The Police getting back together? Whatever.
Def Leppard reunion? Meh.
Kiss doing another farewell tour? Double-meh.
But… Zeppelin?
Led Zeppelin?
I’ve got at least one used-but-not-abused (well, slightly abused) kidney ready to sell for tickets if anyone is interested.
It looks like the late John Bonham’s son Jason will be joining the three remaining members of the band; Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones on stage for a one-time concert at London’s O2 arena. This will be the first time the three have played together in almost 20 years. Lord willing, it’ll spark off a full-fledged tour with at least a few shows in the states. BBC News has the full story here.
Now, about that kidney…

On Friday, Marvel released a teaser image for what appears to be another Marvel event focusing on the X-Men. I’ve mirrored the image below. The only other information released with it was a date. September 10th, 2007. Thats tomorrow. Whatever this is about will most likely be announced at a Diamond event for ‘Direct Market retailers’.

Is it me, or is that Hisako (Armor from Astonishing X-Men) in the upper right corner of the teaser?

Source: Newsarama

As we encroach closer to the October season, you can already notice a few things in the air that signals the coming of the macabre time of the year: numerous Halloween stores popping up at local malls; candy be piled onto shelves at local WalMart and Target stores; and talk of horror movies being remade and receiving long-awaited sequels.

The latter is the cause with Rob Zombie’s remake of the Horror cult classic, Halloween. For quite a while, it was the talk of the horror culture underground, and the most anticipated remake of the genre. Zombie has a small reputation for creating twisted sounds, and equally twisted screenplays, as can be evidenced by his take on “The Devil’s Rejects“. However, it seems criticism is being thrown on heavy in the cause of his touching upon the Halloween series. Zombie takes the original story of Michael Myers, and gives light to the serial killer’s background and childhood, and a look into what made him into the resurrecting homicidal maniac we all know today. Apparently some were not too thrilled with this interpretation of how the story show look, however. I’ve heard some rather good thing from people who have gone to see this flick thus far, but the higher-ups of the horror circuit seem to look down upon the telling of this tale – citing it as “failing because of one simple reason- it’s not scary“, as put by the review of the film on Creature Corner. This seems to be an experience that will be determined on a person-by-person basis. Your either like it, or you don’t.

In the way of sequels, beyond the atrocity that will be released in the form of “Resident Evil: Extinction”, it would seem a second installment of another cult classic in the horror genre is in the works as we speak – The Lost Boys. Twenty years after the first movie hit the screens, and introduced a while new level of modern vampire films, it seems that many of the cast from the original movie are finally coming together for a sequel. Both Corey Feldman and Corey Heim are slated for return, though Sci-Fi reports Heim is having immigration problems that are holding up his arrival on the Canadian set of the proposed sequel film. It would also seem that Keifer Sutherland’s half-brother Angus is ironically being slated as the movie villain role. Whether or not this all hopes to be a grand reunion, or a hopeless flop will as of yet remain to be seen. Either way, it should prove amusing.

PSP Metal Gear Fans have a reason to rejoice, for now there is an actual factual Metal Gear Solid game set within the series’s canon. The two MGS Acid games were nice, but their card game style can’t replace the stealth action that the series is known for. With the PSP’s control scheme, some big changes had to be made to the actual gameplay. Even so, it’s the same style of Metal Gear that we know and love.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Fast on the heels of Dracula X Chronicles, that has a scheduled release date of November 13th, series producer Koji Igarashi seems to feel the need to pump out even more Castlevania for fans to digest in the coming months. Two new games have been announced as in production, one for the Nintendo DS, and another exclusive to cellphone gaming.

Castlevania: Order of Shadows has been announced to be a cellphone-exclusive title to the series and will be released in September to most of the major service providers, including AT&T and Verizon. The game is to be a side-story in the series, and will feature the protagonist stylings of Desmond Belmont, and his sisters Zoe and Delores. (where they though these would be good names for Belmont’s is anyone’s guess….narcotics may have been involved) One can only attribute this Konami’s sudden change from consoles and handhelds to cellphone-exclusive gaming to other games of it’s ilk, such as God of War: Betrayal. Whether or not this game will be inducted into the series storyline as canon has yet to be determined.

The other Castlevania game in production has been confirmed by Iga as being again for the DS handheld system, and promises it “will not be a remake like Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and will be all new“. Any other information as of right now is shoddy at best, and any other solid leads as to what kind of game this will be will most likely be unveiled at Konami’s Spring Gamer’s Day. So, we have a good deal of time before anything substantial is released.

A final note is Iga’s mentioning of a future Castlevania title being released for the Xbox 360, and possibly the PS3 (if it’s sales pick up). Nothing other than this teaser has been mentioned, and won’t probably until after the release of the future DS game. We all can only hope that this long-awaited jump into the next-gen consoles means either a high-quality 3D game in planning, or a grandscale 2D game that would hopefully be the next Symphony of the Night. One can only dream.

Before this game came out, I never considered myself much of a sports player, and save for various college sports games, I still don’t. Now sure, I got a few chuckles out of Mutant League Football and Ice Hockey, and I played Baseball Stars to death, but other than that, sports games were too complicated for me. That’s why me, and millions of others, enjoyed this game. While it wasn’t as complex as Madden or NBA Live, the fact that it was so easy to pick up and play made it a lot more fun to play.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Can lightening strike twice? And by asking that I don’t mean can another toy become successful movie, I mean can a director of critically panned fair win over legions of fans by balancing a mainstream and hardcore audience?

Stephen Sommers, the man behind the Brendan Fraser “Mummy” movies and the absolutely dreadful Van Helsing is now rumored to be the pick for directing Hasbro’s GI Joe.

Now Transformers essentially had its hardest work ahead of the effects team: making convincing characters came easy once you were convinced they could be real. GI Joe has some great characters too, but they are merely human, and it’ll take more than a guy dressed like Snake Eyes who doesn’t talk to get audiences to show up. Theres also that huge problem of this being a military movie and keeping it safe for kids. Transformers got away with all the violence and gunplay because it never showed a drop of blood and most of it was between non-human performers. Lets not kid ourselves, the villains need to be Cobra Commander, Destro, and The Baroness leading thousands of disposable soldiers.

Is Sommers up to the job? I honestly don’t think so, but I’ve been surprised before when Bryan Singer dropped the ball on Superman and Michael Bay surpassed expectations on Transformers. Getting Mark Wahlberg would help, but this needs to be handled very carefully.

From IESB

This game stands alongside Chrono Trigger as one of Squaresoft/Square Enix’s best role playing games not named Final Fantasy. Although it had a few significant flaws, it’s battle system, music (which was composed by Chrono Trigger soundtrack composer Yasunori Mitsuda), and storyline more than made up for them. The game contained references to Freudian psychology, and it was heavy on religious overtones (in fact Square stated in a press release that it may be hard to bring the game over here due to it’s adaptation of Christian themes, but thankfully it was released, with minimal controversy, and only a few changes being made to the characters and story to boot). Oh, and there was another thing that made it different for it’s time: GIANT ROBOTS!
[Read the rest of this entry…]