Meet Yakuza 3’s Real Life Tattoo Artist [Yakuza]

One of the most interesting things about Yakuza 3 is how you keep running into men with enormous, fantastic tattoos. Well, those tats are the work of one man: Kazuaki Kitamura. More

NIER Interview 1

We speak to executive producer Yosuke Saito about his work on Nier.

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NIER Interview 1

NIER Interview 1

We speak to executive producer Yosuke Saito about his work on Nier.

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NIER Interview 1

Alice In Wonderland Movie Review: A Bitter Underland [Review]

Tim Burton once again treads on sacred fantasy ground in Alice in Wonderland, a twisted take on Lewis Carroll’s classic novels. How far down the rabbit hole does Burton go? Alice in Wonderland is a new movie from Tim Burton based on a classic work of literary fantasy, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, not to be confused with most of Burton’s other films. Rather than creating a film based directly off Lewis Carroll’s famous works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Burton has opted to tell his own story, using Carroll’s iconic characters and unique fantasy setting. Is that a wise idea? We’ve seen the concept done right before, most famously in America McGee’s Alice. McGee’s vision of an older Alice, driven mad by survivor’s guilt, returning to a Wonderland transformed by her own madness, was as disturbing as it was poignant, while building off Carroll’s original work in a way that made sense in the grand scheme of things. Burton’s new movie features a 19 year-old Alice who’s forgotten all about the Wonderland (or Underland, as Burton rechristens it) of her childhood, preparing for her engagement to a wealthy young lord. Panicking at the moment of truth, Alice flees into the woods, falls down a rabbit hole, and finds herself in a strange world that remembers her, even if she doesn’t remember it. A prophetic scroll reveals that Alice is fated to become the savior of Underland, slaying a terrible beast of legend and freeing the land of the Red Queen’s tyranny. It’s about this time that Lewis Carroll fans begin to feel desperately ill, and I don’t want to be responsible for any violent heaving due to continuing on with the plot synopsis. Let’s just get straight to the review instead. Loved Bizarre Landscapes: Visually, Wonderland, or Underland, as it’s called in the movie, is a real treat. The bizarre landscapes that Alice and her odd companions wander through are unique and appealing, even if Burton couldn’t resist including a few spirals and topiary animal sculptures. It’s his thing, you know. I expected much worse, only to be delighted that Burton has either mellowed a bit with age or someone reined him in before he made this world into A Nightmare Before Wonderland. Sorry, Underland. Talking With The Animals: Due to some of the issues I had with the “human” actors in the movie, many of my favorite scenes involved the various CGI animals populating Underland. The worrisome White Rabbit, maniacally Scottish March Hare, and standoffish Dormouse stole many a scene, while Alan Rickman’s voice lent weight to the cryptic words of the hookah smoking Caterpillar. Trumping all of them, however, was comedian Stephen Fry’s turn as the Cheshire Cat, managing to win my heart despite looking like a cross between the live-action Garfield and Nightcrawler from the X-Men movies. Another Score For Danny Elfman: I’ve been a big fan of Danny Elfman’s movie music since the original Batman films, though I, like many others, have felt his work with Burton was getting a bit too formulaic. While he does explore some familiar territory with the Alice score (a women’s chorus lala-ing is one of Elfman’s trademarks), he seems to have matured somewhat, creating a sweeping fantasy score that is just as important (or possibly more so) to the film than the plot or the actors. Hated Through The Looking Glass Darkly: This is not Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Hell, this isn’t even Disney’s Wonderland. Rather than the fine episodic tales presented in the original works, or the woefully inaccurate yet appealing animated movie, this is a story of a young woman learning to make her own way in the world, not living life to please others, using Wonderland as a backdrop. Burton takes elements from Carroll’s works, tosses them in a blender, and pours them out into a mold more fitting his vision as a director and storyteller. Unfortunately it’s a mold he’s used far too often, and the ingredients he adds to help make the story his own – his wife, the Mad Hatter’s origin story, and renaming Wonderland to Underland – feel forced rather than natural. I won’t even get into the plot revolving around Alice being the chosen one who must defeat the Jabberwocky on the Frabjous Day with the Vorpal sword. My head will explode. It’s a generic fantasy film that Burton is trying to liven up by including well-known characters from a beloved franchise. It’s the movie equivalent of Sonic & The Black Knight. What Big Eyes You Have: How was the acting in Alice in Wonderland? It’s hard to say, mainly because 80% of the human characters in the film have been twisted into hideous mockeries of real people, thanks to the magic of truly awful computer effects. Helena Bonham Carter’s oversized head is the most distracting thing since Helena Bonham Carter’s actual head. They’ve taken Crispin Glover, already a wiry sort of fellow, and stretched him to ridiculous proportions, and sat him upon a CGI horse with a bad frame rate. I have no idea what they did to Johnny Depp’s eyes, but it makes him painful to watch, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum, both portrayed by Matt Lucas, just seem wrong. That’s the only word I can come up with. Wrong. Not only do these CGI distortions make these bizarre characters nearly unwatchable, their outrageouseness completely overshadows Mia Wasikowska’s already understated performance as Alice. Then again, considering most of the marketing material for the movie features the Mad Hatter instead of the titular heroine, maybe that was the point all along. Useless 3D: Alice in Wonderland doesn’t seem to be a movie that was made with 3D in mind, yet most of the theaters showing it in my area force you to don a pair of plastic 3D glasses to watch the film. Watching a movie with glasses on top of my regular vision correction lenses is uncomfortable enough, but when the payoff is this minimal, it’s hardly worth the effort. Aside from a few bits of scenery and some background creatures flying towards the screen, most of the 3D effects in the movie are simple depth perception tricks. In fact, it almost feels like some of the 3D elements were added after the fact, without any real thought as to how they would affect the film, such as branches in the foreground as characters travel through the forest, obscuring your view of the action, as it were. If you wind up seeing the 2D version of the movie, don’t worry – you’re not missing anything. Of all the variations on the Alice in Wonderland story I’ve seen over the years, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is by far the loosest interpretation of the source material, if you could even call it an interpretation. Burton has said that he never connected emotionally with the original story of Alice, and wanted to make his movie feel more like a story rather than a series of character meetings. This isn’t a sequel to the original Alice, or even a re-imagining. Instead, Burton treats the original story like so much wrapping paper, using the familiar characters and concepts to tell the story he wanted to tell, about a woman triumphing over societies preconceived notions of who and what she should be, by traveling to a fantasy world and becoming exactly what this other society expects her to be. Burton’s twisted sense of art design may have mellowed over the years, but it’s been replaced with a twisted sense of plot, resulting in a tangled mess of a movie hanging onto Carroll’s work like a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood. Alice in Wonderland was directed by Tim Burton, released on March 5th by Walt Disney Pictures. Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ .

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Alice In Wonderland Movie Review: A Bitter Underland [Review]

Video Games’ Team Coco Moment [Feature]

Billions of dollars? Got it. ” Astonishing arrogance and unbridled greed “? Alleged. Video games are so close to being Hollywood, that we must celebrate a breakthrough: A possibly boring contract dispute that could be as juicy as Leno vs. Conan. We’ve got an executive that the Internet fans love to hate . We’ve got not one, but two top creative guys kicked out of a job that they seemed to be doing well. The analogy fractures if we add that these two men, Jason West and Vince Zampella, are more successful in their field than Conan ever was. They crushed more competition than Leno. They have run a development studio called Infinity Ward that just created the other billion-dollar entertainment spectacle of the fall , Modern Warfare 2. That’s the one without the blue cat aliens; it’s the single-player and multiplayer game of war loved and played by millions on Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s day after day, the game Ice-T loves and the one that had a midnight launch attended by James Gandolfini, who just stopped by to see if he could grab a copy for his son. You’d think they would be the kings of the world after creating a game like that or even guests on somebody’s Tonight Show. No, they were fired on Monday. Given that they were fired — given that games are supposedly an enormous cultural force — then you might expect an Internet uprising. Changed photos in your Facebook feed. Virtual pep rallies in Twitter. If video games were as huge as the video game people say they are, you’d expect the entertainment world to be buzzing that two more Conan-like nice guys whose work is loved by 18-34-year-olds got (allegedly) screwed by a big corporation. Shoved aside after a job seemingly well done. Replaced by some interloper who will sit in their chair, behind their desk, handling their coffee mug and entertaining their audience. ” Insubordination ” the company says, but not yet making public any insubordinate acts. For at least 10 years, maybe 20, video games have been on a quest for Hollywood-level respect. The millions in sales and the billions of dollars have helped the entertainment world’s little brother get some proper credit. But the whole effort’s been a little weird, because the gaming world doesn’t play out the way the rest of the entertainment world does. Take the sex scandals. They don’t involve anyone sleeping with anyone. They involve where there are naked bodies in a game a kid might play. The awards shows get red carpets full of people People wouldn’t recognize or Kiefer Sutherland accepting his award for voice-acting in a game, complaining about how dreary the work was. Games are still figuring out how to be big-Hollywood. Maybe this week’s events can help, if we can just frame them right. Attempt: Bobby Kotick is Jeff Zucker, the guy who brought Leno back and let Conan walk. Well, Kotick is the Darth Vader even, though, he recently said that, despite saying he wanted to take fun out of game-making, he thought of himself as Luke Skywalker . Kotick’s company bought Zampella and West’s Infinity Ward about a decade ago. The two developers had already brought Steven Spielberg’s World War II video game series Medal of Honor series to dominance with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Then, for Kotick’s Activision, they and their team created a Medal of Honor competitor, Call of Duty, and beat their old series. Their second Call of Duty trumped the first. Activision let a different one of its studios make the third Call of Duty. West and Zampella’s made the fourth, a phenomenon that sold 13 million copies. The next events in this saga would be contract stuff and rivalry . Itching to make something of their own, West and Zampella carved out an agreement with parent company Activision, one of those oddly specific deals like giving somebody the Tonight Show in five years. Their understanding , written out for the lawyers, wasn’t public, but this week’s lawsuit described an arrangement that permitted only West and Zampella’s team at Infinity Ward make a Call of Duty set after Vietnam. And, according to a lawsuit, it would entitle West and Zampella creative freedom, say-so over the Modern Warfare branch of Call of Duty games and royalties. The ousting of these guys would be the thing that make fans rally, but only if fans knew who Jason West and Vince Zampella are. They are extraordinarily successful game developers with a typical game developer trait: Their presence in the public spotlight is only slightly more pronounced than J.D. Salinger’s. They and the rest of their studio refrained from press attention, even in the fall when TV news stations became interested in their last game letting players, as an undercover CIA officer, participate in a terrorist act. West and Zampella are out. Infinity Ward has a new boss. And Call of Duty continues to have other people in the kitchen Infinity Ward and Activision built: a new Activision studio called Sledgehamer and an old one called Treyarch. The latter had been making Call of Duty games during Infinity Ward’s off years — it takes two years to make a Call of Duty game — and Infinity Ward’s feelings about someone else working their stove were poorly masked . When Conan got the offer he could refuse, to move his Tonight Show to midnight, he became a brighter pop culture star and the most widely-supported unemployed millionaire of the current recession. The firing of West and Zampella, the dismissal of the top two men from the top series in video games today, has caused smaller ripples. It’s big news, but not pop culture buzz. The NBC suits may have been right about Conan. Leno was back this week, beating Letterman just as he did when he left. Conan’s on Twitter joking about French Fries. But Conan fans can at least rest assured that those NBC suits felt some heat. West and Zampella don’t have many people Tweeting their names or even knowing them. Their studio, Infinity Ward, is in transition under new leadership. And Call of Duty soldiers forward. With this one there may not even be a change in quality. It’s too early to say and therefore too early for Modern Warfare fans to panic. But if there’s a time to protest, this is it. If there’s a time for video games to prove they are big enough that even their scandals and contractual disputes can generate buzz, that is now. We might not have even figured who the bad guy is yet. Perhaps Darth Vader really is Luke. Perhaps the “insubordination” was indefensible. But are Zampella and West the new Conan? Check Twitter. [West and Zampella PIC ] [Team Coco modified image by Kotaku]

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Video Games’ Team Coco Moment [Feature]

Infinity Ward Founders Suing Activision Over Unpaid Royalties [Activision]

Jason West and Vince Zampella, the men at the centre of this week’s drama at Call of Duty developers Infinity Ward , have filed suit against Activision over claims they are owed “substantial royalty payments”. “Activision has refused to honor the terms of its agreements and is intentionally flouting the fundamental public policy of this State (California) that employers must pay their employees what they have rightfully earned,” said the pair’s attorney, Robert Schwartz, of law firm O’Melveny & Myers. “Instead of thanking, lauding, or just plain paying Jason and Vince for giving Activision the most successful entertainment product ever offered to the public, last month Activision hired lawyers to conduct a pretextual ‘investigation’ into unstated and unsubstantiated charges of ‘insubordination’ and ‘breach of fiduciary duty,’ which then became the grounds for their termination on Monday, March 1st.” West and Zampella are coming out swinging. “We were shocked by Activision’s decision to terminate our contract,” Jason West says. “We poured our heart and soul into that company, building not only a world class development studio, but assembling a team we’ve been proud to work with for nearly a decade. We think the work we’ve done speaks for itself.” “After all we have given to Activision, we shouldn’t have to sue to get paid”, Zampella adds. Interestingly, in addition to seeking the unpaid royalties, the pair are also after “the contractual rights Activision granted to West and Zampella to control Modern Warfare-branded games”. Whether that means they want to make “Modern Warfare” games without Activision, or would seek to have the brand buried if it’s without their input, is unclear. We’ll update when we hear more.

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Infinity Ward Founders Suing Activision Over Unpaid Royalties [Activision]

Former Dead Or Alive Designer Talks Fighting Games [Tomonobu Itagaki]

Before the brouhaha at Tecmo, game designer Tomonobu Itagaki made a name for himself making fighting games. He’s currently working on another title, which he hinted at last year. Does that mean we’ll see another fighting game from him? “Because I made the best fighting game in the world, Dead or Alive, at my former employer,” Itagaki told Japanese game magazine Famitsu, “it’s futile to do battle with my own daughter.” Like most creators who view their work as their children, Itagaki clearly views the series as his daughter, and it sounds like he is apparently ready to move on. “Fighting games today are at an impasse,” Itagaki added. According to him, the fighting game, DOA withstanding, generation ended a long time ago. Itagaki also revealed that his new title is being developed on new game engine that has been built by assembling world class tech.

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Former Dead Or Alive Designer Talks Fighting Games [Tomonobu Itagaki]

NSFW: Heavy Rain Glitch Brings Playable, Accidental Nudity [PS3]

Reader kuroner says that while playing Heavy Rain the other day, he stumbled on a little glitch. One that leaves one of the game’s stars, Madison Page, completely naked. SPOILERS He says that following the love scene between Ethan and Madison in “On The Loose”, in which he declined the kiss but ended up triggering the sequence anyways, he reloaded his save game later and bam. There was Madison. Playable, and in naught but her birthday suit. END SPOILERS Seeing as a fully naked model of Madison exists in the game already, from her shower scene earlier in the story, this is definitely something that’s within the realms of possibility. While you mull over the clip below (which is NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK ), be thankful the glitch affects Madison, and not someone else. Like Scott. Or the clown .

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NSFW: Heavy Rain Glitch Brings Playable, Accidental Nudity [PS3]

The Underclass of the Japanese Gaming Industry [Japan]

The pay? According to some, it sucks. Programming Japanese video games might seem like a glamourous job to those outside the industry, but according to some on the inside, it pays peanuts. A thread on Japanese bulletin board 2ch asked Japanese game industry programmers about how much they made each month. These 2ch salary claims, of course, are anonymous and unverified. Here are some of the replies (translated by CNNGo): • “

The Underclass of the Japanese Gaming Industry [Japan]

The pay? According to some, it sucks. Programming Japanese video games might seem like a glamourous job to those outside the industry, but according to some on the inside, it pays peanuts. A thread on Japanese bulletin board 2ch asked Japanese game industry programmers about how much they made each month. These 2ch salary claims, of course, are anonymous and unverified. Here are some of the replies (translated by CNNGo): • “

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