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'Ghost Rider 2' Is No Reboot

Set Eight Years Later

Published: 11/07/2009, Last Updated: 11/09/2009 03:48am

Screenwriter David Goyer told MTV that Ghost Rider 2, which will be based on a screenplay Goyer wrote several years ago and should start filming sometime next year, won’t be a franchise reboot.  The second Ghost Rider film will be set some eight years after the original and Nicholas Cage is still on board to portray the flame-headed cyclist.  Goyer said compared with the first Ghost Rider film, the sequel will be “stripped down and darker.  It's definitely changing tone. What Casino Royale was to the Bond movies, hopefully this will be to Ghost Rider.”

Goyer told MTV: “This story picks up eight years after the first film. You don't have to have seen the first film. It doesn't contradict anything that happened in the first film, but we're pretending that our audience hasn't seen the first film. It's as if you took that same character where things ended in the first film and then picked it up eight years later—he's just in a much darker, existential place.”

The first Ghost Rider film, which was released in February of 2007, cost $110 million to produce and garnered a worldwide box office gross of $228,738,393.  Ghost Rider also sold some 4.7 million units on DVD, which brought in close to $100 million in additional revenue.  While those figures indicate that the film was in all likelihood slightly profitable (the rule of thumb is that a movie has to earn more than two times its production cost to break even when theater owners’ share of the grosses and promotional costs are factored in), it was no bonanza for Sony.  Still, with the example of Iron Man fresh in their minds (see “Iron Man Rights Revert to Marvel”), the studios that have rights to Marvel properties are now loath to return the rights to those characters to Marvel/Disney, which means that they will keep on making new films featuring the Marvel characters as long as they can.  The Marvel rights deals all have “use it or lose it” clauses and no studio executive wants to be known as someone who let a blockbuster slip through his or her fingers.

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http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20091106/US.Orlando.Office.Shooting/

Police: Gunman caught after killing 1 in Orlando

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, AP
51 minutes ago
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This image made from video provided by News 13, in Orlando, Fla., shows Jaso...

ORLANDO, Fla. — A gunman opened fire Friday in the offices of an engineering firm where he was let go more than two years ago, authorities said, killing one person and injuring five others.

Jason Rodriguez, 40, surrendered about three hours later, after officers saw him through the window of his mother's home and asked him to come outside, Orlando Police Chief Val Demings said.

Asked by a reporter outside the police station why he did it, he replied: "Because they left me to rot."

Demings said Rodriguez brought a handgun to the firm in a downtown office tower where he once worked as an engineer, but investigators are not sure what his motive was.

"This is a tragedy, no doubt about it, especially on the heels of the tragedy in Fort Hood that is on our minds," Demings said. "I'm just glad we don't have any more fatalities or any more injuries than we currently have."

Charles W. Price, an attorney who represented Rodriguez in a bankruptcy case, declined to comment.

Camille Previlon told The Associated Press her uncle, engineer Guy Lungenbel, was shot in the back and was able to talk but had not said much about the shooting.

"He is stable," she said. "He's just hurting real bad in the back."

Everyone who was shot was in the offices of Reynolds Smith & Hills, on the eighth floor. The five survivors were in stable condition, Demings said.

A somber Gov. Charlie Crist visited some of the wounded at Orlando Regional Medical Center on Friday afternoon.

"They're obviously traumatized," he said. "At the same time, I was impressed with their spirit and strength."

He said he was thankful the shooting was not worse and said the victims "felt very lucky and blessed to be alive."

Reynolds Smith & Hills spokesman Mike Bernos said Rodriguez was an entry-level engineer who was fired in June 2007 after working there for a year.

"His performance wasn't up to our standards, so we terminated him," Bernos said. There had been no contact between the company and Rodriguez since then.

After the lunchtime shooting, some people streamed out of the Legion Place building while others holed up in their offices. A major highway was closed and nearby schools were locked down.

Greg Cross, who works in a real estate office on the 12th floor, said he and his co-workers barricaded themselves inside after hearing about the gunman on television.

"We were terrified," he said. "We locked the door and put a filing cabinet in front of the door and just waited."

Mark Vella, who works in a different office on the same floor, said he and five co-workers also pulled a filing cabinet in front of their door. They prayed and talked about what to do if the gunman showed up.

"It was a little scary, a little unnerving," Vella said. "We were afraid the guy was still in the building and making the rounds."

___

Associated Press writers Travis Reed, Kelli Kennedy, Jennifer Kay, Laura Wides-Munoz, David Fischer and Damian Grass in Miami; Antonio Gonzalez, Mitch Stacy and Tamara Lush in Orlando; and Christine Armario in Tampa contributed to this report.

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PC Modern Warfare 2: it's much worse than you thought

Modern Warfare 2 has long earned the ire of PC gamers for its lack of dedicated servers, but Infinity Ward has now announced that it's taking away much more than control over hosting with the game in one long face-palm of a question and answer session. No servers, no console, no mods, no problem!

By Ben Kuchera | Last updated November 5, 2009 9:48 AM CT

Infinity Ward needs to realize that talking to people in the PC community does not end well for the buzz around its game. The lack of dedicated servers was "announced" during an interview with a gaming podcast, and the interviewers were stunned into silence when they were basically told their community, as they knew it, was dead. They would have to learn to adapt to Infinity Ward controlling all aspects of the servers, or move onto another game.

More recently, Best Buy hosted an online chat between gamers and Mackey McCandlish and Ryan Lastimosa from Infinity Ward. The floor was open for questions, and the pair systematically crushed any hope that the PC version of the game would even attempt to make gamers happy, or allow for what the community has been taking for granted for years. We're going to take a look at some of the more telling questions from this session, and give our thoughts on why this is bad, bad news.

Josh111: PC Question... What will the max amount of players per map be for PC multiplayer on IW.net

Vince-IW: 9v9

No matter how good a connection the host has, no matter how powerful your dedicated server was, the maximum number of players online is 18. If you have a larger clan, you're out of luck. If you're waiting for someone to create a custom map to allow larger groups, don't bother. There is no news on mod tools or the ability to add your own content into the locked-down server structure.

Infinity Ward says the maps are balanced for only nine players per side, but they also say there is no lean in the game because the game "isn't balanced for lean." Remember, you can easily answer any inconvenient questions by saying it would ruin the game's balance.

Somehow, I doubt between the past games and this one they've forgotten how to implement lean. Likewise, with the ability to run your own servers players can decide what size games they'd like to play on, or use new maps that are larger. As the system is set up now, however, that is simply not an option.

Q: Is there a console in the PC version of the game, so we can change our field of view from the xbox's default 65 FOV to 80 also can we tweaks the weapon damage for each gun, removes perks, graphical debris, breathing sway, also thru console like we where able to before or is this all gone?

Vince-IW: We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it.

The lack of console commands is going to be something that may not make the headlines, but may be one of the most annoying omissions to the game. The ability to tweak and adjust your play experience through the console is something PC gamers have enjoyed since... well, since there has been modern gaming.

There is a long list of adjustments and tweaks gamers can make to titles like Borderlands on the PC in order to adjust settings. Now you're locked into whatever options Infinity Ward sees fit to put into the menus.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a console game that plays on your PC. You won't be able to make any tweaks, you can't adjust anything, and even better? You won't be able to make recordings of your matches. The question in the chat showed just how far the gulf between what gamers want and what Infinity Ward is giving them has become. "Is there a /record feature? Answer yes... please. We're trying to give you a 'chance'," the gamer asked. The answer was a simple "No."

DudezTY: Since we cannot kick people in ranked matches, how will we stop hackers who get past VAC?

Mackey-IW: Our goal is to ban hackers from the game.

It's a shame that it's impossible to show a jaw dropping on an online chat. There will be no way to kick players, and Infinity Ward seems sure they'll simply be able to keep hackers and cheaters from playing.

That's a pipe dream, of course, but with no control in the hands of the players, no ability to control who is hosting, and no ability to kick or ban players from your game, you're just going to have to take their word for it.

kaRMa: Please give me a direct answer. On the PC version. Are all games hosted by players, and is there a five-second delay when host migration is in effect?

Vince-IW: yes.

Why is this a problem? Because Infinity Ward also revealed in the chat that the game will pick who hosts. You have no control over it. If the host leaves, there will be a five-second delay while the game picks the next best host. Players have no way of controlling who is hosting, and of course we know there will be no dedicated servers.

The host will of course have a ping advantage, which should be mitigated by the software "having a great tolerance for latency," and a five-second pause if the host rage-quits before the game restarts will ruin any flow the game enjoyed until that point.

What's more interesting is that they said ISPs will have to deal with you hosting games, even if there is language against running servers in their usage agreement. Infinity Ward's response is that since this isn't a "permanent" server, they have to deal with it. When someone else asked what would happen if their ISP throttled traffic that comes from running a server, they were told that "only players capable of hosting will host."

They better hope that no ISPs get upset, because there is no way for any player to control who hosts. You can't opt out of hosting. If the host quits, the game stops for five seconds while the next one is selected by the software. This is good for gamers... somehow.

Moriarte: Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?

Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

This is the amount of work that went into the PC version: you are given the ability to use a mouse, to use text chat, and to adjust graphical settings. Are your fears now put to rest?

To sum it up

We thought the lack of dedicated servers was bad, but now we can add the lack of console commands, the inability to have a say in who hosts the game, a lengthy pause while the game migrates to a new host if the currently selected host quits, no leaning, no option to record matches, and no way to kick or block trouble players, hackers, or cheaters.

You have to wonder if there are any actual PC gamers working at Infinity Ward, as it will be a challenge to find any member of the PC gaming community that will stand up for any of these omissions, not to mention all of them bundled together. At launch, this will be one of the most locked-down, inflexible, and gamer-unfriendly game ever created.

It won't stay that way, of course. The pirates will have the game up on the torrent sites soon, if they haven't already, and the code will be ripped apart and modded to allow everything gamers want. How quickly will dedicated servers pop up for these pirates? It's hard to say... but we have a feeling it won't be long. Those that buy the game legally will have no choice but to play exactly how the developer and publisher want them to. On the other hand, this has given us some incredibly amusing images from the peanut gallery. The images were found on Evil Avatar's discussion thread.

Welcome to the new face of PC gaming.

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'Halo Legends' Due February 9th

Videogame-Based Anime Anthology

Published: 11/05/2009, Last Updated: 11/06/2009 03:23am

Halo Legends, the seven-story anime anthology based on the popular videogame franchise, is due out on DVD from Warner Home Video on February 9th.  Produced by five of Japan's top anime studios including Production I.G., Bones, Toei, Studio 4*C, and Casio Entertainment, Halo Legends was supervised by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell, Skycrawlers) and Shinji Aramaki (Appleseed).  Directors of the individual segments, which range from 10 to 17 minutes in length, include Shinji Aramaki (Appleseed), Hideke Futamura (The Animatrix), Daisuke Nishio (DBZ), Toshiyuki Kanno (Black Lagoon), Hiroshi Yamazaki (Karas), Koichi Mashimo (Blade of the Immortal), and Koji Sawai (Patlabor). Halo Legends follows the template of earlier anime anthology films The Animatrix and Batman: Gotham Knight, which, thanks in part to their association with popular properties, proved to be among the bestselling anime DVDs ever released in the U.S. (see “Anime Studios Creating Halo Legends”).

Halo Legends explores the origin and historical events of the Halo universe and its intriguing characters.  Halo franchise development director Frank O’Connor and managing editor Kevin Grace provided narrative input for the Halo Legends segments. Considered by many to be the epitome of “first person shooter games,” Halo has generated over a billion dollars in sales for Microsoft.  More than 27 million Halo games have been sold worldwide.

Warner Home Video is planning a major marketing campaign for Halo Legends that will include TV and radio spots as well as significant online promotions with Xbox LIVE, iTunes, and Amazon.  WHV will also put trailers for Halo Legends on appropriate winter DVD releases that should generate an estimated 10 million impressions.

The Halo Legends anthology, which is rated “PG-13,” will be available in 3 DVD formats.  A single-disc version will have a suggested retail price of $19.95.  A 2-Disc Special Edition, which will contain several hours of bonus features including a “making-of” documentary covering all seven stories, plus a feature on the history of the Halo phenomenon, will have an MSRP of $29.98.  The Blu-ray Edition, which will have an MSRP of $34.98, will include all of the extras from the Special Edition plus “Halo: The Story So Far,” which examines the narrative of the videogame through Halo 3.

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Wal-Mart Opens New Front in Online Price War

Ten Top DVD Releases for $9.99

Published: 11/05/2009 08:21pm

Wal-Mart has opened a new front in the online holiday price war by offering ten new DVD releases for $9.99 on a preorder basis.  The DVDs included in the Wal-Mart online only offer include: Star Trek (MSRP $26.99, streets 11/17), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian ($29.98, 12/01), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($28.98, 12/08), Angels and Demons ($28.96, 11/24), Four Christmases ($28.98, 11/24), G-Force ($29.99, 12/15), My Sister’s Keeper ($28.98, 11/17), Terminator Salvation ($28.99, 12/01), Julie and Julia ($28.96, 12/08), and Santa’s Buddies ($29.98, 11/24).  All the DVDs are standard single-disc editions.  Wal-Mart’s discounts range from 63% to 67% off the retail price.

By treating DVDs as loss leaders, Wal-Mart has expanded the online price war that it began by offering a similar $10 deal on preorders for a number of bestselling hardcover books due out for the current holiday season (see “Online Book Price War”).  Amazon.com has already matched Wal-Mart's $10 price on the ten DVDs.  When Target and Amazon matched Wal-Mart’s $10 price on the hardcover bestsellers, Wal-Mart lowered its priceon the books to $8.99, so this round of DVD price cuts may not have reached its end. 

In response to the online book price war the American Booksellers Association asked the Justice Department to investigate the online booksellers “illegal predatory pricing” (see “Booksellers Go to Dept. of Justice”). 

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