firehose

By Alec Meer on September 23rd, 2014 at 7:00 pm.

We’ve been hearing about Titan, the next trick up Blizzard’s immense sleeve, for many years now. Sci-fi-themed MMO with shooty stuff was the abiding but forever unconfirmed buzz, which did sound appealing, but perhaps such itches are being capably scratched by Planetside 2 on PC and Destiny on console.

That’s not the reason Blizzard have given for axing the seven-years-in-the-making project, though. The reason is “”We didn’t find the fun.”

We should probably bear in mind that, while they did acknowledge rumours it was on the cards, Titan was never officially announced, and no doubt if Blizzard had their way the wider world would still have no inkling of its existence. What they say about its cancellation is more than they’ve ever said it about before.

In the interview with Polygon in which all this came up, Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime elaborated that “We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.” In retrospect, talk of delays and re-thinks somewhat heralded this some time ago.

Perhaps more telling than such speculation after the fact is his later comment, asking aloud “Are we the MMORPG company? We don’t want to identify ourselves with a particular genre. We just want to make great games every time.” Also, “I wouldn’t say no to ever doing an MMO again, but I can say that right now, that’s not where we want to be spending our time.”

He also references the potential onerousness of having to keep working on an MMO for years on end even after release, as has been the case with World of Warcraft, though claims that they’ll keep supporting WoW ‘forever’ if they can.

Morheim, as well as Chris Metzen, Blizzard’s senior vice president of story and franchise development, are clear that this wasn’t an easy decision, but they felt it best to cut losses than make something that wasn’t what they wanted to do, or that could “damage the relationship. Smash the trust” with their fans.

I can’t begin to imagine the sorts of costs involved when one of the world’s biggest studios cancels a project that’s been in development for seven years. If they really have cancelled it because it wasn’t what they wanted to do though, I can’t begrudge them that. Certainly better to choose that path than soullessly chase the money.

Metzen also suggests that, post-Hearthstone, there’s more appetite within Blizzard for smaller projects, rather than a titanic endeavour every time. “Maybe we can be what we want to be and inspire groups around the company to experiment, get creative, think outside the box and take chances on things that just might thrill people. Maybe they don’t have to be these colossal, summer blockbuster-type products.”

Fair enough once again. Hearthstone’s my favourite Blizzard offering in a long time, and much as it’s almost absurdly polished, there’s a craft and chutzpah to it that I’d love to see Blizzard apply to all sorts of unexpected endeavours.

Do read the full Polygon interview by the way, as it goes into more detail about the decision to kill off Titan, including why they don’t want to be U2. That’s definitely something we can agree on.

The Replacements are probably making a new record—at least, that’s what Rolling Stone seems to believe. The magazine is reporting that the group has written a handful of new songs—including one called “Are You In It For The Money”—and another (rather morbidly and/or hilariously) called “Dead Guitar Player,” with the band saying “they’ll likely make an album at some point in the future.” There’s obviously no release date, title, or any other information available yet, but the band’s Tommy Stinson told Rolling Stone that the band’s recent reunion has made him feel closer to Paul Westerberg, saying he “got to realize we might need each other a bit.”

The Replacements’ last album was 1990’s All Shook Down.

Barring any more setbacks, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote really will be shooting soon, and John Hurt will play Don Quixote. “I am doing the Don Quixote film with Terry Gilliam next year,” Hurt told Supajam of his upcoming plans, sounding pretty confident about a film that’s been in the works longer than this fall’s incoming high school freshmen have been alive. But apparently, it’s really happening: As we wrote back in August, Gilliam says the financing has come together to get his chronically stymied project going once again in 2015, this time with the film taking on the meta twist of being about a guy who’s made his own disastrous Don Quixote movie.

Of course, even since that report, there’s already been another “hiccup,” as Gilliam told Rolling Stone, describing the film as “the Sisyphean rock that keeps rolling ...

Class assumptions come to a head in this new trailer for the action/spy thriller Kingsman: The Secret Service. Colin Firth—who’s made a career out of playing repressed British gentlemen—now plays an ass-kicking, umbrella-wielding spy, who also happens to be a repressed British gentleman. He recruits petty thief and “street kid” Eggsy (Taron Egerton) to join the competitive training program for Kingsman, a super-secret spy organization that churns out future James Bonds. Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson gets to camp it up a bit as the “twisted tech genius” threatening the world (his security guard looks to be a woman with blades for legs). Based loosely on the Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons comic book The Secret Service, the film comes from X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman. And judging by this trailer, at least, Vaughn and Goldman are bringing some of First Class ...

Steven Soderbergh is incredibly talented at many things—directing, editing, writing, importing Bolivian liquor—but it appears one thing that the multi-threat is terrible at is retirement. To be fair, Soderbergh has maintained that he was retiring from directing cinema only and has since gone on to many cinema-adjacent projects, like directing and producing the well-received Cinemax series The Knick. However, while he may be done with making films for theaters, Soderbergh never stops thinking about the intricate elements that make up good cinema and, luckily for everyone, he also doesn’t stop writing about those mental exercises. His latest effort to get people thinking deliberately on how to construct a good film is by examining how staging works in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Over on his excellent website, Extension 765, Soderbergh has uploaded a black-and-white version of the 1981 blockbuster in an effort to prompt ...

hannanimal:

I am starting a girl gang and we’re going to wear these cardigans. 

HANNAH YOU DIDN’T MENTION THAT IT WAS A ~*~CARDIGAN~*~

ffffffffff

let-them-eat-vag:

ashoutintothevoid:

Emma Sulkowicz is on the cover of this month’s New York Magazine and that is the coolest thing wow

DUUUUDE this is a huge fucking deal honestly

Everyone used to read the morning paper because everyone did. Everyone like us, anyway. The people in our group, the informed ones. We all read the same paper.

Everyone used to read the selection of the book of the month club, because everyone did.

And everyone used to watch the same TV shows too. It was part of being not only informed, but in sync.

Today, of course, that's awfully unlikely. Only 1 or 2 percent of the population watch the typical 'hit' show on cable. Of course, it's entirely possible that everyone in your circle, the circle you wish to be respected by, is watching the same thing, but that circle keeps getting smaller, doesn't it?

And when 'everyone' isn't part of the picture any more, when the long tail is truly the only tail, plenty of people stop trying. They stop reading difficult books or watching less-than-thrilling video, and they don't push themselves to do the hard stuff, because, really, why bother?

Society without a cultural, intellectual core feels awfully different than the society that we're walking away from.

The official Android Twitter app running on Mac OS.

Ron Amadeo

If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the "App Runtime for Chrome." The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of "Vladikoff" has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he's made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client, a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as "incompatible."

Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon, that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn't run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called "chromeos-apk" that will take care of that, too.