Alright now, the first trailer for the Green Lantern movie has landed. Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jor­dan, aka Green Lantern, in this film about one of the might­i­est super­heroes in the DC Uni­verse. Well, first things first – here’s the trailer (if you’d rather enjoy it in glo­ri­ous Quick­time, head over to Apple):

The trailer looks def­i­nitely more science-fiction-oriented than other super­hero movies. Oh, and the trailer starts with a funny line. Every­thing starts get­ting more inter­est­ing when he meets the alien Abin Sur. When Abin hands over his ring to Jor­dan, the adven­ture starts. The visual effects are well done except for Reynolds Green Lantern suit. I seri­ously hope it’ll look bet­ter when the film hits the movie the­aters next year. Any­way, there’s no men­tion of Par­al­lax in the trailer who is listed at IMDB as the supervil­lain the Green Lantern has to bat­tle to save Earth.

Green Lantern is due to be released on 17 June 2011.

Accord­ing to Shack­news Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 mil­lion units on launch day – in North Amer­ica and UK alone. That’s almost a mil­lion units more than Mod­ern War­fare 2 man­aged back in Novem­ber 2009. My own copy cur­rently is en route and I can’t wait to finally play the game. Luck­ily, I once again bought the game for the PS3 as there seems to be quite a grow­ing num­ber of bugs and exploits on the PC plat­form. If you’re inter­ested, head over to the offi­cial forums.

So what does the game have in store? There’s a heav­ily scripted sin­gle player mode where you play lots and lots of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, a zom­bie co-op mode, and the mul­ti­player mode, of course. Nat­u­rally, mul­ti­player ist the most inter­est­ing ascpect of the game and I’m going to com­pletely ignore all the rest. Here are the key fea­tures every­one should know:

• High­est level is 50 and there are 15 lev­els of prestige.
• The player must level up to unlock weapons and perks for pur­chase (all perks will become avail­able with level 4, all kill­streaks with level 10).
• There’s a short, very infor­ma­tive list of all the perks and their respec­tive pro ver­sions over at the offi­cial site.
• You can also find a list of all the kill­streaks there.
• The in-game cur­rency is called CoD Points and it is used to pur­chase weapons and upgrades, and can be used for con­tracts and Wager Matches. Con­tracts are basi­cally chal­lenges with dif­fer­ent goals and dif­fu­culty lev­els. You buy con­tracts with CoD Points and upon com­plet­ing a con­tract you’ll earn more CoD Points than you orig­i­nally paid for the con­tract itself. In Wager Matches play­ers wager their CoD Points agains every­one else and only the top three play­ers get rewarded – the rest get nothing.
• CoD Points are 10% of the XP earned per match and 1,000 points per level-up. Con­tracts, chal­lenges and Wager Matches also com­prise a source of income.
• There are four game modes in the Wager Match cat­e­gory: Gun Game, Sticks and Stones, Once in the Cham­ber, and Sharp­shooter. Fur­ther infor­ma­tion is avail­able over at The Call of Duty Wiki.

Three days ago Bliz­zard announced the final Dia­blo 3 class dur­ing the open­ing cer­e­mony of Bliz­zCon: The Demon Hunter. The final class seems to be the most gadget-oriented of the five. The Demon Hunter brings a pair of dual cross­bows and quite an arse­nal of arcane gad­gets to the bat­tle­field. While the Demon Hunter def­i­nitely is a ranged char­ac­ter it’s not your typ­i­cal ranger arche­type. The new class uses knives, bows, cross­bows, and dual-wielded one-handed cross­bows as well as lots of gad­gets like traps, grenades, or bolas.

Here’s a video of the Demon Huntress in action:

Read more…

Almost exactly one year ago I last updated my user­script for KeeP­ass. Dubbed KeeP­ass Auto­Type Enhancer it does a few things to make using KeeP­ass eas­ier. Firstly, the script injects the host­name in the title if it’s not already there. I changed the algo­rithm so that if the site already places its name in the title the script will only add the top level domain in the appro­pri­ate place. I did this to save some space. The title bar always looks pretty crowded to me nowadays.

Sec­ondly, the script tries to locate INPUT tags of the type pass­word on the site it’s exe­cuted. It then looks for the first INPUT tag of the type text that comes before the pass­word input field which usu­ally accepts the user­name and tries to set the focus on this input field. This way you only have to press your KeeP­ass short­cut (CTRL+ALT+A by default) to insert your cre­den­tials auto­mat­i­cally. The new ver­sion of the script will also detect login fields if they’re placed in IFRAMES. So now the script should work on sites like techreport.com as well.

Of course, the script will not set the focus on the login fields if the input box isn’t vis­i­ble in the view­port. To force the script to always set the focus on the user­name input field, sim­ply press CTRL+ALT+S, which will set the focus on the first user­name field it finds – even if it is out­side of the view­port. In this case, the browser will scroll as needed to make the input field visible.

Over the last weeks I spent some time to get the blog work­ing again, after I screwed it up.  I started by mak­ing a child theme of the pop­u­lar iNove theme by NeoEase. A few days later I had to apply some fixes for Inter­net Explorer users. When­ever I had some spare time I changed a few set­tings and tried oth­ers. For instance, Opera users would see strange sym­bols some­where in the text. That’s because wp-Typography has an option named “Enable wrap­ping after hard hyphens” which adds zero-width spaces after hard hyphens. Opera evi­dently doesn’t like this, so I turned if off for the time being.

I deleted a few plug-ins and tried a few oth­ers. I now have a new con­tact form (Con­tact Form 7) and I’m quite happy with Anti­spam Bee which does an excel­lent job. In addi­tion, I edited the Embed­ded Video plug-in to enable embed­ding videos from a few more sites and changed a few para­me­ters. On the other hand, I cleaned up the Socia­ble plug-in and changed a few things in my CSS file to make the site more pleas­ant to look at. Right now, I’m plan­ning to change my theme but I’d have to take a closer look at pos­si­ble can­di­dates first, so that may take me a while.

Now that these issues are out of the way I can return to blog­ging once again. Stay tuned for more posts!

Activi­sion plans to dis­trib­ute feature-length game cutscenes as game-based movies within the next five years. Accord­ing to Eurogamer Activi­sion boss Bobby Kotick made this pre­dic­tion at the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions & Enter­tain­ment Con­fer­ence in Cal­i­for­nia. Kotick referred to Star­Craft II’s hour-long cutscenes, of course.

“If we were to take that hour, or hour and a half, take it out of the game, and we were to go to our audi­ences – for whom we have their credit card infor­ma­tion and a direct rela­tion­ship – and say to them, ‘Would you like to have the Star­Craft movie?’… and say we have this great hour and a half of lin­ear video that we’d like to make avail­able to you at a $30 or $20 price point, you’d have the biggest open­ing week­end of any film ever,” Kotick said.

So, Activi­sion wants to cap­i­tal­ize on the rela­tion­ship it already has estab­lished with its cus­tomers. In other words, they want the cus­tomers to pay some $20 or $30 for ren­dered in-game cin­e­mat­ics they can watch in the game. I mean, what’s this dude smok­ing? I can watch three films in the movie the­ater or I can buy two new Blu-ray movies for 30 bucks.

How will Activi­sion deliver the movies? Kotick didn’t elab­o­rate on that but it sounds like it’s going to hap­pen via the Inter­net. Wait a moment! Didn’t Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment do some­thing sim­i­lar some time ago? Yes! There is some­thing on Ama­zon and other stores that’s called Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment DVD Col­lec­tion. It con­tains cutscenes from Star­craft, Dia­blo 2, and War­craft 3. Well, it already worked once but I’m sure Bliz­zard didn’t try to sell you this col­lec­tion for $30.