The fourth episode of the no-budget short film Sockbaby has been released. The film is directed by Douglas TenNapel, the man best known for works such as Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood; and John Soares, who is best known for co-founding the independent film group WestHavenBrook.
The film lampoons kung-fu movies, and directly parodies pop-culture icons like Dragon Ball Z. All of the martial arts were done by the actors themselves, and were directed by Soares.
In addition to the numerous martial arts sequences, the film also features a cartoon sequence in part two and a partial CGI sequence in part three.
The film centers on a character named Ronnie Cordova, a funky martial artist and (possibly) 70’s-style detective in a slick leisure suit, played by Soares. The plot mostly involves his quest to get a bite to eat that’s thwarted consistently as he must protect a Sockbaby from an evil group of Greys (”demonic men in suits,” to quote the official site).
If you have never checked out the first three parts, head on over to the Sockbaby website and watch them. Then come back here to download Sockbaby 4.
The first thing I did this morning when I woke up was log on to live and buy this game. The game is absolutely awesome. Take the greatness of the first game, and a bunch of new gameplay modes to keep it fresh, and you have yourself an extremely addicting game. Go buy this now!
There are currently only two series of racing games that I find enjoyable: Burnout and Midnight Club. The latest game in the Burnout series, Burnout Paradise, was a bit of a disappointment to me. I feel like they tried to combine the Burnout sense of speed and fantastic car crashes with the large open cities that the Midnight Club series is known for, but missed the mark in a number of ways. Navigation was horrible, retrying races was a pain, finding races took too long, ect. I wish they stuck to what they did best, and left the open world racing stuff to Rockstar Games and their Midnight Club series, since that’s what they do best. Luckily, Midnight Club Los Angeles looks absolutely amazing.
The game was initially in development at Perpetual Entertainment, but after some problems, Perpetual announced that it was no longer developing Star Trek Online. The license for the game and all of its assets except for the code were transferred to another, unnamed, developer (now known to be Cryptic Studios) back in January. Cryptic has launched a website for the game and released a coupe of new screenshots. They also promised to reveal some gameplay footage at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention on August 10.
I am pretty excited about this announcement. I pretty much lost hope for a good Star Trek MMO back in January, but I think the game is in pretty good hands now.
As many of my readers know, I am a big fan of the television show Battlestar Galactica. I think its one of the most intelligent and well written shows ever created. What you might not know is that I am also a big fan of the Aliens vs. Predator PC games. Walking around in dark, scary, environments while hunting/being hunted by aliens is extremely intense. So image how excited I was when I heard that two of the writers form Battlestar wrote the script for the Aliens: Colonial Marines game. In an interview with Shacknews, Randy Pitchford said:
One thing that’s cool is some of the people we’ve been able to work with to help us [on Aliens]. The guys that write the Battlestar Galactica series, Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, they wrote our script. They’re amazing guys. They gave us a lot, too. We could make a whole season of TV with the stuff they gave us. [laughs] We profited from the writer’s strike, let’s just put it that way. We talked with a lot of people, but those guys are so good.
And then a lot of the concept guys that helped make the movies. Like [Aliens concept artist] Syd Mead, that guy walks on water. And to be able to go to his studio, his house, and then have him draw a bunch of stuff. “Here’s when I designed the Sulaco back when we made the first movie. Here’s the original artwork. You want a copy, Brian?” And Brian’s like, “Yes.”
And now he’s designing all the new stuff, because the Sulaco’s a big ship and we only saw a bit of it, so you get the guy who designed it to design the rest of it. And he’s awesome, he designed so much stuff. And then like [concept artists] Keith Thompson, Craig Mullins.. anybody who knows these names knows what we’re talking about. This is no joke.
It’s a big team. And we’re also working with people from all over the world. We’ve been working with a lot of amazing talent at other studios. I don’t know how much of that will be used in PR, but there’s a lot of people who care about this franchise. The opportunity to build a dropship, or build a pulse rifle, or build a smart gun, that’s a pretty cool opportunity–a lot of artists would want to do that. So we have our core Gearbox team, but we’re also finding a lot of folks around the industry now, guys who are on top of their game.
It looks like this game is going to be amazing! Be sure to check their site out later for the full interview.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is an upcoming tactical shooter set in the Aliens universe, developed by Gearbox Software and published by SEGA. The game is in development for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC and is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2009.
The first teaser trailer for Terminator Salvation is here. Since it is a teaser, it doesnt show a whole lot. But what you can see looks absolutely fantastic. After watching this trailer I have gone from “mildly interested” to “can’t wait to see it”.
The long-awaited Max Payne movie now has a trailer. It looks like they got the atmosphere of the games down pretty good, but it looks like they went in a new direction for the storyline. Still, this movie could turn out to be pretty cool.
Grand Theft Auto has finally succeeded in converting the masses into mindless murdering machines and it’s up to one man to save the day: Jack Thompson.
