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The Game Archaeologist: Richard Garriott's haunted cache
Whenever you get really into a new hobby, it's natural to want to blab about it to anyone who drifts into your gravitational field. That's why we all talk about MMOs, right? It's also why any friends, family members, and coworkers have had to put up with excited rambling about my discovered love for Geocaching. Some of you probably know Geocaching, as it's been around for over a decade now. For those of you who haven't, it's a worldwide treasure hunt that involves over a million and a half "caches" of various sizes that are hidden and then marked with GPS coordinates. Players head to the official site or one of the open-source projects to get the coordinates and go hunting for them. There's a useful two-minute introduction to this hobby on YouTube if you're curious. I noted on our Massively Speaking podcast that Geocaching has a lot in common with MMOs: Both encourage questing and exploration, both have treasure to be found, and both plug you into a community of adventurers. Listener Terrence heard this and send in an email with an interesting revelation that ties these two hobbies even closer together, as a game developer brought his online world to a real-world location. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Richard Garriott's haunted cache.
Ancestry.com offers 'most comprehensive' Titanic records, not in 3D
You could mark the 100th anniversary of Titanic by going to see a 3D version of a 15-year-old film. Or, if you're so inclined, you can do some more serious research on the matter, checking out what Ancestry.com claims is "the most comprehensive online collection of records relating to the passengers and crew aboard the legendary luxury liner." The genealogical site is opening up records relating to the famous ship for free searching from now until April 15th. Thousands of records on the subject are available, including passenger and crew lists, deaths and headstones. It's all a bit morbid, but it certainly beats sitting through the James Cameron movie again. More information is available in the press release after the break.
Render me like one of your French girls: The Titanic in CryEngine 3
For the past several years, ORM Entertainment has been working on a simulator called Titanic: Lost in the Darkness. Beginning life as a mod for the original Crysis, T:LITD (just rolls of the tongue, doesn't it) has been updated and refined and reiterated upon until eventually being moved to CryEngine 3, where it has achieved its current, staggeringly gorgeous state, as seen in the trailer above. Now, when we say "staggeringly gorgeous," we don't mean "Oh hey, that looks pretty good for a mod." We mean that we would rather watch this video again than look at a Christina Hendricks made out of diamonds, standing on top of a unicorn riding a rainbow over a waterfall in space. Hopefully Titanic: Lost in the Darkness' next reincarnation will be playable and available to the masses.
HTC Titan arrives on AT&T: pocket-straining Windows Phone for $200 on contract
While Europeans have been filling their pockets with this dark, handsome smartphone for over a month, the HTC Titan has finally stepped across the Atlantic and is up for sale on AT&T. Windows Phone 7.5 is in attendance, spread across a 4.7-inch screen, the most display real estate it's ever had the pleasure to frolic upon. We made it pretty clear in our full review that you'll be getting a beautifully crafted slice of smartphone here -- if you can wrap your hands around it. It's priced pretty solidly at $200 on a two-year contract, or $550 for anyone not a fan of the pay-monthly schtick. The phone towers over the rest of AT&T's Fall collection, also available now. This includes the Pantech Pocket and Samsung Doubletime, both marked up at $50 on contract, while shoppers looking for another QWERTY option might also be tempted by Samsung's Captivate Glide, which will set you back $150 plus a two-year sign-up. If any of these wildly differing models (and prices) have you wanting more info, you can pay AT&T a visit at the source link below.
Titanic 3D re-release scheduled for April 2012, 100 years after the ship set sail
Before James Cameron was all about 3D he did a few features you may have heard of, including some indie project called Titanic that happens to be the second highest grossing movie of all time. Now, that flick is going to return to theaters and of course, it's in 3D. He's been working on the conversion for several years and says it "will be Titanic as you've never seen it before, digitally re-mastered at 4K and painstakingly converted to 3D." This is certainly no Clash of the Titans rush job, but as much as viewers loved Leo & Kate the first time around, whether or not they fill up movie houses again on April 6, 2012 (and for the Star Wars 3D re-releases) will either lift or crush the potential for conversions and 3D movies in general.
New expedition to capture the ever-deteriorating state of the wreckage of the Titanic
Shipwrecks -- especially ones which are located and explored -- hold a special fascination over people, and none more so than the Titanic. The ship has been photographed (and plundered) over several exhibitions since its re-discovery by side-scan sonar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988, about 76 years after sinking. A new exhibition to the site is seeking to discover the extent of its recently advancing state of decay. Using a combination of sonar and acoustic mapping and high resolution photography conducted by submersibles, the 20-day Expedition Titanic hopes to conduct the most exhaustive archeological study of the state of the wreckage to date, culminating in a 3D replica of the two by three mile debris field. As you see from the rough sonar image above, it's quite a beast down there on the ocean floor, and if you hit up the source, you can see the work in progress.
James Cameron, Piranha 3D actor Eli Roth speak up in support of 3D conversions
After Clash of the Titans and Avatar: The Last Airbender, we're leery of any movies rocking the converted-to-3D tag, but a few directors (not coincidentally, ones with 3D productions in the making they'd likely appreciate us buying tickets to see) claim the process itself isn't the problem. Among other comments (including discussing the upcoming return of Avatar to theaters exclusively in 3D, sequels and a new 3D flick on the way from Guillermo del Toro) with MarketSaw, our friend Jimmy C said "[Titans] showed a fundamental lack of knowledge about stereo space, in addition to the shoddy work that comes from rushing." Of course, we'll have to wait to see what the converted version of Titanic looks like, currently undergoing a process taking between 8-12 months. Eli Roth is in Piranha 3D, which debuts next weekend and is also a film that was filmed in 2D and converted in post, but he claims it's different from M Knight's flick because they planned ahead: "You can shoot digital 3-D and it looks great, or you can shoot film and convert and it looks great - but only if you planned to do it that way from the start...With Piranha 3D, the very title of the film is Piranha 3D," he continues. "It was written that way and photographed to be converted. This means that when you're setting up a shot, next to the camera is a technical adviser from the 3D company who tells you exactly what light won't work for the 3D, how far the subject has to be from the lens if you want it to look good when it pops out of the camera, etc...It's not easy and it's not instant and when it's a last minute rushed decision we can see it immediately. But to associate Piranha 3D, a film which spent years planning this, months shooting it with the technicians on set checking the convertibility of every shot, and so far 8 months working on the conversion, is not fair." Check Bloody-Disgusting for the rest of his comments, and listen to Cameron in his own words on MarketSaw -- we'll see how audiences and critics react over the coming weeks and months.
Bungie says Halo: Reach is like Titanic
It's got Kate Winslet? It's on a boat? It features just enough Billy Zane involvement? No, no, we can only dream. Bungie makes the analogy between Halo: Reach and James Cameron's disaster film because you know how it ends before it even begins. "Reach is going to fall and 700 million people are going to perish as a result," said Bungie creative director Marcus Lehto in a new interview with Edge. Dude, spoiler alert! How the developer is handling the seeming contradiction between the reward of "beating" the game and experiencing the fall of Reach is the meat of the Edge interview. It's a fine read if you want to know more about the next Halo game than just how many guns you'll be able to fire at the same time. (Seven, if you must know. Yeah, we were confused too.)
Avoiding a sinking game
With the holiday season usually comes a healthy dose of gift money, and what comes with extra money for many people reading the site is new games. It's not as if the past year has been exactly spare on game releases, although the success of several is a bit up in the air. But be forewarned -- if you needed the reminder, 2009 could very well be the year we learned that no title is immune to being shut down, with Tabula Rasa and The Matrix Online being among the highest-profile games to finally be shut down for good due to sales figures. Bio Break has an excellent post on what is termed "avoiding the Titanic" -- in short, making sure that you're not signing up for a game that's going to just leave you high and dry. The recent announcement from Vanguard is among the examples cited, although some fans would be quick to point out it's not a death knell for the game. But it doesn't sound like the game is going to advance far beyond its current state, and for many games, that means a slow bleeding-out. Of course, avoiding titles that are perceived as hopeless can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it's worth keeping in mind that perhaps that money might be better spent if you question a game's near future.
Titanic remnants find new home in luxury watches
Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome SA appears to have gone a bit off the beaten path in sourcing materials for its latest luxury watches, with the company re-purposing pieces of the Titanic for a limited edition run. According to Reuters, the company mixed a three-pound piece of the hull of the Titanic with some steel from a replica to create an alloy for the watches, with some coal from the ship's debris field finding its way into the paint used on the watch dial. If that's not enough, the so-called "Titanic-DNA" watches also come in three varieties of bad taste, with steel, gold, and platinum versions available for between $7,800 and $173,100.[Via Wired:Gadget Lab, photo courtesy of Reuters/Christian Hartmann]
