Category Archives: Video Games
Nightwing Images Surface
I announced yesterday that Nightwing has been all but confirmed as a playable character in the upcoming video game Batman: Arkham City. Well no sooner did that happen then possible images of Nightwing appeared on the Internet today! They’re pretty sparse, and it’s just shoulders up, but it looks pretty badass. Nicely detailed and with an updated style. Check out more images here.
He's got that sexy hair
Nightwing to Appear in Arkham City
The game developer Rocksteady is doing their darndest to keep the secrets under wraps for the upcoming game Batman: Arkham City. But leave it to random websites to casually reveal these secrets as if they didn’t think they were secrets at all. First, Best Buy revealed that Robin would be a playable character. Now some website that lists video game achievements has revealed that Nightwing will also be a playable character. We’re less than a month away from the game’s release and Rocksteady was able to keep the secret this long.
Well no more! Check out these two achievements:
Rather skimpy proof, but proof nonetheless!
This definitely explains why Robin will be Tim Drake (my favorite Robin). I also think this more than makes up for the lack of any Robin references at all in Batman: Arkham Asylum. As a Robin fanboy, that really ground my gears at the time. But Rocksteady is making up for that fan faux pas by making Robin and now Nightwing playable! Not in the campaign, only in challenge maps, but I’m more than fine with that! Bring it on!
For those who don’t know, Nightwing is the original Robin, Dick Grayson. He’s the circus acrobat whose parents were killed, and he was adopted by Batman. He was in Batman: The Animated Series and was played by Chris O’Donnell in the mid-90s Batman movies.
Well in the comics, Dick eventually grew up into a young teen and rebelled against Batman. He struck out on his own and created a brand new superhero identity: Nightwing.
Still has that boyish Robin charm
That eventually cleared the way for Tim Drake to become the new Robin. And that’s your comic history lesson for today. Thanks to the website www.PS3Trophies.org for the spoiler.
Review: Gears of War 3
Well that was awesome. The final game of the Gears of War trilogy comes and goes with a bang, a boom, a splatter and the rev of a good chainsaw. But most of all, it was a blast. Fun to play, great for multiplayer mayhem and with a pretty good story to boot. I recently finished the story mode campaign, but I plan on playing the multiplayer modes for the next several months. It’s got a great lasting appeal. Gears of War 3 is just as hectic, epic and shotguntastic as the first two games.
So no trilogy curse, as far as I’m concerned. I give it a 5 out of 5: Great.
Should I have expected anything less? This was one of my most highly anticipated games of the year, and it’s lived up to every expectation. Gears 1 was the first game I bought on my X-Box 360, and Gears 2 came along a few years later. While the story hasn’t been Shakespeare, the gameplay has been top notch in game after game after game. That’s not to say the story is lame. It may have started off as simple in the first game, but by this third chapter, we were dealing with real depth and character emotion. I was definitely shocked on more than one occasion with the story this time around. And the death of Dom’s wife in Gears 2 was quite sad.
But we’re here to talk about Gears of War 3, maybe the best of the trilogy.
Geek Does Good, Gets to Make New Mortal Kombat Film
Fear the fury of the front-flips! Shriek at the ferocity of the finishers! Quiver at the capacity of the…catch phrases! New Line Cinema is making a new Mortal Kombat movie, and they’ve hired the guy who directed the recent Glee concert movie to be in charge! Does that sound like a winning combination or what?
Get over here!...and sing me a song!
But seriously, it’s actually a pretty cool story and I have high hopes. The director Kevin Tancharoen got the job by being the biggest Mortal Kombat fanboy ever. While the video game series is pretty cool, the Mortal Kombat movies in the 90s were train wreck of idiotic costumes, horrible acting and groaningly stupid dialogue. They were cheesy and campy because movie studios are idiots. So two years ago, Tancharoen got his pals together and some actual Hollywood actors and made his own Mortal Kombat fan film. He made it realistic and brutal, with actual stakes and no silly costumes.
He called it Mortal Kombat: Rebirth.
It’s actually pretty badass.
The Interwebs loved that little video, and it garnered enough attention that New Line Cinema hired Tancharoen to produce a series of Mortal Kombat webisodes. They were short little mini-movies that ran earlier this year, featuring rebooted or retooled versions of the classic Mortal Kombat characters. For some reason, it wasn’t an exact take off Mortal Kombat: Rebirth. In a lot of places, he relied more on the original video game origins and characters than on his rebooted versions, which I found weird. But for the most part, the short films were pretty good.
And now, after that first series of webisodes, New Line Cinema has hired Tancharoen to just make a full blown movie! That’s pretty damn awesome. A geek who loves a property enough to make his own fan film does such a good job and earns such acclaim that a movie studio hands him the keys to the franchise for reals.
That’s every geek’s dream come true. That’s like writing a Batman fan fiction story on the Internet and then DC Comics letting you write an issue of Batman because your story was just so neat.
I guess I need to start working on my Strawberry Shortcake fan film…
Gears of War 3 by Conan O’Brien
Conan O’Brien is a huge geek, just like the rest of us. And he took a stab at a softer, gentler Gears of War this week. Funny stuff. I probably still haven’t figure out how to really get this embedding thing to work for anything other than Youtube. So please forgive the link.
Henchman-4-Hire 