It has taken quite a long time for Edgar Rice Burroughs classic John Carter books to make their way to the big screen, but the finish line is getting ever closer now that Disney is fully on-board, casting has been completed, and the real work begins.  Considering the John Carter books were a heavy influence on James Cameron’s Avatar, one has to wonder if a John Carter of Mars movie will seem derivative of Avatar? I assume most people have not read, let alone heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so it will be entertaining to watch the inevitable articles coming in the future that claim John Carter is nothing more than a rip-off…

Here’s the line from Disney:

From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton (”Finding Nemo,” “WALL-E”), JOHN CARTER OF MARS brings this captivating hero to the big screen in a stunning adventure epic set on the wounded planet of Mars, a world inhabited by warrior tribes and exotic desert beings.  Based on the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom Series,” the film chronicles the journey of Civil-War veteran John Carter (TAYLOR KITSCH), who finds himself battling a new and mysterious war amidst a host of strange Martian inhabitants, including Tars Tarkas (WILLEM DAFOE) and Dejah Thoris (LYNN COLLINS).

Notes:

• Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago and is best known for writing and creating Tarzan – still one of the most successful and iconic fictional creations of all time. JOHN CARTER OF MARS is based on Burroughs’ first novel, “A Princess of Mars.”
• Academy Award^®-winning director/writer Andrew Stanton directed and co-wrote the screenplay for “WALLE,” which earned the Academy Award® and Golden Globe Award® for Best Animated Feature of 2008. He was Oscar® nominated for the screenplay. He made his directorial debut with “Finding Nemo,” garnering an Academy Award^® nomination for Best Original Screenplay and winning the Oscar® for Best Animated Feature Film of 2003. He was one of the four screenwriters to receive an Oscar^® nomination in 1996 for his contribution to “Toy Story,” and went on to receive credit as a screenwriter on subsequent Pixar films “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo” and “WALLE.” He served as co-director on “A Bug’s Life,” and was the executive producer of “Monsters, Inc.,” the 2006 Academy Award-winning “Ratatouille” and the 2009 smash hit “Up.”

Set in the wounded planet of Mars, JOHN CARTER OF MARS chronicles the journey of Civil-War veteran John Carter (TAYLOR KITSCH), who finds himself battling a new and mysterious war amidst a host of strange Martian inhabitants, including Tars Tarkas (WILLEM DAFOE) and Dejah Thoris (LYNN COLLINS).

Dragon Age is a superb RPG from Bioware, a game made even better by the recent arrival of the Dragon Age toolset, the exact toolset used at Bioware to create the game. This editor presents budding game designers with an incredible amount of power, allowing them to create completely original campaigns and modules however they see fit. On the downside, the toolset has the uncanny ability to completely break the standard Dragon Age campaign, as I so rudely discovered over the weekend.

I knew something was amiss when I started a new game and a few hours in I noticed that NPCs who should have been joining my party weren’t. Worse, cutscenes depicted conversations between invisible people. Sensing something amiss, I restarted a new game and soon discovered that all NPCs thought my male character was female, which was quite funny for a few minutes.

Doing a little snooping around, I soon discovered the cause of these problems: the Dragon Age Toolset.

If you’re planning on exploring the toolset, I highly recommend you wait until a new version is released, as all manner of things will go wrong if you don’t.

From Bioware Toolset Wiki:

Verison 1.0 of the Dragon Age toolset has a subtle but potentially devastating bug. Put simply, the core plot resources that were included with the toolset had different internal identification numbers (GUIDs) than the versions that were used when the retail version of the game was created. The result is that whenever a core plot file is exported it overrides the plot in the preinstalled main campaign, and then none of the other resources in the game are able to reference it any more. The game’s scripts and conversations are unable to determine the state of the affected plots, and are unable to update the state of the plot.

Let’s say you didn’t listen too me or your disovered this post too late. Is there was a way to fix your game without reinstalling from scratch? Indeed.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to remove the faulty exported plot files from your core override directory. You will find them here:

My Documents\Bioware\Dragon Age\packages\core\override

Delete the contents of this directory. Once they’re gone the game will revert back to using the resources that were originally included with the retail version.

If you have saved your game between exporting those core resources and now, the savegame will have faulty plot ID numbers recorded in it and remain broken. The savegame can be repaired manually but it will take a bit more work; if you’ve only lost a few hours of gameplay it may be simplest to just go back to a previous save and work from there.

Two Worlds was one of the worst RPG I have ever played. Unfinished, no polish, broken multiplayer, more bugs than the Amazonian rainforest, on and on and on. So when your new RPG brand tanks at retail and barely sells 10,000 copies, you do the only natural thing: cancel create a sequel for the handful of players who give a crap, players who are most likely related to the designers.

Anyway, Southpeak, a publisher incapable of releasing quality games, is delaying the release of Two Worlds II until Spring 2010, probably because someone there actually played it and thought, “WTF. This sucks.”

Please make a note on your calendar.

Source

Alganon is a new MMORPG that looks frighteningly similar to World of Warcraft, probably for the simple reason that too many companies lack the drive and creativity to deliver something new. Hence, yet another World of Warcraft inspired MMO for your playing pleasure. On the upside, it looks better than most clones and, perhaps best of all, the beta is free-to-play, so you don’t have any excuses to at least try it out.

Head here for sign-up and download instructions.