dimanche, 30 décembre 2012

Pas de libération sous caution pour les développeurs d'ArmA 3

Vous qui suivez l'actualité du jeu vidéo assidûment, vous n'êtes pas sans savoir que deux développeurs de Bohemia Interactive, qui travaillaient sur ArmA 3, ont été emprisonnés en Grèce. C'est dans ce beau pays qu'ils passaient leurs vacances et qu'ils se sont faits pincer en train de prendre des photos près d'installations militaires. D'après les autorités grecques, ce sont deux espions...

Bien entendu, Bohemia Interactive et ses deux employés enfermés depuis plus de deux mois clament leur innocence. Mais rien n'y fait, la Grèce fait la sourde oreille et garde au frais nos deux touristes. On apprend aujourd'hui que, Ivan Buchta et Martin Pezlar se sont vus refuser un appel contre les charges d'espionnage. De plus, ils se sont vus refuser la possibilité d'être libérés sous caution. Les deux hommes restent donc en prison et seront traduits devant un tribunal grec prochainement. Les familles sont aux abois et tentent désormais de faire appel au président et au premier ministre tchèque pour leur venir en aide. Quant au ministère des affaires étrangères tchèque, il proclame faire tout son possible au sujet de cette affaire contrairement aux estimations des proches des deux développeurs.

Pour ne rien arranger, les conditions de détention laissent clairement à désirer puisqu'un proche déclare qu'ils dorment sur le sol dans une cellule avec 25 personnes et qu'ils ne sont nourris que deux fois par jour...

vendredi, 28 décembre 2012

Tribes Ascend en bêta ouverte dès vendredi

Si vous n'avez pas encore eu l'occasion de poser vos gros doigts sur la bêta fermée du très prometteur Tribes : Ascend, sachez que le jeu de Hi-Rez Studios passera en bêta ouverte dès vendredi prochain. Vous n'aurez plus d'excuses pour vous adonner à la pratique la plus en vogue du moment : le shoot en ski et en jet-pack.

Le développeur en profite pour annoncer que les progrès et les objets débloqués par les joueurs seront préservés pour la prochaine mise à jour, elle aussi prévue pour vendredi. Voici la liste des ajouts et des changements majeurs effectués :

- Nouveau mode de jeu, Arena Deathmatch, disponible sur deux cartes
- Nouvelle carte de Capture The Flag : Temple Ruins
- Nouvelle carte de Team Deathmatch : Inferno
- Deux nouveaux objets déblocables pour la classe Soldier : Proximity Grenade et Utility Pack
- Nouveaux skins de base pour le Doombringer et la Brute
- Possibilité de voir l'apparence des skins Blood Eagle et Diamond Sword sur le menu des classes
- Service de changement de nom
- Une tonne de bug corrigés et de rééquilibrages.

Nous vous proposons donc de télécharger le client à cette adresse, de créer votre compte sur le site officiel et d'attendre patiemment l'ouverture de la bêta ouverte prévue pour vendredi à 17 heures.

· Télécharger le client de la bêta ouverte
· Forum Tribes : Ascend

jeudi, 27 décembre 2012

Maestia – Rise of Keledus débarque chez Alaplay.net

Ce n'est pas tous les jours qu'un MMORPG Free to Play fait son apparition sur la toile comme par magie. En effet, personne n'avait jusque-là entendu parler de Maestia - Rise of Keledus.

Hé bien sachez que le jeu est désormais disponible sur le portail bien connu Alaplaya. Le site officiel du jeu se trouve à cette adresse et il suffit de vous inscrire pour télécharger le jeu et vous lancer dans l'aventure. Sachez que Maestia a subi un bon gros lifting graphique avant de sortir en Europe : les visages, les armes et même les décors ont été optimisés.

Du côté du contenu nous avons là affaire à un MMORPG médiéval-fantastique qui fait dans le classique avec du PvE, du PvP, des guildes, des familiers... Bref, tout ce qui fait un bon petit MMO. Les premières images vous attendent à cette adresse.

Maestia - Rise of Keledus est, bien entendu, une exclusivité PC.

· Voir les images de Maestia - Rise of Keledus
· Forum Maestia – Rise of Keledus

mercredi, 26 décembre 2012

Datura révélé à la GDC

Ce sont les Polonais de Plastic Studios qui attirent ce matin notre attention. En marge de la Game Developpers Conference (GDC), ils dévoilent leur nouveau projet : Datura.

Un titre atypique qui tirera parti des fonctionnalités du PS Move. Le concept est un peu flou mais on nous promet un jeu très original dans la veine de Flower ou encore Journey. Dans le jeu, le PS Move symbolise la main du joueur qui peut interagir avec tout ce qui l'entoure. Plongé dans une forêt dense, on peut ainsi manipuler la faune et le flore. On attend également une narration et un scénario très originaux dans leur déroulement. De plus, le joueur sera placé face à des choix cornéliens pour progresser dans l'aventure. Pour vous faire une première idée, voici un court trailer qui nous présente quelques séquences de gameplay avec papillons, voiture et cochon.

Datura devrait sortir dans le courant de l'année 2012, exclusivement sur PlayStation 3.



· Voir la vidéo de Datura
· Forum Datura

mardi, 25 décembre 2012

corman after dark “angel in red”

Sharkey (future Comedian — as in, The Comedian — Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a Sunset Strip pimp who’s having a bad night.? One of his “bitchez” (is that still how they spell it? For that matter, was it ever?) has up and left him for another “player,” another is on the verge of doing the same, and yet another is holding out on him. He’s losing respect on the streets, man, and if you ain’t got respect, you ain’t got nothin’.

To be fair, a lot of Sharkey’s problems are his own damn fault. He hasn’t got a very cool street name, unlike his chief competitors Silk and Slash, he doesn’t seem to run a very tight ship in general, and to top it all off he’s got a psychotic temper that often clouds his judgment and is proving to be detrimental to what little business sensibility he actually does have.

Still, he’s got Mickie (Head Of The Class alum Leslie Bega). She’s cute and she’s loyal. When she fled her abusive home life back in wherever-the-fuck-she’s-from with her mentally challenged brother, Robby (Jason Oliver), Sharkey? rescued them from the streets and gave them a home, as long as she was willing to spread her legs for cash that she would promptly turn over to him. Problem is, Mickie’s doing such good business that some other pimps have taken notice and want her in their fold. She won’t budge, though, and they figure the only way to get her services back out on the open market again is to get Sharkey out of the picture, so they use Mickie to set him up. They tell her they just want to talk to her boss, she’s dumb enough to believe them, and she unwittingly lures him right into an ambush. Sharkey’s as resourceful as he is angry, though, and he manages to escape their clutches, whereupon he promptly vows revenge on Mickie for, as he sees it, setting him up, and now the chase is on as Mickie, slow-witted brother in tow, tries to escape the net being cast by her enraged apparently-now-former pimp.

If? this, the plot for Roger Corman’s 1991 production Angel In Red (also released on video under the name Uncaged, as you no doubt can tell from the cover photo reproduced above) sounds at all familiar, that’s because it’s basically a complete do-over of his earlier 1985 flick, Streetwalkin’, only with the “action” transposed from Times Square to Sunset (actually, it’s most likely Corman’s former-lumber-yard-turned-studio standing in for Sunset), and that was basically a watered-down rehash of Vice Squad, only without the cops or the sheer, visceral nastiness.

As was the case with another Corman effort from 1991, Dead Space, which was a straight riff on his previous film Forbidden World, which was itself a low-budget rip-off of Alien, the law of diminishing returns certainly applies here. First-time director Lisa Hunt (working under the pseudonym of William Duprey, which probably clues you in on how proud she was of her work here) does a serviceable enough, if straightforward, job here, and none of the actors are too bad (Pamella D’Pella — I’m betting that’s not the name on her birth certificate — is especially fun as a foul-mouthed, big-haired fellow prostitute named Ros who tries her best (sort of) to protect the Mickie-n’-Robby duo), but still — you can only boil a roast down for so long before there’s no meat left on the bones, and we’ve just seen psycho-pimp-on-the-loose-and-out-for-revenge movies done?so much better before. Let’s just say Morgan’s okay as Sharkey, but he’s no Wings Hauser and leave it at that, shall we?

Angel In Red is available paired with the far-superior Christina Applegate starring vehicle Streets as part of Shout! Factory’s “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” DVD series. The supposedly-remastered picture is widescreen but looks kinda grainy throughout, the stereo sound is a little iffy but not too bad, and the only extra provided is the theatrical trailer. Streets is an undeniably great flick and the disc is well worth owning for it alone, but when it comes to this second feature, you’re better off taking a pass on this particular Angel and heading down to the next street corner to see who else is working tonight.

lundi, 24 décembre 2012

2012-12-21-242

3D Star Wars Sculpted USB Flash Drives Announced


Yoda USB Flash Drive

Tymes Machines, a worldwide maker of licensed USB drives, has unveiled its series of 3D Star Wars sculpted character USB flash drives, featuring Darth Vader, Boba Fett, Storm Trooper and Yoda.

Available in 4Gb, 8Gb and 16Gb capacities at USD$29.99, USD$39.99 and USD$59.99 respectively via Tymes Machines's online store now, the 3D Star Wars Sculpted USB flash drives are backed by a limited1 year warranty. Definitely a perfect gift for any Star Wars geeks thisChristmas!

“We at Tyme Machines thrive on bringing belovedcharacters such as these to life in full 3D to fans across the world,”said John McDaniel, Chief Marketing Officer of Tyme Machines. “We areworking continuously to bring Star Wars fans more collectables they canuse in their everyday lives.”

News via [Legitreviews]





dimanche, 23 décembre 2012

hollywood sidebar sam raimi’s “drag me to hell”

Once again, this “Hollywood Sidebar” column will be a short one, since Universal Studios doesn’t need any extra help from my little blog to promote their latest Sam Raimi multimillion-dollar summer blockbuster, but I just have to say — damn, this was good. I hesitate to use a shopworn cliche like “wicked good fun,” but in this case it really does apply.

I should say this by way of setting the stage : I’m not an enormous Sam Raimi fan. Do I love the original “Evil Dead?” Absofrigginlutely. The first sequel is pretty good, too, although a little heavy on the comedy elements for my taste. The third installment, frankly, does nothing for me, since by then they were just parodying themselves. As for the rest of Raimi’s oeuvre, I can take it or leave it, apart from “Darkman,” which I love to pieces. I could care less about the Spider-Man franchise, and found the third entry in that over-hyped cannon particularly appalling; I thought “The Quick And The Dead” was alright, but not great; I’ve never seen “For Love Of The Game” and really don’t care to; and as far as “A Simple Plan” goes, hey, I’d rather just see a real Coen brothers movie, they’re generally much better.

With “Drag Me To Hell,” though, Raimi is back on firm horror grounding. Sure, it’ s still got plenty of comedic elements, and an overall “Looney Tunes on bad acid” vibe, but comedy is not the backbone of the film—good old-fashioned scares are, and this movie delivers plenty of seat-jumping moments, even for the grizzled horror veteran.

The effects are generally pretty good, and while I’m no CGI fan, the computer effects that are used blend in pretty well with Greg Nicotero’s “real” effects and the whole thing flows pretty seamlessly, as far as the visual side of things goes.? Bob Murawski’s editing is , as always, both mildly inventive and? flawlessly professional, and Peter Deming’s cinematography is out of this world, his best work since “Mulholland Drive.” So the whole things looks like a million bucks—or rather more like tens of millions of bucks.

The performances are solid all around if not spectacular, apart from the always-excellent David Paymer as our leading lady Alison Lohman’s rather wormy boss. The cast of players? overall is plenty competent, and while no one apart from Paymer stands out as really great, you can’t complain about any of the others, that’s for sure.

As far as the story goes, it’s pretty standard gypsy-curse stuff, specifically young bank loan officer puts an old gypsy woman out of? her house in order to try to secure a promotion at work and is then haunted by a demon the old woman sicks on her, but as with the original “Evil Dead,” it’s atmosphere and execution that trumps originality here, and even though you’ll see the ending coming a mile away, you’ll still enjoy the ride thoroughly.

A couple of weeks back I said if you only see one Hollywood blockbuster this summer, make sure it’s “Star Trek.” Well, your humble host needs to acknowledge that he spoke too soon there. Sure, “Star Trek” is all kinds of mindless fun, but not as much mindless fun as this megabuck studio offering.

Don’t expect anything new from “Drag Me To Hell.” But do expect to have a great time seeing so much you’ve already seen before put together so well.

jeudi, 20 décembre 2012

nick millard round-up “death nurse”

In a very real sense, if you’ve seen Mick Millard’s other SOV/DTV offering from 1987, Criminally Insane 2 a.k.a. Crazy Fat Ethel 2, then you’ve seen Death Nurse. Only you haven’t. Confused yet? Read on, all will made clear — sort of.

At its core, Death Nurse more or less amounts to Criminally Insane 2 in unconvincing hospital costumes (okay, in fairness the nurse’s getup worn by star Priscilla Alden and the lab coat worn by her pseudo-doctor brother, played by fellow Millard regular Albert Eskinazi,? are perfectly fine, but look for the little touches, like a dish rag attached with rubber bands standing in for a surgical mask, to show just how little money our guy Nick spent on this movie) — after all, it’s shot in Millard’s Pacifica, California condo, it stars Alden, Eskinazi, Millard’s mom, and his stepfather, and it’s about a homicidal fat lady, all of which should sound pretty familiar if you’ve seen CI2/CFE2. In addition,?Death Nurse also runs just under 60 minutes in length and looks to have been shot on a consumer-grade VHS camcorder and then haphazardly edited with a basic two-VCRs-hooked-up-at-home set-up.

And yet — it’s the subtle differences here that show Millard’s creativity in the face of no resources whatsoever. His spread is now a clinic (that takes care of everything from open heart surgery to TB treatment to Betty Ford-style alcohol rehab) rather than a halfway house, his mom plays a social worker who takes care of indigent medical patients rather than a social worker who takes care of newly-released indigent mental hospital patients,? and the larger-than-life Ms. Alden plays Edith Mortley, psycho RN, rather than Ethel Janowski, psycho food lover.

So yes — even though both flicks are hopelessly padded to fill out their meager runtimes with “flashback” footage from the first Criminally Insane film (which in this context makes absolutely no sense being that Alden is supposedly playing an “entirely different” character here — oh, and the opening credits are borrowed from?CI again this time as well, right down to the “directed by Nick Philips”), and even though they both linger on certain scenes waaaaaayyyy too long (check out how much time Millard spends showing us Eskinazi’s Gordon Mortley character digging a “grave,” for instance, or eating ice cream just a few minutes later), there are some key differences. And it’s one of those key differences that, in my mind, makes Death Nurse the superior “feature” (to the extent that either of them can be said to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever) of the two? — and it’s not the dish rag “surgical masks,” awesome as they? are.No, friends, what sets Death Nurse apart from its contemporary entry into the Millard canon is its (entirely unintentional, I’m sure, which makes it all the better in my book) full-throttle, no-holds-barred, do-not-pass-go-do-not-collect-$200 leap into the realm of pure, unadulterated absurdity in pursuit of its less-than-lofty mission to simply kill 60 minutes’ worth of videotape.? While Criminally Insane 2? still tepidly clings to the notion of making some kind of rational sense, rest assured that Death Nurse has no such hang-ups.

Consider — the “plot” here revolves around a nurse and doctor (who according to Millard are apparently phonies with no medical training, although the “screenplay,” ad-libbed for the most part as it is, makes no explicit mention of this fact) who take in broke patients and then kill them and keep collecting money from Medicare/Medicaid for their “treatment.” Even though county social workers still have to come by and check on these people. In addition, they don’t even put up the pretense of having real surgical equipment about, resorting instead to using hacksaws and steak knives on their (fully conscious, I shit you not!) patients.? Ethel — I mean, Edith — then feeds the dead remains of their charges to her pet rats in the garage (cue stock footage from Willard) before feeding the rats to others in her care (such is the delicate cycle of nature, I guess). Then a cop (Millard’s step dad) comes along and busts up their little racket and our quaint homemade “epic” is over.

If any of that makes a lick of sense to you, then congratulations on possessing enough suspension of disbelief to almost take Death Nurse seriously. But fear not — Millard’s heavy-handed attempts at “black comedy” still ensure that you won’t (or can’t). Consider : a dead TB sufferer (played by Millard himself with his face covered by a handkerchief at all times) is dug out from his shallow grave and hosed off to “prove” to the pesky lady from county social services that he’s still alive (wouldn’t she notice the smell?). Gordon attempts a heart transplant by inserting the ticker of his dead dog into a human patient — and their cat (who wanders about the clinic freely, apparently) makes off with it. And ol’ Gordo is trading sex for booze with his alcoholic patient (played by Millard’s wife, who also evidently “produced” this movie, whatever that even means).

So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that Death Nurse is more than willing to loose itself from the moorings of reality. But you still can’t really escape the sense that more or less nothing is happening in this movie because, well — it’s not. It just sounds like it is. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean — Millard possesses the unique ability to make even the truly absurd seem hopelessly mundane and to almost hermetically cleanse any scene of all dramatic tension. He could make a real-live snuff film and I swear to God the thing would seem tedious and drawn out. And while some readers out there may find that to be rather insulting to good Nicholas, I genuinely mean it as praise, because it’s a feat I’ve never seen any other director duplicate with the kind of consistently vigorous non-vigor (hell, anti-vigor) that he does. One thing that’s definitely worthy of admiration, though, regardless of how you feel about Death Nurse itself, is the quality of Slasher Video’s new 25th Anniversary DVD release of the movie. Both picture and sound have been remastered to the point of being genuinely passable (no small feat there I would imagine), and it’s loaded with terrific extras including an on-camera interview with Millard (who’s definitely an amiable guy and pretty darn honest about the “quality” of his product), a terrific feature-length commentary with Millard and his wife, Irmi, that’s engaging throughout, a Priscilla Alden tribute featurette showcasing scenes she’s? in from numerous Millard productions, a short-but-sweet still photo gallery, and a YouTube-style “review video” from the head honcho of VHSCollector.com. All in all, it’s a more comprehensive package than any right-thinking person would ever have dreamed a flick like this would receive. Kudos all around.

At the end of the day, it’s pointless to compare Death Nurse to anything other than Millard’s other late-80s SOV productions, not so much because it doesn’t play by the same rules as “normal” cinema, but because it doesn’t even seem to know what those rules are. Although in many ways it’s hopelessly redundant when viewed alongside Criminally Insane 2 (which is already hopelessly redundant in and of itself if you’ve seen the first Criminally Insane), it’s the sheer temerity of Millard thinking he could basically do the same flick again (I picture in my mind him yelling “Cut! — And print!” when he wrapped up CI2 and then saying “Now let’s shoot it again quick in the hospital costumes!,” but I guess they were made a good six or so months apart, which for some strange reason I actually find kind of disappointing), coupled with his absolute unconcern with, if not outright disdain for, trying to be in any way “believable,” that elevates — or knocks down, depending on how you look at things — Death Nurse to its own plateau. This is a work of art — and I don’t use that term lightly, off-handedly, or in any way condescendingly — that manages to be both a complete rip-off and yet defy comparison at the same time. In its steadfast inability to be anything other than what it is, even if “what it is” amounts to being a total rehash of an earlier rehash, it stands alone as perhaps the most jaw-droppingly, amazingly, near-hypnotically pointless movie ever made — until, of course, Death Nurse 2 came along the very next year. Let’s hope Slasher Video sees fit to give it similar treatment in the not-too-distant future.

mercredi, 19 décembre 2012

every single one of us should skip “the devil inside”

I know, I know — I should’ve known better, I really should have. But last January brought us a dead-of-winter studio- dump-off exorcism flick(The Rite) that (admittedly modestly) transcended expectations, so I thought hell, why not?

My mistake. Director/Co-Writer William Brent Bell’s The Devil Inside, supposedly — ahem! — “inspired by true events” (a term so vague as to be less than meaningless — given that our story here revolves around a young woman whose mother killed three people while she was being exorcised and said daughter’s journey to Rome to “reconnect” (or something) with mom after not seeing her for many years I’m thinking the only “true event” that needs to have occurred for this film to “base” itself on is that some girl at some point in time had a mom who underwent an exorcism) had damn well better end up being one of the worst films of 2012 or else we’re in for a very bad, and very long, year.

Eternal optimist (ha!) that I am, tough, I’ll start off by highlighting some of the film’s few good points : the SPFX aren’t too bad, especially the body-contortion stuff. The acting is passable enough. Romania makes a passable stand-in-on-the-cheap for the Vatican. And that’s about it.

Now for the more lengthy list of flaws, and please bear with me here! First off, the film’s use of? “handheld” or “DIY” -style camerawork is uninspired throughout, and downright implausible in many instances, such as on the numerous occasions where the long-suffering “documentarian” of the piece, Michael (Ionut Grama), is actually visible in-shot with his fucking camera? Huh? Who exactly is doing the filming in these sequences, then? Never mind, because that’s nothing compared to the gaping plot holes on offer here,so — spoiler alert! — here’s a rundown of just some of the more glaring ones for your edification —

The woman whose exorcism is at the heart of the story here, one Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) is sentenced to spend the rest of her life in the bughouse by the courts here in the good ol’ US of A, and is then — get this — transferred to a mental hospital in Rome. Did you know our legal system worked that way? I sure didn’t.

Next up, we’ve got the pesky little backstory provided by one of the priests performing secret, unauthorized-by-the-Vatican exorcisms (the other half of the duo being Father David, played by Evan Helmuth, who fulfills the stereotypical doomed-priest-in-an-Exorcist-knock-off’s role) that our story’s heroine, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) latches onto in her quest to get some help for her mom. This guy, Father Ben (Simon Quarterman), lays down the following whoppers in the space of just a few sentences : his father was a Catholic priest who performed exorcisms (huh? I didn’t think they were allowed to have families), dad started taking him along with him to these exorcisms when he was just 13 years old (double huh? are exorcists now participating in bring-your-kid-to-work day?), and by age 17 he was already performing exorcisms on his own (triple huh? he couldn’t have even been ordained as a priest by that age).

If that’s still not enough for you, how about the scene where the two priests, Isabella, and Michael all go in to see possessed-Mom and are somehow allowed to bring in all their own heart-rate-monitoring and other medical equipment even though the Holy See has expressly forbidden this ragtag crew from doing any of this shit?? Okay, fair enough, the movie explains that the facility mommie dearest is kept in isn’t technically within Vatican walls, but no hospital, mental or physical, is going to allow you to wheel all that stuff in when you’re visiting a patient.

Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but The Devil Inside actually requires the audience to have no capacity to think whatsoever in order for it to be taken even remotely seriously. The fact that it’s never even remotely scary certainly doesn’t help matters much either, but let’s not kid ourselves, that’s not even much of an expectation these days, so we won’t hold that against it — not that we really even need to. This is an absurd, abominably lousy flick in pretty much any and every other respect, and who knows? Maybe it really will, finally, be the last nail in the coffin for the whole “handheld-horror” subgenre. Although that assumption has certainly been made way too many times to count at this point.