Monthly Archives: March 2015
What Was Telltale Hinting at During SXSW?
At SXSW on Sunday, Telltale said the next installment in its Walking Dead series, The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series -- Season 3 won't be coming soon, but something Walking Dead related will be.
The actual quote from Telltale's Job Stauffer was that season 3 of the game won't be coming "super, super, super soon," but he said "I think you can perhaps, maybe, expect to see The Walking Dead again sooner."
To clarify, season three is not three-supers soon, but something related to Walking Dead is. After letting loose the statement to the world, he said "I'll let the Internet work on that one."
Telltale recently announced its "super show," a project that melds television content with a companion game that it called its most ambitious project ever. During the same SXSW panel it was revealed that the first super show won't be with new partner Lionsgate. Could Telltale's Walking Dead content Stauffer hinted at possibly be something that advances a story tied to the Walking Dead companion series that will air on AMC?
Transformers Writer to Bring The Brothers Grimm to TV
Miramax has hired Transformers screenwriter Ehren Kruger to transform The Brothers Grimm into a television series.
According to Deadline, the new series will build on the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger and Matt Damon, following the adventures of brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm as they discover the supernatural creatures plaguing 19th Century Europe.
Kruger has most recently worked on Transformers 2, 3, and 4, but he also penned The Brothers Grimm film's screenplay for director Terry Gilliam.
“We reached out to Ehren Kruger and producing partner Daniel Bobker to see if they had any interest in making The Brothers Grimm movie into a TV show and the pitch Ehren came back with blew us away,” said Miramax VP of Television Daniel Pipski. "We’re thrilled to be working with a writer of his caliber.”
Appeals Court Brings Back Xbox 360 Defect Class Action Suit
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has breathed new life into a suit brought against Microsoft that claimed some Xbox 360 consoles caused damage to game discs.
Plaintiffs in the case alleged that the 360's optical disc drive is "unable to withstand even the smallest of vibrations," and during normal play conditions, spinning discs crash into the inner workings of the drive and are gouged to the point of uselessness.
Microsoft countered that less than 1%-- 0.4% to be exact-- of Xbox 360 owners reported damaged discs, and that damage to discs was a result of consumer mishandling and not defective hardware.
The lower court cited precedent in a case against Land Rover, where plaintiffs were unable to show that the defect in that particular case showed up in a majority of its vehicles. The lower-court judge reasoned that since the majority of 360 owners didn't experience the defect, the case followed the precedent set by the case brought against Land Rover.
True Detective Casts Porn Actors for Massive Orgy
It looks like HBO's True Detective is going to get more than a little steamy in its second season.
According to THR, porn stars Amia Miley and Peta Jensen have been hired for a massive orgy sequence (think Eyes Wide Shut massive), featuring "dozens of naked bodies".
THR's sources say that although both Miley and Jensen work in the adult entertainment industry, neither were employed for their porn experience. Rather, they were hired among dozens of other extras to fill the roles of said "naked bodies". Season 2 stars Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn were reportedly present during filming of the sequence.
Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries Review
A game like Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries was inevitable in a media landscape where a grim-and-gritty reboot is as common as films shot in color and in focus. That doesn't make another example of this trend an inherently bad thing, but the pitfalls of such an approach are numerous, and Woolfe provides a harsh lesson in how to fall into all of them.
The pratfalling starts early as our heroine, an axe-wielding, platinum-haired, Amy Brown-meets-Assassins Creed-styled Red Riding Hood, states, "This is no fairy tale, because nothing here is fair.” She could've been warning everyone about the game's combat, but she's actually referring to the bustling city of Ulrica, which is currently falling to ruin at the hands of B.B. Wolfe, a steampunk Daniel Plainview who industrializes the tiny village and needn't associate with the unwashed masses again. Wolfe then puts the whole place under martial law enforced by an army of murderous tin soldiers designed by Red's father. After Red's father dies and her mother goes missing, Red, under the strict tutelage of her grandmother, takes it upon herself to infiltrate Woolfe's businesses and find the truth.
The pitfalls of such an approach are numerous, and Woolfe provides a harsh lesson in how to fall into all of them.
The elephant in the room must be acknowledged here, and it's named American McGee. The game feels like a story that'd be right in that designer's wheelhouse--and in fact, McGee’s game Akaneiro has already pursued the Red Riding Hood theme. (Tale of Tales’ The Path should also be acknowledged for having trod this ground as well, and with great style to boot.) Woolfe does look and act the part. The architecture and atmosphere of Ulrica are marvels of ruined, washed-out, Victorian splendor, with disorienting, flashy clockwork technology intrusively laid over it. This look is intentional, and it tells the story of this place much better than Red does. The impressive lighting effects in the town and forest only enhance it by imbuing everything with a natural magic, contrasting with the ruin instead of clashing with it. This is, in fact, the same marvel American McGee accomplished with the Alice games.
Alice and Alice: Madness Returns work not because they overwrite Lewis Carroll but because they expound upon it. The young Alice in Carroll's story is found insane in the real world, and her being surrounded by mental illness influences the changes in Wonderland. It's an organic blossoming of classic ideas into something darker, and it requires a sure hand to pull it off—one that Woolfe doesn't have. Instead, Woolfe settles for a lazy shorthand of fairy tale tropes but lacks the foresight to introduce any measure or promise of joy or catharsis worth running, jumping, or fighting for. The greed of the Big Bad Wolf is reduced to corporate greed. The sadness of a father forced to make toy soldiers into a real, unyielding military never has enough of a foundation in good times to stick. Red herself speaks in a mix of sub-Buffy the Vampire Slayer modern teenage one-liners and broken, self-loathing pseudo-poetry. It’s a mess, needlessly dour and "edgy" for its own sake, an immature approach to subversive reimagining. The exhilaration starts and stops with the art design.
Red herself speaks in a mix of sub-Buffy the Vampire Slayer modern teenage one-liners and broken, self-loathing pseudo-poetry.
When the game leaves story behind in favor of player interaction, it involves competent platforming and puzzle solving with a small measure of 3D movement and backtracking, but it’s still fairly linear. It's also wholly unremarkable, marred by a score of tiny and annoying but not game-breaking bugs. A puzzle on the second stage requires Red to perform a relatively simple shimmy along a set of pipes to jump across a gap before being drowned in a pile of sludge from above; this stranded me 20 minutes longer than it should have because the game refused to recognize and grasp the pipes on the other side. Long stretches of running from enemies are aggravating because Red snags herself on the edges of walls.
Combat is rather boring to begin with, with a light attack, heavy attack, and two magical attacks. Nothing works more effectively than just spamming heavy attack ad nauseum, especially at the frequent moments when hits don't register, which is especially frustrating in sections involving an evil Pied Piper who summons groups of rats. A ground pound attack, which is supposed to make quick work of the horde, rarely connects in the way you think it will, and the group can chip away at Red's energy far faster than she can readjust and aim for whatever's attacking her. Boss fights compound all these issues, with scripted events all suffering from occasional moments of glitchy failure.
Woolfe barely comes into its own before it's over, with the entire game taking about 2–3 hours tops. It's apparently only half of a two-part experience, but the halfway mark of the game doesn't show much promise for the second. Adult takes on childrens' stories are a hard balancing act, and the moral of this particular take is perhaps in showing just how much a storyteller has to grow up to get it right.
Jai Courtney on Insurgent, Suicide Squad & Terminator
Ever since playing John McClane’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard, Jai Courtney has been in full franchise mode. The Australian actor has taken his Bruce Willis-inspired closely-shaved-dome to the Divergent series, Terminator Genisys, and,the upcoming Suicide Squad.
In between those films Courtney played World War I and World War II soldiers in The Water Diviner (opening stateside April 24) and Unbroken. That’s a lot of past, present, and future warfare for the 29-year-old actor. We recently caught up with him by phone to chat about all those projects.
IGN: You’ve had a number of soldier roles—from TV’s Spartacus, to Unbroken to Divergent—how does Eric (Divergent, Insurgent) differ from other soldiers you’ve played?
Avengers 2’s Game-Changing New Characters
With the film roughly now a month a way from opening overseas, writer-director Joss Whedon has been busy promoting Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Whedon was recently asked about some of the new characters appearing in the film, including latest team additions Vision (Paul Bettany), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
"It was really important for me to have people who would change the game, emotionally and stylistically," Whedon said in a chat with Marvel.com. "Their powers are completely different
and, through them, we get to see things differently."
Whedon spoke about pulling off Quicksilver's powers: "When we're at speed with him, we're going fast, we're going slow; it's not like we're trying to do some enormous slow-guy set piece, it's just something we never had license to do in the first movie. I never want to get so stylistically arch that you're pulled out of what you're seeing, but at the same time, I wanted to shoot something that was some kind of poetic and strange."
MKX Modifiers Hint at 5 Returning Fighters
A list of modifiers from Mortal Kombat X's new Kustom Kombat mode appear to hint at five rumored characters.
Stryker Assist, Smoke Assist, Rain Assist, Kabal Assist, Kabal Blades, and Cyrax Bombs were spotted in the list of modifiers during NetherRealm's demo stream today, which could point to the arrival of five fan favorites in the upcoming Mortal Kombat X.
You can see the modifiers in the slideshow below.
Nothing is certain yet, of course. We've reached out to NetherRealm for comment and will update with any new details.
Kustom Kombat was announced today during NetherRealm's stream, as well as an anti-ragequitting feature called Quitalities.
Full Salem: Season 2 Trailer
WGN America has released the full official trailer for Salem: Season 2 - which premieres Sunday, April 5th at 10/9c.
Stars Janet Montgomery, Shane West, and Seth Gabel are joined by Stuart Townsend and Lucy Lawless ("the last of the true witches" as she describes herself in the video). Check out the trailer - and poster too!
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity.
Mortal Kombat X Will Punish Rage Quitters
You may be playing against a really, really infuriatingly tough opponent online in Mortal Kombat X, but it's not advised to quit the match in a fit of rage.
Speaking during their livestream today, developers at NetherRealm studios explained how they plan to punish rage quitters: Quitalities. And yes, it fits nicely with Mortal Kombat's penchant for gore.
"If you quit, your head blows up and the other guy wins," they simply stated.
In case you'd like to maintain a decent average, it sounds like you might be better off sticking out even the toughest fights.