The Ubi­days 08 are over and Ubisoft has clar­i­fied a few things about the next install­ment in its very suc­cess­ful Prince of Per­sia fran­chise. First of all, the new Prince of Per­sia will fea­ture a prince, not the prince we all came to know dur­ing the Sands of Time tril­ogy. That means, of course, that the new prince will be totally sep­a­rate from the SoT tril­ogy. In addi­tion, he gets a new look and a new female com­pan­ion, Elika. Well, let’s start at the beginning.

The game is set in an ancient fan­tasy Per­sia, where our hero will get caught up in the bat­tle between the God of Light, Ormazd, ver­sus his twin brother Ahri­man, the God of Dark­ness. Obvi­ously, the Prince arrives just in time to wit­ness the destruc­tion of the leg­endary Tree of Life. This act threat­ens to plunge the entire world into eter­nal dark­ness and so our hero will find him­self in a world of light and dark where he has to fight to stop the rise of Ahri­man. Thus, he will sort of become Ormazd’s champion.

Read more…

The first teaser trailer for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has been put online exclu­sively over at MSN. I didn’t like it all that much but it seems to con­tinue with all the funny lines. This time around Rick O’Connell’s son Alex unearths the mummy of the first Emperor of Qin. The Dragon Emperor (Jet Li) and his 10,000 sol­diers have laid in a tomb for quite a few thou­sand years because a double-crossing sor­cer­ess (Michelle Yeoh) has put them in sus­pended ani­ma­tion. After hav­ing awak­ened the for­got­ten ruler he obvi­ously has a prob­lem and is seek­ing the help of his parents …

There’s only one really obvi­ous draw­back: Rachel Weisz isn’t in this movie. Instead, Maria Bello will take over her role as Rick O’Connell’s wife. Ah, we’ll see how it turns out. Check out the trailer which is also avail­able in high definition.

Well, this topic came up at work today – twice – so I thought it’s about time to write a few lines about it. Puh, where do I begin? How about this: Don’t even think about a plasma TV if you intend to buy a model with a size of less than 42 inches. It’s sim­ply not worth it. Why? Because man­u­fac­tur­ers haven’t yet fig­ured out how to cram mil­lions of pix­els on a smaller dis­play. There’s no way you’re going to enjoy HDTV on a screen with so few pix­els. Because LCD and plasma TVs are very dif­fer­ent in the way they deliver the image to the viewer, the same restric­tion doesn’t apply to LCD TVs.

So, if you want to buy a 43” or larger flat panel HDTV, there are quite a few things to con­sider. First, there’s the color. A plasma dis­play cov­ers a far greater area of the vis­i­ble light spec­trum and deliv­ers more dynamic col­ors than a LCD does. Plus, a plasma dis­play has supe­rior black lev­els. Good black lev­els are impor­tant to pro­vide a sense of depth. As far as the con­trast and the black lev­els are con­cerned, the plasma is supe­rior. Color accu­racy is not so eas­ily deter­mined, though. That depends on room light, man­u­fac­turer and model, but as a rule you can assume that a plasma will pre­vail in a room with nor­mal or lower light­ing. LCDs should per­form bet­ter in brightly lit rooms. (That hap­pens because plasma TVs have a glass sur­face where a mir­ror effect can take place when extremely bright light shines on it.) Then again, your liv­ing room shouldn’t be as brightly lit as it is the case with many show-rooms. All in all, the plasma has the advantage.

Read more…

I’ve dis­cov­ered this game quite a while ago but I had only recently time to take a closer look at it. Mirror’s Edge is an upcom­ing first-person action-adventure video game that has quite a dis­tinc­tive style. Very obvi­ously, it is a parkour-inspired game which con­cen­trates on move­ment. The focus is on the per­son and on find­ing the best route through the envi­ron­ment. The player will slip into the role of Faith who strug­gles to free her sis­ter from a cor­rupt gov­ern­ment. As a run­ner she is trans­port­ing mes­sages for the under­world which is why she has to be fast and smart and try to not get caught by the gov­ern­ment forces.

Accord­ing to the avail­able footage, Faith will move through the city on rooftops and sky­walks. She will jump and slide and even run along walls like the famous Prince of Per­sia. The player will expe­ri­ence the whole thing from a first-person per­spec­tive which should make things inter­est­ing. Appar­ently, there will be no HUD, which will only add to the immer­sive game­play, I guess. Well, it’s time to take a look at the first ever game­play footage over at GameTrailers.com. The few fight scenes are quite rem­i­nis­cent of Matt Damon act­ing as Jason Bourne: short and efficient.

The game is cur­rently in devel­op­ment at Dig­i­tal Illu­sions CE. It uti­lizes the Unreal Engine 3 and is set for release in 2008 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. It looks very promis­ing and appeal­ing to me.

Vari­ety reports that the pro­duc­ers of Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion: The Future Begins aim for a PG-13 rat­ing. You can surely imag­ine that I was like “What the fuck?” when I read that. I mean, are these guys fuck­ing crazy? What’s the point of hav­ing a Ter­mi­na­tor movie with a kid-friendly rat­ing? The pro­duc­ers as Haly­con think that this move “won’t com­pro­mise the series’ gritty vision”. They say that “the rat­ings have changed”. They say that “the PG-13 rat­ing has increased in inten­sity”. Can you imag­ine a PG-13-rated Ter­mi­na­tor? I can’t.

Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion is sup­posed to depict the future war betwen humans and machines and you can’t pos­si­bly to that with such a rat­ing. No, I’m sorry. Of course you can do it but it won’t be Ter­mi­na­tor. If they really go through with it, I’m def­i­nitely not going to watch this film. Nat­u­rally, a family-friendly rat­ing opens many doors like a licens­ing deal for action fig­ures with Play­mates Toys. I just don’t get it. But there have to be a few guys doing research who said that this will earn more bucks than just the­ater tick­ets and DVD boxes alone.

Wait, didn’t they mer­chan­dise the fuck out of Ter­mi­na­tor 2 an 3? Both with an R rat­ing? Oh yeah. A few things must’ve changed since then. Well, one thing is absolutely clear: I want to see the future war. I want to see killing machines killing of humans with­out emo­tion. I wanna get scared just by think­ing of what machines can do if they decide to exter­mi­nate humankind. Dying off-screen, lasers hit­ting noth­ing, and no extreme vio­lence? War with­out hard lan­guage? That’s def­i­nitely a no-go, boys. Nobody will believe it.

Just as announced ear­lier last week, the new Dark Knight trailer has gone online yes­ter­day. It’s avail­able at the pro­mo­tional site in won­der­ful Quick­time which you should def­i­nitely visit as soon as pos­si­ble. This incred­i­ble trailer promises quite a lot and if I’m not mis­taken, a lot of peo­ple will refer to this film as Heath Ledger’s legacy. The Joker is just plain awe­some, a very fright­en­ing char­ac­ter! So what in the trailer besides the Joker and – very obvi­ously – the Dark Knight him­self? Well, we get to see Aaron Eck­hardt, who plays Har­vey Dent, who might be known bet­ter as the infa­mous Two-Face. We also get a glimpse of how Dent becomes Two-Face. Ah, that’s enough. Watch it for yourself!

Want more posters? Check out this site! The Dark Knight will come to a the­ater near you on July 18^th. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing more footage spilling on the net before I’m gonna watch this flick on the big screen.