Well I’ll be, I remember being excited for this back in high school… word came in today from Billboard (via Pitchfork) that former, and now current, Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha has finally completed his solo album, you know… the one he started working on back in 2000 when the rest of the band left to form the not-terrible-but-terribly-disappointing Audioslave? Pitchfork’s Matthew Solarski had this to say:

De la Rocha collaborated with Golden stickman and one-time Mars Volta/Royal Trux drummer Jon Theodore on the LP and recorded some of it at a studio belonging to acousti-surfer-dude Jack Johnson. Zack doesn’t have a title for the record and is still considering his release options, so no word yet when he’ll rally ’round your family with this pocket full of new songs.

It’s also unclear whether post-millennial de la Rocha collaborations with DJ Shadow, ?uestlove, and Trent Reznor will make the LP. Billboard.com, however, quotes a source saying that Zack’s first solo foray sounds like a mix of “Led Zeppelin and Dr. Dre. Some of it has the power you’d expect from him in Rage.” So there’s that.

Hmm… I’ll be remaining cautiously optimistic about the whole thing, but my inner 15-year-old can’t f***ing wait.

Weta Workshop started work on the Halo movie some time ago, and even if that’s been put on hold, they continue to work on the Halo short film series thats been leading to the Halo 3 release, as well as developing an as yet unseen game set in the Halo universe. Part of this is making props, replicas, miniatures, and in this case, functional vehicles from the game.
Bungie’s Frank O’Conner elaborates.

Some of the Bungie boys are in New Zealand this week, working with Peter Jackson on the Halo project. For fun, they got to drive around in a real, functioning Warthog. At the wheel, Curtis Creamer, producer extraordinaire –on the turret, Mr. CJ Cowan our cinematics director, and Harold Ryan, studio head rides shotgun. The powerful, four-wheel steering and almost perfect replica of the Hog is fast and agile. Amazing then that Curtis uses these abilities to smash it into what he describes as “the illogical wall section” at a parking lot near Weta.

We’re a bit late this week due to the outage, but we’re back. I’m gonna give you the $20 GOTW and the Lost Classics at the same time this week, as to not to overshadow aDam’s Mexican Independence day. One of this week’s featured games is one of the all time greats of the RTS genre, while the other is one of the few good movie based games of the 16-bit era. So, lets waste no further time in getting started. Click the jump and come ride with me to your local video game dealers bargain bin.
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A Powet.tv Original Movie:

September 16th is Mexican Independence Day. It’s just like Independence Day, only Mexican.

Support Powet by buying the other Independence Day movie DVD on Amazon
(This DVD was used as “research material” for “Mexican Independence Day”)

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For the regular readers, you may have noticed the site has been down for the better part of the past two days.

The reason for this was that we were served with a DMCA copyright infringement letter from an internet investigator on the behalf of Microsoft. Last month, we posted a leaked copy of the Halo 3 manual (which several commenters exclaimed that it had to be a fake). All seven of these images were listed in the email specifically by filename. Our host, who received this letter, shut the site down. When we got in contact with the host, they forwarded the letter to us. After reading the letter and getting back in touch with our host we were given a 5 hour window today to remove all traces of the images from our site.

We have done so and the site has been restored.

We are going to further review the policies of our host regarding further instances such as these and based on that, make a decision to move to a new host or not. While we are willing to comply with letters such as these when they are valid, we are more than discontented that the host decided to shut our site down for such a length of time without any type of notice before, or during the outage, until we were forced to reach out to them.

I have copied the infringement letter after the jump.

But first, Zac made a couple videos about the fall and rise of Powet.

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CYBERTRON VS CYBERDENE

I understand there’s a “Transformers/Terminator” comic book series on the way. Will it be Dynamite, will it be IDW?

Will it be as bad as “Transformers/Avengers?” No.

Sounds alright to me. Hopefully they’ll get a good writer attached, I nominate Greg Pak.

New York Times reports from an interview with Daniel A. DeMatteo, the COO of GameStop, that they’ll be re-organizing their stores this fall to accomodate the massive influx of DS players, Wii Warriors, and Guitar Heroes.

In particular, he describes a whole rack just for music and rhythm games and more shelf space dedicated to family friendly games like Mario Kart, Nintendogs, LEGO Star Wars, and more. Frankly, I’d expect this from a larger retailer. I’m surprised a Target or Walmart hasn’t already done it. As a described “core” gamer by those who are catering to these “Casuals” I have to wonder how this will cut into shelf space for more refined titles like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed, and even well known games like Mario Galaxy. I mean, there are now tons of old people playing Wii Sports and training their brains, but doesn’t GameStop owe it to themselves to turn these casuals into core gamers too? Putting up a shelf with nothing but music and rhythm games will mean for sure coverage with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but will they also pull out older and lesser known titles like Elite Beat Agents?

Can the casuals and cores live together? Leave a comment.

Image from nataliedee.com

This is the latest in the Halo live action video series.

A veteran remembers the day he fought along side Master Chief.