Infinite Lives

Granted, “Facebook” isn’t the timeliest way to get up-to-the-minute news, but Ray Barnholt left a “link” on my “wall” about the upcoming animated Professor Layton movie, to be released in 2010. The president of Level5, Akihiro Hino, is currently writing the screenplay.

But that’s not all! According to the news article, a live-action film version is also in the works. Whaa??! No other details were provided, but the mere mention has worked me into a giddy panic.

Have a very happy holiday, everybody.

Anime News Network – Professor Layton: The Movie Set for January 2010

I recently had a friend over for multiplayer, and I was taking Halo 3 out of the Xbox and putting Gears of War 2 in. Or maybe it was the other way around—I don’t remember. But I was putting one disc into the drive, and returning another to its case, and then I had the keep-case for Halo 3 in my left hand and Gears of War 2 in my right.

And I had never seen the box art for the two games side-by-side before. “Oh my God!” I shouted. I presented both boxes to my friend. “Just look at them—it’s the same cover!”

“How could a Christmas shopper tell these two games apart?” I continued. I named the similarities aloud: on each, there stands a hero, totally kitted out, wielding an enormous gun, set against a post-apocalyptic futurescape with a big, fiery sky, maybe with some alien architecture or a spaceship just along the horizon.

“If it’s so easy,” I concluded, “I think I have a real future in box art.”

I’m not being snide here. So, for your consideration, my attempts to punch up a couple game franchises for their eventual blockbuster releases:

I tried counting the ways I could get into trouble with this post, and I got nervous. So here are some due attributions: cosplayer, arm cannon (sorry), Dr Wily’s castle, stars tutorial, Arizona, robot, zeppelin, steamgun/forearm, sweet-faced man (sorry), Victorian man, Victorian boy, France.

The last time I played Cosmology of Kyoto, my whole apartment began shaking. I remember thinking, at first, that the sensation of the room bending and lurching was a product of my own imagination, of too much time spent dying at the hands of evil Japanese ghosts, being reborn, dying again, trying to figure out what the game was all about. But then I heard a crash upstairs—something like dishes and silverware smashing onto my ceiling—and so I ran (still cradling my laptop!) into a doorway for cover. Verdict? Memorably frightening game.

But, writes blogger Akela Talamasca, “none of these games [Cosmology of Kyoto, Phantasmagoria, Silent Hill] left me with that nearly indefinable feeling of having experienced true horror, the kind that calls into question your perceptions and expectations of what it means to truly be alive, and how tenuous your existence might be. In fact, what these games trade on is their ability to startle, not scare.”

Sincere apologies for the protracted absence! (Inexplicably, though: now more spam comments than ever before. What the…?)

In the short interim before resumption, here is a video, embedded below, that popped up in my YouTube subscriptions the day before yesterday. It heralds what is sure to be the winter season’s hottest fad, the PES Fireplace Screensaver.

P.S. Still here? Perhaps you are wondering how PES correlates with videogames? This is how.