Tonight Spike TV premiered Blade: The Series in a 2 hour “limited commercial interruption” event following UFC 937 or someting.

The premier holds much promise for this series which follows the style of the world of Blade as we see it in the movie so well that it almost seemed as if they were reusing some of the sets. The action is certainly there and is helped by effects, while understandeably not of a the calibre of a high budget Hollywood movie, are great for a tv series.

The story appears solid though it remains to be seen if it can keep us interested for weeks to come. Blade’s backstory is the same as the one we already know with some minor changes. It’s unclear where this movie takes place with respect to the movies though I get the impression it starts off around the same point as the first movie did and will evolved differently. The premier story, which is setting the scene for the TV series, centers around the character of Krista, played by smokin’ hot newcommer Jill Wagner, who in tracking down the death of her brother gets caught up in the world of Vampires.

Most of the cast including the star, rapper Sticky Fingaz, is composed of relatively unknown actors with the obscure exception of screen legend Randy Quaid as Professor Melvin Caylo. The cast delivers a solid performance and shows that you don’t need big names to get a good story across.

A preview for next week’s episode as well as things to come in the future of the series were shown. The only other star I reckognised from the bunch was The Big Hit star Bokeem Woodbine. It’s looking like the rest of the season will offer the same fun action packed story and amazing visual style we’ve gotten a taste of. I’d certainly recommend checking this series out if you have a chance.

The premier episode will be rerunning this Saturday, July 1st, at 4pm. The show’s regular timeslot is Wednesday night at 10pm.

I’d have to say that “Blade: The Series” is surely the best comic based motion picture to be released on June 28th 2006.

Today we saw the first Blu-Ray discs hit store shelves. On a trip to Best Buy I saw a number of them for sale at prices that weren’t totally unreasonable. The boxes looked cool which is pretty much all anyone would be able to tell you right now. Poked around looking for the players… which were nowhere to be found. I don’t think there are any in Canada. Why are we selling unplayable discs again?

Sony and Pioneer, the major supporters of Blu-Ray technology, have decided to postpone releasing their players. Sony’s Blu-Ray player is currently slated to be sold on October 25th 2006 according to their BDP-S1 product page. I wouldn’t be surprised if that date was pushed back again by the way things are going for them. Pioneer has also delayed the release of their BDP-HD1 player until September according to this article though no date could be uncovered on Pioneer’s website by this reporter. Having the 2 major supporters delay their own players within weeks of the pending release is not the best way to support a format consumers are already apprehensive to get on board with.

Samsung’s BD-P1000 is now available and retails for a shocking 1000$ US. With Pioneer’s player currently slated to sell for an astronomical price of 1500$ US and coming out only a month before the already expensive 600$ PlayStation 3 not to mention 2 months after Samsung’s 1000$ player the logic in this move is not obvious. Sony’s player will be selling at 1000$ and will be released, assuming all products follow their current release schedule, at the same time as the 600$ Blu-Ray compatible PlayStation 3. Why would anyone with an ounce of sense invest in their bare bones player? If we are to believe that this player will be in any way superior to a game system by the same company wouldn’t that just give people another reason not to invest in what is already considered by most to be a far too expensive game system?

I guess these guys just won’t be happy unless Blu-Ray really does go the way of Beta as everyone seems to be worried about.

After all this is said and done HD-DVD players have been available for over 2 months now and are selling at half the price of the competition at a mere 500$. This can be considered cheap only in the same way that the X-Box 360 is considered cheap when it’s price is compared to the price of the PlayStation 3. Of course people aren’t buying either player. I know I for one would get on board with this kind of technology if there were only one available but I just can’t afford to take a risk at such a price point and I think most HDTV owners share this sentiment. I’m fearfull that with everyone waiting there will be no clear winner in the format wars and that both will die leaving us with sub par 480p DVDs. It already happened with laser disc and there wasn’t even any competition for them.

Is there something these guys aren’t telling us? Is this all an elaborate ploy to avoid selling players at a loss while making fat cash off disc sales? Don’t they realise this makes everyone uncertain about the future of this technology? That when they can’t even put 100% behind their product no right minded consumer is going to be able to?

Maybe they’re just not trying anymore or maybe Sony’s trying to make sure the PS3 isn’t their worst mistake of 2006. That will be a tough one to top.

Good news for French Canadian Anime fans! We could be seeing the return of some of our favourite old school Anime shows.

Le journal de Montréal has this article discussing plans for 2 new Canadian TV stations “Teletoon Retro” to debut in English in Spring 2007 and “Télétoon Rétro”, the French equivalent, in French in Fall 2007.

The channel will be featuring animation dating from 10 years back and older. It’s mentioned that they are attempting to secure the rights to old classic Anime such as Albator and Goldorak.

Albator is the French dub of Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock (or Herlock as the Japanese insist on calling him). It came in 2 series. Albator 78 is a 42 episode series translated from the 1978 series “Space Pirate Captain Harlock”. “Albator 84” is a 22 episode series translated from “Endless Orbit SSX” from 1983. The numbers denote the year of their French dub rather than their Japanese release.

Goldorak is the French version of Grandizer (Grendizer to the Japanese) and aired starting in 1975.

Both shows were wildly popular among French Canadians in the late 70s and early 80s.

It needs to be mentioned that Teletoon in both it’s English and French incarnations is notorious for horrible programming due mainly to the fact that they’re incapable of affording to pay for anything the least bit desireable. They generally get the scraps that better channels like Comedy and YTV don’t want. Whether or not this goes through really depends on the financial feasability of securing the rights to these shows.

Anime News Network mentioned this story on Friday but claimed the rights to the series had already been optained. This confusion was probably just lost in translation.

Thanks to Powet antagonist Dave aka Soundowaivu for finding this article.

After a week delay in it’s release we finally get the much anticipated first book of the Gargoyles comic. There’s not much to say about this as it’s pretty much just a retelling of half an episode of the TV show. Waiting for some new material which we should be seeing in book 3 according to some liner notes in this issue. Still I managed to put together a 6 minute review so do enjoy it!

Check out this page for some older info on the book and some samples of what the art looks like.

Guest reviewer Ryu gives us a unique perspective on the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Street Fighter Alpha Anthology games for the PlayStation 2. Also includes a look at the Official Street Fighter Anniversary Edition Controller.

According their official website the new Gargoyles comic was meant to be released this past Wednesday June 14th 2006… yet here we are. According to more reliable sources it will in fact be released this coming Wednesday, June 21st 2006. After such a time I will have a proper review. Until then please enjoy this stupid review of old crap mainly the old Gargoyles comic, a French Gargoyles comic or “Bande Desiné” as we call them and also a colouring book (seriously aDam? A colouring book?)

As the video resolution is fairly sub par I have included a few sample high mediocre quality scans of the reviewed items.

The first real day of E3 come to a close with less E3 news than the days that weren’t technically part of E3. Weird.

Here’s are some of the fun things discovered today:

A new Duck Hunt?!

A sequel I honestly never thought I’d see is playable at E3. The Wii will have a new gun peripheral and what is surely gaming history’s most played gun game appears to be having another go at it. Is this going to be a full on Wii game or is this just a demo so that they can showcase the gun at E3? I’m not going to speculate an answer to that! IGN gives us an impression of the game as well as a look at the new “light gun” shell for the Wii controller. It’s unknown how exactly the “light gun” will work or even whether or not it will use light (if it does not it will probably not be refered to as a light gun much longer…”. Since the original Nintendo Zapper is incompatible on some modern televisions (such as my LCD projection TV) this may finally give us unfortunate souls who tragically only have access to high end televisions the oppurtunity to shoot some ducks again.

New Super Smash Bros. Brawl characters announced

New characters for the Wii Super Smash Bros. game have been reported by Kotaku. New characters include Solid Snake, Nintendogs, Metaknight, Pit, Zero Suit Samus and Wario. I don’t even know who two of those are! I certainly hope players can move their Wii-mote in a belly rubbing motion to incapacitate their Nintendog opponents… though apparently we will be using the classic GameCube controllers on this one.

Earthworm Jim Returns!

From the soil did crawl an interesting announcement from Atari today. We’ll be seeing another Earthworm Jim game, this time on the PSP. Check out IGN for more on this.

An innovative X-Box game?

A game more attypical for it’s system than Kameo will be released on the X-Box! You guess it! It’s a… piniata game… WHAT? Yeah so I guess you just whack a piniata with a bat, right? No. It’s a piniata farm simulation game. Wasn’t that a skit on the short lived John Leguizamo vehicle “House of Buggin“? Well I’m pretty sure it was but still this game is coming. Check out this article at Kotaku for more info and a sweet looking screenshot.