Pixar released the first image from Brave today, and while it doesn’t give away much, the stunning animation does finally give sight to the project so many of us have long been excited about.
Their source from the image, a page on Disney/Pixar’s French site, is 404ing at the moment, which leads one to suspect that Pixar didn’t “release” this image so much as it was leaked, though whether that was intentional or not is anybody’s guess. Looks good, though. Give me this over Cars 2 any day.
Kaoru Mori won the hearts of manga nerds everywhere with her Victorian romance Emma, and in her new project, A Bride’s Tale, she’s taken her craft to another level. Tale follows the story of 20-year-old Amir Halgal, a newly married woman in central Asia, circa the 19th Century. She first meets her husband, Karluk Eihon, on the day of their wedding, only to discover he’s a boy of 12. Yet romance—or something like romance—does begin to blossom between the two, and readers can look forward to a vivid, affecting portrait of life among the nomads of the steppe. Mori’s art is painstakingly detailed without sacrificing motion or life; she is an artist at the top of her game. A Bride’s Tale is so good, we here at SPJ unhesitatingly recommend it even to non-fans; it’s easily among the best manga releases of the year so far.
Well, here we are again. The capricious auteurs over at Valve have labored and toiled and turned the glorified tech demo that was the original Portal into a big ol’ game. And whether or not you played the original (although if you didn’t, shame on you), all you need to know is that Portal 2 is completely brilliant and a total masterpiece.
If Portal was a hit single, Portal 2 is the whole album, and every track on there is as good or better than the original. The gameplay is almost completely unchanged, because why mess with perfection? You are still the silent protagonist Chell, you still wield the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, and you still have a very complicated relationship with artificial intelligence and human testing. But there’s a lot more to it than that this time around. For one thing, there are more characters. You’ve got an affable robot with a British accent named Wheatley helping you out, which is good, because GlaDOS, your nemesis from the first game, wants revenge for that time you killed her. (She seems to have conveniently forgotten that she tried to kill you first.)
The puzzle design is relentlessly clever, and there are many more puzzles in this game than in its predecessor. The environments in which those puzzles exist are equally impressive. You can expect to see significant graphical and aural variation from room to room, and even on the aging XBox 360, everything looked great—the PS3 and PC versions are even better, supposedly.
There’s not much else to relate without spoiling the many surprises of the game, so it must suffice to say that Portal 2 is a synthesis of all the video game arts: graphic design, sound design, animation, gameplay, puzzle, and narrative—each doing its part to create one of the most memorable entertainment experiences of 2011. And that’s not even getting into the incredible 2-player co-op mode, which has its own characters and plot.
If you own any of the platforms capable of running it, Portal 2 is a must-play. I know it’s only April, but this could be Game of the Year.
Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the “clean” version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version available for streaming on our site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony.
The Beastie Boys are streaming their new album Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two in its entirety, right now. And it’s really good.
The Warner Brothers adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic Akira has been stuck in development hell for years now, but it seems like it’s finally picking up some momentum. And of course all the casting ideas being batted around for the (teenage, Japanese) main characters Tetsuo and Kaneda are white guys in their late 20s and early 30s.
It’s becoming increasingly hard to decide if the project is just laughable, just offensive, or both.
They should probably stick with weirdly incongruous white dudes, though. I mean, it worked so well in The Last Airbender.
While it’s certainly a weird choice for a review, the plain fact is that the web comic Homestuck’s many soundtracks are increasingly dominating my listening time. You can expect a lengthy SPJ feature on the comic itself soon, but in the meantime, if you’ve run out of vintage Final Fantasy soundtracks to listen to, you could do a lot worse than AlterniaBound, the latest release from the Homestuck musical collective. This 30-track compilation is a melodically and thematically ambitious tour through the many characters and events associated with Alternia, including most of the troll character themes. If you have no idea what that means, it’ll cost you about six bucks to download this diverse collection of lovingly-sequenced electronic soundtrack pieces and find out. And if you then get pulled into the rabbit hole that is Homestuck, well… I’m sorry. (No, I’m not.)
Artist Mads Herman has created a screenshot of what an early-’90s Lucasarts adventure game (think Loom or The Dig) would look like if it were based on Duncan Jones’s Moon. It would look like this.
Perfect.
Via the WSJ Speakeasy Blog:
Next year, Nickelodeon will unveil the “The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra,” the channel’s highly-anticipated follow-up to its animated show “Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The fact of the show’s existence isn’t news, but the new artwork certainly is. Korra looks like a stone-cold badass. Can’t wait for the show.
Here’s something worthwhile: Selene.
Selene is a hip-hop EP inspired by the 2009 science fiction movie Moon, written and directed by Duncan Jones. Each track samples a song from the original score written by Clint Mansell.
There can never be too many things inspired by the 2009 science fiction movie Moon.