29 February 2008
New Iron Man Trailer
New trailer for Iron Man. It’s of course too early to pass judgment, but it’s so evident that when movie makers take time to understand and pull the good stuff out of the source material (Superman, Spider-Man, Batman Begins), they great kick-ass movies, as opposed to when they just try to slap something together to ride the trend (Fantastic Four). And how cool is Robert Downey, Jr.!
28 February 2008
More on Batman 156
More about that Batman issue that Grant Morrison’s in love with. A quick check of eBay shows a few issues of Batman 156 that people are trying to make money on.
PETA Objectifies Women
Why does PETA think it’s okay to objectify women while advocating their own causes?
Batman 156
The current arc in Batman plays on an old, crazy story where Batman participated in an isolation experiment and hallucinated Robin’s death for a few days. Here are some scans of it.
27 February 2008
Rasl
Jeff Smith’s Rasl is out today, and it’s good. Newsarama has a two-part interview up with Smith. Part one deals mostly with Bone. Part two goes into Rasl and discusses his Shazam series some. Sadly, knowing Smith’s drawing speed and looking at the last page, Rasl is only going to be coming out quarterly.
Update: Here’s part one and part two of an interview Smith did with Publishers Weekly last month, and here’s Don MacPherson’s review of number one.
26 February 2008
Juno DVD to Include iTunes File
Nifty. The two-disc edition of Juno will include a “digital copy” ready for iTunes, iPods, iPhones, etc. No reason iTunes can’t just let you rip DVDs like you can CDs, of course.
Wii Menu 3.2
If you were wondering what the Wii update from this morning does, the answer is: almost nothing. It just provides a new way for games to tell you that they have a patch available for download.
25 February 2008
Oscar Observations
Just a few quick thoughts.
- In general the awards went to whom it was expected. There Will Be Blood was Daniel Day Lewis’s show, so he got that, and No Country for Old Men grabbed the bigger ones, with Diablo Cody getting best screenplay because movies like Juno can’t compete with movies like No Country.
- They should really do away with the montages. There were fewer this year than in the past, but people just want to see the awards. Do an Oscar retrospective special for the montage-hungry.
- Ditto the individual songs. Do one long medley with all the different performers.
- Jon Stewart did a good but not great job. He was a little tamer than last time maybe? Like he learned his lesson that Hollywood is too full of itself to handle being mocked by an outsider.
- Jack Nicholson is the King of Hollywood, I think. He’s won three Best Acting Oscars, and he’s developed the perfect persona that he can ride on his entire life. I can’t remember an Academy Awards ceremony when he didn’t get a front row seat, and at some point during the show someone always looks down, sees him with his “I’m wearing sunglasses with my tux because I’m Jack Fucking Nicholson” look and makes a reference to him.
Garfield Minus Garfield
Witness if you will Garfield Minus Garfield, the result of taking the orange cat out of Garfield strips and leaving everything else creating an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?. See also the Garfield randomizer.
23 February 2008
22 February 2008
Talking Batman with Grant Morrison
Grant Morrison talks about his ideas for his ongoing Batman run. I love his idea that all of the different types of stories from the origin to the campy 50s to the grim and gritty 80s all happened and all represent his psychological makeup.
Amazon Wii Games Sale
If you go to Amazon.com and click on the Gold Box at the top of the page today, they’re having Wii games on sale all day.
20 February 2008
Whither Wii
With the Wii, Nintendo made the argument that its new generation of games would be about innovative game design and not raw graphics power. Now that we’re into year two of the system, I find myself thinking about how it stacks up against the XBOX 360.
Off the top of my head, here are the big Wii games that Nintendo itself has published:
- Wii Sports
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
- Super Mario Galaxy
- Smash Bros. Brawl
These were all big games for Nintendo, yet I think only Wii Sports qualifies as a major part of Nintendo’s argument. It’s easy to pick up and play with no prior gaming experience. It’s accessible to everyone. The Wii remote’s usage is very intuitive and fun. You couldn’t substitute a normal gaming pad and maintain the same level of immersion. The graphics are simple but endearing. I don’t think the same can be said for the other four offerings listed above. Zelda, admittedly, began life as a GameCube game, and it doesn’t make large use of the Wii remote aside from aiming one’s bow, which isn’t much different than it would be if you were using a mouse or a joystick to aim. Ditto for Metroid. It works nicely, but isn’t so much better than using a mouse on a PC that you’d never want to go back. Collecting Star Bits in Mario Galaxy with the remote pointer is fun, but you could remove that aspect from the game entirely without reducing it very much. Smash Bros., from what I understand, just uses the Wii remote like any other button smashing pad, and you’re fairly encouraged to just use a GameCube or Classic Controller instead.
All of these games were great games, but I think you could put them onto a 360 and they’d play almost identically (and likely look better). In fact, as I think about places where innovative controls drive the experience and graphics take a second chair, the big examplar right now is Rock Band, which isn’t even available for the Wii (yet). And for more traditional gaming, on the 360 you also have Mass Effect, BioShock, Portal, Half-Life 2, Halo 3, Gears of War, and so on. Those are all games I’ve wanted to play over the last year but can’t because I don’t own a 360. Putting myself in the shoes of a 360 owner who doesn’t have a Wii, I’d certainly have wanted to play Zelda and Mario Galaxy. Metroid I was never a big fan of, but it has its pull, and I’ve never been into fighters too much to care about Smash Bros., but again, your mileage may vary. Point being, that’s seven for the 360 and two for the Wii, and neither of those two games are must-plays because of their specific Wii-like attributes, they just happen to be manufactured by Nintendo and thus exclusives to that system.
Now, Wii was a surprise hit to some, so there were studios that didn’t start working on games for it until it was proven to be a success. Additionally, there are studios that aren’t interested in doing anything other than making the same old games, and making them prettier and prettier, so the Wii just doesn’t appeal to them. You can call it lazy, but it’s silly to say that there was anything wrong with the types of games that existed prior to the Wii, so why not just keep making them and making them prettier? Especially when Nintendo itself is still publishing its old standards without adding in much motion control innovation. And this is a very tricky battle for Nintendo to win. Given any “standard” game that could exist both on the 360 and the Wii, the 360 version is always going to look prettier, and is going to have better online integration. So even if versions of Portal, BioShock, et al did come out for the Wii, the 360 copies would still be preferable. I’ve yet to see a multi-platform game where the Wii version added anything to the experience that greatly improved it over the 360’s. Wii Spore could probably beat out any 360 port, but that’s mostly because it would be more closely able to emulate the points and clicks on the Mac/PC version.
I don’t want to come off sounding like I’m unhappy with my Wii. It’s loads of fun. It doesn’t break down all the time like a reported 30% of 360s do. And the price is nice. Post WoW I’ve been a very casual gamer, so it’s not like I’m devoting hours a day to gaming, anyway. The flow of Wii games coming out has been sufficient for my needs, but it you’re only going to buy one system, I think the trade-offs make the Wii a hard call if you’re going to be buying more than one game every 1 ½ - 3 months.
Nintendo has sold enough consoles, and is far less expensive to develop for, that one would think there would be plenty of money in developing exclusives for it. All of the mini-game games have shown that all sorts of interesting things can be done on the Wii, but very few developers have managed to stitch those proofs-of-concepts into full-length gaming experiences. I’m quite certain it can be done, but I’m still waiting to see the cards laid out on the table.
15 February 2008
Ultimate Burnout
How quickly is the Ultimate Universe catching up to the Marvel Universe proper? Ultimate Burnout.
Freak Angels
23 years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at exactly the same moment.
6 years ago, the world ended.
This is the story of what happened next.
The first issue of Freak Angels, a weekly online comic by Warren Ellis with art by Paul Duffield, is online. If anyone can figure out how to make long form comics (that is, not comic strips) work online, it’s Ellis. The two-by-two panel construction works great for reading in a browser window. You don’t wind up scrolling around the page and missing the composition.
14 February 2008
13 February 2008
Dinosaur Genders
It’s almost impossible to figure out the sex of a dinosaur from its fossil. Thus, it’s very hard to know anything about their mating behaviors. Olivia Judson, writing for The New York Times, gives it a stab.
Writers' Strike Ends
The writers’ strike is officially over. Here’s a letter from the presidents of the WGA announcing such.
12 February 2008
Spore out on 9/7
Spore now has an official release date: September 7, 2008. I’m guessing this will be Mac/PC only for launch, with consoles to come. Previously: EA confirms that Spore will be on the Mac, and much, much more.
Update: more info, via Ars Technica. N’Gai Croal has an interview with Will Wright, confirming that there will be versions for Mac, Windows, DS, and cell phones, and also an interview with producer Lucy Bradshaw.
TV Shows Resuming After the Strike
The New York Times has a chart listing the status of which TV shows will be back once/if post-strike resumes. The full season of Jericho starts tonight.
11 February 2008
Calories in Restaurant Foods
Men’s Health provides a terrifying look at how many calories are in restaurant foods. See also Consumer Reports’s quiz about which foods are less healthful.
09 February 2008
New Weekly DC Series: Trinity
DC Comics has announced that their next weekly series, following Countdown to Final Crisis, will be called Trinity. As widely rumored the main story will be written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley, with backups by various teams. This is, I think, a great idea. It gives comic stores something to recommend to new or casual readers that comes out every week, should hopefully be easy to follow, and features its most recognizable characters—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
08 February 2008
Miles on Lost
Watching Lost last night, I was certain that the character Miles, played by Ken Leung, had been in the mental hospital with Hurley in a previous episode. Turns out he was actually in Junior’s mental hospital on The Sopranos. Either way, good episodes so far this season.
06 February 2008
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday falling on February 6 today is the earliest it’s been since 1913. The earliest it can be is February 4, which hasn’t happened since 1818, says Wikipedia.
05 February 2008
How Long Groundhog Day Is
Danny Rubin, who wrote Groundhog Day, responds to the question of how long Phil spends looping through that one day.
Types
I’m well into the fourth of seven books in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I got to thinking last night that his gunslinger characters are really cool, but that I think Star Wars has laid permanent claim to the “last of a dying breed of warrior” type. Just as no one will be able to write a book about a wizard school ever again without being compared against Harry Potter, I wonder if the Jedi is simply the winner in that category. Not that King is whatsoever ripping off George Lucas. I think that he started the early writing of The Gunslinger at around the time that A New Hope came out, and certainly he’s drawing from westerns which in turn drew from samurai stories. And of course it occurs to me that there in fact are Star Wars novels featuring Jedi wizard schools.
03 February 2008
Coloring Comics, Old School
Here’s a cool piece by Todd Klein about how comic books used to be colored before computers, including a very vivid illustration of how paper quality changes the effect of the colors.