Hijinks Inc.

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  • Saturday’s Shenanigans: Recent Entertainment News

    Welcome to the first edition of Saturday’s Shenanigans, another series I hope to bring you on a regular basis. I’ll just bring you some quick takes on some of the recent news from the entertainment world.

    I’m sure most of you know that Spider-Man is heading for a reboot and we now have our new Peter Parker: Andrew Garfield. Yeah, I’ve never heard of him either. On selecting Garfield, director Marc Webb said, “Though his name may be new to many, those who know this young actor’s work understand his extraordinary talents. He has a rare combination of intelligence, wit, and humanity. Mark my words, you will love Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker.” Yeah, let’s hope so, otherwise you won’t have a chance to screw up the 3rd movie like the old group of guys did.

    It looks like we’ve come full circle and Peter Jackson is now slated to direct The Hobbit, which will be split into two films. He was initially planning to only work in an ‘overseer’ role, but really, it just makes more sense for him to do this thing on his own. This movie is still a very long way from making it to your local theater, but in my opinion, this is a big step in the right direction.

    Steve Carell plans on leaving The Office after the upcoming 7th season. The Office used to be my favorite show on television, but it’s really been lacking over the course of the last year or two. It’s time for them to call it a day. I’ll hold out hope that they can get the show turned around with him and then continue without him, but I don’t see any way of them making the show work without Michael Scott. It still wouldn’t surprise me if they tried. If this is, in fact, the end, it will be sad not seeing Pam, Jim, and Dwight up to their regular antics along with the rest of this outstanding cast.

    (more…)

  • We Have Clout

    You may recall a few weeks ago, our very own Frederick Smith wrote a review of Tower Madness HD, at the end of which he wrote this little letter to the developers:

    Dear Limbic Software,

    In your next update we at Hijinks kindly request you focus on fleshing out your multiplayer mode. It’s the best part about your game, and we really want another excuse to hurl insults at each other involving the pilfering and security of sheep. Add more abilities to hurt your opponent, like destroying a random tower, or sending a wave of stronger/faster aliens.
    Most of all, please look at your pricing structure. We’re big fans of capitalism and making the almighty dollar, but if you price your product at the the same level with games by studios with bigger budgets and names like Popcap, we’re afraid your hard work will get buried in the every increasing avalanche of iPad games coming out. Try $4.99. Seriously. Try it.

    Love,
    Hijinks Inc.

    I’ve underlined the important part of this letter. Why is this important? Because I’ve just been informed by Limbic that Tower Madness HD is now available for $4.99, yes, that just happened. Help convince Limbic this is the right price point and go download it, otherwise the price goes back up to $7.99 next week.

    [ iTunes Link for Tower Madness HD ]

  • Hijinks Reviews: Command & Conquer Red Alert for iPad

    Red AlertPublisher: Electronic Arts
    Platform: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch
    Cost: $12.99  [iTunes Link]
    Release date: April 1st, 2010
    Version Reviewed: 1.00

    Let’s jump right in, is it worth $12.99 you ask? Good question. I really have mixed feelings about its price point, though I suppose when you consider that I paid more than $13 for almost every game in the Command & Conquer series for the PC it seems a little more reasonable. That said, unless you’re a die hard Red Alert fan and someone who finds these types of campaigns engaging, you might want to hold out for a lower price. This isn’t a bad game, but as in introduction to the series it’s not that impressive, and it really could use an update to fix some serious bugs.

    When I first heard Red Alert was coming to the iPad I was pretty excited, I’d downloaded the Lite version for the iPhone in the past, but didn’t buy the full version because of screen size issues. So I figured the iPad would be a perfect platform for an RTS game like RA, and I still think that’s true, but EA needs to get their act together before someone else comes out with a better RTS for the iPad. The controls in this game are sloppy at best, unit highlighting isn’t precise, selecting buildings often results in accidentally selling them (how hard is it to add a “Are you sure you want to sell this building?” dialog?), and the build interface in general could use some tweaking.

    Other than using a touchscreen interface, the game hasn’t changed much from its PC counterpart. Your goal is still to destroy everything in sight, all while managing the mundane tasks of generating enough money and energy to keep everything running smoothly. Graphics are nice, but not awe inspiringly so, and they suffer from the occasional stuttering problem when there’s a lot of action going on. (more…)

  • The MMA Minute – UFC 116: Lesnar vs. Carwin

    Even though this card features a title unification bout, I’m not particularly worked up about the card this weekend at UFC 116, but that’s hardly the UFC’s fault. They originally had big names like Wanderlei Silva, Nate Marquardt, and the Ultimate Fighter 10 winner Roy Nelson, but a variety of things went wrong and they had to be replaced or moved to later events. Perhaps some of the biggest news regarding this event is Chris Leben filling in for the injured Wanderlei Silva and fighting on two weeks notice, after winning Knockout of the Night at the Ultimate Fighter 11 Finale on June 19.

    As the event stands now, we’ve got 5 match-ups on the pay per view main card and 2 preliminary fights to be aired live on Spike TV, check your local listings for time and channel information. Here’s the lineup per Wikipedia:

    Main card

    After a pedestrian 2-2 on my picks last week at Strikeforce, I hope to fare a little better this time around, although I’m going with quite a few underdogs. I’m picking Carwin over Lesnar, Leben over Akiyama, Brown over Lytle, Soszynski over Bonnar, and Sotiropoulos over Pelligrino.

  • Google Me

    Google Me - A Facebook Killer?The internet has been abuzz ever since Kevin Rose drunkenly tweeted that Google was launching a Facebook competitor and was going to call it Google Me, though still no confirmation from Google, but that’s not really very surprising.

    My knee-jerk reaction to this “announcement” was something along the lines of “WTH, Google?!”. Have they so quickly forgotten just how successful their Twitter killer, Google Buzz was? Seriously,  hasn’t Google already made enough failed attempts at social networking? Let’s review… Orkut (fail), Google Profiles (meh), the afore mentioned Google Buzz (eh), and to a degree Google Wave (blah). Name one of those products that’s successful by any stretch of the imagination. And no, just because Leo Laporte uses Buzz does not make it successful.

    Currently Google does one thing well in the social scene, and that’s aggregate your social content. For example, Social Circle (beta) is a nice feature added to the results page which displays your friends tweets and blog posts that might be related to your search, they also have fairly robust support for importing your content from various sources into Buzz, though that’s still not enough to get me to actually use Buzz.

    There’s also some speculation that Google Me will just be a more robust version of Google Profiles, building off the existing profiles that users have setup and expanding their functionality, which would make sense. But at that point why bother renaming it. And would really compete with Facebook?

    Bottom line here, I agree Facebook needs to die and Google might seem to be the best company for the job, but I don’t think given their track record of late that they’ll be able to pull it off.