First Impressions Of The Kane & Lynch Movie Script [Hollywood]

I’ve been slowly reading through a draft of the big screen adaptation of IO Interactive’s Kane & Lynch today, the movie set to star Bruce Willis as Kane , Jamie Foxx as Lynch . Screenwriter Kyle Ward has done some… interesting things. More

Why Predators Got Made [Clips]

Money. Easy as that. But there’s another reason as to why filmmaker Robert Rodriguez signed off on the film. Before we get to that, watch the movie’s brand new debut trailer. More

Exultant Farmville Developer Is Only Joking About A Farmville Movie, Right? [Gdc]

Zynga’s Bill Mooney obtained the 2010 Game Developer’s Choice Award for Farmville in the Best Social/Online Game category. To celebrate, he allowed Kotaku to brainstorm with him about world domination, Farmville: The Movie and … I got Pokemon tips. More

Oscar-Winning Duo Working On Ghost Recon Movie [Ghost Recon]

The creators of Logorama – an Oscar-winning short film that featured its fair share of video game companies – will be sticking with a gaming theme for their next work, creating a live-action short for Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon series. More

Can Hurt Locker Inspire A New Generation Of "War" Games? [Movies]

Hurt Locker won some Oscars last night , and is a movie about a war. But there’s not much shooting in it. Video games could learn from that. I think a real part of the movie’s appeal is that, while set in a war – which is always exotic and exciting – it’s not really a war movie. Sure, there are moments of combat, like the sniper shootout in the desert, but for the most part it’s about the relationship between three guys and how the stress of war affects them (and everyone around them). That’s more the kind of thing people enjoy from a normal movie, not from war movies, which are normally more about action, thrills and excitement. Which got me thinking: why can’t games follow suit? Why does every war game have to involve shooting? And not just shooting, lots of shooting? We don’t need every game set in a war to be about driving tanks and moving past spawn points and manning turrets. I mean, we could – if we’re going to take Hurt Locker as direct inspiration – have a puzzle game, in the vein of Trauma Centre, where you need to disarm bombs and unexploded ordinance. We could have an adventure game, with journalists or military police on an investigation in a warzone. We could have a base-building deal, where you have to manage the rebuilding of ruined areas of Iraq. Heck, we could even have a Heavy Rain-type deal, a dialogue-heavy game built more around the bond shared by men in conflict than the conflict itself. We don’t have these titles yet, of course. But remember, games often follow a trend set by movies. The pandemic of zombie titles on the shelves today is the result of the recent Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later. Or, more poignantly in this case, what began as a beach landing scene in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan inspired Medal of Honour, and ended with a trend towards Second World War video games that’s only showing signs of letting up now, over ten years later.

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Can Hurt Locker Inspire A New Generation Of "War" Games? [Movies]

BioShock Designer Wrote Movie Script For Amy Grant [Ken Levine]

Long before game designer Ken Levine created games like BioShock and System Shock 2, he was keen to get into the movie business. So keen that he penned a script for a movie starring Amy Grant. Christian music singer Amy Grant is best known for her hits Every Heartbeat and Baby Baby . Hollywood hired Levine to pen the screenplay, which was called Devil’s Advocate (not the 1997 Keanu Reeves film, website Destructoid points out). The story was about “a devil who comes to Earth to corrupt an incorruptible human”, recalls Levine. And according to the game designer, it was “fucking terrible”. The movie never went into production, and Levine took his paycheck and bought a VCR and a Sega Master System. And everyone lived happily ever after. Introducing Irrational Behavior [Irrational Games via Destructoid ]

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BioShock Designer Wrote Movie Script For Amy Grant [Ken Levine]

Chesty Jake Keeps Shirt On For New Prince of Persia Trailer, Part II [Clips]

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time? More like the shirtlessness of Jake Gyllenhaal. Though, like the last trailer , it was short on Chesty Jake. Though, the promotional photos for this movie have been long on the Chesty Jake! Ditto for the behind-in-the-scenes clips . Based on the Ubisoft games, Prince of Persia is set in sixth century Persia. Gyllenhaal is Dastan and Sir Ben Kingsley is bald. This May, the big screen version of Prince of Persia kicks up sand in a theater near you, bare chest and all! News: Brand Spanking New Prince Of Persia Trailer! [Latino Review]

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Chesty Jake Keeps Shirt On For New Prince of Persia Trailer, Part II [Clips]

The Crazies Review: Left 4 Dead In a Small Town [Review]

An idyllic American town plunges into murder and mayhem after a toxin finds its way into the water supply, leaving a sheriff, his deputy, his wife and her friend to survive a town now peopled by The Crazies in what looks an awful lot like a zombie apocalypse. Sound familiar? While this is no Left 4 Dead, there’s plenty about the remake of 1973’s The Crazies that will feel familiar to fans of zombie games and movies . Lets see if it’s worth the nearly two hours to check out. Loved Zombie 2.0: How quickly we grow bored of zombies, or at least the way they were created and how they behave. What started as an off-shoot of voodoo rituals and resulted in mindless, ambling, brain-eating undead, has seen quite a few changes over the year. The slow, moving, unthinking zombies of movies like White Zombie and Dawn of the Dead, gave way to faster unthinking zombies in movies like 28 Days Later, Resident Evil: Extinction and Zombieland. The Crazies brings us a kind of zombie that, while slowly decaying and murderous, can still plan out attacks and use tactics. The In Cold Blood: What makes zombies creepy on such a deep level is the fact that they don’t make sense. The dead stay dead, they don’t get up and start eating you. The Crazies magnifies this uncanny effect by setting the entire movie in a tiny isolated Iowa town where everyone knows everyone. It’s frightening not just because of the startles and mayhem you witness, but because deep down you know violence like this isn’t supposed to ever happen in small towns in America’s heartland. The Moral of the Story: The Crazies, as Fahey pointed out on Friday, is a remake of a 1973 movie of the same name. The 70s original was directed by the king of zombies himself: George A. Romero. Like other Romero movies, The Crazies was a film very much tied to the current events surrounding its release. While 1968’s Night of the Living Dead took careful aim at the American society of that decade, The Crazies seems more driven by the politics of its time, landing in the midst of a general distrust of the government driven by Vietnam, the Watergate imbroglio and President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. In the 70s version, the movie worked best as a critique of the moral ambiguity of Nixon and concerns over the war. That version followed a Vietnam veteran turned firefighter, and elements of the story included scenes of Washington politics. In the remake, the movie’s government is faceless and heartless. The only responsible party ever show is a sweaty white guy pulled from a Cadillac Escalade, who asks the hero sheriff “What do you expect of me.” “An apology,” is the reply, driving home, perhaps, the fact that the movie isn’t just talking about zombies, but something more. Scares: Fans of frightening movies should get a kick out of the flick’s skillful navigation around the typical startle moments in a scary movie. The mirror scare, the closet scare, the happy music scare, most of these and other horror cliches get little attention in this film, which instead finds new ways to squeeze our a few screams from its viewers. Tension: Early in, the movie slowly cranks up the emotional tension and it never turns it back down. The pacing delivers a taut tale, an unwavering movie that blasts past you in a single gasp. Tight editing, camera work and plot deliver a film with little wasted moments and no time to relax until the very, sadly expected ending. Hated Throwaway Cast: A sheriff, a nurse, a deputy, a frightened teen, The Crazies isn’t very creative in forming its band of survivors. Even the male to female ratio is dead on. With so little effort put into central characters, it would have been nice to see something interesting happen in terms of emotional development or relationships, but that too falls desperately short. Forgettable: Zombie movies have been done to death, recreating a 70s movie means that you’re starting out decades behind where horror movies have gone since. Unfortunately, The Crazies doesn’t seem to recognize that. The end result is a movie, that while not bad, is certainly forgettable. Maybe that’s worse. Too Safe: The scares, the themes, the gore are all very adult, but the terror of the movie feels watered down. It’s as if the team behind The Crazies were afraid to stray too far from the original, or push too hard against the conventions of zombie apocalypse movies. The Ending: If you’ve seen a zombie infestation movie, you know how this one ends. It’s unfortunate that a movie so smartly written manages to still fall back on the biggest zombie flick cliche of all, undermining all of that build up and subtext. The Crazies has its moments, it’s certainly a tense movie, but ultimately it doesn’t go far enough to deliver the scares or enough of the gore that fans of the genre will be expecting. I was expecting, hoping, for the sorts of moments that these movies are best at delivering: Frightening, unsettling tableaus of horror. The notion of a more meaningful theme in the movie also falls apart in the end with The Crazies ultimately falling back on a trite finale and half-baked conclusion. The Crazies was directed by Breck Eisner and distributed by Overture Films on Feb. 24. Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ .

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The Crazies Review: Left 4 Dead In a Small Town [Review]

Square Enix "Suspicious" That Avatar Was Influenced By Final Fantasy XIII [FFXIII]

Avatar, the biggest grossing film ever, looks familiar, says Square Enix’s Motomu Toriyama, director of Final Fantasy XIII. A little too familiar. “The in-game universe this time around is quite fantasy based, but also futuristic at the same time,” Toriyama told website Tech Digest in a recent interview. “We never really had any particular reference points for Final Fantasy XIII, in terms of places where we drew inspiration from. That said, we’re a little suspicious that the world famous Avatar movie might have take inspiration from us!” That’s right, because Final Fantasy XIII invented the fantasy-based, futuristic look! Of course it didn’t, and like me, Toriyama might have been joking. James Cameron began work on the script during the 1990s, but production on the film did lurk forward until 2006 — and Final Fantasy XIII was not officially shown until the E3 gaming expo of that same year. Avatar is a CG heavy film and took years to development. While it’s possible that the movie’s visual look was influenced by FFXIII (anything is possible), would the look of the entire film be based off a few trailers and a handful of screenshots? Final Fantasy XIII is the second game which has placed claims on Avatar inspiration. Previously, a group of gamers said Avatar looked too much like Halo, which is an assertion that director Cameron later refuted . Final Fantasy XIII ’s Motomu Toriyama and Yoshinori Kitase [Tech Digest via はちま起稿 ]

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Square Enix "Suspicious" That Avatar Was Influenced By Final Fantasy XIII [FFXIII]

Mile Marker 16: Vessel [The Road To The Igf]

Tired of stodgy corporate games made by The Man and his minions? We’re playing the 31 best indie games for a change of pace —- and so we can judge them. Today, Vessel. In A Sentence Man uses backpack that shoots fluids to solve puzzles in a 2D game that’s nothing like waterpack genre leader Super Mario Sunshine and instead an impressive, Totilo-Laptop-Crippling demonstration of fluid physics. State Of Completion Not playable by the public yet, the game is still in development but will be available to play in demo form at the Independent Games Festival in March. It got a nomination for Technical Excellence. Thoughts The earliest bits of Vessel ask you to manipulate levers and buckets to get fluid to fill into one container and then pour out into another. The way that liquid sloshes as you move the container from screen left to screen right is as impressive in the game as it is unimpressive when it happens in every real-world water bucket I’ve ever dragged. In other words, this game has the chops to do something realistically that other games simulate more simply and crudely. But what fun is a good fluid system in a game? That’s what Vessel needs to prove and begins to do so a little later when the protagonist is using a new, luminescent and sticky green fluid to light his path through a wall. Imagine a flashlight that was painting light on walls. And imagine you sometimes had to vacuum that paint back lest you have too little deeper in a dark cave. That’s a game going in the right direction. Answers We Demanded Kotaku: The entries of the IGF are an eclectic bunch, ranging from esoteric art titles to straight forward drop-in-and-play casual games. In creating your entry what do you hope to accomplish with your game? John Krajewski, Strange Loops Games : The reason we left the mainstream video game industry to go indie is because we want to take a different approach to games, we want to make games that focus the massive power of today’s hardware on gameplay, not just graphics. The gameplay of Vessel is centered around a physics and fluid simulation and interacting with fluid characters, which is something that chews up a lot of CPU cycles and wasn’t really possible in previous generation hardware. Our goal is to experiment with new kinds of gameplay that are just now becoming possible, that’s something we’re excited about. Kotaku: What was the inspiration behind your game? Krajewski: I remember the event that first pointed me in the direction of Vessel, I was playing with a middleware physics engine demo, something that showed off the abilities of their engine. It had mini-games like knocking over stacks of bricks, launching catapults, objects floating on water, and it was just so fun to mess around with, that little demo was actually more fun than the games that made use of the middleware. That seemed like such a strange contradiction to me, that these highly interactive physical universes were possible, but they were always being relegated to mere aesthetic purposes, rag-doll simulations and other non-interactive situations. I wanted to make a game that would let you just dive into the simulation. Kotaku: Name your favorite book, movie, album and game? Krajewski: Book: Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and 2001 Space Odyssey Album: Radiohead – OK Computer Game: Old-school Ultima Online, back in the chaotic early days Make sure to check out the rest of the Independent Games Festival finalists as we head toward the March awards show.

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Mile Marker 16: Vessel [The Road To The Igf]

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