Mafia III sur la prochain génération de console

Le site tchèque d'Eurogamer indique que le prochain épisode de Mafia sera disponible non pas sur Xbox 360 et PS3, mais sur les prochaines consoles de salon de Microsoft et Sony. On savait que le développement de Mafia III avait débuté depuis quelques temps, mais on ne savait pas encore sur quelles plateformes. Eurogamer.cz précise d'ailleurs que Mafia III devait être présent au lancement de la prochaine Xbox et de la PS4, mais le licenciement d'une quarantaine de développeurs l'année dernière aurait ralenti le processus de conception du jeu. Quoi qu'il en soit 2K Czech recherche actuellement une dizaine de personnes pour travailler sur leur prochain projet AAA. Une chose est certaine, on ne devrait pas pouvoir jouer à Mafia III avant quelques années...

Amnesia A Machine for Pigs reporté

Dan Pinchbeck, le Creative Director de Amnesia : A Machine for Pigs a annoncé au travers d'une interview accordée au site Gamezone.com que le jeu d'horreur en vue à la première personne est désormais attendu pour le début de l'année prochaine. Initialement prévu pour Halloween, ce spin-off de Amnesia va profiter de quelques mois de développement supplémentaire pour atteindre des critères de qualité suffisant. Si on se retrouve avec un jeu aussi effrayant que le premier Amnesia, on ne va pas s'en plaindre.

· Forum Amnesia : A Machine for Pigs

Les soldes Steam commencent !

Comme tous les ans à la même période, Steam, la plateforme de téléchargement de jeux PC de Valve, débute une période de soldes massive.

A compter d'aujourd'hui et jusqu'au 22 juillet prochain, de nouvelles offres de jeux à prix cassés feront leur apparition quotidiennement. On commence avec, entre autres, Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 3 qui voit son prix réduit de moitié pour passer à 29,99 euros. On trouve ensuite Might & Magic Heroes VI, lui aussi bradé à 50% pour un prix de 14,99 euros. Portal 2 voit son prix sacrifié à 4,99 euros, Total War : Shogun 2 se négocie à quelques 9,99 euros, et enfin le Indie Bundle 1 ne vaut plus que 9,99 euros.

Du côté des packs on trouve des offres très alléchantes telles que la Valve Collection à 44,99 euros, la Activision Collection pour seulement 45,99 euros, la SEGA Collection se négocie à 49,99 euros et bien d'autres encore. Rendez-vous sur le site officiel de Steam pour profiter de ces offres coup de poing.

Assassin's Creed III confirmé pour la fin de l'année

Yves Guillemot, le PDG d'Ubisoft, a profité de l'annonce des résultats trimestriels de l'éditeur pour annoncer une date de sortie pour Assassin's Creed III. Et celui-ci devrait vraisemblablement sortir le 30 octobre 2012 sur Xbox 360 et PS3. Monsieur Guillemot a d'ailleurs précisé que le titre était en développement depuis maintenant trois ans dans les studios d'Ubisoft Montréal et qu'Assassin's Creed III sera le plus gros lancement de jeu de toute l'histoire de l'éditeur.


Rappelons toutefois que le troisième épisode de la franchise n'a pas encore été officiellement annoncé, mais que des rumeurs insistantes laissent penser que ce dernier abandonnera le destin d'Ezio pour nous envoyer dans les bottes d'un nouvel ancêtre de Desmond vivant au XVIIIème siècle aux Etats-Unis. On devrait notamment y vivre les premières heures de la révolution Américaine.

· Forum Assassin's Creed III

2012-12-21-427

Achronix Semiconductor Corp.: Now With Intel Inside, Literally

What's this? Intel is opening its 22nm fabrication process to a third-party? This must be some kind of belated Halloween trick, right? Well, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), this latest bit of news from Intel is about as real as it can get. In fact, it was so groundbreaking and unheard of, it required both an announcement from Achronix Semiconductor Corp. and a blog post from Intel to confirm the impossible: that Intel has, for the first time, opened up its fabrication process to a third-party.

But what really takes the cake is the type of access Achronix had managed to secure from Intel in this landmark agreement. Instead of granting the small startup company access to its older fabrication processes, Intel has surprisingly offered Achronix 'strategic access' to its brand-new 22mn process, which is only expected to initiate production sometime in the second half of 2011. Even though Acronix designs FPGAs or Field Programmable Gate Arrays which are completely different from Intel's x86 microprocessors, the fact that it can take advantage of Intel's huge lead over the competition with its 22mn fabrication process means that Acronix can produce chips which consume far lesser powerful while boasting much greater performance at a significantly reduced cost.

In fact, Acronix has gone as far as to claim that its upcoming Achronix Speedster22i family of FPGAs will be capable of “as much as 300% higher performance, 50% lower power, (at)40% lower cost than any other FPGA in any other process technology”. If one were to take Achronix's claims at face value, the new chips built on Intel's 22nm fabrication process could potentially trash the competition in every single aspect, thanks to Intel's huge lead in its fabrication technology over the semiconductor industry .

Needless to say, Acronix is understandably elated at being able to secure such a strategic tie-up with Intel.

“Intel has the best process technology in the world and we are privileged to haveformed this strategic relationship, which enables simultaneous improvements inspeed, power, density and cost,” said John Lofton Holt, CEO of Achronix. “Thecombination of the advanced 22nm process from Intel and the advanced FPGAtechnology from Achronix enables Speedster22i to eclipse other FPGA solutionsexpected to hit the market in the next few years.”

Intel, for its part, was quick to downplay the significant of its agreement with Achronix. However, the chip giant has announced on its official blog that it was also excited to serve as Achronix's foundry and that the agreement was also an “important endeavour” for it.

“With Achronix, we are selectively offering access to our 22 nm fabs. For perspective, this deal would only make up a tiny amount of our overall capacity, significantly less than one percent, and is not currently viewed as financially material to Intel’s earnings. But it’s still an important endeavor for us that we’re committed to deliver on,” wrote Bill Kircos, Intel's Director for Product and Technology Media RelationsGlobal Communications Group. “I can tell you the folks over at Achronix are very excited about the opportunity and the expected performance boosts they will see in their Intel manufactured products. We are too.”

And it is not just Intel and Achronix who are excited with the tie-up. On our part, we will be very interested to see just what Intel can do for Achronix's ambitious Speedster22i FPGA with its brand-new 22nm fabrication process. Now all we have to do is to wait for Intel's 22nm fabrication process to officially commence production sometime in 2011. Although we cannot help but wonder if Achronix will start to use the 'Intel Inside' branding as a result of this tie-up.

Source: Technology@Intel, Achronix Semiconductor Corp.

2012-12-21-388

Acer announces new Aspire 5755 multimedia notebook in UK

Notebooks are supposed to be used only for work and casual entertainment, right? Well, not in todays context they arent; apparently, the notebook today is expected to be an extremely versatile tool capable of some serious entertainment such as mid-range gaming and the playing back of full HD movies without any signs of slowdown or lagginess. And leave it to Acer to provide consumers with yet another choice in the multimedia notebook department with the announcement of its new Aspire 5755, which is apparently designed to cater to the needs of "multimedia lovers looking to get their entertainment fix on the go".

According to a report published by Tech Digest, the Acer Aspire 5755 multimedia notebook is powered by Intels Sandy Bridge platform (as most would expect from notebooks that are released recently), and that Acer is reportedly offering a variety of processors for consumers to choose from in order to suit their personal needs and budget, with the top-end configuration utilizing the i7-2820QM processor. In addition, the notebooks graphics crunching capabilities will be provided by NVIDIAs Optimus-capableGeForce 540M graphics card, which is definitely powerful enough to handle just about anything a user would throw at it (except for graphics-intensive games, of course).

Backing up the notebooks processing power is 8GB of DDR3 memory and up to 1TB of storage capacity, so suffice to say users should not expect to run out of space on the Aspire 5755 anytime soon, even after transferring their entire collection of games and movies into the notebook. The display, unfortunately, will probably be a bit of a deal breaker, as Tech Digest has reported that the 15-inch screen is only capable ofresolutions of up to 1366x768.

However, if you are thesort of user who often hooks up his or her notebook to a huge television set to enhance your multimedia experience, you will find that there is something extra which the Aspire 5755 is capable of offering, and it comes in the form of built-in support for Intels Wireless Display or WiDi technology, which allows users to stream content directly from the notebook to an external display without the need to deal with those cumbersome wires. Of course, if WiDi is not your thing, there is always the trusty HDMI-out and Acers own clear.fi to fall back on.

No mention about the Aspire 5755s global availability (if at all) has been made, although Tech Digest is claiming that the notebook will be retailing in the UK at the starting price of £899 or approximately US$1,440.

Source: Tech Digest

2012-12-21-173

[Rumour] Nvidia Q3 Roadmap

Nvidia is preparing a slew of GF10x series cards in Q3. With thetroubled GF100 chip holding the price points between $280 and $500,Nvidia is finally ready to strike the high volume mainstream and budgetsegments. First up is the GF104 card. While optimistically rumoured tobe "Fermi 2" by some, it looks likely to be a tweaked derivative ofGF100. It is set to take aim at the Radeon HD 5830 - which is clearlythe weakest product of the HD 5000 series. Set to release in mid-July,it will cost exactly as much as the HD 5830 - $230.

Previously rumoured to be GTX 460, it would make sense if GF104 were named GTS 460. However, it is likely that the GF104 will perform too close to the dismal GTX 465. Either way, the "460" nomenclature is very likely, the prefix is not so certain.

Following GF104, a GF106 series is set for release in mid-August in the $129-179, taking direct aim at the HD 5700 series. Considering GF104 is rumoured to be a 256SP product, it is likely GF106 would be about 128 - maybe 160. HardOCP also suggests that it will be a replacement to the GTS 250 - finally laying to rest one of the longest serving GPUs ever - the G80/G92. Unfortunately, the HD 5700 products are more cut-down GF104 territory than GF106. Of course, it is possible that GF106 will be closer specced to the GF104, which will mean GF104 would commit the same mistake as the HD 5830 - being too close in performance to the HD 5770 to justify the price. We will see how this pans out, as the $100-$200 segment is the real volume market.

Finally, the GT 240, another uninteresting product, will be replaced by GF108. This would presumably take over the sub-$100 market, competing with the HD 5500 and HD 5600 series, set for release in September.

One has to wonder if Nvidia is giving up the $50 entry level market, or if there will be a final GF10x product. With the advent of Fusion and Sandy Bridge, the entry level discrete GPU market is gradually going to erode away.

While Nvidia have been very late with GF100, it will be a formidable achievement if they can release GF104, GF106 and GF108 within the space of three months. No one trusts Nvidia with release dates any more, but it is imperative that Nvidia releases the complete Geforce 400 series as soon as possible, especially with ATI's Southern Islands looming.

It is unlikely that AMD GPG will be worried, unless GF104 indeed turns out to be a highly tweaked derivative. What we haven't seen for an eternity now, is price wars. We certainly hope that Nvidia price their cards aggressively, unlike the poorly priced GTX 465. After all, many ATI products are still selling at prices way higher than their release date MSRPs! This generation has been particularly poor for the consumer.

Reference: HardOCP

tfg comix month daniel clowes’ “the death-ray”

While many of his contemporaries from the late-80s/early-90s “alternative comix” scene have either mellowed with age or disappeared completely, Eightball creator Daniel Clowes — perhaps best known to regular readers of this blog as the screenwriter of Ghost World and Art School Confidential — seems to be gaining a deeper, if ultimately more pessimistic, handle on the human psyche over the years, and while new work from his strikingly able pen appears at what could generously be called a snail’s pace at best, the meticulous nature of both his artwork and his economic and incisive scripting demonstrates that he’s certainly not resting on his laurels.

Case in point — The Death-Ray, originally published by Fantagraphics Books in 2004 as (to date) the final issue of his previously-mentioned Eightball series and recently reissued in a handsome, oversized hardcover edition from Drawn & Quarterly, is nothing less than a disarmingly bleak masterwork that’s stunning to look at and oftentimes painfully, albeit gorgeously, misanthropic in tone. The title of one of Clowes’ earlier lengthy serials was Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, and this book definitely packs a wallop underneath its lush, even soothing at times, visuals.

The story presented here of orphan-turned-teen-outcast Andy, a casually misanthropic (mostly) loner who acquires remarkable super powers through remarkably outrageous means (see the panel reproduced above for a clue) and also happens upon the titular “death-ray” gun that can instantly wipe anyone or anything completely out of existence, is, on one level, a pretty simple meditation upon the old “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” slice of conventional wisdom, but it’s also much more — a stark portrayal of deepening alienation that sets in slowly over the years and it’s resultant heart-hardening and conscience-numbing; a requiem for lost loved ones we never really knew; and a simple yet profound study of two friends who drift apart over time, all related through a series of what by all rights should be hopelessly disjointed short comic-strip vignettes that vary nearly schizophrenically in tone and style, yet flow from one to the next with grace, ease, and confidence in service of producing what ultimately reveals itself to be a jaw-droppingly seamless whole.It’s also a perfect example of how to subvert reader expectations — the more we see of Andy as the years progress, the more distant he becomes; the more we find ourselves able to predict his actions (and his targets), the less we can relate to him; the more casual and nonchalant his violence, the more it shocks us. As we watch a tragic figure devolve into a monstrous one, we can’t seem to fight it when our pity turns to despair turns to disgust. It’s an emotional roller-coaster ride delivered with a dead-pan, entirely matter-of-fact sense of almost clinical detachment. Camus in the American suburbs.

Andy’s story doesn’t end so much as it simply stops, with Clowes presenting the reader with a number of potential conclusions to the story in “choose your own adventure” style, but in all honesty, while this sounds like a bit of a cheat, if you’ve gone with his flow to this point it actually feels not only fitting but necessary, since a hard-and-fast resolution would, in fact, betray the tone of everything that has gone before by interjecting hard-and-fast authorial manipulation into a work that’s been meticulously constructed to avoid any semblance of it from the outset. Clowes’ style here has the distinct flavor of a true documentarian, even if the people and events he’s portraying are entirely fictitious.If there’s one minor quibble I have with The Death-Ray, it’s that $19.95 (assuming you pay full price) is an awful lot to shell out for a book that’s only 48 pages in length, even if those 48 pages are dimensionally more than generous and reproduce the varied-in-style-but-uniformly-stark-and-exquistite artwork in luscious, vibrant detail. It’s a just a damn hefty price tag, plain and simple. Still, this is a work that rewards rereading and careful analysis and can be viewed and interpreted in so many different ways that it’s downright impossible not to ultimately get your money’s worth from it. As rich, complex, and challenging a piece of graphic fiction as you’re ever likely to find, that presents no easy answers — or any answers at all, for that matter — yet resonates with an internal truth all its own,?The Death-Ray numbers among a small handful of books that well and truly show comics to be a medium as limitless in terms of their possibilities as film or literature.

“i spit on your grave” (2010) — the remake all of us sickos have been waiting for

Well, here it is. The remake of the mother of all rape-revenge films, and one your host had been looking forward to, sure, bu I don’t mind admitting that my eagerness was mixed with more than a little trepidation. Turns out I needn’t have worried — at least not that much.

Our story’s essentially the same — young up-and-coming New York City novelist Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler — don’t ask me why the added an S to the end of the character’s last name here)? heads to a quiet cabin in the country in order to find the peace and solitude she needs to write her next book. Along the way, she draws the unwanted attention of some local redneck yokels at a gas station and these guys find out where she’s staying and use the excuse of trying to pop their mentally retarded buddy’s cherry as the pretense for a night (and day) of brutal gang rape. Things get ugly. Damn ugly. They toss her in the river and figure she’s dead (a solid plot derivation from the original wherein they just sent their slow-witted friend in there to finish her off and he, of course, can’t do it, but tells the fellas he did). She’s not, though, and spends te next month or so surviving on her wits in the forest and plotting her revenge.

And what a revenge it is. Frankly, the way remake director Steven R. Monroe (who’s got a very solid knack for visuals and pacing, by the way, and brings out some strong performances in his central cast, particularly on the part of Ms. Butler, who delivers and extraordinary turn in the lead role, and Jeff Branson, who plays leader of the pack Johnny) and screenwriter Stuart Morse structure this new version makes a hell of a lot more sense than Meir Zarchi’s original — the gang-rape sequence is not nearly as drawn out, yet it’s (perhaps paradoxically) even more psychologically disturbing than it was the first time around. And the emphasis is squarely on the revenge aspect of the story, which, while certainly creative, always felt a bit slapped-together in the original (she didn’t even bother to save the ringleader of the gang for her last victim in it, for instance — although admittedly he did suffer the most gruesome fate).

Some of the more visceral horror of the first, though, is frankly missing. Sitting through the entire extended gang-rape in the original is admittedly a very tough proposition, but you really do feel like the bastards had it coming (and then some) when they get theirs. Here, it feels like she’s paying them all back with more than sufficient interest because the (admittedly quite expected, given the day and age we’re living in) Saw-style torture-porn scenarios she concocts to exact her pound of flesh upon her perpetrators (especially the last one) are seriously depraved and feel more thought-out (because they obviously were). This isn’t bad, per se, but the end result is to make Jenny Hill(s) feel more like your standard cinematic calculatingly revenge-obsessed? killer and less like an unpredictable force of naturally righteous anger.

On the whole, though, it works, so I’m not complaining, and the decision to add the local sheriff (Andrew Howard in yet another of this film’s terrific performances) into the mix as well adds an extra layer of horror to the proceedings, as does the time the filmmakers spend showing said sheriff’s apparently happy domestic life. It shows that monsters may indeed lurk amongst us and these evil bastards are, in fact, good to other people — something only vaguely hinted at by Zarchi.

The end result is a more mature and sophisticated work of horror cinema, and a more violent one to be sure, but one that lacks a little bit of the sheer visceral energy and power of the original. It’s both more creatively realized and more horrifying in many respects, but lacks some of it’s predecessor’s harrowing, soul-shattering fury. For fans of the original I certainly recommend it without reservation, and it’s a damn site better than almost all of the other horror remakes out there, but dues to the (entirely understandable) shift in emphasis to be weighted more heavily on the revenge side of the equation, and its (again entirely understandable) nod to modern horror conventions, it’s a different viewing experience. Just as shocking, to be sure, maybe even moreso, but on the whole maybe just a touch less powerful than that which came before it.

Given that this flick never made it to my native Twin Cities during its extremely truncated theatrical run, I snapped it up off Netflix the second it became available on DVD, and Anchor Bay has done a really nice job on that front. The wide-screen picture and 5.1 sound mix are great, and the extras include a making-of featurette, the full theatrical trailer as well as a “teaser” trailer, a radio spot that evidently ran in the San Francisco area, and a full-length commentary from director Monroe and producer Lisa Hansen that gets a little bit pretentious at times but on the whole is very involving and well worth a listen.

I Spit On Your Grave (2010) , while taking the story in some directions I approve of and others I’m not so hot on, is a more than worthy heir to its groundbreaking source material and is a gut-wrenching and important entry into the annals of horror cinema. If this kind of thing is, in fact, your kind of thing, you’d be doing yourself a massive disservice if you don’t check it out.

“chernobyl diaries” off-the-geiger-counter awesome or radioactive waste

Some things are tried and true because, goddamnit, they still work. Take a cast of unknown young-twenty-somethings, throw them into an unfamiliar, possibly haunted locale, give us enough information to grasp the basic set-up but be utterly dumbfounded by anything else that happens, concentrate a lot more on what’s unknown (and leave it that way for the most part, even when you show it) instead of what we do know, amp up the isolation and paranoia, and you?could have the recipe for a pretty decent scare flick.

Oh, sure, it might suck if the director’s incompetent and the actors are so bad as to be completely unconvincing, and plenty of films following more or less this exact same blueprint have sucked, but if you know what you’re doing, there’s no reason an audience still can’t be entertained by this kind of thing.

Director Brad Parker, the guy behind the newly-released Chernobyl Diaries (working from a script by Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli and Shane and Carey VanDyke), knows what he’s doing. His film employs many of the “hand-held” visual trappings of the like find in films from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield to Quarantine to Apollo 13, but wisely does away with the tired plot contrivance of having to explicitly point out that this is a “home movie” or “found footage” of some sort. He just apes the look to give the unsettling locale of an abandoned town within spitting distance of the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant an even more alien, ominous feeling — and while it may be a cheap trick, it does the job.

The script itself is pretty solid, too — it doesn’t dwell much on explanations, but ratchets up the tension at a precise, well-orchestrated rate. Each character, from the American asshole-older-brother-living-in-Kiev-for-reasons-never-explained to his heart-of-gold younger brother to younger brother’s girlfriend to the young couple joining the “extreme tourism” journey into the radioactive (but apparently sort of safe in certain places if you don’t hang around for too long) post-meltdown wasteland are given just enough personality to make them interesting and semi-involving without toying with the standard,? by-now-archetypal images of folks in these kinds of films?too much, and the perils they quickly face are plausible enough to maintain some semblance of “holy shit I can sort of see this happening” without being pedestrian enough to veer into the territory of actual narrative plausibility. In essence, you can believe their predicament without being able to directly relate to it.

One of the most common criticisms I’ve seen online so far of Chernobyl Diaries is that it’s totally beyond the pale to somehow suggest that people would be stupid enough to pay good money to tour an abandoned, radioactive ghost town. On paper, that seems like a reasonable point. For all of about one second, until you remember that there are idiots out there willing to fork over their hard-earned cash to bungee jump off cliffs and zip-line across fucking canyons. One person’s idiocy is another person’s adventure, after all, and if there were tours like this actually offered, ya know what? Just about every day there would probably at least a few folks foolhardy enough to go. So there’s that gripe out the window.

And without that, there’s really not much to dislike here. The Serbian and Hungarian filming locales utilized by Parker look an awful lot like any former town right next to the biggest nuclear disaster in history would look, the acting is all perfectly competent, the scares (even the cheap ones) are fun, the dialogue is consistent with what you or I would probably be saying under the same circumstances, the actions of the characters run the gamut from “that seems sensible” to “dear God, what the fuck are you thinking doing that?,” and the overall atmosphere is one of tight, accelerating foreboding and dread. It certainly doesn’t take any risks — hell, the characters even die in more or less exactly the order you would predict (although it does adhere to Joe Bob Briggs’ classic rule of good drive-in cinema, namely that it at least?seems?like anyone can die at?any time) — and it doesn’t break any new ground, but since when did a horror film need to do those things to be good? If you just want a movie that does a good job of delivering exactly what it sets out to deliver, then you could do a whole lot worse than Chernobyl Diaries. It’s pretty standard stuff, but it’s fun standard stuff that should leave a smile on the face of the average genre fan, even if they can’t specifically remember any special reason?why within a few hours of having seen it.