Sony Online‘s next big MMO release looks like it will be DC Universe Online and the long awaited game just got another classic DC Comics character added to its ranks. This time it’s Power Girl, who originally was created as an alternate universe version of Supergirl, living on Earth-2.
In 1985, DC Comics did away with the multiverse idea with the Crisis on Infinite Earths maxi-series. That cause’s Power Girl’s history to be changed. She then became a granddaughter of the little known magic user Arion. More recently the Infinite Crisis mini-series turned her into a survivor of a version of Krypton. As such she has the same abilities as Superman. As you can also see from the above screenshot she has no issue using her . . . assets to defeat super powered criminals.
Heavy Rain was announced way, way back at E3 2006, which was the week of May 8. One week after the show, May 15, 2006, the U.S. Copyright Office recorded an option for the film rights to the game.
The option, re-filed in 2007, is between Quantic Dream chief David de Gruttola and New Line Productions. By itself it doesn’t mean Heavy Rain is coming to a theater near you soon. Short form options are simply a notice that the rights to produce an adapted work have already been granted. It’s largely a procedural matter, one that sets for the record who owns what rights.
But it’s fascinating to see that, so shortly after the game went public, Quantic Dream had a Hollywood option for the game. It means they were either in talks well before this, or there are (or were) Hollywood types roaming E3 with orders to snap up rights to promising-looking games. Hollywood has tons of money, and options are often bought up as a hedge, comparatively cheaply, very early in a work’s life cycle. Because they get hellaciously expensive when they get popular. So the latter scenario’s somewhat plausible, too.
It seems that the PlayStation Network is having some issues. Over the past two hours or so, people have been having problems getting online over PSN and are getting errors when they try to play games. One tipster received an error code of 8001050F, and a quick Google search shows that a lot of people are having the same problem.
Don’t worry, though: Sony is on the job. They just tweeted, “We’re aware that many of you are having problems connecting to PSN, and yes, we’re looking into it. Stay tuned for updates.” We’re sure they’re figuring it out now.
Having booted up my PS3 and checked it out, I don’t seem to be having any issues, but mine is fresh out of the box. It seems that a lot of the people having problems have older versions of the PS3 before the Slim landed. We’ll keep this post updated to let you know what is up.
[Update: Judging from the comments, it appears to only be older (non-Slim) PS3s that are having the issue. Worse still, it is keeping many from playing certain games that evidently require an Internet connection -- even to play the single-player. That's some messed-up sh*t.]
[Update 2: From scattered reports and our own experience it has become evident that the PS3's suffering from the issue have had their internal clocks reset along with plenty of Trophies becoming corrupted. Also, this doesn't look good either: http://us.playstation.com/PS3/dearplaystation/. Still no word from Sony officially.
Further updates after the jump.]
[Thanks, Zachery and Mike S.]
[Update 3: Sony updated their Twitter. According to their readers/followers, 120 and 250 GB "Slim" models are working and only "fats" are glitching; they are narrowing down the source of the issue.]
Any one of us with an artistic bone in their body has always dreamed of being somehow involved in the creation of videogames. After all, for every fantastically designed game, film or piece of work, there has to be a designer making sure that something inspires it to its full potential.
Enter the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. Founded in 1997, this school was originally designed to feed the visual needs of movie studios in the Hollywood area. Of course, the last twelve years have seen a transformation and a shift from films to videogames as the technology has become closer to indistinguishable. Add in a staff of professors who currently work in the real world, such as Kevin Griffith, alumnus and Environment Creator for Blizzard, and Rich Diamant, Lead Character Artist for Naughty Dog. To have them be your teachers, well, that’s already taking steps toward an awesome career.
It’s obvious to see that Gnomon is quite the place to be. With a 98 percent job landing rate on this campus alone, it is clear that there is something going right here. Follow the jump for a quick profile of the school, and the man in charge of making it happen.
I was lucky enough to chat with the co-founder of the Gnomon School, Alex Alvarez. A man well entrenched in artistic design for films and more, he has even been profiled on Last Call with Carson Daly. When he started the company in 1997, his vision was to create a vocational school for people who were genuinely interested in having artistic jobs in the tech side of films and games. In the twelve years since Gnomon launched, two-year programs, graduate degrees, games, and Industrial Light and Magic have all become paramount areas of study.
The school is very successful, with a 98 percent hire rate upon graduation. Part of that success is the employees. Says Alvarez: “Gnomon is a place where we have 25 people, and each person is a specialist in that area,” where he goes on to cite alumni who worked on Avatar and Star Trek, himself included.
So where do burgeoning game designers fit ins? First, there is the staff who currently work in the industry. They themselves act as networking opportunities for fresh-faced students. Since the school is so career-oriented, having the ability to know people who are on the cutting edge of design, and proving through classes that you have those skills, means students can learn the very specific abilities they need for a job. With 30-50 instructors, there are plenty of opportunities to network in nearly any field of study the concerning technological arts. “Our teachers have hired a huge number of our students,” he says.
Even better, the games industry has become even more important to the school. Alvarez says “The games industry has evolved to match the film industry in visuals…or at least close to it.” With plenty of game studios in the Los Angeles area, there are many opportunities to network and connect with future job prospects.
However, those looking for a degree in computer science need not apply. Gnomon is an art school, with some very interesting approaches to game and film design. At Gnomon, art skills are considered paramount to study. Basic artistic skills are taught before later computer tech is introduced. Many students come in with practice in ceramics or photography, and they continue in those fields as they earn their degree. These design skills lay the foundation for later work that can be applied to a career. Even this artistic vision applies to how the school itself functions, for Alvarez treats Gnomon like a creatively driven place. “Some schools,” he says, “have become large corporations.”
It’s interesting to see how one can go from not knowing a thing to being a designer for a brand-new videogame. Gnomon seems to offer a great opportunity for people thinking about entering the next phase of their life, and making games an element of that. While schools like DigiPen and Full Sail have established themselves as places to be if you want to be a game designer, it is awesome to find a new resource for those who want to create their own masterpiece visions.
In the past year, 70,000 men and women enlisted in the U.S. Army. Sixty-seven times that amount – 4.7 million – played Modern Warfare 2 on a console or PC, released one day before Veteran’s Day.
In the latest edition of Foreign Policy, P.W. Singer examines the growing phenomenon of “militainment,” a type of game content that draws praise from actual soldiers and officers as much as it gives them pause in its simplification of a deadly job, and bloodless lack of consequence.
The article is an objective treatment of the subject, spending much of its time describing the history of the genre and the surge in the military’s budgeting for computer simulation training. It has an obvious benefit, one top commanders believe in: “Combat veterans live longer,” said Col. Matthew Caffrey, a professor of war gaming and planning at the Air Command and Staff College. “One reason we use war games is to make virtual vets.”
But demonstrators who object to recruiters using video games to lure teens aren’t the only ones troubled by the simulations’ reduced presentation of war. It’s possible that, in the transition from militainment and game training to live fire with consequences, we can see the age-old argument about violence and desensitization writ large. Managing that, and managing young soldiers’ expectations of what they will face and its aftermath, must become a priority. Because it’s clear that military games are here for good.
Not everything about militainment is controversial: Who is going to complain, after all, about trying to find a better way to save soldiers’ lives, help trauma victims, or prevent sexual harassment? And as Maj. Gen. John Custer told Training & Simulation Journal, the world has changed: “You have to realize what generation you’re trying to teach. You know what? PowerPoint is not the way to go.”
But there are many concerns about what these dramatic changes mean for war’s future. With only so many hours in the day, some in the military worry that video games are beginning to edge out real-world training. Navy Capt. Stephen David complained in the service’s in-house journal that the virtual vets arriving aboard his ship lacked “the requisite familiarity with even the most basic shiphandling skills.” Others raise what is called the “O’Brien Effect,” referring to the time talk-show host Conan O’Brien challenged tennis champion Serena Williams to a match, only to defeat her on the Nintendo Wii. At some point, piloting a plane in combat is different from piloting a computer workstation, just as hitting a real tennis ball is not the same as hitting the Wii version.
The real danger of militainment, though, might be in how it risks changing the perceptions of war. “You lose an avatar; just reboot the game,” is how Ken Robinson, the Special Forces veteran who produced Army 360, put it in Training & Simulation Journal. “In real life, you lose your guy; you’ve lost your guy. And then you’ve got to bury him, and then you’ve got to call his wife.”
This is not just an issue for the military, but also for a broader public that has less and less to do with actual war. As Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, told Salon, “I’ve always believed when people participate in virtual violence, it makes the victims of violence become less empathetic and less real, and people become immune to the real pain people suffer.” But for most parents, having to send their children to war is not something they worry about, even as it becomes something that more of them play at.
At the same time, the nexus of video gaming, war, and militainment is growing even fuzzier with the rapid growth in unmanned systems that use video-gaming technology to conduct actual military operations (the United States now has some 7,000 unmanned systems in its aerial inventory and another 12,000 on the ground). Indeed, the executive at robot-maker Foster-Miller worries that it is becoming too fuzzy. “It’s a Nintendo issue,” he told me. “You get kids used to playing Grand Theft Auto moving on to armed robots. Are you going to feel guilt after killing someone?”
With more and more soldiers sitting at a robot’s computer controls, experiencing no real danger other than carpal tunnel syndrome, the experience of war is not merely distanced from risk, but now fully disconnected from it. One Air Force officer speaking to Wired’s Noah Shachtman about his experiences in the Iraq war, which he fought from a cubicle hundreds of miles away, described the feeling: “It’s like a video game…. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool.”
A commander of a Predator drone squadron based in Nevada probably best summed up to me the quandaries, for both the military and the public. A former F-15 pilot, the officer described the new generation of unmanned systems operators with awe. Years of video gaming had made them “naturals” in the fast-moving, multitasking skills required for modern warfare. But there was also a cost. “The video-game generation is worse at distorting the reality of it [war] from the virtual nature. They don’t have that sense of what’s really going on,” he told me. This might be the essence of this new era of militainment: a greater fidelity to detail, but perhaps a greater distortion in the end.
Every day, this officer heads off to virtual war. But when he comes home, he doesn’t let his own children play the many war games aimed at them. “We do the car ones instead.”
Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Sundays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.
I have a playstation 2 and 3. Does anyone know any good games such as Grand Theft Auto just with out the violence and gun such as spiderman!
It has to include levels!!!!
On line games has been influenced by the power of the World of Warcraft. The game offers unique controls and detailed graphics but the professions provide additional edge in the WoW game. One of the professions is the fishing profession. Fishing profession is a gathering type of profession the same as Herbalism and Mining but with slight tweaks of operations.
If you are interested in fine WoW fishing guide, Do not miss this guide: WoW Fishing Guide Here.
The WoW fishing guide to beginners will be presented before you . The whole fishing profession in the game WoW is like real world fishing. Patience and long lasting endurance to attend and wait for extended periods of your time is one in every of the key elements because catching a fish will be onerous within the game. Once the bobber submerges within the water, it is a signal that you can currently hit the double click to reel the fish to you.
Aside from the fish, there is a bent for you to catch a junk or an item which will solely be attained through fishing. Presented before you\’re the essential steps that any beginner should master within the fishing game.
Step 1. Have a pole prepared for your fishing. Poles in the sport are important and the first thing you want to have therefore get a fishing pole. For twenty three coppers, you\’ll be able to already purchase a fishing pole from trade suppliers and fishing equipment retailers that are usually found near fishing sites.
Basic step 2. Find a trainer for fishing. Fishing trainers are easily found on fishing locations like bodies of water but if you cannot find one then you\’ll ask a guard for their locations. A silver is sometimes the coaching value for a beginner.
Your 3rd step. Search for a water. All varieties of water forms will do. Rivers, ponds and lakes are samples of fishing spots. Looking for a pleasant place can really take you 2 days to complete. A nice location must be peaceful, silent and free from enemies thus you won\’t should fight anyone as you fish and your senses will be alert.
Step 4. Arm yourself with the pole. Access initial the character screen for you to equip the pole by dragging the pole to your character\’s hand slot.
Basic step 5. Look for the spell book. For better outcomes, put your fishing icon in the action bar and it will be in your spell book.
Guide 6. Casting away is the subsequent move ! By clicking on the fishing icon, you can already solid the road and it will submerge in the water if you actually did it right.
Basic step 7. You must reel in what you have caught. Once a fish or something caught the bait, the bobber can surely submerge. By clicking on the proper click 2 times, you\’ll reel in for the catch. Once the full reeling activity is over and you have got caught something, you will now keep the fish in the inventory.
I wish that you have fun with this guide. You cancheck out additional secrets on World of Warcraft Fishing Guide that I additionally review here: Best WoW guide reviews.
[This Week in the Community is your weekly look at some of the best Community related work that has come from the Community Blogs and Forums.]
This week’s gaming setup belongs to Dao2-SKP. It’s best to sum up his collection by calling it the “wall of awesome.” He has a ton of games, movies, collectibles and it’s all neatly presented. Check out Dao2-SKP’s setup over on his Community Blog.
Dtoid New York has a podcast, grunchk1n had a baby, answer the phone, pictures from the Destructoid housewarming party are up, mistic had another amazing EuroNARP and more happened in the community over the last couple of weeks.
Dtoid New York has a podcast now! It’s called The Brocast and Dtoiders Tino, Petiepal, power-glove, Greks, Anonymous Noob and DaRookieMonster all reflect on some past Dtoid NY events.
The latest C Blog meme resulted in a hilarious comment by the unintentional starter of said meme. A self-pwned, if you will. So many memes. By the way, it was Hamzaka two weeks ago. We totally missed it. CELEBRATE ANYWAY!
