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.
The Spiderwick Chronicles, a game based on the movie of the same name, based on the best selling book of the same name, was published by Sierra Entertainment and developed by Stormfront Studios for the Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, DS, and PC (not available on the PS3 for some reason). This review will be based on my experiences of the game using the Nintendo Wii and will be written without any prior knowledge of the book or the movie as I never read or saw it.
Basically the story follows the Grace kids exploring the secrets of their uncle’s magical book. In this title you play as Jared, Simon and Mallory Grace exploring the hidden world of the unseen within the large, extremely well designed house and forest areas. Each of the three Grace children are playable at some point of the game and each also carry their own set of abilities, as well as a character named Thimbletack the Brownie whom lives in a bird house and rhymes everything. The gameplay within the title is pretty repetitive, but at the same time varied in some cases. What I mean by this is that you will be doing a lot of exploring for certain items and bringing them back… A LOT of this is done, very repetitive. That being said however, there are a lot of different types of gameplay spread out throughout the short game length, things like simple puzzles (use an item in your inventory to pass a locked door for example), boss battles, and timing minigames. A lot of the gameplay is also very simplified, attacking only requires a single button, and while each character has a different weapon (baseball bat, water gun filled with vinegar, and fencing sword) the player need only push the button at the right time to get the moves performed (of which you upgrade throughout the game). It also only involves a single button to explore and examine items and creatures to build your field guide and earn more for the game’s progress.
The graphics within the game are pretty average, character animation, while not choppy, are nothing fluid or amazing. They do what they’re made to do and nothing more, once more, items you can examine sort of appear a different shade, so it’s not like you can walk by a crucial item and not know it, maybe walk by an item and not be able to pick it up until later, but by the difference from everything else, you’ll know its important. The scenery however is much more impressive, the design of the house looks like a lot of effort was put into it, not only to impress gamers, but to keep the comparison between film and game as close as possible.
Sound wise, while there is some voice acting, pretty much every item you investigate has only one sound clip, otherwise there may just be grunts hitting bad guys or being hit by them.
The controls using the Wii are handled by moving around using the nunchuk analog stick and moving the camera around by holding the C button, everything else can either be handled by swinging the wiimote or pushing the A button. A couple of times I noticed that, with the bat for example, it must have a magical property, because I seem to be able to hit goblins without touching them or through debris lying around thanks to the weak collision detection in the game.
Otherwise aside from gathering items, examining and developing your field guide, and the story itself; players can also find and gather sprites using their sprite nets, paint them, and be granted special one-time-use magical powers. There are also a few weak but present mini-games that put players in an arena where they try to catch as many sprites as possible or battle enemies with up to two whole players!
All in all, I admit that this might not show the true power of the game as it may or may not be true to the movie/book, but from a game only perspective, I find The Spiderwick Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii to fall into the dreaded ‘quick-buck-based-off-movie’s-profit’ category you find so many movie based games to fall into. It is however, very simplified and might be a perfect game to get your young cousin or child into the world of video games.
Graphics: 2.0 / 5.0
Gameplay 1.5 / 5.0
Sound 1.0 / 5.0
Replay value 2.0 / 5.0
