Games So Brutal They Were Banned (Kinda)
From gratuitous violence and vehicular carnage to same-sex romance and, uhm, rampant graffiti, a great many games have been censored, refused classification or banned entirely in a variety of countries around the world. The legal wrangling and content changes that follow such decisions have seen games being delayed, heavily modified or, some cases, entirely withdrawn from sale in one region while another barely bats an eyelid.
So, what does it take for a game to be banned and what does that even mean?
Usually, when we talk about a game being banned in the US, UK or Australia, it means that the relevant ratings board in that country has refused to bestow an age rating to the title, effectively making in illegal to sell. This can happen for a great many reasons and it’s not always as black and white as it might seem.
Assassin’s Creed: Watch the 1st Trailer for the Movie
Feast your eyes on the brand new trailer for 20th Century Fox's Assassin's Creed, based on the Ubisoft video game franchise.
The trailer below debuted tonight on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
X-Men's Michael Fassbender stars and produces the film.
The cast also includes Marion Cotillard (The Dark Knight Rises), Jeremy Irons (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), Harry Potter's Brendan Gleeson, The Wire's Michael Kenneth Williams, Ariane Labed (Before Midnight), and Callum Turner (Green Room).
Here's the official plot synopsis: "Through a revolutionary technology that unlocks his genetic memories, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) experiences the adventures of his ancestor, Aguilar, in 15th Century Spain. Callum discovers he is descended from a mysterious secret society, the Assassins, and amasses incredible knowledge and skills to take on the oppressive and powerful Templar organization in the present day."
Brave Director to Helm Alice and Peter Pan Prequel Movie
Brave co-director Brenda Chapman will helm Come Away, a live-action prequel to Alice and Wonderland and Peter Pan.
According to Deadline, Chapman will direct based on a script penned by Marissa Kate Goodhill. Leesa Kahn, Michelle Manning and Andrea Keir are all on board to produce.
Come Away will be the first live-action film Chapman has ever directed, having previously only helmed animated features, including Pixar's Brave and DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt.
"I had never really considered directing live-action – animation has always been my genre," Chapman explained. "But when I read Marissa’s fantastical script, I felt that little tingly feeling run up my spine. I thought, 'Wow! I’ve changed my mind. I want to do this'"
Jumanji Reboot: Jack Black in Talks to Star
Another high-profile actor may soon be joining the cast of Sony's upcoming Jumanji reboot, as Jack Black is reportedly in talks to star.
According TheWrap, negotiations are currently underway. If a deal is struck, Black will join co-stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart.
Jack Black as R.L. Stine in Goosebumps
Power Rangers Writer to Script Booster Gold Movie
Warner Bros. is reportedly moving forward with a Booster Gold / Blue Beetle movie, and Zack Stentz is writing the script.
According to Birth. Movies. Death, the writer behind Thor and the forthcoming Power Rangers movie is currently working on script. Additionally, the outlet has heard that Greg Berlanti is on board to produce and possibly direct.
While Warner Bros. has yet to comment on the status of a Booster Gold-centric film adaptation, the project is now rumored to be a solo outing and not the Blue and Gold "superhero buddy cop movie," prior reports claimed the studio was looking to create.
FX Orders Sons of Anarchy Spinoff
The Sons of Anarchy spinoff show, called Mayans MC, is getting a pilot, courtesy of FX Networks.
The company has ordered a pilot script for the drama series, which comes from Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter and producer Elgin James. In fact, on top of producing, James, who directed the film Little Birds, will script the first episode for Mayans MC.
Mayans president Marcus Alvarez (Emilio Rivera) in Sons of Anarchy. It's unknown who will star in the spinoff, Mayans MC.
The Magic Circle: Gold Edition Review
The Magic Circle is another entry in the burgeoning but fascinating subgenre of games about the process of making games. Most games in that niche tend to aim small, often taking up the perspective of underdogs struggling to make tiny personal games in an industry filled with multimillion-dollar productions. The Magic Circle, on the other hand, aims big. It’s the product of AAA veterans, evidenced by some impressive technical wizardry, but also by the tone and timbre of its commentary, which pointedly deconstructs the egos of business types that tend to rip creativity up by the roots during big-budget game development.
The titular Magic Circle, in-game, is an old-school series of text adventures whose reboot has been mired in development hell for years. It’s finally beginning to take shape as a triple-A, first-person, Skyrim-like RPG, but the creative direction of the game is being split three ways. The game’s original creator wants to go ambitious and artsy; the game’s creative director just wants to push out a game that will actually sell in the current landscape; a scheming, passionate intern with the support of the series' fanbase wants to put out a game that’s basically the original series, repackaged, and will do whatever it takes to see that happen.
In the middle of it all is you, a lowly tester, forced to play a constantly changing rudimentary build, all while watching the creators float around the landscape, squabbling over the game’s minutiae. A playable demo is set to appear at a thinly-veiled version of E3 in mere days, and the creators are trying to push out something that will keep everybody happy, to virtually no avail. Their game is barely functional: the planned painterly landscape is still rendered mostly in black-and-white; creatures and objects lack proper behavorial programming; and the persistant remnants of a previous, cancelled build from the 32-bit era remain in place. One of the team's older testers, however, has decided to take action, and since you’re the only player with boots on the virtual ground, he grants you access to a few developer tools. Your task is to explore the unfinished game world in hopes of finding a way to lock the actual developers out of the game and craft something playable out of the mess.
With the in-game creators calling the state of the unfinished build a disaster, the irony here is that it takes serious ambition and programming chops to render a game world like The Magic Circle, which has to come across as broken, lazy, and unfinished, but still functional enough to suit a playable fourth-wall breaking experiment. Despite a long initial load time, the fact that you can transition between three distinct aesthetics without so much as a stutter is truly impressive. But even then, not as impressive as the game’s bread-and-butter mechanic: the developer tools.
You’re given the ability to recode the attributes of any object or enemy in the game, changing the names, movement, attacks, AI, and elemental weaknesses/affinities. The number of possible combinations allows for a lot of creativity. If you want to strip some of the mean little dog-like enemies of all their powers so they wander around aimlessly, you can. If you want to give a stationary rock the ability to walk and set its “Ally” setting to yourself so you have a literal pet rock following you around, you can do that. If you want to arm a bunch of spider-like enemies with laser rifles and the ability to fly, that’s also an option.
Most of the fun of The Magic Circle stems from the sheer joy of experimentation, solving the game’s tricky environmental puzzles in an open-ended God Mode. That mandatory experimentation does have a tangible downside, though, as the game does a poor job of explaining how to weild your control over the world early on. There also a number of seemingly unintended technical issues. Reconfiguring attributes is a mechanic that feels like it would be far more suitable to control with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller, as the UI for making edits can get terribly twitchy since the same button you use to jump is used to make selections on the edit screen. With automated characters getting stuck behind walls or turning invisible when there’s too many onscreen, there are glitches that you have to contend with. But none of these complaints are enough to dilute the overall joy of flexing your creativity as a virtual developer. Most of the games of this ilk tend to settle for being rather linear interactive narratives. The game is better for executing something new and distinctly enjoyable in how it ties its gameplay and story together.
The only major disappointment is that there’s not enough of either. Only about half of the game is built around exploration and the edit function, though an extended climax does something unexpectedly magical with the idea. But even if you get meticulous about the endgame, The Magic Circle is on the short side, and just when the game truly settles into a groove, the narrative kicks into high gear and your time with the development tools is stripped away.
Thankfully, the narrative is well-crafted, often funny, and salient about how much strife goes into even the smallest decision about a game’s design. The game’s storytelling apex is a five minute rant by the in-game Magic Circle’s creator about the impossible expectations of the industry, presented through an ingenius interactive gambit. There’s irony in the fact that the actual game’s greatest idea is eventually overtaken by an overambitious story, especially considering that one of the characters argues that the game’s audience doesn’t care about story to begin with.
It’s hard to definitively say if The Magic Circle succesfully achieves its high-minded aims. Those expecting to play around with the physics of an open video game world will find themselves lamenting the lack of control and additional objectives after a short period of time, and those wanting nothing more than to find out where the narrative goes will be discouraged by how frustrating the gameplay can occasionally be. The essence of The Magic Circle is somewhere in between. As a piece of work meant to comment on modern game design, it’s wholly successful at creating a scenario perfectly illustrating just how Herculean a task it is for developers trying to create a game with a perfect balance.
3 Ways Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 Radically Reinvents Itself
Five times now over the past 25 years, Sid Meier and his teams of expert strategy game designers have created the Earth and populated it with competing nations. Each iteration of the notoriously addictive Sid Meier’s Civilization series has taken the same concept of reenacting variations on humanity’s history of conflict and technological development and built a similar, but distinctly different turn-based strategy game around it from the mind of a new lead designer.
Today, publisher 2K and developer Firaxis announced that the sixth iteration of the series will arrive in just six months on October 21, 2016; for Civilization 6, Lead Designer Ed Beach and his team are building on many of the concepts we saw in the hex-based Civilization V, but with some ambitious, fundamental changes to the way cities are built and scientific progress occurs that are aimed specifically at making sure playing this version never becomes routine.
First Look: John Oliver’s Danger Mouse Character
Last year, Netflix announced that John Oliver would be lending his voice to the company's animated reboot of Danger Mouse.
Now IGN has an exclusive image of his character Dr. Augustus P. Crumhorn III, who is described as an "evil modern-day industrialist" and a reimagining of an old Danger Mouse villain.
Check out him out below:
John Oliver voices Dr. Crumhorn in Danger Mouse
"I've loved Danger Mouse my whole life," said Oliver in a statement. "Danger Mouse was a significant part of my childhood. So to get a chance to do it is like getting a chance to step into your childhood, which is both a magical and a potentially hazardous thing! It will be awesome, I can't wait to see it, let alone hear myself in it!"
Game of Thrones Spoiler Source Could Face Legal Ramifications
A Spanish YouTuber who frequently posts Game of Thrones spoilers could see his day in court if HBO decides to prosecute.
Very few people—including United States president Barack Obama—have seen the show's episodes before they air, and it's unclear how the the man, who identifies as Dr. Jose Senaris, receives the information. In a post to Reddit, Senaris wrote he "never" knows when he'll get new information. It just appears in his email when the source sends it.
"If he's giving away detailed plot information, he definitely faces the possibility of being liable for criminal copyright infringement, no question," Deborah Gerhardt, professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, told US News in a long feature about the situation.