You speak french?  Probably not!  Then check out my brand new blog at http://lejoueurdelys.blogspot.com  There a bazillion blogs about gaming out there, but few in french. I'll probably translate my blog entries here and shift them over to The Lys Player ( rough translation )
So it's true. A WoW movie is in the works and now Sam Raimi is onboard to direct this. Now that we know the project is in competent hands, there's 2 questions left :
 - What's gonna be the story?  - What's the cast?
I'm actually excited about this since Raimi did a great job on the Spiderman movies and im a huge Evil Dead fan. So lets play, throw ideas and suggestions for your story and cast! Here's mine!
Story : I go for the obvious, The Rise and Fall of Arthas, the Lich King and i'd do it Star Wars style. After all, Arthas is our Darth Vador. So yeah, basically, i'd tell the Warcraft 3 story. On one side, you have Thrall, the young warchief, getting is people to safety in Kalimdor and creating an alliance with the Tauren. On the other side, you tell the story of young prince Arthas slipping into madness and killing is father. I'd end the movie with Arthas going to northrend. The 2nd movie would be about Arthas killing is father. 3rd movie would be up for suggestion.
Cast :
My Cast would be :
Arthas
Vladimir Kulich ( 13th Warrior )
Uther the Lightbringer
Ron Pearlman ( Outlander )
Thrall
Sala Baker ( LOTR )
Jaina Proudmoore
Scarlett Johansson ( Goddess among men, we're not worthy! )
I'm not even sure this thread will last long but here goes.
There's one subject the giantbomb guys will avoid, same on every "pro" podcast out there. Piracy.
It's something that's been bugging me for a while now because, I don't know about you guys, but I know LOTs of people around me with hacked psps or hacked 360s, downloading games and burning them and whatnot. Hell, on this very forum there's been mentions here and there of piracy.
I don't like it. I pay good money for my games because it's my passion. I don't drink anymore, I don't smoke anymore. All that sweet sweet cash goes directly in gaming. Then you come to work one morning, and 4,5 guys are exchanging the latest burned DDVD 360 release, sometimes when the game is not even out yet. It pisses me off. Back in the days, i would mind less because in the nintendo days, most of these games were from japan and somehow, it felt so far away i wouldn't mind much. But when i see people with burned copies of Mass Effect, my canadian heart burns with rage. Bioware works freakin hard on their titles and they don't deserve this. Nor any developper for that matter.
I've been quite hosest with that, if a web site would exist where you could turn those people in, I gladly would, and then tell em to their faces. But i don't think such a thing exist.
I know you guys will probably be touchy on this subject but still, you have opinions? Stories? you know how we, paying gamers could do something about piracy?
Note : Theres no piracy concept page, granted it's illegal, but its a gaming-related concept. Even if its against the law, it exist.
Even though the time for the " who won E3 " threads seems over now, I feel like I should post what I think about it.
Since sony's conference, I started to reflect on what was shown to us by the Big 3 and you know what?
I think there's no clear winner. I think that each company came this year with their own objectives and each of them did exactly what I thought they should.
Let's check them in order.
Microsoft
What they needed to do this year : Last year was pretty good, plus they had that FF13 sucker punch announcement which was great for them. I thought that this year, they needed to announce their plan to tap into the casual market, put up a wall of exclusive titles, announce a few surprises here and there and keep on adding stuff to the Xbox interface, which they did at every E3.
What we got : That's precicely what happened. They presented their Natal project and shows what's their angle on the casual market, We got a pretty impressive list of titles with a few good surprises L4D2 and Crackdown 2 for example, and last.fm + facebook + twitter are nice additions, I might not use them, but its free and its there.
Nintendo
What they needed to do this year : Lets be honest, last year was a goddamn train wreck. I don't play on Nintendo consoles anymore but I came out of last year's conference basically insulted. Nintendo wanted to seel their stuff to my mom and my grandma, Wth? This year, I felt Nintendo needed to address this situation by doing 2 major things : Make sure they have games for all 3 major franchises ( Mario, Zelda, Metroid ) announced and get some grittier games shown to, at least, pretend they care about hardcore gamers while still continuing on pushing the casual market further.
What we got : Mission accomplished. We got Mario games, Zelda Games, a neat Metroid announcement. Resident Evil, Conduit and whatnot. And Nintendo can keep going selling Wii fit and the like. My girlfriend is quite excited, i guess its a good sign.
Sony
What they needed to do this year : Last year, Sony had a pretty good conference too but we were left with mostly promises. I felt this year, they needed to bring on the heat, get the PSP back on track with a clear direction, sign some goddamn exclusives and get a plan to tap in the casual market as well.
What we got : Again, dead on the money! Sony showed an awesome lineup of games including surprising exclusives, a new psp with a whole bunch of psp games to go with it. The "wiimote" they showed looked interesting and there's potential there. Also there's one big news that flew under most people's radar : They will drop the price of PSP devkits by 80%. That may not mean much to you, but this means Sony is effin' serious about getting developpers back on the psp. Great news for everyone.
so as you can see, from my perspective, I don't feel anyone dropped the ball. They all had clear objectives and I feel that the clear winner here, its us! 2010 is gonna be a great year to be a gamer, whatever the console(s) you own. 7 Comments
Since I have a strange user icon compared to most people out there, I thought i'd blog about it and tell you what it is.
This my friends, is my favorite moment in sports history.
Sweet russian justice Let me explain.
3/26/2006 - Montreal, Bell Center.
Theres a hockey match between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens. For a couple of years now, there's a rivalry building up between these 2 teams and this event is one of the key moments in that modern rivalry.
Score is 6-2 Montreal, end of the 3rd period. The game is almost done. Then, this happens.
 Â
As you can see at 0:04 seconds in the video at the far right, tucker goes to hit kovalev with a clear elbow shot but nearly misses. Alexei Kovalev is the russian star of the Montreal Canadiens and is not known for being a tough guy, but he's known to take care of himself when that kind of stuff happens. And he will.
He quickly turns around to see who tried to nail him like that, took his number.
at 0:09 seconds, the puck goes back to where Kovalev is now, near the boards and he takes possession of it. Usually in hockey, the puck carrier is focused on getting a scoring chance but Kovi has something else in mind...
at 0:13, Kovalev sees his teammate Sheldon Souray at the Blue line and raises his stick, expecting a pass, Kovalev skates around him, he has something else in mind....
at 0:15, he pushed another Maple leaf player and is in direct line of sight with his target, Darcy Tucker, The man who tried to elbow him a few seconds earlier, he has gained a good amount of speed and then....
at 0:17 he jumps RIGHT IN HIS EFFIN' FACE!!!!!!
Brawl ensues. Montreal wins. I glee at that video every time i see it, even today.
10 Comments
So, with my brand new xbox 360, i thought i'd give an rpg a go so my friend came over last friday with his copy of Star Ocean 4, said he loved it and I should play it.
And I did. And i think it sucks.
I tried...Right now im 25 hours in and i'm pretty sure I had enough. I might continue but i'll probably just uninstall the whole thing and give the copy back.
I have an issue with JRPGs in general it seems, and every time a brand new one gets out and looks like its gonna be something I might like, i get caught up inthe excitement and forget I don't even like JRPGs, start to play it and then remember, slowly but surely, why I hate those games.
There's so much I wanna write about, where do I start?
I guess I'll start with what matters most to me in an rpg : Characters. Without the story, an RPG just becomes a generic 3rd person action game, It's the reason why we play these things. To see what's going to unfold. Where these characters are headed, what's gonna happen to the hero, or your character. But you can have the best story in the world, if you don't give a f*** about those characters, it's not gonna be a fun experience. You have to relate to those characters.
See, I like north american rpgs ( I say north american because Canada is a part of that continent, believe it or not and we make pretty good rpgs. Oh and btw America is a continent, not a country. Thank you) because in most of them, you get to create your own character. There is a few exceptions here and there but its a clear tendancy. Which brings me to my first problem with JRPGs : Characters
The first distinct difference between JRPGs and NARPGs is that japanese developpers are control freaks. They have to control every thing you do, everything that happens in the story, the way it looks and the themes that THEY want to talk about. on the North american side, its more about choice, especially in the recent years. Most rpgs give you Character customisation and choice. This is what i prefer. I like building my character before entering an RPG. Because this way, i'm going to relate to this guy, it's MY guy. Some might argue that having a fixed main character will allow greater character development and and more solid story compared to " Generic Hero number 22045 " and they are mostly right but Mass Effect proved you can create your character ( Captain Shephard ) and still allow lots of customisation without hurting the story.
Edge Maverick: fancy name, whiny guy.So my problem with JRPGs is that, basically, they give you a main character to play with but you don't get to customize him at all. And in Star Ocean 4's case, its Edge Maverick and he's like all goddamn jrpg main characters : Young, inexperienced, fancy haircut and whiny as hell.
I'm not going to go deep into why I don't like the guy, It mostly comes from what happens in the game so I'll let you play it for yourself but those who did play it know what i'm refering too. And it's something we've all seen over and over again with these characters before.
But that wouldn't be so bad if the rest of the crew is fine right? Well for me, they all sucked. Most of them are tweens anyway. Yet again. That's another thing JRPGs are having a hard time with, mature heroes.
Meh...So far i've seen 9 characters playable in the game and all of them are bugging me to death, some are just kids, others are poorly written. But the main problem is that you've seen this already. There's nothing original to it. It's fan service, its anime-based and its written by a guy who could've wrote a pokemon episode and that's about it.
Aren't japanese developpers checking what's being done elsewhere? I played Star Ocean 4 and all along i though : You know, this could've been a playstation 2 rpg. Except for the graphics ( and on't get me started on the animation in this game, it's horrible. It's basically like watching a Thunderbirds episode. Yes, it's that bad. ), theres nothing next gen about this game. At all.
And this brings me to another issue I have with JRPGS : Combat and character progression.
Anyone who played a Star Ocean game or a "Tales of" game before knows how the combat works. To it's credit, at least it's not turnbased, which is in my iopinion a style of combat of the past, and nothing says PS1 like a turnbased jrpg. But in the end, its number porn. That's all there is to it. You smash a button, bunch of numbers appear on screen that you don't care about and eventually the bad guy dies, you get a not-so-cool " you win" screen with a whole bunch of number thrown at you again, and every now and then you level up.
This is another difference between NARPGs and JRPGs, when you level up, THEY control what goes where. Some like it that way, I don't. In Star Ocean 4, it works like this, after your "you win" screen, it zooms on the character who's leveling up and on the right part of the screen they throw every stat boost he gets from leveling up and that's it. Where's the fun in that? Again, control freak method right here.
So what i'm saying is Star Ocean 4 is a perfect example of why I think japanese developpers are outdated right now. They stopped innovating a long time ago and every JRPG tries to be FF7 all over again. Nothing in these games are next gen, except for the textures, this game could've been a playstation 2 game and that's a problem for me.
I played those. Isn't it time for JRPGs developpers to evolve? To push the genre to it's new level?
Well, Star Ocean isn't tempting anything new so I guess if you liked those, you're going to like this one. For me, i'll be waiting for the first true evolution in the JRPG genre. Problem is, i might way a long, long time. But hey, at least Mass Effect 2 is coming... 19 Comments
For my close friends, this is an awesome joke, probably the funniest thing I did this year. Why? Because I talked s**t about the xbox 360 for a solid year and a half now on all sorts of occasions.
IS THERE NO GAAAAAAWD???Story goes like this : Near the ES4 : Oblivion launch back a couple of years ago, i thought that spending all that tax return money on a next gen console ( the only one on the market back then ) was a great idea.
And it was for the first few months. Played Oblivion, condemned 1, Marvel UA, NHL 2k7, Dead Rising. Life was good.
Then Mass Effect came out. It was a big deal for me because it was THE game I was waiting for. Played the hell out of that game, passed it, and the very first game I tried to play after that, NHL 2k7, i got the Red Ring of Death.
This was in November, just a few weeks before Christmas. I called Xbox support, they sent a box, you know the drill. Xbox comes back JUST in time for Christmas, December 20th of something like that, and i got a refurbished console of course. Played for about a week then, after a whole series of unreadable disk errors, my xbox thought that it could go another mile by scratching my game dvds completely. Mass Effect and NHL 2k7 were totally raped by my console, and of course, unreadable.
So at that point, I just had it with my Xbox, payed for Xbox live, paid for that stupid wireless network adaptor, recharge battery kit, and THEN some, and that thing blows up in my face ans scratches my CDs.
So I sold the whole thing and turned to my PC for my gaming needs. I eventually went on to PS3 and was very happy with it for a while.
But thing is, when you're a PS3 owner, you have a great console in your hands but oh so few games to play. Especially if you like RPGS. PS3 right now is full of shooters of all sorts but if you strip it down of all the games consisting of you, in a first person view, poiting a gun at someone's head and repeating the process over and over again, you'd be left with a couple of multiplatformers without much interest and Valkyria Chronicles.... but wait, thats pointing a gun at someone's head too!!! damn!
So my friend bought an XBOX 360 recently and he's full of good rpgs to play like Fable 2, Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean 4 and whatnot and I can't play one of those.
And yet again this year, i get a big tax return. Plus I sold my PSP very recently. You all know what that means don'tcha?
So here I am, with a Red xbox 360 at home with a copy of Resident Evil 5 in it. Played it the whole week end, had a blast with it, im happy. But I'm also scared. See i'm like a rape victim : I've been hurt once, and I know it could happen again....
Yeah, i sold my PSP to some guy at work. PSP-1000, 5 games with it and LOTS of dust on it.
Im happy for the cash income but im sad at the same time because for me this is a bit like admitting PSP failed. Most of the games that are coming out for it are meaningless and just look at the lineup for the next year i mean, little big planet on psp? really?
Maybe im just getting old and handheld gaming is for people who travel alot or kids who's parents won't let them have a tv in their room or something.
Here's to hoping sony comes up with something awesome for the PSP2, because as of right now, im done with handheld gaming.
You were the best! UPDATE : may 31 - PSP Go leaked, totally called it. 36 Comments
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