sets time to play forward at x0 speed, that is, standing still.
A very minor problem is the title of the game. I was originally put off by the name "Braid", which comes from the story's Princess whipping Tim in the face with her braid as she spins around to walk away from him, but I'm not sure what I would call it otherwise.
The last problem is that now I'll be expecting every game to incorporate the time rewind feature, it certainly acts as a sedative for gamer rage.
Overall
I'm not sure if the game is poking fun at or paying homage to classic platformer games which work in similar ways but punish you for hitting buttons at the wrong millisecond. What I am sure of is it was a beautiful breath of fresh air in a stale game market where every big game is just a sequel to a game we've already played.
All this for $20 AUD. Easily 4 hours of totally original gameplay costing me a whopping $5 an hour. It took me 8-odd hours to get through Halo 3 and that game costs around $100 so that's $12.50 an hour for gameplay almost identical to the previous 2 Halo games, just a bit prettier.
So, jump onto XBLA and spend your hard earned cash on what could be the best game of the year.
Alright already, yes, we've all seen the photo of the bride with her enormous personality traits hanging out of her marvel-of-engineering wedding dress. Now can we please get on with our lives?
PS: I cropped the people in the foreground out of the original as they were just plain distracting.
Kotaku has some new in-game footage (below) from this year's parkour-inspired first person shooter runner game Mirror's Edge. Finally something different from the same scene/level we've seen over and over in the past 6 months.
This time the gameplay is centered on running around in a Half-Life-esque indoor area with lots of ladders and platforms and snipers! All I could think of while watching the new footage is how much the gameplay is like Portal... Portal without the portal gun. Basically you enter an area at point A and you've got to figure out how to get to point B before GLaDOS does something nasty to you while acting all innocent.
All similarities aside, I'm still looking forward to this game as it appears to offer something new in a time when all the big games are sequels to games we played on the previous generation platforms.
After years of random people uploading their own clips from the hit UK TV show the BBC has started its own Top Gear channel on YouTube. There are 30 clips available including scenes we've seen on air plus juicy bits never aired outside of the UK.
To get it all started, and to quote CarAdvice.com.au, "Michael Harvey, Editorial Director of Top Gear, gives us a quick overview of what to expect in the future." You can see the clip below.
I received some great news today from Movieweb. On November 11 this year the entire series of Firefly will be available to purchase on the only surviving physical HD format, Blu-ray.
That's right, all of Captain Mal's and Wash's and everybody else's antics aboard Serenity ready to watch in glorious HD.
I was just thinking it's about time I rewatched one of the best sci fi TV shows ever made. Thanks Joss!
Are you sick of USB 2.0 yet? According to Wikipedia it was released over 8 years ago (April 2000). Of course there's always a lag period between when things are released and when they are freely and cheaply available to the masses but that can't have been more than a year.
"The highlights include assurance that USB 3.0 will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 and that it'll provide transfer rates up to ten times more than USB 2.0's 480Mbps limit (that's 4.8Gbps). Furthermore, we're told that uploads and downloads are kept on separate lanes, the cables are thicker, it will charge more devices more quickly, and it will be much more mindful of energy waste."
The bad news is that it's going to be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0... yes, that's bad news. It means we're still stuck with that rediculous rectangular plug. Seriously, who designed that thing? Make it an irregular shape so we don't have to go crawling under desks just to see if it's the right way round. I'm sure there's a "Murphy's Law" that dictates that you will always get the plug upside down on your first attempt, something similar to the butter-side-down Tumbling Toast theory.
Anyway, if we're lucky, by next year we'll be seeing some crazy 4.8Gbps transfer speeds from our portable devices... maybe a nice 512GB SSD or something.
It appears as though the Voltron feature film is back on the cards but this time with a lesser budget that previously thought. Of course that could be the doom of the project or the boon as you can do some pretty amazingthings these days without the big James Cameron bucks.
To quote Movieweb, "Producers expect to attach a director within the next week.
Last summer, New Regency picked up the rights to the property, adapted by scribe Justin Marks.
Marks' take is described as a post-apocalyptic tale set in New York City and Mexico, where five survivors of an alien attack band together and end up piloting the five lion-shaped robots that combine and form the massive sword-wielding Voltron that helps battle Earth's invaders."
WTF? Voltron in Mexico? That's as bad as Godzilla in NYC... Surely the American kids who watched Voltron in the 80s are mature enough to accept a storyline that's NOT based in the USA.
Feast your eyes on this lovely close up of the production Chevy Volt. So far all we've had to go on is the concept vehicle photos of the car that will hopefully bring the US car industry into the future but GM just released a couple of teaser shots of the actual production Volt.
While looking vastly different to the concept car this new design still bears some resemblance as though it is its brother or cousin from interstate. The front grille appears to be enclosed, most likely due to aerodynamic issues and I'm not entirely sure what the series of funky blue and red LEDs at the front do other than look cool. You can get a gander at it's rear flanks over at Autoblog but you'll just have to wait a bit longer to see any more of this beasty.
I love reading stuff like this. It's super nerdy but has the potential to hugely change the way we do things. This new nanoantenna material developed by the DoE's Idaho National Laboratory grabs heat from anywhere and converts it to electricity. That's right, heat. So you could whack it in your uber crazy gaming rig to help with the cooling and at the same time gain a bonus source of power.
To quote Engadget, "The material, composed of tiny gold antennas set in polyethylene plastic is tuned to gather 80 percent of energy from infrared rays in its production version, and can gather energy from the sun, earth, or even your PC's warmth. The antennas can be tuned to different parts of the infrared spectrum, and the thin material can be sandwiched together to cover the full desired range. Unfortunately, the resulting current generated alternates at rates too high to be converted to DC with current technology -- new manufacturing processes will needed -- but once that problem is solved, nanoantennas should easily best solar cells in efficiency and production costs." Did you like their little "current" pun there?
Haven't had much crapworthy stuff from Tim recently but today I got this email from him with the subject "After flipping his hydrofoil..." with the remaining text/punchline reading "...Jesus quickly leaves the scene before his Father finds out!".
Run Jesus, RUN!
Direct all religious criticism or comments from people lacking a sense of humour to tomc@scientology.org.
The Fallout 3 saga continues but hopefully this is the final chapter. The news today is that the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has given Fallout 3 an MA 15+ rating for the slightly modified version of the game.
The rating was given for "Strong violence, drug references and coarse language". Originally it was these "drug references" that caused the ruckus as the use of them in-game was too realistic. Word on the street is that when you used morphine in Fallout 3 your character felt better. Weird hey... so the OFLC refused classification on that basis. Now you get a "health pack" in-game which makes your character feel better. The whole game has changed!
EB Games says Fallout 3 will be in stores in October (nice and precise there EB!). Anyway, read a little more about it over at Kotaku.
We've seen quite a few iterations in the overall design of the lovely Lara Croft in either digital form as seen in the many games starring her or live-action form via the models used to promote said games and Mrs Smith Pitt in the feature films.
Well to promote the new game Tomb Raider: Underworld Lara has undergone yet another transformation and she is now wearing a Batman-inspired singlet and looking generally darker. To do all the public appearances for the "real" Lara we now have 23-year-old Alison Carroll, a professional display gymnast from the Croydon area of London, who has performed in front of Prince Charles himself. Miss Carroll beat out hundreds of applicants for the role of Lara Croft, the new position allowing her to quit her day job as a receptionist.
The brains at MIT have created what they're calling a "4-D" display where a static image (in this case a brandy bottle) appears to cast shadows, show highlights and generally react to the light behind it. Make sure you check out the video to ensure you have even the slightest clue as to what is going on.
Great news for billboard-type advertisers and maybe the manufacturers of those LCD photo displays you see in homes these days. Not sure who else this may benefit but cool nonetheless.
I just read on the inside sleeve of Matthew Reilly's recent novel Six Sacred Stones that he had written a TV pilot episode for ABC. A quick check on IMDb confirms this to be Literary Superstar, "A look at the life of an overworked book publicist." starring Jenna Elfman AKA Dharma from Dharma and Greg.
Not only is it on IMDb but tv.com also has a little bit of info on the show.
It doesn't really sound like something I'd be interested in but I'll give it the 6-episode test (if they make more than the pilot). Now Matthew just needs his Bruckheimer movie to be made and he'll be happy. My money is on Ice Station, that'd make a great action flick!
If you're a fan of Futurama (like me) then you've probably already seen the firsttwo straight-to-DVD feature length films released since its revival. Well strap yourself in and prepare for the third installment as Futurama: Bender's Game is due for release on DVD and Blu-Ray on November 4.
Here's a little plot outline to whet your appetite. "With fuel prices skyrocketing, the Planet Express crew sets off on a dangerous mission to infiltrate the world's only dark-matter mine, source of all spaceship fuel. But deep beneath the surface, they discover a far stranger place... a medieval land of dragons and sorcery and intoxicated knights who look suspiciously like Bender."
Strange that out of 3 films 2 of them star Bender (well, his name is in the title). I guess the producers of the show know that Bender is the greatest!
As most people had already guessed the mysterious car that kept showing up on the set of Transformers 2 was a Corvette concept car. Well Autoblog has some more details on this silvery sharky beast.
"According to their sources, the design study will debut sometime next year ahead of the Transformers sequel, but won't foretell the future of the next-generation C7 Corvette. Rather, it's called the Corvette Centennial Design Concept and was developed to celebrate General Motors' 100-year celebration.
Hot off the press comes this piece of interesting information from Kotaku. I assume the quicker-than-usual PC release is due to the fact that GTA no longer has an exclusivity contract with one particular console to worry about.
Rockstar Games Announces Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC
New York, NY – August 6, 2008 – Rockstar Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), is proud to announce that Grand Theft Auto IV will be arriving on the PC on November 18th and 21st in North America and Europe, respectively.
"We are very excited to be releasing the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV," said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. "The whole team is dedicated to bringing an amazing gaming experience to the PC. The game looks and plays beautifully on PC and we can't wait for people to play it."
Developed by series creator Rockstar North and set in Liberty City, the latest installment in the enormously successful Grand Theft Auto series features a painstakingly detailed and life-like city for players to explore; a rich, immersive narrative experience; an original soundtrack highlighting the cultural eclecticism of Liberty City; and newly expanded multiplayer just for the PC.
Some new screen grabs from the upcoming PS3 "game" Heavy Rain were released into the wild today. Very little is known about the title with only this freaky video and the new screenshots given as clues.
The new short-haired biker chick and some random fat guy star in the new shots with plenty of heavy post processing and some cool skin texturing. Motion blur makes a guest appearance in the final screenshot of the bike riding over a bridge.
See the rest of the new screenies over at Spilzonen.
As I previously mentioned, I'll be watching the Watchmen film the day it comes out (midnight session anyone?) but in the meantime I'll have to be happy by watching them make the Watchmen.
Yahoo has an ongoing series of videos of the production diary with a 2 minute behind-the-scenes look at the creation of The Owlship being the latest in a series of 5 (so far). If you don't want to spoil the movie then don't watch these but if you're interested in how all this stuff gets made then why are you still reading this? All videos are available in HD formats too...
Kotaku has a little story today about a guy who installs computer systems for the US government. Said guy recently set up this behemoth then proceeded to thoroughly "test" it by playing BioShock and World of Warcraft on it.
In case you have the money lying around under your mattress here's what you'll need to get started: 27 HD panels that equate to a display that's 40 feet wide (12.2 meters) and 15 feet high (4.6 meters), with a desktop resolution of 12,600 x 3,150. You'll probably need to get some serious graphics hardware to push that many pixels at once too.
I love getting news about Australia via international sources, especially when it's something as cool as this.
A German-born, Aussie resident designer by the name of Axel Peemöller has taken the perspective-based ads we see a lot in sports television these days and painted up some signs in the carpark of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne. These mind-bending signs use simple mathematics and some thinking ahead to produce words that appear to float in space but only from the right angle.
We currently only have 4-core processors (or 3 if you're AMD) but since the quad-core was released all I could think of were the days when we had 4MHz processors. Next will be 8MHz, then 16MHz etc. Well, this new performance graph snuck out of Intel's super secret headquarters shows that they're thinking along the same lines with their Larrabee CPUs.
As you can see from the graph, as cores are added the performance increases in a very linear fashion. You can also read from the very same graph that we might be looking at 48-core processors sooner than you think with Intel now trying to tell us that GPUs are a thing of the past.
With all the rumours bouncing around about Arnie's involvement in the new Terminator: Salvation film it's good to hear that the man himself has spoken up (with his instantly recognisable Austrian accent) and confirmed those rumours.
Yes, Arnie's ugly mug will be digitally scanned in 3D and plonked on top of Austrian body builder Roland Kickinger's body in post production. Not sure whose (if anybody's) voice will be used but if the big bucks are being thrown in Arnie's direction he could at least give us a few sound bites. "Cahm aaahn!"
I laughed out loud reading Arnie's following quote, not from the content but from my inability to not hear it in his voice, "I hope they do well, and I hope it is a huge hit. I do hope it creates a spectacle on the screen. That is what James Cameron created. With those big movies, there's a certain expectation and if you don't live up to it, if the movie is not a 10, then the business will be soft. If Terminator Salvation is pushing it forward, it will be breaking records all the time. If director McG has the T4 and the kind of shots that has the audience thinking, 'Now how did he do that?' -- then it is "The Terminator" and you can blow everyone away and every record at the box office."
Translated: "With those big moofies, there's a cyertain eggspectation and if you doen't life ahp to it, if the moofie is naht a 10, then the business will be sawft."
Man, what would Hollywood do without Arnie... *sigh*
Some cool new posters for the upcoming Watchmen movie which is being directed by 300's Zack Snyder have surfaced on the internets today. To the left we have Sally Jupiter (played by Carla Gugino) in a very cool 1930s S&M-ish poster claiming it doesn't rain on the good guys in California. You can check the rest of the posters out at Movieweb.
After seeing the super cool teaser trailer the other week I keep hoping this won't be a recurrence of the 300 Trailer super hype. Man, I loved that 300 trailer and no film on earth could meet my expectations after that.
"To date, Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award, and is also the only graphic novel to appear on Time Magazine's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels" published since the founding of the magazine in 1923.
Watchmen is set in 1985, in an alternate historyUnited States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union; throughout the books, the Doomsday Clock is shown gradually ticking towards midnight. It tells the story of a group of past and present superheroes and the events surrounding the mysterious murder of one of their own. Watchmen depicts superheroes as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who struggle with neuroses and failings, and who—with one notable exception—lack anything recognizable as super powers. Watchmen's deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism, multi-layered dialogue, and metafiction, has influenced both comics and film."
The film is going for a global release of the 5th/6th of March 2009.
A little write up over at CarAdvice.com.au talks about one of the coolest features in a new car since sliced bread (huh?). We've had trip computers and speed monitoring computers in cars for ages but this new feature called Speed Limit Display will, well, display the speed limit.
The system uses a little camera mounted near the passenger side rear-vision mirror which watches the side of the road for any speed limit signs (including those funky LED-based electronic ones they like to use around construction zones) and pops up a little alert on the car's HUD if you're going over it.
However, before alerting the driver the new system chats with the car's nav system to see if the speed matches the speed in the GPS data so maybe it's not exactly like a back seat driver.
Oh, and BMW really wants to make sure you understand that the system won't try to slow you down, we wouldn't want THAT now would we!?
Anyone taking bets for TDK being the fourth film ever to reach the golden $1 billion USD mark worldwide? Currently Titanic is sitting pretty after grossing $1.84B USD worldwide back in 1997, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is in second place with $1.13B USD and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest just scraped it in with $1.06B USD. Of course none of those figures have been adjusted for inflation... Google it if you really want to know.
Kotaku put me on to a great post on abc.net.au by Tom Crago on the current Australian games classification system. Tom is the chief executive of Tantalus and president of the Game Developers' Association of Australia (GDAA) so you'd hope his words carry some weight.
Tom mentions that there are 2,000-odd game developers living and paying taxes (we hope) in Australia yet some of the games they work on can't be sold here due to the lack of an R rating (18+) for games using Fallout 3's effective banning as a good example.
One interesting quote is "Australia's absence of an R18+ category, and the financial imperative of getting a game onto store shelves in a timely manner, means that many games intended for adult audiences (and rated 18+ in other countries) are inappropriately shoehorned into the existing MA15+ category in Australia. Far from protecting minors from adult content, our uniquely incomplete classification system has allowed them, in many cases, to legally purchase and access such content.".
Read the entire thing, it's not long and points out how stupid our government (yes, even you KRudd) is in the eyes of the world.
Man, I love the way the Japanese come up with whacky and wonderful new ways to play games. Take this online version of the upcoming PS3 game The Last Guy. The idea is to save everyone on screen by running around and letting them join your group. When you have enough followers take them to the Escape Zone but don't go too close to the bad guys or the little people will scatter or worse, you'll die.
What makes this fun is that you can choose pretty much any website to use as the play field. The whitespace acts as areas you can travel through with images and dark areas blocking your way. To get a feel for the game I recommend running around on Google or even my blog here.
There's a table of the most played sites on the front page of the Japanese site. Some of them are pretty hard.
Today's big waste-of-everything story comes from the land of excess where a wealthy Sheikh thought it'd be a great idea to send his black and gold Lambo LP640 in for an oil change. What makes this a big waste is that the Sheikh lives in Qatar and his 'local' service center is in London, UK.
Autoblog Green was suitably miffed by it all and brought to our attention that not only was there a lot of waste in getting it to and from London (apparently it cost $46,644 USD to ship) but the car itself is a big carbon farting machine.
Even the staff of the shipping companies thought it was total bollocks with an airport worker saying, "This car doesn't have a carbon footprint – more of a crater." A London-Heathrow cargo handler added, "It would have been far more efficient to fly mechanics out there.". No duh!
This on the same day as the announcement that Exxon posted record profits making a cool $1,500 USD per second in the last financial quarter. At least our petrol has dropped to around the $1.50/l mark (not that that's cheap but it's cheaper than it was).
Alex Proyas, the Aussie director of cult goth classics The Crow and Dark City is returning to his gloomy roots after a flutter on the indie side of things and a big budget Hollywood flick. According to Movieweb this "big" director is set to direct Dracula Year Zero, a film focusing on a fresh look at an overdone horror staple. Think Batman Begins with more fangs and blood.
