Tonight Spike TV‘s Blade the Series concludes it’s first season. There’s been no confirmation of whether or not the show is being renewed. When asked about the possibility of having a second season the show’s star Kirk “Sticky” Jones was quoted to say in an interview with MediaBlvd Magazine that “I’ve been told, unofficially, that it will. I’ve got the inside scoop.”. The show did quite well with it’s pilot episode with ground breaking ratings for Spike TV. Though ratings dropped for the rest of the season the show still had a good deal of success.

This season really didn’t pull any punches. With some pretty graphic violent scenes and sexual content it’s nice to see something like this on TV where in the past you’d be hard pressed to find it in theatres.

I think the show so far has been excellent. The story has been quite gripping and I find the characters to be very well fleshed out with tons of personality. One problem as I see it is they’re spending so much time giving the vampire vilains great personality that in contrast the hero Blade and his gimp sidekick seem boring. Though one shouldn’t fault the writters and actors for outshinning them. It’s just that the concept of having a very solitary broody character like Blade makes it difficult to give him much depth. Going against this wouldn’t really be good for the series. Still I find they do a great job of compensating for this with the other characters. You can’t really have a series who’s heroes are villains so Blade just sort of needs to be there.

The cast has done a great job. Kirk “Sticky” Jones is great as the stoic bad ass Blade. He’s not Wesley Snipes but he fills his shoes and brings more than just emulating. The stylish and cool Marcus, protrayed by Neil Jackson plays both a very civilised and clean cut business man and viscious and capable adversary to Blade. Jessica Gower who plays Chase plays a wonderfull bitch. Whether that’s her natural demeaner or not doesn’t affect the fact that she delivers a sweet performance who’s hotness is superceeded only by the smokin’ hot Jill Wagner as Krista, Blade’s mole/love interest/antagonist/whatever! The character of Shen by Nelson Lee hasn’t had an excessive amount of screen time. He’s no Whistler but then it would be pretty lame if his character was just like him. My favourite performance of the season by far had to be Emily Hirst as the incredibly creepy Charlotte, the young pure blood vampire who verbally chastises otherwise intimidating characters and shows a disturbing preference for the blood of newborn babies. I wouldn’t have thought that a child could give such a performance as to make me believe that she was really a few hundred years old but here we are. I was starting to worry about how they’d deal with a vampire character who’s actress was so young that she would in time show clear signs of aging. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem with her…

Hats off to a great season filled with action packed excitement and a slew of powerfull scenes that made me cringe and look away more than once. In a time with a lot of crap on TV here’s hoping we get a lot more of this great show.

Links:
Spike TV’s official site
Official forum
Blade: The Series Myspace page
Series page at IMDB
Blade: The Series on Wikipedia
A popular fan site
Original powet.tv post about Blade: The Series premiere

Yesterday we reported a list of Sega Genesis games for the Wii as metioned on IGN. These were listed on the ESRB’s website where one can search for games by system and publisher. Today I was searching some more and found that these games had disapeared from the list. A search for games on the Wii now returns 12 titles rather than 18 and those Sega Genesis titles are missing. Yesterday a search for publisher “Sega” on the Wii platform yielded 7 results. Today 0.

Why? Could be nothing. Could be Sega doesn’t want people to know what’s out. Could be these games aren’t confirmed and they don’t want people spreading rumours like we have. We can only jump to conclusions so get your mat out!

Compare a screenshot from yesterday (left) to today (right):

IGN reports a list of Sega Genesis games for the Wii Virtual Console. These titles are listed on the ESRB website. The Entertainment Software Rating Board must rate all games before they can go on sale in the US. I guess there’s no surprising them.

By going to the website and doing a simple search for the publisher “Sega” and chosing the platform “Wii” you’ll see that the following games will probably be available:

Though with only 18 titles for the Wii listed on the ESRB site one doesn’t even need to narrow it down to Sega at this point. Kind of funny that Sega has the only exclusive Wii titles listed with nothing by Nintendo there yet.

It’s not known whether or not this is all the games we’ll be getting but if I had to guess I’d say this is probably all we’re getting in the first batch. Why submit just a few of the more reckogniseable titles for approval and sit on others? Still this is a great assortment of some of the best games the Sega Genesis had to offer and I can’t wait to see what else the Wii Virtual Console has in store.

Thanks to powet poster Spooie for the heads up.

Anime Jungle has pre-orders for 2007 calendars up and I stumbled upon one for the new Animal Crossing movie that’s set to be released in Japan on December 12th. Powet.tv last reported on this movie in July when a few characters had been revealed through their official site.

A look at this better but still low res picture of the cover courtesy of Yes Asia reveals some new characters:

Among some already introduced characters we see the inclusion of K.K., Mr. Resetti, a Penguin who appears to be Hopper, and some kind of otter fisherman character who I believe is new to the movie. A look at other items available on both Yes Asia and Amazon Japan show that there is a plushie for this weird fishing character, named Rakosuke, due out in the next month.

Not much seems to have been going on at the official site but there is an unupdated blog which tells us nothing we don’t already know that you can check out if you really want to see something.

Stay tuned to Powet to get every tiny detail we can find out about this movie as it becomes available.

Playsyde has made available Sony’s first Playstation 3 commercial which is intended for a European audience.

A lower resolution streaming version is available for the impatient You Tubers out there and a 1280×720 high quality downloadeable version is also available for those that want to see some guy punching a bag and jumping around a ring in high definition and then seeing a few short seconds of some lame first person shooter in a quality that’s comparable to what the rich elite of Europe will see on that system sometime in 2007.

The commercial rings in at a ridiculous 3 minutes and 20 seconds with about 12 seconds of actual footage tagged on at the end. Most of it is just some guy training and boxing with a voice over going on about how revolutionary this beast is supposed to be. Unless there’s an ultra realistic boxing training simulation game I haven’t heard about I’m not very impressed.

This is living?

Thanks to TVPro for the heads up.

A powet.tv exclusive! A review of advanced copies of the new Star Wars DVDs planned to be released on next Tuesday September 12th 2006.

Special thanks to Dave for giving me the heads up that the Zellers at Place d’Orleans in Ottawa was selling these DVDs a week early and to Janine my loving and patient camerawoman/stunt double/lover.

Update – September 9th

Compare the video quality between the new updated versions (left) and original vesions (right) images have been scaled to a common size and correct aspect ratio for easier comparison

The ratings system here in Canada differs from that in the states and it takes a lot more to get yourself an R rating then it would down south. Mainly if there’s a sliver of nudity in a movie State side you’re pretty much guaranteed to get an R while the violence is more likely to get by. And I understand and respect that because a tit isn’t going to make kids go out and screw like crazy. Crank’s another story.

This movie got an “A” rating which means you have to be 14 to see it unless you’re with an adult in which case they could bring their 8 years old. And how they do! I still remember the time the mother and her 6 and 8 year old child made it all the way to the abortion joke in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut before leaving. The onus is on the parents to decide what they want their kids to watch. Unfortunately the parents don’t know what the hell’s going on.

This movie is, simply put, the most offensive movie I’ve ever seen. It makes fun of black people, Jamaicans, Somalians, whites, Asians, Latinos, Muslims, gays, women and pretty much any group they thought of. A running joke of the movie is the main character verbally berating the vilains saying that he’s a “fag” and having sex with his brother. Women are nothing but objects and stereotypes. Amy Smart is his idiotic piece of ass girlfriend who he has sex with in public a number of times. Other women in the movie are the excessive number of prostitutes made to do extremely kinky things for both heroes and vilains as well as a number of Asian sterotypes mainly the Japanese schoolgirls and old Asian ladies.
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