Saturday, July 28, 2012

Realm of the Mad God

well, Kabam came out with a new game, from the title you can probably guess it's called "Realm of the Mad God"



it's a game that uses old-looking graphics, like the type you saw on the NES

this is the loading screen. it has considerable lag for a game like this. do they store the game assets on ancient CDs and old drives?

the tutorial take up an entire stage. it doesn't patronize you like some games do, (*glares at Angry Birds*)

ok, (*this is easy*)


simple enough.....

the graphics are pretty cool, retro style stuff always makes me feel good.

i got hit a few times here.

there is a stage where to shoot at chickens and have to kill the chicken god (giant red rooster) but i forgot to take screenshots of it. i did, however, remember to take a screenshot of the final part of the stage:

there's an "I'm still alive" joke here somewhere......

now, i didn't take too many screenshots from the game after i entered the portal. the one main thing that happened was this:

Perma-death, YAY! I FREAKIN' HATE PERMA-DEATH!!!!!!!

so far this game is pretty good. aside from perma-death it incorporates the elements of Third-Person Shooter and top-down RPG quite nicely, but if i have to create a new character every time i die, instead of a respawn i need to create a new PC (player-character) all the time (especially with bosses) will make it hard to impossible to get any progress in the game.

this is somewhere. it doesn't say where. it leads to the Nexus, which is a lobby/bazaar of sorts.

this is all for now. more in-depth review Sunday!


BTW: here's the link to the game: https://www.kabam.com/realm-of-the-mad-god

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

What a HeMan and/or SheRa remake should be.

If they remade the He-Man/She-Ra series as a Manga/anime with more of a fantasy/sci-fi theme, better animation, better writing, and a darker undertone (and do something about those names for gods sake, geez they're bad.) they would have a potential for a very good series. Now, it could also fail if they try too outlandish things with it although if they use original material and stay within the confines of what is considered plausible and keep only the most basic elements from the original cartoon it'll be a success. I hear there's a live action LOTR style film coming soon. As long as they stray very far from the cartoons, I'm sure it'll make it big.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

How these movies could fail:

Just some thoughts on the possible and confirmed sequels, remakes, and crossover movies.


The movie adaptation of The Justice League AND Superman: The Man of Steel are going to fail unless:



The Man of Steel is a reboot of, and not a sequel to the Superman movies, which honestly were terrible.
If they don't reboot EVERY superhero in the JLA movie except Batman, because Christian Bale is the best Batman I have ever seen. And let's face it, lately DC superheroes haven't been doing so hot, with the obvious exception of Batman.

If they release it before the theoretical Batman 4 with somebody as Robin

Honestly, Warner Bros needs to take DCs comicbooks and movies as seriously as Marvel does. Otherwise they could fail epicly, and I mean like Batman and Robin type failure, times a hundred. With an ensemble cast, lots of special effects, tons of extras, and licensing costs from all kinds of brands and such down the drain..... I mean c'mon, if they screw this up, they might as well retire from movies altogether since they will lose so much money I doubt they could afford to make anything else.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

what i want from the video-game industry part #1: Nintendo.

there's quite a bit of flurry going on about the next generation of consoles. with rumors of SeGa reentering the race since 2006, mockups and digital counterfeits of the 8G Xbox running around the internet, and still no news about the PS4, we all turn to Nintendo for the new hardware: Namely Wii U and 3DS XL:


now, you all probably know what the Wii U is already so i'm going to skip the description. you might also know they plan to have HD remakes of gamecube classics like Metroid Prime and Rogue Squadrom 2&3. But, here's something that would make it a winner from the start:

What i want from the Wii U:

3D HD Motion+ remakes of the following:
yeah, i realize i listed every home console Zelda game save for Skyward Sword. yeah, i realize they would have to totally remake three of them at least. and yeah, i realize that would take a very long time. doesn't keep me from wishing though. in the meantime i'm gonna get to modding my N64 with a Bluetooth module so i can actually swing my sword LIKE A SWORD! now, nintendo has a lot on its plate right now, so i don't expect these, it's just what i want.

less DRM:
let's be honest, everyone wants this with everything. not that nintendo is one to go for DRM, just needs to be said

more physical releases than digital ones and decent DLC:
what i mean by that is that i do not want them to have many digital games released so we can still resell them, and decent DLC means not charging for things that should be unlockables or charging to paint a gun/armor/hat/item a different color.

Nintendo to buy Rareware back from Microsoft:

why? because then Nintendo could get Perfect Dark back on it's consoles and stop Microsoft from republishing any more Nintendo classics. ok, let's be honest, that's not ENTIRELY the reason, simply put: Rare makes great games. if Nintendo buys them back at at least 51% stock, Microsoft will have a good deal of its thunder taken away.

SEGA to sell to Nintendo:

i know this might sound unreasonable, and even impossible, but in the end it's what we all want.
why? because we would finally get the true SEGA/Nintendo crossover game we deserve.
now, with rumors spreading about a new SEGA console and SEGA employees acting strange when you ask about the possibility of them coming out with a new console this may never happen, but it would be Nintendo's and SEGA's saving grace if they merged or it Nintendo bought out SEGA.


for now that's it. join us soon for another installment of what i want from the video-game industry!

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

SEGA coming out with a new console?



I was looking about the webs for some news on the eighth generation of gaming consoles, and I have found lots of rumors thick in the depths. Some about the PS4, the X3, the hypothetical Xbox handheld console, and then, I stumbled across a few rumors about a new SEGA home console and handheld. With Microsoft and Sony putting off the launch of their new home consoles until 2015, Nintendo will make it big with people wanting new games, new hardware, and better graphics. So if that's the case, SEGA could also take advantage of the market and clean up with Nintendo. My advice to them is this: remake older games. The games that didn't do very well, the games that were good, but had bugs galore, the games that everyone likes, etc. Come out with a bang, IE a new Sonic game, Phantasy Star Online services canceled for the PSVita and made exclusive to the new home console and handheld. Motion control, motion control, motion control..... They need to take all the modern motion control tech, from the Wii's Motion+ and PS3's Move to the Xbox Kinect and combine them into the ultimate motion control where you get exact 1:1 control, and buttons, with no need for calibration.



As you probably know, SEGA released their last console, the Dreamcast in '98, and discontinued it in '01. Now since that was about eleven years ago, and Sony's PS2 was the main cause of the demise of the excellent, but underrated Dreamcast, it would make sense for them to release it soon so they can kill off the PS3. I wouldn't mind seeing SEGA and Nintendo be the only main ones in the console business. That way we could see what we've been missing these past years.

Now, I haven't been able to get any statements from SEGA regarding this, they still maintain that they had left the hardware business for good eleven years ago, but this is prime time, a golden age for those who can survive the inevitable crash that Sony, Microsoft, and EA will bring about if they keep up with these DLC models, DRM crap, and if they (Sony and MSFT) release locked consoles (single use codes that require constant internet connection and only let you play demos if you buy used) or if they go the way of the PSPgo and make them download only with no removable media. I am sure that if they do that, we will have a crash worse than in the '80s when Atari flooded the markets. Now, this is all speculation but if these rumors are true, there will be only two home consoles that anyone with a brain will buy: the Wii U, and SEGA's new home console, whatever it be named...

Now, since this is entirely speculation, and I can't find any mockups online, i can't reference anything, so it's all just conjecture and speculation. SEGA's keeping mum, and i have yet to get word from Sony or Microsoft as to the nature of their 8G home consoles, but like I said, it's not like there's anything ELSE being said about this particular topic (aside from Wii U news) isn't. I'm going to call Sony and Microsoft up and see if there's anything new about their home consoles. For now, enjoy the games you have, and look forward to the (hopefully) excellent games to come.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

iPhone 5



The latest news on the new iPhone is that it is going to be much slimmer than the current 4S, that it will have 1GB of RAM, a 2.0GHz processor, a thinner screen (easier to break my dear) and that it will  have a whole host of other features, maybe being a silver spider on your hand or maybe some kind of VR tech, who knows. And why i'm dedicating a six line post to this have no clue. Maybe I'm doing it to boost views or maybe i'm doing it so I can at least SAY I put up the specs. Although this has as much info in two lines as some articles have had in three pages!

is it just me or do these look like someone photoshopped an iPhone onto a hand and then added legs?

photo credits: google image search.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Iron Man 3 suit

ima state this straight off: i really don't have much to say here, other than partially reporting my opinions on the new Iron Man armor, and then goes into my gripes about repaints and aesthetic changes further on. 



well, since Iron Man 3 is gonna come out someday soon and apparently this is what the suit is going to look like.

now i know i didn't think the Spider-Man suit redesign in The Amazing Spider-Man was necessary, but i don't think this suit remake is entirely needed. in TA Spider-Man they were starting from scratch, but this is more of mid-series redo to try and make it look cooler. they already HAVE a cool suit, why do we need a Silver Centurion remake in this new one? i mean unless this is for a specific purpose, this just seems well, sort of unnecessary. not that it's not cool looking, it is it's just it doesn't seem very needed in terms of the series unless they have a reason. oh well, it's pretty cool, but i will have to watch the movie to see why this has been made. at the rate they're going through suits they will have nearly the amount of suits that there are in the comics by Iron Man 4. eh, if this was a consumer product it wouldn't be all that good, but from my point of view right now it's like when Hasbro took the Vortex Praxis, repainted it, removed the shoulder stock, tacked on some LEDs and batteries to the clip, and called it the Lumitron.


notice any difference between the two here?



didn't think so. so, until i get more details on the new armor, all i know is that it looks like the Silver Centurion, and it's sort of like the mind-summon Bleeding Edge armor in the fact that he can summon it anywhere. i don't really know that much about it right now, so in conclusion, i know nothing more than i did before i wrote this article, and you probably only know that Iron Man has a new suit, and that it vaguely looks like  the Silver Centurion. yup, pretty much an article about nothing for now, but hey, at least i was clear about it. NERF Vortex Praxis review coming soon.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Hotmail Review:



i've been using Hotmail for a while now, it's pretty good, most of the features are either excellent or non-annoying. i never get any spam in my inbox, which is better than i can say for Yahoo! Mail where i get nearly 100 a week or 30-60 per day depending on the situation (grumble). anyways, most of the annoying things happen when Hotmail dumps game publisher newsletters into junk for no reason. strangely, it happens with nearly every Sony and Nintendo newsletter and never for Xbox stuff. i think there may be a subtle bit of marketing going on here in an attempt to make me only go for the Xbox and licensed Xbox games rather than Microsoft's competitors, but when i call them up to complain they'll probably deny it. oh well.  one more odd thing is that it would put stuff that i purposefully sent to myself and dump it in the Junk file, and stuff from the forum i created into junk as well so that's annoying, but i curbed that with autosort into files. if you get a lot of eMails from somewhere and want to keep them for future reference, but don't want to manually sort them (a real pain when i have to move lots of eMails from one folder to another) the sweep option lets you move all future messages to the folder of your choice so if you have a lot of invoices you don't want on your hard drive or the like, just sort them into a folder of your choice. if Yahoo! and Gmail had this feature i would use both of them more often but since i cannot find the feature with lots of attempts at finding it i have since given up. i have had the Yahoo! account for two years now, and i have gotten and deleted countless THOUSANDS of SPAM letters and unfortunately too many things (more than my Hotmail account) that i actually want have been sorted into spam wheras i have also gotten stuff from  the same senders that didn't go into spam, such as newsletters from lego or subscriptions to updates from a game company or the like. i hate it whn i have to sort through all the fake crap and go into the real stuff. i mean, Yahoo's spam guard/filter is nearly as bad as it's news, and that's saying something.

now, back on about Hotmail.

i have two Hotmail accounts, one personal, the other i dedicated to contacts for this blog. i tired quickly of swapping them so i decided to link them together. it works perfectly and all it takes is the click of a button to swap Hotmail accounts. if i could link my Yahoo!, Gmail, and Altfuse accounts to Hotmail, i would never use anything else. i also like the you can create aliases for Hotmail that enable you to send and receive from multiple eMails without ever needing to create extra hotmail accounts. i use them whenever i feel like utilizing an alternate eMail address. all in all, quite good except for the throwing lots of not-junk into the junk folder, and the fact that i cannot find any hotkeys for selecting and marking the eMails, which is pretty much Yahoo! Mails only good feature aside from the drag and drop eMail from folder to folder. 8.9* rating. room for improvement in some areas. Yahoo! and Gmail, and Altfuse review coming soon.

Monday, July 2, 2012

The Amazing Spider-Man

    
Okay, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't too thrilled about this movie. I grew up on the Rami series and personally loved the trilogy, and couldn't WAIT for Spider-Man 4. Then Rami and most of the cast were dropped off. WONDERFUL! if only Tobey Mcguire and J.K Simmons had stayed on I would have had the same enthusiasm I had for Spider-Man 3. Now, having put out there that I was pre-biased against the series and HATED the fact that Andrew Garfield was Spider-Man and the fact that he is British didn't help things, you are probably wondering what changed my mind. Well, I went to see MIB3, and all that hate faded away. They played a trailer for it that made me swap back over to the infinite love I had for the original trilogy. Now, that being said, this and the Avengers series will be an epic fail if there's no Avengers 2 crossover seeing as Spider-Man IS AN AVENGER!!!!!! they also need to crossover The X-Men franchise BECAUSE WOLVERINE'S AN AVENGER! They cannot make Iron-Man 3 without Spider-Man because The Iron Patriot is Norman Osborn in a stolen/bootleg/whocares Iron-Man suit. Otherwise, it's just an Iron-Man painted like Captain America.
Okay, this movie was better than I thought it would be, and it trumps Rami's trilogy by a long shot.

                                Peter must have great stamina because in this scene after a fight with
                                        The Lizard I'm pretty sure there was bone showing.

I'll be honest, I was prejudiced against this movie because I grew up on the Raimi series. I hated the thought of a brit (Not that I have anything against them, I just don't like it when their regular accent bleeds over into the one they're acting as [Which never happens to Hugh Laurie as Dr. House come to think of it]) playing my favorite super-hero and I honestly didn't care for Gwen Stacy. then I watched the movie and all that changed. I thought the web-shooters were unnecessary, I though that Gwen Stacy's only purpose was to die, and that the new suit was trash.

Not so. Emma Stone (left) makes Gwen Stacy into everything Kirsten Dunst's Mary-Jane Watson wasn't, and Bryce Dallas Howard's Stacy could never be. Andrew Garfield (right) plays Spider-Man more convincingly than Tobey Mcguire ever could. he only slipped up on maintaining his American accent once, in a scene where he was sobbing, and even then he managed to blend it perfectly into the scene. Rhys Ifans (below) evokes the mad scientist expressions that always seemed to elude Dylan Baker in the role, yet he managed to portray a mad scientist in other, post Spider-Man roles.
                               This guy looks and sounds like the kind of guy who is desperate enough
                                                               to test something on himself

The theme of the movie is the same as most Spider-Man origins. Peter lets somebody go who eventually kills his uncle Ben. Martin Sheen(left) did a great job playing the soon to be deceased Benjamin Parker, and Sally Field plays Aunt May the way I imagined her in the novel adaption of Spider-Man.
  These two make a great onscreen couple and almost 
never cease to be funny when they interact

Denis Leary plays Captain George Stacy, the ill-fated father of Gwen. He's almost exactly how I imagined a younger Capt. Stacy would be, and much slicker in the role than James Cromwell was in Spider-Man 3.
The modernized and youthful version of this character makes 
you sorry about his fate

Chris Zylka (left) plays Eugene "Flash" Thompson. They have the same kind of odd, comradely/adversarial relationship they've always had. Unfortunately, it's hard to figure out why he does the things he does because they never really explained his character to us. Really, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that you can't really tell what's going on with Thompson from one scene to the next seeing as he goes from archival to sort-of pal and back and forth a few times.  
All in all, the cast is excellent and they all perform much better than the Raimi series's cast did. I was hesitant about this at first, but after seeing it, I've got nothing but love for it.


Now, moving on from the cast, the cinematography was excellent in some places, and terrible in others. major contrast and fast camera movement caused lots of blurring and sometimes it was hard to see the action sequences because of it. the final scene on Oscorp Tower was stunning, to say the least, and in the final scene we are given hints at the next movie. All in all, the film is wonderful, the plot is thick, and has enough substance they could make another one this year and it would be great, but the blurring took away from the action sequences and they really need to find a way to fix that...

Now, as for the technology, I thought the web-shooters were a bit much (they could have just made his webs like Raimi's Spider-Man's and made them organic) but they served them well both as a plot device, and a gadget. I am pleased that he can stick to walls naturally rather than using some kind of gadget to do so. the gas dispersal device known as the (darn i can't remember at the moment) is the main plot prop used by The Lizard. It's a little outlandish, but not exactly hard to imagine. Most of the technology featured in the movie is either very new, Sci-Fi, prototype, or at some point of evolution that it isn't recognized as what it seems. It embodies exactly what is needed in order to make a world where The Lizard, Spider-Man, Dr. Octopus, and others can exist without any major stretch of the imagination. If the videogame is anything at all like the movie, it'll be stellar!


all in all, not exactly the Spider-Man i've always dreamed of, but close enough. i hope they make a sequel and i hope it's better than this one! it gets an 8.7* rating due to the blurriness.

all images courtesy of  http://www.sonypicturespublicity.com

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