The Heroes are Back!

[Update #2]

FLV playback is now working in the player. Sorry about that! All the clips below are now playable.

[Update]

I’ve uploaded high quality files of the NGH 2 Diaries.

It appears that any file that was FLV is having some playback issues. We’re working on fixing this problem in the player.

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It’s been a long time since I last talked about The Next-Generation of Heroes on StuffWeLike! This series was the first film StuffWeLike.com ever made! That’s how classic this series is.

Back in the summer of August 2003 filming began on a set of films that took almost a year to complete. After that we released a DVD with tons of special features. Then about a year after the DVD filming began for the sequel and eventually wrapped up in spring 2006.

The Next-Generation of Heroes has and for ever will have an impact on my life and since it is 100% tied to StuffWeLike.com, I’ve dedicated an entire show to it. This collection features potentially everything ever made available and many things that were only shown on the DVD!

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As of writing this post, I still have a couple more videos – NGH 2 Diaries – that will be added later tomorrow.

Our Video Player to the MAX!

Class is now in session. First on the list of lessons is how to comment on any video in our video player called The Pipeline. I knew that you wouldn’t want to read how to do this so here’s a 16-second video tutorial. Yes it’s really easy and fun to comment!

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Dragon Ball Z the movie?

[UPDATE]

Dragon Ball Z has been confirmed. It will star Justin Chatwin and James Marsters. See this post for more details.

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Screenshot from an episode of Dragon Ball Z

If the Gazette hasn’t begun spreading lies, it is probably telling the truth when it says that a live action Dragon Ball Z movie may actually be in the works!

According to the Gazette, 20th Century Fox is working on 3 movies that are expected to be shot in Montreal next year, each having a budget of atleast $100 Million! From the source:

The films are the Night at the Museum sequel Another Night, Independence Day director Roland Emmerich’s remake of the sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage and a big-screen adaptation of the Japanese manga Dragonball Z.

Are we hearing this right? Dragon Ball Z is an immensely successful franchise spanning mangas, animes, several video games and who knows what else (wikipedia it, dummy).

We know nothing more than this, except that production should end by next July.If this turns out to be ‘fer real!’, we might just be in for a nonsensical, but fast-paced, action-filled live action flick! Just the sort I like!

[Via SuperHeroHype]

Filmmakers Don’t Know Games

Next-Gen.biz had a great article with Jeremy Bolt, the Producer from the upcoming Resident Evil: Extinction film. I love this article because it talks about someone other than Uwe Boll. Sure everyone loves making fun of Uwe, as well as anyone that attempts to adapt a video game to film. Lets face it, video game movies aren’t high quality – but some are at least enjoyable.

Mortal Kombat: The Movie

Next-Gen’s article reveals how little producers care for the material that they’re adapting from. It’s good that Paul W.S. Anderson at least plays the game before writing the film script, but does he and other writers understand what makes the game great in the first place?

“Gone are the days where you could just quickly jump on an IP like a videogame, make a close adaptation, and then just watch the money roll in,” said Jeremy Bolt. From my perspective it seems like filmmakers are still doing this. Obviously films have to appeal to general audiences as much as possible, in order to gross the largest amount of money possible, but why is it that films based on games have sucked, do suck, and will suck?

What it comes down to is one simple thing. You can play a game as much as you want to, but you will always have a different experience than someone else. That’s the beautiful thing about video games – there are multiple possibilities that change the experience users receive and in turn react to. Before any worthwhile adaptation can be created, it is key to understand what made the game good and how it impacted the player.

Lets face it, there has probably never been a film based on a video game that was directly made for the fans. If there ever was, it probably still bombed at the box office. Is any gamer really going to pay to watch a direct translation of what they’ve already done on their own in a video game?

This is a dilemma that all filmmakers face when trying to adapt a video game to film. It’s not an easy process. Much like the comic book to film adaptations, the best films will come when there are more closely tied collaborations between filmmakers, that fully understand why the material has a fanbase, and the industry that created the original material.

Medal of Homer

Truly, I wonder if there can be a game to damned compelling, emotionally demanding and downright beautiful. You might have played Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Brothers in Arms and god knows what else they spat at you, but you haven’t played intense World War II till you’ve played Medal of Homer.

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New Cloverfield Rumors

[Update]Check out more of our Cloverfield Coverage!

Ye Olde series of tubes blog Ain’t It Cool has released a new article about Cloverfield’s plot. The article mentions that the information comes from two untested, and thus somewhat unreliable, sources. The article mentions that the trailer we’ve seen was the beginning of the movie, a shortened version of the opening at that. After the trailer the main characters are in a dark corridor, and one of them is a girl whose badly bruised.

Blah blah blah, so on and so forth. I could repeat everything the article mentions here, but honestly, I don’t think it’s significant. Much of the rumors that AICN posted sounds like a blow by blow translation of the Korean Monster movie The Host. Some people survive a monster attack, one of them is seemingly “infected” and they’re quarantined by their government while the monster spouts out some minions and the government fails to stop it. The entire rumor, should be taken as just that, a rumor. Much of the official information we’ve seen says that the opening of the movie is a group of people mulling around a destroyed New York City finding the camera with all of the information. Not much, could have been avoided in the write up, but somewhat important to point out. Another piece of information is that there have been several Myspace accounts set up echoing the characters from the movie, might be fake, but doesn’t appear so. The accounts show more than three main characters like AICN says. Hit the jump for more.
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