Warning! There's an expletive-filled trailer below for the film Nerdcore Rising. It also features people binge drinking Yoo-Hoo, just so we have full disclosure. If you haven't heard about the movie before, it's a documentary that follows MC Frontalot on his first national tour as he goes from South Carolina to last year's PAX, where he was captured on film by our own Christopher Grant.
Nerdcore, which is trying hard to become its own genre of music, features songs about everything from Dungeons & Dragons to 8-bit video games, and the film explores what that's all about with Frontalot, his band, and several other Nerdcore artists. The film premiered at SXSW in Austin earlier this year, but PAX gets the goodness of the first-ever west coast showing of the flick this Saturday at 4pm. Head below the break to see the special PAX trailer for the movie, created by director Negin Farsad and MC Frontalot himself.
Nothing goes together like drinking brewskis and the PlayStation Portable, right? Apparently, that goes doubly so if you're a sales representative in the land down under. Stella Artois is the number one international draught beer, but they haven't cracked the Australian market. So, instead of sending boring brochures and glossy guides down to the land of Oz, they sent 50 custom-made Stella-branded PSPs to the sales teams.
Not only were they in hand-stitched black velvet Stella bags, but they also had Stella themes loaded on them, and were packed with information about the beer. Plus, since they have wi-fi built-in, they can download updated beer data when they aren't playing God of War: Chains of Olympus or listening to Kylie Minogue MP3s. Now that's a marketing tool we can get behind. We wonder how long it'll be before one of these babies is up on eBay.
Microsoft has released their partial game schedule for the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, and it's chock full of Gears of War 2, Halo Wars, and the New Xbox Experience ... experience. Sure there's plenty of other stuff happening at their booth as well, but we're drooling over these three right now, fetch the bibs. Hopefully those "TBA" slots mean there's going to be some surprises from Bungie someone, which will really kick our saliva glands into high gear.
If you're going to be at PAX, be sure and stop by for some hands-on time with these titles, and then search out one of your favorite Joystiq bloggers to pal around with. We'll be the ones with the plastic spit-shields on to keep the precious electronics dry.
Halo doesn't have a ton of airborne combat in it, but if you've ever been on the receiving end of a non-stop Banshee spawnkilling attack, you know how frustrating the skies can be. Thankfully, Halo Wars feels your pain and is introducing a new unit: the UNSC Wolverine.
It's armed with two anti-aircraft missile pods that can be lowered to target ground units as well, and it features a front-mounted heavy grenade launcher to take out "soft targets," like meat-shield infantry puppets. However, it looks like the thing is pretty vulnerable and will need plenty of ground support so it doesn't get blown to smithereens after it launches its first missile volley. We can't wait to see if they include this in the upcoming PAX demo. WOLVERINES!
Oh Myst, whatever happened to you? We loved you when you were original, and we loved you even more when Riven came out. Then we were rudely slapped in the face when the game left Cyan and Ubisoft released Myst III: Exile and later Myst IV: Ages of Revelation. We tried to be chipper when you went back to Cyan and Myst V: End of Ages came out, but honestly too much water had passed under the bridge. Maybe because of the Uru: Ages Beyond Myst / Myst Online: Uru Live debacle.
We know you might be too busy and Hollywood now, with your movie deal and iPhone announcement. But, we're still smarting from our past experiences. We'll give you another chance, but you'll need to hurry along while we're still smitten with the iPhone. And please, don't call it iMyst. Myst will do just fine. You wouldn't want us to get Pyst all over again.
[Update: We just heard from one of the gents working on the game (Yeah, that's the kind of pull we have) and they tell us "I'm pretty darn sure we're only calling it iMyst internally as a goofy moniker. I really doubt you've got anything to worry about with regards to rebranding of the game. Who knows, maybe if it does well, other Cyan games will follow." Good news all around!]
This has to be one of the most incredibly overproduced game trailers in existence. It's like SEGA and BioWare hired the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack producer and forced him to write a full-blown soundtrack for Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Sonic has never had so much fanfare, especially on such a small system.
Zack nailed this in his hands-on impression, and the gameplay backs it up, but it looks like you could have dropped any ol' characters into this real-time RPG. When we hear the name Sonic, we tend to think hyper-speed running and gold rings flying all over the place. Call us old fashioned.
Still, this trailer is sure to wake you if you're in that end-of-the-week coma.
Like any good developer should be doing these days, Harmonix is already looking over the horizon beyond Rock Band 2, and working on their next big title. Surprise! It'll have something to do with music. However, in a "now we'll be playing catchup to Guitar Hero" reversal, it sounds like they're working on a robust music creation title. Guitar Hero: World Tour features a fairly involved music creation studio, where you can both create a song, and edit it in pseudo-MIDI software. In fact, it's so robust and technical that we think most casual players will hardly touch the thing. Is Harmonix going to take the concept and make it a little more, oh I don't know, fun?
Hamonix's PR rep John Drake told MTV's Multiplayer: "We've done the whole MIDI creation thing. We think we can do something really ambitious and really great that's going to speak across all the users of the game, not just hardcore users - and that will result in some awesome stuff and not just Final Fantasy covers." Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, we'd love to see a cool music creation game that doesn't require a thick manual and that isn't Wii Music.
[Photo from the amazing Glennz Tees. Check out his awesome artworkz]
The much ballyhooed Team Fortress 2Heavy Update that Valve released this past Tuesday will be heading to the Xbox 360 by year's end, according to Gamespot. At last, you can start cracking your knuckles and bone up on your sandvich eating skillz. Just watching those videos made us want to start playing TF2 again. We know, you're saying, "What?! Why'd you put it down in the first place?"
New maps, new weapons, and new achievements? What's not to love? Anything that can extend the wonderment of TF2 is just fine by us. Now get cracking on a massive Portal update, already. The XBLA title is only going to keep us sated for so long.
Despite his fondness for authentic, handmade pirate headwear, Peter Moore was talking about video game pirates at the Leipzig Games Convention, telling Eurogamer that he doesn't think the rapscallions should be made to walk the plank. After all, that didn't work when the record industry tried to sue people for illegally downloading music, Moore reminds us.
Granted, this doesn't mean he wants people to run out and torrent the latest EA title but "there are better solutions than chasing people for money," Moore says. "I'm not sure what they are, other than to build game experiences that make it more difficult for there to be any value in pirating games."
So will Moore change his tune and start keelhauling PC pirates? Probably not, since he's "not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer." Avast, me buckos! Might we expect a subscription-based Madden on PC then?
One of the most surprising films in the sort of "Holy crap? What the heck?! This is cool!" vein to come out of SXSW film festival earlier this year was Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet. It's all about chiptune music and the performers, and is beautifully shot. It's hard to imagine Nintendo thinking people would be hacking into their Game Boys in order to create full-fledged concerts, concerts that would one day spark a feature documentary and an entire genre of music.
For one week, you can watch the impressive documentary at Pitchfork.tv. It's even broken up into bite-sized chapters for you. Give it a looksee and you'll find yourself toe-tapping along to the addictive 8-bit music throughout the film. It's beaten Wizard Rock as our current favorite geek music of choice.
Valve really missed a good opportunity for a bad pun here by not calling it "Meat the Sandvich," but hey, it's still pretty damned funny. What's next in the series of loony videos? Meet the Bullet? Seriously though, we'd watch them all. Heck, just throw a TF2 cartoon on the air as part of Adult Swim and we'd be glued to our sets.
The Spy Hunter movie based on the Midway arcade hit that we talked about more than a year ago is hitting the skids, crashing through the guardrail, and plummeting off the cliff that is called "development hell" in Hollywood. Looks like director Paul Anderson (W.S., not Thomas) is being taken off the project, which will spin it out into limbo.
You can also read Latino Review's review of the script right here. They seemed to like it, saying it was better than The Fast and the Furious 3 ... which ain't saying much. In fact, the best thing Spy Hunter has spawned as far as filmed entertainment goes is the Pontiac commercial above. If any of the game sequels had looked like that, we might still be playing them.
Now, we ask you... is this such a bad thing? Sure it had Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson attached to it, and John Woo was supposed to direct it at one point. However, it's had a slew of different writers and now with two director replacements, do we really need a Spy Hunter movie? We hope no one hits "Continue" on the Spy Hunter movie, and that it just dies a merciful death. What say you?
According to DFC intelligence figures cited by Dave Perry, Sony has lost more money on the PlayStation 3 hardware than it made on the PlayStation 2 during its five most popular years. In pure numbers speak it's lost $3 billion on the PS3, which is about equivalent to everything it made selling PS2s during its peak years. This story would actually have a lot more impact if Carl Sagan was around to say "beelyuns."
Perry, best known for his stint at Shiny Entertainment, was speaking at the really long-named Games Convention Developers Conference, which appears to be both a Convention and a Conference, and was just using the figures to underscore how much Sony was spending on hardware development. However, the 1UP article doesn't mention until near the end that the original PS2 lost money in its first year, and that Sony (and the other console makers) does this so it can make bank on the software/games that people need to fuel their systems.
In all fairness, the article goes on to explain that Microsoft lost $4 billion on the original Xbox, and has had to spend over $1 billion replacing faulty hardware in the 360 and extending the warranty for original purchasers. So, we tend to think $5 billion trumps $3 billion. The real winner in this struggle? Nintendo. It has been churning a profit on that little Wii since it hopped out of the gate. Rassin' frassin' wand-wagglin' profiteers.
We've already witnessed the news that made us go, "Wha?" -- Atari actually turned a profit this past financial quarter, even though it was just a measly $3.5 million smackers. GameDaily went a little more in-depth in their interview with brand-spanking new Atari CEO Jim Wilson to find out what the company's plan is for staying profitable and earning bigger margins, and we'll sum it up for you here: "We really, really, really hope Alone In The Dark continues to do well," and "Location, location, location!" Yup, it's trying like mad to establish a strong footing in the North American market.
The trouble with that scenario is that the most exciting Atari title we were shown at E3 was What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver for the DS. Atari is relying heavily on N+ and Backyard Sports to make a splash... but will it be enough to keep its head out of the water? The publisher needs a huge smash that can potentially turn into a franchise to keep things rolling, or else release dozens of marginally successful titles for the DS and the Wii to make things stick.
Either way, the interview is an interesting read. While we don't want to see Atari fade into obscurity and bankruptcy again, the company has a hard row to hoe.
Although it was dangled in front of us like a tantalizing carrot, it looks like you won't be able to get any cross-gaming action between PS3s and PCs out of Sony's upcoming spy MMO, The Agency. Last year, designer Hal Milton told us the developer weas looking at it, but in a recent interview with Eurogamer it looks like he's closed the door on things for good. You can thank Shadowrun for ruining it all.
"PC guys say, 'PS3 guys have aim assist and the controls nerfed for them'. And PS3 guys say, 'PC guys have a mouse and keyboard - it's all easier for them'. Even if it's not true." Not that we're complaining, because Shadowrun made us a bit mental. But this really needs to happen in a fun way sooner or later. Which title is going to be able to nail it down and make it work? Super Mario Crossover Party Platformer 2: Now With More Fun has our money.
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