Archive for May 6th, 2013
This weekend, Baz Luhrmann takes a crack at interpreting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby seems to already miss the point, but given how sexy the trailer is, I couldn’t care less.
While we wait for the movie to open, there’s always the Great Gatsby videogame. Like Gatsby himself, you can’t really be sure where this NES tie-in came from. One version of its backstory is that a guy named Charlie Hoey made it. The backstory I prefer, supported by a magazine ad not nearly tacky enough for videogame ads from the 90s, goes as follows:
I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”
Whatever its true origins, The Great Gatsby videogame has not been gunned down while floating on an air mattress in its pool. Instead, it is fully playable here. I can’t get past the Valley of Ashes myself, which is probably for the best where Myrtle Wilson is concerned.
That’s no moon! That’s EA and Disney teaming up! EA announced that they have signed a multi-year agreement to develop and publish new Star Wars games for Disney. EA Labels President Frank Gibeau disclosed a few of the studios that will develop new games starring beloved characters like Watto, Nute Gunray, and Kit Fisto.
“DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”
DICE and Star Wars. Maybe now, we’ll finally get Battlefront 3.
EA has officially announced The Sims 4 will be coming in 2014. There’s a newsletter sign-up form here if you need more junk email. There aren’t many details, but the Sims team did want to address the elephant in the room right away.
The Sims 4 celebrates the heart and soul of the Sims themselves, giving players a deeper connection with the most expressive, surprising and charming Sims ever in this single-player offline experience. The Sims 4 encourages players to personalize their world with new and intuitive tools while offering them the ability to effortlessly share their creativity with friends and fans.
If you just want more details now, you’ll have to wait for someone to translate the simlish on the announcement page.
After the jump, take a crack at the simlish code! Continue reading →
Kiss of the Damned has a promising pedigree. The director, Xan Cassavetes, is the daughter of John Cassavetes, so it’s no surprise that she gets how to do an homage to movies from the 70s. In this case, Italian horror. But she’s also the daughter of Gena Rowlands, so you’d think she’d know the importance of casting good actresses, particularly in a movie about three female vampires.
Unfortunately, this occasionally intriguing homage can’t bear up under the weight of its three awkward performances. It opens promisingly enough with Josephine de la Baume, unconventionally lovely in the way that people are lovely in movies made 40 years ago, as a vampire who reluctantly falls in love because sometimes guys are just so darn persistent. There’s enough style and sexual heat in these early scenes that you might think you’re in for an adult version of Twilight (pictured). Sounds good! Remember that scene in Coppola’s Dracula movie when all the naked vampire chicks writhe invitingly around Keanu Reeves? I sure do.
But then Roxane Mesquida shows up as the bad sister vampire. In the surreal horror movie Rubber, her nearly impenetrable accent lent a touch of hilarity, particularly when she tried to coax the killer out of a house by voicing a booby-trapped mannequin. But here her accent just makes her hard to understand. I suppose bad English in an English-language movie is another way to represent the exotic, timeless, and worldly quality of a vampire.
Finally, there’s Anna Mouglalis as the mother figure standing between the sisters. Mouglalis has a long list of credits, which includes playing Coco Chanel to Mads Mikkelsen’s Igor Stravinsky. But by the time she’s called in to lend some gravity to these squabbling vampire sisters, Kiss of the Damned has long since left the realm of the sexy and stylish and wandered into a maze of camp and bad acting. I suppose it is an adult version of Twilight after all.
Kiss of the Damned is available to watch instantly at Amazon.com.
It’s Monday, so that means we must have new rumors regarding the next-gen Xbox! This time, Ars Technica claims to have a Microsoft internal email that outlines basic functions that the console will be able to support without a continuous connection to the internet.
“Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today’s Internet.” It continues, “There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should ‘just work’ regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.”
Unfortunately, the email date wasn’t revealed, so there may have been significant changes to this directive since it was sent to employees working on the project.
The inclusion of “watching live TV” does seem to confirm that the console will be tied directly into the cable TV signal in some way. Previous rumors had said that the console would act more like a cable box in that it would hook directly to the incoming signal and play normal cable television signals, but with the Xbox interface being used instead of the cable menu. This would allow seamless switching between games and watching Duck Dynasty.
This week your wallet is entirely safe from new releases, because there aren’t any. So what better time to sample something you might have otherwise overlooked, like Sang-froid, Monaco, or Don’t Starve (pictured)?
Nintendo is courting smartphone app developers for its Wii U console. According to The Japan Times, Nintendo is offering conversion software to smartphone app developers to assist them in porting their software to the Wii U.
Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.
A lack of popular games was one of the primary reasons cited in the recently released annual report for the lower than projected adoption rate of the Wii U console.
Besides porting smartphone games to the Wii U, Satoru Iwata told investors that Nintendo is also looking into subscription and free-to-play games as a possible strategy to entice gamers more used to digital gaming prices.
“We will not simply change our existing packaged software distribution channel. Rather, we might have many other types of business models in addition to packaged software.”
“For example, we might see more games that are similar to free-to-play games, games that cost much less or games that require a monthly subscription fee. Digitalization allows for greater flexibility, whereby having more ways to make payments, both software developers and consumers have more options.”
“And Nintendo 3DS and Wii U have flexible systems to handle such trends, so it is now a question of putting these ideas into action. I can definitely say that Nintendo will make new offers that go well beyond simply replacing packaged software with digital software.”
We might be too cool for Thor, Dark Knight Rises, and Elektra, but we’re not too cool for Iron Man 3. Maybe these comic books aren’t so silly, after all. You can skip this week’s 3×3 about lip syncing as soon as you hit the 1:20 mark.
Next week: The Great Gatsby
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