Movie Addicts. Celeb Dishers. Gamers. We're All Here.

Oh man, folks…I’m actually somewhat happy! I know–several of you out there are clutching your chests in alarm and reaching for the cell phone to call for an ambulance, and even more of you are wondering if that tingle in your left arm means anything, but it’s true! I’m cheery happy, and it’s because SAG is getting taken down a peg.

Remember that writer’s strike that ground most new productions of pretty much anything to a halt for a while, while the WGA tried to get a piece of the as-yet-tiny digital pie? The one where they had to fight for weeks for every scrap and nickel? It was starting to look like SAG was going to walk all over the directors and producers and such, like normal–they were even starting to plan for strikes in some cases, and wouldn’t even show up for talks–and now, suddenly, they don’t have much left to stand on.

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Great news! Starting next week, the gaming masterpiece Deus Ex will be free to play on Gametap, as long as you’re willing to sit through some commercials. A marketing effort for Deus Ex 3, perhaps? It doesn’t matter.

Deus Ex is far from flawless. The models were clunky and the animations were stiff even for a 2000 game, and the voice acting was apparently done by whoever happened to be around the office at the time. (The accents in the Hong Kong section of the game are painful, but the voicework does have some moments of hilarity, like J.C.’s deadpan delivery of the line “A bomb’s a poor choice of weapon for close-range combat.”)

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Tags: Video games by Matthew Boyd
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A few weeks ago, when CBS announced their fall schedule, fans of the vampire series “Moonlight” were deeply disappointed. Though the show’s creators explained that they’re not giving up hope, the network’s reluctance to renew this fan favorite isn’t a good sign.

Originally titled Twilight, this supernatural detective show was handed over to David Greenwalt, co-creator of another vampire detective show. Yes, Angel. Of course it’s Angel. There aren’t any other vampire detective shows, silly. Pretty much the entire cast was revamped (get it?), including the addition of charming rascal Jason Dohring from Veronica Mars. But to no avail.

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Tags: TV stories by Liz N.
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And I couldn’t be happier.

Let’s be honest, folks…the theatre as a means for movie distribution is an archaic, outdated, and nightmarishly overpriced system. The monster speaker array and the huge screen are almost replicatable at your own home thanks to rapid advancement in home theatre technology. Not to mention the sheer hubris involved with the continually inflating prices…but now, things are only getting worse for the theatre.

Popcorn prices are on the rise.

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Some of you will remember me saying this, but this is more for the folks who just showed up.  The Japanese do the very best ghost stories on the face of the earth.  Sure, we’ve got slasher flicks on lockdown and we invented the zombie movie, but the Japanese were telling ghost stories before America was a twinkle in Amerigo Vespucci’s eye.

But before I go any farther with this, I’m going to show you exactly what I’ll be talking about, right in advance.  Check out the synopsis for Exte, the upcoming Japanese ghost story movie. [Read more →]

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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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Tags: Video games by Matthew Boyd
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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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