Rumor: Toy Story 3 screenwriter scripting Star Wars: Episode VII

Assuming Vulture is to be believed, the screenwriter for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII may very well be Michael Arndt, an Oscar winner best known for writing Pixar's Toy Story 3.

Ever since news broke that Disney had purchased Lucasfilm, and has plans to release three new live-action Star Wars movies over the course of the next decade, the geek masses have been alternately celebrating with abandon and racking their brains for any snippet of information that might reveal who exactly Disney will tap to work on this crucially important continuation of George Lucas’ world-famous sci-fi saga. To wit, this article published only yesterday which claims that Harrison Ford may return to reprise his role as Han Solo in Episode VII.

In reality of course, nobody outside of the expansive Disney family has any idea who might be tapped to work on this project, but that won’t stop journalists from clinging to anything that could possibly be construed as a hint. Thus, Vulture reports that Disney wants to hire Michael Arndt to script Episode VII. According to unnamed, “informed sources,” Arndt has already completed a “a 40- to 50-page treatment for the film and is likely to be at least one of the writers when the Disney/Lucasfilm project begins shooting in 2014.”

Though you may not be familiar with Arndt directly, you’ve certainly seen his work. He wrote the indie hit Little Miss Sunshine, and provided screenplays for both Toy Story 3 and the upcoming Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire. Further, he’s also apparently penned screenplays for an upcoming film based on The Disney Channel’s Phineas and Ferb cartoon series, and a Pixar film that IMDB calls “The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind.” Obviously we know nothing about that last project, but based on Pixar’s past efforts it’s likely to be delightful fun for the whole family.

With Arndt’s credentials established, we should probably mention the two other aspects of Vulture’s claims. While the Disney/Lucasfilm deal seemingly caught everyone by surprise, Vulture claims that talent agencies were hit hardest. Instead of using this as an opportunity to pitch their writer clients to Disney for the coveted script writing gig, these agencies were informed that Arndt had already been working on that aforementioned treatment for quite some time prior to Disney’s announcement. Intriguingly, now that the treatment is complete, Vulture believes it will shortly be sent out to a swath of big-name Hollywood directors to gauge their interest in helming this movie. Names listed in Vulture’s report include JJ Abrams, Brad Bird and Steven Spielberg.

As with all rumors, we caution you to take this news with a huge grain of salt. We have no reason to doubt any of Vulture’s claims, but without official confirmation, all of this will remain a rumor until such time as Disney sees fit to solidify some of these ethereal details. That said, if Vulture is entirely correct, Episode VII could be an even bigger event than we’d previously imagined. A new Star Wars film written by one of the guys behind Toy Story 3 and helmed by the beloved director who brought us Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park? If that doesn’t get you worked up into an excited lather, then your sense of whimsy has been dead for years.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Choose your own bloody adventure: Hands-on with Dishonored

Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks have a winner on their hands with first-person assassin’s tale, Dishonored.

If there has ever been a good argument for developers to continue supporting E3, it is Behtesda and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored. Before the convention earlier this year, Dishonored was a curiosity. It was the second most interesting sounding title of what many considered a relatively weak Bethesda offering compared to previous years. Prey 2 was AWOL, Skyrim and Rage had both released, there was no Fallout news, and the highest profile title was The Elder Scrolls Online which is still a long way from release. 

It isn’t a franchise title, Arkane Studios is not a well-known developer, and the game itself had only been seen a handful of times. But then came E3 and everything changed. The previously unknown game was suddenly a game of the year contender and it won several Best of Show honors (including ours). The most often comparison was BioShock, which seems obvious since Arkane helped out with BioShock 2 and both games use a similar ability and weapon offensive combination. But it was more than just a similarity in the gameplay, it was a feeling that you were seeing something special. Both games featured a rich and original world and both offered a mysterious and compelling story, but beyond that they both offered choice.

How you approach the world is entirely up to you. If you want to go stealth, you have several tools at your disposal. If you want to take on the world, you can do that too. If you want to be a prick to the citizens of the fictional town of Dunwall, you can get incredibly creative and then ruin their evenings. The choice is yours.

In the demo that Bethesda is currently showing off, you are tasked with entering an exclusive party and assassinating an aristocratic matriarch named Lady Boyle — there’s a catch though. The target and her daughters are all wearing similar outfits that include masks. The game randomizes which of the three ladies is the actual target, which means you have to approach the mission creatively and put in the legwork. You could always try to kill everyone, but that be somewhat like ordering a steak from a fine restaurant and then covering it in A1.

Almost immediately I noticed that my game was progressing differently from that of the people playing around me. My game took me through the courtyard of the estate where the party was held, and an optional sidequest offered me the chance to fight a duel with pistols. Throughout the game there will be optional events within main missions, which shouldn’t come as a surprise for this type of game.

Even entering the house can be completed in multiple ways. Assuming you take the main door, you then have options. If you wander around and explore there are other side-missions to partake in, or you can focus on optional objectives that will help with the main quest.

I chose to complete the secondary objectives to help with the main quest. This sent me to the second floor to explore while dodging guards. It would be easy enough to take out the guards one at a time, but there is always the risk that the bodies could be discovered. So I decided to get creative.

The gameplay uses both weapons and powers, and you can bring these up on a selection wheel. From there you can map the weapon or ability to one of the d-pad directions. Using the ability to see through walls, I stopped time as a guard approached, then teleported behind him and went on to find a note that said who the target was. There were several areas to explore after that, and some were accessible through unusual means like possession of a rat that could then navigate the heating ducts to get to the basement. But that was for another quest, and I had an appointment to keep.

Due to my limited time, subtlety took a backseat to speed. I found the target and eliminated her with prejudice, then had to run for it. Once outside it took a moment for the confusion to settle and the guards to mobilize. As bullets ripped by, I froze time to escape the grounds. I sprinted to the sewers and slid into a covered escape route, but came out and was facing tallboys, guards walking on mechanized stilts. These guards can quickly ruin your day, so I laid a trap on a nearby bridge, summoned rats to attack another guard, and threw a sticky grenade into a crowd to even the odds. The tallboy then came at me via the bridge and walked right into my trap. As guards closed in, I possessed a fish and swam to my escape route, a waiting boat.

I immediately wanted to replay the section since I thought of at least five different ways to complete the mission that I wanted to try. When I eventually have the chance, I will be sure to do just that. And then I will probably do it another way, and then try another and another. And that alone justifies making Dishonored not just a game to watch, but possibly the game to watch this year.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Twitter users sent more than 150 million Olympic Tweets this summer

The true winner of the London Olympics? Maybe that was Twitter, which found itself setting new records throughout the entire two week run of the XXX Summer Games.

Consider it a last huzzah of Olympic fever. As the world struggles to get used to a life without constant concern over who was leading the pack on the medal table, or whether or not dreams would be dashed thanks to a last minute stumble on the parallel bars, Twitter quietly revealed the scope of the Internet’s obsession with the sixteen day sporting event – or, at least one part of the social media conversation.

“We saw more than 150 million Tweets about the Olympics over the past 16 days,” wrote the company’s manager of editorial programming Andrew Fitzgerald, in a post that appeared on the official Twitter blog last night, going on to add that “The biggest tweeting moments that came during the heat of competition (not at a medal-winning conclusion) included Kobe Bryant’s dunk towards the end of the USA-Spain basketball game, and Hope Solo’s (@HopeSolo) land-diving save in the women’s USA-Japan soccer match.”

In terms of specifics, Jamaican Uslan Bolt’s gold in the 200m sprint is already known to have broken records with more than 80,000 Tweets per minute, but his gold win in the 100m is not far behind, with 74,000 TPM. The next most popular Olympic moment comes from Brit Andy Murray winning the gold in the Men’s Tennis Singles (and in the process, beating his opponent from this summer’s Men’s Final at Wimbledon, Roger Federer), with more than 57,000 TPM, with Bolt returning for the fourth place; the Jamaican gold win in the Men’s 4x100M Relay received an average of 52,000 TPM. The highest American win came with Team USA beating Spain in the Men’s Basketball final; that reached an impressive 41,000 TPM.

(That the top four Tweeted events were non-American wins is surprising, at least to me, but also points to the success of Twitter as an international phenomenon and communication system, as well as the excitement surrounding individual athletes and stories within the Olympics. In short, it’s a kind of a great thing all ’round.)

Unsurprisingly, Uslan Bolt was also the most discussed Olympian during the sixteen day event, but Fitzgerald reported that he was joined by nine other athletes in making it to more than one million mentions on Twitter during the games (They are, in descending order, Michael Phelps, Tom Dale, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei and LeBron James).

The most-Tweeted-about sport during the games? That would be soccer, again demonstrating the international flavor of the micro-blogging service, but perhaps the surprise of Twitter’s metrics was the most-Tweeted-about event of the entire 16-day span of the Olympics. It wasn’t anything to do with sports at all, but instead something far more important: ” It was the Spice Girls who stole the night, inspiring more than 116,000 Tweets per minute,” Fitzgerald explained, writing about the success of last night’s Closing Ceremony. The Spice Girls? Oh, Twitter, I expected more from you…

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com