It was certainly a shock move and on paper it does look like Blizzard are simply withholding two singleplayer campaigns in the name of yet more spondoolies. They claim otherwise – it’s apparently so they can build a massive and elaborate solo offering out of a game that many had dismissed as being only aimed at the RTS multiplayer hardcore. The facts, though, are these: the initial release of StarCraft II will have all three races available for multiplayer, but features just one campaign, for the human Terrans, called Wings of Liberty.

A Zerg-centric foꦯllow-up will likely be called Heart of the Swarm and the Protoss-starring pack Legacy of the Void. Blizzard being Blizzard, no time frame has been given for any of this and StarCraft being StarCraft, clearly they intend fo𒁃r II to hang around, so that Protoss pack could be years off. We don’t have a Wings of Liberty release date yet, but the recent Blizzcon footage looked so polished that it can’t be far off now – and hopefully splitting the game into three means the first can arrive sooner.

“We’re aiming to push the boundaries of storytelling and character development in RTS games through the unique single-player campaign design of StarCraft II,” claim Blizzard, and honestly, that’s reason enough to treat this as a good thing. Single-player has𒈔 long been the falling-down of RTS games, as in-engine cutscenes and talking head exposition rarely helps storytelling. C&C keeps its head above water with high camp, Total War has the meta-map, but involving narrative is in short supply.

Th🦩ey’re also talking about unique locations and units for solo play, to ensure it’s not just a bunch of linked skirmishes. Each campaign should total up to 30 missions, and each pack will introduce new multiplayer content. If Blizzard are trying to re-establish the RTS as one for the lone man as well as the online warrior, there’s much to be happy about.

The multiplayer community is also happy. Along with the trilogy announcement, Blizzcon 08 brought a ton of SCII footage and live matches showing that Wings of Liberty contains a complete multiplayer game that’ll be a worthy sequel to StarCraft. It looks furiously fast, hugely tactical and not as outlandishly cartoonish as some had feared. The differences between factions are profound and the AI seems hugely improved over the first game. Inevitably some folk started screaming about imbalances and the like, but generally the Blizzcon showings won everyone over. Just as well – if Blizzard had pulled 🎃the tri-game surprise and shown disheartening footage, it’d have been flaming pitchfork time.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nov 21, 2008

The most exciting thing about Borderlands is that it’s very similar to the ‘🌄80s space western cartoon BraveStarr. In fact, apart from the notable absence of Confederate little people in smocks and sentient, anthropomorphic robot horses, Borderlands is just like it- but with more extreme vi♐olence. The second most exciting thing about it is that it’s a little bit like the ill-fated Firefly TV series as well. With that in mind, let us proceed.

The game’s setup is one of linear plot missions, often issued by the Mayor of Newhaven, a sultry femme fatale with ‘Two Face’ scarring down her face, and a raft of side-quests that see you clearing o๊ut alien caves, searching for valuable kit or dealing with troublesome bandits. You’ll be accompanied by an odd lady called Lilith who’s become a smidge infected by alien powers beyond our ken, a hunter called Mordecai who’s turned a local beast into a loyal pet, and a man with a computer in his brain called Roland- much like Daryl from oft-forgotten ’80s flick D.A.R.Y.L. only with guns (and that’s the last comparison).

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Bu☂zz Uncut: Our Top Ten Te൲en Tearaways

1) Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller's Day Off): "Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
2) Steve Stifler (Sean William Scott, American Pie): "I say, why don't you guys locate your dicks, remove the shrink wrap, and fucking *use* them!"
3) John Bender (Judd Nelson, The Breakfast Club): "Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?"
4) Dean (Corey Feldman, License To Drive): "Natalie! I was wondering, if you were driving 55 miles per hour and you collided with a runaway train, would it make ANY improvement on your face?"
5) Eli (Chris Marquette, The Girl Next Door): "God, I just wanna bang hot chicks! "
6) Lane Meyer (John Cusack, Better Off Dead): "My little brother got his arm stuck in the microwave. So my mom had to take him to the hospital. My grandma dropped acid this morning, and she freaked out. She hijacked a busload of penguins. So it's sort of a family crisis. Bye!"
7) Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder, Napoleon Dynamite): "Well, I have all your equipment in my locker. You should probably come get it cause I can't fit my nunchucks in there anymore."
8) The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, Sixteen Candles): "By night's end, I predict me and her will interface."
9) Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn, Fast Times At Ridgemont High): "Hey, bud, let's party! "
10) Duckie (Jon Cryer, Pretty In Pink): "This is a really volcanic ensemble you're wearing, it's rꦯeally marvelous!"

Quentin Tarantino decamped to Amsterdam in March 1992, using the city as a European base for his promotion duties on Reservoir Dogs. Holed up in a flat without a telephone, he hung out in hash bars by night and gorged on obscure French gangster films by day. Not surprisingly, the latter bled into the screenplay he’d been paid a cool $1 million by Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films to produce. “The plan was to write a crime anthology,” the large-chinned helmer remembers. “But when I sat down, I sa🅷w there was much more gold there. It would be neat to have three separate stories, but have the same characters floating in and out.”

Brutal, funny and with a wonderfully skewed narrative, the resulting script was indeed “neat”. As he did in Dogs, Tarantino humanised fundamentally unlikeable characters with frothy, smart-mouthed dialogue on everything from TV programmes to hamburgers. R♈earranging the chronology meant a supporting character from one tale could become the hero of the next, and a guy you’d seen riddled with bullets previously could return from the grave without so much as a scratch on him. “I read it straight through, which normally I don’t do,” remembers Samuel L Jackson. “Then I took a breath and I read it again, which I never do. Just to make sure it was true. It was the best script I’d ever read.” “When I read it, I was laughing my head off,” adds DeVito. “I thought, ‘Either this is brilliant, or I’m the sickest man you ever met in your life!’”

It wasn’t long before the word got out. Bruce Willis altered the production schedules of two other movies to secure his part as Butch, the wily slugger whose plan to rip off gang boss Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) takes what can only be described 🐟as a peculiar turn. Uma Thurman reportedly won the role of gang moll Mia Wallace on the basis of her feet – pretty crucial given the role a foot massage plays in th🏅e story – while Dogs veteran Harvey Keitel happily returned to play ‘The Wolf’, whom Tarantino had conceived with him in mind. Only Michael Madsen was immune to the director’s blandishments, turning down the role of Vincent Vega (the brother of his ear-amputating nutter in Dogs) in favour of one in Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp.

After Madsen♑ passed, Tarantino briefly considered Daniel Day-Lewis for Vega before offering him to one of his favourite actors. Not everyone was convinced. “You can get anyone🌄 in the world,” said producer Lawrence Bender. “Why do you want John Travolta?”

Bender wasn’t the only one asking the question. The faded star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever was colder than Siberia, reduced to playing second fiddle to a talking baby (voiced, coincidentally, by Willis) in the Look Who’s Talking series. “John has a lot of baggage,” admits Tarantino. “But I cast him because he’s a terrific actor, not some trash icon.” To say the role save🌌d his career is an understatement. Dominating the screen with a louche, winning perfor🌊mance that slyly nodded to his own iconography, most notably in the delicious dance-off at Jack Rabbit Slim’s that found him twisting his booty to Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’, Travolta made the biggest comeback since Lazarus and scooped an Oscar nomination for his trouble. “Quentin will always be my guardian angel,” says the actor.

Made for just $8 million, Pulp Fiction premieꦰred at Cannes in May 1994, where it snaffled the Palme d’Or out from under the nose of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s swansong Three Colours Red. (The announcement was met with outraged boos; Tarantino responded by flipping the finger at his detractors.) Raking in over $100 million in the US alone, the film went on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards; in the event it won just one, a Best Screenplay gong the 🥀director had to grudgingly share with Roger Avary. (Jackson’s reaction to losing out to Martin Landau in the Supporting Actor category – a clearly visible “Shit!” – has since entered Oscar folklore.)

No matter though: by the end of the year, P𒁏ulp had become an international phenomenon, its influence felt in music and advertising, television and literature. Its true legacy, though, is in the movies that it made possible. Would Bryan Singer, Danny Boyle and PT Anderson have careers now had Tarantino♑ not laid the groundwork for their deeply personal style of cutting-edge filmmaking?

Okay, so Pulp also spawned a less-welcome deluge of jive-talking imitators, not to mention kick-starting Quentin’s mercifully brief acting career. The proof of its success, however, lies in the fact that, 12 years after his intricately woven saga of scumbags, junkies and unlikely heroes, it’s still as fresh and staggeringly original as the day it first roared on to the big screen. The reasons are legion, from the pitch-perfect cast and the pumping soundtrack to the brilliant, intricate narrative. In the end, though, it all comes down to the dialogue: smart, funky and endlessly, magnificently quotable: “Bring out the gimp”; “Zed’s dead”; “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass”; “Cold shit to say to a motherfucker before I pop a c💫ap in his ass”; “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger...” (giving Ezekiel the kind of pop-culture notoriety usually reserved for The Beatles).

“I don’t want my films to be disposable,” said Tarantino just after his flick’s UK release. “I hope they last for hundreds of years. That’s the thing that’s great about film. I can make one and all the critics say, ‘It sucks!’ But if you’ve made a good film and nobody got it at the time it came out, history will be the ultimate test and you’ll get recognised. Five years, 10 years, 25 years from now, it will find its audience if it’s good.” No such worries for Pulp Fiction, which we confidently predict will still be finding an audience long after its creator has gone the way of Vincent Vega.

Just Cause is shaping up to be something beyond incredible. Whenwere mighty impressed when we saw it at E3 and now, after savoring another hands-on with the game, we're still smitten. And it's not just the eye-meltingly gorgeous graphics or the indulgently expansive play area that has us quivering at the knees -when you play Just Cause it's like a mushꦏroom cloud-laying fun bomb going off in your face⛄.

If you're unfamiliar with the set-up, here's a quick rundown: you play CIA agent Rico Rodriguez who is sent to a make-believe South🅰 American island, San Esperito, to destabilize and, ultimately, overthrow the government in order to neutralize their threat to world peace. It might sound like a lot of straight-faced blah, but it's really just a great excuse for running amok, blowing stuff up and goggling in awe at some truly stunning views.

Our latest brush with Just Cause showed us in wonderfully explosive detail an example of how Rodriguez will go about getting under the skin of Esperito's WMD-hoarding leaders by liberating a town. A visit to a local guerrilla on the outskirts of a settlement activates the side-mission and, once it begins, all hell breaks loose. Tooled-up guerrillas appear in force, Government troops swarm into the town and civilians dash for cover. The first skirmishes are intense, run-and-gun outb🧔ursts, but the party really gets started when a couple of missile-spitting helicopters appear overhead...