TrueGentleman

Only if your PVP opponents can't pass the Turing Test.

If by "fixed" you mean "baby successfully thrown out with bathwater".

That's the drawback to Paragon Studios' reliance on instanced mission conent. They need to add either more mission options in the shared world or create more zone-wide events if players are ever going to break out of the single-player mentality.

That's literally the approach the devs took with Galaxy City. Even the well-received revamp of Dark Astoria is a complete break with the original version in terms of continuity. Positron has stated in the forums that it's easier for them to start from scratch when it comes to refurbishing old content, as though that justifies the schism between CoH Freedom and CoH Classic.

My apologies for the oversight - you have the claim to the first citation in this thread. (To give Hyperstrike his due, he did describe the first one to some extent to distinguish it from my criticisms about the show.) In any case, the Web naturally has a trivia-filled site devoted to the franchise. Suffice to say, the Burton-Depp production sticks out from all the other ones.

By the way, I also watched a bit of the 1991 TV remake (starring a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt). It was dreadful, and not in a good penny-dreadful way.

Thanks for the tip - I see they're currently available for streaming on iTunes and Amazon and that a DVD edition will be published to tie in with the movie's release. That and the sequel "Night of Dark Shadows" sound like they're in the Hammer Films tradition.

It's not dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but what this describes is basically a single-player game. Why the devs would want to put a dedicated single-player option for a pocket instance into a multi-player game with a shared virtual environment is a bigger question than why they'd kill off a former dev's in-game avatar.

That's always been my approach to my characters, even the ones who want to save and/or take over the world. Pretending that they're unique or superlative requires more roleplaying skill than I can muster.

As The Incredibles' Syndrome observed, "When everyone's super, no one will be."

That's exactly what I meant when I described their motivation as "generic at best." What is the source of that passion for law and order motivating Primal Earth's Statesman when that wasn't enough for Praetorian Earth's or Amerika Earth's? Why did he originally adopt a "masked adverturer" persona to defend Paragon City, instead of, say, joining the police force? Why did he continue his career as Paragon City's primary defender despite the deaths of friends and family over the years? What made him a hero?

The in-game speeches from Emperor Cole and Lord Recluse provide us with their philosophies straight from the horse's mouth. Statesman doesn't even get the proverbial "famous last words" when he dies.

That statement reads like nothing but a kiss-off to Jack Emmert and Cryptic. That Paragon Studios is continuing to use Statesman's image as part of their branding and marketing efforts only means that the trademark is staying with them, too. Emmert's legacy is effectively in checkmate: His creation is dead in game, but it's actively in use outside, so the big blue cypher has no chance of either new adventures or reverting to his creator.

The only thing required to complete this scenario is motive, which Cryptic plausibly supplied when they decided to digitize the "goatee universe" setting from the pen-and-paper Champions RPG at about the same time as CoH's Going Rogue.

Without getting a full explanation or formal admission from Posi, we can't declare it "IS" - but it certainly can be interpreted that way.

The problem with the WWD arc goes beyond its convoluted plotting and the extra killing: The devs haven't given us sufficient cause for what Statesman and Sister Psyche died for any more than we had sufficient background on what they stood for. How can we mourn their heroic deaths if we don't really know why they were heroes in the first place? While Emperor Cole is motivated by a twisted interpretation of upholding the greater good for society's sake and Lord Recluse wants to rule a super-powered Darwinian world, the motivations of the likes of Statesman and Sister Psyche are generic at best.

Killing them off like this seems like the devs' admission that since they didn't know what to do with them in the game, removing them entirely was the most dramatic option they could come up with.

And if Stephen Moffat continues to disrupt Yates's buzz, then he'll just have to arrange a sit-down meeting with him:
Meanwhile, Moffat's declared he's not personally interested in producing even spin-offs for Doctor Who, so his likely reaction to Yates's statements isn't looking good.

While I was attracted to the original series's serial format for a gothic story, the incredibly slow pace rather than the cheap production values proved the biggest obstacle. I wonder if a trufan has put together a supercut that compresses the drama. Jonathan Frid's performance stood out among the cast's, but he hardly ever revealed his fangs.

While the series definitely got weird later (introducing time travel, for instance), I don't believe that it descended into the playful self-consciousness of camp, a la Adam West's Batman.

If Burton and Depp had decided to do a campy takeoff of gothic soap operas but came up with their own title and their own names for the characters, this movie would feel like more of a labor of love (like Beetlejuice) than a cynical cash-in on a half-remembered TV show. Unfortunately, the marketing boost it gets from calling itself "Dark Shadows" - look at the way we're discussing it here - is too much of an opportunity for free advertising to pass up.

Given the amount of time and effort spent promoting the Super Packs vs. that for the Loyalty Program, you can probably guess which is more important to Paragon Studios in the CoH Freedom era.

Despite the trend of these comedic remakes faring badly at the box office, the success of the newly released 21 Jump Street will probably guarantee more of the same for the time being. The ratio of blockbusters to bombs isn't in their favor, but that doesn't affect the Hollywood mentality.

As for this particular remake, it's only morbid (so to speak) curiosity that has me paying any attention. Its winking camp humor - so utterly at odds with the source material's gothic tone - will probably put off most of the original fans, but that will hardly matter if the film attracts enough of an audience between the devotees of Burton and Depp and the moviegoers who have enough of a vague memory of the show to count as "presold".

When it comes to Burton's "interpretations", in the past twenty years he's directed only one feature film that wasn't based in some way on existing material. Originality is often overvalued in creative works, but come on.

The problem is not how much money the current ones are making - Land of the Lost, Fat Albert, and Bewitched, for example, were all big bombs - but that at one time, the formula paid off massively. Hollywood execs, like slot-machine addicts, keep on gambling because they're hoping their chance at the box office will be the next one to hit the jackpot.

Those were straight-up parodies rather than out-and-out comic remakes. Oddly enough, they're probably truer in spirit than a lot of these cynical reboots.

Back in 1995, The Brady Bunch earned over $46M at the box office (and then another $21M in rentals when it came out on VHS/DVD). That kind of return on a movie with no real expectations, no real stars (Shelly "Diane" Long? Gary "Bill Lumbergh" Cole?), and no real budget (maybe $12M) surprised everyone in Hollywood. Naturally, its "ironic"-nostalgic fish-out-of-water formula was applied indescriminately to any presold property since that's a lot easier than seriously updating the original material's spirit. (The early 90s had already seen successful movie remakes of B-TV shows such as The Fugitive and The Beverly Hillbillies, but whatever their level of quality, these were comparatively faithful updates.) Since then, we've had to endure the likes of Starsky & Hutch, Fat Albert, and Land of the Lost on the big screen and to look forward to the upcoming Gillgan's Island and The Lone Ranger.

Either that, or this is Tim Burton's way of getting back at Barry Sonnenfeld's Addams Family movies for ripping off Beetlejuice's "look and feel".

Now that's some sensible tie-in marketing, Paragon. Thank you also for at last explicitly noting when sales end (since you have customers in numerous time zones).

Although I'm not in the market for a new Mastermind power, I'll definitely pick up the extra costume pack while it's on sale.

How hilarious is it that Comic Book Resources felt obliged to tone down Bay's all-caps shouting: "They care VERY MUCH about making this film for the fans." and "HE'S NOT GOING TO LET YOU DOWN." But the best part is that Bay shouts in all caps when he signs off as "MICHAEL". Perhaps he thinks that if he keeps hitting the caps lock key, nobody will notice that he doesn't possess a very well-tuned sense of humor.

That doesn't bode well for a remake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which began, after all, as a straight-faced mashed-up parody of trends in comics at the time—the adolescents, the mutants, the martial artists, and the funny animals all in one package.

If the contemporary "anti-big-government" movement is really about class ressentiment, then Hunger Games probably fits. One could also argue that it's "anti-1%", though, given the luxurious and ostentatious lifestyles of the capitol's citizens. Either way, it's doing what good science fiction should: providing futuristic metaphors for present-day issues without the baggage.

Nor do I, although the bit about being inspired by the legend of the minotaur is less convincing since there are so many other contemporary variations on this theme.

I completely forgot about The Long Walk, which has many of the same themes, although the competitive aspect isn't direct. The Running Man is less original, but it did jog my memory about the film Series 7: The Contenders, a satire of reality TV along the lines of The Most Dangerous Game.

You've touched on arguably the most significant difference between the two: In The Hunger Games, the contest is a nationally televised spectacle in full-on bread-and-circuses mode (there's a reason the future state is called Panem), while in Battle Royale, the students are completely isolated. Their different political themes follow from these, as Battle Royale also taps into youthful violence (c.f. A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies), whereas, from what I understand, The Hunger Games is more like Brave New World meets The Most Dangerous Game or Rollerball.

Sorry, no special pleading. Colin Baker's Sixth notwithstanding*, Peri dragged down Peter Davison's Fifth, who had already had to put up with a series of companions who were either bland at best or, more often, irritating. Much of the tension in Davison's final story drew from how the Doctor was risking his own life to save that of this extremely annoying pseudo-American.

In any case, I am too much the gentleman to speculate on a competition between Jenna-Louise Coleman and Nicola Bryant (if you know what I mean, and I think you do).

* While his tenure was the nadir of the classic series, he's been gracious enough since then that I wonder how he'd have fared with adequate scripts, costumes, and companions.

Are you suggesting Tegan had anything in common with Peri? I mean, besides an inexhaustable capacity of abrasive whingeing?

It would be a huge mistake to rank the Doctor's companions in terms of mere eye candy rather than the rapport between the characters, not to mention the actors. Sarah Jane Smith is remembered so fondly not simply because she's an "English rose" but more due to her character's pluckiness and Elizabeth Sladen's ability as an actress to convey both bravery and fear. Her tenure with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker is a significant part of why their Doctors rank among the top of the show's. Conversely, Bonnie "Mel" Langford was the nail in the coffin of Colin Baker's Doctor and got Sylvester McCoy's off to a very rocky start - which didn't recover until Ace came along.

I'm reasonably confident that Moffat is aware of this and that he has created an interesting character for the new companion and cast a capable actress to play her. The crazy thing is that with the new series's international popularity, Jenna-Louise Coleman's casting is mainstream news for the likes of the New York Times and the Hollywood Reporter.