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.
This review marks a number of firsts for andPOP. It’s the first time I’m reviewing a Disney title, it’s the first game I get to play and write about before the official launch date, and it’s the first game I’ve ever reviewed… in 3D! That’s right, today I’ll be reviewing, nay, PREVIEWING Disney’s G-Force video game on the PlayStation 3; talking about what I liked, what bugged me, and all the interesting cute little things guinea pigs do that now freak me out when I see them in real life. With the movie comes out this Wednesday on July 22nd, and the game being released July 24, this is your first look into the inner workings of a super secret group of spy rodents.
Following (but expanding on) the story line of the movie, G-Force has you taking the roles of Darwin (guinea pig) the commander of G-Force and his infiltration comrade Mooch (house fly). Throughout the game you progress as the movie progresses, however, in this rendition, you take an active role in saving the world as you interact with other members of G-Force. Beginning with a training level to show you how to make best use of Darwin and Mooch, you are taken through a fairly basic tutorial that looks like it’s been ripped right out the pages of Portal, while the level design is simple and pretty, I feel like this short training session was not nearly enough to prepare you for world savings and robot fightings.
As an action / espionage / adventure title, you are presented with times where you must sneak by lumbering humans, utilize your partner mooch to by-pass defense system (you can access Mooch for a limited time whenever you like by pushing up on the D-pad), upgrade yourself and your weapons, and cause general havoc throughout different parts of the game. What I enjoyed most about G-Force was the variation in gameplay you got to deploy throughout, as different obstacles and objectives gave you new and interesting methods of progressing to your goal.
While you have many different styles of gameplay to enjoy in G-Force, I felt that in order to include all these variants made the controls way too complex, especially considering this game is intended for children, the target demographic of the movie. I think the main reason I find the controls confusing is because not only does every button do something, but as well, depending on the context you are in these buttons can do something else. The best example of this is the X button, while walking it will let you jump, push it again and you double jump, push it a third time and you hover, push jump again and you use your rocket boost. As well, if you push jump while targeting a bad guy, you dive and roll. There are a number of techniques like this that you acquire throughout the game. Beyond this every direction of the D-pad gives you access to a tool such as your hints radar, Mooch, or heat-sensor vision while every face button changes your weapon equipped. The shoulder buttons allow you to attack, target, or scurry across the floor; really there is a lot to do with your controller and in the heat of battle it can get a little flustering. On the flipside, the reason you have so many buttons do so many things is because you have that many weapons, gadgets, and tools at your disposal. Weapons and items such as Mooch, heat-sensor vision, hint PDA, Electro-whip, Plasma gun, scanner, Nanohacker, Saberlizer (That allows you to weaponize every day appliances yourself) and much much more. One thing to note as well when talking about the controls behind this game is that there is no motion sensitive gameplay utilizing the PS3 controller; I would take this as a good thing as a) the controls are confusing enough, and b) I have yet to play a PlayStation 3 game that made good use of such a feature.
The sound in G-force is as expected, but done well. Action packed generic music; zappers, snapping, and appliance related sound effects sound as realistic as I guess we could assume them to sound, as the ambient noise that comes from action and infiltration fill the air I feel that at least, they are appropriate as they are used in the game. The voice acting is decent as well, while I don’t really know what rodents mouths would look like when talking, I take it as them actually speaking in the game, spot on and when talking through their voice communications, the radio-ish distant sound works well. Voice acting is another story however, while Disney was able to keep some of the voice actors in the movie for the game (namely the main character Darwin played by Sam Rockwel, G-force friend Zach Galifanakis, and Saber himself Bill Nighy), a lot of the more unique voices are absent. I guess Will Arnett, Nicholas Cage, Penelope Cruz, Steve Buscemi, and Tracy Morgan had conflicting schedules. Instead, similar sounding voice actors were used in their place but these I feel were hit and miss as I could not really tell the scope of these voice actors in the film based on trailers alone. For the most part I enjoyed the voices used but in some instances a faux Tracy Morgan just doesn’t do it for me.
Oh Mr. Pink, when are you going to make the leap into gaming?
Here’s the part I assume most of you are most interested in, the graphics. As a current generation game based on a movie which boasts it’s fantastic computer graphics, you would assume G-Force to look great, and it does! From little guinea pig hairs and whiskers, to Mooch buzzing around your head, the modeling of the rodents used in this game are extremely detailed. I wish the same could be said however for the humans roaming around the game as they seem to be a little less rendered than your average first year PlayStation 2 title. Luckily, you do not interact with humans very often as your main enemies are appliances that have been transformed into killing machines (almost exactly like the kitchen appliances at the beginning of the Transformers 2 movie). One thing I enjoyed about the Saber branded appliances however was that with each one introduced, their entire model name complete with number was shown (as if you could purchase these appliances in catalogues) as well, utilizing your scanner, you have the option of discovering each enemy’s weakness and exploiting them during your attack. Overall I think the graphics used in G-Force the video game weren’t exactly up to par with the movie (that took millions to produce) but were still pretty slick for a PlayStation 3 title with all the particle effects used and whatnot… what? That’s not the big thing you were interested in? Ohhhhh, you want to hear about the 3D? Well, let me tell you all about it, gather around children. As the first console 3D game, I was a little worried as to how it would work out because, to be honest, I always had a hard time seeing 3D in movies (like Monsters Vs. Aliens, Up, and Ice Age 3) but to my surprise G-Force came with two paper blue and red 3D glasses, like the old school ones instead of the new polarised technology. Now, the 3D-ness of G-Force can be turned on and off whenever you like in the options menu, which not only do I think is a fantastic idea for those who get headaches easily, but also extremely useful if you have more than two people in the room watching the game. I find the 3D welcome, but a mixed bag of usefulness from time to time. Mooch, your whip, and the jetpack will actually pop out and look amazing; but other times such as during some cutscenes and menus it is very hard to see what’s going on or what you are choosing. The most prominent example of this issue is if you are playing in 3D and your hint screen tells you to push a certain direction on the D-pad to activate a new ability, every direction looks the same in these 3D glasses and you cannot tell what direction the screen is telling you to push. Reading text in general while in 3D mode I find is also quite challenging. Overall however, the introduction of 3D into G-Force did not in any way make the game harder to play or control and in the end I think is quite amazing in short bursts, I don’t think I could play the entire span in 3D alone.
Now for the rest of the review that didn’t really fit in anywhere else. The instruction manual that came with G-Force was abysmal; I find more often as time goes on that companies stop using instruction manuals as well… manuals for instruction and rather as promotional pieces. I say this because I went through G-Force’s instruction manual a number of times looking for instruction on saving, controls, gameplay mechanics, screenshot explanations… anything that I would like to know before diving into the game and I could not find any. Instead there were just instructions on how to turn on the system and the rest of the manual was just an explanation of the characters, weapons, story, and levels. Playing through the game you collect health, ammo, chips, and silver and gold discs. Chips are a form of currency you use to purchase upgrades and new weapons, upgrades and weapons you unlock with gold and silver discs. In order to purchase these weapons and upgrades you must find a Saber branded vending machine. Two things about these vending machines, 1) you cannot see what you are selecting in the vending machine menu in 3-D mode, and 2) if these are machines… why aren’t they transforming and attacking you like every other machine in the game? Silver discs that provide upgrades are hidden (along with extra lives) throughout the game in strategically placed spots so for the completionist gamers out there, you have a little extra something to look out for while playing through G-Force. Maps showing the location of these silver discs can also be purchased at vending machines.
Overall I was impressed with G-Force, while it is not my type of game, I thoroughly enjoyed the graphics, control, gameplay, and innovations found within, and I know I’m not the only one that enjoyed it as you all will see soon enough when Jenn’s video interview and demo of G-force is published in the near future. One thing I have to ask though, is how vicious flesh tearing waffle irons get into the heating vents of an office building…
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Graphics: 4/5
Sound: 3/5
Replay Value: 2.5/5
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