Monthly Archives: April 2015
So, Why Exactly Can’t the Rest of the World Watch Powers?
The penultimate episode of the first season of Powers (the PlayStation Network’s first original, scripted series) will be available to watch today, April 21. The final instalment of Powers’ debut, 10-episode season will be released a week later, on April 28.
Emerging from a fairly mammoth gestation period (a Powers TV series was in active development at FX as of early 2009, although it was reportedly optioned for film by Sony as far back as 2001), Powers was showcased during Sony’s E3 2014 press conference. There Sony revealed to the world that the long-discussed TV adaptation of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Avon Oeming’s superhero-themed police procedural comic series was finally coming to the small screen, via the PlayStation Network. PlayStation Plus members would be eligible to watch the whole series for no additional cost.
Boba Fett Waiting to Be Saved by a Story
Boba Fett may be dead, or he may be alive, and it's up to a future Star Wars storyteller to determine his fate.
According to Slashfilm, Pablo Hidalgo, a member of the Lucasfilm Story Group, had this to say about the fate of the legendary bounty hunter:
"Boba Fett is both simultaneously alive and dead in the Sarlaac Pit until a story pulls him out."
Hidalgo is credited with additional production support on Star Wars Rebels, and is part of a team whose job it is to ensure all current and future Star Wars narratives tell a cohesive story.
This team was created by president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, and its influence expands to cover upcoming films, books, TV shows, comics and games.
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review
Assassin Shao Jun really wants a box. Apparently, the box holds a precious artifact left from the time of the First Civilization, but it is simply the ultimate in MacGuffins; it's the Maltese Falcon, the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, and the Ark of the Covenant. What it does is irrelevant and never elaborated upon, at least not in this story, for its purpose is to kick an adventure into action--in this case, a beautiful and ultimately boring trek that cribs from Mark of the Ninja but can't capture the earlier game's cleverness or excitement. It's tempting to praise Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China for squeezing the series' signature elements into two-and-a-half dimensions, and for making stealth gameplay more vital than it has been in an Assassin's Creed game for years. But Chronicles rests on being pretty, adding new mechanics over time but flattening the pace and allowing exploits and glitches to suck out the rising tension.
If a game must rest on being pretty, then at least Chronicles makes the most of it. This side-scrolling stealth game is overflowing with watercolor beauty. In one level, an impossibly large, bright moon rises in the sky, shining through the mist and illuminating willow trees in the foreground, which have the natural smudges and brushstrokes you would expect to see from the Qing masters. Elsewhere, a distant waterfall glows of its own accord, as if pure moonlight had been mixed into the paint that created it. Each scene comes to life with an inviting softness; even simple gray walls depict hushed details, like an underlying paperlike texture, where darker rings reveal where water droplets might have landed on the canvas.
It's a gorgeous style, relegated to an atmospheric role; Chronicles' wan storytelling, which mostly occurs in hand-drawn interstitials, doesn't engage in much world- or character-building, leaving the art to provide the game's aesthetic, along with an unobtrusive, string-heavy soundtrack. As Shao Jun, a silent killer trained by none other than Assassin's Creed II hero Ezio Auditore, you move through these spaces, sneaking past patrolling guards and avoiding their vision cones; they cannot see more than 20 feet in front of their own faces, and will not notice you at all when they engage in conversation with each other. Avoidance means slipping behind a pillar with a flick of an analog stick, hanging from a front facing ledge, spidering along a ceiling, or tumbling into a pile of hay. (Of course, in Assassin's Creed fashion, you will occasionally make a leap of faith into one of these bales, an action as satisfying to perform in two dimensions as in three.)
You make your way from one array of guards to another, sometimes flinging your rope dart towards an overhang and swinging towards the camera (or away from it) and into a different adventuring layer. Chronicles makes good use of these layers, giving its best levels a sense of depth. You spend more time, however, navigating past the guards that bar your way, either by sneaking around them, stealthily assassinating them, or, rarely, by directly confronting them. My favorite approach was assassination, because it is in silent assassination that Chronicles stays truest to the games that preceded it. When you plunge your hidden dagger into an enemy from behind, you hear an eerie crunch as metal permeates flesh; your target grunts and falls to the ground, and blood seeps across the corpse and dissipates as if soaking into the paper upon which the game is drawn. Performing an assassination while hanging from above is even more enjoyable, thanks to the way Shao Jun points her blade downward as she falls, as if absolving herself by letting gravity perform the cruel deed. Later on, you can sprint forward and slide into unaware guards, which makes for a smooth and rewarding way to combine momentum and quiet butchery.
The game awards you the most points for complete avoidance, yet it is when skirting around your enemies that Chronicles' flaws most often surface. In most stealth games, there is intrinsic reward in sticking to the shadows--or in this case, slipping into a dark doorway, or dropping into crevasses that guards ignore unless you've alerted them to your presence. Yet over the game’s four-hour (or so) running time, the challenge rarely grows. You earn upgrades to your stealth repertoire as you progress, such as a limited ability to flit from one cover position to the next as if you were a ghost on methamphetamines, but there is no sense of rising anxiety. The puzzles don't noticeably increase in complexity, keeping pace with your new moves but not pushing beyond them, and a few ideas--wind chimes that jingle if you don't crouch under them, for instance--appear too rarely to invigorate any given level.
In time, you discover ways to exploit the AI's limitations, rushing out of guards’ view if you alert all of them, and waiting to return until they resume their patrols just a few seconds later. Of course, you could accuse many stealth games of allowing similar exploits, but in Chronicles, each guard is leashed to such a limited area that the ease with which you can simply sprint away and wait it out makes the entire setup feel contrived--quite a feat in a genre that, by nature, can feel particularly game-ish. And occasionally, the game doesn't know how to respond to your reactions and glitches out. At one point, the AI remained on high alert even though I'd escaped the area and was no longer in view; at another, two guards got stuck in place as they searched for me, halting the game and forcing me to leap out of hiding just so I could put the adventure back in motion.
This side-scrolling stealth game is overflowing with watercolor beauty.
Going toe-to-toe with the enemy is an option, yet an unsatisfying one. Combat has never been Assassin's Creed's strong suit, but swordplay has always featured an understandable rhythm. In Chronicles, you are meant to avoid combat if possible; perhaps battle was made to be purposefully awkward, so that you avoid it when possible. Design choice or not, fending off patrolmen is hardly fun. It's possible to escape with your life if you are incredibly careful and alert, even when flanked on both sides by multiple sword- and gunmen, but the entire affair is clumsy, and death is quick in many of these situations, regardless. There is no cadence to enemy behavior, nor do the fiddly controls invite fluid motion. Direct confrontation is best circumvented, making a boss fight that requires combat all the more mind-boggling.
Another boss fight puts to use your throwing knives, one of a few gadgets you have on hand for solving Chronicles' super-easy pseudo-puzzles. You can distract and lure enemies by whistling or throwing a projectile, and momentarily stun them with fireworks, but the predictability of level layouts and ease of AI exploitation means that your strategies can remain the same from start to finish. Ironically, this stealth game's finest moments arrive when it allows you to break free and sprint ahead in order to flee encroaching danger, such as a blazing fire. In no way do these escape sequences match those from the recent Ori and the Blind Forest, but they are the closest Chronicles comes to delivering the series' signature freerunning. You vault over obstacles and slide into shellshocked guards, cutting them down as you rush from danger, watching Templar baddies succumb to flames and crumbling infrastructure. It's a lively diversion in a game that is otherwise mostly devoid of forward momentum. You know the end is about to arrive because the cutscene narration tells you as much, and because the music's tempo has increased, but the gameplay hasn't built to this moment. The credits roll. The game is over. But there was no more excitement in that finale than there was in the opening minutes.
Chronicles' passive pacing is a shame, because the pieces, combat notwithstanding, are mostly strong. Furthermore, the exquisite environments craft a setting that makes me eager to see the two upcoming sequels--Chronicles: India, and Chronicles: Russia--in action. If they follow in Chronicles: China's footsteps, they will be beautiful to behold. I hope, however, that unlike the first entry, they take the leap of faith required to make them play as boldly as they look.
Star Wars Fan Shows How to Make BB-8 Toy
A Star Wars fan has created his own functional BB-8 toy.
The ball droid that was circling around R2-D2 at Star Wars Celebration 2015 is the newest robot to join the Star Wars family in The Force Awakens. Although BB-8 toys have been officially licensed, industrial design student Christian Poulsen couldn't wait to make his own. "As I watched
roll around my only thought was “need!” …So I made one", Poulsen told MAKE.
Pan Film Flies from Ant-Man Release Window
Hugh Jackman's next film Pan has been delayed from July 24 to October 9 in North America.
According to Variety, Warner Bros. made the decision to delay Pan to avoid competing with the big mid-year films such as Ant-Man and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.
"We wanted to give Pan the space to extend its theatrical run, so taking it out of the cluttered summer season made the most sense," said Dan Fellman, distribution executive at Warner Bros.
Pan tells an original story within the Peter Pan mythology. It's directed by Joe Wright and stars Hugh Jackman as the villainous Blackbeard, Garrett Hedlund as a young James Hook and Levi Miller as Peter Pan.
Hasbro CEO Confirms Shared Transformers Universe Plans
Today, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner shared an update on the Transformers franchise, confirming the Transformers Cinematic Universe and a potential release date for the next film in the series.
According to TFW2005, Goldner made the statement during Hasbro's 2015 Q1 Earnings Conference Call, saying:
"Our plan with the studio and filmakers you may have heard some writers being hired and we have in fact brought in Akiva Goldsman to lead a group of writers to really create a strategic plan around Transformers. We think there are any number of stories to be told from the brand that has been around for 30 years with amazing canon and mythology. We would expect the sequel to the Transformers movie
Batman V Superman: IMAX Trailer Event Details
By now you've likely seen the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer, the preview that was teased a few days ago only to be released in full early by Warner Bros. in response to a bootleg leak. The plan originally was to give fans a taste of what was to come with that short tease, building up excitement and anticipation for a big IMAX event that was to be held in theaters across the country tonight. But yeah, that bootleg...
So with that iPhone leak kind of taking the air out of the event, BvS director Zack Snyder took to Twitter to promise that the IMAX trailer evening would still be worth it for fans:
Cell Phone v IMAX. IMAX Event BvS fans will still be first & only to see special IMAX BvS teaser #AFewExtraShotsPlusALittleSwag #NotPirated
SHIELD Spinoff to Feature Mockingbird and Hunter
We've got some new details about the Agents of SHIELD spinoff series that's currently being developed by ABC and Marvel. The one that's supposed to be based on upcoming story elements nestled within the last few episodes of SHIELD's Season 2.
Deadline is reporting that SHIELD stars Adrianne Palicki and Nick Blood, who play ex-huband and wife duo Bobbi Morse (aka Mockingbird) and Lance Hunter, have almost finalized their deals to headline the series.
3 New Star Wars Books Will Explore Movies, Comics & Games
Sequart Organization has three large Star Wars books set to release over the next few years.
Edited by Rich Handley and Joseph F. Berenato, these books will take a look at and celebrate different aspects of Star Wars and Star Wars fan culture through a series of essays written by a number of different film historians, writers, bloggers, and experts. The books are as follows:
- A Long Time Ago: Exploring the Star Wars Cinematic Universe looks at the Star Wars saga as it has been seen on-screen in various forms of cinematic media. This includes films, television, commercials, theme park rides, and cartoons. This book is expected to release in 2015.
Join Our Facebook Q&A with Greg Weisman!
What do Gargoyles, Young Justice, Star Wars Rebels, and The Spectacular Spider-Man all have in common? The answer is Greg Weisman, a comic book and animation writer and producer who is responsible for quite a few beloved things from your childhood. Join us this Thursday for a Facebook Q&A with him!
Weisman will be sitting down to answer your questions about everything he’s worked on, plus his current project -- a high production radio play for Rain of the Ghosts, his first novel about a young girl who can see ghosts. The production features a musical score, sound effects, and a full cast featuring more than a few notable names -- Ed Asner (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Gargoyles, Up), Marina Sirtis (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gargoyles, Young Justice, and Steve Blum (The Spectacular Spider-Man, Star Wars Rebels), among many others.