Ah, True Blood. Your second season just wasted a chunk of my Sunday evenings for an entire summer. Now you have a video came coming:

Via Kotaku:

HBO’s filed a trademark registration for its show “True Blood,” in relation to video games.

What Kotaku failed to report was the entire trademark that was filed. The game is going to be titled True Blood: Boring Pontificating In-between Emo Declarations…Rise of Alan’s Balls. I’d like to strike every person who buys this game in the crotch with enough force to render them in half.

No seriously, I love you Square Enix. Just when I think nothing can beat Ninja Gaiden 2’s feature that allows players to shake a character’s breasts with the controller, we have a game featuring a hermaphroditic demon:

Via Destructoid:

Nier…features a character known as Kaine, a hermaphrodite with identity issues and a demon that has taken over half his/her body.

I don’t think we should be looking for any sort of developed, nuanced character here. The pictures that have been provided show what can be easily categorized as a “female” – with what, a penis thrown in for effect? Oh well, I shouldn’t let my intellectual, culturally sensitive side kick in. I should just be stoked about the uber hotness that Nier Replicant apparently contains. There is absolutely no subset of horny gamer that Square does not want to cater to. They will cover it all eventually.

I never played Star Wars Galaxies. Somehow despite being a complete Star Wars and video game fanatic, it slipped through my grasp. And then the few friends who did play it told me in no uncertain terms that it was horrible, a psychologically scarring experience, and induced late-term miscarriages in certain women and men.

So with that said, how the hell is this game still around? Sony announced today that they were closing some servers:

Via Kotaku:

Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service, we want to inform you that on October 15, 2009, at 5:00 PM PT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers:

o Corbantis
o Europe-Infinity
o Intrepid
o Kauri
o Kettemoor
o Lowca
o Naritus
o Scylla
o Tarquinas
o Tempest
o Valcyn
o Wanderhome

And all I could think was wait, this game still exists? What the fuck. Who are you sickos still playing this game? Do you really need to role play in a cantina band that badly? I feel frightened by you, and sympathy for you.

Oh snap! NHL 10 came out today. Which means, if you’re a decent human being like me, you’re going to do two things. First you’re going to buy it. And then you’re going to take run after run at Sidney Crosby. It’s not that I want to mercilessly paralyze him in the game forever. I mean, that’d be cool and all. But I’d settle for knocking him over and tearing a shoulder-socket out or something. It’s going to be therapeutic. I’ve been suffering night terrors since the little bitch won the Stanley Cup like three months ago.

So do your part. Buy the game, choose your favorite team, and just wail away on the little punk. I wish it was like old-school SNES NHL ’94. Then I could drill him and receive that beautiful little graphic of the sprite rolling around on the ice in agony. But I’ll just have to settle for a Lucic slam against the boards. Again. And again. And again.

Yo! Check it out! Where the Wild Things Are: A New Hope! Where the banthas at?!

I feel a general sense of sympathy for anyone who isn’t excited for the Where the Wild Things Are movie. The visuals alone have me in a sort of frenzy. Slashfilm has a news story that links to a NY Times article that provides yet another look into the aesthetics of the film. I swear I can feel the sense of confused childhood wonder vomiting through the pictures. I don’t usually get that cheesy, and I’m as surprised as you are about how excited I am for this flick. I don’t know, it just seems like it’s going to be such a trippy romp through what was already an eerie kid’s book.

Pepsibones and myself have been pretty high on Kid Cudi for a while now. I was pretty excited about his album Man on the Moon: The End of the Day. And then I heard it, and it lit my expectations on fire and kicked them down the stairs. In a good way.

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This is truly rad:

Via New Scientist

On 2 September, MIT students Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, and Eric Newton launched a 350-gram (0.8-pound), helium-filled weather balloon from a field in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The balloon carried a used 7.1-megapixel camera — purchased on Amazon.com — that was programmed to take pictures every 5 seconds.

…

After four hours, the balloon reached its peak altitude, an estimated 28,350 metres above the Earth’s surface. At this height, the curvature of the Earth was just visible.

Earlier in 2009, a team of Spanish students launched a €1000 balloon-borne probe that made it to 30,480 metres using a bigger balloon. Larger balloons have more room to expand before breaking as the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with altitude.

[check out the entire gallery @ new scientist]

They’re making a Battleship movie. Like, the game.

Via /Film
Universal has officially signed filmmaker Peter Berg (who was in talks) to direct a big screen adaptation of Hasbro’s board game Battleship

At first I thought it was a horrible idea. But what if, like, they make it some eerie meta-narrative? Like, you have this brutal naval battle between two parties. And at some point, they cut to two people moving the pieces of a Battleship game board. And just when you thought it was some trite war movie based loosely off of another childhood relic, you realize it’s some psychedelic narrative on the freedom of choice and the manipulation of countries populations to wage war over natural resources. The guys on the ships realize that they’re nothing more than plastic pawns of two masters waging the war on some level imperceptible to them.

Then the plastic battleships, upon this realization somehow fix themselves in the esophagus of the players, bringing down the man. Or the men if you will.

Naw, it’ll just be a shitty naval movie.

FELLOW Metal Heads, fucking stop! Put down Megadeth’s Endgame, and go spend the money on something productive. I see you in the aisle, with it in your hand. I’ve been there. But you don’t owe Dave Mustaine anything. I’ve enjoyed almost all of Megadeth’s albums for varying reasons. I even enjoyed their last effort, United Abominations. It had some decent songs, and the lyrics were so bad they were entertaining.

Endgame makes a good point that I hope you all pay attention to: heavier isn’t always better. Even though Endgame is heavier than probably everything since Countdown, it’s my least favorite album since The World Needs a Hero. All the riffs sound like Dave Mustaine was trying to write Rust in Piece again. The results are thrashy riffs that aren’t really memorable, and half of them sound like a rehash or tweaking of Tornado of Souls of some shit.

Amorphous, boring riffs.

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Harrison Ford is talking Indiana Jones 5?

Via /Film

According to Tout Le Cine, Ford told the assembled press at Deauville that he, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have agreed on the maguffin for the fifth film. Well, my translation software doesn’t say the ‘fifth maguffin’ but the ‘fifth element’ – I hope he wasn’t just talking about the Luc Besson movie.

What the fuck. Guys. Come on. The Indiana Jones awesome to suck ratio is so friggin’ high. Don’t start diluting that. Did you ever think that there would be as mad awful Star Wars movies as there were stellar ones? Kingdom of the Crystal People With Adamantium Skulls featured Even Stevens swinging on vines with monkeys. Please. I beg you. No