Rahul Shirke

Watchmen May Be Delayed to June?

Looks like the seemingly awesome adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen may be in trouble. In the worst kind of trouble possible. Legal trouble. Fox claims the rights to the masterpiece, which has resulted in some nasty tug-of-war between them and Warner Brothers.

While legal troubles go over the naive and petty heads of us bloggers, we have some disturbing news at hand. The trial itself may go all the way upto June. And since it doesn’t make sense that Fox would allow the movie to be released till then, that could only mean…

The movie may be delayed to after the trial is over, and that is at least June 2009. Bad news. The movie was already a ways off, at March 2009 and is now delayed further? Not that I seriously mind this: I’d wait for all eternity for a Watchmen movie, so what I find scarier is that…

Fox may be trying to sabotage the movie itself. That would mean that if Fox wins the battle, the movie might actually not come out and the trailer we just saw may go into the ancient halls of “Awesome Movies that Weren’t”. And that’s a scary picture for us Watchmen fans.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Delayed for Silly Reason

Most game delays have reasons like an extended development cycle, or maybe trouble in the development team, or so. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky isn’t one of these games. According to reports, Clear Sky’s copies were recalled from North American stores when it was found that a printing error had left without CD Keys. Without goddamn CD Keys.

The game was to be released of September 5th, but will now be pushed back, most likely to September 15th. No change in the European release date, so it’s only North Americans affected. Well, to be entirely honest, I don’t think STALKER was too big of a title to miss for 10 days anyways.

STALKER: Clear Sky is the follow-up to STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. I go on about it now, but why don’t you just checkout this post I made back when it was first released? It’ll sure as hell make my keyboard last a little bit longer.

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:

Gearbox working on Duke Nukem Game? WTF?

Right, okay, let me get this straight. First we have rumours that Gearbox is working on Halo 4 for the next Xbox. Now /gamer reports that it won’t be Halo 4, but a goddamn Duke Nukem game. That’s right, Gearbox is developing a Duke Nukem title, according to the rumour.

/gamer’s mysterious source contacted them, informing them that there is, in fact, no Halo 4 going on. Also, he mentions “When it is announced fans of a series from the past will be surprised.” Note how he says “a series from the past”.

Now, they are contacted once again, with their source hinting at an article they wrote about Duke Nukem Forever. Why the source is not willing to state directly is unknown, but by his enigmatic words, this most probably would mean that 3D Realms is handing the reins of Duke Nukem to.

This wouldn’t be very surprising. Hell, it’ll be great, considering we won’t have to wait another century-and-half for another Duke Nukem game. Besides, the guys at Gearbox are trustable enough to deliver a quality shooter like Duke Nukem’s calibre.

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.

Chris Taylor: PC Gaming is Rediscovering Itself

In an age where pretty much everyone believes that PC gaming is dying a slow death, it’s nice to see some optimism from developers. While Blizzard and Valve have already shown their love for PC, there’s another developer scurring behind them, and that’s Gas Powered Games, known for their PC-exclusive games, such as the Dungeon Siege series, Supreme Commander and last year’s Space Siege.

Chris Taylor, supreme commander of GPG said in an interview that he believes that PC gaming is, in fact, rediscovering itself. The last 10 years of it, have been all about breaking system requirements, and the audience was also crazy enough to buy the latest gear for it. That is starting to change.

“We have to be careful we don’t create games that require four gigs of RAM to run. It’s just not responsible. It kind of was, in the old days; now, well, hardware’s pretty quick. We don’t really need to do that. We should be focusing on the characters, the story, the UI, the design.”

Nice to see it come honest and clear from a game developer. While console gamers have only to buy a disc and pop it into their drives, PC gamers have to inspect the game, compare the requirements, install it, and then hope it’ll run as it should. No wonder even the most hardcore PC gamers have been taking to consoles!

Taylor also thinks that Blizzard has the right idea, “using art direction rather than pure technical showmanship to create visually appealing but less-demanding games.” He says that GPG is working on something very similar with Demigod, their upcoming RPG-Strategy hybrid.

We’ll just hope Taylor’s optimistic tone holds up. Long live PC gaming!