Resident Evil: Afterlife Preview

It seems a curious practice to me, that when production companies invite you down to their often illustrious headquarters in order to see and then write about their latest films, they feel the need to confiscate any tools you may have with you in order to better record the experience. Surely they want their films promoting as accurately as possible? In any case, I’ll stop whinging and get to the beef: Resident Evil: Afterlife. This latest episode in Paul WS Anderson’s horror franchise – and first to be filmed in 3D – is coming to cinemas imminently. A brief behind the scenes feature was screened this afternoon, to whet appetites for its release, in which Anderson and stars Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter waxed lyrical about the movie and the joys of filming in 3D.

Anderson, who once again wrote and produced the film, also returns to directorial duties for the first time since the original film (this being the fourth instalment). He was keen to stress the importance of filming in 3D – a process done, essentially, by filming with two cameras simultaneously, one filming the action, the other filming the action in a mirror between the two lenses – and was derisive of post-production 3D retro-fitting techniques (as used in Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans). Anderson used the same rig and technicians as James Cameron employed on Avatar. The film was apparently conceived and written with 3D in mind, hence the use of environments and set pieces with a sense of depth, such as a Matrix-like combat sequence and footage of the heroines plummeting down a shaft, firing guns that we caught glimpses of. The 3D techniques used allow for single shot action sequences to go into slow motion and back again easily and remove the reliance many action directors have on annoyingly fast edits.

After the ‘making of’ footage ended (during in which Anderson compared his film to Avatar on several occasions), we were treated to a full sequence from the film, in which an eight foot, axe-wielding zombie slaughters a wimpy sidekick, and then sets about offing the heroines in a shower room. Cue plenty of cascading water droplets, swinging blades, sliding around, shotgun blasts and slow motion footage of our leading ladies covered in water and breathing heavily, all in 3D. Bits and pieces appear to fly out of the screen and the pounding soundtrack completes a not unimpressive action sequence.

Despite regularly receiving overwhelmingly negative critical responses, the Resident Evil series remains commercially viable due to its legion of fans, no less rabid than the zombies in the films themselves. This latest version should more than satisfy the hordes then, perhaps more so than ever with the added dimension. Whilst 3D has not been without criticism, horror movies are well suited to the new medium. As Anderson said, with its explosions, action sequences and tentacles, Resident Evil and 3D may make the perfect pairing.

Toy Story 3 The Videogame Preview Part 2

Our attention now switches to the Xbox that has been waiting patiently on the table and the brightly coloured visuals it is producing on the attached TV. Jon explains how they rejected typical gaming menus in favour of a more toy-orientated approach: a board game interface selects modes and such, navigated with a neat Crayola crayon cursor. In Story Mode, players collect items to unlock new toys to play with in The Toy Box, though collecting every item isn’t necessary to finish the game, completists can check their progress until every secret has been discovered. But the meat of the game is the much-mentioned Toy Box mode, which Jon begins to load up. ‘Who would you like to play as?’ he asks us. Unanimously, we choose Buzz Lightyear.

‘Poor Woody and Jessie!’ a nearby assistant laments.

‘They never get any playtime, it’s just like in Andy’s house,’ Jon confirms. The mode loads and we find Buzz in a stylised western town, modelled after Woody’s Roundup. Graphically, the game is reasonably impressive, the bright, cartoony look of the films replicated satisfactorily on screen. Buzz trots around the town as if in some pre-teen friendly Grand Theft Auto game, chatting with townsfolk and tossing hapless Pizza Planet aliens with reckless abandon. Controlled by Jon, Buzz interacts with the town’s inhabitants, makes shops, rides Bullseye the horse and is given tasks to complete by other characters, such as Hamm, Rex and Slinky Dog. Jon explains that the tasks are there for players who enjoy structure. The Toy Box also accommodates for players who enjoy exploring, in its myriad of things to discover and for those who like to customise their game worlds, in the multitude of options that can be utilised to alter game features.

‘Once you’ve built up your town to a certain point and it’s prosperous enough, outlaws will come into it to rob your people, so if we have enough money, we can purchase a jail to hold your outlaws – if you don’t, the outlaws will take all your people’s money,’ says Jon, discussing the possibilities of the game. Buildings and characters are purchased in-game with money collected through completing tasks and collecting gold nuggets. ‘There are some characters you can buy that you can ride, like Bullseye. Riding around on Bullseye is great,’ he demonstrates as the horse capers around with Buzz on his back. There are numerous races to complete with Bullseye around the game world to partake in at the player’s leisure.

‘You can buy a car and it opens up the racing area, a kind of Skate Park with stunt-driven missions. If you enjoy racing games and playing with cars, and that’s all you want to do, that’s completely an option. There’s a bunch of preset missions and areas where you can just screw around doing stunts. You can customise your cars, you can change what type of car you drive…’ Eager to show us more of the possibilities of the game, Jon loads up a profile on with more features unlocked.

‘If you remember when you were kids playing with toys, you’d never seem to have a full set of toys that were all from the same set, it was always kind of a mish-mash of stuff, but it was okay because it made sense to you and that’s all that mattered, so we wanted to replicate that feeling. There’s toys that fit in the Woody’s Roundup set, and then there’s toys make absolutely no sense, but are fun to play with anyway,’ Jon says, explaining the eclectic aesthetic of the game.

Jon discusses the amount of time players can expect to have with the game. ‘The Story Mode lasts for about four solid hours for a good gamer, if you’re a completist, for younger gamers, it’ll take a bit longer. The Toy Box is really open ended; there’s no end, we never roll credits. You play there ‘til you’re done playing. That could be ten hours, it could be twenty. I’ve been playing my session for about twenty-two hours and there’s still stuff I’m not done with yet! What was amazing when we were play-testing the game, was that out of the sixty groups playing it, not one of the games ended up the same. Of course, they were doing the same missions, but their game worlds were all completely different.’

The new game loaded, we are confronted with a much bigger town with more denizens. One of the buildings is decorated like a clown fish from Finding Nemo and there is a NPC styled after Syndrome from The Incredibles. I asked whether there were a lot of nods to other Pixar films and Jon confirmed that in many of the customisation options, there were various tributes to Pixar’s repertoire, including Wall-E and Monsters Inc. too. Other new options in the game include a goo machine, which dispenses globules of pink and green sludge that can be used to grow and shrink characters and items, affecting how the player interacts with the in the game. For example, a shrunken Bullseye is quicker, whereas a giant Bullseye can crush obstacles. There are also bigger toys to purchase in the game that offer new challenges, customisation options and tools, such as Sid’s Haunted House, which unleashes monsters on your town for you to defeat.

Finally, it is our turn to have a go. We enter split-screen mode. The controls were intuitive enough and the game had a fluid feel to it. Players are under no obligation to play with or against each other whilst in multiplayer, but we decide to have a race on our horses. I’m pretty rubbish and lose the race, but it was pretty good fun nonetheless. I had a go on a monster truck too, which was also a hoot.

With that, my time was up and I was ushered out of the room. Though I only spent a short time with the game, it seemed like a lot of fun. I’d also barely scratched the surface of the number of options of features of play. I imagine that Toy Story 3: The Video Game will do a lot of good for the mediocre reputation of tie-in games, and will prove popular, especially among the franchise’s younger fans. If the rest of the development team at Avalanche are half as passionate and enthusiastic about the game and put those qualities into its production, Avalanche should be on to a winner.

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/25/exclusive-toy-story-3-the-videogame-hands-on-report-pt-2/

Toy Story 3 The Videogame Preview Part 1

Say what you like about the corporate machine that is Disney: they have a lovely HQ. And lovely staff too. One such lovely member of staff is the gregarious and affable Jon Warner, producer at Avalanche Studios, the folks behind the new Toy Story video game to coincide with the cinematic release of the eagerly awaited third installation in the popular series.

Upon gratefully receiving an invitation to meet Jon and have a gander at his new game, I was escorted through the HQ, passing a life-size statue of Tony Stark’s first Iron Man suit, an office adorned with a six foot Lego model of Woody the toy cowboy and a High School Musical themed meeting room, complete with lockers. Eventually, we are led to a small office, where Jon awaits our arrival, Xbox at the ready. He grins and shakes us each by the hand cordially. Once he’s satisfied we’re comfortable, he begins to describe Toy Story 3: The Video Game, his pride and delight practically tangible.

‘Let’s start from the start then,’ Jon says. ‘We came up with the idea for the game in November 2007. Pixar had invited us down to have a look at a real early, preliminary screening – it was storyboards that they’d put together in kind of an animated reel. There was no dialogue in it or anything; it was just narrated by the director, Lee Unkrich. It was great, it was brilliant. We were there with a bunch of other licensers, like Mattel, in the theatre watching this presentation and man, it was good. By the end of the screening there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The lights went up, you feel tears in your eyes, you’re like, “oh no, this is going to be embarrassing!” But the lights come up and everyone is choked up: it was that good, it was that powerful.

‘So when we left Pixar, we thought, “We can’t do an average game treatment for this one”, you know, “see the movie, play the game”, it just didn’t feel right. First of all, Pixar had done a great job on telling that story and I don’t think it was right for us to rehash it; we didn’t want to do that. We thought what would be really cool is if we could give Andy’s toys to everybody, the players: if you could take Andy’s toys and play with them any way you wanted to. So we hung onto that idea, it sounded right. We developed the idea and called it The Toy Box, where it’s a big sandbox environment and you get to play as Buzz, Woody or Jessie and it’s a big, open, free environment, where you get to play with Andy’s toys the way you want to, not the way we want you to.

‘We took that idea back to Pixar and said, “Hey, we want to make this Toy Story 3 game that has nothing to do with Toy Story 3, how do you like it?” That was a little intimidating, so we also pitched a kind of a more traditional approach and asked them which one they wanted us to do. They kind of looked at each other and said, “We like both ideas – could you do both?” So we did – if Pixar ask you to do both, you do both!’

‘That was a pretty big challenge. The we approached it was to have The Toy Box be the core experience, the bulk of it and have Story Mode be a briefer, almost a bonus experience, for players who want to relive and replay the moments of the film that they really loved, they’ll be there, but we don’t have to try to make that into eight hours of gameplay, which, I don’t know about you but often in film tie-in games, sometime feels kind of forced. We didn’t want to do that.’

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/24/exclusive-toy-story-3-the-videogame-hands-on-report-pt-1/

Marvel Superheroes 4D Preview

I cannot be the only one who has come to the conclusion that Madame Tussaud’s is perhaps the closest thing to hell on earth that can be experienced. It’s like some sort of unholy shrine to the union of snakes that are consumerism and celebrity, filled with people who consider photographing themselves with eerie, dead-eyed sculptures of famous people such a great idea for a day out that they are prepared to not only pay top-dollar for the privilege, but to cram themselves into the tiny corridors of the building like so much cattle awaiting the bolt through the hypothalamus, where the ethos of anti-establishment icons like Pink Floyd and The Sex Pistols are available to purchase in fridge magnet form for £2.50. My annoyance with the place began when my breakfast of over-priced and disgusting meatball Panini was interrupted by several thousand school children (each sporting an Oxford University hooded top, for reasons known only to God) and reached its apex upon discovering that Madame Tussaud’s not only renders celebrities immortal in wax, but also serial killers.

Fortunately, between these two events I had the pleasure of being among the first to witness the attraction’s soon-to-be-opened Marvel Superheroes 4D exhibit. Upon arriving, I was offered bacon sandwiches, orange juice and muffins free of charge, which was lovely, but did serve to salt the wound somewhat of my bad experience with the meatball Panini. I and the other lucky chosen few were then escorted to the entrance of the event, where punters are able to have their photo taken with Spider-Man, check out Wolverine and try out his claws and see what they’d look like after a dose of gamma radiation (big and green, as opposed to weak and frail). A ma-hoo-sive Hulk sculpture presided over the room.

In the foyer before the 4D experience are figures of Nick Fury and Tony Stark (modelled on Sam Jackson and Robert Downey Jr) and a spookily realistic Iron Man. The 4D film itself is an amusing jaunt which sees all the aforementioned superheroes, plus Captain America and Ms Marvel kicking Dr Doom’s bottom in jolly old London town. This being a 4D presentation, we are not only adorned with 3D specs, but are blasted with air and mist, vibrated in our seats and subjected to flashes and booms from a top of the range sound system. It is tremendous fun, especially for the younger visitors who are delighted by the film’s every set-piece. At one point I thought someone was kicking the back of my seat, until I realised that I was actually being poked by Wolverine’s adamantium claws.

All too quickly, the film ended and we were treated to a question and answer sessions with the folks behind the whole shebang, who explained how the exhibit was created in a mere six months at an incredible cost, with a team of hundreds working closely with Marvel – even Stan Lee has his standard-issue cameo in the short film. Clearly as excited by the experience as the fans in the audience and delighted at our positive reception, we are treated to another viewing, after which I had a quick chat with the director of the video, Joshua Wexler.

Hi Josh, can you tell me how you were chosen to direct the feature?

It was a collaboration between the guys at Madame Tussaud’s and Marvel. We had done a number of projects for Merlin Entertainment [the company behind Alton Towers, Legoland Thorpe Park, etc] already, we’d done Clutch Powers and Bob the Builder 4D shows for Legoland and as we were talking to them about it, we were just incredibly passionate about Marvel, so I sat down with Robert Henry, a friend of mine, and we wrote the script. We kept going from there. There’s two co-directors on board with me, one storyboard artist, one animation director, and we put it all together.

Who is your favourite superhero and what is your favourite bit in the film?

Spider-Man has to be my favourite. I grew up on the Spider-Man cartoons, with Stan Lee narrating them every morning. It’s definitely Spidey, so he gets a lot of little extra bits of humour in the film. I have to say my favourite moment in the film though is probably when Wolverine jumps out of the screen and flies at you with his claws out.

How long is the exhibit going on for? Indefinitely, or is it a limited run?

That’s a good Madame Tussaud’s question. It will end, but not for a while. There’s plenty of time to see it.

Do you have any future projects coming up?

Yes, we are working on a third Mortal Kombat feature film and a new top secret project with Lego, a feature length movie.

As we left, we were treated once again, this time to a lovely goody bag with some surprisingly valuable merchandise inside. Frankly, the exhibit is easily the best thing at Madame Tussaud’s by some distance. If you’re a fan of Marvel, it’s probably worth the ticket price alone, especially when the rest of the show rooms are included. I would advise arriving first thing however; the queues outside as I left were almost Biblical in size. For Marvel fans, Madame Tussaud’s have basically created their version of Mecca.

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/05/29/marvel-superheroes-4d-preview/