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Papercraft D0g from Half-Life 2 looks Awesome

There’s papercraft, and then there’s awesome papercraft. 4chan user (yes, 4CHAN USER) chamoo232 made a truly remarkable papercraft version of the fun mechanical contraption from Half-Life 2 that kicks ass: D0g.

Just look at the goddamn attention to detail. D0g looks exactly as he did in the Source engine. chamoo232 took 50 hours out of two weeks to finish this project. I know that I sure as hell can’t do that in 50 hours. This guy’s got talent.

It’s also a great break form the norm to create a papercraft version of a character as visually complex as D0g. I mean, everyone else is doing the goddamn Weighted Companion Cube from Portal. The guy is a full 12″ tall, and is currently occupied by a paper rollermine. It looks pretty awesome as well, but nowhere near as awesome as that D0g!

Check out more photos over here at the 4chan board. Don’t worry, this isn’t /b/, so it’s perfectly safe. For now. Meanwhile, here’s the image in the preview above:

Holy Lego Cartoon Series, Batman!

Batman will be hitting the TV again, and I’m not talking about The Batman here. Instead, Traveller’s Tales, developers of all those great Lego games will be handling this. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about a Lego Batman cartoon series by a video game developer! Awesome!

“We’re looking to do… a Lego Batman series. I think they’re looking at doing a one-off initially,” Rich Earl, producer at TT said. The series will use the game’s engine itself, and the characters will animated fresh from Maya.

Earl claims that this will be quite different, and that’s totally fine by me. Traveller’s Tales earlier announced that they had their minds on a TV cartoon series, but did not mention any specifics. This news confirms that a 20-minute Batman cartoon will be on, and hopefully make its way to its own series!

I hope LucasArts looks at this and decides that a Lego Star Wars TV series will be worth its salt. Hell, from what I can tell, that might even end up better than that battlefest kid’s show The Clone Wars. Well, it’s not that bad, but a Lego Star Wars TV series might end up somewhere. Or not.

Kevin Smith Vouches the Watchmen

Everyone’s having doubts about this. Zack Snyder is doing risky business by adapting to film the greatest graphic novel of all time. Will he succeed? Nobody can be sure, because you can’t have the film take too many liberties from the novel, and you can’t capture all the subliminal hints and qualities of the novel fully in the film.

In any case, Kevin Smith, dude extraordinaire, has watched the Watchmen (don’t worry, the use of that pun is going to increase exponentially as we approach March 2009). A paltry NDA stops him from saying anything, but he definitely has words to share about the experience:

“I saw Watchmen. It’s fucking astounding. The Non-Disclosure Agreement I signed prevents me from saying much, but I can spout the following with complete joygasmic enthusiasm: Snyder and Co. have pulled it off. Remember that feeling of watching Sin City on the big screen and being blown away by what a faithful translation of the source material it was, in terms of both content and visuals? Triple that, and you’ll come close to watching Watchmen. Even Alan Moore might be surprised at how close the movie is to the book. March can’t come soon enough.”

Now I am one of the pitiable souls who has not watched Sin City yet, but I can tell that the guy is saying that it’s going to be a great movie. I don’t know how many changes will be made to the movie upto release date, though. It’s still a good 7 months or so away, so you never know. Still, seeing Smith’s reaction, I think we can all expect something extreme.

Spanish Cabbies Want GTA4 Banned Too!

After being banned from Thailand, Rockstar’s infamous Grand Theft Auto 4 may also see a boot from another country: Spain. According to GamePolitics, the Catalan Taxi Federation’s secretary general Josep Maria Goñi has asked the government to ban the game.

Goñi states that the move has been triggered by the Thailand murder case where a loser kid wanted to know “if it’s as easy to hijack a taxi as it is in the game” and did just that. Kid will soon face execution by a lethal injection.

And GTA isn’t the only one on Goñi’s hitlist. He wants a ban on all games with “a high level of violence or which “celebrate” drug trafficking or prostitution”. Well, that isn’t something new, because there must be about a million people or more on this planet who want a ban on those.

Regardless, it should be noted that Goñi didn’t say anything about movies. Apparently, movies with a high level of violence and which celebrate drug trafficking or prostitution must be perfectly fine. But video games? Think of the kids!

While we don’t know how the Spanish Government has responded to this, we’ll just hope that they won’t. There must be more important matters in Spain that banning video games, dammit!

No GTA in Thailand after game-related murder

It’s controversy-time for Rockstar again. Reuters reports that Thailand has halted sale of Grand Theft Auto 4 after a dumbass teenager admitted to killing a goddamn taxi driver after being inspired by the game. While we’re not sure as to how much of an impact this is going to have on the game’s sales, Rockstar is definitely going to take some moral beatings.

The 18 year old boy wanted to see if it’s as easy to hijack a taxi as it is in the game. To conduct this experiment, he tried it on a 54 year old taxi driver. When the driver resisted, the boy killed him with a knife. He was later caught “trying to steer a cab backwards out of a Bangkok street with the severely wounded driver in the back seat”. Holy shit.

And what’s worse? The boy will be executed by a lethal injection if proved guilty. Seriously. I’m not even sure what to say. The boy was an arse alright, but a lethal injection? Thailand’s law is not to be messed with.

While anti-video game fanatics will say otherwise, I still say that there’s nothing wrong with the game. If the kid is stupid enough to try and find out if it is “as easy to hijack a taxi in real life as it is in the game”, then he was definitely the village idiot here. Or maybe suicidal.

A lethal injection. Damn.

Sony to launch even slimmer PS2 in India

Sony, abiding perfectly to the “believe in the sales” maxim has decided to release a fourth version of their immensely popular PlayStation 2 console in India by Diwali – the festival of Light, which occurs somewhere around late-October or early-November. While the Wii and Xbox 360 compete neck-to-neck in the International market and the PS3 slowly catches up, here we have Sony selling the PS2, the first version of which was released in *drum roll* 2000. That’s 8 years ago, people. 2 years shy of a decade.

AC adaptors will be integrated into the console itself now, but even then, the PS2 will be “slimer, sleeker and more suave” [sic]. It will be priced the same as before, at Rs. 6990 (approx. $165). The PS2 has become the best selling console in India very recently because of this cheap price, easy availability, combined with the fact that there are still games being made for it. The Xbox, on the other hand, was nowhere in sight until the 360 came along with its humongous price tag.

Another reason why the PS2 is big here is, that pirated games for the PS2 are pretty much everywhere. For the Xbox 360 though, you need to buy original titles, which cost somewhere around Rs. 2000, which no sensible Indian consumer will be willing to spend. The PS3 is too downright costly and the Wii isn’t available officially (I don’t remember the last Nintendo console available officially here…)

In addition, Sony will also be introducing the PlayStation Network for India by the end of this fiscal year, which should bring India into the realm of online PS2 gaming.

Sony Country Manager (awesome title there) Atindriya Bose said, when asked about whether it will affect the PS3 market:

“We do not market it as a PS-2 or PS-3. It is the experience of the PS that we market. PS-3 is for the next generation. People who are first timers in the gaming market want to pick up PS-2 and experience that, before upgrading to PS-3,”

Now that’s funny. “How do we make money off of casual gamers?” they asked. “I know, milk the PS2 until we’re totally out of stock, release the PS4 and then release PS3, because it’s the console for the better gamers which the Indian crowd has become! Perfect plan!”

Source: The Economic Times