Posts Tagged ‘Onlive’

for you baby I would, swim the sea
nothin’ I’d do for you that’s too tough for me
I’d put out a burnin’ building with a, shovel and dirt
and not even worry about, getting hurt
ain’t that tuff enough?
 

 -From Tough Enough by Johnny Clegg

Welcome to the “Tough Enough” edition.

 

Tough Women

 

Let’s start with five tough women (pictured above). The first is, of course, Signourney Weaver (top left)  as Ellen Ripley from Aliens in one of our  favorite moments from the movie – where Ripley confronts the Alien Queen in a mechanical loader and screams the famous line “Get away from her you bitch.”  The second woman is Jenette Goldstein (top row, 2^nd from the right) in another of our favorite roles, from the same movie as well, portraying Pvt. Vasquez.  Private Vasquez is the tougher than nails marine that seems to be the first in a type of role that gets repeated in later movies. Top right is actress Linda Hamilton from the Terminator movies as Sarah Connor.  She is depicted in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day where the character first becomes the sort of character you want on your side in a fire fight in the middle of a jungle…an urban jungle.  The next (bottom left) is from the recent James Cameron movie Avatar.  While Signourney Weaver’s cigarette toking Dr. Grace Augustine is fairly tough, as often happens it is the character actors that shine the brightest in their roles. (More on that later).  The character in this case is, of course, Pilot Trudy Chacon as portrayed by Michelle Rodriguez. And yes, we noticed the similarities between the Trudy Chacon and the Pvt. Vasquez characters, but since both Aliens and Avatar are James Cameron films it seems reasonable that the movie maker borrow from himself, eh? Still, we would have liked to see actress Jenette Goldstein in the role of Trudy Chacon, but Ms. Rodriguez did a marvelous job as well.  You might want to also add actress Jessica Biel in the list above as Charisa Sosa (not pictured) from the newly released “A-Team” movie (but more on that later)

The toughest woman above is not an actress at all…and anybody who us knows that we will naturally include her in any list of tough women.  In fact I am told Julie and Fran quote her each night before they go to bed.  This woman may not look tough but she is – tough as titanium. We can list her meager possessions here:

3 dresses

1 sweater

1 pair of sandals

Underwear made from flour sacks.

1 plate

1 spoon

1 book

1 crucifix

1 rosary

And of course one canvas bag to put it in.

That’s it. That’s all this woman owned, period. 

Actress Signourney Weaver tells a story of the time she attended the academy awards and she heard a young actress from one side say, “ look at her that must have taken a lot of surgery”. To which Ms. Weaver replied “I worked for this body.”  As much as each actress worked out to get the well chiseled look, few people are tough enough to live in such poverty by choice as the woman on the bottom right, and do so while spending a large part of her life caring for the sick in a leper colony.  And THAT my friends is ONE TOUGH mama Jama. This is the same woman to whom President Ronald Regan once presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, of which he said that she was the only recipient likely to melt the medal down, sell it, and use it to feed others.  She is, of course, the toughest of the tough. She is Mother Teresa.

 

The Tough Team

by Julie Whitefeather

 As I see it, in every article for this website, somewhere there has to be a tie in with the video game industry – so here it is.  The tough team in this case is the A-Team.  Anyone who has ever played World of Warcraft (WoW) has seen the Mr.-T commercial he did for WoW (remember the phrase “night elf Mohawk”?). If not you can see it here. For those of you too young to remember, Mr. T was in the original televised series of the same name.  In the recently released movie version the role of B.A. Baracus was portrayed by Quinton “Rampage” Jackson (WWF Raw). There may even be some of you who rarely see movies yet still recognize the voice of the leader of the A-Team, Liam Neeson as Colonel John “Hanibal” Smith (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Batman Begins).  Those of you who say to yourselves “That voice sounds familiar” will remember the same voice actor portraying your father in Fallout 3.

So there’s the videogame tie-in.

Members of the 2010 A-team are also portrayed by Bradley Cooper (“Alias” –Will Tippin) as Lt. Templeton “Face” Peck and Sharlto Copley (District 9, Wikus Van De Merwe) as Murdock.  Another familiar face (and especially voice) is Gerald McRaney (Major Dad, Simon and Simon) as General Morrison. And of course the runner up to the “tough women” list above Jessica Biel (Abigail Whistler, Blade: Trinity) as Cpt. Charisa Sosa.

In a recent review that proves the point of one of my fine arts professors (oft discussed before in these pages and on our show) Roger Ebert proves the prof’s point that the arts (yes even movies) where done for the common person and not the reviewer. His lead in paragraph is as follows:

“‘The A-Team’” is an incomprehensible mess with the 1980s TV show embedded inside. The characters have the same names, they play the same types, they have the same traits, and they’re easily as shallow. That was OK for a TV sitcom, which is what the show really was, but at over two hours of Queasy-Cam anarchy, it’s punishment.” – Roger Ebert,

 

The obvious question is to wonder if Roger’s delineation of the movie as “an incomprehensible mess” is more due to a lack of powers of comprehension on the reviewer’s part than the movie’s script.  In a manner that I am sure must be totally uncharacteristic, and belying what must certainly be his astounding powers of observation, he points out to us that the characters all have the same names. Amazing that isn’t it?  By the end of the first paragraph we find ourselves forced to resort to utter shock by Mr. Ebert’s further powers of analysis by revealing the fact that, yes, the characters were shallow.

As amazing as Mr. Ebert’s powers of analysis are, might I respectfully (ok perhaps not too respectfully) suggest that if he wants good drama and in depth characters that he go rent an Ingmar Berman film, and perhaps go back to typing reviews on a manual type writer.

Amazing as it is, some films are done simply for the fun of it as, spell it with me Roger…E-N-T-E-R-T-A-I-N-M-E-N-T.

Part of what Ebert has a hard time with is the lack of fluidity where the film inter-cuts between scenes – this is more along the lines of “you be the judge”; I had no problem with it, nor did my companion nor anyone else in the theater. I think Roger is the lone wolf on this one.  Effective or not, it is simply a technique used to tie together parts of the script. Roger goes on to complain about the physics in the movie, ‘Bored out of my mind during this spectacle, I found my attention wandering to the subject of physics’, bad guys who monologue too long and hero’s who always seem to know what the bad guy is going to do.

In the end it’s a good thing that Hollywood directors don’t follow Roger’s movie making advice, otherwise I would never have been able to enjoy horrible movies like the “Die Hard” series and any of the James Bond films.

Toward the end of the review Ebert pens the words “I don’t want to be tiresome, but…” to which I can only reply.

Too late, Roger – Much too late.

At this point I will risk adding the advice, next time grab some popcorn and at least try and enjoy the movie.

Tough Enough to Try Again

 

Another question that rises to mind was triggered by the news that Brad McQuaid is going to try and build another company.  Those of you who are not new to gaming will remember the names Sigil Games and Vanguard – both classic examples of how not to develop a game, not to mention never have the chutzpa to call your game a “WoW killer.” If not you can go back to articles of yester year and read  Brad McQuaid and  Chutzpa and Sigil: The Flipside . The new company he will be starting will be concentrating on “sophisticated casual and social games”, with no further explanation on exactly what that entails. You can read the advert on his blog site here.  The question remains, however, (aside from exactly what he means by “casual and social”) is whether or not he will still garner the trust of the industry.  After all, as the old adage goes, we learn from our mistakes, and  Mr. McQuaid has said repeatedly in his blog that he has learned from his.  Certainly the shadow of his former employees, who were told to gather everything they needed for the rest of the day and meet in the company parking lot, and then summarily dismissed, will still loom large.  Does he deserve a second chance? We think so and even if he isn’t good at business he is good at making games.

Tough enough for a tough market

 

Onlive-The first question anyone should ask who is considering going into any sort of business is what they can bring to the table that someone else hasn’t already.  One of those who has brought something new to the table is Onlive.   They hope to be the answer to those developers/publishers who come out with a game that few computers will run, then simply shrug their shoulders and say “well it’s a high end game.”  The solution, of course, is a streaming game, like a remote terminal.  It sounds like a great idea, dependant on whether or not the ping rate to their servers will move faster than an arthritic pigeon.  Even if that is the case, and it could well be, the question then becomes one of pricing.  Would you pay $14.95 per month to play single player games?  Our news feed tells us they will offer games “including Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed II, Borderlands, Dragon Age Origins, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and Metro 2033.” You can read more here .

Connect with Kinect- How much would you pay to play a game without a controller? Certainly it is an amazing concept, as our regular guest Saylah says it is “full of win”.  The idea of playing an MMO with Kinect certainly excite the imagination, but the real issue is pricing – or so say a couple of the articles that recently crossed our news desk.  The first tells us that, “Microsoft’s Kinect motion camera is that the platform holder is still struggling with some aspects of its launch strategy for the device.”. The second source tells us that it is a done deal:

“Well, none of this will come as a big surprise here, but it’s always nice to hear it straight from an official source. Microsoft has confirmed that a $199 version of new Xbox 360 will be coming in the fall to replace the now-$149 Arcade, which is no longer in production. In addition, the company’s also spilled a few more beans — Kinect will be available as a bundle with the new Xbox 360, and though there isn’t any official pricing information on that one just yet, we’ve seen some telltale evidence on that front which would lead us to believe it’ll run somewhere in the neighborhood of $399 for an Elite and $299 for the Arcade. So now you know.” – Kotaku.com

 

Warner Brothers –  At any time in the last week or so, if you were playing word association and I gave you the name “Turbine” odds are that you would follow up with “Warner Brothers”  (Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment), the company that bought the developer of Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online not that long ago. The subsidiary of media giant Time/Warner now owns Monolith, TT Games, NetherRealm Studios, Turbine Inc. and is reported to have an interest in RockSteady (developer of Batman: Arkham Asylum). Recently Samantha Ryan, senior VP of production and development told Gamasutra    the following:

“But after the rapid expansion it’s time to focus on internal depth and growth, not more acquisitions. We’re actually I think going to go through kind of a settling period for a little while,” she said, “where we’re going to focus on getting all the stuff that we’ve just acquired well-integrated, and really focus on the games.” – Samantha Ryan, senior VP of production, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment

 

That sound you hear in the background is the No Prisoners, No Mercy team applauding.  Good news for Turbine, and sound advice that Starbucks should have taken.

Tough Enough to Survive

 

There are many things the No Prisoners, No Mercy team have in common and one of them is an Alma Mater – University of Illinois.  The University is taking the time to preserve video games that go back over the last four decades including “a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT’s Spacewar! circa 1962.”  When Jerome McDonough, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois spoke to Arstechnica to answer the  obvious question “Why” he responded as follows:

The really simple, one-sentence answer is because games are important. In the United States we’re looking at about 80,000 people who are directly employed by the gaming industry and maybe another 240,000 people involved in related, tangential industries that rely on gaming companies for their existence….In the United States, we have two thirds of American households as active gamers….You also can’t understand some other parts of our cultural world unless you preserve some of the game world.” – Jerome McDonough, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois

You can read the entire interview here.

Last and least

 

Last and certainly least has got to be one of the dumbest ideas to come across our news desk in a long time. It seems that the California Legislature is considering license plates that turn into small electronic bill boards when the car to which they are attached stops for more than four seconds.  Here is a quote:

“The bill’s author, Democratic Sen. Curren Price of Los Angeles, said California would be the first state to implement such technology if the state Department of Motor Vehicles ultimately recommends the widespread use of the plates. He said other states are exploring something similar.” -  source

Now granted the news does come to us via Slashdot, still it makes us pause to wonder if the good Senator mentioned above has a keeper somewhere that isn’t watching him carefully. Living in Illinois we do, of course, understand when states have difficulties. After all, we live in a state where our governors seem to end up in prison.