Like many horror flicks before it, the upcoming movie The Strangers claims to be “based on true events.” In a way, this has to be accurate. Pretty much anything that can happen has happened already. The Strangers might be based on the Manson killings, but even if it wasn’t, you can be sure that, at some point in history, mysterious masked men have broken into a peaceful isolated cabin and wreaked havoc on the occupants.

It’s entirely possible that something like what happens in the movie will never happen to you. But can you really afford to take that 0.8% risk that it just might? In the spirit of some popular survival handbooks, here are a few tips on how to survive the most common horror movie scenarios. (Remember, we’re not professionals, and are not making any claims that the advice here will save your life in any real-life danger.)

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E3 used to be THE show for the video game industry. An orgy of spectacle, every development team on the planet had to have a working demo in time for the convention or risk being ignored. Then the powers that be decided to make E3 a convention that nobody was allowed to attend and it all fell apart. Whoops.

Since the effective demise of E3 as a landmark show for the industry, more and more companies have realized they can get more mileage out of their marketing money just by holding their own exhibition. Among these publishers is Ubisoft, whose UbiDays convention is currently underway in Paris, and we are happy to oblige them. Here’s a roundup of the press coming out of France.

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What IS it with May and celebrity deaths?? Seriously! I crack open my web browsers tonight and all the news I’m getting is about people DYING!

First off, I get the news that the guy–Earle Hagen–who wrote the theme for the Andy Griffith show died. You know, that song that when you hear it on Nick at Nite or TV Land or whereever you hear it, you can’t stop whistling for like three days afterward? The one that some of you are no doubt whistling RIGHT NOW? He’s dead. He was in his eighties, so that’s not too much of a surprise–frankly, I can’t be that shocked by any news item that starts “Elderly (Wo)Man Dies”. But it’s no less sad in the hearing, and losing the guy who not only gave us a universally recognized theme song, but also the themes for a whole bunch of old TV is just a pretty big blow.

But what really floored me was hearing the news that Tartan USA is officially closed. Yeah. Ferme. Cerrado. Clo-sed. These are the guys who brought us all sorts of fantastic finds out of Asia, and now, suddenly, it’s gone. I speak for a lot of horror buffs tonight when I say that this travesty of corporate justice never should have happened, and I’m really, really upset with the lawyers who actually perpetrated this monstrousity.

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Making custom Super Mario World levels isn’t a difficult concept. Crack open the ROM, edit the resources, and you have a brand new board. It’s not an easy thing to do by most standards, but you can at least understand the idea behind it.

However, there’s a subset of SMW hackers who do something called “No Move” levels. In these, the level moves Mario around with things like conveyor belts and music blocks with no player intervention. It’s essentially a level that plays itself. You can see several examples here at Joystiq.

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Sharon Stone!  Thank you for being a colossal moron in the face of overwhelming tragedy and giving us all a convenient target for our formless and amorphous rage.  In a time when a horrible natural disaster rendered thousands of people dead, injured, homeless, grieving and worse, I’m so happy you could be counted on to get up in front of the world and openly declare that THEY HAD IT COMING!

But you know, it’s downright unfair of me to castigate her without letting her tell HER side of the story, so here it is, in her own spectacularly idiotic words: Read more

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