Transformers 4: you didn't ask for it, but by god you're gonna get it. Michael Bay's next entry in the studio franchise that's come to define 'diminishing returns' sees the director team with future Pain & Gain collaborator Mark Wahlberg, though until now that's just about all we've known about it. With the reveal of the vaguest of plot details as covered below, we can now add 'ingenious scientists' and 'ancient...Transformer' to the list of participants in a story yet to appear, but which Bay claims will move "in a full, new, different direction".
Not content with their deconstruction of the American superhero in ode to violence Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling reteam for this summer's Only God Forgives, from which several new stills have emerged today. The film, in which Gosling's Thai boxing underboss is tasked by his mother to avenge his brother's recent death. Sounds like more of the same from the pair whose fascination with the nature of violence, its influences and its influence made Drive a deceptively deep film about a man driving fast cars.
For a while, the cinematic landscape seemed a little bleaker as the likelihood of a new Bond Film, (capital F) was jeopardized by MGM's bankruptcy and the gap between the cooly-recieved Quantum of Solace and any potential follow-up grew ever larger. Quite unbelievably, Skyfall did eventually emerge as not only a commercial smash of significant enough proportion to guarantee the series' future but as a critical darling, embraced by a great many Bond Fans (another capital F) as one of the greatest ever. Director Sam Mendes has opted not to return, instead acting as arguably the series' most positive influence in 50 years with his inheritance of a flawed franchise and restoration of its roots. Skyfall was like a mechanic in a bad metaphor: it didn't just tune up the engine - it replaced it with a superior model built to the original car's specification.
You know how it goes: the trailer (or the trailer for the trailer) for a big new release is shown at some highly-publicized nerd mecca, someone nabs a copy and sticks it on the Internet, whoever's making the film shuts the whole thing down before finally capitalizing on the publicity by releasing the thing in high quality within the week. Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright's Ant-Man has so far enjoyed half of this rite of passage and I reckon we'll all be treated to the trailer teaser trailer (for the film's trailer) sooner'n you can say "how's that for a slice of fried gold?"
Spearhead Games is to make its debut with Tiny Brains, a co-op puzzle game in which a group of four animals escape a testing laboratory and exact revenge on their captors. If that sterling premise alone isn't enough to sell you on it, perhaps the Canadian studio's pedigree will: the group is comprised of developers whose credits include work on Dead Space, Assassin's Creed and Army Of Two. While none of those games boasts crossover appeal with Tiny Brains' announced features so far, they each represent considerable success in their respective genres and prove that these guys know how to make games, at least.
Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight, currently seeking funding with Kickstarter, will add Nintendo's 3DS and Wii U to its list of platforms if it reaches its $75,000 goal in just under a month from now. A copy of the game, developed by a group of former WayForward (Batman: The Brave and The Bold) employees, will cost you a $10 pledge for the PC version and $15 for the Nintendo copies owing to extra costs for console development and certification and that sort of thing.
If you're still playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, you may be excited to hear its latest 4GB patch is now available for download. Fixes include myriad visual tweaks, repaired audio glitches and basically just a really, really long list of things that tackle faults the game was released at retail with built-in.
Blade: Trinity director David Goyer has reportedly signed on to direct a new adaptation of a thing, because he's alive and awake: Alexander Dumas' classic novel The Count Of Monte Cristo. Goyer, known for his hand in (admittedly) the best Batman origin story ever told in Batman Begins (but also for directing Blade: Trinity), is no stranger to what he calls "re-invigorating and contextualizing classic characters that are relatable to contemporary audiences", though his apparent use of the term 'graphic novel' to describe a film he's making has me worried.
Following in House Of Cards' footsteps (and getting the jump on Arrested Development), Hemlock Grove is Netflix's next all-original program to go live, full-season, on the subscription video service in mid-April. The Eli Roth-produced thriller looks to take cues from Twin Peaks and The Killing in its depiction of a small town dealing with the death of a teenager while going about their business as the sort of weirdos that wold get curtain-twitchers tutting. A second trailer's been released for the series, which you can can view right here, right now, and without a moment's delay (unless you're at work or just, like, don't want to or something...)
I don’t think I qualify as a gamer. I play games, sure, but it’s a rare occasion that I buy a new triple-A title and rarer still that I venture into the ever-intimidating realm of competitive online play which I feel (ever so slightly resentfully) has come to define gaming, and thus gamers. I’ve been playing the same franchises since the 1990s and those are the few I’ve kept close to my heart, treasured sets of games against which all others have been measured as generations have come and gone. I’d champion the merits of Resident Evil 2 to co-workers fresh from a night’s carnage on Modern Warfare and meet only ignorance or arrogance. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 held not the same charms north of the Millennium that it did back in 1995. In getting to a point, I was in exile, self-ostracized from a gaming community I felt I couldn’t engage with and forever doomed to re-enjoy but never supplant the small cache of titles I’d been playing for years. Then, God Of War happened.
