Culture

The three live action films based on the Resident Evil game franchise have always been very loosely based on the Capcom games but the movies have always made their money back and more thanks to relatively low budgets, solid box office returns and high sales of the DVD and Blu-Ray versions. So it's no shock to hear that a fourth Resident Evil movie might be in the works.

According to Shocktillyoudrop.com a "studio source" at Sony's Screen Gems division has supposedly confirmed that the movie, to be titled Resident Evil: Afterlife, is in the works with Sony wanting to put the movie in theaters by September 17, 2010. There's no word yet if the star of the three previous movies, Milla Jovovich, will return for the fourth filick.

There are only a few games with less of a story than Asteroids. The classic sci-fi shooter from Atari is bascially you shooting stuff that are supposed to be rocks in space with an icon that's supposed to be a laser-armed space ship. Pac-Man has more of a plot. Yet, the Hollywood Reporter states that several studios were actually in a recent bidding war to get the movie rights to the game.

The story repors that Universal "won" the bidding war and that screenwriter Matthew Lopez is handling the "adaptation" (he basically has a clean slate to write whatever he wants, we imagine). Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who also produced the awful Doom movie adaptation, is one of the producers of this flick. We hope Universal will get its money back from this deal.

Games can can adapted into movies, comic books and even prose stories and now CCP has announced that a new novel set in their space-based MMO EVE Online is due for release in November. The book, titled, EVE: The Burning Life, is being written by CCP team member Hjalti Daníelsson, who has written much of the game's storylines.

The plot apparently revolves around a man who is the loan survivor of an attack on deep space mining colony and a woman "agent of death" who leaves her gig on her own personal journey. These two people's lives intersect in a story that will "plunge them into the darkest parts of space where they encounter denizens of the chaotic and dangerous pirate kingdoms." Sounds painful. Anyway, the novel will be published by Tor Books in trade paperback and in hardcover and is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

Despite the fact that we live in the 21st century, fantasy as a genre is still with us, and shows no signs of going away any time soon. As an environment, it is so poorly defined that it can take the aesthetic of nearly anything, provided that certain tropes are in place: swords, archery, royalty, magic, assorted humanoid monsters with orcs being the mainstay, and the like. Temporally, there is a nebulous period of time during which all fantasy takes place, but you recognize it when you see it.

However, it's this vagueness that lends itself to abuse. Stylistically, there is little to cause any one fantasy-themed game to stand out from any other. And how many times can you get excited about playing the same character class over and over again? I'm in favor of any attempt to leave the stale fantasy genre behind and striking out into new territory, but how can we replace it, and with what?

Life imitates art and then imitates life again. That's the lesson for the makers of the Mana Energy Potion, a real energy drink that comes in a small spherical bottle that is supposed to look like similar health boosting items found in RPG and MMO games. This week it was announced that the Mana Energy Potion will actually appear in the anime-themed MMO title Lunia.

You can purchase the fictional version of potion for your characters via Lunia's in-game currency and when you purchase a certain amount of Mana, players will be mailed a four-pack of the real thing for free (yep, they even pay for the shipping and handling). Of course the Mana Energy Potion girls pictured above don't come with the real potion delivery . . at least not yet.

Like everyone else we were shocked and sad to hear about the premature death of Michael Jackson at the age of 50 last week. The news of his death was apparently enough to bring down parts of the Internet as tons of users hit news web sites reporting on his demise.

Since then the media has been paying tributes to Jackson's life with retrospectives, specials and the like. Those tributes are now extending to games. The just launched Battlefield Heroes free-to-play shooter from Digital Illusions and Electronic Arts is offering folks a chance to purchase some new in-game outfits for their characters. As you can see on the the right, those suits look an awful lot like Jackson's costumes in his 1980's music videos. The suits are just available for the month of July.

The summer game-pop culture convention season is in full swing in the US and it will end on Labor Day weekend with Penny Arcade Expo 2009. Today the organizers of the largest video-PC game convention in the US announced that legendary game creator Ron Gilbert will be making the keynote speech at PAX 2009 in Seattle, Washington.

Gilbert is best known as the main designer behind the classic LucasArts adventure games Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games (the latter of which is being revived). Currently he is a design director at Hothead Games (the same folks who created the first two episodes in the Penny Arcade Adventures downloadable titles) where he is working on the long-in-developnment game Deathspank. PAX 2009 will be held Sept 4-6.

Even with id Software's purchase by ZeniMax Media last week, plans for QuakeCon 2009 are continuing. However the annual free LAN event-game convention is getting a last minute venue change. Instead of the previously announced Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, the venue has changed over to the Gaylord Hotel in nearby Grapevine, Texas. The Gaylord Hotel previously hosted the 2004 and 2005 QuakeCons.

According to today's press announcement, this change will allow QuakeCon 2009 to have a bigger BYOC area, a biggest exhibitor area and "totally new events and entertainment." Folks who had made QuakeCon resevations at the previous hotel will find that those reservations have been canceled. id plans to announce when reservations will be made available for the Gaylord Hotel soon, at equal or lesser rates. The dates for QuakeCon 2009 have not changed; it will still be held August 13-16.

Blizzard's annual BlizzCon event sold out quickly but if you are not one of those heading to Anaheim, CA on August 21-22 you can still get some of the feeling of the event from the confort of your office chair or couch. This week pre-orders are being taken for the live Internet streaming video for BlizzCon 2009.

The video will come from the DirecTV coverage of BlizzCon which will have 16 hours of coverage of the event for its subscribers. While DirecTV owners will get that video in HD, those of us that don't have the satillete TV service will still be able to see the event via the$39.95 Internet streaming coverage. World of Warcraft players will even get the BlizzCon in-game Murloc Marine pet when they purchase the BlizzCon streaming services.

We've already mentioned the fact that the sold out San Diego Comic-Con will have a bunch of game publishers exhibiting at next month's massive pop culture event. Now we have the first word on one of the game-oriented panels that will be held at Comic-Con.

On Friday, July 24, a panel on Star Wars: The Old Republic will be held with members of the BioWare development team talking about their plans for the highly anticipated MMO game. Look for a mini-comic based on the game to be given away at the convention and the Lucasfilm booth at the con will be showing the E3 CGI trailer based on the game on their big screen at select times.

Australia is already known as a country that won't allow certain games to be sold because of their lack of a adult rating for game titles. Many games, including the above Fallout 3, have to be edited in order to comply with Australia's MA15+ rating. Now a new media report states that the country's government is moving to go beyond just monitoring retail games.

According to a story on TheAge.com.au, the government is thinking about censoring web sites that sell games beyond the MA15+ ratings along with Flash games and downloadable titles. This could affect MMO games such as World of Warcraft and others which are currently exempt from the ratings system. Naturally this move has angered many in the country. Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesperson Colin Jacobs stated, "Far from being the ultimate weapon against child abuse, it now will officially censor content deemed too controversial for a 15-year-old. In a free country like ours, do we really need the government to step in and save us from racy web games?"

Even though the reviews were, well, crappy, the 2007 movie adaptation of Io Interactive's Hitman game series was a money maker for its studio Twentieth Century Fox. It earned nearly $100 million worldwide in theaters and was also a sales success in its DVD release.

Now movie web site IESB.net is reporting that the studio has hired scriptwriter Kyle Ward to write a treatment for a second Hitman movie. There's no word yet if actor Timothy Olyphant will return as Agent 47 in the sequel. In the meantime publisher Eidos is reportedly working on getting a new Hitman game in stores for 2010

It certainly was surprising news on Wednesday when ZeniMax Media announced that it had purchased id Software and its properties. It certainly was surprising to John Romero, one of id's original co-founders but who hasn't been part of the company since 1996. While he's been working in secret at the MMO game developer Slipgate Ironworks since 2005 he certainly had some . . interesting thoughts on this week's news.

On his Twitter page, Romero first stated, "ZENIMAX??????? Disgusting." and later added, "Fallout 3 bought DOOM. Wow.." Later he seemed to calm down saying, " i am positive about the Zenimax deal. my initial reaction was harsh. sorry." His last "tweet" on the subject was downright melancholy, as he stated, "i guess i was shocked and sad to see the id Software of old changed forever today. it's a new day and a new id."

There is a moment during the almost three hour-long Giant Bombcast: Game of the Year Edition when Jeff Gerstmann is expostulating on his choice of Grand Theft Auto 4 as his pick for GotY, where he describes a character that so closely resembled someone he knows -- and the associated memories of that person, and presumably the eventual fate of that person -- that he broke down a little and cried. "And games don't do that," he adds quietly.

It is the continuing viewpoint among those who don't play video games that games are not art. Among the reasons they cite for this stance, valid or not, is that a game could never make the player cry, because it lacks any sort of emotional depth. Obviously, this is an extremely facile argument, and can be attacked on a number of fronts, but let's examine it from the opposite angle. Can we envision a game that could make us, any of us, cry? What would it need to do to accomplish that?

When we and other web sites post up galleries of booth models for events such as E3 2009, it's always assumed that the models are there just for eye candy. Surely the babes know nothing about the products they are trying to sell, right? Well, not necessarily. CNBC's web site has a feature on a booth model agency that prides itself on hiring models that also happen to be gamers.

The agency, Charisma+2, was founded in 2008 by Yvonna Lynn (pictured above) who felt there was a niche to be filled by creating a company of models for events like E3, Comic-Con, QuakeCon and others. It can also be a way to break into the game industry. Lynn states, ""The main idea is to help these guys and girls get their foot into the door in an industry they normally would not have access to That's especially true with the ladies, because this is such a hard industry for women to break into."