New 28 Weeks later Trailer

Get it while its hot people, the new 28 Weeks later trailer is out. For those of you not in the know, 28 weeks Later is the sequel to the 2002 awesome zombie movie, 28 Days Later.

The sequel picks a little after the events set by the first movie. Seven months after the rage infection has pretty much finished Britain the good US of A is taking over and restoring whats left. They actually made a quarantined city (London) and are repopulating it but a carrier of the Rage infection (Zombie) enters the city, re-igniting the rage plague yet again. It seems that even though the people repopulating the city are meticulously tested before entering the quarantined city, somehow one of those rage zombies got inside the place to bring hell.

My only worry about the film is the fact that Danny Boile didnt direct it. He is now Executive Producer with Juan Carlos Fresnadillo at the helm of the directing. Will this change in the team make the movie better than the last? Or, will it make it tarnish the good name of the first one? Whatever the case, 28 Weeks later is stated for a release on May 11th, 2007.

Thora Birch’s dad is a freak-o

Thora Birch (the girl with the awesome rack from American Beauty and Ghost World) apparently has the creepiest dad ever. During the shooting of The Winter of Frozen Dreams, her dad, Jack Birch, insisted he be present on the closed set so he could watch them shoot his daughter’s sex scene with Dean Winters. A source says:

“It was so wrong,” said one insider. “The director is saying, ‘Harder! Faster!’ and the father is giving Winters the thumbs up.” Jack Birch was on the set every day giving orders – even telling director Eric Mandelbaum where to place his camera so that Thora would look her best. Mandelbaum was about to shoot the first sex scene Monday when, “all of a sudden, the front door is being kicked in. Her father was threatening to kill the assistant directors. Then he threatens to pull her from the movie with three days of shooting left.” Making matters worse, a problem with the focus on the camera necessitated 14 takes. “It was the most bizarre, perverse scene,” said our witness. “One girl on the crew broke down crying.”

Sounds like my kind of guy. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see Thora Birch naked? Her boobs are huge. Plus she’s got grea — wait a second did you say her dad? *face slowly turns to horror and runs screaming into the distance*

[Source: NYPost]

Koei’s Wii business

As the Wii proceeds to make its mark on the world in its own way more developers are embracing the machine. One such studio is that of Koei, which many should recognize mainly as the studio which graces (if you can call it that) the market with those Dynasty Warrior games. Koei’s Wii project is Opoona, a sci-fi, cartoony RPG developed by Artepiazza. You play as Opoona, who got lost with his family during a trip to the planet Landroll, and later found his parents were in hospital, his brother and sister were gone missing. Opoona starts off his quest traveling to different planets to find his missing siblings. In the quest Opoona must master different job skills and earn licenses to travel to different colonies. Have a look at the screens of their project.

Rumorang: Xbox 360 Spring Update List

Seems a few peeps on the internets have leaked what will be showing up very soon on LIVE’s Spring update. Again this is Rumorang material so take with a grain of salt, or a pound; your choice.

Multiperson Group Chat – You can’t do it with people in the same game as you.

Tighter Xbox.com Intergration – More personal online profile page intergration

More BC Games – Larger list of Backwards Compatible games.

Clan Blade – Clan support for all games that have clan support.

Web Browser – Optional download in the marketplace so those that don’t want it don’t have to have it.

Faster Guide – The desktop with be much smoother and cleaner with some visual tweaks and upgrades.

Vision Camera Features – A lot more features for the camera.

Disk Drive – When disk is in drive it’ll display which game is in the disk drive.

Customizable Themes – able to put a different pic on each blade.

Friends List – able to add more friends

Multi Video Chat -up to 4 people in a room chatting

Video Messages – able to send a video message to your friends

Ad Deletion – Able to turn on or off the advertisements whether your 18 or not.

Arcade Demos – Not to appear under games played.

Open Tray – Open the disk tray from the dashboard when a game is in it.

Text Messages – Longer than 250 characters.

Away Messages – Like AIM. So it would say going out for dinner, etc.

Weather System – Somewhat like the Wii where you can see a forecast for your area.

Zune – More integration with the 360.

Video Codec – More support than just WMV.

Reply Message – Able to see the text that your friend replied to. So you can
remember what you said to them.

Save Vision Pics – Able to save a bunch of pics from your vision camera to the hard drive.

Groups/Clans – Be able to have groups on your friends list. like “real friends” and “GOW gear heads”

Shivering Isles now on Marketplace

According to Major Nelson the shivering Isles Expansion has finally been released on Xbox Live Marketplace

Quote:

Name: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Shivering Isles
Price: 2400 Points
Availability: Not Available in Japan
Dash Details: Play the official expansion for Oblivion – the 2006 RPG and Game of the Year. Shivering Isles features more than 30 hours of new gameplay as you are sent to explore the realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. Shivering Isles adds to the existing world of Oblivion, so you can continue playing with your existing save game/character, or create an all-new character just to explore the new content in Shivering Isles. New quests, creatures, weapons, armor, ingredients, and more await in the land of Mania and Dementia.
Size: 993.75 MB

Now go forth and Kick some more Goblin ass.

My girlfriend is a dude?!

Face it; there are people out there in this world who instantly fall in love with someone else who lives oh so many miles away. Yet, both people have never met in real life and only know how the other looks via pictures; but even sending and receiving pictures can be a bit deceiving. You never know if the person is who they really say they are.

Of course, nothing beats this interestingly humorous headline from DailyGamer.net about 22 year old college sophomore John Harrison learning that his longtime WoW girlfriend was…well…really a guy! The best part about it; he was literally shocked!!

Quote

The revelation that Chelxai was actually a guy has caused a rift in the guild. A survey of the guild showed that everyone but the officers had engaged in a textual relations with Chelxai since the guild’s founding, and they now live in constant fear of screenshots surfacing on the forums. Further scandal erupted when an unnamed source amongst the officers hinted that the higher ranking officers were aware of the entire charade since the guild was founded and thought the whole situation was hilarious. Guild infighting quickly spilled over to public message boards, compounding Harrison’s mortification to impossibly high levels.

The clever ruse also caused some stir amongst the general male population of the server. Pictures of Chelxai had been making the rounds on server message boards, and he managed to gather a large following of fanboys before it was revealed that the object of their desire was actually a twenty seven year old junior college dropout who still lived with his parents and had recently been fired from the local Burger King after being caught masturbating in the store office to pictures of blood elves he had printed out and brought to work.

Lesson of the day; never do online dating. You could be dating a 40 something year old Star Wars geek who lives in his mom’s basement…yeah 😦

Guild Wars 2 Details Surface

Guild Wars and it’s chapters have been a huge success for ArenaNet and NCsoft. With over 3 million current PC gamers diving into the subscription free MMO monthly, ArenaNet has a huge hit on it’s hands. Not one to rest on it’s achievements; ArenaNet announced today their latest projects in the Guild Wars franchise with Guild Wars 2 and Guild Wars: Eye of the North. Eye of the North is the first actual expansion pack for the original Guild Wars, set in the land of Tyria. Eye of the North will be the bridging chapter to the full featured sequal to Guild Wars with Guild Wars 2.

Jeff Strain President of ArenaNet let loose some details on the sequal:

Since the game is essentially starting with a clean slate, Arena Net decided to make some pretty substantive changes to the game.

First, and most importantly though, the game will remain subscription free.

This time around the game will have a persistent world, one still set in Tyria, but now hundreds of years after the events that took place in the original Guild Wars.

“The big new feature is a persistent world,” Strain said. “I think Guild Wars has some very radical departures from typical role-playing. One of those was the instancing model.”

“As each of the original Guild Wars campaigns was released ArenaNet took greater and greater pains to distance itself from everyone else, but using instanced zones. On the other hand, there are things that they missed out on, like the more organic type of community building where you wandering through the area and hook-up with other people.”

“In Guild Wars 2 we wanted to have the best of both worlds. We are retaining the strengths of instanced areas, but we are also integrating a persistent world. We are not making a World of Warcraft clone here, we are not trying to do what other MMOs have done.”

Arena Net’s new spin is sort of an amalgam of both instanced and massive environments, where instanced events can have domino effects on other parts of the world. “The idea is that there will always be something going on in the world,”.

He said that there will be hundreds of these types of events that happen in the world, some daily, some hourly, some will be triggered by specific player actions.

GW2 will feature predominately open worlds, with instancing as a secondary feature in (some areas) literally there will be hundreds of people in the same area, and choices that the population make as a whole change the quest structure around them. At time triggering dynamic quests that alter the world.

“That is what persistence allows us to do. That is the type of content and play experience that we can offer in Guild Wars 2 that we couldn’t offer in Guild Wars.”

Along with a persistent World mixed with some instanced portions, there are plans for four new races and more dual classes. Of course all of this will be wrapped around an entire new engine. Other Radical changes include an overhauled environment and character control system, redefined PvP play and retooled NPC companion system.

Sidekicks are similar to those in the MMO City of Heroes, allowing powers to seep from a high level character to a friendly lower level character near by, thus powering-up friends. NPC like Heros can join you (like a pet), and don’t count towards your party. Not using this feature lets you be more powerful. Every player can bring a single companion on his adventures and won’t take up a slot.

Arena Net, it seems, is trying to tackle many of the biggest drawbacks most current massively multiplayer online games face. Chief among them is level capping. Why, once you top out, should you stick around in a game?

Guild Wars 2 is trying to deal with that issue by using a system with a high level cap once that could be set to 100 or even boundless.

“So there is not a level 20 cap,” Strain said. “Either it will be a high level like 100 or unbounded, we haven’t decided.”
Besides these significant changes to the game, Guild Wars 2 will also introduce plenty of smaller ones, like the ability for your characters to do things like jump, swim, even climb trees.

The combat though, Strain says, will remain purely RPG

“Our belief is that role players aren’t playing a RPG because they want a twitch action,” Strain said, “there is a difference between playing a game like an RPG and playing a game like God of War.”

Guild Wars 2 is expected to hit public beta next year.

Final Fantasy Crisis Core- JUMP FESTA Trailer

Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core keeps looking better and better and may just be the reason some people pick up a PSP. Once again Square comes to save Sonys bacon. Let’s here it for Square!

Microsoft’s Thompson Says Blu-ray Irrelevant

Microsoft’s UK boss has slammed PlayStation 3, saying it has nothing unique to offer the market, and describing Blu-ray as an irrelevance.

In an interview with the London Times, Neil Thompson, senior regional director for the UK and Ireland said, “In the technology and gaming there’s really little in the PS3 where I can say, ‘Gosh, I wish we had that’. The biggest threat that Sony has for us is the brand that’s been established around it.”

He added,

“You have to have a range and quality of gaming content. More and more we’re seeing that the online experience is a really important factor. Sony has come up with an online world that seems to let you do just about everything except gaming.”

He gave Blu-ray short shrift, ” It’s two, three years ahead of the market. People won’t want to replace their entire DVD collections, and they’ll get a better resolution with a standard DVD on an Xbox than a PS3.

“It’s nowhere near the importance of the format war between VHS and DVD,” he said. “The internet is becoming an increasingly important medium. Surely online is going to be the distribution method for much of the high-definition content.”

I have to agree with the guy on that HD-DVD and blu-ray are a ways off from winning any format war. Honestly as he says people are not gonna want to re-buy all their DVDs all over again, fuck that.

US = Land of Cheap People?

When it comes to criticism in this day and age, the United States has been known to receive so much criticism from various people in various parts of the world. Sometimes the criticism is fallacious, sometimes its humorous, and sometimes its something that doesn’t even deserve attention. In the case of Ray Maguire, though, the U.S. is…well…pretty stupid…at least those who complain about the price of the Playstation 3.

In an interesting interview with Sony UK Managing Director Ray Maguire, GameIndustry.biz asked Maguire why the Playstation 3 is more expensive in the UK than it is in the rest of Europe to which Maguire, speaking in economic rhetoric and analogies, responded

If you take the product at the factory gates there are slight variations to price if you’re putting out a single sku product, but it’s very, very small. But then the differences start to accumulate. If you’ve got different shipping costs and import duties that makes variation in price. And that’s just getting it into a country. Then you have a look at the economic and financial situation in each and every territory. That’s where the differences start to vary massively.

If you take what’s considered to be the most expensive and the least expensive – consider the US with its massive land and cheap people. Then you look at the UK – a little island where rent and rates are at an absolute premium, and the cost of people is a lot more. The cost of retail is vastly more in the UK than it is in the US and that’s before you even stop to consider the US doesn’t have VAT at RRP, they put a small amount on afterwards. Whereas, we get stung by 17.5 per cent. And pity the poor Irish and places like Sweden.

It’s nice how Maguire compares the cost of the Playstation 3 in the UK to the cost of living in the UK. Whether or not the man is being cocky or serious is unknown to me; but from what I gather, which is obvious to a lot of people, Europe seems to be the most important market for the Playstation 3. Read the interview and see what else Maguire has to say. It’s a noteworthy read, but I question Maguire’s integrity the most.