Irrational has released yet another trailer for [amazon_link id=”B003O6E6NE” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Bioshock Infinite[/amazon_link] that focuses on Elizabeth and her powers.
New footage is shown as Booker DeWitt begins to question if he should go through with the deal to bring Elizabeth back from Columbia. The trailer ends with the chilling line that was said in one of the game’s first trailers.
While the release of new music games has pretty much been put six feet under Harmonix has been releasing weekly content to their ever expanding library. Now, it seems, that it can fight no more.
April 2nd will be the last week of content release for the Rock Band store bringing to an end an impressive five year run that saw the release of over 4,000 songs over 275 consecutive weeks. They are currently having a sale on over 1,100 songs at 50% off so people can keep filling out their Rock Band libraries.
The company released a small statement on the Rock Band forums:
“We hope that you’ll all agree that this has been a tremendous run, and you should know it’s a ride that we at Harmonix have been thrilled to be a part of. We’re going to continue to support the forums and RockBand.com and hope to still see you rocking out online, in photos of Rock Band parties shared on Twitter and Facebook, or here on the forums. Whether you waited in line for a midnight release of Rock Band over 5 years ago, or you just joined the party with Rock Band Blitz… whether you’ve downloaded every single song we’ve ever released, or you’ve just played on disc songs until your neighbors moved away… whether you’re a metal shredder, or a bubblegum pop singer… thank you for being a part of our band.”
Legendary film composer John Williams has thrown his hat in the ring and gone on record saying he would like to work on the next set of Star Wars films. He said this found on jwfan.com:
“We’re about to play Star Wars [audience interrupts with cheers] and each time we play it, I’m reminded of the first time we played it decades ago. Neither I, nor George, nor anyone else involved thought this would go far or in a few years there would be a sequel and I’d have to revisit the themes…and years later another trilogy. Now we’re hearing of a new set of movies coming in 2015, 2016…so I need to make sure I’m still ready to go in a few years for what I hope would be continued work with George…[more cheers].”
I hope by continued work with George he meant Disney and J.J. Abrams since George Lucas is probably at most going to be an advisor on the next set of films. We all know Abrams is a huge Star Wars fan and getting John Williams would seem like a no brainer, but let’s not also forget his relationship with composer Michael Giacchino who has worked with Abrams on Alias, Lost, Fringe and 2009’s Star Trek. He also won an Oscar for his score of Disney’s Up. Fanboys would cry bloody murder, but I am pretty sure they would get over it. And who’s to say that having some new blood wouldn’t yield greater returns?
This past weekend Bungie, the creators of Halo, finally took the covers off of their next project, Journey. Ambitious does not begin to describe what Destiny is. Not only is this the company’s first game outside the safety of Microsoft’s umbrella, but it is an entire series of games that will involve a brand new universe and occupy the developers next ten years. Ten years!!
When they struck a deal with Activision to publish the game the documents revealed showed that Destiny is being made already sequel ready and the first game will release this fall on Xbox 360 and PS3 and also, presumably, for the next gen consoles as well. Every sequel after will be released strictly for the next generation.
Destiny’s plot revolves around the last portion of humanity to survive an apocalyptic event. The only piece of humanity left were saved when a mysterious ship, known as The Traveler, began to float above a section of Earth. It is always there, hanging as a somber protector for what reason no one knows. Humanity has put the pieces back together under The Traveler and begun to explore the galaxy again. With this comes new threats in the form of alien life that is looking to finish off the remnants of humanity. Destiny will see you play as a guardian, tasked to push back these forces and protect humanity.
Bungie is coining a new term for Destiny’s gameplay, the “shared world shooter”. Not wanting to call the game a true MMO, Destiny will be available to play completely in single player, or at any time, you can join some friends or strangers and help out in missions they are doing and decide to stick together or go do your own thing with your story. How this will work cross-platform remains to be seen. Will it be only 360 players that can match up with 360 players and vice versa or will Bungie somehow work there magic and have all consoles playing on Destiny’s world in one big sci-fi love fest?
Watching the video above also shows off that social integration will play a big part in Destiny. While the specifics are not known as to what will be the basis of the app, it would be easy to assume you would get story updates as well as messages from friends as they interact in the world. You may be able to set up party missions but that is just pure speculation on my part.
Photo courtesy dorksden.com
It looks as though you will not be stuck on Earth in Destiny. You will have the ability to go to other planets, but it is not known if the space travel will be able to be controlled or if Destiny will have space battles. Even if the first game does not, it would not surprise me to see them added in sequels, especially with the horsepower of the next-gen consoles.
This is just the opening salvo of Destiny from Bungie. Expect to see a lot more from now until its planned fall release. I would expect a massive blowout at E3 this year to truly give gamers a sense of the scale of this project.
With the Sony Playstation event coming up on Wednesday where the Playstation 4 is expected to be unveiled the rumor bin is in full overdrive. The newest one comes from The Wall Street Journal that reports that Sony will offer streaming games over their new system.
‘The new technology, to be unveiled Wednesday along with the new console, will allow users to play games delivered over the Internet, these people said. The streaming service, they added, is designed to use current PlayStation 3 titles on the new console; the new device is also expected to play new games stored on optical discs.”
This rumor should probably be filed under the section “completely likely to happen”. Sony spent $380 million dollars last year purchasing the streaming service Gaikai and I am pretty sure it wasn’t just to have no use of it.
Mortal Kombat Legacy was a big success in 2011 for director Kevin Tancharoen. Big enough that Warner Bros. not only gave him a chance for a second season of the show but also the directing job for a new Mortal Kombat feature film. Now Season 2 of Mortal Kombat Legacy is almost upon us and here is the first trailer.
A lot of new additions have been made for Season 2 both in characters and actors. Ermac, Stryker and more will be joining the series and some roles will be filled by new actors most notably Johnny Rico himself Casper Van Dien as Johnny Cage and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa reprising his role of Shang Tsung from the first Mortal Kombat film.
There will be ten episodes of Mortal Kombat Legacy Season 2 and each will average around eight minutes in length. The series can be seen on Machinima.com.
John McClane is back again for his fifth adventure, this time teaming up with his grown-up son to take on a group of political radicals in the heart of Russia. There is just one problem with this; A Good Day To Die Hard is not really much fun and as a Die Hard fan it hurts a bit to watch.
As this Die Hard opens up we see that John McClane’s son Jack has gotten himself arrested for murder and is facing Russian justice so he heads off to Moscow to try and help out his “misguided” son. Truth being that Jack is in actuality a C.I.A. agent that has placed himself in his situation to rescue a Russian prisoner and get him out of Moscow in return for a mysterious file.
One of the best things the first three Die Hard’s did so well was great setup and character development. A Good Day to Die Hard abandons all this and literally within the first fifteen minutes McClane has found out where his son is, said goodbye to his daughter, had a taxi ride with a singing Russian, survived a courthouse bombing and is chasing down Jack and the Russian baddies through the streets of Moscow while causing rampant destruction. While you watch this it feels like you are about 30 minutes ahead of what your watch says. While that may work for standard action movies these days, for a Die Hard movie it seems like lazy filmmaking. There is no character development at all to this film. But we will get to that a bit later.
Photo courtesy tumblr.com
When Live Free or Die Hard was released back in 2007 it was the first in the series to abandon the “everyman” John McClane. That is one of the reasons the first three movies in the franchise worked so well. He was a cop. He made mistakes. He was a smartass and he had a sh**y family life. It was just that he was in the wrong places at the wrong (or right) times. LFODH set up McClane as almost indestructible. Like a bald, American James Bond who could take out helicopters with taxis. A Good Day to Die Hard continues this formula and even goes more over the top with some of the things that should break any normal man, but this McClane barely has a limp.
The sad part about this is that Willis can play the role of John McClane in his sleep. He does it here. The swagger, the chuckle, the smart ass comments. It’s all here, but the characters and script around the character are so very weak.
Pacing and character development are two of the serious offenders like I mentioned earlier. The movie’s breakneck speed, which may help action movies these days, is a detriment to a Die Hard movie. There is no time to develop any of the characters like Jack or the villains because the movie is too busy going from one explosion set piece to another. I really feel sorry for Spartacus alum Jai Courtney as Jack McClane. He is a great actor and could have worked a whole lot better as Willis’ son….if he had more to work with.
The presence of a memorable villain is non-existent. While I was not a big fan of Live Free or Die Hard, I did think that Timothy Olyphant’s role was a good one and worth remembering. This go round there are so many multiple Russian who all have there own agendas that by the time the main villain is revealed (20 minutes before the movie ends mind you), you really have given up even remotely caring about why he is there.
This is by far the shortest of the Die Hard’s. Where most run right at two hours or a little over this entry clocks in at only 97 minutes. Which is easy to see why when you watch the movie and see that there was not much material to work with and abandoned all hope of making you care about the players.
Photo courtesy inquisitr.com
I hope A Good Day to Die Hard does well in theaters which may sound weird given what I have just written, but here me out. There is still good material left for the John McClaine character. I have no doubt there is. I hope that A Good Day to Die Hard does not make people jaded towards the franchise. They just need to scale back the super-hero John McClane and get back to what made the first one so great. Develop a memorable villain, good setup and put in a worn down NYC cop who just happens to be there trying to do his best.
A Good Day to Die Hard is disappointing and not because of Willis. He was made to play John McClane, but the McClane character has got to get better and more realistic aspects working for him. If this was a normal run of the mill action flick it would be on the decent side, but being this is Die Hard we are talking about there is a higher standard that this needs to reach. Now I am going to celebrate the franchise’s 25th anniversary by watching the first three entries.
It looks like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie just bulked up big time.
Jason Mamoa, star of Game of Thrones and the reboot of Conan the Barbarian, has reportedly been offered the role of Drax the Destroyer on the intergalactic team. The casting appeared to be down to Dave Bautista, Brian Patrick and Isaiah Mustafa and Mamoa. Mamoa nailed his screen test and Marvel offered him the role on the spot.
Drax the Destroyer is Arthur Douglas, a human whose family was killed by villain Thanos. His spirit was placed inside a powerful body and given powers to combat the the villain.
Not a whole lot has been shown of Star Trek: The Video Game beyond a handful of screenshots since last year, but now with the game’s April release looming Digital Extremes is beginning to take the wraps off of their licensed title.
The game looks to mix a lot of different game styles together. The shooting sequences are close behind the shoulder type run and gun like Dead Space or Resident Evil while there appears to be some small exploration element like Uncharted or Tomb Raider and you even get to control the Enterprise in space battles. Hopefully all of this can come together and deliver a good movie tie-in game (for once).
[amazon_link id=”B0081B1O5A” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Star Trek: The Video Game[/amazon_link] releases on April 23rd.
Obsidian has kind of made a career off of making sequels to highly popular games. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 may not have been the defining RPG in the galaxy far, far away that its predecessor was, but the game was well made and dang fun. Same could be said for its sequel to Bethesda’s Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas. They did a great job bringing a new story to the Fallout universe and crafting an impressive open world to play in.
Now the developers behind the upcoming [amazon_link id=”B006IOAHPK” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]South Park: The Stick of Truth[/amazon_link] may want to get back into the post-apocalyptic business if company CEO Feargus Urquhart has anything to say about it. And he did:
“Oh, we’d love to do Fallout: New Vegas 2. It would be awesome. If I think of going from Fallout 1 to Fallout 2, we tried to associate the two areas somewhat closely. It wasn’t just ‘Oh, we’re gonna do this 2,000 miles from here.’ So I think if we were to do Fallout: New Vegas 2 – or just a new Fallout – we would probably separate it from what the internal team at Bethesda’s doing. We’d keep it on the West Coast, because we’re West Coast people. They’re East Coast, so it makes sense.”
With Bethesda supposedly working on Fallout 4 would you want Obsidian to get another crack at the Fallout universe?