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A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.
I'll admit from the start, I am disappointed…
I would say there are spoiler alerts int his review (cos usually I care…) but this is a prequel to Alien and we all know what happens there, so I can just get on and tell you why Prometheus DIDN'T work!
Ok, the film starts with aliens, the Engineers, or Space Jockey from Alien, being left on Proto Earth (you'll read Proto a LOT in this review…) and using a whacky science experiment to unravel his DNA and seed the planet with DNA that will eventually create us… yeah yeah, both Creationism AND Evolution being wrong… This, while his friends fly away on thier massive spaceship that left him there
Cut to 2086 (pretty close to present day, that's a worry) and we meet one of the two main characters of this story finding cave paintings pointing to the LV star system we know so well from the Aliens franchise (yeah, this one being LV-223, an Engineers WMD factory planet)
Cut then, to 2093 (Christmas yay!) and we first meet the ship Prometheus, Serenity's sleeker, roided up brother! Seriously, whoever designed this ship must be a Firefly fan! The crew are all in Hypersleep and David (played by a surprisingly good Michael Fassbender) is watching over them all… Lets meet David:
Now, unlike Alien, where no one knew Ash was a synthetic with a company directive, we know from the outset that David is a robot, hell, the crew just don;t like him, even though he spent two and a half years making sure they survived hyper sleep and learning how to read alien languages and speak them… Yeah, I think I'd be thanking him, but ok…
Now Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her, too cool to be an archeologist, boyfriend Holloway (the OC's Logan Marshall-Green) get to tell the rest of the crew what the deal is and we meet the supposedly now dead Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), who must be the son of Alien Vs. Predators Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) (and yes AVP is canon folks, even if it was pants)
Let's meet Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) so you can get an idea who the guy is…
Ok, enough buildup… They get to LV-223, they find the tunnels and severed head of an engineer and things start to go bad from there… They soon realise the planet is the engineers WMD factory and we are VERY QUICKLY introduced to a proto facehugger… Shaw gives birth to the full on proto Facehugger after Holloway is infected by David… Blah Blah Blah…
Seriously, Ridley Scott bought us the amazingly tense and properly terrifying Alien, but Prometheus just left me cold… I can't tell you how disappointed this film left me… The majority of deaths were the sort of fair you would see in a B-Movie martial arts horror film… The actual Alien based deaths where so well set up, you saw them coming… Plus these are alien creatures we know, we know a facehugger impregnates you with a forced blowjob… We know the alien queen is gonna bust out of the chest… meh, saw it all coming…
Ok, the one thing I did find myself thinking while I walked home eating my chips was HOW the Space Jockey and the Alien queen got from LV-223 TO LV-426 in Alien… It is mentioned in Prometheus that there are more than one Engineers ship… and Alien fans who have followed the books and graphic novels know that an Alien Queen, like an Ant queen will create a colony as quickly as possible… Now it makes sense to me that the Queen, or at least one of her facehugger babies found another Engineer in stasis, gave him a not so friendly tongue kiss and when he came too, took off from the planet and crash landed on LV-426 where Ripley and the crew found the eggs in the Engineer ship… Thank you Ridley Scott for tying that up, but how you did it, not so great
ok, it was flash, so I have to give it a 5 outta 10, but it disappointed me too much for higher…
My name is Chris Whiteside, and I’m the lead producer of Guild Wars 2. Normally, I’m head-down in the trenches, making sure we’re producing the best MMO possible, but I wanted to come up for air and share some exciting news with you:
Beta Weekend Event 2 will begin on Friday, June 8th, at noon PDT (GMT-7) and will run until Sunday, June 10th, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT-7).
If that isn’t enough to get you all bursting with excitement, here is some more news:
Your existing beta characters have not been deleted, and you will be able to continue right where you left off! This means that enterprising players with characters level 35 or higher will be able to test their mettle against the explorable version of the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon!
In addition to sharing this news with you, I want to convey a massive “thank you” to all of you for playing in our beta events so far. The participation and enthusiasm we’ve seen has exceeded our expectations, and we’re all very grateful and appreciative here at the studio. Your support during our first Beta Weekend Event and throughout development has been instrumental in getting us prepared for launch and helping us take massive steps in the evolution of Guild Wars 2 as a whole. You, our community, are an integral part of the development process, and Guild Wars 2 simply would not be what it is today without you.
Your participation is even more important when you consider that we take our beta events very seriously in terms of our development strategy. At ArenaNet, “beta event” means exactly that—it’s a development-centric event in which we test our systems, discover new and exciting bugs, and get pivotal feedback from our testers about what is going in the right direction and what isn’t.
We have listened intently to all of your feedback from our first Beta Weekend Event, and we’ve made great strides toward resolving many of the issues you’ve helped us identify. These include party movement into overflow servers, chat functionality, key bindings, server stability, performance, and many more that we will detail in the near future.
Of course, there’s no denying the benefits of having such a vocal, outspoken community. And I’m not speaking just in terms of development; I’m also referring to how our players are spreading the word that Guild Wars 2 is more than just a game, it’s an evolving, online world that is shaped and driven by its players. Our community and our studio won’t accept anything less than excellence, and above all else, we both value a pioneering approach to the future of online worlds.
Having said all that, what is the one thing we most look forward to in our second Beta Weekend Event? In a nutshell, it’s getting the chance to play with you all: sharing a world we’ve built together, discovering what’s great and what could be better, and defining a ground-breaking world that we can all enjoy for many years to come. That’s what these beta events mean to us.
For those who haven’t yet pre-purchased Guild Wars 2, you’ll still have a chance to play in the beta. We’re teaming up with our partners to give away keys for Beta Weekend Event 2, so follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest news.
Thank you all so much for your support, care, and enthusiasm—we couldn’t do it without you!
Well, todays blog post from ANet is about reserving your character names for GW2… Something we were told the Hall of Monuments automatically did, guess they changed their minds on that one…
Ever since we announced the Guild Wars 2 Pre-Purchase program and Headstart Access, we’ve had a lot of questions about how name reservation will work for existing Guild Wars players. Here’s how it will work:
Character names in the Guild Wars universe work differently than they do in most other MMOs. Whereas in most MMOs character names are unique only within their world/server, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, character names are unique across the entire game. In Guild Wars 2, when a player acquires a name like Wizardex, he or she is acquiring it across all worlds. Clearly this places more importance on grabbing the name early.
Today no one actually has the name Wizardex, because all character names from the original Guild Wars were two words or more. All one-word names will be up for grabs at the start of the Guild Wars 2 Headstart Access period. But there are currently 20 million two-word names in use by existing Guild Wars players. We need a policy that allows dedicated players to hold on to their established names, while freeing up the bulk of names for the rush of Guild Wars 2 players who will come into the game at launch.
Thus our policy will simply be as follows: to preserve your character name from Guild Wars into Guild Wars 2, you must be an active Guild Wars player (more on that below), and you must create a Guild Wars 2 character with the same name as your Guild Wars character during the Headstart Access period or on launch day.
After launch day (and after we work through support tickets filed on launch day), we’ll free up the millions of unclaimed names for new Guild Wars 2 players to use.
To implement this name reservation system, we need to build a list of the character names of active Guild Wars players that we’ll reserve through launch day. We actually need to build that list a few weeks prior to the launch of Guild Wars 2.
So we’ll use the following very generous definition of active: Guild Wars players will be considered active—thus having their Guild Wars names reserved and available to claim during Headstart Access and on launch day—if they have logged into the game at least once between January 1, 2012 and the day we build the name reservation list.
We’ll warn the community before we build the list, but that’s irrelevant, because there’s no reason for anyone to wait. If you want to reserve character names from Guild Wars into Guild Wars 2, log in to the original game now so we know you’re active!
Ok, for one, yes, these guys are technically competition, but hey, I run a business so I follow the competition and back them when it will help us too
I read on twitter this morning, with great sorrow, that anotehr great station has been lost in the DAB market in the UK, due to the crazy licencing hoops we have to jump through here in the UK that are not only hurting the radio biz, but also the artists of bands
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Amazing Radio ceased broadcasting nationally on Digital 1 at midnight on Monday. This letter explains what happened, and why we think it is important for all of us who love radio and care about music.
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Let’s be honest. Some of you will have said ‘Amazing Who?’ Others will go ‘serves them right, their model was crazy’. Others will be sad to see something new disappear from the airwaves, but assume it was never viable as a concept.
The truth is more complicated. Amazing Radio did not go off the air because our model failed. We have been growing very rapidly for two years and broke even in January. We have very supportive shareholders who understand that we have a long term, very audacious plan to reinvent the music industry. We are about to raise $30m in Silicon Valley to expand internationally and in the UK. Transmissions ceased because we were unable to secure acceptable terms for an extension of our contract. We could not close a US funding round with uncertainty about our UK broadcasting licence. We remain grateful to Digital 1 for taking a risk with us when we launched in 2009, and we hope to resolve the dispute and get back on the air. Certainly the astonishing reaction from listeners and musicians, erupting spontaneously within an hour of our announcement, confirms that people want us back on DAB.
Why should you care about this? Several reasons: –
The music industry is broken. The old model doesn’t work any more. Major labels have withdrawn from A&R. The industry needs help finding the new talent. That’s what we do.
Musicians need an outlet. The UK has an incredible live music scene, and technology allows bands to record to a higher standard and lower cost than at any time. But there’s no point having an MP3 nobody hears. We have given thousands of bands their first radio play and first revenues.
DAB has to work. It’s important for the whole radio ecosystem and the Government needs the cash from analogue switch-off. The incredible reaction to our departure shows people want to use DAB to find new things. (Not just simulcasts of FM).
It’s good for GDP. Creative industries are the fastest-growing part of the UK economy. The industry needs to work together to find the next Adele, the next Radiohead. We are (now) an important player at the start of that process. And our expansion will create even more jobs.
It’s good for young people. Music provides a creative outlet and focus for anyone. It’s democratic and (because of digital technology) accessible – if there’s a route map for talent to develop.
It’s good for radio. We don’t compete for your audiences – we only ever expect to be a niche, and we’ll never take advertising. But we will find the music you’ll be playing next year.
We hope you see merit in these arguments and will wish us well, as we continue to expand. When we get back on the air, we hope you’ll find some new music you love. (Thousands have).
Amazing Radio are still up and going online, however they were a big player on the DAB radio network and an example I planned to follow with The Saniarium.FM too
– The story continues in Kingsmouth with all new characters, storylines and missions, Funcom teams up with major websites all over Europe for massive key giveaway –
Durham, USA – May 15th, 2012 – Funcom is excited to announce that the next Beta Weekend for its upcoming modern-day massively multiplayer online game ‘The Secret World’ will start on May 18th at 9am PDT / 6pm CET and run until Sunday May 20th at 11.59pm PDT / May 21st 8.59am CET. During this Beta Weekend players get to pick up where they left off with the same character they played during the first Beta Weekend, as they get to meet all-new characters in Kingsmouth each with their own unique missions and storylines.
The best way to gain access to the Beta Weekend is to pre-order ‘The Secret World’. This grants access to all Beta Weekends leading up to launch. Funcom is also teaming up with major websites all over Europe this week to conduct a massive giveaway of keys for this weekend only, and this is a great way for gamers to have a look at the game before pre-ordering.
Funcom executed a successful first Beta Weekend from May 11th to May 13th, both in terms of player numbers, feedback and technical stability on both client and server side. The company is also encouraged by the fact that this Beta weekend saw higher player numbers, longer play-times and higher return visits than for beta week-ends conducted for its previous MMO, “Age of Conan”. Funcom also teamed up with the world’s largest gaming site GameSpot to bring thousands of keys for the first Beta Weekend to its readers. During the Beta Weekend ‘The Secret World’ featured as the most popular game overall on the site, and as of today the game has a higher number of active followers on GameSpot than any other massively multiplayer online game in development.
“The results from the first Beta Weekend are very encouraging,” says Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas. “The majority of the feedback we have received from players is very positive, and also looking at it from a development perspective the Beta Weekend was undoubtedly a major success for the company.”
The international gaming press has also been playing ‘The Secret World’ for the past week, and many of them have provided their impressions. Leading gaming site GamesRadar says in their preview that they have “…just started to scratch the surface of ‘The Secret World’, and already, we’re awfully impressed.” Leading MMO site ZAM says in their preview that “… ‘The Secret World’ is a tremendously immersive experience that will invite you in to stay.”
