The new Kindle Fire HD trio is ad-supported on the lockscreen in the US and Europe

If you have wondered how the new Kindle Fire HD prices are possible, the answer is simple – they all have ads on the lockscreen.

Whether you like it or not, you won’t be able to remove the ads, no extra payment options are available for now.

The disturbing thing here is not that the Kindles have ads on their lockscreens, but that Amazon won’t be offering an option to remove them. There won’t be more expensive ad-free Kindles either.

So, could you live with the ads on the lockscreen or is this a deal-breaker for you?

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Michael Keaton tapped for RoboCop villain role

Who will take Hugh Laurie's antagonist role in the upcoming RoboCop remake? Apparently the answer is "Michael Keaton."

Despite the eternal machinations of the Internet, we’d like to assume that you haven’t yet had the entirety of your attention span sucked from your inquisitive little head. Thus, we also assume you recall an article we published last week that both revealed Hugh Laurie’s departure from the upcoming, in-production RoboCop remake, as well as the rumor that Clive Owen might be taking his place. This morning however, we received word that Laurie’s villain role will instead be played by Michael Keaton.

/Film reports:

Keaton will play the ultra-wealthy CEO of the greedy Omni Corp, which turns Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Kinnaman) into an unstoppable law enforcement cyborg for its own means. Director José Padilha announced the casting via a statement, saying “Michael is the final addition to the amazing cast we have assembled for this film and it is so great to have the last puzzle piece in place.”

Those of you who adore the original, 1987 version of RoboCop will likely know that this is more or less the same role portrayed by Ronny Cox. Presumably, you’ll also agree that Cox was excellent in the role. His performance blends moral flexibility, a politician’s practiced faux emotionality and an unapologetic, mile-long streak of intense greed. Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, despite its gore and massive body count, is first and foremost a satire of 1980s American culture, and as such Cox’s character was something of a jab at the megalomaniacal suits who spent the decade accumulating frankly obscene wealth by exploiting every resource and person available to them. Granted, Michael Milken wasn’t sent to jail for attempting to privatize a major metropolitan police force via resurrected cybernetic Christ allegories, but then again, Verhoeven’s version is far more entertaining and thought provoking than the depressing reality that spawned it.

As far as Keaton’s casting in the role, we see this as a positive. Though he saw greatest acclaim in family-friendly films like Batman and Beetlejuice, Keaton is an excellent dramatic actor with an undeniable smirking charm. If you haven’t seen his work in 1989′s The Dream Team, you really ought to seek it out. Though it’s a comedy, Keaton shifts gears from humor to pathos often, and proves that he’s much more than just a pretty face. Actually, if you can set up a double bill with Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, you’ll get a pretty solid perspective on Keaton’s capabilities, and as far as we’re concerned “scenery chewing evil rich dude” is well within Keaton’s range.

Despite Keaton’s casting effectively completing the list of actors lined up for the RoboCop remake, we still don’t have much solid information on how this film is shaping up. We can speculate on actors, and compare them to their analogues in the original RoboCop, but until we hear some official information from this project we’re going to have to wait and wonder how well director Jose Padilha can match the efforts of Paul Verhoeven. Even if Padilha isn’t going to attempt to make his RoboCop a sweeping, razor-sharp satire of modern American values (read: violence, greed, reality TV — sadly, not much has changed since the 80s) he’s got a very high bar to reach with this film. And, needless to say, if he does attempt to ape Verhoeven entirely, Padilha had better be ready to bring his absolute best to the table. He hasn’t done anything to date that would definitely convince us that this remake will be awesome, so while we’re tentatively optimistic about this film, we aren’t about to take bets on how well Padilha may fare. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Pups battle zombies in short film Play Dead

Ever wondered what it's like to be a dog during the zombie apocalypse? Play Dead offers an answer.

While we normally avoid covering every single film project to emerge from the modern electronic gestation pod that is Kickstarter, once in a while something comes along that is just too cool to ignore. Something like a short film depicting the zombie apocalypse. Wait, don’t click away just yet. Granted, zombies have been done to (un)death, but Play Dead is a different kind of zombie movie. Instead of pitting hungry, desperate human survivors against a shambling horde of reanimated corpses, the short film’s creators have decided that perhaps it would be more interesting if these rotting corpses were forced to battle man’s best friend.

The results, as you can see in the 18-minute vignette embedded below, are equal parts adorable, depressing and weirdly funny. It’s dark humor, but c’mon, it’s dark humor starring cute lil’ pooches. You Internet people love stuff like that!

With the hype properly shoved onto you people, we can get to the crucial details behind this. Play Dead, as we mentioned, is the result of a successful Kickstarter project from a Florida-based studio calling itself the Borscht Corporation. Though it has no real impact on the short film’s content, we’d also like to point out that the Corporation has a lovely alligator Ouroboros as its logo. Honestly, that’s pretty keen, so propers to whoever designed that bit of art.

That aside though, we know very little of the people behind this movie. As far as we can tell none of them have been involved in any major Hollywood productions to date, nor can we find any information on what the Corporation has planned for its next project. We do know that the people behind Play Dead are quite capable of working on a minuscule budget — the Kickstarter originally sought to raise $3,000 but managed to nearly double that figure by pulling in $5,849 — and that bodes well for the potential future of the studio. While a small film project like this won’t ever hit theaters, it makes a nice stepping zone toward the big time, and few Hollywood studios would turn away a director capable of producing a movie like Play Dead with a budget of less than $6,000.

If we have one qualm about Play Dead however, it’s that the short is just too short. That’s a stupid complaint for us to make, but as die-hard fans of zombie lore (yes, we can see the pun, and no, it was not intentional) and anything involving adorable animals this kind of thing lands directly in our wheelhouse. Though we doubt it’s a possibility, we’d love to see a major studio hire the Borscht Corporation to remake Play Dead as a full feature-length movie with a proper budget. The project wouldn’t even need major stars either; we’re perfectly content with the amateur thespians seen in the short film, and the potential profits generated by the “dogs versus zombies” premise alone should make such a film a massive hit. Just don’t let Romero direct the thing. As much as we love the man’s work, the quality of his zombie films dropped off precipitously after 1985, and we’d hate to see these puppies squandered on a movie that is qualitatively comparable to 2007′s Diary Of The Dead.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Persona 4 Arena review

Can a hybrid of a fighter and an RPG succeed? Atlus and Arc System Works hope to find the answer in Persona 4 Arena.

As a big fan of Atlus’ Persona series of roleplaying games, I had my doubts about Persona 4 Arena. Developer Arc System Works has proven time and time again that it’s got the chops to create some of the finest 2D fighters in the world, yet with P4A the company was attempting to build a fighter in its own trademarked, hyper-kinectic style that also somehow retains the crucial elements fans loved about the Persona titles, that initially built the canon for the game. It’s hard to imagine two gaming genres as disparate as fighting games and epic Japanese-style roleplaying games, and yet I’m relieved to report that P4A is not just a great mashup of Persona and Arc System Works’ fighting game mechanics, it’s one of my favorite fighters of recent years.

Keep in mind that I did not say “one of the best new fighters of recent years.” We’ll get to why that’s important in just a moment.

If you’re unfamilar with Atlus’ Persona games, a quick primer: In short, the Persona franchise is a modern Japanese-style roleplaying series that tasks players both with battling demons and with surviving the rigors of a Japanese high school. The vast majority of the game’s key characters are high school-aged teens (with all the drama, sarcasm and hormones that implies) with the ability to summon and control the titular Personas. Think of Personas as aspects of one’s personality that manifest as giant, supernatural creatures and grant their users all kinds of useful magical abilities. In Atlus’ Persona RPGs the characters used these Personas to battle shadows throughout the many floors of a giant otherworldly tower that replaced their high school every night.

Notice how complicated that backstory gets? Yeah, and that’s massively condensed. That must have presented a pretty massive hurdle for Arc System Works to overcome in creating a fighter based around this mythology. Traditionally, fighting games have had little to no story — they only needed enough to justify the virtual fisticuffs  — so how would they have to change to incorporate a massive, pre-existing storyline?

The answer, at least according to Persona 4 Arena, is that every aspect of the fighting game has to be infused with backstory. Take the game’s Story Mode for instance: It differs for each fighter, and offers two to three hours of playtime for each, but the majority of one’s time in this mode will be spent reading screens of scrolling text. Occasionally you’ll find yourself drawn into a fight, but with these battles ending in a matter of minutes, the Mode is pretty much entirely dedicated to telling a story. While that may offend those who bought Persona 4 Arena as a fighting game, it’s great news for fans of Atlus’ Persona RPGs. The story written for Persona 4 Arena is on par with its roleplaying forebears, and the characters are somehow fleshed out to an even greater extent than they were in their original games. There’s a good reason why Atlus has officially stated that the events of Persona 4 Arena are canonical in the Persona universe, and that that they fit in so very well. 

Of course, those who were hoping for a simple fighting game could just play through the Arcade Mode, which is a Street Fighter-esque string of battles leading up to a fight with the game’s boss. While this is more traditional, it is also infused with story. Characters chat about the plot between rounds, the announcer offers canon-appropriate commentary and the ending is surprisingly lengthy and involved. The online multiplayer and versus modes are more or less standard fighting game fare, but in the end Persona 4 Arena is the most story-rich fighting game ever created. Whether that pleases you or completely turns you off to the project is a personal choice, but given that Atlus and Arc System Works wanted to a create a fighter that would have crossover appeal to RPG gamers, it makes a lot of sense — and it’s impressive that Atlus and Arc System Works were so successful.

I realize that until now I’ve focused pretty heavily on how much storytelling this game does, but underneath all of that is a very functional, interesting fighting game engine. Though characters feel a bit slower than those found in Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear series, they’re still very agile, and “hyper-kinetic” is a good description for the combat. Remember the Personas I mentioned earlier? They accompany characters into battle and functionally serve to power the more spectacular attacks the game has to offer. Unfortunately, while your Persona is throwing a hurricane at your opponent, it is standing out on the battlefield, vulnerable to attack. If your foe is able to hit your Persona enough it will cause a Persona Break which disables all of your Persona-powered attacks for a short period of time. Since Persona-based attacks are your character’s most powerful attacks, you can see how this might limit a person’s options during battle.

Though the Persona Break system is a very interesting quirk, it represents the combat’s only real break from traditional 2D fighting genre tropes. The controls in Persona 4 Arena are a relatively simple riff on the classic Capcom formula, special moves, super moves and all the other flashy attacks we’ve come to know and love are represented here, and you get about eight fights before squaring off against an over-powered boss. Hopefully I haven’t made this sound like it’s a bad thing, because I think that this level of familiarity makes sure that fans of other fighters can quickly acclimate to the Persona 4 Arena system. Likewise, it allows those gamers who bought this thing purely on the strength of the Persona brand name a chance to pick up the basics of how to punch and kick in relatively quick fashion. While it’s not yet known how well the fighting game community will adopt Persona 4 Arena, they seem pretty keen on it so until further notice you can view the fighting game system in this game as pretty solid and robust.

Conclusion

As I said above though, I wouldn’t quite place Persona 4 Arena as the best fighter of recent years. Instead, it’s the fighter that I’ve enjoyed the most over the past decade. Why? To put it simply, I’m a huge Persona fan. I love these characters and any chance to experience stories of their further adventures, even if they aren’t in RPG format, is something I just can’t argue with. While I would recommend the game to fighting game fans, I would first and foremost recommend it to those who enjoy fighters but also love the Persona RPG games. This is as close to a Persona 5 as we’re going to be getting any time soon, and I’m happy to report that it’s a very viable substitute while we wait.

Score: 9 out of 10

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com