10 Minute Break!!! Everybody out of the pool!

...err, everybody out of the blog, I mean...and a 1-3 week break is more like it :)

I think hiatus' for blogs suck. They are the quickest way to watch your readership plummet. And right now, with daily hits being at an all time high, I hate to duck out for a few weeks. But turns out, I gotsta.

Major time right now in the life of our design and while the blog takes little of my time- especially when I do video posts- I just don't want any distractions while I pound out a few key documents for the team. Also in the next 1-3 weeks I got:

a- my birthday
b- my mother-in-law's birthday (and a big surprise party....and she don't read this blog and no one she knows does either so we're safe! Don't tell her, dammit!)
c- Taking our kid for a surprise visit to Disneyland. I remember when Scott did this for his kids about 8 years ago and I always thought, 'Man, that sounds so cool! Making them think they are going to school and at the last second, you hit the freeway and head to Disneyland! When I have kids, I'm doing that!'....well now we have two kids and one is old enough for Disneyland so we's going! Hell, truth is, the trip is probably more for me than her but hell, she'll dig it too :)
d- Going up to Sony to pitch Allan and Shu on the current state of the game
e- GTA 4 hits and I'm gonna need a few days to digest what I am sure is going to be a bar raising- fuck it- bar SHATTERING experience.
f- I imagine I will head out to Utah for 1-3 days to work on the game and pitch the documents once I am done writing...

So with all that PLUS these key design days I got ahead of me, I really need my focus and energy.

I will be back in the next 7-21 days, no doubt. This is not a long haitus, just a few weeks. I'll miss the blog, I'll miss you guys. Hope to see you all very soon!

Thanks for all the support and thanks for reading- talk soon!

David

MARVEL MOVIE MADNESS + LIVE BLOG TEST TODAY!

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LIVE BLOG TEST NEWS:

NOTE: Me and Brady Fletcher will be testing out our live blogging 'show' today at 5:10 Pacific time. We are only going to go online for about 10-15 minutes just to test it out in prep for an actual show we are going to start doing. If you want to say hey and help us test out the service, scroll down to the bottom of this blog. If you can't see us talking, hit the button that says POPOUT and you should get a window that shows us chatting. Stop on by, interact with us, and help us get a sense of what the actual show should be about! Thanks ya'll!

David

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Ok...on with the post :)

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Something amazing is happening at the movies and I’ve gotten so used to it that the magnitude of this event almost passed me by.

Check it out: We are in the middle (maybe towards the end) of a Marvel Comics movie explosion!

Now to younger folks who may not know what the name Cannon Films means, who may have never seen what ‘The Boy Who Could Fly’ looks like dressed up as the Human Torch, who didn’t nightly curse the names of Golan-Globus before they went to bed, this is probably a ‘what’s the big deal’ moment.

To those youngies, they just take for granted that this summer Iron Man is gonna be tearing it up on one screen, while down the hall the Incredible Hulk is kicking ass and tossing around army tanks. To these kids, it’s no big deal that last year they got to see what Ghost Rider looked like on the big screen, they got to watch the FF battle the Silver Surfer AND they got a third installment of Spidey with not only Black Suit Spidey but Venom, Sandman, and Goblin II tossed in for good measure! And the fact that they’ve already gotten to watch Daredevil battle Kingpin and Blade battle vampires? No big deal.

But to me- a Marvel Comics geek- it’s a HUGE deal. And it took some amazing shots from the new IRON MAN flick to wake me up and get me to realize that this is really happening!!! (I would have posted those new shots but it seems Paramount has gone around to the various sites that were hosting them and requested they be taken down…but rest assured, they rocked!!)

I just never thought I’d actually see the day when so many of my childhood heroes got the big screen, big budget treatment. But now I walk into any multiplex, and I’m likely to be greeted by a standee of one of the Amazingly Masterful, Monumentally Magical, Mega Marvel mainstays! (That’s for you, Stan!!)

And soon, from what I hear, there may be an Avengers flick, a Thor Flick, and a Nick Fury movie?!?! I mean, come on!!! They should get Angelina Joile to do a Silver Sable movie, too! But that’s just me being greedy!

Do I have a point with this post?

A few points actually:

a- I’m just fucking crazy excited with every new IRON MAN still I see. And Favreau has never made a bad movie. This could be the biggest hit of the summer…bigger than Indy or Batman!
b- I’m just sharing the love cause as a kid growing up loving comics, I never thought I’d see this day. Which brings me to…
c- …ONE DAY- maybe soon- Hollywood is going to really get behind games in a big way and make some damn good movies out of these properties. It may take a few more years for games to really get mainstream…it may take another generation so the majority of the studio execs are the ones who grew up playing CALL OF DUTY, DEVIL MAY CRY, and METAL GEAR SOLID. But it will happen. It will be HARDER than making movies from comics because comics already have good-to-great stories and iconic characters. While the scripts certainly don’t write themselves, a lot of the ground work has been laid…Games on the other hand tend to be based off movies anyway and have shit-to-average stories that would not cut it at a pitch meeting for a low budget, straight to video flick. But the themes and characters and worlds of these games ARE worth crowing about and CAN be translated to film in a big way. At least I think so. Hey, maybe the God of War flick will be the first GREAT game movie!!!

So yeah, I’m excited.

Ok guys…I gotta get to work. But in celebration of Marvel movies kicking ass, this morning I picked up one of those Iron Man Slurpee cups at 7-11! I even got the $1.50 straw with shellhead on the top!




I felt like a bit of a dork buying a Slurpee, let alone a Slurpee in an Iron Man cup, let alone a Slurpee in an Iron Man cup with the official Iron Man straw, but what the hell.
Summer movie season is almost here, ya’ll! Sweet!

Later ya’ll!

David