Fourth Futurama Movie Keeps Me Laughing Until Y3K
Futurama fans worldwide rejoiced when Fox announced the creation of four new full-length direct-to-DVD movies starring everyone’s favorite Planet Express crew, reviving the series from cancellation Hell. Unfortunately, these movies have been uneven, to say the least: Bender’s Big Score suffered from a labyrinthine plot and forcing too many characters in for nothing more than fan service, and Bender’s Game abandoned the series’ staple style of humor at the midway point, instead opting for an unsuccessful Lord of the Rings parody. While they were still fun (seriously, they were better than 95% of the “comedy” movies that were released last year), only The Beast With A Billion Backs recaptured that ol’ Futurama feeling for me. So when I popped in the final flick—Into The Wild Green Yonder, which is officially out today—I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Now I can happily say that this is likely my favorite of the four Futurama movies, finally achieving the goal of an 88 minute episode without packing it full of unnecessary fan service or plot devices.
When HD-DVD took a nosedive into obscurity, the Internet was ripe with statements like “The format war is over,” “All hail Blu-Ray,” or my personal favorite, “Click here for boobies!” But even though Blu-Ray won the battle, the war continues to rage—DVDs continue to outsell Blu-Ray discs by a respectable margin, and digital distribution is becoming increasingly commonplace for both movies and video games (
Over the past few years, readers of Electronic Gaming Monthly may have noticed that their video game magazine of choice was losing some weight, that its page numbers were dropping lower by the month. Given the dire state of print journalism, we knew it was only a matter of time before EGM went the way of The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Games for Windows, and dozens of other discontinued gaming mags. What we didn’t expect, however, is that most of the 1UP Network would go down with it.
One of the most celebrated films in all of dork-dom is this little space opera called Star Wars. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Arguably the most infectious part of the entire movie was the music composed by maestro John Williams, punctuated by a series of themes that still resonate throughout society a generation later. While maybe not as widely-known as Star Wars’s intro, there are few video gamers who haven’t heard the Metal Gear Solid theme, which was present in all of the series’ PlayStation and PS2 iterations. So gamers were understandably surprised when the theme was absent from the fourth game in the series, Guns of the Patriots. While composer Harry Gregson-William’s score met—maybe even surpassed, in my opinion—the standards of the previous games, the main theme’s truancy left many gamers befuddled.
Dear 
Celebrities are the glue that holds our society together. Need proof? Ask your friends or coworkers who their state representative is, and you’ll most likely be met with a blank stare. Ask about Brad and Angelina’s babies, however, and you’ll likely still be hearing about them until Ms. Jolie reveals she has another bun in the oven/package from Cambodia. So why not revel in our collective fascination? After all, there are some pretty fascinating celebrities out there (I’m looking at you, Gary Busey), meaning there’s tons of potential for video game material. So here are a couple of game ideas starring some of our favorite celebrities, complete with a dash of their real-life shenanigans.
On Friday morning, Konami released a mysterious photo teasing about a new installment in the Metal Gear series, and the message boards have been overrun with rumors ever since. The teaser truly reveals nothing, combining the series’ iconic exclamation marks with the universal “power on” symbol, all of which is set on a jet-black background. Seems like a standard release teaser, right? But it’s the ad’s use of neon green—a color commonly associated with the Xbox brand—that has further ignited the already-flaming rumors that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots will soon be adorning Microsoft’s console. Could this be true, or is Hideo Kojima once again messing with gamers’ minds?
It has been over 13 years since Chrono Trigger was released, and three console generations later, this game still sits proudly as one of the best RPGs, nay, video games, ever made. Yet after its initial release on the SNES, the game has only been available as a part of Square’s Final Fantasy Chronicles collection that was released in 2001. Despite featuring new animated sequences by character designer and anime god Akira Toriyama, this version was dismissed by fans due to lengthy load times, terrible resolution and sound effects engulfed in static. But Square Enix has finally given Chrono Trigger the treatment it deserves by porting it to the Nintendo DS, allowing the game to perform better than its SNES ancestor. Also, it fits in your pocket. Neat!