In his latest movie, The Woman In Black, Dan traded his Hogwarts uniform for a totally new role as a Dad.
Natalia brings you the latest news on Adele’s interview with Anderson Cooper, Kristen Bell’s interview on Ellen is auto tuned, Ladyhawke’s latest music video and much more!
Natalia discusses what’s new with Pharrell Williams and her thoughts on Karl Lagerfeld’s mean comments towards Adele’s weight. She also shows a roster of animals behaving like humans and, wait until you see the new size of coffee available at Starbucks!
Natalia dishes the latest news on the Juno Awards nominees, the upcoming Spiderman 3D film starring Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield and is Katy Perry hooking up with Tim Tebow? Watch today’s episode to find out.
When The Kooks are in the studio they’re focused and most importantly, sober. Watch Hugh and Luke explain their reasoning below.
The Kooks released a new album called “Junk of the Heart,” and you would think Hugh and Luke would be very excited about it. Well, they seemed rather indifferent to be honest. We spoke about that and why they don’t care about critics.
Natalia dishes the latest in entertainment news on Joan Rivers, Lana Del Rey and a brand new trailer for the movie Hunger Games.
Natalia talks about how Snooki might be pregnant, Nicolas Cage’s Cage Rage, Elisabetta Canalis is dating Steve-O and more for Feb 1, 2012.
Natalia dishes the news on Miley Cyrus breaking her tailbone, a 100 year old woman who plays the Nintendo DS to stay young and Houston, Texas contemplating a statute of Beyonce.
David Beckham debuts a new line of underwear, the worst dressed celebrity – Shy’m and Matthew Broderick is back as Ferris Bueller with a brand new commercial airing during the Super Bowl on Feb 5th 2012.
Daniel Radcliffe is back with his new movie The Woman In Black. It’s a bone chilling remake of a film from the ’80s. Ironically, Daniel actually scares very easily but he’s not afraid of ghosts. In this interview he tells us what really gives him the creeps.
Next time you’re struggling to make conversation, try asking this question: “If you could invite anyone (living or dead) to the perfect house party, who would it be?”
Graffiti6 is starting to make their North American invasion, and they are hitting up the Tonight Show. Does this sound familiar? Well the Beatles made the exact same journey over 40 years ago. Naturally, @jordans_life had to make some comparisons.
Nick plays World of Warcraft. Not only that, he’s the head of his guild, demonstrating that it IS possible to juggle being a hardcore gamer with being a top-selling recording artist.
During a LIVE interview on andPOP.com Nick Carter gave out a number and took phone calls from his fans. These were real phone calls from real fans who we gave exclusive access to one of the biggest recording artists of our generation.
There were great questions about music, fitness, the backstreet boys but the most popular question, however, was about his underwear. In this clip Nick talks about his his ‘Haynes’ and covering his fans with glow in the dark paint.
When releasing new music today, half the battle is online promotion. However, contests, signed merch and giveaways aren’t always the best solutions. When working on their latest album, Hedley came up with a brilliant idea, they decided to make trailers.
It’s hard to prepare for an interview with Hedley. So in this interview, we threw caution to the wind, got a 24 of beer and broadcast the interview live on our USTREAM (andPOP.tv). Eventually Jacob, Dave and @jordans_life ended up talking about hairy legs, their newest music video and more.
Diamandis from Marina and The Diamonds talks to us about her very serious disease. It’s called synaesthetic. And we lied, it’s not a disease. More like a cool condition. Diamandis explains further.
Would you be embarrassed if someone scrolled through your iPod? We sit down with Spee and Brendan to talk about the diverse music on their playlist.
It occurred to me recently that of all the superheroes that have made it onto consoles Spider-man has had the most hits. Generally, comic games can be pretty bad: typically leaching off movie hype or getting stuck with a lousy developer but Spidey has endured for a long, long time.
Back in the good old days of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis there was Maximum Carnage, released in 1994. This was a 2-d sidescroller in which you used Spider-man and later on Venom to take on a variety of villains from the comic series as well as the most ruthless thugs and bandits New York has to offer. Anyone who remembers playing this game knows that I don?t have to go into detail as to how fantastic it truly was. Graphics, gameplay and a badass theme song made this title a triumph.
A Spider-man title came out for N64 and Playstation in 2000 and it was the first time the web-slinger was brought to life through the beautiful spacious element that is 3-D. No longer would players have to simply move in the rightward direction for hours on end, no, now it was possible to shoot webs and swing through the air. To this day, and you heard it here first – no other title has covered such a broad number of the villains of the Spider-Man universe. Venom, Carnage, Doctor Octopus, Scorpion, Rhino, Lizard and Mysterio were all bosses. Nowadays, especially with the movie-based titles, no more than four of the top-notch villains make an appearance.
This game also had the best reward system of any Spider-Man game to date. First of all there were a ton of comics to unlock and you didn?t just get a picture to pull up on the screen of its cover (like so many of unlockables of today), but also a sweet, concise synopsis.
Even better than the comics, were the costumes you could unlock: the Symbiote, Scarlet-Spider, Spider-Man 2099 and even Cosmic Spider-man – now that is what I call a reward for pumping in hours of gameplay.
Recently, we?ve had the movie-based Spider-Man games. The first one received great reviews but frankly I?ve never understood why. I mean, the graphics were great, the CGI sequences were sharp and the environment became more spacious but I remember this game didn?t take me too long to beat. It was possible to play as Green Goblin after beating the game on the harder difficulty, which was a cool reward, but this didn?t necessarily make it a hit in my opinion.
Now, Spider-Man 2 deserves a round of applause. For the first time, the environment covered every inch of New York City; this undeniably set the new standard and perhaps this is really why its predecessor doesn?t seem so fantastic to me anymore. I own both of these titles and since I purchased the second, have never played the first.
Needless to say, I?ve noticed that the movie-based titles co-exist with movie plot lines in a very specific manner. That is to say, in the first spider-man game no mention was made whatsoever of Doctor Octopus as I assume Sony already knew he was going to be a villain in the next movie. From playing both titles and seeing how tightly-knit game developers and movie producers keep their continuity I?d wager the villain in the next movie is going to be the Lizard.
Anyways, back to video games, this week I rented Ultimate Spider-man (USM). I had held off renting this for a while simply because my little brother had played it a few weeks ago and managed to beat the story mode in less than ten hours. Thus, I was in no mood for playing a title that had been so hyped up only to be disappointed, however USM is?well, okay I suppose.
Part of the reason why people were so excited about this game was because the highly acclaimed writer, Brian Michael Bendis, wrote the story. This definitely makes a difference as the re-invention of the symbiote saga unfolds just like a comic book. And this idea is brought to life through sequences of comic panels in which heroes and villains duke it out by literally by leaping off the page ? definitely a nice touch.
Taking the aspect of using Venom, which was one of the main reasons Maximum Carnage was so great, the game seems to have a bit more variety. The control styles of Spider-Man and Venom are also quite different. Instead of swinging through the city like Spider-Man, Venom makes a 20-story leap, extends his arms to grapple onto buildings and surfaces to then lunge himself forward. I know it sounds like web-swinging but trust me they it’s different.
Smooth, crisp, cell-shading make the graphics exceptional and gameplay for the most part is decent. I say decent because I actually wasn?t impressed by Spider-Man?s occasional awkward web-slinging. At first I thought this might have been because I am so accustomed to the predecessor but even within the last levels of the game I realized it was actually because the buildings and environments in the game make it difficult. There don?t seem to be as many skyscrapers and the ones that are there are spaced so far apart.
After beating this game, which took less than ten hours just like my little brother, I was really disappointed. The option becomes available to switch between Spider-Man and Venom at will, but there is close to nothing to do after beating it anyways. I mean, there are costumes to unlock, which are for Spider-Man specifically, but the only one anyone would want to invest time in is towards the symbiote costume. And I should mention that to get this costume you have to fully complete the game, which means collecting a ton of tokens, which I think is an incredibly tedious task.
I?ve read a lot of reviews for USM and quite frankly, I think that this is a case where the game was so hyped up that people seemingly don?t care whether or not it?s good or bad – I for one, sure don?t think that a game that takes no time to beat deserves so much positive criticism. Don?t get me wrong, if you like Spider-Man you?ll like USM, but trust your spider-sense, you?ll regret buying it before renting it first.
