E3 2012: Splinter Cell Blacklist - Fearing Sam Fisher

Sam Fisher is no longer hiding in the shadows. He’s taking the fight to the enemies of the United States in plain daylight, and he’ll do it by any means necessary. Whether through more traditional, conventional stealth tactics, or by blowing everything up in sight, the notion of variety and choice dominates the landscape of Splinter Cell Blacklist. That’s a good thing considering the formidable task at hand.

Blacklist takes place six months after 2008‘s Splinter Cell Conviction. Rogue nations have pooled their resources to pose an ultimatum to the United States: withdraw all forces from deployment or suffer the consequences. This threat is backed by the blacklist, a file that contains classified intel on high profile targets and assets of the U.S. Naturally, to prevent these consequences and end the stalemate, the government calls in Sam Fisher, who demands vast and mobile resources be placed at his disposal. He forms a new 4th Echelon unit, one with a plane as its headquarters. He has access to the SMI - a Strategic Mission Interface - an operating system that helps Sam analyze and determine the best course of action. This is clearly not the deeply personal story of Conviction. This is one man waging a nation’s war. The scary part? He’s good enough to do it.

Ubisoft wants to extend that sense of power and resourcefulness to the player. Sam Fisher needs to seem like an unstoppable force, a threat so significant that it’s easy to see why the President of the United States would call on him - and him alone. To that end, Blacklist features a lot of returning ideas as well as some new ones. The result is a hybrid of stealth and high stakes action. No doubt some franchise purists who have followed the series for a decade will find this evolution jarring, but the good news here is that the old approaches aren’t going anywhere. They’re now just supplemented by alternatives - alternatives that allow you to engage in large scale firefights, call in air support and generally unleash hell upon guys that could easy be killed in the darkness with a knife.

At the heart of Blacklist is the notion of fluid traversal, which also lends itself to combat and the implementation of being able to kill while in motion. Though reasonably self-explanatory, these movement and combat options can change how certain scenarios are approached. Simply holding down one button will now allow players to sprint through environments, leaping over obstacles and climbing over objects as necessary. Taking out enemies during that dash is as easy as tapping a button. The goal here is to remove the challenges that can come with complicated, frustrating controls. The emphasis and focus should be on dealing with the objective - and opposition to that objective.

Sam will take the fight to his enemies.

That’s not to say that the game’s designers always call for a faster pace. Sam can grab from cover, hang from ledges and move bodies. He has his snake cam, sticky shockers and knife. He'll torture men, digging his knife into their shoulder, and players will control the movement of the blade. In other words, he will do whatever the hell he wants. Whatever it takes. Blacklist takes the idea of “aggressive stealth” of Conviction, but then allows players to completely drop all pretenses and shoot it out, machine guns blazing, even behind cover if they’re completely outnumbered. Classic Splinter Cell ideas are being mixed with new ones, all of it guided by the larger sense of flexibility and strategy. Better yet, the game affords the player the option of finding a middle ground between stealth and action. Sam might be torturing a man one minute and then sprinting to cover as a half dozen men fire upon him the next. In one scenario he’s calling in air support from above, and later on he’s using his snake cam to mark and execute his enemies.

The evolution of Splinter Cell applies to its cooperative and adversarial modes as well. Longtime fans will be pleased to hear that the multiplayer mode Spies vs. Mercenaries, missing from Conviction, will return. Both it and the larger co-op concept are more integrated into the single player experience, both through the game’s ‘economy system’ and the actual missions themselves. Ubisoft wouldn’t get into details, but it appears as though mission parameters can actually be affected by the completion of objectives in other modes.

Expect big action sequences - if you look for them.

Blacklist is still a ways from completion. Due out in Spring 2013 (along with every other game known to man), the team at Ubisoft Toronto has much more to develop, and we have much more to learn. It is clear, however, that this game is building upon Conviction, emphasizing its more aggressive nature while bringing back old tools to allow players stealthier options. In previous Splinter Cell games we were playing as Sam Fisher. Now we’re finally starting to feel like we are him.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/04/e3-2012-splinter-cell-blacklist-fearing-sam-fisher

Depp's Night Stalker Stakes Out a Writer

His latest big screen adaptation of a cult classic horror TV series isn't exactly doing great business at the box office, but that apparently isn't deterring Dark Shadows star Johnny Depp from moving ahead with his plans to produce and star in a feature film version of The Night Stalker.

The Hollywood Reporter says D.V. DeVincentis (High Fidelity, Gross Pointe Blank) has been hired to script The Night Stalker based, like Dark Shadows, on the 1970s Dan Curtis TV series.

Scott Pilgrim helmer Edgar Wright will direct The Night Stalker for Disney.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/19/depps-night-stalker-stakes-out-a-writer

Dark Shadows Review

Director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp reunite for their eighth collaboration in this feature film adaptation of Dark Shadows, the 1966-71 cult classic supernatural soap opera they loved as kids.

In this version, scripted by John August and Seth Grahame-Smith, Depp portrays Barnabas Collins, the heir to a prosperous fishing family who leave England to settle in the New World. In 1752, Barnabas is cursed by the witch Angelique (Eva Green) after breaking her heart and falling for his one true love, Josette (Bella Heathcote). Angelique's spell leads to Josette's death and turns Barnabas into a vampire. She chains Barnabas inside a coffin and buries him "alive" for the next two centuries.





After being unintentionally released from his grave, Barnabas finds himself in the strange, perplexing world of 1972. He returns to his family estate, Collinwood, where he passes himself off to his descendants -- matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), her troubled children Susan and David (Chloe Grace Moretz and Gulliver McGrath), Elizabeth's shady brother Roger Collins (Jonny Lee Miller), as well as the family's live-in psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter) and caretaker Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley) -- as a distant relative from England back to help the struggling dynasty return to prosperity and prominence. His true nature will remain a secret to most of them ... for now.

But the Collins aren't the only ones he finds in the namesake town of Collinsport. Barnabas meets Victoria Winters (Heathcote), David Collins' new governess and the spitting image of his beloved Josette. He also discovers that Angelique is still very much alive and well, having thrived in the ensuing centuries to become a successful businesswoman and the Collins' biggest rival. Her lusty obsession for Barnabas remains, and she's grown powerful enough to destroy him and the newfound family he's vowed to help.

- Warner Bros.

The characters are played by one of Burton's best ensemble casts yet, but only Depp's Barnabas has anything remotely resembling an arc or development. Pfeiffer is commanding as the Collins' matriarch, but we never get to see her do much more than sit at the head of the dining table or at her desk. Moretz's Susan is the character most radically altered from her small screen counterpart as she's about a decade younger and more akin to Winona Ryder's moody teen in Beetlejuice than the young woman from previous incarnations of the show.

There's an element to Susan that's introduced late in the story, that comes out of left field and is completely arbitrary. Why even introduce it if it's not going to truly be explored? McGrath is a very likable child actor whose arc here as David is, like Susan's, underexplored and underwhelming in the end. For a kid whose problems have brought not one, but two different people (Dr. Hoffman and Victoria) to Collinwood to care for him, there's practically no time spent showing them doing anything with or for him. It's all just exposition to nowhere

Haley has a dopey appeal as the family's oft-drunk handyman and Barnabas' mind-controlled servant, while Miller's self-centered Roger is all upper crust smugness. But, outside of Barnabas, the women are the true protagonists of Dark Shadows and besides Pfeiffer the real standouts among them are Carter as the bitter, besotted shrink and Green as the obsessed enchantress whose spurned love for Barnabas and disdain for the Collins knows no bounds. Green and Carter clearly enjoy sinking their teeth into their roles and have fun with them even when the script seems to forget about them. The most inexplicably neglected character is Heathcote's Victoria, who begins the movie as the protagonist and eyes of the audience only to almost literally disappear from the narrative once Barnabas takes center stage. Their romantic subplot is completely shoe-horned in and woefully undeveloped.

 But this movie is, as expected, The Johnny Depp Show where everyone else is just a guest star. Both Depp and Burton show a degree of restraint here (well, for them at least), finding the pathos in Barnabas' plight even as they have fun with the fish out of water and anachronistic elements. Yes, there are times when Depp seems like Captain Jack Vampire, but there's more vigor and palpable interest from him in this character than there's been in any of his performances in the Pirates sequels. Depp keeps you interested in Barnabas even after it's become clear the movie is in a rush to nowhere during its homestretch.

Like the cult classic TV series it's based on, Tim Burton's Dark Shadows is oddly charming despite being a mess that never reaches its full potential. There are strange characters galore, almost none of whom ever develop into anything more than an image of an interesting character. Commercially, one can't help but suspect that Dark Shadows may prove a disappointment despite the usually powerhouse coupling of Depp and Burton. The film's not horrific enough to be scary, funny enough to truly be recommended as a comedy, and about as dark and Gothic as a Hot Topic t-shirt. And yet, like the original TV show, there's just something about Dark Shadows that keeps you watching to see how things play out. It's just all so damn … peculiar.


Source : http://movies.ign.com/articles/122/1223999p1.html