“For those of you who want to see something specifically related to Christmas, the Revue has come to your rescue with the help of Dion Conflict, who will be showing Christmas Kitsch-A-Roo at 9:30 p.m. If you’re familiar with Dion Conflict’s Hunk-A-Junk screenings, you’ll know what to expect—a variety of utterly bizarre found shorts—but they’re normally excellent fun and the Christmas theme means some really weird stuff is going to show up. Hopefully he’ll be showing the legendary Santa Claus’ Punch and Judy, which really has to be seen to be believed.”

You can see Santa Claus’ Punch and Judy over at the Internet Archive. I highly recommend it.

“Stéphane D’Astous, General Manager of the newly-formed Eidos Montreal, is bullish about his studio’s planned development cycle. ‘Trying to get nine women to give birth to a baby in one month doesn’t work. Everyone has tried that in this industry, but we decided to cut the bullshit,’ D’Astous declared on our in-depth tour of the new facility.”

Some more coverage from my time in Montreal! This time in feature form.

I eagerly await Deus Ex 3, even if, at this point, there’s really not much more than speculation floating about. I adored the original Deus Ex, but the sequel was just horrible. Not for the reason that so many people complain about (that it was “dumbed down”) but because the environments were absolutely nothing in comparison. In the original, areas such as Hong Kong were large and interesting to explore, while in the sequel, entire cities seemed to be about four rooms big. It was a complete disappointment.

“At the Montreal Games Summit, Realtime Worlds producer Phil Wilson gave an in-depth postmortem of Crackdown, discussing obstacles encountered and mistakes made during the development. Wilson noted that while he did a postmortem for Game Developer, he wanted to add some other aspects of the game from a different direction, looking at things from a chronological standpoint.”

A left over bit of coverage from the Montreal International Game Summit appears with some help again from Leigh Alexander.

Crackdown: Made in Scotland. Like me!

“We were kind of pumped for I Am Legend, but then Eye’s Adam Nayman informed us that it ‘omits the novel’s key twist.’ So, uh, it’s completely pointless then. The only save we can imagine is if it ends with a ‘Big Willie Style’ rap at the end. It probably doesn’t, though.”

I Am Legend is a fantastic book that I completely recommend. You can pick it up for a fraction of the cost of a movie ticket, folks, so do the right thing!

“If you were believe the opinions of many members of the forum for Twin Galaxies, the organisation that tracks videogame world records, and which plays a major role in King of Kong, King of Krap, as they so wittily call it, is the most egregious misrepresentation of the truth since, I don’t know, the Hitler Diaries or something. As any good active viewer knows, however, there’s no such thing as the absolute truth – especially when it comes to documentaries.”

I really enjoyed King of Kong, and I’m amazed at the reaction to it from certain members of the, er, classic-arcade-high-score-gaming community. I’m always surprised when people think documentaries purport to show some sort of absolute, objective truth, though I suppose I should be getting less surprised. The journalist panel at MIGS (which I still haven’t found time to talk about) similarly surprised me with the amount of people who think reviewers intend to offer the same, but that’s another story.

I thought some reviewers were a bit cruel about King of Kong (to the level where they missed the point entirely.) The quote from Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post “The competition is so vicious because the stakes are so low” stands out in my mind, because I don’t think that’s true, but I do feel like the reaction to the film is so vicious because the quibbles are so small.

We actually have a thread (began by Robert Mruczek, who looks like a horrible unwashed nerd in the film with no effort on the filmmakers’ part) where people don’t seem to understand the concept of editing!

To be fair, a lot of people have their head on straight, and see that there really is no issue. Twin Galaxies is represented very fairly, and even Billy Mitchell, who, if you’re to believe some people’s reaction, may as well be seen eating babies while driving a combine harvester over a field full of puppies during the film, is given depth. In both cases, though, that is within the framework of the narrative that Seth Gordon has (to an extent) constructed using the power of filmmaking techniques! Oh the humanity!

I do wonder what the reaction within the spelling bee community to Spellbound was. I bet it was just as angry.

“Let it never be said that the world of downloadable content is boring! Since October’s launch of import games on the Wii’s Virtual Console service it feels like the landscape has been constantly shifting: in November Sony opened an online PlayStation Store for PSP owners who don’t own a PS3 (er, most of them) and December’s Xbox 360 Dashboard update includes the ability to download a range of classic titles from the Xbox back catalogue (including the original Halo and cult hit Psychonauts.)”

A look at Sony’s new PlayStation Store, Super Mario Bros. 3, Alien Soldier, Axelay, and a brief mention of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

I don’t look at the Xbox Originals service, but I’ll be taking a look at it this month, where I’ll complain about the lack of achievements, just like everyone else.

“The Golden Compass also opens, if you want to turn your kids (and possibly yourself) into evil atheist monsters. But hell, if being an atheist gets you an armoured polar bear to command, it can’t be all bad. Wait a minute…these atheists and their armoured polar bears will kill us all!”

I discuss King of Kong in this post, but I’ll talk more about that when I post my review later!