Obligatory title
I love the smell of Kickstarter cash in the morning
It has been 38 years since Apocalypse Now burst onto the cinema screen, and now Francis Ford Coppola says he wants to revisit the classic in computer game form – and wants you to pay for it. The renowned auteur, estimated to be worth several hundred million, is trying to raise $900,000 to build the game himself after the game …
a modest home in the suburbs will set you back the better part of a million dollars becoming a multi-millionaire doesn't make you a fat cat - it just means you were moderately successful and invested wisely (or were raking it in and blew most of it on cocaine, booze and hookers).
So what if they do, if they get what they want from it why is that a problem?
Almost every creative project is a some sort of pet-project of someone. Why is funding a project started by a millionaire any different from funding one by someone with a couple of quid? So long as you get to enjoy the result at a price you're prepared to pay. It's a problem when you pump money in some vanity project that promises you get something and then you find yourself screwed over..
WTF? Francis Ford Coppola crowdsources Apocalypse Now game
Crowdsourcing would be if he asked the internet to write the game for him. There's no hint of that in the article.
This is crowdfunding, but so what? The record of Kickstarter projects run by people who know what they're doing is pretty good. I guess you're suggesting that he can afford to finance it himself but the advantage of Kickstarter is that it identifies and locks in demand for the product before you start. Because, as any fule kno, stated preference surveys and observed preference surveys give very different answers to the same question.
I'll probably wait for the Humble Store sale though.
the team thinks they can have the game finished by October 2020 – although given the original movie was over a year behind schedule due to difficult on-set conditions (a hurricane and Martin Sheen's mid-filming heart attack) and extensive reediting, that date might slip.
...huh?
"The record of Kickstarter projects run by people who know what they're doing is pretty good."
Agreed. Francis Ford Coppola is a film writer and director who has never, as far as I am aware, made a video game or even been involved with one in any way, or been involved with crowdfunded projects either. And who hasn't been particularly successful at making films for the last decade or two for that matter. That doesn't mean things are bound to go badly; he should at least have a decent idea of financial management due to his previous work, but when it comes to crowdfunding video games he really wouldn't seem to count as someone who knows what he's doing. There are all too many people who still consider games something of a joke and assume that just because they've been successful in films or similar that it will be a doddle to jump into gaming and show all the idiots how it's supposed to be done, and who invariably fail horribly. Maybe Coppola isn't one of those, but I wouldn't bet money on it just because he made a few good films 20+ years ago.
"The player will take on the role of Captain Willard and will have to pass through the jungle to find the elusive Kurtz, but the idea is not to kill everyone and let god sort 'em out, but to stay alive and undiscovered."
Isn't this the idea behind the XBox Tom Clancy stealth games?
Aye, saw that article the other day. Death Stranding is looking mighty fine, judging by the trailers so far. Guillermo del Toro, Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen. It could be the perfect comeback after the cancellation of Silent Hills (I didn't get to play P.T. as I didn't get a PS4 until after it had been removed from the Playstation Store, and I was not prepared to pay up to £1000 for a PS4).
I don't go in for the whole pre-orders thing, but I may end up doing that and booking a few days off work for it.
Del Toro was working with Kojima on game that Konami cancelled, which is why he tweeted "Fuck Konami" as a Christmas message. Seems Kojima might have some sympathy for Coppola's attitude towards big film studios.
There is spoof photo of a Powerpoint slide doing the rounds on the internet, purported to have been revealed by the infamous Sony leak:
KONAMI - INTERNAL USE ONLY
2015 STRATEGY AND PLANNING
- Fuck Hideo Kojima
- Fuck Metal Gear
- Fuck Silent Hill
- Fuck It
- Fuck You
The decision to crowbar films into games to create a parallel income stream has ruined many movie franchises. It is a relief that Apocalypse Now came out several decades ago. If it had been made today with an eye on the gaming market it would have been one of the worst movies ever made instead of one of the best.
A new game based on the film, though - I am intrigued.
I am similarly intrigued at the thought that models of Kurtz, military choppers playing Wagner and other items (such as Frederic Forrest's severed head) could end up in toy shops.
Not sure whether a game would be allowed if it included a trip to an opium den (Apolocalypse Now Redux) but either way I'd buy it - if only to ensure that the surfer (Sam Bottoms) has his head blown off at the first opportunity.
"The decision to crowbar films into games to create a parallel income stream has ruined many movie franchises. It is a relief that Apocalypse Now came out several decades ago. If it had been made today with an eye on the gaming market it would have been one of the worst movies ever made instead of one of the best."
Not too sure it would have been one of the worst movies ever made, but I can see them adding the Ride of the Valkyries scene into the game, possible as a sort of helicopter chase.
I can see what you mean though. In Star Wars: EP1, the pod racing scene was arguably one of the most exciting scenes. It also felt like it was bolted on so they could get at least one game out of it.
Damn, I might have just given the developers an idea.
> the helicopter tune
You now picture airborne assault on pajama-clad peasants to the sound of Nyancat.
Meanwhile: How I Tried to Transplant the Musical Heart of Apocalypse Now: Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch describes the surprising idiosyncrasies of film scoring.
Practically no fuss and, most importantly, NO RISK of sinking your own money. Fools will sink THEIR money for you. Not like those pesky banks that not only charge high interest, but even want to grab a large share of your hard-won profit afterwards.
Keep diggin!
In Vietnam everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission... and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over... I would never want another.
The horror... the horror.
Something about snails and razor blades.
Curious about the history of home computing both west and east of the iron curtain? Berlin's ComputerSpieleMuseum in Germany's capital has you covered.
Museum director Matthias Oborski was The Register's guide around the ground floor site of the museum, which is located among the Soviet buildings of Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee (a five-minute metro ride from Alexanderplatz, or 25-minute walk if you want to take in the brutalist architecture).
After the reception, with its impressive Soviet-era mosaic still in-situ behind the cheerful staff, there is a temporary exhibition celebrating the role of food in computer games. Oborski winced a little at the word "temporary" – it had been set up in 2019 and was still in place due, mainly, to the events of the last few years.
After a nine month pause, Beijing has finally granted new video game licenses to 45 titles.
The approvals arrived on Monday through China's National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA). The newly approved titles hail from video game makers Lilith Games, Baidu, XD, and Seasun Entertainment – but curiously not Chinese gaming giants NetEase nor Tencent.
China uniquely requires video game publishers to secure regulatory approval ahead of release, and NPPA suddenly ceased granting approvals back in July 2021. Prior to the halt, between 80 and 100 video games were approved monthly. The last batch, released in July, contained 87 titles.
Viral online puzzle game Wordle has been acquired by The New York Times Company (NYTCo), publisher of The New York Times.
The game requires players to guess a five-letter word within six turns – a task made easier by Wordle offering clues that players have chosen letters used in the word, and whether or not they are in the right position. Gameplay is similar to codebreaking pegboard game Mastermind, but with 26 different "pegs" – and of course the answer has to be an English word. A single puzzle is offered daily.
Wordle was created by a sole developer, Josh Wardle, as a lockdown distraction for his partner. It took off when Wardle added a feature allowing players to share their results, and is now thought to have millions of daily users – up from mere thousands in October 2021.
The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our (sometimes) monthly gaming column. At long last, New World is out and we've been diligently grinding our faces off to answer the question: Can Jeff "mountains of cash" Bezos make a decent MMO?
On 28 September, Amazon Games released its first serious, big-boy-pants-on video game: New World. Why does this matter? First of all, it's Amazon. Not content with anything short of global domination, Jeff Bezos' e-commerce and cloud computing juggernaut has had a sticky start with gaming – two titles prior to New World, Breakaway and Crucible, were scrapped – and people would love to see the venture fail. I would love to see the venture fail.
Secondly, New World is an MMORPG. That's "massively multiplayer online roleplaying game" to the untainted. As far as game development goes, it's hard to think of a more complicated and ambitious genre, especially as this has transpired to be Amazon's "debut" outside of the mobile platform.
A software upgrade will disable a "feature" that allows the touchscreen on Tesla cars to play video games - even while the vehicles are in motion- after the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated a complaint about the tech.
The feature, called "Passenger Play", has been available since 2020 in the Tesla Model 3, S, X, and Y. As the name implies, it was aimed at passengers. Prior to 2020, occupants of the car could only play games while the vehicle was in park.
“Following the opening of a preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s ‘Passenger Play,’ Tesla informed the agency that it is changing the functionality of this feature. In a new software update, “Passenger Play” will now be locked and unusable when the vehicle is in motion,” said a statement from NHTSA.
Since early September, Josh Muir and five other maintainers of the noblox.js
package, have been trying to prevent cybercriminals from distributing ransomware through similarly named code libraries.
Noblox.js
is a wrapper for the Roblox API, which many gamers use to automate interactions with the hugely popular Roblox game platform. And for the past few months the software has been targeted by "a user who is hell-bent on attacking our user-base with malware, and continues to make packages to this end," explained Muir in an email to The Register.
This miscreant, with the assistance of at least one other, has been "typosquatting" the noblox.js
package by uploading similarly named packages that deliver ransomware to NPM, a registry for open source JavaScript libraries, and then promoting the malware-laden files via Discord, a messaging and chat service.
The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Not that anybody noticed but we skipped the last edition for a number of reasons. 1) Too many betas. Though we were monitoring developments in potential World of Warcraft killer New World and Left 4 Dead's spiritual successor, Back 4 Blood, we didn't see anything that could be discussed fairly. 2) Generally no new full releases of interest. 3) We had to RMA a graphics card and got sad. However, when setting out the vision for this column, there were no hard and fast rules about what got covered. So this time we're headed back to 2014 and a crumbling space station where something extremely violent and dangerous lurks in the shadows…
I own two copies of Alien: Isolation. The first was bought on disc for the Xbox One at release seven years ago. At this point I had never truly committed to a "survival horror" simply because, while horror films and literature are great, horror games are another kettle of fish.
The flicking of pages and glow from the big screen are gentle reminders that you are "safe". But gaming, as a far more immersive and active (dare I say) art form, is too real. Done well, your body and mind can forget that you're not actually about to be murdered – at least in my case.
Analysis Amazon Game Studios has reportedly dropped terms in its employment contract that gave the internet giant a license to the intellectual property created by employees, even to games they develop on their own time.
The expansive contractual terms received some attention last month when James Liu, a software engineer at Google, recounted via Twitter how in 2018 he turned down a job offer at Amazon "due to absolutely draconian rules regarding hobbyist game dev."
His Twitter post from July 6, 2021, since deleted, included a screenshot of a contractual agreement that laid out specific terms by which employees were allowed to develop or release "Personal Games."
The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. In May, the industry finally pushed some hot properties out the door including Resident Evil Village, Biomutant, and the Mass Effect remasters. But we opted to check out something just a little bit older.
Though pop culture might have reached peak zombie almost a decade ago, Oregon-based Bend Studio still managed to walk away with a decent game in the 2019 PlayStation 4 "exclusive" Days Gone. We say "exclusive" because we've been playing the PC port, which came out on 18 May. This follows a recent trend of titles made specifically for Sony's last-gen console being re-released for PC a couple of years later including Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn.
Yes, the world stopped giving a toss after the eleventy-first season of AMC's flagging comic book adaptation The Walking Dead, but somehow surviving a zombie apocalypse remains a gripping setting for many – yours truly included. Even if it's one of the most done-to-death concepts under the sun, Bend has done a fantastic job of rendering an Oregon scorched by a mysterious viral epidemic that has turned 99 per cent of the population into rabid, shambling cannibals.
Folks in the US will see the transformative effects of 5G first in the areas of online gaming and fixed wireless broadband internet connections, Ericsson North America CEO Niklas Heuveldop said on Thursday.
"When it comes to new services, look at gaming as one of the sectors that holds promise for 5G. You need the unique throughput that 5G offers ... and the instant response," he said during a webcast hosted by The Washington Post. And yes, Heuveldop works for the Ericsson that makes and sells 5G network equipment.
5G networks – which promise increased capacity as well as high throughput and low latency – could move game console hardware from the edge of your furniture to the edge of a network, he said, adding that is already happening in places such as South Korea, where high-performance 5G networks are operational. That is to say, the gameplay processing is done remotely and piped to a relatively simple terminal in your home, potentially using 5G if the connectivity is available.
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