For todays fan art feature I’ve chosen Olivia Dunham, the dimension-hopping hero of Fringe. As a live action show and a fairly serious character I’m interested to see how different artists will show her.
First up is this image from Forgottenones – I’m a sucker for a realistic pencil portrait, and there are plenty to choose from for Olivia. It’s not super clean and polished, a quite sketchy picture, but I really like it. The eyes and face have real life to them, and the dark shading gives a nice atmosphere.
Next up this lovely pic from Natalie Nourigat. She has done a lot of Fringe art and I really like the comicbook style. Even without high realism or massive facial accuracy she’s perfectly captured the character in her pose and setting.
For my third I’ve chosen this digital painting from Renata Volent. Although a fairly simple image, drawn from a promo shot, I think there is real skill in the painting, the hair and eyes are amazing. Again, this artist has done more Fringe work, all of which is worth a look.
Next something a bit different – Fabulous Fringe Paper Dolls from Peter Vescovo! You can even dress her up as Fauxlivia. Fun idea and really well done.
And finally, like I said I’m a sucker for realism, so I can’t ignore this amazing painting from Jason Lan. It’s images like this that get me to pic up the old Wacom tablet and have another stab at it
The eyes, the hair, the lighting – it’s all brilliant, but I also love the shading on the jacket – very subtle but affording exactly the right amount of detail to balance with the rest of the image. I love this piece!
If you have any suggestions for characters you would like to see featured here please comment below, or send us a message!
Press Release from the Guys at MCM about the upcoming MCM Birmingham… anyone going?
Who’s coming to Brum?
Doctor Who guests at MCM Birmingham Comic Con & Memorabilia
The MCM Birmingham Comic Con and Memorabilia show will be welcoming whole host of sci-fi special guests when it returns to the NEC on 22-23 March – and amongst them will be a Tardis-full of Doctor Who stars!
These include Louise Jameson, who played Leela, the barbarian companion of Doctor Who’s Fourth Doctor, as well as appearing in over 200 episodes of EastEnders; Paul McGann, best known for playing the Eighth Doctor, as well as starring in 1987 black comedy Withnail and I; and Peter Purves, who while most famous as a Blue Peter presenter also played Steven Taylor, one of the First Doctor’s time-travelling chums.
Then there’s Katy Manning, who played the third Doctor’s companion Jo Grant; Sophie Aldred, who accompanied the Seventh Doctor as Ace; Anneke Wills, who as the vivacious Polly travelled with both the First and Second Doctors; Frazer Hines, who played Jamie McCrimmon in no fewer than 117 episodes of Doctor Who; Geoffrey Beevers, whose Doctor Who appearances include playing the third Master in ‘The Keeper of Traken’ and John Leeson, best known as the voice of man’s (robotic) best friend, K9.
Other guests with Whovian connections include Corrie regular Sasha Behar and Phil Davis (Alien 3, Whitechapel, Sherlock), who both guest starred in the ‘The Fires of Pompeii’, and Catherine Schell, who played Countess Scarlioni in ‘City of Death’ but is more famous as Space: 1999’s Maya and Bond girl Nancy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Of course, these are just a few of the film and TV special guests attending March’s MCM Birmingham Comic Con and Memorabilia and we’ll be adding to the list throughout the run-up to the show – for an up-to-date list, please visit our website at
A couple of confessions before I start this review properly:
I have never previously played a Castlevania game before. I am aware of the series but have never played any of the titles before, including the previous Lords Of Shadow game. So what backstory/lore I know comes from quick Wikipedia searches and not an extensive understanding of the game’s references.
I, perhaps unfortunately, read the IGN review of the game before I got a chance to play, thus slightly colouring my opinion in advance.
I do not own a gamepad and was playing the game with a keyboard and mouse. This changed my perception more than a little.
Let’s start with number 3 shall we? Playing Lords Of Shadow 2 I can understand why a gamepad is recommended. Similar to games like God Of War, it is clearly more orientated towards a controller based playstyle and it goes so far as to tell you to plug in a controller from the off. And for those of you wanting to play keyboard and mouse, like a normal PC gamer, you can press F1 to bring up a handy comparison menu every time you forgot what the hell left bumper translates to. Needless to say, this pissed me off no small amount. Now I can’t be certain but I’m guessing that this setup is not unique to my copy of the game. It is perfectly fine to include a gamepad option in a PC game and, in a game like Lords Of Shadow 2, it makes sense given the game style. But I’d like to emphasise the word “option”. It should be a choice whether you take the keyboard and mouse approach or plug in a gamepad not a crudely forced decision with a pitying backup for those who don’t conform. So yeah, this slightly biased me in the game. Obviously I got used to the controls to a degree but every time a cue popped up telling me to hit the left bumper I’d be reminded of my irritation. It wasn’t a great start to a game that continued in a distinctly “meh” fashion.
Dracula. Making mass murder look good
Now, as I have already confessed, I did start the game with a certain sense of bias from reading the IGN review. But you know what? I agreed with the distinctly average review they gave. Because here’s confession number 4. I am a completionist. I don’t like leaving things unfinished and I will regularly force my way through books/games/films that don’t maintain strength because I don’t like leaving things half-assed. But number 4 is that I didn’t finish Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow 2. And I know you may protest at this because how can I truly judge the game if I didn’t finish it? The fact that I didn’t finish it is the judgement. I was just so darn bored. It’s not a bad game, not by a long shot. It’s just dull. Enemies are formulaic, the stealth sequences unnecessarily break up the flow of the game and it just all feels like it’s been done before by better games. God Of War is the primary comparison that comes to mind in terms of play style. But where GoW3 instantly set me against Poseidon, LoS2 has me fighting knights. A lot of knights. Of course, in fairness, later enemies may be better. But if a game bores me so much that I never get to those enemies, something has gone wrong.
Someone should tell these guys it’s ok to wear a shirt
It’s not all bad of course. The game looks darn good, the luxuriant reds and blacks that dominate the colour palette wonderfully suited to the blood soaked adventures of Dracula. It’s visceral but not shlocky, sumptuous but not gaudy, it’s pretty much what you’d hope for when presented with the life and times of literature’s most famous monster. And even if they’re not presented with the most compelling of stories to work with, the voice cast is truly stellar with Robert Carlyle, Patrick Stewart and and Richard Madden all playing major roles to the utmost of ability that you would expect from such high level actors. These central characters are intriguing if somewhat hard to connect with. It may be a result of me not being well associated with the character’s backstory, and thus empathising with his change, and of course this is no sparkly Twilight vampire, but it’s slightly hard to just dismiss Dracula murdering and feeding from a family that includes a young girl. But worries like this aside, the characters are, for the most part, interesting if not sympathetic.
But it’s not really enough. The game never really drops into being poor, it just never rises to being great. I can’t help but feel that, although I will persist at trying to progress through the game, it’s never going to grab my attention in the way I want it to. It’s Dracula, it’s modern day and it has all the heritage of the Castlevania series, including the good reputation of the first Lords Of Shadow title. It should be amazing. But I’m just bored.
Those who love to see death in the shape of a Panzer battalion have received a rather pleasant surprise as bitComposer and Sproing announced the release of Hex-based War ‘Em Up Panzer Tactics HD for PC and iOS devices in Q2 (Sometime in the summer) 2014 – an updated re-release of 2007’s Panzer Tactics DS.
The original Panzer Tactics DS was basically the game which hardcore Advance Wars players picked up when they wondered if their finely tuned Neotank skills would get them anywhere in a real war, before being firmly put in their place. It was challenging, lengthy and oddly deep, yet still had enough of that simplicity to fit with the rest of the fantastic DS strategy games.
You might need to take out more than four of their good men to get out of this one…
Much of that content, from the 30 commanders, to the 150 unit types spread over three campaigns is largely the same, but all of the art and animation assets have been completely redrawn. As hinted by Sproing CEO Harald Riegler, certain progressive elements of the battlefield have been emphasised; “The changes will be more than visible…weather and terrain significantly affect the battlefields, thus strategy for the next move. In short, with Panzer Tactics HD, we are taking the game to a new level.”
The partnership with bitComposer here is very much an interesting one. The Jagged Alliance: Back in Action publisher is as much here to ensure a smooth transition onto digital distribution platforms as anything else, but bitComposer would with Panzer Tactics HD be moving back into familiar turn-based territory.
Well, that’ll be a tricky weather forecast to explain in Kristensand…
The focus has been on refining the single player experience, with the AI punishing the player for mistakes in ways much more subtle than a lot of games on the DS. The game will also provide 60 hours of musing tactical game play for those armchair Churchills we know and love to hone their Machiavellian machinations.
Civilisations may have risen and fallen but Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, the long awaited follow up to 2005’s Sin City is almost here with the trailer finally arriving along several new images.
Based on the critically acclaimed series of neo-noir comic/graphic novels by Frank Miller. Sin City told the interweaving tales of numerous characters as they go about living in Basin City, a place wracked with corruption and crime. The first film was based on the first, third, and fourth books in the series, ‘The Hard Goodbye’, ‘The Big Fat Kill’ and ‘That Yellow Bastard’. A framing sequence was based on the short story ‘The Customer is Always Right’.
Sin City gained attention for its ensemble cast and highly stylised color processing, which rendered most of the film in black and white but retained or added coloring for select objects as the story progressed. Many scenes were direct live action recreations of Miller’s panels in the comics.
A Dame To Kill For, directed again by the partnership of Miller and Robert Rodriguez, and featuring another ensemble cast (Bruce Willis, Dennis Haysbert, Eva Green, Jaime King, Jeremy Piven, Jessica Alba, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Josh Brolin, Mickey Rourke, Powers Boothe, Ray Liotta, Rosario Dawson, Stacy Keach) is based on the second book in the Sin City series and is also set to feature ‘Just Another Saturday Night’ and two original stories written by Miller for the film.
There’s been some confusion as to how characters like Mickey Rourke’s Marv can feature in ‘A Dame To Kill For’ as he died, in rather memorable fashion, in the first film. The original stories though weren’t chronological and often featured characters who had died in another story, often stories would be taking place at the same time chronologically speaking or earlier than the story in which a character died, the film is sure to follow suit.
Pop up cinema event in Glasgow Cathedral by Eoin Carey
It’s not every day that a grand opportunity falls into my lap, but a week last Thursday, while bracing myself for another gloomy Saturday of trying to twist someone’s arm into watching 12 Years A Slave with me, (again) – I was given the opportunity to head up North into Scotland to cover Glasgow’s Film Festival. Naturally, like any cinematic addict, I jumped at the chance, and off I went on my grand and elaborate adventure to watch a handful of quirky masterpieces!
Now in it’s 10th year, Glasgow Film Festival is a complete cinematic experience from start to finish – and one that proves you don’t have to flee the country in order to experience it. Spread over several easy to navigate locations in Glasgow; ranging from the decidedly comfy Cineworld to the dark and gloomy depths beneath Glasgow Central Station – there was genuinely something for everyone to enjoy, depending on your particular poison. Aside from the typical indie movies you might expect, this year’s event also featured some altogether more specific programming, such as 1939: Hooray for Hollywood – an ode to some of the iconic films from Hollywood’s greatest year. Others included Kapow!, a strand of cinematic programming centred around comics and the blossoming superhero franchise (and headed up by the ever legendary Mark Millar no less) and Pop-up Cinema, a series of events designed to fully immerse you in the film you’re watching through tangible (and often delicious!) experiences.
Given the choice, I would’ve gladly watched every single film in the programme – but alas, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day and I had to be selective in my viewing choices. Admittedly they did speak volumes about me as a person, and were perhaps some of the more heavy going movies on offer, but I really do think the skill and creativity behind every film I watched was definitely worthy of it’s place in the festival.
Salvo
I was due to start off my intrepid expedition into film festival territory with a look at Salvo, one of the more action packed films on offer. Told in Italian, it’s basic premise is that Salvo (played by the fabulous Saleh Bakri) is a cut-throat Mafia assassin, and following an attack by a rival mob, he sets out to seek vengeance. While waiting at the man responsible’s home however, he meets the mobster’s blind sister and it sets into motion a series of events that change who he is from a hardened killer into something a little warmer and a little less detached. It’s a decent plot line and sounded like a really good film to watch – I didn’t get chance to however due to a conspiratory delay on the train, but it’s one of the few films I missed that I am undoubtedly eager to track down and watch, and would advise you dear readers to do the same!
Following the little train setback, the first film I did actually watch was Jasmila Žbanić’s For Those Who Can Tell No Tales. It’s essentially a film exploring the attitudes towards some of the atrocities committed during the Bosnian war, and features an Australian’s tourist’s journey to Višegrad, a town that during the war saw hundreds of Bosnian Muslims massacred and systematically raped. Whilst in Višegrad, the tourist stays in a hotel spa recommended to her by a tourist guide book, and only comes to learn upon returning home that the spa actually used to be the infamous rape camp in which so many of these brutal crimes took place. Rather than stay away however, she returns to Bosnia, and she tries to find out why the town ignores the brutality took place there, why nobody acknowledges the crimes out of respect for the victims.
For Those Who Can Tell No Tales
It sounds extremely heavy going, but it’s something I found myself particularly able to connect with and watch because of that. There’s a nuance to Žbanić’s approach, and it’s emotive without being overt and addresses some of the politics present in the region in the wake of a war that seems to go largely unacknowledged by a lot of the world. I think there’s a great deal of depth to what could easily be dismissed as a tourist’s holiday gone awry, and it’s one of those films you need to look deeper into. Plot aside however, I think the cinematography was gorgeous, and there’s more emotion perhaps in some of the landscape than there is in the conversations taking place, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe the hills are supposed to say the words that the people can’t, and give a voice to those that can’t, because it’s just as the title says, the dead are those who can tell no tales.
Next up on the agenda, was Manuel Martin Cuenca’s Cannibal – and I have to say this was one of my favourite films of the entire festival. The film focuses around Carlos (Antonio de la Torre) a well-to-do and completely unassuming tailor in Granada. He lives alone and outwardly looks like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but as the film unfolds you get to know him as so much more than that – because he’s a cannibal, praying on Eastern European women and largely going unnoticed by the rest of the people around him, until one day the sister of one of his latest kills arrives in search of her, and he’s faced with man’s greatest dilemma; to love or not to love. Cannibal’s been compared in the past to a Beauty and the Beast sort of dynamic, but I don’t think that’s particularly fair. I don’t think there’s anything beastly about Carlos per se, just something a little more basal than most – and it’s his inner conflict with himself in trying to decide whether or not to kill the woman he loves that makes the film so interesting.
Promo Teaser for Cannibal
It’s a really good film and I think the pacing and some of the cinematics are rooted towards the same audience that might enjoy NBC’s Hannibal. It’s not an overt film, there’s a lot of subtlety to it, but also a fair amount of distance too. There’s one particular scene, fairly nearly the beginning, that features Carlos’ first kill, and I am so glad I took my friend with me. I swear it was the most powerful scene all weekend for me, because I very nearly passed out. His victim is stripped and strung up, angled as you would a carcass, while he picks out a knife and caresses and scopes out which bit exactly he’s going to harvest. And then it pans away, in a tasteful fashion to the woman’s feet, but that’s when you hear it, the slide of metal and the thud that follows. All while blood trickles straight past those feet and pools. It makes me shudder even now, but it’s one of the reasons I remember the film so well, because it’s full of scenes like that which stick with you and sort of help to show some of the duality of Carlos’ psyche. He’s this kind, quiet man to the outside world, and yet he can still do this, without restraint and hesitation. It’s sort of poetic, in it’s own way, and if you do ever get the opportunity to watch it, I would highly advise it, because personally I think it’s a work of genius.
Magdalena Rózanska in The Girl From The Wardrobe
Which leads me onto my personal favourite of the entire film festival, The Girl From The Wardrobe. This Polish movie was undoubtedly a little lighter than the others I’d chosen to watch as it revolves around the three interlinked lives of neighbours within a busy apartment block. Jacek lives within the apartment block taking care of his autistic brother Tomek, and trying very hard to juggle a normal life of work, women and everything in between.
The film’s hidden gem is undoubtedly Magdalena Rózanska, who plays the eccentric neighbour Magda to the brothers, and helps to take care of Tomek while his brother works. Magda herself has a fair few issues, often attempting suicide, or simply hiding out in her wardrobe and partaking in a plethora of drugs to get her through the day. It’s very much a black comedy with a few hilarious hallucinations thrown in alongside a very real and deep rooted emotional message. It’s a bit bonkers, but still beautiful in it’s own way, and I think that’s rare to find these days. There’s also a highly emotive twist at the end that really stays with you and grounds you and that’s one of the reasons I love the film so much – because it gives you an entire spectrum of feelings as opposed to one that’s simply one-dimensional.
Still from Ida
Next up on the agenda we have Pawel Pawlikowski’s, Ida, which I have to confess to having my doubts about at first. Given the vein of films I’ve been watching, I wasn’t sure I was equipped for anything else that was too gritty, but the subject matter was something I couldn’t ignore and I needed to see it from the very moment I’d discovered it in the film festival guide. Ida is the story of a young girl named Anna, who is about to take her vows to become a nun. In order to do this she needs to visit her last surviving relative Wanda, and come to terms with the extent of her past and to discover her true identity.
It’s a heartbreaking story told against the backdrop of post-communist Poland, and it really encompasses a lot of the conflicted sense of identity felt by Poles in the wake of WW2. It’s a film that questions views on personal identity, but also religion, because Anna is actually Jewish and that raises a lot of conflict for her. It’s a beautifully crafted and entirely sincere look at a country still battling with it’s own demons, while also telling an emotive and engrossing story from within it’s black and white cinematic style. I may have left with a tear or two in my eye, but it’s such a thought provoking film I’m glad I went to see it, because it does a great deal of justice to both the subject matter and the respect it deserves.
Still from Yves Saint Laurent
In a slight change of pace from the doom and gloom of hard hitting drama, I did also manage to catch Yves Saint Laurent, a biopic of the coveted and highly respected designer. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for both fashion and biopics, and it seemed silly not to go and watch something that combined two of my vices! I went into it not knowing what to expect and I came away sincerely glad I did. It’s a highly evocative and sumptuous account of the beginnings of Yves Saint Laurent’s career back in 1958 and encompasses his evolution into a major fashion house alongside his business partner and lover, Pierre Berge.
It’s a very sophisticated drama if truth be told, and the imagery in which it’s shot is part of what makes it such an enjoyable masterpiece. From the intricate interiors of Berge’s apartment to the lavish backdrop in which they work, there’s a level of timeless quality there, and that helps to encompass what YSL is supposed to mean as a brand. If you’ loved Audrey Tautou’s portrayal of Coco Chanel back in 2009, this is a film for you. It’s well paced, visually appealing and more than a little sophisticated. It’s everything Yves Saint Laurent deserved in an account of his life and career – because it’s more than just memorable, it’s also classic.
The Grand Hotel Budapest is just one of many promising films on offer this year.
I think part of the appeal of being able to go somewhere like Glasgow Film Festival, is the sheer volume of choice on offer to the general public in choosing what to see. Independent cinema is one of those areas that you really need to just dive head first into and take a risk. I chose a few questionable films to watch, but I’m glad I did, because they left a mark on me, and that’s what I feel cinema is supposed to do.
I would’ve loved to watch Papusza, the biopic of Bronislawa Wajs, a Polish-Roma poetess back in the 1950’s, because that speaks to me on a personal level, just like I would’ve adored watching The Grand Budapest Hotel, because the trailer alone sold it to me the minute I stepped into Cineworld – but schedules and showings didn’t match up and I didn’t get the chance. I did however take note of what I wanted to watch and actively sought it out after leaving the festival, to such a point I now have half a dozen people ready to rope into watching it at some point later down the line.
Glasgow Film Festival for me, became less about watching films and more about turning them into an experience. To be able to meet up with like minded people and discuss and enjoy cinema for what it is – an artform and a talking point. I legitimately feel a little ashamed to say I’ve never been up North to GFF before, but after this year’s show stopper of a festival, I definitely can’t wait to make it a staple of my year from now on.
For more information on the Glasgow Film Festival, check out: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/
Although it would appear that not everybody shares that view. Rockstar’s fifth outing for the Grand Theft Auto franchise last week picked up it’s second lawsuit for hijacking the likeness of another Z-List celebrity who is totally not seeking publicity at all…
Karen Gravano, who appeared in the reality show Mob Wives, is claiming that her life story and likeness have been used without her permission in GTA 5 and is suing the games-maker for $40 million. Which will come in handy, since she was kicked off of Mob Wives in December before it’s 4th season aired according to NYDailynews.com.
She is claiming that a character who appears in one of GTA 5’s random encounter missions, Antonia Bottino, is based on her and according to her lawyers, her story is unique and hers to tell.
Now we’re a bit thin on the ground for details as they’re being reserved for her upcoming book (totally not about publicity remember) or as part of her pending legal action. However, the GTA character she’s claiming is based on her helpfully has a bio that we can cast an eye over.
A murder charge was pinned on her father so her and her family went into hiding out west. She says that they were “…moving around safehouses in rat-hole hick towns where no one comes looking.” According to Antonia her father was eventually arrested and became a snitch as part of a plea bargain. Due to this deal she says that her father made a lot of enemies and it was because of this that she was kidnapped and almost buried alive.
Ok, so if we are to presume that the Godfather, Goodfellas, every GTA game since GTA3 and pretty much every episode of In Plain Sight was never made, then I could see her point. However, I kinda feel that this is entirely in the world of GTA and seems a fairly normal backstory for the kind of characters that GTA creates.
That said, as with any creative process, it’s impossible to say where inspiration comes from, so we’re just going to have to wait and see how this one turns out.
Going back to the first of Rockstars incoming lawsuits, Lindsey Lohan has also decided to take a slice of the $1 billion they racked up in the 3 days following Grand Theft Auto V’s release last year.
Lohan is claiming that the infamous bikini girl from GTA’s loading screens is based on her, which from these images is a fairly compelling argument:
Lindsey LohanRockstars Bikini Girl
Until you consider that someone actually went to the bother of tracking down Shelby Welinder who was hired by Rockstar to model for the part…
Shelby Welinder morphing into her GTA counterpart
So, if you bear a passing resemblance to your GTA Online Avatar or you’ve ever had a cup of coffee then you could be in luck and Rockstar could owe you big time. But I have a feeling that the reality, both for your coffee drinking and any celebrity who is completely and in no way looking for free global publicity, the courtrooms will be far less profitable than imagined.
While you weigh up your chances, I’ve taken some other GTA stars and pitted them against the free celebrity facial recognition site www.pictriev.com, let us know what you think of these matches, or if you think you look like a GTA character, send us a pic and we’ll post the best ones in a later feature!
Is it right to trademark basic words? Isometrics looks at the case of King’s Candy Crush Lawsuit, and contemplates the death of satire…
Welcome to Isometrics, the usually serendipitous soirée that looks at the literary world of computer and video games. Now one of the things I noted in my statement of principles is that Isometrics was to be a celebration of video games as an art and literary form, and absolutely not a platform for me to rant about things I hate in the gaming world. However, given that basically the entire month I had been covering WARP games there had been stories all about it, it’s essentially become impossible to ignore. It is unfortunately time to talk about free to play games.
Free-to-play, paradoxically is a billion dollar part of the gaming business. EA has made it a core part of their business model. Upstarts such as Zynga became some of the biggest companies in the gaming world. It has got to the point that even traditionalist companies such as Nintendo have flirted with the possibilities of mobile gaming. But what exactly is it? A free-to-play game does not apply to all games that are free, confusingly enough, but to games where there is no cost to download and start the game, but instead the game is funded through other means, typically through microtransactions of some kind.
So what are microtransactions then? They are distinct from either expansion packs or add ons (either in physical or DLC form) in that they do not add to the game necessarily, be that in the feature and narrative enhancing form of expansion packs or in the more cosmetic or otherwise subtle form add-ons take, but instead usually take the form of a virtual currency that can be used in game for various means, usually to speed up certain aspects of the game, to purchase features and content earlier than one would receive it though playing the game normally, or the ability to purchase new features entirely.
In a hat economy this is the equivilent of “bling” isn’t it?
In theory, a game with microtransactions isn’t necessarily bad. There are many examples of free-to-play games on PC which grant the player a large amount of features for free, such as Team Fortress 2, Warframe, Loadout, or to a lesser degree League of Legends or DOTA 2. All of these games offer a large amount of content that can be played for free, with other stuff either unlocked randomly or purchased using either in game money, real world money or a combination of the two. There are worries about balancing a game where real money is involved, with the worst offenders derided as “pay to win” but often these issues are much the same as they would be in a trading card game or tabletop war game so it has mostly been kept to acceptable levels, typically controlled both by tight regulation by content platforms and by a gaming community unwilling to accept particularly egregious attempts to con the masses.
On the mobile market however, there are no such problems whatsoever!
Probably the best review of Flappy Bird you’ll ever see…
Ah, the mobile market, a gaming market where a game where you tap a screen to move a bird between copyright infringing pipes will not only earn you fifty thousand dollars a day, but lead to such hysteria that on the day the game was removed from the AppStore, mobile phones with that game on it were selling for several thousand pounds. When you are working at that level, it’s only natural you would get the profoundly depressing stories surrounding the free-to-play market.
Yes, stories about the parasitic and massively expensive menace of mobile gaming took up the majority of February’s gaming stories, to the point of leading to a European Commission investigation into the effects of free to play games, which comes on top of an investigation by the UK’s Office for Fair Trading into the very same thing, both of which looking at the influence on children in particular.
There might be something to it, with games such as Asphalt 8 potentially making a player pay over a thousand dollars to complete it, as well as the various cow clickers and incredibly slow building sims, which can take days in real time to complete unless you pay up to skip it. Dungeon Keeper Mobile was particularly insidious for this, with 24 hours needed to mine out a single square of the map, and the “best value” pack for microtransactions costing a mere £70.
I kind of need to illustrate how much I wish I was kidding…
And yet, in this midst of all of this one particular event stood out, and it began with a company called King. King is a small company that made an obscene amount in the mobile market by basically doing everything sceptics feared they would, and no event illustrates how they function better than Candy Crush Saga.
Candy Crush Saga, for the fortunate souls who don’t know, is Tetris Attack, or Pokemon Puzzle League, or Panel de Pon, or Puzzle Quest or basically any match-3 puzzle game ever made. But due to a ‘pay or wait for lives’ system and very incremental changes in difficulty and gameplay, it managed to get millions of gamers hooked and sinking tons of real money into the game, putting the game constantly in the top twenty of the AppStore and Google Play best seller lists, which is an interesting place for a “Free-to-play” game.
Tetémon Bequest Saga
Now this game being both awful and rather manipulative in how it preys on particular elements of gaming psyche isn’t really any striking revelation, but then they tried to trademark the word “candy” and all hell broke loose. Again.
This all goes back to a game called CandySwipe, a game released two years before Crush Saga, with a design aesthetic that bears more than a little resemblance, almost as if the latter, more successful release plagiarised from the former (though really there’s only so much originality you can get from Bejeweled). King’s response to this was to purchase a company that possessed the trademark of a game called Candy Crusher, and use that to stop the trademark application of Candy Swipe, basically being the gaming trademark equivalent of a patent troll.
This of all games was considered such a threat to a Bejeweled clone that King tried to litigate it out of existence. Marvellous
This is similar to a failed attempt to trademark the word “Saga” to halt the trademark request of a game called The Banner Saga, which is a tactical RPG with pretty much nothing to do with sugar at all. Both the “Candy” and the “Saga” trademark attempts were pulled, but not without exposing the incredibly brutal business tactics that bullying free to play companies will do in this most cowboy of new frontiers for gaming, and really giving EA an actual competitor in the “Worst Company in America” stakes this year.
In the end though, the solution is always that there is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to gaming, and to always be aware of how much you spend and how much information you give to these companies, because if you give an inch, they’ll take a foot.
And before too long you won’t have a leg to stand on.
Any positive thoughts on F2P? No? Please post your thoughts in the comment box below as well as on the Geek Pride Facebook and Google + pages for proud geeks, and of course posting any thoughts to Twitter, either Geek Pride’s or my own.
Titanfall is nearly upon us and they have just dropped their official gameplay trailer, along with a live-action TV ad, titled Life is Better With a Titan. Damn I love the smell of trailers in the morning!
Titanfall brings us an amalgamation of insane free-running infantry action and kick-ass agile mech combat. Simply writing that sentence left me drooling like Pavlov’s best friend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsf25G5IArA
The game has already received industry-wide critical acclaim before its official launch and much of the gaming community is simply chomping at the bit waiting to get their sweaty paws on it.
Titanfall is due for release for both Windows PC & Xbox One on 11th March in North America, 13th March in Australia & Europe and 14th March in the UK & New Zealand. The Xbox 360 version will launch a little later: 25th March in North America and 28th March in Europe.
Paramount Pictures has revealed a new trailer and a new character poster, for Michael Bay’s upcoming Transformers: Age of Extinction, which for anyone who doesn’t know, is set to feature the Dinobots.
This is a new era of sorts (as one of the characters says in the trailer, I see what you did there Paramount) with no Sam Witwicky played by Shia LaBeouf and the lynchpin of the previous films.
This film is set to feature Mark Wahlberg as mechanic Cade Yeager, who unwittingly discovers a beaten and broken down Optimus Prime in a junkyard. Reviving Optimus drags Yeager and his daughter Tessa, played by Nicola Peltz, into a chain of events involving Autobots, Decepticons and shadowy government agents.
The question is will this, the 4th film in the franchise, erase the horror of the last two films or will it just be yet another display of mindless “Bayhem” with big explosions and indistinguishable Transformers fighting at the expense of anything resembling plot, story and logic?
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