Monday is the environmental awareness day called Earth Day. It’s purpose it to increase awareness of the effects of pollution on the Earth. However, it also provides us an excuse to post a gallery of beautiful women from around the world that would also give you an incentive to save the world. It also gets us clicks which helps us keep the site viable.
Next week is going to be Canadian Gaming Week here on the blog. We’ll be looking at London, Ontario’s Digital Extremes’ Star Trek: The Video Game. The plan is also to put up reviews of Canadian indie games Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves and Papo & Yo in addition to a column or two.
First up, this weekend is the 2013 Canadian Videogame Awards which celebrates the best the Canadian gaming industry developed and released in 2012 as determined by a committee of developer executives and a couple of programmers. As we are wont to do with big awards shows, we have the nominees and predictions.
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Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone likes to claim that the World Championship isn’t used for nor is allowed to be used for political purposes. However, the Formula One World Championship returns to the Kingdom of Bahrain, the land that the press covering the Arab Spring forgot. From the sounds of it, things haven’t gotten better for the people of Bahrain.
I’ll write a bit more about that during my race and news recap. For now, here are this round’s Power Rankings, assuming that this race is allowed to go ahead. Since Bernie appears to be oblivious to how Bahrain’s leadership is using the Grand Prix to portray a positive public image, let’s just assume there will be a race this weekend.
If it’s the middle of the week, it must be time for some links. Let’s start today’s post with Chrissy Teigen.
Filing tax returns is probably everyone’s least favourite activity. Even less so than going to the dentist. Naturally, TurboTax, a company that profits from allowing people to do their own tax returns, doesn’t want filing your taxes to be any easier. They even lobbied to keep from getting tax filing any easier. (ProPublica)
Meanwhile, Samsung has gotten to the top spot in the smartphone market through more legitimate means. (Businessweek)
There might be some political career threatening rumours over Marco Rubio’s head. The only problem is that some outlets aren’t willing to say what the rumours are because they probably aren’t true. That begs the question: Why are you mentioning that these rumours exist if you know they aren’t true. (Gawker)
Hollywood and the video games industry don’t have a very good track record of adapting the other’s work. A quick look at the movie adaptation of video games shows a track record of consistent critical flops with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within scoring the highest Tomato Meter score of 43%. Video games based on movies and TV shows haven’t fared much better as good licensed games are more the exception than the rule.
As the week’s go by, I hear more and more about the planned Mass Effect movie. It’s not just Hollywood’s terrible track record in turning video games into a live-action dramatic presentation that worries me. It’s that Mass Effect can’t be turned into a movie without removing its soul.
The talk about tyres has been growing since Pirelli took over as the sole tyre manufacture in Formula One. This weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix saw tyres and pit strategy play a significant part. Fernando Alonso won the race but he certainly wasn’t what people were talking about. Even on the podium, the drivers were talking amongst themselves about the effect the tyres had on the race.
It’s the end of the week so it’s time for links. Formula One is back this weekend so I’ll have some racing content over the next couple of weeks. I don’t think I’ll have time for a gaming column this week because I’ll be busy playing through a few games. In the meantime, since Mad Men is on tonight, here’s Christina Hendricks.
As someone who, on occasion, considers himself a member of the media, I’m a little unnerved by the lack of attention being paid to a court case in Colorado over a journalist’s sources in the James Holmes investigation. Taking a reporter to court for reporting is the beginning of a slippery slope. (New York Times)
Justin Trudeau is seen by many as being in the shadow of his father but he is his own man and has economic policies that should make Bay Street happy. (Canadian Business)
I don’t know what Bitcoin is or why it’s having a crash but I find the fact that a virtual currency can have a crash fascinating. (Yahoo News)
While we get first dibs at Oblivion here in Australia, that doesn’t hit theatres in North America til next week! Take that! Anyway, in theatres this week, there’s the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 and there’s Scary Movie 5. If you were to choose between the two, go with the former since the latter looks horrendous, but at least it got some good eye candy courtesy of Ashley Tisdale.
After the jump, there might be a sequel to Dredd 3D after all, some Man of Steel news, Matt Damon goes on an epic sci-fi adventure, Edgar Wright did some extra directing work and a look at the opening cinematic for Injustice: Gods Among Us. Continue reading
Inspired by the Globe and Mail’s caption writing person, we waste our time writing funny picture captions for some of the more interesting photos we come across when blogging. So here are some of the best pictures from the past week with a funny (-ish) caption. Continue reading
One console has a sharing feature that nobody wanted and unveiled with a slightly underwhelming line-up. Another console is strongly rumoured to mandate a permanent connection to the internet to play games and is likely to prevent playing used games. The third console is so underpowered that some third-party publishers have abandoned it less than six months after release.
For as excited as everybody was about this generations console wars, it sure seems to be shaping up to be a race to the bottom and a case of not survival of the fittest but survival of the least weak.
The Lowdown 