FREE Vol 4 Issue 5 * Gaming Articles, Monthly Editorials & Remarkable Stories
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Celebrating Over 2 Years in Publication!!!
May 2010
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Date Set for 'Dark Knight' Sequel Warner Bros. has staked a claim on July 20th, 2012 for the sequel to the hugely successful The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan, who returns to direct his third Batfilm, is currently putting the finishing touches on Inception, which opens July 16th. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan is also starting to work with David Goyer to fashion the story for his third Batman movie. The film doesn’t yet have a title, and no date has been set for the start of production, but the July, 2012 debut means that the Batman opus will be Nolan’s next project. The third Batmovie opens just two-and-one-half weeks after Sony’s rebooted Spider-Man bows on July 3rd, which certainly won’t give the new Spidey franchise much “leg” room. The summer of 2012 is already shaping up as a very competitive season for pop culture-inspired tentpole films at the box office. Marvel’s Avengers kicks off the summer movie season on May 4th with the big screen adaptation of Hasbro’s Battleship set for May 25th, and a sequel to highly successful Star Trek reboot now set for June 29th followed by Spidey and Batman in July.
IDW Launching 'D&D' Comics IDW Publishing, under license from Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, will publish several all-new comic book series based on the Dungeons & Dragons Role-Playing Game. The first new series will begin with a Dungeons & Dragons Issue #0 in August with new monthly comics and reprints of past series launching in November. IDW’s Dungeons & Dragons comics will each offer new stories and playable characters to existing game campaigns. The first Dungeons & Dragons series will take place in the RPG’s core world. It will be followed in January, 2011 by a Dark Sun series, with plans to launch a Forgotten Realms series later. The individual D&D comics will be collected at intervals into graphic novels, which will be widely distributed in comic book shops, bookstores and in the mass market. Creative teams for the new series will be announced in the near future, but IDW has secured the services of fantasy painter Wayne Reynolds, who will supply the covers for the launch of each new series. The D&D comics represent another addition to IDW’s burgeoning line of licensed comic book series that also includes Transformers and G.I. Joe, which are both also licensed from Hasbro. G.A.M.E.R.S.
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REVIEW: Super Street Fighter IV Super Street Fighter IV is basically everything you know from the original SFIV, but with a host of improvements, balance tweaks, and new characters. In all, there are ten new characters; eight should be familiar to fans of the Street Fighter series. Dee Jay, Guy, Ibuki, Dudley, Makoto, Adon, Cody, and T. Hawk are all back in action, and they're joined by two completely new fighters: Juri, a Tae Kwon Do expert working for S.I.N., and Hakan, an oil wrestler with some of the most ridiculous-looking moves ever seen in a Street Fighter game. All ten characters, from my playtime with them, seem like they'll be viable choices for combat, although some will definitely take more practice to master than others. The biggest improvements that will be most immediately noticeable are in the online multiplayer modes. Rather than just having Ranked and Player matches, you now have the option of playing a ranked match, endless battle mode, or team battle. Ranked matches still function the same as they did before, although the point system has changed a bit. Player Points and Battle Points still exist, but where Player Points measure your overall skill as a player, Battle Points are character specific. Both values change any time you win or lose a match, but they can be helpful in showing you just how good someone is with the character they're playing. If you go up against a Fei Long with 1000 PP and 0 BP, it either means they've never played Fei Long before, or they're really bad with him. As your battle points with a character change, your battle class (a letter grade you're assigned to show your skill) increases or decreases, giving you another visual measure of a player's skill with specific characters. Endless battle is the new "player match" of Super, but this time around it's a much more social experience. Endless battle lobbies hold up to eight players, so you or your friends can jump in and take turns kicking each other's asses. Only two fighters can play at once, but everyone else in the lobby is able to spectate the match. The winner stays, the loser gets bumped to the bottom of the lobby, and the next person in line goes on to challenge the previous winner. Team battle is exactly what it sounds like. You can play 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4, and you simply set up your order and fight. If a player is knocked out, the next person in the battle order goes to fight, and the first team to have all their members defeated loses. The last major thing to talk about is the balance and gameplay changes. There's virtually no way to discuss all the ways they've tweaked each individual character, but on the whole all of the changes appear to have been made to make characters more competitive and fights closer. Dan still isn't going to be a top-tier character, but I'm willing to guess that with both the new characters and these tweaks, you'll be coming up against a more diverse selection of characters in online matches instead of playing against the same Sagat/Balrog/Ryu players over and over. The other major change that's occurred is that, with the exception of Dhalsim, damage has been reduced across the board for all other characters. When this was announced on the Capcom Unity blog I was pretty skeptical, but seeing it in practice has changed my mind. Matches now last longer, as making one mistake doesn't mean losing half your life bar (unless you get hit with an Ultra). This gives you an opportunity to learn from your mistakes, make some awesome comebacks, and overall the change surprisingly makes the fights feel much more intense. A decent portion of my matches have ended with both myself and my opponent down to our last 10 or 15 percent of life, something I feel happened relatively rarely in the original. The one major thing missing at this point is Tournament Mode, which will not be available out of the box. The Tournament mode is getting a major upgrade, and will feature an actual bracket system for four to eight players, with the ability for everyone to spectate matches and comment on them through voice chat so that all players can hear. Like Championship mode for Street Fighter IV, Tournament mode will be free DLC, and is expected to be released on June 15th. It's nice that it will be free again, and I understand that the delay is due to the new features and functionality, but it still would have been nice to have on day one. Capcom could easily have charged $59.99 for this, and I would have bought it in a second. At $39.99, it's a crazy deal. Any Street Fighter fans, even those who quit playing the original and moved on, should be picking up Super. If you missed out on Street Fighter IV but are interested in fighting games, Super is an excellent purchase for you as well. Personally, I consider Street Fighter IV to be one of the best fighting games we've seen in a long time, and Super Street Fighter IV does nothing but improve on it. Buy this game. Score: 9.5
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'Dark Tower' to Ron Howard? Bad Robot Ankles Project
Stephen King’s magnum opus The Dark Tower, which spans seven massive novels, won’t be the next project for Lost producer Damon Lindelof. In fact, Lindelof and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions have returned the rights to the epic saga to King. A year ago The Dark Tower was a key component of the deal between Bad Robot and Paramount with Lindelof reportedly chomping at the bit to adapt the King saga as soon as his chores on Lost were done (see “Lindelof to Tackle Dark Towers”). According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment and their house screenwriter Akiva Goldsman “are teaming up to tackle the fantasy western.” The plan is to begin the massive adaptation process with a movie that will be written by Goldsman, directed by Howard and released by Universal. The movie would be followed by TV series produced by Imagine’s TV division. Conceived as an epic hybrid that melds the spaghetti western with a Tolkien-style fantasy saga, The Dark Tower is currently being adapted into a very successful comic book series published by Marvel.
New 'Beyblade' Anime Debuts This June Corus Entertainment has announced that the latest anime iteration of the Beyblade franchise, Beyblade: Metal Fusion, will premiere in the U.S. on the Cartoon Network starting on Saturday, June 26th at 7:30 am (ET, PT). The 51-episode series, which began airing in Japan in April of 2009, has revitalized the franchise there with sales of more than 17 million metal-geared Beyblade tops making Beyblade once again one of the top toy franchises in Japan last year. Hasbro, which has North American rights to the Beyblade toy franchise, is clearly hoping to rejuvenate the toy line here with an extensive line of Beyblade: Metal Fusion tops that is now expected to debut here in the late summer or early fall. The new Metal Fusion anime series is a spin-off from the three original Beyblade anime series that aired in Japan from 2001 to 2003. The new series was created by Tatsunoko Pro and Synergy SP, and co-produced by Nelvana. It features all new characters and a new storyline that emphasizes individual battles rather than team battles as the young heroes battle against the evil organization known as The Dark Nebula. Fifty-six episodes have already aired in Japan, which means that it could run longer than 51 episodes here in North America, if it proves to be a hit with kids. G.A.M.E.R.S.
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