The news earlier this year that Bungie had signed a publishing agreement with Activision-Blizzard to create a multiplatform game rocked the game world to its roots. This is the developer that created Halo, the games series that has carried Microsoft’s Xbox brand on its shoulders from the day it was born. But at least Bungie gifted Microsoft with a magnificent parting shot in the form of Halo Reach before it leaves the franchise behind for good.
Browsing: Lance Harris
American indie films, at their worst, tend to confuse slightness with subtlety and artlessness with authenticity. Many of them take the form of inert slice-of-life pieces that have no greater ambition than to present the unvarnished reality of life of in middle-class America.
If Mafia 2, the new game from 2K Czech is to be believed, life as a mob wiseguy in the 1950s was less like The Godfather and more like Driving Miss Daisy. After spending 12 hours completing the game, the memories that linger are those of driving from one side of Empire Bay to the other at 30 miles an hour in a car that handles with the finesse of an ocean liner.
Nicolas Cage stars in two films that open on SA screens this week. Unfortunately, you’ll really need to hunt to find a cinema showing the more interesting of the pair. The awkwardly-titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans couples the mercurial actor with German director Werner Herzog in an offbeat character study about an unhinged policeman.
Crystal Dynamics may have made a conscious choice not to sell the new downloadable Lara Croft game under the Tomb Raider brand name, but don’t be fooled. Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light is the best Tomb Raider game that this console generation has given us. The game eschews the third-person camera of traditional Tomb Raider games in favour of an isometric view on the action. Despite the change in perspective, this is a Tomb Raider game in every way that matters, from the devious environmental puzzles to the treacherous traps and precarious platforming.
Sharlto Copley and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, two of the stars of The A-Team movie, were in SA this week for premieres of the film hosted by Nu Metro and MTN. Copley is already well-known in SA and the rest of the world for his star turn as Wikus van de Merwe in District 9, the SA-flavoured science-fiction hit of 2009. In the A-Team, he takes on the role of HM Murdock, the nutty military pilot played by Dwight Schultz in the original television series.
Predators, a reboot of one of the most loved 1980s action franchises, wants so badly to be badass that you almost feel sorry for it. It’s like a gawky adolescent straddling uncomfortably on a big motorbike he can barely control in a bid to impress the toughest kids in the schoolyard. At its every step, the film invites you to compare it to the manly swagger of the 1987 classic, Predator, which paired Arnold Schwarzenegger with Die Hard director John McTiernan when both were at the top of their game. But the comparison does it no favours.
In a gaming industry where developers release sequels at the rate of one a year or every two years, a 12-year wait for a new game in a franchise is a lifetime. But that’s how long we have had to wait for StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, the follow-up to a real-time strategy (RTS) game that has sold about 10m copies worldwide and still commands a fanatical following. Rival franchises such as Command & Conquer have Zergling-rushed retail with a string of mediocre sequels over the past decade. Blizzard, by contrast, has turtled in its base for years to create something truly special. Initial impressions are that the game has been well worth the wait.
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” is the advice that one character gives another in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. With this film, the director of The Prestige and The Dark Knight proves once again that no other big-budget filmmaker has dreams quite as large as his. Part existential spy film, part science-fiction epic and part heist movie, Inception is by far the boldest and best film in a disappointing Hollywood summer season.
If you played videogames in the early 1990s, you probably spent many hours engrossed by the devious puzzles and tight storytelling of LucasArts adventure games such as Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island. Though LucasArts itself has since become a sausage factory that churns out Stars Wars games of variable quality, some of the maverick designers and writers responsible for its classic adventure titles are still around.