The movie hits cinemas on 8 June.
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Full trailer for Ridley Scott's PROMETHEUS
A new full-length trailer has been unveiled for Ridley Scott's Alien quasi-prequel Prometheus:
The movie hits cinemas on 8 June.
The movie hits cinemas on 8 June.
Saturday, 17 March 2012
New cover art: Steven Erikson's FORGE OF DARKNESS
The cover art and blurb for Steven Erikson's The Forge of Darkness has been released:
The novel, the first in The Kharkanas Trilogy, will be released in August in the UK and in September in the USA.
Enter the New York Times bestselling Malazan universe... at a time that sets the stage for all the tales already told.
Steven Erikson entered the pantheon of great fantasy writers with his debut Gardens of the Moon. Now Erikson returns with a trilogy that takes place before the events of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Forge of Darkness takes readers to Kurald Galain, the warren of Darkness, and tells an epic tale of a realm whose fate plays a crucial role in the fall of the Malazan Empire.
It’s a conflicted time in Kurald Galain, the warren of Darkness, where Mother Dark reigns. But this ancient land was once home to many a power… and even death is not quite eternal. The commoners’ great hero, Vatha Urusander, longs for ascendency and Mother Dark’s hand in marriage, but she has taken another Consort, Lord Draconus, from the faraway Dracon Hold. The idea of this union sends fissures throughout the realm, and as the rumors of civil war burn through the masses, an ancient power emerges from the long dead seas. Caught in the middle of it all are the Sons of Darkness, Anomander, Adarist, and Silchas Ruin of the Purake Hold.
Steven Erikson brings to life this ancient and important tale set in the world he introduced in the Malazan Book of the Fallen in a way that should appeal to fans of George R. R. Martin.
Mass Effect 3
The Galaxy has been plunged into war. The Reapers, a race of intelligent machines who cleanse the Milky Way of advanced, organic life every 50,000 years or so, have returned. In their opening salvo they have occupied Earth and attacked dozens of other worlds, including launching a major assault on the turian homeworld. Commander Shepard, who has been warning the various races about the Reapers for the last three years, manages to escape from Earth on his ship, the Normandy, and sets about unifying the Galaxy against the Reapers. But this is easier said than done.
Mass Effect 3 concludes BioWare's epic trilogy which began five years ago. Long-term players will have guided their version of Commander Shepard (whose gender and abilities can be adjusted by the player) through three games totalling 65-80 hours (depending on what side-missions you played) to reach the grand finale of the story. As a result Mass Effect 3 has more weight than most computer games. Though assembled from some fairly generic ingredients, the Mass Effect universe has become immensely popular, making it the most successful new space opera franchise to appear in any medium since Farscape and the Stargate TV shows in the late 1990s.
The game has a similar structure to the first two. You spend most of it on the Normandy with a choice of where to go next. There's a number of main storyline (or 'priority') missions to complete before the final showdown with the Reapers on Earth, but there's also a large number of side-missions to undertake. The mineral-scanning mechanic from the second game has been replaced by a new system where you can scan planets and star systems to search for items of interest and then recover them. Whilst this risks detection by the Reapers, the items you discover can be of immense cumulative value in the war.
The game tracks your readiness for the final battle with a new war room installed on the Normandy. From this console you can see how the allies you have made in the main and side-missions are faring against the Reapers, as well as the tangible impact of the items recovered from planets on the war effort. The game measures these factors with a score. How high the score is when you launch the final assault on Earth determines how successful you are and the details of the ending that you get.
Mass Effect 3 calls upon the full resources of the storylines and characters established in the first two games (and even some of the spin-off novels) to deliver an immense series of pay-offs. The war between the quarian and the geth is resolved and an opportunity arises to cure the krogans of the genophage disease to win their loyalty (though this might come at losing the support of other races who fought the krogan in prior wars). Whilst Mass Effect 3 has a relatively small pool of characters to take on missions compared to the second game, just about every single major character (and many minor ones) from the series reappears. Some of them don't make it to the end (this is war, after all) and others only have fleeting appearances, but the game does an impressive job in wrapping up almost all of the plot points left dangling from earlier in the series.
Something that Mass Effect 3 does well - and easily its greatest achievement - is giving real value and depth to the relationships established over the course of the trilogy. One of the best (and funniest) scenes in the whole trilogy comes when Garrus and Shepard just decide to hang out on a building rooftop and talk the breeze with some drinks to hand. There's a whole bunch of ongoing subplots that are carried out entirely through dialogue, such as Shepard trying to convince a nervous new comm officer that her skills are of worth in the war or EDI attempting to understand human behaviour better. These elements, based on role-playing and characterisation, are handled well by the game. They're not quite as well-written as previously (most of the franchise's better writers, including Drew Karpyshyn who is credited with the best work, bailed before Mass Effect 3, some of them to work on The Old Republic), but still effective. This extends to tons of 'slice of life' conversations going on at the Citadel as refugees search for family members and security officers struggle with the influx of people, adding detail and depth to the struggle.
An unfortunate problem is that the game's journal is a rather sorry thing compared to the previous games. It doesn't track your mission progress, which given the sheer number of missions you can have going on becomes rather tiresome. The game also has a number of quest-related glitches that leaves several missions uncompletable after a certain point in the game, but the journal and map both insist they can be finished, resulting in you wandering around confused. It's a tribute to the game's quality that, whilst irritating, these problems only had a minor impact on the enjoyability of the game.
Combat, the meat of the game, is mostly unchanged from Mass Effect 2. The biggest change - and problem - is the addition of a combat roll move. In theory this allows you to roll from cover to cover, but it is pretty much totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, BioWare chose to make the 'roll' button the same as 'cover' and 'use', with the result that the game often gets confused about what you are trying to do and has you rolling into the enemy's crossfire when you're actually trying to duck behind one of the many chest-high walls in the game. If you've imported a character from the previous games, you will retain your level which is nice, but means you're so powerful that combat in the game is trivially easy. There's a couple of enemies (most notably the Reaper Banshee) that require more intelligence to deal with, but overall combat is so easy as to be almost perfunctory in the game. This isn't helped by the fact that you have dozens of weapons to choose from, but the original starting weapons are actually all you need to complete the games (with suitable upgrades).
The game unfolds with a crisp pace, complete with an effective, doom-laden atmosphere (helped by Clint Mansell's excellent soundtrack). The scale of events is epic with a capital EPIC, and there are multiple individual showdowns, confrontations and battles huge enough to be end-of-game bossfights in other titles. The final scenes on Tuchanka (the krogan homeworld) are brilliant, as is the battle to reclaim Rannoch (the quarian/geth planet). The game also knows when to reward the player and when to punch them in the gut; the loss of several planets (including one major one) to the Reapers with attending death tolls in the billions is dramatically powerful and has major repercussions throughout the game.
Events culminate in a massive assault on Earth...which is where things fall apart. The Reapers rather conveniently make a series of embarrassing tactical errors that give you a shot at victory. But during the final confrontation, the game suddenly makes a hard left turn into unexpected weirdness. Remember how the Neo/Architect conversation in The Matrix Reloaded sucked and was universally loathed? BioWare seem to have decided that is a good model on how to end a story. Whilst it undercuts expectations not to have a massive bossfight at the end, that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. The other problem is that the revelations in this conversation make no sense, and go against what you've just spent three games and 60+ hours learning and experiencing. Thematically, the Mass Effect games are about free choice, cooperation and not letting old arguments derail future chances at peace. The ending throws that out the window and offers you a fairly boring choice of which of three buttons to press (and no matter which one you press, there is immense death and destruction waiting). The games have had their hard knocks, but the ending is downright miserable to the point of making the entire trilogy feel pointless, and totally out of keeping with the tone of the series to date.
This has led to the suggestion that the ending of the game is not real and in fact a hallucination. That's entirely possible (the supporting evidence is rather impressive) but, if so, it shows that BioWare has not learned from the mistakes of the creators of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. We shouldn't have to parse and fanwank the ending. This isn't Twin Peaks, this is an epic space war story, and epic space war stories need endings. Return of the Jedi, for all its faults, had a decent ending. Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine had decent endings (wobbling only when they brought in mystical events and implausible backstory revelations, but they were relatively minor). BioWare claim they wanted a bittersweet ending, but we've had tons of bittersweet moments in the game up to that point with billions dying, planets burning and major characters biting the dust. Ending the game in a further bloodbath of millions of innocent civilians followed by a nonsensical conversation, a really weird ending cinematic and then a cheesy post-credits sequence straight out of The Big Book Of Overused Cliches That Should Never Be Used Again, Ever is an idiotic move, a failure of the writers, the game designers and the Q&A testers who should have told their bosses this would never fly (although to be fair they may have done, and been ignored).
The fact that the ending to Mass Effect 3 (****, with the ending costing the game a full star) sucks should not overshadow the achievements of the rest of the game. BioWare has pushed the ability of computer games to showcase real emotional relationships rather than just explosions and bullets further than before and some of their decisions were surprisingly brave. But ultimately the ending is cheap, nasty and nonsensical and cannot help but put what has come before in a less flattering light. The game is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, Playstation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, Playstation 3).
Mass Effect 3 concludes BioWare's epic trilogy which began five years ago. Long-term players will have guided their version of Commander Shepard (whose gender and abilities can be adjusted by the player) through three games totalling 65-80 hours (depending on what side-missions you played) to reach the grand finale of the story. As a result Mass Effect 3 has more weight than most computer games. Though assembled from some fairly generic ingredients, the Mass Effect universe has become immensely popular, making it the most successful new space opera franchise to appear in any medium since Farscape and the Stargate TV shows in the late 1990s.
The game has a similar structure to the first two. You spend most of it on the Normandy with a choice of where to go next. There's a number of main storyline (or 'priority') missions to complete before the final showdown with the Reapers on Earth, but there's also a large number of side-missions to undertake. The mineral-scanning mechanic from the second game has been replaced by a new system where you can scan planets and star systems to search for items of interest and then recover them. Whilst this risks detection by the Reapers, the items you discover can be of immense cumulative value in the war.
The game tracks your readiness for the final battle with a new war room installed on the Normandy. From this console you can see how the allies you have made in the main and side-missions are faring against the Reapers, as well as the tangible impact of the items recovered from planets on the war effort. The game measures these factors with a score. How high the score is when you launch the final assault on Earth determines how successful you are and the details of the ending that you get.
Mass Effect 3 calls upon the full resources of the storylines and characters established in the first two games (and even some of the spin-off novels) to deliver an immense series of pay-offs. The war between the quarian and the geth is resolved and an opportunity arises to cure the krogans of the genophage disease to win their loyalty (though this might come at losing the support of other races who fought the krogan in prior wars). Whilst Mass Effect 3 has a relatively small pool of characters to take on missions compared to the second game, just about every single major character (and many minor ones) from the series reappears. Some of them don't make it to the end (this is war, after all) and others only have fleeting appearances, but the game does an impressive job in wrapping up almost all of the plot points left dangling from earlier in the series.
Something that Mass Effect 3 does well - and easily its greatest achievement - is giving real value and depth to the relationships established over the course of the trilogy. One of the best (and funniest) scenes in the whole trilogy comes when Garrus and Shepard just decide to hang out on a building rooftop and talk the breeze with some drinks to hand. There's a whole bunch of ongoing subplots that are carried out entirely through dialogue, such as Shepard trying to convince a nervous new comm officer that her skills are of worth in the war or EDI attempting to understand human behaviour better. These elements, based on role-playing and characterisation, are handled well by the game. They're not quite as well-written as previously (most of the franchise's better writers, including Drew Karpyshyn who is credited with the best work, bailed before Mass Effect 3, some of them to work on The Old Republic), but still effective. This extends to tons of 'slice of life' conversations going on at the Citadel as refugees search for family members and security officers struggle with the influx of people, adding detail and depth to the struggle.
An unfortunate problem is that the game's journal is a rather sorry thing compared to the previous games. It doesn't track your mission progress, which given the sheer number of missions you can have going on becomes rather tiresome. The game also has a number of quest-related glitches that leaves several missions uncompletable after a certain point in the game, but the journal and map both insist they can be finished, resulting in you wandering around confused. It's a tribute to the game's quality that, whilst irritating, these problems only had a minor impact on the enjoyability of the game.
Combat, the meat of the game, is mostly unchanged from Mass Effect 2. The biggest change - and problem - is the addition of a combat roll move. In theory this allows you to roll from cover to cover, but it is pretty much totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, BioWare chose to make the 'roll' button the same as 'cover' and 'use', with the result that the game often gets confused about what you are trying to do and has you rolling into the enemy's crossfire when you're actually trying to duck behind one of the many chest-high walls in the game. If you've imported a character from the previous games, you will retain your level which is nice, but means you're so powerful that combat in the game is trivially easy. There's a couple of enemies (most notably the Reaper Banshee) that require more intelligence to deal with, but overall combat is so easy as to be almost perfunctory in the game. This isn't helped by the fact that you have dozens of weapons to choose from, but the original starting weapons are actually all you need to complete the games (with suitable upgrades).
The game unfolds with a crisp pace, complete with an effective, doom-laden atmosphere (helped by Clint Mansell's excellent soundtrack). The scale of events is epic with a capital EPIC, and there are multiple individual showdowns, confrontations and battles huge enough to be end-of-game bossfights in other titles. The final scenes on Tuchanka (the krogan homeworld) are brilliant, as is the battle to reclaim Rannoch (the quarian/geth planet). The game also knows when to reward the player and when to punch them in the gut; the loss of several planets (including one major one) to the Reapers with attending death tolls in the billions is dramatically powerful and has major repercussions throughout the game.
Events culminate in a massive assault on Earth...which is where things fall apart. The Reapers rather conveniently make a series of embarrassing tactical errors that give you a shot at victory. But during the final confrontation, the game suddenly makes a hard left turn into unexpected weirdness. Remember how the Neo/Architect conversation in The Matrix Reloaded sucked and was universally loathed? BioWare seem to have decided that is a good model on how to end a story. Whilst it undercuts expectations not to have a massive bossfight at the end, that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. The other problem is that the revelations in this conversation make no sense, and go against what you've just spent three games and 60+ hours learning and experiencing. Thematically, the Mass Effect games are about free choice, cooperation and not letting old arguments derail future chances at peace. The ending throws that out the window and offers you a fairly boring choice of which of three buttons to press (and no matter which one you press, there is immense death and destruction waiting). The games have had their hard knocks, but the ending is downright miserable to the point of making the entire trilogy feel pointless, and totally out of keeping with the tone of the series to date.
This has led to the suggestion that the ending of the game is not real and in fact a hallucination. That's entirely possible (the supporting evidence is rather impressive) but, if so, it shows that BioWare has not learned from the mistakes of the creators of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. We shouldn't have to parse and fanwank the ending. This isn't Twin Peaks, this is an epic space war story, and epic space war stories need endings. Return of the Jedi, for all its faults, had a decent ending. Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine had decent endings (wobbling only when they brought in mystical events and implausible backstory revelations, but they were relatively minor). BioWare claim they wanted a bittersweet ending, but we've had tons of bittersweet moments in the game up to that point with billions dying, planets burning and major characters biting the dust. Ending the game in a further bloodbath of millions of innocent civilians followed by a nonsensical conversation, a really weird ending cinematic and then a cheesy post-credits sequence straight out of The Big Book Of Overused Cliches That Should Never Be Used Again, Ever is an idiotic move, a failure of the writers, the game designers and the Q&A testers who should have told their bosses this would never fly (although to be fair they may have done, and been ignored).
The fact that the ending to Mass Effect 3 (****, with the ending costing the game a full star) sucks should not overshadow the achievements of the rest of the game. BioWare has pushed the ability of computer games to showcase real emotional relationships rather than just explosions and bullets further than before and some of their decisions were surprisingly brave. But ultimately the ending is cheap, nasty and nonsensical and cannot help but put what has come before in a less flattering light. The game is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, Playstation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, Playstation 3).
Friday, 16 March 2012
ANACHRONOX re-released on Good Old Games
Anachronox, one of the greatest, funniest and flat-out most bonkers computer RPGs of all time, has finally been made available on Good Old Games. For $6 you can set out to save the universe with a party comprising a washed-out Mexican superhero, a grumpy old archaeologist with health issues and a miniaturised planet. Worth playing for the showdown with the evil supervillain Rictus (catchphrase: "I SHALL KILL YOU...WITH DEATH!") and the fact your mouse pointer exists in-game as a character and occasionally talks to the party-members.
More than worth playing today (if you can get over the somewhat clunky graphics), especially at such a ridiculously low price and considering the game has been optimised to work with modern PCs.
More than worth playing today (if you can get over the somewhat clunky graphics), especially at such a ridiculously low price and considering the game has been optimised to work with modern PCs.
GAME OF THRONES sets DVD sales records for HBO
HBO have revealed that Game of Thrones is the fastest-selling DVD or Blu-Ray release in the company's history. Season 1 of the show outsold all of their prior box sets in its first seven days on sale. When you realise that means it has outsold The Sopranos, The Wire, True Blood, Band of Brothers or The Pacific, that is a huge and impressive achievement. The series also set new records for HBO sales on iTunes.
Notably, the box set shifted somewhat more copies (57% in the USA) on Blu-Ray than on DVD.
Excellent news, especially as we know that DVD sales were going to be a key factor in future decisions to renew the series.
Notably, the box set shifted somewhat more copies (57% in the USA) on Blu-Ray than on DVD.
Excellent news, especially as we know that DVD sales were going to be a key factor in future decisions to renew the series.
Thursday, 15 March 2012
Details on the resurrection of BALDUR'S GATE
The first information about the rebirth of the Baldur's Gate franchise has been released. As anticipated, the project is an 'Enhanced Edition' of the existing BioWare games (Baldur's Gate, Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal) which will launch later in the summer. The first release will be Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, which will include the original game and its expansion with enhanced and improved artwork, native high-resolution support and reworked music and voice-overs. There will also be some 'new content' provided by the original writers and creators of the game.
Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, which will include the Throne of Bhaal expansion, will be released at a later date. This is generous, since whilst Tales of the Sword Coast was a fairly minor expansion to the original game (with a couple of dungeons and a few new monsters and magic items), Throne of Bhaal was massive in size, easily bigger than many full games. Including it with the already-gigantic Baldur's Gate II is an impressive move.
The Enhanced Edition will retain the original isometric, 2D viewpoint, but with a better interface and higher-res graphics. The game will also retain the Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition ruleset (understandably, as moving to a different edition would necessitate rewriting the entire game from scratch). Whilst there will be new content and new characters (unknown if there will be new party characters), the game will have the same music and sound effects as the original. What is interesting is that the codebase for the entire remake comes from the latest release of Throne of Bhaal, meaning that all the interface improvements from the later games (better inventory, more class/kit combos, possibly a much higher level limit) will be available in the original Baldur's Gate (as quite a few mods enable at the moment). The new remake will also be compatible with many existing mods and original savegames.
Ex-BioWare staff are involved in the project, which is coming from Overhaul and Beamdog, under licence from Atari and the supervision of Wizards of the Coast. If the project is successful enough for all involved, than apparently an original Baldur's Gate III could well become a reality.
Excellent news. A full remake of the original games is just what the Miniature Giant Space Hamster ordered (especially in the wake of the colossal disappointment that was the ending to Mass Effect 3). You will be able to gather your party and venture forth this summer.
Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, which will include the Throne of Bhaal expansion, will be released at a later date. This is generous, since whilst Tales of the Sword Coast was a fairly minor expansion to the original game (with a couple of dungeons and a few new monsters and magic items), Throne of Bhaal was massive in size, easily bigger than many full games. Including it with the already-gigantic Baldur's Gate II is an impressive move.
The Enhanced Edition will retain the original isometric, 2D viewpoint, but with a better interface and higher-res graphics. The game will also retain the Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition ruleset (understandably, as moving to a different edition would necessitate rewriting the entire game from scratch). Whilst there will be new content and new characters (unknown if there will be new party characters), the game will have the same music and sound effects as the original. What is interesting is that the codebase for the entire remake comes from the latest release of Throne of Bhaal, meaning that all the interface improvements from the later games (better inventory, more class/kit combos, possibly a much higher level limit) will be available in the original Baldur's Gate (as quite a few mods enable at the moment). The new remake will also be compatible with many existing mods and original savegames.
Ex-BioWare staff are involved in the project, which is coming from Overhaul and Beamdog, under licence from Atari and the supervision of Wizards of the Coast. If the project is successful enough for all involved, than apparently an original Baldur's Gate III could well become a reality.
Excellent news. A full remake of the original games is just what the Miniature Giant Space Hamster ordered (especially in the wake of the colossal disappointment that was the ending to Mass Effect 3). You will be able to gather your party and venture forth this summer.
Gamer pays game creator $10K as an apology for pirating his game
Min-Liang Tan, the founder of pro-gaming peripheral company Razer, has given $10,000 to games developer Brian Fargo as an apology for pirating his game Wasteland a couple of decades ago. Fargo has been using the 'Kickstarter' system to raise funds for a potential Wasteland 2 and has recently passed his first goal of raising $900,000.
In a Tweet, Tan said
In a Tweet, Tan said
"I'm sorry for playing on a pirated copy of Wasteland years ago, I hope this makes up for it."Fargo's startled reply was:
"Wow.. I just saw that you donated 10k... You more than made up for it. I am most grateful...You are forgiven... ;) Thanks for the support."Fargo is legendary within the video games market for founding Interplay in 1983. He directly wrote and created Wasteland (released in 1988) and later worked on games such as the original Fallout, which was directly inspired by Wasteland. He also worked on the Baldur's Gate franchise. During the numerous tumults that shook Interplay in the early 2000s, he quit to found a new development company, inXile, which is now producing Wasteland 2.
Monday, 12 March 2012
First footage of DISHONORED
One of the potential sleeper hits for this year in gaming is Dishonored, a steampunk game being developed by some of the creators of Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows and Arx Fatalis. The game is notable for its offbeat feel, its steampunk setting and some interesting character designs. It could well be one of the first games in the 'New Weird' subgenre to appear.
In this video, creators Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantino discuss how the game works. It basically sounds like a steampunk Bioshock mixed in with elements of Deus Ex, such as being given missions and then total freedom on how you execute them, varying between stealth, combat and information-gathering. Potentially interesting is an eavesdropping system, where pausing and spying on enemies before engaging them could lead to your objectives changing on the fly.
Originally mooted for summer 2012, a final release date for the game has not yet been revealed. It will be published by Bethesda who, in the wake of the enormous success of Skyrim, are probably going to be content to wait until Dishonored is fully ready before releasing it.
In this video, creators Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantino discuss how the game works. It basically sounds like a steampunk Bioshock mixed in with elements of Deus Ex, such as being given missions and then total freedom on how you execute them, varying between stealth, combat and information-gathering. Potentially interesting is an eavesdropping system, where pausing and spying on enemies before engaging them could lead to your objectives changing on the fly.
Originally mooted for summer 2012, a final release date for the game has not yet been revealed. It will be published by Bethesda who, in the wake of the enormous success of Skyrim, are probably going to be content to wait until Dishonored is fully ready before releasing it.
New cover art: David Wingrove & China Mieville
First up, a better look at Larry Rostant's cover art for the third Chung Kuo book, The Middle Kingdom, due on 1 August 2012:
And with the cover lettering in place:
Meanwhile, the UK cover art for Railsea, China Mieville's new novel, due on 24 May:
And with the cover lettering in place:
Meanwhile, the UK cover art for Railsea, China Mieville's new novel, due on 24 May:
Happy 15th and 20th Birthday to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
2012 marks two anniversaries for Joss Whedon's signature creation, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. July marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the original 1992 movie starring Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland. More notably, however, Saturday was the 15th anniversary of the TV series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Joss Whedon created the character for a spec script he shopped around Hollywood in the early 1990s. He was inspired by the idea of inverting the traditional horror movie open with a monster chasing a girl and killing her. Instead, the girl fights back and kills the monster, because that's her job. Whilst the 1992 movie (directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui) was a modest success, Whedon was unhappy with the degree to which his script was messed around with. In 1996 he was offered the chance to helm a TV spin-off and seized the opporunity with enthusiasm. Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on 10 March 1997 and ran for seven seasons, concluding in 2003. It also spawned an arguably superior spin-off, Angel, which ran for five seasons in 1999-2004.
The series was notable for combining drama and humour, whilst its ensemble cast was impressive. It made Joss Whedon a cult star, along with several of the cast (such as James Marsters and Allyson Hannigan) as well as kicking off the career of David Boreanaz (now famous in the States for his role in the long-running Bones). Ultimately it led to Whedon being picked to write and direct the movie The Avengers, due out this year. It wasn't the most consistent series in quality - arguably only the second and third seasons were reliably excellent and the rest were highly variable - but when it was on form it was very entertaining, with several episodes (such as the inventive, almost dialogue-less Hush and the unrelentingly dark The Body, an impressive take on loss and grief) that are borderline genius.
The future of the Buffyverse appears in doubt these days, with apparently the studio that owns the rights more interested in pursuing a movie remake rather than anything new in the existing setting.
Joss Whedon created the character for a spec script he shopped around Hollywood in the early 1990s. He was inspired by the idea of inverting the traditional horror movie open with a monster chasing a girl and killing her. Instead, the girl fights back and kills the monster, because that's her job. Whilst the 1992 movie (directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui) was a modest success, Whedon was unhappy with the degree to which his script was messed around with. In 1996 he was offered the chance to helm a TV spin-off and seized the opporunity with enthusiasm. Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on 10 March 1997 and ran for seven seasons, concluding in 2003. It also spawned an arguably superior spin-off, Angel, which ran for five seasons in 1999-2004.
The series was notable for combining drama and humour, whilst its ensemble cast was impressive. It made Joss Whedon a cult star, along with several of the cast (such as James Marsters and Allyson Hannigan) as well as kicking off the career of David Boreanaz (now famous in the States for his role in the long-running Bones). Ultimately it led to Whedon being picked to write and direct the movie The Avengers, due out this year. It wasn't the most consistent series in quality - arguably only the second and third seasons were reliably excellent and the rest were highly variable - but when it was on form it was very entertaining, with several episodes (such as the inventive, almost dialogue-less Hush and the unrelentingly dark The Body, an impressive take on loss and grief) that are borderline genius.
The future of the Buffyverse appears in doubt these days, with apparently the studio that owns the rights more interested in pursuing a movie remake rather than anything new in the existing setting.
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