A mish mash of my favourite recipes, video games and my travels near and far.
Finally! At long last! Resident Evil 4 has come to the Playstation 2. Ok, this isn’t such new news since it’s released in Australia since November 4th, 2005, but nevertheless, it’s still worth a mention because it’s an absolutely fabulous game! (more…)
Yet another video game is being turned into a Hollywood production, this time it’s the Playstation 2 exclusive game, God of War.
God of War is an action adventure video game geared towards to adult market. It’s definitely not for kids as the amount of violence, blood and gore, nudity and strong language was even almost (!) too much for me. God of War is set in ancient, mythological Greece where you play as the ex-Spartan warrior, Kratos, on his revenge driven journey to take down the God of War himself, Ares.
Variety magazine has reported that Universal Studios have picked up the rights to turn God of War into a movie. Charles Roven and Alex Gartner of Mosaic Media Group will be producing the God of War movie, other than that, not much details are known. The writer for the script, director and casting choices has not been selected.
Roven told Variety,
We’ve been enthralled by this project since our first time playing the game in March and realized its narrative had great potential for large-screen production.
Who will be Kratos?
Kratos is the much-loved anti-hero of God of War and the question of casting a suitable actor for this role is in the forefront on my mind.
Some actors that come to mind:
Many will no doubt think of Vin Diesel first, I know I’m not excluded from this group, but I think The Rock or Jason Statham may make a better cast. Although I like Vin Diesel, he can some times come off looking dopey, and Kratos should never look dopey!
David Jaffe’s Involvement
David Jaffe, the game director of God of War, will also be involved in the movie, not as the writer, but probably more in the role of advisor or consultant.
Am I involved? I am. I am not writing the script or anything but I am involved in making sure the movie is true enough to the game that fans of the game will be happy
David Jaffe also mentions in his blog that he knows who the scriptwriter will be, although he couldn’t and wouldn’t divulge this information.
I’ve seen the name of the writer they are going after…I can’t spill the beans but he’s done some damn fine shit! Hope he signs on…I meet with him next week!
Serious, I can’t talk about details but I think it will be darn good. The writer who is on board is AMAZING!
As for his views on who should be cast as Kratos, he’s more interested as who will be the director, though he does mention that Vin Diesel or The Rock are obvious choices for the role.
Remember The Matrix movie trilogy by the Wachowski brothers? Well, it looks like the end of the third movie, The Matrix: Revolutions, was not the end of the franchise.
In addition to The Matrix movies, there was also a series nine animated Matrix short stories called, Animatrix. The Wachowski brothers had an interested in Japanese anime and had the nine Animatrix stories done in nine different anime styles.
The second movie in the trilogy, The Matrix: Reloaded, saw the release of The Matrix video game, Enter The Matrix. The game itself wasn’t the greatest ever made, but the story gave an alternate, behind-the-movie-scene view of what was going on from the Niobe’s and Ghost’s point of view during the Reloaded movie.
The last Matrix movie was released in 2003 and many had heard that the Matrix story was going to end there. Not so. Two years after what we all thought was the end of the Matrix, the Wachowski brothers have come up with a new video game, The Matrix: Path of Neo.
In The Matrix: Path of Neo, gamers now play as the hero himself. The story is nothing original, you’ll follow the story of the entire Matrix trilogy as you run around as Neo in the Matrix world, with Matrix physics, and try to save Zion. Players will most likely come across all the familiar and famous scenes in the Matrix, such as the train battle with Mr Smith from the first movie.
The Matrix: Path of Neo will be coming out on November 11, 2005 and will be available on Playstation, Playstation 2, Xbox and PC.
Unbelievably, the High Court of Australia has today ruled that mod chips are legal… again.
For those who don’t know the history of this case, here’s a very brief summary of the mod chip battle between small business owner, Eddy Stevens and the electronics giant, Sony.
The legal battle started in 2001, when Sony filed a suit against Stevens, and has been ongoing for four years. In 2002, the Federal Court ruled that mod chips were not in breach of copyright and therefore were legal. Sony appealed this decision and won their appeal, therefore making mod chips illegal. Stevens then appealed to the High Court, which unanimously ruled on Steven’s side and mod chips are now deemed legal again in Australia.
I can remember the first ruling in September 2002 where mod chips were deemed legal, there was almost a mad rush to get your console “chipped”. Then soon after the courts ruled on Sony’s side and all of a sudden everyone was worried that they now have a chipped console.
I found it amazing that back in 2002, Australia (possibly the only country in the world) could find that mod chips are legal. I still find today’s news amazing, but I can see the reasoning behind the latest ruling and Stevens’ lawyers did successfully argue the two issues in this case.
The first issue is whether mod chips circumvent a technological protection measure and therefore breach the Copyright Act. The second issue is whether the act of playing a pirated video game breaches the Copyright Act (playing a game requires data to be copied from the disk to the RAM of the console) where game makers didn’t granted a licence to copy the pirated data on to the RAM.
Steven’s argument for the first issue was that making a pirated copy of a video game was illegal, but using a mod chip to play a pirated video game wasn’t. His argument for the second issue was that people simply playing a video game didn’t mean they were making an illegal copy of the game on the console. The High Court ruled on Steven’s side on both issues and so mod chips are legal to use again.
Read the Full High Court Judgement in the case of Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment.
Gran Turismo 4 is the latest release in the Gran Turismo series. The Gran Turismo series of games are driving simulators. They are essentially car racing games where the game developers use real life car models in their games. It was released in Australia on March 10, 2005 and we just bought it today.
An initial impression of the game is that the game has some amazing graphics and amazing cars. The detail the developers have put into the cars is astounding. They look very life like and realistic with smooth bodies and amazingly realistic shadows and lighting. The environment and race tracks is also equally as spectacular with breath taking scenary and detail. The music throughout the game isn’t irritating and for some reason, I quite like the menu music the game makers have chosen.
The actual game play itself is a little more difficult for a novice (video game) driver such as myself. I’m not the biggest fan of racing games but I do enjoy watching them. I did managed to complete a few licensing races, with much trouble and some frustration, but I would always come last in the actual races themselves.
Gran Turismo 4 has a new racing mode called “B Spec”. In this mode, you don’t actually steer the car or anything, but you “instruct” your cars driver on how to drive. This means you can tell your driver how aggressively to drive and when to attempt to overtake. Quite amusing actually, and surprising very satisfying when you win a race in B Spec.
Overall it’s a brilliantly put together game, controls are good, graphics are stunning, sound is excellent, the cars are incredible and game play is challenging yet satisfying. The only downside of the game would be the loading times, it’s a little slow (understandably), but one can live with it.
Our household has two video game consoles, the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox. I don’t have a favourite, I like them both as they both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Personally, I feel the exclusive games on the PS2 are better, but the graphics on the Xbox are fantastic. The only Xbox exclusive game that was any interesting was Halo (and its subsequent series).
Controller wise, I now have no preference. I use to think PS2’s controller was better as the original Xbox controller was pretty poorly designed. It was made for the hands of a giant! We got a controller S, a smaller version of the standard controller, and that felt much better. I eventually got use to the Xbox controller S and now both controllers feel good and doesn’t hinder my gameplay. One downside for the controllers of both consoles is that the leads were way too short for our living room, so we had to buy extension cables for both console systems.
The Playstation 2 console was release about a year before the Xbox console, we bought the Playstation 2 pretty much on the day of its much anticipated release. A year later, we received the Microsoft Xbox console from America. It was a gift from some business partners we had over there and it was sent with three Region 1 games, Dead or Alive 3, Project Gotham Racing and Halo. We were very fortunate to be able to get our hands on a Xbox before its release in Australia and had the chance to “test drive” PS2’s new competition.
The only downside of having an American Xbox was that we had to buy a rather pricey transformer to step down the voltage otherwise the Xbox would fry. Australian domestic mains power supply is 240V and American is 120V.
