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.
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.
Epic Citadel is now available for play through a web browser. Epic and Mozilla collaborated on creating the HTML5 tech demo in just four days to showcase the power and flexibility of the Unreal Engine and Firefox. Also, they wanted to show off by creating a whole castle in a browser in less time than I took to fail at ordering my Netflix queue.
The tech demo has been available on iOS and Android for since 2010. To check out the demo, you’ll need to use Firefox Nightly version 23. Neither Chrome nor Internet Explorer are supported, although Google says they are looking into it.
Hey, don’t complain. It’s got as much gameplay as Dear Esther.
Zen Studios’ Pinball FX 2 on the consoles was an huge hit on Quarter to Three. Scores were challenged, smack was talked, and dreams were crushed. Pinball wizards gathered together to mash flippers and pump fists when multiballs bounced. Such was the stuff of pinball dreams.
The only thing missing was PC players, but since Zen saw fit to release their initial PC version as a Windows 8 app, there were few people playing. That’s finally going to change. Pinball FX 2 will be hitting Steam on May 10th and will work with Windows 7! Finally, the majority of Steam gamers will be able to experience the red-hot rage of posting a high score only to have someone else post a better one within minutes.
The basic Pinball FX 2 client will be free, but packs of tables will be $9.99 each. These packs will inlcude Star Wars, Marvel, Marvel: Vengeance and Virtue, Marvel: Avengers Chronicles, the Pinball FX2 Core Collection and Zen Classics.
ZeniMax Online released the Journey to Coldharbour trailer to remind gamers that they have a game coming up. Looks pleasant enough, I guess. Longtime Elder Scrolls antagonist Molag Bal seems to be fond of a certain unified color scheme. Hopefully, that doesn’t hurt Coldharbour’s guest ratings.
Did you play the Dissidia games for the PSP? I see a handful of Final Fantasy fans raising their hands enthusiastically. But only a handful. Even the die-hardest Final Fantasy fan isn’t necessarily inclined to bang his head against a drawn-out leveling grind, creeping up in power one notch at a time, accumulating one tiny crafting ingredient on the way to a ring that boosts a stat a single point. It’s a series of slight imperceptible tweaks to the next fast-paced unbounded flash of anime combat on the way to not much at all beyond more unbounded anime flashes. Dissidia was like staring into a strobe light, and even for some of us who wouldn’t know Lightning from Cloud Strife, just as mesmerizing.
The PSP, and now the Vita, was uniquely suited to Dissidia’s short arena battles. Small system, cramped controls, graphics mini-powerhouse, eminently portable. Three minutes of gameplay at a time, with breaks between to admire your stats, assign points, pick the next mission, whatever. That’s also how Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker got its hooks into someone — me — who couldn’t care less about a Snake or a Pistol Ocelot or a Big Momma. Snippets of gameplay connected by walls of stats? Sign me up. Oddly enough, it’s not that far a jump from Paradox’s strategy games or the numbers-based power leveling in an MMO.
After the jump, dark souls, nier misses, and bearing armsContinue reading →
Gearbox has confirmed to IGN that the fourth campaign DLC for Borderlands 2 will be released on June 25th. Tina Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep will be the final DLC included in the Season Pass.
The DLC was teased at the PAX East Gearbox presentation with a video of Tiny Tina and other Borderlands characters playing Bunkers & Badasses which seems to be a fictional version of Dungeons & Dragons complete with a 20-sided die.
You’ll experience their game as part of Borderlands 2 with Tina serving as dungeon master, narrating the action as it happens and even changing boss attributes, location details, character names and much more on the fly.
More Tiny Tina is always welcome. If you don’t have the Season Pass, the DLC will cost $9.99 on PS3 and PC or 800 Microsoft Points on the 360.
TimeGate Studios, developer of the Section 8 games, and most recently (and infamously) contributed unspecified work on Aliens: Colonial Marines, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas. Polygon reports that the court documents reveal that money owed to creditors and total liablility ranges from $10 million to $50 million.
TimeGate’s top creditors include companies like Unreal Engine developer Epic Games, online game service Agora Games and transmedia developer DJ2 Entertainment. Creditors listed in court documents also include a local pizzeria, to whom TimeGate owes $34.80, and video game agency Birthplace Management Group, which is owed $20,539.20.
TimeGate recently lost an appeal against Southpeak Interactive for ownership of the Section 8 property and $7.35 million in damages as part of a fraud countersuit.
The status of their currently in development game, Minimum, is unknown.
The Kickstarter for Camelot Unchained, by Mark Jacobs and City State Entertainment, has been successfully funded with $2.23 million in the final tally. The Kickstarter asked for $2 million, so the extra amount pledged was enough to unlock archers, one new race per realm, and heraldry. The MMORPG will include realm versus realm battles with up to 500 players and player-built forts and castles.
The game will feature RvR-based leveling tracks for all classes. No PROGRESSION VIA PvE (player vs. environment), loot drops or other such systems are currently planned. All leveling will come from engaging in the game’s RvR-based systems, whether by fighting other players, capturing objectives, and/or crafting objects to help in RvR. There will be NPCs but you cannot use them to level your character.
The last 48 hours of the Kickstarter was hampered by overzealous fans that spammed news sites with entreaties to publish stories about the game. Mark Jacobs asked fans to tone down their efforts and let journalists do their jobs.
Mojang announced that Minecraft: Pocket Edition has sold 10 million copies. That’s a lot of wood chopping and coal mining! The post also included some details on future updates.
So… I know what you are thinking. “Yeah, 10m is cool but where is the next update?” We have been working hard on restructuring the backend of a lot of things for Minecraft – Pocket Edition to make future updates smoother. For instance, you can now change options without jumping back to the main menu. What you can also notice is that we have in one of our menues (more to come in the future) an experimental title where we will put in features that will work for more high end devices. The reason to put in in experimental is because we first want to test out features before making them default on.
Mojang is also working on Minecraft Realms, a paid subcription service that will allow players to use official servers and maintain persistent worlds.
This week we’re joined by Monaco designer Andy Schatz who recognizes Tom Chick’s intellectual acumen at things like geometry and stealth gameplay, while he also recognizes that some people — he’s too polite to call out McMaster by name — need Moles in their games. We also discuss Korean pop on the Vita, a card game about tragedies befalling hapless families, and a match-3 that’s more than just a match-3.
Is your Wii’s light slowly pulsing with a blue glow? It may be that update from last year that you still haven’t downloaded, but it could also be the message Nintendo sent out to explain the benefits of owning a Wii U instead of the sad Wii you have now.
It’s time to discover Wii U.
Wii U is an all-new home console from Nintendo. It’s not just an upgrade – it’s an entirely new system that will change the way you and your family experience games and entertainment.
Nintendo of America’s newly appointed CEO, Satoru Iwata, told stockholders after the last financial briefing that the company hadn’t educated consumers on the Wii U system.
Some have the misunderstanding that Wii U is just Wii with a pad for games, and others even consider Wii U GamePad as a peripheral device connectable to Wii. We feel deeply responsible for not having tried hard enough to have consumers understand the product.
Blasting a spam message to everyone owning a Wii is one way to do it, I guess.
