Une démo pour Conflict of Heroes Awakening the Bear!

Uniquement disponible au Japon et aux Etats-Unis, Conflict of Heroes : Awakening the Bear! n'est pas prêt à sortir chez nous. Aucune date de sortie européenne n'a été avancée mais on peut désormais essayer ce jeu de stratégie tactique.

En bon wargame, le titre de Matrix Games nous envoie au combat durant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, de 1941 à 1942 précisément. Le jeu comporte une vingtaine de missions scénarisées. Ce sont trois d'entre elles que l'on peut découvrir grâce à la démo jouable. De plus, ces trois missions peuvent être jouées en solo ou en multijoueurs selon vos envies.

Espérons que Conflict of Heroes : Awakening the Bear! sorte un jour dans nos frontières.

· Télécharger la démo jouable de Conflict of Heroes : Awakening the Bear! (1,2Go)
· Forum Conflict of Heroes : Awakening the Bear!

ZOEHD - E3 Zone of the Enders HD se montre en vidéo

Il est des jeux mythiques qu'on n'oublie pas si facilement. La série Zone of the Enders, chapeautée par Hideo Kojima lui-même, est de ceux-là.

Si vous ne connaissez pas cette série, sachez qu'elle met en scène des robots de combat géants se déplaçant à des vitesses phénoménales. Le gameplay est très nerveux et les affrontements, débordant d'effets spéciaux, sont de toute beauté. Konami pense aux plus jeunes (et à son porte-monnaie) en annonçant l'arrivée prochaine de Zone of the Enders HD qui fera office de séance de rattrapage. On découvre aujourd'hui la vidéo d'introduction du jeu qui se présente sous la forme d'un anime du plus bel effet. On peut y observer les personnages principaux au cours de leurs affrontements classieux.



Cette compilation devrait voir le jour dans les mois à venir sur PS3 et Xbox 360.

· Forum Zone of the Enders HD Collection

La prochaine Xbox 6 fois plus puissante que la 360

C'est la rumeur qui enfle depuis quelques heures sur la toile, la prochaine console de salon de Microsoft serait (notez bien le conditionnel employé) six fois plus puissante que la génération de consoles actuelles. Une information qui a de quoi nous faire réagir ! Le site Fudzilla dévoile ainsi que cette hypothétique console serait en développement depuis la fin décembre 2011, soit depuis quelques petites semaines à peine.

La console continuerait de s'appuyer sur les technologies AMD, puisque selon les sources du site, le chipset graphique serait équivalent à une Radeon HD 6670. Pas de quoi faire bondir les joueurs PC qui ne voient là qu'une carte graphique en fin de vie. Oban, le nom de code du CPU, serait lui en développement chez IBM, qui travaillerait en étroite collaboration avec Global Foundries. Évidemment, Fudzilla finit par un pronostic quant à la sortie de la console, estimant que les kits de développements n'arriveront chez les développeurs que dans le courant de l'année, pour une sortie au mieux, en 2013.

Zombie Studio sur un nouveau projet

Beaucoup sont les joueurs qui attendent de pied ferme la prochaine génération de consoles. Ils ne sont pas les seuls puisque certains éditeurs et développeurs s'enthousiasment déjà de ce que nous réserve l'avenir.

Mais certains acteurs de l'industrie semblent manquer de patience et se lancent dans des projets "next gen" dès maintenant. C'est le cas de Zombie Studio, à qui l'on doit notamment Blacklight : Retribution. Le studio annonce ainsi être au travail sur un jeu utilisant l'Unreal Engine 4, la nouvelle itération du puissant moteur graphique de Epic Games. On en sait encore très peu sur le titre en lui-même si ce n'est qu'il sera exclusif au PC et devrait voir le jour durant le second trimestre 2013. Aucun nom n'a encore été avancé mais on sait que le jeu sera un thriller psychologique.

NB : L'image ornant cette news est tirée de Blacklight : Retribution.

2012-12-21-283

64-bit Notebooks Mainstream Within 2 Years

Notebook computers with 64-bit processors could becomemainstream within one or two years, ushering the industry into a new era andheralding a new battle among leading notebook vendors. Such a scenario couldhappen as prices of 64-bit notebooks drop to as low as US$ 1,500 per unit in thefuture. Acer kicked off the battle after deciding to use Athlon 64 3000+ and3200+ processors for its Aspire 1500 notebooks. eMachines, which recently agreedto merge with Gateway, is the world’s first PC maker to use the AMD mobileAthlon 64 processors for its notebooks, the M6805 and M6807 models.

The impact of 64-bit notebooks on the market will become moresignificant when HP begins delivering its entry-level notebook models, builtusing the AMD mobile Athlon 64-bit processors, in the near future. Two otherTaiwanese PC makers, Asustek and BenQ, are both gearing up efforts topromote their own-brand notebook PCs, and are expected to roll out their first64-bit notebook PCs soon, also using AMD’s mobile Athlon chips.

2012-12-21-207

17-year-old Brittany Wenger develops artificial brain to diagnose cancer

A 17-year-old girl from Florida has spent the last several years of her life developing an ‘artificial brain’ that can diagnose cancer. Using various computer-programming languages, Brittany Wenger created a cloud-based artificial neural network that can assess tissue samples for signs of breast cancer.

Wenger wanted to design a tool for doctors to examine and diagnose cancer without making the process too invasive. The artificial neural network along with a procedure called Fine Needle Aspirate may help to ease the process of having lumps examined.

The artificial neural network has data collected from 7.6 million trials, and according to Wenger, the Java-based artificial brain is 99.1 percent sensitive to malignancy.

What’s even more amazing is that Wenger’s network is 4.97 percent more sensitive to malignancy than three other commercially available networks. Wenger is aiming to deploy her network in hospitals and extend her dataset to include other cancers.

“It will require a little bit of coding and tweaking, but it would be very easy to adapt it so it could diagnose other types of cancer and potentially other medical problems,” said the 17-year-old whiz kid.

She recently won first place in the Google Science Fair project, and for all her hard work she was awarded a $50,000 scholarship, an internship with the sponsor, and a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands.

"Ive never been to South America," she said excitedly.

We can imagine that South America wont be the only destination for this young lady in the future.

Source: MSNBC

documentary sidebar michael moore’s “capitalism a love story”

You might think that with a purported “progressive” in the Oval Office and both houses of Congress firmly under Democratic control, Michael Moore wouldn’t have too much to bitch about these days.

But you’d be wrong. And thank goodness for that. Because in the current political atmosphere when liberal and otherwise left-leaning voters might be tempted to assume that everything’s okay and that now’s the time to rest on their laurels and enjoy the fruits of their “victory,” Moore’s message is actually more relevant than ever, and his latest film “Capitalism : A Love Story” shows that he’s not about to sit back and give the Democrats a free pass. He’s doing exactly what everyone else should be doing, namely holding these people’s feet to the fire, and he hasn’t mellowed one bit. In fact, he’s chosen now to unleash his most uncompromising, well-realized, and comprehensive assault on the robber barons of the late 20th/early 21st century and their paid henchmen in the political and media classes. The result is a polemic (sorry, TFG doesn’t really consider Moore a documentarian in the strictest sense and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that) that’s energetic, focused, and mad as hell with a smile on its face. Moore is the happy warrior of the working class and “Capitalism : A Love Story” is his magnum opus, the natural culmination of everything he’s been working towards all these years crystallized into one seamlessly flowing, easily-communicable message : capitalism sucks, it has nothing to do with democracy (or even the US Constitution), we’ve all been played for suckers, our country has literally been swindled out from underneath us, and it’s well past time that we fought back.

And you know what? He’s absolutely right. I may disagree with many aspects of Moore’s proposed solutions, but in terms of identifying the problem he’s spot-on. Runaway Wall Street greed has resulted in a pronounced and rapid deterioration in the quality of life of average Americans, and the honest working man and woman have been left in the dust as the already-filthy rich have fattened their coffers way beyond the dreams of avarice.

Moore starts out his latest offering by showing us the human toll that the recent foreclosure mess has taken on people before segueing into his by-now-typical paean to life in the 1950s America he grew up in where one income was more than enough to buy a house outright, send your kids to modest private or parochial school, pay for their college when the time came, take a nice little vacation every year, and have enough left over to enjoy one’s golden years in relative comfort.

Then we go back to the modern day, and learn that pilots are only making $19,000 a year, the unions that once helped fight for our customary way of life have been decimated, whole cities lay in ruin due to factory closings, and Wall Street tycoons are laughing all the way to the bank (that they own) as their complex derivative games turn the stock market into a giant casino that the taxpayers they’ve spent the last few decades ripping off cover the losses for in the form of all these insane “bailouts” that have been rammed down our collective throat in the last year or so.

Nobody comes away from Moore’s equal-opportunity assault clean, with prominent Democrats like Chris Dodd exposed as charlatans and stooges for the predatory capitalist class every bit as much as Republicans. Coming in for special criticism is Donald Regan, secretary of the treasury and later chief of staff for Ronald Reagan (the footage where? Regan, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch,? tells his supposed boss to “speed it up” without even adding the customary “Mr. President” to the end of the command as Reagan is addressing the crowd on the Wall Street trading floor is priceless and lays bare in the most stark terms possible who’s really giving the orders in Washington these days) who slashed taxes for the wealthy while slashing regulations on the financial sector, Robert Rubin, Clinton’s former treasury secretary who deregulated the industry even further before going on to make $115,000,000 running Citibank, and Hank Paulsen, former Goldman Sachs CEO and Bush treasury secretary who arranged the current “bailout” fiasco.

Yes, there are a few honest folks in Washington who do their part in laying the scam bare and sticking up for the interests of ordinary working folks in the face of teh Wall Street juggernaut. Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, in particular, would probably be elected President if everyone saw this film. But they’re few and far between and Moore makes it clear that if we want to end this cycle of legalized theft, we need to do it ourselves.

To that end, the final third of the movie is actually a somewhat uncharacteristically optimistic portrayal of some positives that have taken place in recent months : a high-tech robotic equipment company and a bread-baking corporation that are run in truly democratic fashion where the workers all have an equal voice in how the company is run and all take home an absolutely equal share of the profits are both making money hand over fist. A group of concerned neighborhood activists in Miami banded together to prevent a family from being foreclosed on and refused to move for days, causing such a stink that the bank eventually walked away in shame. The sherriff in Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit rests, has refused to serve any more foreclosure notices. Workers at a door and window company in Chicago locked themselves into their factory when they received three days’ notice that they were all being fired without pay, and after a six-day sit-in they all received $6,000 severance packages.

Sure, along the way Moore serves as our guide as usual and gets up to his usual antics of trying to get into various corporate headquarters and being refused entrance (the scenes where he’s driving an armored car around Wall Street and backing up to places like Goldman Sachs and Citibank and asking for our money back are classic Moore — when no one budges he tries to get inside to make a citizen’s arrest of their boards of directors with equally predictable results), but these antics come pretty late in the game, and rather than making himself the star of the film as has been a frequent and entirely justified criticism of his previous work, in “Capitalism : A Love Story” Moore does a much better job of letting the ordinary folks involved in his portrayal of contemporary America and their stories serve as the real centerpiece of the film. He’s more a tour guide than he is a protagonist, and the movie is all the stronger for his decision to take more of a back seat to his subject matter.

The usual redundant criticism from the usual corners will certainly all be heard in the days to come — that Moore has gotten rich himself by criticizing the wealthy, that his films are one-sided, that he’s out to push an agenda, that he’s a shill for the Democratic Party. The last is refuted pretty easily throughout the course of the film (he’s even notably ambivalent about Obama, excited by the prospect that his historic election represents while fully cognizant of the fact that his largest comparing contributors were all Wall Street giants—he seems to take the pragmatic and understandable view that Obama may want to do the right thing, but that if we don’t demand it, he’ll opt for the politically easy route of pleasing the folks who paid for his ticket to the top instead), and the rest just plain don’t matter, pure and simple. If folks on the other side of these issues want to present their side of the story, they have the entire media apparatus and most of the government in their pockets and are free to do so. In fact, they do 24 hours a day , seven days a week, in what is laughably called “news” programming.

Simply put, Moore is not merely giving us one side of the story. He’s giving us the other side of the story, the one we know to be true from our daily lives but never see reported by the networks.? And he succeeds where so many other left-leaning journalists fail by actually employing a technique that the right uses very well : placing things not in cold logic and concrete numbers but in real, human, emotional terms. He speaks to the head only after he’s proven what the heart already knows to be true. It’s not about the facts and figures with Moore, in the end it’s about the people. This movie plays at the heartstrings, sure, but in the present political climate of town halls and tea parties, it’s refreshing to see purely emotional politics put in service to issues that speak to the better angels of our nature (and yes, I hate that term, too) rather than baseless, irrational, divisive fears.

As for the most lame-brained fall-back argument his critics employ against him, “If he hates America so much, why doesn’t he just leave it?, ” Moore delivers a poignantly simple rebuke at the end that is the film’s best line and maybe the best line you’ll hear in any movie this year : “I refuse to live in a country like this anymore. And I’m not going anywhere.” After over two hours of succinct and harrowing accounting of our present crisis laid out in terms anyone can understand and far too many people can relate to, it’s enough to make you want to pump your fist in the air. And then roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Given that’s exactly the reaction Moore wants, it’s only fair to conclude that “Capitalism : A Love Story” is an unqualified success —? his best and most accomplished work and a movie no one should miss.? We already know that, given the nature of our highly divided Union these days, Moore will essentially be preaching to the converted with this film and those who would benefit the most from hearing his message will be nowhere in the audience. Our task, then, is to convince others of the truth in what Moore is saying in our daily lives, to take his message to unfamiliar quarters and present it in a way they can relate to without feeling alienated and/or somehow threatened by “socialism” (a position Moore never actually advocates, instead stressing that democracy—real democracy—is the best antidote to capitalism). It’s a daunting task, to be sure, but it’s one we have to undertake if we want to bring about change we really can believe in.

Next time out, we’ll return to our little halloween countdown, but for now, we all need to get off our butts, get out and see this movie, and then get down to business.

you don’t want to get locked in this “trunk”

Writer-director-producer Straw Weisman is one of those guys who’s had an interesting and varied career (mostly) on the margines of ultra-low-rent independent film, and you literally never know just where he’s gonna pop up. His professional high points are probably serving as screenwriter on the ultra-mean race-hate exploitation classic?Fight For Your Life and as one of the producers on, believe it nor not, the” New Age” documentary mini-sensation?What The Bleep Do We Know? Apart from that he’s mostly known, to the extent that he’s “known” at all, for direct-to-video horror and suspense efforts like the one we’re here to take a look at today, 2009′s?Trunk.

Filmed in and around the Los Angeles area for just over a million bucks (a figure I frankly find hard to believe — it looks like it could, and probably?should, have come in for a fraction of that cost), ?this flick features exactly two characters, two sets, and one car.

grindhouse classics don’t go in the house

Let’s face it, grown men who have unresolved issues with their mothers, particularly those who still live with them, have been a staple among movie bad guys since the days of Norman Bates — and while it may have become something of a cliche, it’s one that works, because to the rest of us, there’s just something creepy about a guy in his 30s or 40s who lives with his mom.

Donnie Kohler (Dan Grimaldi), the central character in writer-director Joseph Ellison’s 1980 grindhouse psychodrama “Don’t Go In The House” has a million and one reasons to move out of his mom’s drafty old Victorian tomb of an abode, but he doesn’t. His mom used to burn him as a kid, you see, holding his hands and arms over an open gas flame on their gigantic old stove when he’d been a bad little boy. As a result, Donnie grew up not only with unresolved mommy-issues, but with a peculiar fascination with fire, as well. He’s both attracted to and frightened of it in equal measure in his adult years, as evidenced by the fact that he works in an incinerator but when a co-worker catches fire, he freezes up and is unable to assist in his rescue, forcing the other guys at the plant to save him even though Donnie is closest to the scene.

Needless to say, this act of cowardice doesn’t go over well with his co-workers, and Donnie leaves the plant humiliated. If he thought he had a bad day at work, though, things only get worse when he gets home — his mother, you see, has finally succumbed to old age and departed this mortal coil, and with her goes Donnie’s last (admittedly tepid) connection to reality. He’s on his own now, and has a lot of shit to work out as he finally “grows up” in his own uniquely twisted way.

His first actions are natural enough—he blasts his stereo at top volume and gets drunk. But this youthful (err—okay, so he’s not youthful) fling with excess quickly loses its appeal and Donnie soon combines his unhealthy fascination with fire and his unresolved issues with an overbearing mother (issues that he has now, in a classic case of psychological transference, grafted onto the entire female gender as a whole) in a decidedly toxic fashion. He starts calling in sick from work every day and nailing sheet metal to the walls, ceiling, and floor of? one of the many large and unused rooms in his house. Then, it’s time for him to get busy and bring home some “dates,” by any means necessary—but his idea of a good time with a member of the opposite sex requires him to wear an asbestos suit. That’s right, our guy Donnie decides to bring women home, chain them up, and take a flamethrower to them.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit there’s nothing terribly original about the premise here (apart from Donnie’s preferred method of dispatch for his victims), but Grimaldi really sells you on the character with his performance.? He absolutely seems like the quintessential loser who never left home, has no social skills, is terrified of the opposite sex, and blames them (all of them) for his problems. Ellison’s script is a character piece through and through, and the casting of Grimaldi in the lead was a brilliant stroke on his part. In the hands of a lesser actor, this would be standard—or even substandard—exploitation fare, but Grimaldi’s virtuoso performance alone elevates this movie several notches above where it probably belongs.

The house itself is a brilliant piece of location scouting, and succeeds in first capturing, then magnifying, the twisted mental landscape of? our psycho protagonist. The winter shooting schedule of the film in the New York/New Jersey area adds to the overall intensely moody atmosphere, as well.

All in all, this is a classic case of a film whose whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. The creepily inherent understanding of the lead character’s twisted psychological worldview on the part of both the writer/director and the star, combined with (I hesitate to use the term but it really does apply here) a perfect physical setting takes what is, on paper, nothing too terribly special and transforms it into something very special indeed. Sick, twisted, depraved, abhorrent, offensive, shocking, perverse, and sleazy, to be sure—but very special nonetheless.

Media Blasters released “Don’t Go In The House” on DVD under their “Shriek Show” label a few years back, and it features a fine feature-length commentary with Grimaldi, an on-camera interview with the actor, an alternate take of one of the film’s more brutal scenes, the original theatrical trailer, and more. It’s available alone or as part of the “Grindhouse Psychos Triple Feature” boxset, together with “Cop Killers,” an early Rick Baker special effects effort, and Roberta Findlay’s notorious “Tenement.” Great stuff!