Home Blog Page 290

Bad Wolf Day

TheWookie
-
0
Bad Wolf Day

Bad Wolf Day 2013

badWolf

Whovians around the world are confused

 

What is Bad Wolf Day? In 2005 an episode of Doctor Who was broadcasted on the 11th of June in the U.K. entitled “Bad Wolf.”

When The Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack Harkness wake up on Satellite 5, also known as “The GameStation,” They suffer from a small bout of amnesia. After regaining their memories, the group starts to see “Bad Wolf” all over the place.

Turns out that they had previously visited Satellite 5 but at that time it was a news broadcasting station. After destroying it, the world fell into confusion. Bad Wolf corporation then took control of Satellite 5 and created life altering (life ending) games and broadcasted it worldwide.

Throughout the series Bad Wolf appeared everywhere in time and space, including in the present time (2005,) in London where Rose is from. In Parting of Ways we find out Rose had left Bad Wolf as a clue to bring her back to save The Doctor. She achieves this by looking into the heart of the TARDIS and getting super awesome, time bending, life creating, Dalek destroying, mega powers. 

[pullquote_right]I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words……I scatter them, in time and space. A message, to lead myself here.[/pullquote_right]

On Facebook, several dates have circulated including the 3rd of June and the 16th of June. The true air date of the epic Bad Wolf episode was the 11th of June 2005. They are encouraging Whovians worldwide to tag “Bad Wolf” on everything they can (legally.)

Since air dates were different in other countries there was a lot of confusion. It is a two-part episode with the second part airing on June 18th 2005 entitled, “Parting of the Ways.”

Considering the show is actually a British, “Bad Wolf Day” is on the 11th of June following the proper timeline.

Now go forth and be a force of The Awesome! (Remember, don’t do anything illegal while tagging things.) Be creative.

Thale — 4 GPPs

Andrew Corban
-
0
Thale — 4 GPPs

 
I had very high expectations for Thale when I saw the trailer for it many moons ago. It promised to be a high quality fantasy horror film from lovely Norway. It was actually very boring.

Thale 2012 movie pic3 The movie couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a tense horror-mystery or a creepy fantasy. The confusion of genres made it feel like it was trying to be too many good ideas all at once. In the final analysis it didn’t succeed as a horror or a fantasy film. In horror, I expect to see something scary besides myself nodding off in the mirror. In fantasy, I want to see more than a naked lady with a tail. The basic elements of both horror and fantasy were ultimately too thinly presented for me.

 [BEGIN SPOILERS]

The story is about a huldra secreted away by a benevolent mad scientist. The huldra was raised in a bunker for years when the main characters find her. The scientist was absent and the only artifact of his presence was the peculiar research materials he left behind. Most of the voice overs were from cassette tapes the scientist made while waxing affectionately of the little girl-creature in his cabin-shack-lab-thing.

thale10-520x230This freaks out one of the main characters, Elvis. He quickly warms to her. His boss/friend/business-partner was inexplicably unmoved and nonplussed the entire film (until the last scene). He had cancer. That’s the big reveal for him. The huldra, Thale, cured him with her woodland folklore magic. This was after the Norwegian Men-in-Black came to, you know, ‘secure the package.’

And that’s it. That’s all. If I’m generous, this movie could have easily been a 14 minute short. There was maybe a total of five minutes of action in a film clocking in at 76 minutes. That’s a lot of yawning Ladies and Gentlemen. Another thing in great abundance, repetition. Elvis vomited a lot. I mean, I get it, he’s squeamish. A strange trait to have considering his job is cleaning up crime scenes and dead people. We see Thale’s tail a lot…vacuum-wrapped in plastic. Seriously, how many times do you have to show that? It’s like the director was doing the movie equivalent of writing a college paper with a page limit.

[END SPOILERS]

ThaleMovie

In short, Thale is boring. Unless you are writing a dissertation on depictions of Norwegian folklore in contemporary genre media, give it a pass.

Teen Wolf – Season 3

Cristina Bogdan
-
0
Teen Wolf – Season 3

teen-wolf-stars

The third season of Teen Wolf has hit the air this Monday after months of anticipation from the hoards of fans that the show has managed to gather up in its two year run. But let’s backpedal a little and clear some of the confusion for those of you that were unaware that Teen Wolf has been turned into a TV series.

In 2011, MTV has started airing the first season of the show that shares little with its grandfather, the Teen Wolf movie, starring Michael J. Fox. While written and directed to include a slightly humorous touch, its themes are a lot darker and edgier than I expected. Not the first season though, that one was just bad. I watched it as a lot of friends told me it was good, but as I painfully made my way through the episodes I decided that the music was much better than the show would ever be. Colour me surprised (and impressed) when the second season came around and, while it had pretty much the same cast, the tone of the show darkened further, the body count going up and the quality of acting improving substantially.

After a painful season 1 (yes, I’m not getting over that any time soon) the second season brought on fresh stories and even some fresh faces, with Daniel Sharman (Isaac), Gage Golightly (Erica) and Synqua Walls (Boyd) joining, the pack of wolves led by Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin). Admittedly, I thought the show had Hoechlin as a lead and I was surprised to discover it was actually Tyler Posey, playing Scott that was the hero of it all. True, he does look more like a teen than Hoechlin does, but hey, this is Hollywood. After countless enemies, including a lizard like creature that just loved to kill and maim, the second season wrapped up most of the storylines, but it did leave us with a hook: a new wolf pack came to Beacon Hills (funny how all these supernatural creatures seem to thrive in small towns across America) and Erica and Boyd were taken by the angry wolves as they were running from their own pack leader.

Drum roll please, for we are into season three territory as of now and there might be some spoilers ahead. And by some I mean a lot.

tumblr_mnwyv676OQ1suoei1o2_500The premier episode maintain the same dark tone of the second season, we get to see one of the fan favourites, Isaac, getting his heart started again by getting electroshocked with jumping cables in a dirty warehouse, while blood seeps from his wounds and there are two very (I suppose they were going for mean, but I found them kinda funny looking) angry Alphas chasing him down. Other than the bad CGI that accompanied the scene from start to end, it was actually a nice way of getting your viewers to want more. Of course, that is if you ignore the mandatory shirtlesness and the fact that they had a transformer moment in which they became one big a** Alpha. Yeah, I didn’t get the point either. Of course, the shirt off was mandatory cause it appealed to the masses (thought not according to tumblr where they were mostly found creepy. Okay, why am I still on this subject?)

Anyway, while Isaac is getting somewhat rescued by an Amazon of unknown name and origin, from the big bad Alphas, on the other side of town, Scott is getting a tattoo, to mark the fact that he hadn’t called his ex-slightly psychotic- girlfriend in over four months. Yes, good thing, Scott, etch it on your skin, making sure you never quite get over her. After it heals, because it’s all ephemeral  in the world and werewolves have a really kick-ass immune system, he runs into…yes, you’ve guessed it in one Allyson(Crystal Reed) the aforementioned girlfriend. After awkwardness ensued and they both end up relying on their respective best friends Lydia (Holland Rode) and Stiles (Dylan O’brien) for help to get out of it, they are gotten out of the pickle they found themselves in, in the middle of the night, on the road, all alone (cool setup for a horror movie) saved by the deer. Literally. It slams into their car, marking the start of a lot of unexplained animal behaviour that includes crows slamming into windows and attacking people brutally and dogs biting their owners.

Those pesky Alpha pack wolves! But, they do have a charismatic leader that’s also easy on the eye, no pun intended, that I’m sure will o-TEEN-WOLF-PACK-ALPHAS-130603-facebookfit in the role of villain of the season. Each one gets a different bad guy and I quite like it, it keeps things fresh. Deucalion, played by Gideon Emery, is apparently ruthless and vicious and the only one to be able to keep the pack of Alphas in check. Which reminds me, how would a pack of Alphas even function and why haven’t they killed each other yet? I suppose it will all be explained later on, but until then I’m still going to call the idea stupid. Despite having one injured beta wolf to tend to, Derek spends a lot of the episode focusing on getting Scott’s tattoo to stick to his arm, by using somewhat of a torturous technique. I’m going to assume it was also a way of getting Scott to stop lurking around and destroy his property. Really, Scott, you just had to claw your way through the painted door of Derek’s house? I’m pretty sure he would’ve caved and told you why it was there if you had kept on asking. Which reminds me, all the Alphas need mani/pedis. For someone that tries to blend in with thee regular folk of Beacon Hills, the lack of shoes or their nails piercing through the leather of whatever they are wearing can’t be very stealth.

All in all, it was a good start of the season, but for God’s sake, find some new CGI guy/girl. If the budge doesn’t allow it, just skip the bits that would require it, cause it was painful to watch. What else is there to say? It seems that Colton Haynes departure, towards the green pastures of Arrow, hasn’t hurt the show, not significantly. His not being there has been explained in a way that leaves the door opened for him to come back if he so chooses and it’s also funny enough – considering he played a werewolf, who is American, that moved to London. Dylan O’Brien is still as funny as ever as the quirky Stiles and all the other characters seem to fill into their roles better this year. Maybe it’s all the time they ended up spending together during the hiatus or they sold their souls or something, but the show seems to run smoother now than it had in its first year of being on the air.

All in all it was worth the watch and the wait (minus the CGI) so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to get to it. Chop-chop!

Here’s the trailer for next week’s episode and by all means, don’t be shy, we’d be happy to hear what you thought of the season premier.

 

Five things you could buy INSTEAD of an Xbox One

The_Dark_Mike
-
0
Five things you could buy INSTEAD of an Xbox One

 

Today this happened on Amazon.co.uk

 8486_10151423436185706_1631995656_n

So now we in Britain know what the projected costs are for what is quite frankly the biggest let down since Prince Charming found out where Rapunzel’s hair really came from (Thanks, Cyanide and Happiness)

As you can see, The PS4 has been projected as the same price, but their release event was okay, and not an hour of back patting and “FUCK YOU” to anyone that wasn’t American. Also PS4 doesn’t have an Orwellian eyebox that is required to watch you for as long as the machine is turned on (or just plugged in, who knows? It knows.) The PS4 also doesn’t look like a goddamn VCR.

After initially spitting my drink in a brown rainbow of coffee and sugar, aghast at how far the industry is going to keep out the poor, I spent about an hour searching on the internet and have compiled a list of five things You could (and definitely should) buy Instead of an Xbox One with one game: a grand total of £689.98. There is a school of thought that this is a “placeholder” price, but I’ve spent an hour considering a speedboat and lightsaber/harpoon gun combination, and I’ll be damned if I can’t share it with the world.

Every major console that has existed in the last twenty years, up to now.

 For researching this, I was not content with EBay due to the fact you can never truly tell what you’re getting with games consoles

 N64BoyAdvance-550x412

Although sometimes this happens and my faith in humanity is restored

 

 I phoned up an expert in this field;  my friend Alex from Level Up Games in Canterbury (address at the end of the article) how much it would cost to buy a: snes, n64, gamecube,wii,ps1,ps2,ps3,xbox,xbox 360, megadrive,Saturn, dreamcast, gameboy Colour, Gameboy advance, Advance SP and a DS.

PRICE: £586

Saving: £103.98

During my chat with Alex, he assured me that at second-hand, local stores, like Level Up, you would be able to buy between 2-3 games for each console with the remaining money… Or ten take away pizzas. Or 170 mar bars. You can see where I’m going with this; it’s a lot of money.

 A SPEED BOAT

You know what Dead Island needed? A speed boat. You’d have thought that in a tropical paradise of Banoi there would have been a whole array of speedboats and Jet skis. But to no avail. Perhaps it’s because Techland realised that the inclusion of speedboats might be so fun that no one would leave the first level and partake in the mandatory sewer run.

 dead-island-sewer

Altogether now: “heroes in a half shell, Turtle power!” (copyright Techland)

Well, now you can make up for the mistake that was purchasing the full Dead Island game and buy a speedboat instead:

 $T2eC16hHJGEFFm6wehvzBRo6zg4siQ~~60_12

This Fletcher Speed Power Ski boat comes with a 70hp mercury engine and a trailer, so you can take her out to your local lake and scare the living Christ out of some moor hens.

PRICE: £620

SAVING: £69.98

That’s enough money to buy a harpoon gun, a pirate flag and an eye patch!

 

 Recreate that Phantom Menace fight

That’s right folks, for the same price as one game and a console to play it; you could buy the robes, the soundtrack (on CD) and the face paint to recreate the epic fight between Darth Maul, Qui Gon Jinn and Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

And you get to do it with lightsabers.

 lightsaber-umbrella1

I took my Lumbraber to a party in Gotham once. The Penguin was furious.

Alright, well not a real one, but one you can hit your friends with and not have it break. After a quick look at ultrasabers.com  I priced up all the gubbins above, along with two ultra saber handles and their custom “battle ready”, ultra hard blades PLUS a double ender for Maul and came to:

PRICE: £446.03

SAVING: £243.95

That’s a week’s pay for some people. Spend it on a deluxe edition of all Six Star Wars flicks, then use the surplus to grab yourself the snacks required to watch 4-6 and the alcohol required to suffer through 1-3.

 

Speaking of alcohol…

 

Enough Beer to kill you… a lot.

According to both WIKI and Yahoo answers, the amount of pints of beer needed to kill an average man is 18 consumed in 12 hours which is when “your heart and liver begin to shut down” (wikianswers.com) .

Looking around my local supermarket I found an offer for 30 cans of Carlsberg for £16. This breaks down to about 53p per pint. So that’s £9.54 for death.

NUMBER OF DEATHS: 72.32

SAVING: Nothing. You’re dead.

 Beautiful_beer

We’re gonna need a bigger keg.

 

Start a Band

If drinking yourself to death BEFORE you get to rock stardom doesn’t sound appealing, then you can begin the long, rewardless and disappointing crawl to becoming a musician and starting a band. All beginner instruments start at around the £300 mark if you want one worth playing on.

Price: £300

SAVING: £389.98

You could then, upon realising the road to rock stardom is far too much time and effort, throw a rock band party.

 rock-band-game

YEAH.yeah. (copyright Gameaxis.com)

You could buy three guitars, the drums, Rock band 1 and 2 AND the console to play it on for £183.54. So you’d still have cash left over for snacks/paying people to come and be your real life audience/hookers.

 

Xbox One: Putting the “One” in “are you kidding me? How much? That’s it, as far as Xbox are concerned, I’m dONE”

If you liked the sound of Alex and live anywhere in the Kent area (England), check out Level Up Games here

Domino’s Pizza Delivered by Helicopter Drone

James Buckingham
-
0
Domino’s Pizza Delivered by Helicopter Drone

When you hear the term “unmanned drone” or “helicopter drone”, most geek minds shift to something from Call of Duty (man I hate those Dragonfire drones!) or an actual military drone. Not Domino’s Pizza.

"The DomiCopter"
“The DomiCopter”

A Domino’s franchise based in the UK has done a “test delivery” of a pizza using what they affectionately call “The Domicopter”… and it seems they’re serious about making it a standard feature. We shit you not.

The Domicopter (pictured above) is created and operated by a company called AeroSight, and with a successful test, it seems they’re wanting to set up a “Domino’s Flight Academy” going forward for future long-distance deliveries!

Check out the video below:

What do you think? It’s definitely the geekiest pizza delivery I’ve ever seen… but is it a feasible and cost-effective method of delivery? Plus how long will it be before someone shoots the drone down and hijacks the pizza?

Source: Mashable!

New Mexico E.T. landfill to be resurrected for new documentary film

Sai Mealing
-
0
New Mexico E.T. landfill to be resurrected for new documentary film

E.TAs well as the reported hidden military bases and the left overs of alien experiments, the New Mexico desert has also provided the burial ground for another extra-terrestrial monstrosity for the last 31 years.

In 1982 Atari famously released one of the worst games ever made. Rushed through it’s entire Atari 2600 development cycle within 6 weeks and sold based on the misguided notion that paying customers would buy any old shit, the game bombed with critics and public alike and almost single-handedly brought the early 80’s games industry to it’s knees.

The unsold copies of the doomed movie tie-in were eventually confined to a landfill just outside the city of Alamogordo, reportedly along with some console hardware but Canadian film makers Fuel Industries have just been granted permission by the local council to dig up the site for a 30th Anniversary documentary which could end up being this year’s answer to Indie Game: The Movie.

If like me you are too young to remember this game and have never played it, its likely that you would have only come across the title in the ‘top 10 worst games ever’ lists that occasionally show up on YouTube and some other gaming sites. E.T. was built in an age where almost every major corporation in the US had a finger in the games industry pie and film tie-in’s were among the worst quality releases in the market.

Obviously, the industry’s relationship with movies has come on a long way since then with some absolute classics like Goldeneye and The Chronicles of Riddick. However, considering Atari’s current financial difficulties, the film could still prove to be a useful insight in to how even the most promising young companies can be destroyed by poor management and a lack of respect for the paying customer.

 

Stay with Geek Pride for regular updates on the latest titles coming to your Atari 2600 such as Daley Thompson’s post-decathlon hoedown and Dot Cotton’s forensic biscuit adventure. 

Gaming in the New Century

TheWookie
-
0
Gaming in the New Century
taken from www.neatoshop.com
taken from www.neatoshop.com


Today there are over forty-six million Xbox Live and PS3 accounts for online gaming (Xbox.com/live). With these accounts people all over the world log in to do the same thing: accomplish a common goal. Teams are randomly chosen or clans are formed, and the shooting begins. The goal isn’t always, “kill the other team.” Sometimes it’s to capture a flag, build a castle, bomb a base, and so much more. Most of us just want that epic win. Well, today we are building something out of our gamers that we didn’t think possible. Video games have created Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals (SEHI).

These SEHI are people who believe they are individually capable of changing the world.Alan Gladstone came up with the 10,000 hour theory which states that, “If an individual devotes 10,000 hours to studying and perfecting one thing, they would become virtuosos at it.” In America, the average child will spend 10,000 hours playing in a virtual game world by the age of 21. We are building virtuosos, but at what?

The average kid in America will also spend 10,080 hours at school, from 5th grade till graduation as long as they have perfect attendance. So we have created a parallel track of education without realizing it also. Children in America today are getting a traditional education as well as a virtual education. So what are video games teaching our children to be? Jane McGonigal believes they are teaching them these four things:

-Urgent Optimism, which also can be seen as extreme self motivation. These people are so motivated to achieve their goal, they will usually not stop until it is achieved. This is seen in the virtual world, as well as the real world. If a gamer loses a level we do not stop playing the game forever after just one try. We will try again and again until we pass it. The same can be said for a college math student. If the person is a gamer, it is believed that they will try harder and more often to accomplish a seemingly impossible task.

-Blissful Productivity. Gamers are historically viewed as slackers or lazy. However we have seen a change in this idea as the new generation comes forth. These gamers are happier working hard as an individual or as a team to accomplish a goal. We are more likely to get depressed and lonely if we are not productive in some way. Gamers feel productive in every match we play due to the high level of achievements available to us.

–Epic meaning. In general, people like to be attached to awe inspiring things. Some examples would be people trying to get in on a photo op with a famous person, or trying to say they are, “with the band”. In the virtual world of gaming we are attached to awe inspiring missions and the seemingly impossible every time we play a game. We get the epic win feeling every day. We are attached to that epic win.

–Weaving Social Fabric: since we spend so much time with so many different people from around the world, as gamers we can weave an amazing social fabric. We get encouragement from others that boosts our self esteem. Friendships are formed from thousands of miles away. We have friends in every country and from every walk of life. By having this as a resource we have access to a huge database of information from a cultural perspective. We talk to each other about our problems, we have deep meaningful conversations that allow us to form bonds with others like us. Advice is given and accepted. It’s a beautiful fabric.

For now it is perfectly normal for us to be spending so much time in a virtual world because we get the instant feedback. Economist, Edward Castronova stated, “We are witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.” The next generation of gamers is expected to be no less than one billion. We will have essentially created two generations amounting to 6.5 billion people who are virtuosos at video games, having also created Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals to lead our new century.

 

http://http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

 

Source cited

Castronova, Edward The Economist

Gladstone, Alan The 10,000 hour virtuoso

TEDTALKS, McGonigal, Jane Gaming can make a better world

Xbox.live.com/accounts

Matt Geary Interviews Sneaky Zebra – MCM London, May 2013

Matt Geary
-
0
Matt Geary Interviews Sneaky Zebra – MCM London, May 2013

SneakyZebra1

It seemed that the SCG table was the place to ‘Hang out’ because just after talking to Tabitha, I bumped into the Sneaky Zebra guys, so decided to have a chat to them too!

(apologies for the sound quality… had micros SD card issues!) 

FACEBOOK: http://www.Facebook.com/TheSneakyZebra
TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/The_SneakyZebra

Also please check out their kickstarter and get them funded for what will be AN AWESOME Fan film :http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/n…

 

also if you would like to check out Sneaky Zebras recent MCM videos… look no further :o)

 

Eidos Teases Us With Deus Ex: The Fall

James Buckingham
-
0
Eidos Teases Us With Deus Ex: The Fall

They may be hard at work on the forthcoming Thief 4, but Eidos Montréal still have the time to tweet a tantalising question that appears to be for a new Deus Ex title called “The Fall“. Deus Ex

Simply asking “Where will YOU take The Fall?” followed by a Vine Clip (see below) the tease appears to be a game connected to Human Revolution (if the font and design are anything to go by), so may be a direct follow on featuring Adam Jensen again.

There’s speculation that the title “The Fall” may link to the first game, where the world was ravaged by an artificially-engineered virus called the Grey Death to go along with the economic downturn, pollution and bitter conflicts between several groups vying for power.

If this is proven to be true, then it sounds great to me – it’s almost like the Deus Ex universe is forgetting that Invisible War existed, and is treating The Fall as the end of the trilogy, going back to where it all started.

Free Copy Of Monster Hunter 3 For Your Friend

James Buckingham
-
0
Free Copy Of Monster Hunter 3 For Your Friend

Do you have a Nintendo 3DS? Have you already purchased, or are you intending to purchase Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate? Well you can give a friend a free digital copy of the game!

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

Yes, you heard correctly. As part of the “Gift & Hunt Together Promotion” you buy the game, and get a free copy for a friend! How you ask? Well firstoff you need to reside in Europe, and register Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate before 11pm UK time (BST) on June 30th – you’ll then get a recommendation code for a digital copy of Capcom‘s title.

Your friend of choice needs to have their 3DS registered on the Club Nintendo website, or to have registered between 11pm BST today and 11pm BST on July 31st, and they’ll need to redeem their free code by 11pm BST on August 5th.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Recommendation Code

If you’ve already registered your copy of the game, then check the Club Nintendo site on or after 5th June at 3pm BST to acquire your recommendation code.

Want a little more information on Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate? Have a look at the trailer below.

1...289290291...362Page 290 of 362