I don’t like Call of Duty. I don’t hate it either. When I reviewed Call of Duty: Ghosts last year, it was the first time I had played more than an hour in what is arguably the world’s most popular FPS title. I found the experience unmemorable. So I’ve been impervious to CoD fanaticism/hype and don’t have high expectations for this year’s iteration of the franchise, subtitled Advanced Warfare.
As the name implies, this tour of duty is set in the future of 2054 where clever human technology (no alien involvement here) has greatly improved soldiers’ mobility and combat skills. I don my exo-suit and jump buildings in a single bound to bring you this review.
Transhumanism (which my spell checker insists is the misspelling of transvestitism) is a movement that seeks to improve the mental and physical characteristics of humans through the liberal use of technology. It is the main subject of a new sci-fi web series that premièred just the other day.
Aptly titled H+, the digital series produced Bryan Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) advances ideas like Project Glass into a future world where human beings are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day via a device planted in their bodies. While some are more than happy to accept the H+ computer into their lives, others are opposed to the technology for the fear of breaches in privacy and the ever looming threat of hackers. It’s not long before a virus outbreak kills millions of users, leaving the remaining humans to fend for themselves in an offline world.
The first two episodes were flighted on August 8th on YouTube, with a new episode due to be added every Wednesday. Have a look at these two H+ episodes after the jump.
When I first heard the Syndicate announcement I was filled with nostalgia harking back to the 90s. Those were the good old days of PC gaming. Before Windows became the centre of the universe, where running MS-DOS was the norm, and you needed to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat files just to make things work properly. When Peter Molyneux was still Bullfrog, before EA took over and he ran off to Microsoft. That being said, let’s find out what the new Syndicate game is all about.
From the high-speed pursuit to the slo-mo big air jump to the classic train escape, the chase scene is an integral part of movies.
In his short film, Wes Ball of Oddball Animation studio creates the thrilling post-apocalyptic chase sequence in which an unnamed protagonist is invariably spotted by a flying sentry and must take to his trusty Yamaha motorcycle to escape. Check out RUIN below.
Ball’s short film leaves off where all good teasers should—with you eager to know more. To see behind-the-scenes work on RUIN, be sure to check out Oddball Animation’s concepts page.
The famous physicist Albert Einstein once said, “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” Another scientist of sorts, Dr. Emmett Brown, told a pair of teenagers that the future is not written yet, and their is “whatever you make it”.
If you’ve ever wondered what the future would be like if we left it up to the movies, then you’re not alone. London-based designer Michael Hobson has created an infographic timeline that shows the pivotal events in our future, according to films. Unsurprisingly it is a bleak outlook where the sun starts to die off in 2057, we try to ruthlessly pillage unobtanium on Pandora in 2154, and all glory goes to the Hypnotoad in the year 3000. Have a look at Hobson’s lengthy infographic after the jump, but beware, some of Hobson’s plot summaries may contains spoilers.
I love infographics, especially the animated ones. Trillions is a short film but technology research lab MAYA that takes a look at the evolution computing from its humble beginnings to the future that possibly awaits us. Have a look at it below.
Hey, I’m in a movie. And so are you. Unfortunately, it’s not a thrilling Hollywood adventure flick where you or I save the world, get the girl, and live happily ever after. It’s quite the opposite.
In The Age of Stupid, the year is 2055 and climate change has devastated the earth, and the last surviving person, The Archivist (Pete Postlethwaite), has assembled an archive of all of humanity’s works of art, literature, and culture in a giant library. He combs through series of documentary footage from 2008, pondering the actions (or inactions) that have brought on the bleak future he lives in. He asks the question: “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance?” Take a look at the trailer below.
Directed by Franny Armstrong, the drama-documentary-animation hybrid took three years to make and was financed through “crowd-funding” – 220 people donated between £500 and £35,000 in exchange for “shares”. The Age of Stupid was released internationally on September 21st and 22nd, in a live-via-solar-powered-satellite premiere in over 45 countries, including South Africa. I’m always late to the party so I missed it at The Labia in Cape Town, and I can’t seem to find it on the SterKinekor listings neither. Pity.
