From time to time we come across things on the periphery of gaming, or even outside of the subject all together, that we think would still be of interest to our readers and post them here with the tag “Splash Damage”. Movies are one of the subjects that frequently finds its way on to the pages of GameAlmighty with that tag and one of last year’s movies I was most anxious to watch and then review here came and went before I had a chance to see it in theaters. The film I missed tells the timeless tale of two cultures in conflict. One is comprised of a dark-skinned race of people who are misunderstood and are being exploited by another group who considers themselves superior. In an attempt to gain total control the second group hatches a plot that takes advantage of medical science and uses the enemy’s own bodies against themselves. They also lie to one of the males and trick him into working as their inside man in order to keep the peace and prevent larger-scale violence and destruction.
While it sounds like I may be describing Avatar, that’s actually the plot of a different movie mentioned more than a time or two on our sister site, InfoAddict. The smaller independent film I am referring to is Black Dynamite and it had so limited a release for such a short span of time that I never could find it playing anywhere close at a time where I could make it.
It’s that time of year again. Love is in the air, suicide rates are spiking, and businesses everywhere are lying and trying to take advantage of you. Some companies are spending millions in television advertising to convince you that buying pajamas on the internet will get you laid. Or perhaps the woman you desire will finally surrender to you once she sees that you’ve bought her a teddy bear that cost more than the Prestige Edition of Modern Warfare 2? What about diamonds, or the boxes of chocolates where you only end up getting one or two bites of the one you really like? Maybe a really expensive, super-special arrangement of flowers from that guy with the commercials who gives off the distinct impression he might be considering marriage someday in the state where they make the pricey teddy bears? That’s not likely to do it either.
The brutal truth is that the only people guaranteed to be stimulated this evening are the flower shop owners and Hallmark store managers. Plus, in the opinion of this aging writer, if you’re having to pay for it you’re with the type of chick you might as well try and get the money back from once she’s refilled your health meter. Instead you need to keep your Modern Warfare 2 NVGs turned on and eyes peeled for the type of girl that cares more about a players Mana then his gold. A woman who’ll start an Army of Two with you and always give her all playing Co-op even when you’re wounded and it looks like you won’t have ammo enough to make it to the next save checkpoint.
In an amazing display of honor and integrity possibly extinct amongst American businesses, Toyota Motor Corp. CEO and President Akio Toyoda declined to accept an award from the Japanese Government for the Prius model’s energy efficiency. The Prius was on of 3 products this selected this year to receive the Grand Prize for Energy Efficiency and Ecological Quality from Japan’s Trade Minister.
Referring to the recent voluntary recall of 437,000 Prius for possible brake problems, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco said, “We declined to accept the award because we thought it was not appropriate.” Toyota made the decision to recall the Prius amongst the recent recall of a total of 8.5 million other Toyota autos after receiving only 200 complaints total in both the U.S. and Japan of the hybrid experiencing a braking delay in very specific cold weather conditions over very bumpy roads.
I have a real Love/Hate relationship with the Ghost Recon franchise. Being an OG Rainbow Six fan, I loved the original idea behind the Ghost Recon IP – it was meant to be the larger squad & platoon-focused traditional military counterpart to Rainbow’s team-based, close-quarters battle and hostage rescue tactics. Well it wasn’t long before Ubisoft decided to monkey with that in order to adapt Ghost Recon to consoles. A decision I seriously hated. What was almost just as frustrating though was that most of the Ghost Recon games since the transition have been pretty damn good. I hope that still holds true for the latest game in the franchise – Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. It is impossible to tell from the teaser trailer which has just snuck onto YouTube from Xbox Live. In the video there doesn’t seem to be any actual gameplay footage, but there’s still enough there to get this old fan interested. I just hope they can begin making some strides back toward larger unit tactics so the games start to feel less like Rainbow Six clones again.
(Video after the break.)
Also, am I the only one, or do the guys that materialize at the end look suspiciously like the army of cursed spirits Aragorn recruited to sweep over the army of orcs in one of the Lord of the Rings films?
We get a lot of press releases sent to us. Myself, it’s not unusual to see near a hundred of them hit my inbox in a day. With that much competition, its hard to capture our attention. But when I glimpsed an email saying that development studio “Bloober Team” is announcing the first title being developed exclusively for the iPad, and their calling it “Gender Wars: The Battle”, I couldn’t help but sit up and take notice. When I then read that the lead designer described the game like this,
“In a way, and I understand that it’s bit bold to say, we would like to create something similar to Metal Gear Solid for iPad.”
I start to scratch my head and a confused look passes over my face. Gender Wars? Solid Snake?
But it doesn’t end there so I am posting the original press release in full (minus legally sensitive info, of course) after the break so you can read it for yourself. It’s one of the stranger ones we have ever come across and was either written by some kind of genius, or someone on acid. We’ve also posted the game’s sole screenshot to be released so far. (For those not sure about clicking through, the screenshot does not contain any images of Gender-specific anatomical parts battling it out.)
Here are both the screenshot and the press release:
I just suffered through one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it; I was just going to let it pass and hide my shame for even having voluntarily seen the film because I should have known better. However the filmmakers appear to have a huge marketing budget that they’re using to push the damn movie relentlessly through posters at every bus stop and an ad during every commercial break. The movie is “Gamer,” and being one myself, it got me thinking about what the film says about this very unique and diverse classification of people.
Before “Gamer” I had never seen any other films by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor who’d both written and directed it and I had no idea that they already had a reputation, of sorts. Their previous movies are Crank, and Crank: High Voltage which I’ve heard many describe simply as “hectic.” (They are also currently working on Crank 3, said to be in 3D, and finishing up Jonah Hex, which IMDb has explained like this: “In the Wild West, a scarred bounty hunter tracks a voodoo practitioner bent on liberating the South by raising an army of the undead.”)
In the special features of the “Gamer” DVD they themselves said, “Watching [our movies] is like audience torture. We were talking about this the other day, like, not only do we torture our characters [...] but we torture our audience. It’s like hitting them over the head with a ball pein hammer for 90 minutes.”
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(Ratings Average: 4.50 out of 5)
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