Geek Tragedy Podnotes

Geek News Segment:

• Creator of Crayon Shin-chan Yoshito Usui falls off cliff while hiking
• The estate of Jack Kirby sues Dismarvel
• The Kirbys claim a piece of Spider-Man
• Nigeria vs. Sony Part I – Nigeria bans District 9
• Nigeria vs. Sony Part II – Nigeria objects to PS3 ads that mention 419 scams
• Possible next Dalai Lama enjoys FPS games, hip-hop
• Indy 5: the Return Of Connery?
• Gene Roddenberry’s Macintosh 128 (#00001), a gift from Apple, auctioned
• Dr. Horrible declares war on television
• Heroes season opener takes 46% dive from last season premiere ratings
• Dollhouse, Smallville opener ratings drop
• Live-action Barbie movie coming
• Star Trek movie writers take on zombie movie
• Burglar caught after he checks Facebook on victim’s computer
• Undercover cops on drug raid stop to play Wii Sports
• Attention Internet: LeVar Burton does *not* hate Reading Rainbow
• 1/1 Scale Rin Kokonoe figure released
• We get our first press release – from RiffTrax!
• We get blurbed by SciFi Surplus!

From Remake Corner:

• New Daredevil, Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider movies coming
• Jessica Biel joins the cast of The A-Team, as a US Army General
• Keanu Reeves’s Cowboy Bebop movie retools after being declared too expensive to make
• David Cronenberg, director of the 1986 remake of The Fly, may remake his own movie
• Highlander remake coming

Announcement:

• The Alternative Press Expo is coming to the San Francisco Concourse! We’ll be there!

Stuff You Should Know About:

• DOSBox – Emulation so you can play DOS games on every OS!

[podcast]http://www.npccomics.com/podcast/gt/GT_ep16.mp3[/podcast]

Thank you to William Gibson for alerting the podcast to the existence of this short film by Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost In The Shell and The Sky Crawlers.

Check this one out – it just might fry your brain, extra crispy!

Dave here,

So, I’ve been going through my stash of old games. Like really old games. Like games I had on my Apple II and my IBM 386 PS/1. And no, that didn’t stand for ‘PlayStation/1′; it stood for ‘Piece of Shiat/1′, but I digress…

I’ll get into how I’m able to play these games on my new machine on the next podcast, but one game in particular totally recaptured my attention: Wing Commander. This was the game that let me live out all my Star Wars fighter combat fantasies before ‘X-Wing’ came along a few years later. and was still fun even after that. So I was thinking about making a post about classic games series that should be brought back. And I hopped over to the ever helpful Wikipedia to find out what the status of the franchise, and Origin Systems in general, was. I was pretty sure Origin had been disbanded, but I didn’t know the whole story.

Origin was bought out by EA in 1992, 2 years after Wing Commander hit the shelves and things went decent. In 1997, Ultima Online hit and was pretty well recieved. But when Ultima IX flopped in 1999, EA pulled the plug on all of Origin’s upcoming products. Like Ultima Online 2. Privateer Online. And Harry Potter Online.

Yes, Potter-heads. If it weren’t for EA, you’d be running around a virtual Hogwarts by now instead of having to wait another few years for the online game to come out from developers at Turbine. Ask some Dungeons & Dragons Online players about Turbine’s development schedule some time then go cry a bit in your butterbeer.

Seriously, EA has two legendary game franchises in Wing Commander and Ultima. And instead of trying to so something with them, the franchises just sit there, gathering dust until some hack at EA decides it’s time again to dust them off and re-release them in a nostalgia shovelware pack.

At least Fox let Joss Wheedon give Firefly fans some closure by letting Universal do Serenity.

This is why EA can’t develop a game title outside of the EA Sports line or Medal of Honor series to save it’s life. It’s why our good friend and video game commentator Chris Jones lost his job in a mass firing at EA that hit their non-sports sector. It’s why I have little faith Warhammer Online will survive. It’s why EA reported a $1.08 billion loss on $4.2 billion of revenue that rose from the $3.6 billion of the previous year. The only thing keeping EA on life support are the sports games and distributing Rock Band. This is a prime example of a company that used to be innovative at the begining, but now is content to just rest on it’s laurels and piss and crap over itself like some diseased Hutt-spawn.

[podcast]http://www.npccomics.com/podcast/gt/GT_ep15.mp3[/podcast]

A whole lot more of these posted over at Sci Fi Wire. Check them out.

We remind ye lubbers that tomorrow be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! If ye forget, we’ll be forced to board yer poop deck and plunder yer booty, ye sea wenches! Yar harr!

Trust me kids, of all the comics produced in Oakland, you want to stick with NPC Comics. The others may be a thrill, but in the long term, they’ll just destroy your brain.

News from Hogwarts: Universal is opening a 22-acre Harry Potter-themed theme park in Florida next year.

Which will feel just like England, if you ignore the 90% humidity and the Palmetto bugs.

This of course means that we will be losing David and his paramour Pixy Gina for a week sometime next year as she gets her Potter on.

Careful though, we already know what the clientele will look like.

Here’s the park’s official site.