OnelargeprawnI may be mediocre at most things (it’s part of my charm you see), but I’d like to think our last mega trailer blowout post was decently written. And due to popular demand* I present, for your viewing pleasure, Trailer Tuesday.
Hit the jump to see trailers for The Road, The Book of Eli, Black Dynamite, The Boondock Saints II, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Developed by Zach Gage, Lose/Lose is a game about choice and consequence. Have a look at it below.
Unlike any of the games you may have played before, where you are far removed from the result of your actions, Lose/Lose has very real consequences. In what looks like a classic top-down shoot-em-up, you control a space ship flying toward alien enemies. They aren’t your standard, over-the-counter enemies – these aliens are, in fact, based on random files on your computer. Kill an alien, and the file it is linked to gets deleted. Sounds dangerous doesn’t it? I think that was the intention.
By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?
You can download Lose/Lose from Gage’s online portfolio (it’s 5.8 MB and seems to be only for the Mac). Let us know if you were brave enough to play it, or if you tried it on someone else’s computer. In case I didn’t mention it, play this game at your own risk.
[via Geekologie]
From recut TV title sequences to entire movie trailers, mashups are becoming an art form, and Empire Magazine has scoured the Interwebs to compile a list of the fifty best YouTube movie trailer mashups. Have a look at some of them below.
Double-0 Dynamite
Napoleon Dynamite meets Quantum of Solace
Matrix Club
The Matrix meets Fight Club
Kill Beast
Beauty And The Beast meets Kill Bill
Watchmen Parod-E
Wall-E meets The Watchmen
Star Hour
Return Of The Jedi meets Rush Hour
The full list can be found at Empire.
[via The Awesomer]
No offense to Cape Town, y’all a great and all and all, but the few months I spent in Durban a few years ago were entertaining to say the least. I won’t name any names (mainly because I forgot them after the night’s worth of boozing), but the people were awesome, and it really was a jol wherever we went.
Friend, fellow gamer, and multi-tasker Macross just sent me a video that brought all those feelings back. Straight outta Durban, by way of Chatsworth, it’s the hilarious hip hop artist Rajiv with I Get The Stekkies (you get the bats). Check it out.
According to Facebook, Rajiv’s rhymes will be featured in The ATTACK of the INDIAN WEREWOLF movie, a horror spoof set in Durban. Awesome on both counts!
Surprise buttseks! I don’t mean it literally, but our blog’s downtime certainly took me from behind. I don’t quite know what happened, but I would like to send my apologies to you if you tried to visit and failed miserably. It’s not you, it’s me (well it’s due to our hosting company an internet backbone connectivity problem if we really want to point accusatory fingers). Needless to say, we’re back and we have some news.
Hosted by the scientific humor magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, the IgNobel Prize seek to highlight mankind’s achievements resulting from research that “cannot, or should not, be repeated”. In its 19th year, the prizes were presented to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates, at a gala event at Harvard University. This year’s achievements ranged from the power of Panda poo to diamonds made from Tequila. Africa got a mention as well, specifically to Gideon Gono, Zimbabwe’s professor of hard sums, creating a staggering range of bank notes.
Here’s a quick round-up of the winners:
Veterinary Medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
Peace: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl for their extensive beer bottle vs skull research. They determined – by experiment – that empty or full, a beer bottle is strong enough to break a skull before the skull breaks it.
Economics: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into big banks, and vice versa.
Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño for creating diamonds from liquid, more specifically from Tequila.
Medicine: Donald L. Unger for investigating a possible cause of arthritis by cracking only the knuckles of his left hand for more than 60 years.
Physics: Katherine K. Whitcome for determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.
Literature: Ireland’s police service for issuing more than 50 traffic tickets to a man they thought to be the most persistent driving offender in the country. Mr Prawo Jazdy is Polish and in his native language, his name means “driver’s license”.
Public Health: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan for inventing a brassiere that can quickly be converted into a pair of gas masks.
Mathematics: Gideon Gono, the governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for printing bank notes that range from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
Biology: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei from Japan, for determining that bacteria from Giant Panda faeces can be used to reduce kitchen refuse by more than 90% in mass.
Congratulations to the winners. You can see previous IgNobel laureates at Improbable Research.
[via Neatorama]
Vox Populi, Vox Dei is Latin for “The voice of the people [is] the voice of God.” In this context, it is also the name of an action/puzzle platformer created by an Argentinian game designer, Weremsoft.
It’s perhaps one of the more off-kilter games out there, in which you play as the blue ninja on a bloody quest to save the woman who broke your heart. She has been captured the planet’s dominant race, the werewolves. Why are they the dominant species you ask? Because they have machine guns in their chests.
The combat is pretty visceral, with a lot of pixelated blood. There is no background music, except the cries of your enemies, as you maul them to death.
It’s a game made for the people, judged by the people – play Vox Populi, Vox Dei at Kongregate.
[via Jay is Games]
…ME!
Since February this year, we here at Onelargeprawn have been hard at work getting our hands on prizes to give them away to you, our loyal readers. We’ve had some really great companies who have sponsored their goodies for our various competitions and I’d like to send a massive thanks to them for their kindness.
I can’t enter our competitions, and whilst it’s always great to give stuff away, I wouldn’t mind winning something occasionally. And recently, a little bit of good karma must have rubbed off – the blog aggregating juggernaut Afrigator teamed up with financial institution Mimoney to offer R500 vouchers to five lucky bloggers, and I was one of them.
Being a gamer, I spent that voucher before you can say “Press Start”! It wouldn’t come as a surprise that I pre-ordered the critically acclaimed Uncharted 2: Among Thieves from Kalahari.net. At the moment, you can’t actually use Mimoney vouchers to pre-order goods at Kalahari, but a simple workaround suggested by their ever helpful staff got the order done.
So there you have it, 172 words to tell you I won something. It hardly enriches your life, but I thought I’d share it anyway. ;-)
Our good friend and all-together awesome dude Martin sprung for the tickets, so last night Lucy Furr and I had the pleasure of attending the Nando’s Comedy Festival at the Baxter Theatre.
There was a fantastic lineup including international acts like Angelo “sperm-sack” Tsarouchas, the Russian Jew (and part-time stripper) Kira Soltonavich, the always-detained Ahmed Ahmed, SNL-featured comedian Dean Edwards, and UK comedian, Simon Clayton, who missed his ride on the blow job boat. The local talent on the night was the hilarious Loyiso Gola and the incomparable Kagiso Lediga (I shook his hand, they are very soft). Here’s a clip of the opening night of the comedy festival.
As great as the comedy was, I completely awed by a 19-year old white boy, who nonchalantly started the show by doing a rudimentary equipment check and then launched into the most fantastic beatbox. George Avakian (aka Georgeous the Beatboxer) is completely self-taught, and is a total party starter. Check out a small clip of George doing this thing.
For more clips and info, check out his Facebook profile and group, or visit his MySpace page.
The Nandos Comedy Festival is in Cape Town until October 4th, and at R120 a ticket, it’s well worth it. More info about the comedians and schedules can be found at the official website.
27-year old illustrator/animator, Noper, hails from Bucharest, Romania and describes his style of drawing as “teethy”. It’s twistedly teethy. Have a look at some of his work in the gallery below.
Hit the jump for Noper’s animation reel.
The name’s Bronson, Clifford Bronson. It’s the 60s and our spy has infiltrated a villain’s underground layer to retrieve an artifact that is protected by a network of deadly laser beams. Will the classically-trained spy waltz through the beams and capture the prize? Find out in this retro claymation short.
The Bronson Maneuver was created by artists Ryan Sluman, Joon Kim, Danny Dahlquist, and Mike McCain as an entry for CG Society’s “Challenge XXIV – Secret Agent”. See the full list of the entries at CG Society.
[via Notcot]