Scott's Walkman Trail

BBC have a great article where they took away a 13yr old boy’s iPod, and gave him a classic Sony Walkman instead.

Born in 1996 (the year i graduated… i feel so old…) this was pretty much the first time young Scott Campbell had needed to deal with old analogue technology, particularly the staple of my youth, the humble home audio tape, producing my favourite remark from the article:

“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.”

kids today…

Clicky to the full article

Callum Blue will be playing Zod in Smallville

It looks like Clark will be having another run in with General Zod in season 9 of Smallville, and obviously like all good evil characters on US shows, he’s English. British actor Callum Blue will be taking on Kal-El in season 9. Callum will be familiar to those of you that saw the wonderful ‘Dead Like Me‘ as the reaper Madson, or you may have spotted him as Billie Piper‘s boyfriend in Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Is isn’t Zod’s first appearance in Smallville having previously escaped the Phantom Zone, capturing Lana and inhabiting Lex Luthor’s body making him evil… well, more evil than usual anyway.

The original Zod, Terrance Stamp, also has a recurring role in Smallville as the voice of Kal’s father Jor-El. Interestingly Stamp’s version of Zod was also used in CGI form when we see Zod being forced from Lex’s body, so there’s a slight continuity error there. I’m sure they can cover it by slapping a Zod’s goatee on Callum. That might be a slight giveaway to Clark though, because as we all know, people with goatee beards are inherently evil.

Could Star Trek return to the small screen?

Rumours started to fly about the interwebs yesterday that a new Star Trek TV series may be on the way after Bryan Fuller announced he was leaving Heroes… again.

Fuller was an executive producer and writer on the 1st season of Heroes, but left to pursue other projects (including the brilliantly original Pushing Daisies). He returned to Heroes during the 3rd season after signing a 2yr development deal with NBC Universal Media. After planning out some of the major story arcs for the 4th season of Heroes, Fuller was finding himself stretched a bit too thinly – “Development was really starting to heat up, And it appears like I may be writing multiple pilots for NBC so that wasn’t leaving a ton of room for ‘Heroes,’ unfortunately. We crafted some really great arcs for the season that I’m excited to see come to fruition. I love that cast dearly and am sad to go, but the plate – she was over-flowing.” Fuller told AICN.

Fuller has another year and half pilot and pitch writing for NBC Universal, however the bit that has got most of us sci fi geeks excited though, was that Fuller expressed a desire to help create a new series for Paramount set in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek universe. Fuller is no stranger to Trek, having had 22 episode writing credits on both Star Trek: Voyager and  – my personal favorite of the next gen Trek – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

I’d love to see Abrams and Fuller get a chance to bring Star Trek back to the small screen. I can’t see it being with the Enterprise crew necessarily, but maybe you set it on one of the other starfleet ships. I’m sure Kirk, Spock & Co weren’t the one to have interesting adventures going where no one had gone before!

This is very silly, but it made me laugh.

With Stargate:Universe, the latest in Stargate franchise, due to hit the small screen in a few months (air date is October-ish on Sky 1 in the UK), little bits of information and footage are starting to appear.

I’m rather looking forward to having Stargate back on screen. It feels like it’s been off for ages!

Speaking recently to videogamer.com, lead designer of SOE’s EverQuest, Ryan Barker, has a theory about the MMORPG that will finally knock out Acti-Blizzard’s 1000lb gorrilla off it’s gold plated tyre swing. Barker says this ‘WoW killer’ may be something “totally different that we haven’t even thought of yet…”

Genius. Thanks for that insight Ryan… Oh, wait there’s more,

“At some point someone will dwarf those numbers with a game. If we can get passed some of the barriers that are keeping people from playing with their friends, just because their friends happened to start the game before they did, and maybe started on a different server or whatever, if we can start to get rid of some of those social blocks, I think it can get even better.

Things like that show us that there are a lot of people out there that are interested in being involved in an internet community, especially with all the apps on Facebook, in playing casual games. At some point someone’s going to do an MMO that really caters to that group, and is going to have a billion subscribers or whatever. There’s another ceiling somewhere that we haven’t hit yet.

There is still somewhat of a stigma with the fantasy genre. It’ll be some weird mix of something we haven’t seen before. A lot of the standard video game genres I don’t think will have the breadth of appeal that would be necessary for something like that. It might not even be a game world per se; it might be something totally different that we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Okay… so, the WoW killer MMORPG is:

• Non-genre based
• Everyone in one place
• With no levels
• that you can drop in and out of
• And has social networking

Sooo… the WoW killer isn’t like Facebook, it is Facebook?… Or Facebook with some sort of 3D interface.. OMG! I have it! The WoW killer is Second Life!!.. …Okay, maybe not…

The fundamental issue of this for me is when does an MMORPG stop being an MMORPG? What Ryan Barker seems to be suggesting is the David to WoWs Goliath is an entity that isn’t really an MMORPG as we know it. Ironically, the closest in existing MMO terms to what he’s talking about I’d say is Star Wars Galaxies… They game SOE destroyed to turn it from a relatively casual MMO which had less focus on leveling and more focus on social interaction, into a WoW clone…

Yes, obviously SWG was a genre game, but then, i’m not sure how you make the RPG part of an MMORPG fun without it fitting into some sort of genre.

• Role playing a talking cow-man that rides a rhino through distant magical lands, and can chop people up with a flaming sword = fun.
• Role playing, erm, myself = not so much fun…

So what do you guys think? Is SOE right, or are they talking a load of old tauren?