IGN Presents The History of Awesome: 1979
Welcome back to IGN's History of Awesome - a year-long look back at all the coolest and most influential games, movies, TV shows, comic books, toys, and tech that have shaped pop culture, and shaped the lives of an entire generation. Up this week is 1979 - the year that Star Wars' runaway success was truly felt in the world of film, and the concept of a true "console game" experience finally took shape.
Risky films like Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture were released to critical acclaim and massive box-office success, ensuring plenty more big-budget sci-fi epics would be released in the years to come.
LG’s ‘Wallpaper’ TV Prototype is Basically a Sticker
LG Display recently unveiled its proof-of-concept for a 55-inch TV that's only 4 pounds and 0.97mm thick. It's being referred to as a "wallpaper" TV for the way it can be stuck to a wall via a magnetic mat, and of course for how ridiculously thin it is.
Photo courtesy LG Display Co.
The Seoul-based LCD panel manufacturer showed off the prototype at a press event in Korea yesterday as a way to broadcast its future plans, including that commitment to OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology that LG brought up earlier in the year.
FOX Debuts Full Scream Queens Trailer
FOX has released the first official trailer for Scream Queens, the new comedy-horror anthology series premiering on the network later this year.
Take a look below, and let us know what you think!
Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, Scream Queens features a cast that includes American Horror Story's Emma Roberts and Skyler Samuels, Glee's Lea Michele (rocking quite the body brace), Animal's Keke Palmer, Zombieland's Abigail Breslin and Nick Jonas.
Scream Queens will air on Tuesday nights later this year on FOX.
Who Is the Most Dangerous Marvel Character?
With a roster that includes hundreds of characters, Marvel has plenty of dangerous characters. But who's the most deadly?
Morph Costumes put together an infographic that reviews the body counts of many of Marvel's most famous characters, both heroes and villains.
Force Awakens Star Teams With The Wire Creator
The Wire's creator, David Simon, and director Paul Haggis (Crash) are bringing a new six-part miniseries Show Me a Hero to HBO, based on the non-fiction book of the same name. The series will star Oscar Issac, who can be currently seen in the critically acclaimed Ex Machina, and is starring in both Star Wars: The Force Awakens and X-Men: Apocalypse (playing the title role).
Oscar Isaac.
According to The Los Angeles Times, Show Me a Hero is set in the 1960s, and will deal with the theme of racial tensions which grip a mid-sized American city. Isaac will portray the mayor of that city, receiving a federal court order to build low-income housing within white neighborhoods. The mandate causes conflict within the city, its government, and causes all sorts of political turmoil for the mayor.
Scotland Yard Feared Trek, X-Files Fans Could Pose Threat
Scotland Yard -- London's Metropolitan Police Service -- kept files on Star Trek, The X-Files, and a handful of other American science fiction shows due to fears that fans of such programming might start a cult, or go insane, harming themselves and others.
A report titled "UFO New Religious Movements and the Millennium" was filed in 1998-99 following the mass suicide of the 39 Heaven's Gate cult members in San Diego. Special Branch claimed the cult members were big fans of X-Files and Star Trek.
The shows themselves weren't believed to be harmful. The concern stemmed from the theory that the people who believed the end of the world was coming due to the millennium might also be fans of those shows. The report, brought to light by The Telegraph, mentions that such shows often touch upon themes involving UFOs, conspiracies, and mythic events.
Apple Watch OS 1.0.1 Now Available
Apple Watch users can now download the wearable's first OS update. Apple Watch OS 1.0.1 includes various performance improvements, display support for new emojis, and additional language support.
With the new update, Apple Watch now supports seven additional languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. OS 1.0.1 also brings improvements to Siri and third-party apps, as well as more precise calorie and distance measurements for workouts.
To download the update, make sure your Apple Watch is connected to a power source. You can then initiate the download through the Watch app on your iPhone.
This Virtual Reality Headset Lets You Shoot Things with Your Eyes
Virtual reality’s on its way to becoming a crowded space—even well in advance of any first-generation consumer hardware being available. Among the latest entries into the space is Fove’s eye-tracking headset, which launched on Kickstarter on Tuesday.
Like the headsets we’ve seen from Samsung, Oculus, and Sony, the demo hardware I sat down with last week isn’t final yet. In fact, a Fove team member noted that the two headsets I used had been built by hand after I inquired about fit—on the second visor, one of the lenses kept touching my eye. Accommodations for flatter nose bridges and even diopter adjustments is still to come.
Japanese Retro Console Plays Pretty Much Everything
The Japanese Retrofreak console plays basically all the old cartridges you can think of. The Japanese two-piece console plays Famicom, Super Famicom, Mega Drive, PC Engine games... along with Super NES, NES, TurboGrafx-16, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, Genesis and Supergrafx.
The Retrofreak is a Swiss Army knife of consoles that puts itself just barely above even the great Retron5 as far as total number of accepted carts is concerned.
First spotted on Kotaku, the one-stop, retro-shop solution comes with a console and an adapter that accepts the myriad of games. The included controller is reminiscent of the trusty Super NES controller, but the console accepts any USB controller. That includes support for PS3 and PS4 controllers, in case you have any of those kicking around.
The Big Screen Flash Will Also Be Barry Allen
Filmmaker Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street) recently chatted about his plans for plotting Warner Bros.' big screen rendition of The Flash, as well as the recently announced animated Spider-Man movie he's producing for Sony.
While appearing on the Hippojuice podcast, Lord confirmed that his feature film version of the DC superhero will indeed be Barry Allen, the same incarnation used on The CW's The Flash.