Tagged: game

LEGO Batman Happy Meals

LEGO Batman Happy Meals

  • News
  • September 17, 2008

September 23rd, hurry up and get here already. All we ever seem to do is build up anticipation for the LEGO Batman videogame (coming to every now-gen game system). To forget about my lack Batman brick bashing I went to McDonald’s for a healthy salad. Really. I swear.

But what do I see spotlighted like the Batsignal, but Happy Meal toys based on LEGO Batman. I can’t escape their cute, grim visages. Offered toys include Batman with Batarang, Robin with Grappling Hook, the Batboat, the Joker Helicopter, Mister Freeze with Ice Blast, the Batmobile, the Penguin Submarine, and the Joker Surprise.

“Is this for your boy or girl?”

“Uhhh… My boy. Yes, my son. Whom I have at home. Waiting for his Happy Meal. By the way, which toy am I getting?”

See the McDonald’s promo page for the LEGO Batman Happy Meals here.

 

Webcomics You Should Be Reading: ‘Darths & Droids’

Webcomics You Should Be Reading: ‘Darths & Droids’

  • Uncategorized
  • September 8, 2008

Though Star Wars fandom is full of disagreements and divisions, most of us fanboys are in agreement about a few things: Jedi, lightsabers and force powers are awesome. Anything Timothy Zahn writes is going to be better than anything Kevin J. Anderson writes. And Lucas probably would have had a better script for The Phantom Menace if he’d hired a seven-year-old to write it.

Enter the Comic Irregulars (Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick, and Steven Irrgang), who you might recall from their work on the action figure/photo capture comic Irregular Webcomic. Inspired by Shamus Young’s work on DM of the Rings, they ask the question, “What if Star Wars was a roleplaying campaign that went far, far away from what the Game Master intended?”

And thus was born Darths & Droids.

The comic is set in a universe where Star Wars never existed, and the unnamed game master/narrator has designed the world from scratch for his game. Before the game begins, the players don’t know anything at all about Jedi, or Tatooine, the Skywalker family, because they only exist in the GM’s mind. The setting is built up over the course of the story in response to what the players do, and what they do is never what the GM expects, in a classic roleplaying maneuver known as “going off the rails.”

The plot follows Jim (playing Qui-Gon), Ben (playing Obi-Wan), and three other players who join later as they demonstrate why you shouldn’t make laser swords the cheapest available weapons, why you shouldn’t bring your little sister to roleplaying group, and how much more sense the plot of Episode I makes when filtered through the chaotic lens of a roleplaying game.

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Review: ‘Scout, Vol. 2’ by Timothy Truman

Review: ‘Scout, Vol. 2’ by Timothy Truman

Scout, Volume Two
By Timothy Truman
Dynamite Entertainment, July 2008, $19.95

This, as you might have guessed from the title of the book, is the second collection of Tim Truman’s [[[Scout]]] series, originally published over twenty-four issues starting in 1987 from Eclipse Comics. (You young ‘uns won’t know from Eclipse, but they were one of the major “indy” comics companies, back before anybody used that term.) The first Scout collection came out last year, and I reviewed it then.

To recap: Scout is set in a world of the worst fears of mid-‘80s liberals: global warming ran riot, turning most of the US into a desert; the US government collapsed into corporate fascism; the US economy basically dried up and blew away; and everything generally went to hell. It also went to hell really, really quickly, since Scout starts in 1999, only twelve years after it was originally published. By the beginning of this volume – the eighth issue and the start of a new plotline – it’s possibly a year later than that, but everything is still horrible, and getting even worse. (It’s one of those post-apocalypse settings in which regular people, like you and me, seem to have all died off quietly, without even leaving rotting corpses or giant piles of bones behind, so that the tough survivalist types can battle it out over the scarce resources left.)

But Scout’s world is different from our own in other ways: it’s not really a science-fictional world, despite being set in the near future. Various kinds of magic and mysticism really do work, and our hero, former Army Ranger Emanuel Santana, is explicitly on a mission to destroy a series of legendary monsters that are behind the USA’s troubles. (The first storyline was called “[[[The Four Monsters]]];” in that, he tracked down and killed four monsters from Apache mythology, all masquerading as powerful humans. At the beginning of this volume, his spirit guide – a talking prairie dog called Gahn – leads Santana to the next monster, which is a part of him.)

 

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George Lucas Hangs Up The iPhone

George Lucas Hangs Up The iPhone

  • News
  • August 11, 2008

Those who own or know people who own an iPhone have probably come in contact with an application that has been on the iTunes top 25 applications since the birth of the App Store, and easily one of the most entertaining. The PhoneSaber app is a very simple yet enjoyable application which uses the accelerometer of the iPhone, turning the phone into a makeshift Lightsaber, sounds and all – minus the ability to cut off your bastard son’s hand.

Well, it looks as if Star Wars creator and ultimate ruiner of all things good George Lucas has expressed that he is not pleased with the fact that there is a Lightsaber application, seeing as how his video game developer, LucasArts, along with sister company THQ, have all the rights for handheld Star Wars video games. This coming on the heels of the I Am Rich App scandal, Apple has pulled the popular PhoneSaber from the App Store.

There are currently talks about LucasArts retooling the application under thier name to coincide with the "Unleashing the Force" iPhone game later this year, with better functionality (and a price). Either way, if you own the application, and don’t feel like spending $4.99 in six months to buy the exact same thing, make sure you don’t delete it in a fit of rebellion.

Jeffrey Brown Does ‘Warhammer’ Benefit

  • News
  • August 5, 2008

Earlier this year, retailer David Pirkola was seriously injured during a robbery of his comic shop in Kentwood, Mich. He’s still recovering, and now Boom! Studios and Jeffrey Brown are launching a benefit auction.

Brown is a customer and friend of Pirkola, and he partnered with Boom and iFanboy.com to do a tribute page of the Warhammer 40,000 comic, which you can see at right.

The auction is now running, and you can find it right here.

Brown is best known for his book The Incredible Change-Bots. Here’s his thoughts from a press release:

"I became a father a year and a half ago, so it’s been a while since I’ve had the time to field my Ultramarines force or let my epic scale ork gargants rampage across the battlefield," said Brown. "I keep up with the comics, novels, and White Dwarf magazine, but spend more time playing with buses and trucks now. It was a great experience to work on this page and get back to the game that I love, and it was even better knowing I could help David by doing it."

Marvel Debuts ‘Ultimate Alliance 2’ Video Game Trailer

Marvel Debuts ‘Ultimate Alliance 2’ Video Game Trailer

At New York’s E3 video game expo, trailer’s have debuted for a couple big upcoming comic book video games, with the more notable being DC’s huge DC Universe Online game. Marvel also has Ultimate Alliance 2 in the works, though its preview was much shorter.

See the trailer below.

 

Review: ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’ by Joshua W. Cotter

Review: ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’ by Joshua W. Cotter

Skyscrapers of the Midwest
By Joshua W. Cotter
AdHouse Books, June 2008, $19.95

If Chris Ware were a few years younger, grew up in a more religious household, and had less of an obsession with comics formalism, he just might have become Joshua Cotter. Or maybe that’s just me being flippant – it isn’t really fair to Cotter; his work covers some of the same emotional terrain as Ware’s, but is otherwise very different.

[[[Skyscrapers]]] is difficult to describe; it’s made up of many short stories – sometimes as many as three to a page – that mostly focus on a family in the small town of South Nodaway, somewhere in the vast American Midwest in 1987. There’s also the robot Nova Stealth, who is both the human-sized hero of a Marvel-ish comic the elder boy of the family loves, that boy’s robot toy, and a gigantic god-figure stalking across the landscape, sometimes in imagination but other times clearly real. And then there are the stories that get into really weird stuff.

The stories mostly focus on the family’s ten-year-old son, who is never named. Neither are his father or mother, though his younger brother Jeffrey has the same name as Cotter’s own younger brother (to whom the book is dedicated). And Cotter was born in 1977, which would make him ten year old in 1987 – the same age as his fifth-grade hero. So we do know a name for this boy, even if that name never appears in the book.

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Review: ‘Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel’

Review: ‘Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel’

Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel
By Jordan Mechner, A.B. Sina, LeUyen Pham, and Alex Puvilland
First Second, September 2008, $18.95

The first [[[Prince of Persia]]] game was a 2-D platformer almost twenty years ago, and the next big thing with the name Prince of Persia on it will be a major Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie next summer. In between have been a number of games, with a number of different protagonists and plotlines. (And I’ve played exactly none of them, as far as I can remember – just to make that clear.) This year, in between the games and the movie, First Second is publishing a graphic novel loosely based on the series – or at least the title. It’ll be in stores in September.

This graphic novel is credited as “created” by Mechner (seemingly because he invented the original game, and maybe still owns a piece of it), written by Sina, and with art by Pham and Puvilland. And, as far as I can tell, the story here has nothing specific to do with any of the previous incarnations of Prince of Persia. (If I’m wrong, please correct me in comments.)

In this graphic novel, you actually get two stories for the price of one – they’re told intermingled, though, which can make it difficult to remember which story a particular panel belongs to, or which characters belong to which stories. (Evil, nasty overlords being depressingly common in stories like this, for example.) I did read Prince of Persia in bound galley form, though – without color – so it’s quite possible that the palette of the two stories are different enough to make that distinction clear in the final book.

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Science Friction, by Dennis O’Neil

Science Friction, by Dennis O’Neil

The following will be about a column I didn’t write and it’s Vinnie Bartilucci’s fault. But that’s okay. I forgive him.

What Mr. Batilucci did was beat me to recommending Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku. This Mr. B. did in a comment on last week’s column which, some may remember, described how awkward I felt being a published science fiction writer who was abysmally ignorant of science and how one of my earliest attempts at remedy of this ignorance was reading One…Two…Three…Infinity, by George Gamow.

My plan was to save recommending Dr. Kaku’s much more recent book – it’s on current best-seller lists, in fact – for this week.

Said recommendation would have come at the end of a blather that would have mentioned yet another elderly book, The Two Cultures, by a remarkable man who was both a scientist and novelist named C.P. Snow. According to the endlessly useful Wikipedia, “its thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the “two cultures” of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems.” I encountered Mr. Snow’s slim volume in college, probably when I should have been reading something some teacher had assigned, and it must have impressed me. (I mean, here we are, all these years later, and I still remember it.) The unwritten column would have culminated in the reiteration of something I mentioned some months ago, advice from my first comic book boss, Stan Lee. Stan said, in effect, that it’s a waste of space to “explain” comic book “science” because readers will accept what we tell them.

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Grand Theft Auto IV: Less NYC, More Chicago’s South Side?

Grand Theft Auto IV: Less NYC, More Chicago’s South Side?

The hub-bub over the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV is finally starting to die down, but of all the stories popping up around the InterWebs about the controversial videogame, one really caught my eye.

Slate recently posted an analysis of the real-world dynamics of life on the wrong side of the law – and those who are forced to live and work with that dynamic every day – as echoed in GTA IV. While the landscape of the videogame is based on the New York City Metro area, the author contends that the true real-world equivalent of life in the GTA IV universe can be found in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods.

The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59th Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by other enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.

Author Sudhir Venkatesh goes on to compare the decisions GTA IV’s protagonist must make over the course of the game, and compares those choices to many of those made by residents of South Side streets where the criminal element provides the only semblance of structure.

Read the full article on Slate.com.

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