Yes, Uncharted 2 features Twitter integration. Wowzers. What exactly can you tweet?

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Slow Thursday morning. So let me pass along some sexy concept art from Duncan Jones next movie, Mute. Click the image for a larger rendition of it. I was unfortunate enough to miss Jones’ Moon this year which looked like a trippy riff on 2001 and other things. But this promo art along with all the good things I’ve heard about Moon have me pretty geeked out. It also doesn’t hurt that Jones intends on borrowing heavily from Blade Runner‘s vibe:

Via Slashfilm:

Mr. Jones has made it abundantly clear how much a fan of Ridley Scott and the seminal work of future noir he is and another one part unsurprising as he’s explicitly compared Mute to Blade Runner himself.

Awesome.

ZOMG, controversy surrounding Scribblenauts? I lamented the lack of dildos in the game earlier in the day, but apparently there’s buzz about the word “sambo”:

Via Kotaku:

What happens when you write “sambo”? You get a watermelon.

I’m a naive sheltered white kid who was luckily raised by two very open-minded parents. And as such, I had never heard the term before.

According to Kotaku:

The word “sambo” has been used to demean and degrade Africans and African-Americans alike. “Sambo” was a common slave name in the U.S., and the late 19th century children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo is cited as furthering the word as a slur. While the book was set in southern Indian, it did play on the blackface iconography and African-American intellectuals have been critical of the pickaninny motifs

and:

There was even a New Jersey brand of watermelon called “Sambo brand”

Weird. The Scribblenauts’ creative director Jeremiah Slaczka retorted:

Via Kotaku:

Slaczka said that the word was included in Scribblenauts because it is an ingredient of the Ecuadorian dish Fancesca, which is listed, on Wikipedia, as including a “figleaf gourd,” or “sambo.” A Google image search of the term “figleaf gourd” produces an image that looks like a watermelon. Slaczka said that it is common to use the same image for multiple words in Scribblenauts and that that is the reason a word meant to depict a figleaf gourd appears to be a watermelon.

Oh boy. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing about this one for a few days. I don’t really understand how this could have gotten past the Scribblenauts team. Knowing people given the function of this game, the first thing a bunch of intrepid nerds were going to do was…try every single imaginable slur, curse word, and questionable noun. While I had no idea what sambo meant or the negative connotations it carried, it is hard to fathom there wasn’t a group of people or person in charge of preventing something like this from happening.

Someone’s Christmas bonus is going to get significantly lighter!

Oh man! On the same day that the Halo 3: ODST 250gb bundle was announced, Engadget reports that there’s a Uncharted 2 250gb bundle coming to the PS3. I love the fact that both Sony and Microsoft are taking uppercuts at one another. It’s fun to watch, and it’s creating all sorts of ridiculous bundles and deals. Sure, I bought the 360 and PS3 at launch. So really I don’t have any direct benefit from it. But it’s great to see the two giants fighting over our dollars.

Right now? How can you pass up a PS3 Slim with 250gb of space and Uncharted 2 for the ODST bundle? You’re getting a superior game and a Blu-Ray player. Hot.

The way everyone is going nuts about Kanye West you’d think he was caught molesting children.

Oh wait.

We don’t lash into child molesters, now do we? Well, I mean we do. But not ones that didn’t make a significant contribution to the pop industry, molest countless boys and bribe their parents, and perform surgery after surgery on themselves until they look like an unrecognizable monster from my dreams.

I’ve found the past week to be generally disappointing for a humanity I don’t have much faith in already. The pervasiveness of Kanyegate is staggering. It’s everywhere. Twitter updates. Facebook status updates. On the news. On the radio.

Who the fuck cares. Why the fuck cares! Who the fuck cares?

I find it particularly saddening that a dude crashes the stage of a shitty pop infomercial and it brings hell down upon him. Of course he acted like a goddamn schmuck. Is that really debatable? He apologizes a day later and it ain’t good enough. No way. No how.

Why?

Because you’re being told you’re supposed to be outraged. It’s a convenient little bit of fast-food pop-news to keep the fat docile populace from really thinking about anything worth fucking mentioning.

Then there’s Michael Jackson. A man commits a laundry list of sex crimes against little boys and he’s lauded as Pop Jesus. The way people cried and cried and oh-my-gosh-I-can’t-believe-he-died sentiment that was vomited across the walls of media was disgusting.

What the fuck is going on here? How is it that a guy who crashed the gate of a Shit Castle becomes a public enemy, while another pop-star can get away from having children fondle his nipples.

It’s insanity in motion.

People’s memories have become so tailored by the exertion of the media it’s absurd. Newscast after newscast told everyone, you’re supposed to be sad, Michael died! Oh my gosh Michael died! No, not Michael! The world’s only lost a child-molesting pill-popper! How are we ever going to cope? Who is going to cure AIDS? Who is going to solve cancer? Who is going to create the ultimate renewable energy?

More importantly, who is going to be a sexual threat to our children?

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The dudes behind Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma have been promoting one thing: The fact that you can shake female characters’ boobs with your Sixaxis controller. In addition to being horribly objectifying and focused on the lowest common denominator (all of us), Tecmo has now gone and cut a TV commercial that features only one thing: boobs jiggling. Young and old and fat and skinny men shaking their controller to get some boobs hopping. It’s eerie. It’s brilliant? Check out the video after the jump.

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I love Halo. Even though I don’t think it’s blown me away since the first game. And yet, I can only feel general sympathy for people who love it so much they go out and buy this bundle. Only confirmed for a PAL release at the moment, frat boys across the world are hoping North America gets a release as well. I think they’ll be hooked up.

Ben Templesmith’s original art, found via Warren Ellis’ blog. Templesmith is rad, and is responsible for the art on such comic projects as 30 Days of Night and his collaboration with Lord Ellis, Fell.

In case you missed all the crazy Warner Bros/DC restructuring last week, there’s this new entity called DC Entertainment. The head behind it is Diane Nelson. And apparently she has no plans to push through a Superman movie at the moment:

Via Slashfilm:

We’ve obviously done a lot of great things behind the property in our history, and it’s a key part of the family, but we don’t have current plans behind Superman.

So we have a Green Lantern movie in development staring fucking Van Wilder, but no one is working on a Superman movie? Something about this doesn’t compute. If I was Diane Nelson, I’d do two things. First, I’d get Mark Millar back into the DC Universe. I’d give him the keys to Superman. Because if anyone can make Clark Kent one-thousand percent awesome, it’s him. And then I’d make sure that there was a Superman movie put into production that doesn’t just use two-hours of film to slob on the knob of Christopher Reeves.

It’s simple: Make a film where Superman deals with the usual existential crisis, while getting to punch the crap out of something. Like Metallo, I don’t care. And someone please make Lex Luthor imposing. We have flying, relate-able internal strife, a machavelian villain, and a dude fighting a robot. Seriously, c’mon. Easy. It’ll make a zillion bucks. But uh, good luck with Green Lantern And the Emerald Dongs.

I bought Scribblenauts for my girlfriend yesterday. It’s a pretty dope puzzle game, and I knew she’d like it. I watched her play it for a bit, and it seems fun enough. But then I came to a pretty big disagreement with the game over the concept of vulgarity and what constitutes it.

Caffeine: Do you think you can use a dildo in the game? Or is that vulguar?

Note how I even have to ask this.

Far Too Patient Girlfriend: I’m pretty sure that’s vulgar.

Insert some serious silence while I ponder.

Caffeine: Really? Like…really?

I again doze off into rumination.

Far Too Patient Girlfriend: It’s a dildo.

Caffeine: Yeah, exactly! I mean, it’s a device that brings pleasure. How is that vulgar?

Sorry Scribblenauts, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Apparently you’re like everyone else in this boring Puritanical country. I mean, I should have known we’d part ways. I’m the same guy that finds it completely acceptable to discuss bowel movements and masturbation at the dinner table with my eighty-seven year-old Nana. I mean, c’mon! It’s just a beautiful scientific discovery we’ve fashioned to give women and me pleasure. It’s not vulgar, it’s beautiful.