The Nerdy News Blog - November 20th, 2010

Forgive me, folks, for failing to write up last week's Nerdy News, so here we go for what happened this week.

FOX Announces That Fringe Will Be Moved to Fridays

 Normally, I wouldn't find a change of day and time for a show to be anything remotely newsworthy. But let's take a look at the facts here. Fact: Fringe is a science fiction show on FOX with critical acclaim that's currently on Thursday nights. Fact: Starting on January 28th, it will be on Fridays. Fact: Firefly was a science fiction show on FOX with critical acclaim that aired on Fridays and was quickly canceled. Fact: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a science fiction show that aired on FOX that was moved to Fridays in its second season and was quickly canceled.
Opinion: Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcapOHCRAP!
FOX might as well have put out a press release that said we're thinking about canceling another awesome show because we're a bunch of morons.

Cryptic Studios and CBS Will Let The Fans Design The Next Enterprise

I realize I'm probably the only person you know who plays Star Trek Online, and hell, I don't even play it as much anymore. But I think this next bit is pretty cool. The game's developer, Cryptic Studios, along with Star Trek license holder CBS Studios and Intel have announced a contest that asks for fans to design the next starship Enterprise. I'm assuming it will be the Enterprise-F, since, according to the game's timeline, the Enterprise-E had a significantly longer life span than some of the other ships in its line. The grand prize is kind of lame, though - an Alienware laptop, the collector's edition of Star Trek Online along with a lifetime membership, the new Enterprise will appear in STO and you'll get a replica of your design. Personally, I'd rather have the replica and royalties for the use of my design. Oh well. The contest starts on December 9th. Check here for details.

 Darren Aronofsky To Direct The Wolverine

 That's right. The guy who directed head trips and arftsy flicks like Requiem for a Dream, Pi, The Fountain, and The Wrestler, is directing the sequel to the abysmal X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Aronofsky has worked with big screen Wolvie Hugh Jackman on The Fountain and it would seem that it was Jackman himself that got him the job. One of the things Aronofsky has done already is to change the title from something that probably would have been awful, like X-Men Kinda Origins: Wolverine Goes To Hollywood, to the simple title, The Wolverine. Supposedly, Aronofsky is looking to really separate his film from the Gavin Hood-directed nightmare that gave us magic adamantium memory-erasing bullets and the horribly realized Wade Wilson/Deadpool. He's called it a "stand alone" film, that "isn't connected" to its predecessor. Frankly, I don't see how that's possible since you still have Hugh Jackman playing Logan (though I actually still think he's great in the role). But combine this with the fact that they're rebooting Wade Wilson's origins for Deadpool, which should film soon if Ryan Reynolds' schedule ever frees up, and the craziness that seems to be involved with X-Men: First Class, and it's pretty obvious that FOX doesn't give a rat's ass about maintaining continuity in its X-Men film universe.


Oh, and for your amusement here's an image from a mid-90's Star Trek/X-Men crossover comic. I actually own a copy of it.

Yeah, that's Spock owning Wolverine with a Vulcan Nerve Pinch.

Win.

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 6

Sorry I'm late, I had a busy weekend. Anyway, on to Zelda!

For this post, I delved deeper into Ikana Canyon. Frankly, I meant to play through the Stone Tower, but I didn't make it that far.
Appalled that I had done the Ocean Spider House on the wrong day and not received the Giant's Wallet, I went to the ocean once again to complete that task. Actually, I began that bit twice because there was a game crashing freeze once again. That's the second time that's happened. I had to restart the system and redo what little I had done on that day cycle. I'm once again wishing that I had downloaded Majora's Mask on Virtual Console rather than play it on the GameCube disc.
So, with thirty Gold Skulltulas dead and the morning of the first day all used up, I obtained my big ass wallet and proceeded to Ikana Valley to tackle the Gibdos' Well. Now this is one of the more annoying sections of the game. For some reason, a bunch of mummies regret that they never got to have some Deku Nuts and bombs, or never got to eat a fish. So they've spent eternity standing guard next to doors in some underground chambers. Its only when you give them what they want that their souls can rest and the doors will open.
Also, the mummies find bugs creepy.

The only tool you need to fool a mummy.

Unfortunately, there are a couple things that you can't get a hold of inside of the Gibdos' Well, like a blue potion, that forced me to go searching around for one. I didn't want to fetch the ingredients for it to take the witches in the Swamp, and I couldn't remember which Business Scrub would sell me a blue potion. I checked in Lulu's room in the Zora Cape before I remembered that he's right there in Ikana Canyon. So I dropped 100 rupees (And thanks to the Giant's Wallet, I made it back and then some) to buy the potion. I did have to break down and look at my old player's guide at the map of the well, if only to remember where I needed to go with the time-sensitive hot spring water. Yes, a mummy's only regret was that it had no scalding water to look at.
Once I wrapped up (Ha!) my business in the well full of mummies, I obtained the incredibly creepy looking Mirror Shield - much creepier than a bug, thank you - and made my way into Ikana Castle.
Since there are only four main dungeons in Majora's Mask, it's kind of nice having the small sub dungeon that is the Ikana Castle. It involves a lot of ReDead, which are pretty easy to kill when wearing the Gibdos Mask, Captain's Hat or Garo's Mask, since they begin to dance and not attack when you wear one of those masks. And because ReDead drop about fifteen to twenty rupees each, that new Giant's Wallet filled up quick. The goal of Ikana Castle is to get to King Igos du Ikana, a skeletal warrior king who looks like the winner at last year's Day of the Dead costume contest.

The runner-up didn't think to carry a sword.

After dispatching his two henchman, a murderous, skeletal version of Laurel and Hardy, you get to take on Igos himself. I always find it's fun to wear the Captain's Hat that is given to you by Captain Keeta, Igos' military commander. This brings about a quick, but rather funny cut scene that shows that Igos might have had a little too much royal blood in his system. Cue "Dueling Banjos." He isn't the sharpest of skeletons. Once you defeat him, he realizes how much he and his kingdom had lost its way, that their failure to trust in each other led them to a long war that destroyed their kingdom and their lives. He then teaches you the Elegy of Emptiness, a song that creates statues of whatever form Link is in, so you can create up to four statues at once as Hylian, Deku, Zora and Goron. Unfortunately, the Hylian Link stature is creepy as hell.

That's going to haunt me.

And so, with the Elegy learned, and midnight passed (my time, not game time), I played the Song of Time, saved the game and called it a quits.
I might double up on the Zelda blogs this week, since there's not much to this one and I've probably got a good three blogs worth of Majora's Mask left at least. I'm eager to finish and move on to Wind Waker and then Twilight Princess.

Zelda Retrospective: Part VI - Majora's Mask - Day 5

Sidequests, sidequests and more sidequests! Unfortunately, I didn't do much in the main quest this week. I logged in a little time earlier in the week and started up in Ikana Valley. This is another point where I wish I'd never been given that damned player's guide. I can't remember anything! And what do I do? Instead of trying to work everything out for myself, I keep deciding to steal a peek at the guide. But hey, it does cut down my play time so I won't be playing Majora's Mask for the next 6 weeks.
Anyway, I forgot how much I love the Ikana Valley section of Majora's Mask. It has such an excellent atmosphere. The whole area is set up as a land of the dead, where a mighty kingdom that ruled Termina fell to ruin during a war with a far off nation. Now the spirits of the soldiers are trapped in the land of the living as ghosts and ghouls of various kinds. Combined with the prominence of the falling moon, the Ikana Valley is probably the most moody and eerie portion of the game.
The other sections of Termina all feel so full of life, whereas Ikana only has a handful of living people - just Dampe, the researcher and his daughter, the thief, Sakon, and a soldier who's so boring that he's invisible. Everyone else is dead. Maybe it's just my fascination with skeletons (it's very evident in all the doodles I draw as ideas for band logos and such), but all the roving skeletons looking for solace and release for their souls just sucks me into the story. I guess I just have a thing for the macabre. Crap, does that make me emo?

"Yeah, you're totally emo," said the vanishing, stick-wielding hooded cyclops. What a prick.

Anyway, I played a little ways into the Ikana Valley quest before deciding to go after some more heart pieces and upgrades. First off, I made Captain Keeta feel like a little bitch, despite the fact that he is a huge skeleton with a killer hat - which he then gave to me once I played him a ditty on my ocarina. Then I hung around the graveyard each night and ordered some Stalkids/Former Ikana Soldiers to dig up the graves so that I could get at the goodies, as well as healing the researcher to get the Gibdo mask.
There's another screwed up thing in this part of the game. The paranormal investigator guy dragged his little out into a section of the world where there are ghosts and the undead surrounding them at all times if their house, which doubles as a giant music box, doesn't have the water power to play the song that wards off the walking mummies. Good job on the parenting skill there, dude.
From there it was collectormania!
I saw that I had a measly nine hearts and decided that, rather than go on to conquer the hazards of the Ikana Valley further, I would pump up Link further. Thus today was spent with minigames and trading quests galore.
I managed to collect thirteen or fourteen of the game's fifty-two total pieces of heart. With only four bosses to collect heart containers from, you have to do a lot of collecting to get all twenty containers. I also managed to upgrade to the biggest bomb bag and the biggest quiver. In the case of the quiver, it involved playing some minigames that would have the Terminan version of PETA ready to kill somebody. See, in Hyrule, the target shooting games were innocent, involving targets like moving rupees and giant dartboards. In Termina, they use living creatures, trained to appear at the blow of a whistle only to be shot down by twitchy archers looking to win a prize.

The shooting gallery's proprietors at least tried to replicate their natural environment, so they can feel more at ease while they're being shot at by blood thirsty elven people.

What makes it worse is that the Swamp Shooting Gallery has Deku Scrubs as targets. We've already established that the Deku Scrubs are sentient beings with a language, monarchical government and even a bureaucracy. At the shooting gallery, they're being round up and murdered for sport. Seriously, this world just seems more and more screwed up the more I play this game. Termina has a moon with an angry face, big rock-eating bipeds who can roll around in balls, sentient plants, fish people with poor taste in music a land where the dead roam about and can't get any rest and pointy-eared humans who don't mind wantonly killing their neighbors. I know it was water pollution that caused all of Hyrule's problems. But what about Termina? I haven't figured that out yet.

I'm blaming this guy though.

He's freaky.
Coming next week, Ikana Valley and Stone Tower Temple.


As a side note: I'm moving these posts to Sunday nights, since I seem to play more Zelda on the weekends. Or in this post's case - early Monday morning.

The Nerdy News Blog - November 4th, 2010

The Avengers Delayed?

Perhaps Nick Fury will educate Thor in the do's and don't's of foot massages?

Is Joss Whedon looking to spend too much money? According to BleedingCoolNews.com, Marvel Studios has delayed the pre-production process on the movie that will cause millions of fan boys to quite literally die from the excitement of seeing Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk all on one screen. I might be one of them. And by might, I mean almost definitely. But it's okay, the new Star Trek should come out before The Avengers hits the screen. But the film's shaping up to be pretty expensive, with big name stars like Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson, combined with what will surely be massive amounts of CGI and filming on location in New York City. So Marvel's accountants are understandably freaking out. With any luck, the movie won't be delayed. Cross your fingers, true believers.

James Bond to Reappear (Maybe) in Late 2012

Thanks to MGM's keen desire to blow all it's money like a drunken frat boy in Vegas with his daddy's credit card, many of its big properties, like the James Bond series and The Hobbit have gone through development hell due to lack of funds. In the case of The Hobbit, some iffy rights issues led to the film being a joint-venture with Warner Brothers. Agent 007, however, has not been so lucky. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's money problems have left it looking for another company to make it their bitch. Yesterday, however, MGM filed bankruptcy - otherwise known as a Financial Get Out Of Jail Free Card. Now that they've got some breathing room, MGM is aiming to get Bond 23 out in November 2012. Daniel Craig currently has a pretty tight schedule, so it looks like they may not get to film until late 2011 at the earliest. Luckily, the current Bond series doesn't rely too much on CGI, so post-production shouldn't take too long. Woo! Yay for big Hollywood companies going bankrupt!

TIE Fighters Will Soon Be In Your Living Room And Everywhere Else You Go

I don't think Homeland Security saw The Galactic Empire one coming.

So, file this one under "Now I Wish I Had An iPhone." This really isn't all that important, I just enjoyed the thoughts of thousands of people all over the country saying to their neighbors, "Hey, you've got a TIE Fighter on your face."
THQ is working on a new augmented reality game that has you shooting down TIE Fighters with whatever your camera sees as a background. It's a simple arcade shooter of little consequence, it just lit up my eyes with nerdy glee when I saw it.

Out.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS3) - Review

I suppose this is a little late in coming, since Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, developed by LucasArts, came out in the middle of September. I, however, just completed the game today in my efforts to relax on this lovely three-day weekend I've had.
I suppose curiosity killed the cat when it comes to me shelling out the $8 it cost me for a five day rental (thank you, Blockbuster), but with this game being hailed as official canon and all, I just had to play through. So, wanting to witness the new Euphoria engine that LucasArts has been touting about for the last couple of years as well as find out what the hell Darth Vader was up to with some secret apprentice, I decided to devote my weekend in passionate gaming on my roommate's PS3.
The result turned out to be a mostly positive experience.
The game follows Darth Vader's secret apprentice, codenamed Starkiller, as he terrorizes the galaxy at Vader's bidding, taking down Jedi that survived Order 66 (the other nerds out there will know that that is the order given by Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith to exterminate the Jedi) and making sure no one, Imperial or otherwise, lives to say they saw him.
Storywise, the game is solid. Some of the advertising might have you believe that there are branching paths to take in the game, but it follows the same path until just before your final boss fight, where you decide whether to follow the Light Side of the Force or give in to the Dark Side. Though the plot was somewhat predicatable, especially the Light Side ending (which is the "official" ending that fits into Star Wars canon), it is still fun and there are a few good surprises in there. Rather than try to barrell through the game a second time before I had to take the game back to Blockbuster, I just found the Dark Side ending on Youtube. It was good, but it didn't have the same sense of resolution as the Light Side.
The use of actual actors for motion capture, likenesses and voice was a brilliant move on LucasArts' part, because it makes the characters feel much more natural and empathetic. Not to mention the fact that these characters now might be able to make the transition to live action via the forthcoming live action Star Wars TV series set in the same time frame. However, I think they should have made an effort to get James Earl Jones and Ian McDiarmid in to voice Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, respectively. Though Matt Sloan's Vader is downright perfect sometimes, it often just doesn't sound quite right. Surprising, Sam Witwer (known to some genre fans as the short-lived Crashdown in Ron Moore's updated Battlestar Galactica), who portrays Starkiller, also portrayed the Emperor and did a good, but not great, impersonation.
Now, for the technical stuff.
Anybody who has ever played God of War or Devil May Cry will probably be pretty comfortable with The Force Unleashed. It's all about fast combat and beating the ever-loving shit out of stuff in very cool ways. Literally, you can pick up a Stormtrooper with the Force, swing him around a bit, zap him with some lightning, throw your lightsaber into his gut and then fling him into an abyss. Starkiller is nicely customizable with the games levelling system. Basically, with every level you gain, you get points in three different areas - Powers, Combos and Talents - that allow you to decide which Force Powers to upgrade, which awesome melee and force combos to learn (getting them all by the end of the game is not difficult) and what attributes you want, such as more life and less damage taken or faster recharge rates on your Force Powers. Also, you can customize Starkiller with different lightsaber crystals and costumes that you can find hidden throughout the game's levels. It's a fun system to work with, because you have to make strategic decisions about what to upgrade based on your playing style. I, for instance, tended to use combos of Lightning with melee attacks, so I bolstered my defenses so I could survive longer at close range and increased the potency of my lightning attacks. It's much more satisfying than having all of your abilities and attributes pre-determined, though it's not a system that hasn't been done before.
Also, much like God of War, there is a high degree of repetitiveness, because all you really do is barrell through constant streams of enemies until you hit a boss, most of which can be killed with similar tactics, and then have to go through some interactive cutscenes that at least look cool enough to make the monotonous fights a little better. I would live to have seen LucasArts come up with a few more animations than they did for the interactive kill sequences on some of the larger non-boss enemies. It was cool to see Starkiller finish off an AT-ST by jumping up between its legs and cutting it in half, but after the eighth or ninth time, it was just boring.
Some greater attention to some of the gameplay mechanics would have been nice too. The Force Grip was something I found especially flawed. The environments were full of objects that could potentially be picked up and thrown at unsuspecting enemies, or with enemies that could be picked up and thrown at other enemies, but it proved so difficult to control anything with the dual analog control I largely ignored it until the final section of the game when I had a bit more control over it. The targetting system was especially flawed, because it changes as you move, so you might have your eyes set on a Stormtrooper running from your left to right that you want to zap with lightning, but end up missing him completely because your target won't stay with him. This also plays a role in the times when you really need to use that grip ability and just came seem to grab the object.
There were points where these flawed gameplay mechanics made the game insanely difficult. There were also points where the game was just flatout difficult in general. In an effort to add to Starkiller's general badassery, the game is often filled with dozens of enemies at one time. Sure, when you clear out a hangar full of Stormtroopers, nasty assault droids and a couple AT-STs, it's pretty satisfying. But not when you have to start over ten or eleven times because it's so hard to stay alive. Battles against other Jedi characters were also frustrating, especially the second to last boss fight, because some Force attacks seem completely impossible to dodge.
One last technical thing, all the claims of technical acheivement LucasArts made with this game fell short. I saw occasional framerate drops, which sometimes left Starkiller vulnerable in a tight spot. Also, the "advanced physics engine" needs tweaking, especially its collision physics, because I often found Starkiller running with half his body through a wall, standing on things he shouldn't have been able to and looking like he was floating while running uphill. I never really did see this advanced enemy AI that had them reacting realistically to being thrown around, because there were so many enemies on screen most of the time that I couldn't take the time to notice.
In the end, I generally enjoyed my experience with The Force Unleashed. If LucasArts can deliver another compelling story and fix some of the gameplay issues, I'd happily play a sequel.

7.5/10