Brave New Films, a progressive viral film site born out of the 2008 election, has taken a sharp stab at conservative pundits. Unfortunately they did so by slandering a classic video game character in the process.

An email sent out of subscribers and an update on their home page shows a headline “Pac Man vs Palin? You Betcha!” paired with an image that depicts the Namco owned character chasing former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin like one of the enemy ghosts. In the text they refer to him as “Progressive Against Conservative” Man though there is little mistaking the character, right down to the basic yellow pie shape.

The game itself is identical to the original Pac Man, with a purple maze instead of blue, and the ghosts replaced with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Bill O’Reilly. When a player eats a power pellet and then eliminates an enemy ghost, an audio clip from one of the conservative pundits plays. Likewise, when a pundit catches Pac Man, a clip taunting the player also runs.

Parody and satire are well and good, and fair use laws when paired with non profits are generous and fair. However, it cannot be mistaken by my eyes that Brave New Films and its founder Robert Greenwald are guilty of stealing Pac Man for their own gain. There are millions of unique or even similar flash games available and plenty of like-minded developers who could’ve made a game for Brave New Films. Instead they took an existing idea and willfully modified the visuals and audio. The core game mechanic, the very thing that makes Pac Man an arcade classic, is completely unchanged.

Brave New Films did not respond to requests for comment, we will update if they do. The game is currently still available at http://bravenewpacman.com/

Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

The early 90s bought gamers a new genre of video games: the one-on-one fighter. This new genre of games was the offspring of sports games and beat-em-ups. You took one fighter against another, and it was up to you to take him down. These games weren’t controlled by the simple joystick plus 1 or 2 button setups. No, there were anywhere from 3 – 6 buttons, and you performed special moves by pulling off combinations of the joystick and these buttons to pull off special attacks. The key to winning these games was mastering and utilizing these special attacks, stringing them together in combos. To the best fighting game players, this became both art and science. It wasn’t uncommon to see crowds of players standing around a heated fighting game contest that was going on at the local arcade, weather it was Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Power Instinct, or X-men. Capcom was the undisputed leader of the genre, although beside Midway’s Mortal Kombat, there was another competitor, SNK. Of all the game developers who made fighting games, SNK had the most acclaim after Capcom. The developer had released a collection of fighting games for its Neo Geo arcade system/home console, among them were Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting. These two games enjoyed a deep storyline and an interesting cast of characters who were every bit as memorable as Capcom’s fighters. In 1994 however, they would release something that had never before been seen in gaming, the King Of Fighters.
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The fourth season of The Venture Bros has been split into two 8 episode arcs. The first 8 have already aired and the series will continue with “The Diving Bell VS. The Butterglider” on September 12. As with last year, we have a teaser for whats in store this fall.

See Sgt Hatred in the Optimus Prime Voice Changer Helmet, Brock as Cobra Commander, White and Billy on a motorcycle, Shore Leave talk about his ass, and more clones than we can count.

The Venture Bros is still the most amazing show on TV and its only getting crazier.

So back in the day, MTV actually had a decent helping of good programming to its name, in tandem with the music component it has since lost. In the 1990’s, you had shows such as Beavis and Butthead (I didn’t say they were intellectually-stimulating, mind you), which showcased the network’s mindset of pushing the envelope with mindless entertainment for it’s core audience – teen and 20-something men.

But then the balance came out in the form of Daria in 1997. Daria Morgandorffer started as a side character on Beavis and Butthead to serve as a foil for the two brainless teen boys. MTV execs approached the series story editor with the idea of creating a spin-off series starting Daria. The Go-ahead was given, and in March of 1997, the first of 13 episodes aired for the new series and an animated legacy was born. Sorta.
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Nickelodeon has announced a new series to air in 2011 based on the mythology of their very popular Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Here is the description given in the announcement:

The Legend of Korra takes place 70 years after the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender and follows the adventures of the Avatar after Aang – a passionate, rebellious, and fearless teenaged girl from the Southern Water Tribe named Korra. With three of the four elements under her belt (Earth, Water, and Fire), Korra seeks to master the final element, Air. Her quest leads her to the epicenter of the modern “Avatar” world, Republic City – a metropolis that is fueled by steampunk technology. It is a virtual melting pot where benders and non-benders from all nations live and thrive. However, Korra discovers that Republic City is plagued by crime as well as a growing anti-bending revolution that threatens to rip it apart. Under the tutelage of Aang’s son, Tenzin, Korra begins her airbending training while dealing with the dangers at large.

I haven’t seen the live-action movie that is out right now, but I loved every minute of the animated series and I am delighted to hear that the narrative will continue.

Full press release after the jump.
[via SuperHeroHype]
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I ain’t talking about no damn laundry soap. Bleach is a very popular anime and manga series created by Tite Kubo. It debuted in America is 2006 and is currently shown Saturday nights on Cartoon Network’s late night Adult Swim programming block. It can best be described as Ghostbusters and X-men meet Gi-Joe and Samurai Showdown. It enjoys a nice following, particularly amongst fansubbers and bittorrent pirates, almost becoming as iconic of an anime as Sailor Moon, Gundam, or Naruto. This article deals with the anime, although most of it is adopted from the manga. The series has been on hiatus since last November, and re-runs have been shown in its Saturday night time slot since then. New episodes are set to premiere August 28th.
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Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

The sixteen bit era of video games is considered by many to be the bridge between the past and modern eras of video gaming, and there were two kings of the ring: Nintendo’s Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega’s Genesis. Though there were more powerful systems that sprang up around the time, it would be these two that would outlast and outperform all of them, thanks to their accessibility. This was due not only to the technologies that the two systems boasted under the hood, but also with the library of games that were released for the two. It also gave rise to some of those most heated fanboy wars of our hobby. If you think system wars are bad now, you should have seen how bad it was during the 16-bit days, especially when system manufacturers were openly taking pot shots at each other. However, it was pointless for fanboys of both systems to argue with each other, as both systems not only had an equally impressive library of games (even if many multiplatform releases on the Sega Genesis tended to have inferior audio and visual quality to their SNES counterparts), but they outlasted and outsold the more powerful systems that sprang up around the same period. Click below to take a look back at one of gaming’s most exciting eras.
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Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

Zombies – they’re a staple of film and games alike. Pioneered by the likes of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and its sequels, and followed by the slightly less-serious “Return of the Living Dead” movies and scores of others in the horror genre, zombies have been a tool of the entertainment industry for decades. Games began using them as early as the late 80’s, with Castlevania starting the trend of pixelizing the undead, and the idea taking off with subsequent games such as DOOM and the less-than-terrifying “Zombies Ate my Neighbors”. The idea of the dead coming back to life in order to devour the living has been used to great effect in all types of media, and tend to do rather well because of a good chunk of the populace having a morbid fascination with not only the undead, but more importantly – killing the undead. Capcom decided that, by the mid-1990’s with video games starting to become mainstreamed in the media, that it would try its hand at capitalizing on the concept.

Enter Resident Evil (Biohazard) in 1996 for the Playstation. [Read the rest of this entry…]