Russ McCutcheon

Blue Dragons anime adaptation gets a second season released in the US, The Old Republic takes comics, and Mass Effect gets a fancy art book and third issue of its Dark Horse miniseries.

Mass Effect: Invasion #3 and The Art of Mass Effect Hardcover

Weve got a one-two shot of releases here: the first is the current issue of the ongoing miniseries set on the Omega space station hitting shelves and digital distribution this past Wednesday, and the other is a big, glossy hardcover coming in February, both from publisher Dark Horse Comics. Invasion is written by Mac Walters and John Jackson Miller with art by Omar Francia. Walters was actually one of the writers on Mass Effect 3, so you can at least be sure the canon will be intact (Dark Horse is actually billing this as An essential lead-in to Mass Effect 3). Heres what theyre saying about the story:

The Omega space station has fallen and Aria, Omegas pirate queen, is on the run from an enemy greater than anything shes ever faced before. Learning that the battle is merely the first skirmish in a war that will reshape the galaxy, Aria must retake Omega and lead a new charge to save her empire!

You can check out a preview or order a digital copy on the Dark Horse site.

Then, on February 8th, Dark Horse is releasing The Art of the Mass Effect Universe hardcover, showing off some of the weapons, vehicles, and character designs from the series as well as concept art for Mass Effect 3. Theres no publicly-viewable preview available, but having seen some of the interior of the book, I can say its the kind of thing that sci-fi design fetishists will really get into.

Blue Dragon: Trials of the 7 Shadows

Its strange how some things take off. While Blue Dragon didnt exactly create the next great gaming franchise for the 360, it has spawned an animated series in Japan as well as a DS spinoff. That show has actually wrapped its second season which is making its debut here in the US via anime and manga distributor Viz Media. The first five episodes are available on Hulu and the Viz site, with new episodes going online every Friday.

Heres the summary from Viz:

BLUE DRAGON is a classic adventure story of magical Shadow powers, flying air fortresses, and unbounded heroism! Brought together by fate, Seven Soldiers of Light must awaken the Shadow within themselves in time to overcome a despotic power and bring peace to their land. Their ensuing journey through a rich fantasy world is also an internal journey to awaken the great power within each of them.

In the exciting Second Season, Shu and his friends fought to defeat the evil lord Nene, the ruler of the Grankingdom. Nene was defeated, but it was revealed that the true evil was none other than Zola, who was the avatar of the legendary Darkness. Shu and the other Seven Soldiers of Light managed to once again seal off the force of Darkness, but lost their Shadow Powers in the process. Two years has passed since the battle with Darkness. As Shu and Bouquet continue their battle against General Logi and his Rosekstan army, a new threat arrives. Powerful dragons calling themselves the “Legion of Elite Species” set out to test the worthiness of mankind, selecting Shu as the candidate.

DC Universe Online Legends #20 (26)

That would be a 26-issue maxi-series right there, hitting next Wednesday, the 28th. This tie-in to DC Universe Online provides some of the story to the opening cutscene that sets up the DC/Sony Online Entertainment MMO. As such, it doesnt really have a whole lot to do with the regular DC comics continuity. Still, its got veteran comic writer Marv Wolfman on the script and Howard Porter on art is never a bad thing.

From DC:

As Brainiacs invading force prepares for combat, Batman must make a deadly decision that may put him at odds with the entire JLA. Its a decision that could save the Earth, and the Dark Knight will stop at nothing – even fighting his allies – to guarantee success…but can anyone save him from himself?

Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic–War! #1

Finally, Dark Horse has another contribution to the list with KOTOR–War! #1, out January 11th. John Jackson Miller is writing this one as well with Andrea Mutti on art. Since The Old Republic MMO doesnt have a central character to focus on, per se,, Miller and co. have created focus on the warring factions that make up the game. Heres what Dark Horse had to say about it:

If youve ever heard of the Knights of the Old Republic video games and comics but didnt know where to start–this is it!

The Republic and the Mandalorians are at war! Jedi are joining the fight, despite the noninterference stance of the Council. One Jedi, however, has found himself on the front lines against his wishes-the peace-loving Zayne Carrick has been drafted!

Related posts:

Kingdom Hearts 3D Gets A Release Date in Japan
DC Universe Online Gets Into the Christmas Spirit With Update 7

–
Discuss this story in our Gaming forums! Follow @MTVGeek on Twitter and be sure to like us on Facebook for the best geek news about comics, toys, gaming and more!

Tags bioware, Blue Dragon, Dark Horse Comics, DC Universe Online, mass effect, star wars: the old republic

A program that aids people with their heating bills should have adequate money to handle a larger number of requests this winter, according to the director of the states energy assistance program.

Congress has not finalized spending on the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program for this winter but has continued to provide funding at past levels through a continuing resolution.

What we have received so far, along with what we have obligated from past years, makes us very confident that we will have funds for even these extremely high bills we are expecting, said Ron Knutson, director of LIHEAP in the Department of Human Services.

Although requests statewide are down for December because of mild weather, the department is prepared for a higher number of requests from the Minot area. Hundreds of homeowners are heating both their flooded homes and temporary housing units provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Electric bills in the FEMA units could be higher than residents are used to, which may require some residents to seek assistance, Knutson said.

In 2010, more than 16,000 low-income households in North Dakota participated in the state program.

People can apply for assistance through their local county social service offices.

The Ponte Vedra Branch Library is the recipient of a PlayStation 3 with games and give-away prizes for teens, thanks to the generosity of Sea Coleman, Playstation employee and a PV Branch Library patron. And as a result of this initial donation other libraries in the county are receiving similar donations for use by teens across the county.

Coleman explains that as a father, he appreciates the safe welcoming place which the library offers to teens. Since the initial donation, the Ponte Vedra resident has also donated free games, equipment, demos of not-yet-released games and gaming goodies for teens.

And because the donations had such a positive impact for everyone involved, Playstation officials announced they decided to use PV library as a model with other libraries.

Anne Crawford, youth services librarian/assistant branch manager at the Ponte Vedra Beach Library, contacted Patricia Romig, head of youth services for the State Library of Florida. Romig suggested starting with partnerships statewide. Coleman and Playstation agreed to go county-wide with St. Johns County. As a result Coleman and the Ponte Vedra Beach Branch Library put together a small application for a grant that would include a free brand-new Playstation 3, games, and equipment.

St. Johns County’s five other locations — Anastasia Island, Bartram Trail, Hastings, Main and Southeast also applied for the grant. Those branches received a free Playstation 3, equipment, and games.

All six locations of the St. Johns County Public Library System can now offer additional teen gaming programs.

For information about gaming events at the branches, check the library’s website at www.sjcpls.org.

OKOBOJI, Iowa (KTIV/KUOO) -

The days of walking around the Arnolds Park
Amusement Park for free
may be about to end.

Currently, those who do not purchase tickets to ride
the rides can stroll around the park for free while watching their kids or
grand kids. But a proposal under consideration by the board of trustees of Historic Arnolds Park,
Incorporated would change that. Theyre toying with the idea of charging two or
three dollars for each person who wants to walk through the park. Scott
Pyle, the parks General Manager, says the revenue from the fee would allow
them to provide some additional amenities.

Well
the main reason that were considering this option is because we want to add more things going on
at the park all the time, but those things obviously cost money. Somebody as
simple as a person that ties balloons gets a couple hundred dollars a day, so. We want to create things that are there for
everybody that we can sustain, fund and continue to have throughout the years.

The board took no action on the proposal at its
meeting earlier this week, but will consider it further at an upcoming session.

The show went into suspended animation in late 2009. “It went from experiment to business,” he explains. We were getting into advertising deals and selling merchandise. But when the economy tanks, a Tiki mug is not a high priority.” Leaving three unfinished episodes on the shelf, Macpherson turned his attention to other things.

So what has the good doctor been doing for two years? Just what any self-respecting new-media innovator would do: He’s been building an incredibly cool smartphone game. “I like to create worlds,” he says. “I want to give people the experience of living in this fictitious world.”

CodeRunner is emphatically not a casual game. As the video trailer shows, it’s the opposite of FarmVille and a far cry from Angry Birds. Its an alternate reality game for iOS that embroils players in an intricately constructed paranoid fantasy of government-mediated total information awareness. Quietly beta-launched on the App Store, the game has garnered five-star ratings and glowing reviews from players in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and New York (the classic spy cities, Macpherson observes).

The experience of playing CodeRunner is like starring in a James Bond film in which everyone around you is an unwitting extra. Upon launching the game, you’re recruited to work undercover for the newly created US Department of Privacy. A spymaster tasks you with spying on enemies,  gradually drawing you into layers of deception, conspiracy, and intrigue. The mechanics are something like a treasure hunt, with each clue leading to the next opportunity to download or upload vital information. These items – an email message pilfered from a hacked Wi-Fi connection, a bank balance gleaned from a nearby ATM, a password based on the name of a nearby business – thicken the plot and drive gameplay forward. It takes between four and eight hours of diligent spycraft to solve the mystery.

“I love those old stories where someone has the microfilm and has to deliver it across the Iron Curtain,” Macpherson says. “But technology has made them obsolete. Now you’d just email it. So I’ve created a scenario in which information has to be transmitted manually. Your location triggers messages from your handler. When his instructions line up with what you’re doing at the time, you become utterly convinced you’re being monitored.”

In developing CodeRunner, Macpherson and his collaborators, game designer Mike Ferraro and technical lead Ryan Chapman, took full advantage of the iPhones capabilities. The game uses audio, video, camera, messaging, GPS — everything but the accelerometer, which will be incorporated into a future release. The Google Maps API was also critical. Access to Googles geolocation database allows players anywhere on earth, speaking any language, to find banks, schools, libraries, and other brick-and-mortar establishments that serve as pivot points in the game. “It pulls in from locations around you to make you feel like it’s happening in your neighborhood,” Macpherson says. “It works best in an urban area, especially in Europe, where pubs and shops are near where people live.”

Priced at $2.99, CodeRunner will function as a loss leader for a series of missions that likely will carry higher price tags. In building mobile games that require focused attention, Macpherson understands that hes swimming against the tide of anywhere/anytime casual gaming. In certain mobile games, some levels are so mundane that people pay to avoid playing them, he says. If there’s anything in your work that someone would pay to avoid doing, it shouldn’t be there. I believe in charging at the box office and delivering the best piece of entertainment I can.

As for Tiki Bar TV, Macpherson hopes to reactivate it coming months. But the world has changed, and it will require a new venue. “I don’t think people watch vodcast feeds anymore,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of people subscribed to the Tiki Bar TV feed, but I doubt people subscribe anymore. I think they prefer to watch embedded videos or see them on YouTube.” This is the challenge of new media: To deliver a fresh, compelling experience despite incessant technological and social change — and maybe create a new genre in the process. Tiki Bar TV did that at the dawn of the Web video boom. CodeRunner is a bold bid to do it again.

At least four roll-your-own tobacco shops that offer premium cigarettes at half the price of a carton of brand-name cigarettes have opened around the state in the past year. Customers save money by rolling their own cigarettes on an automatic cigarette-rolling machine that produces 200 cigarettes in about eight minutes.

Typically, customers pay about $40 for 8 ounces of loose tobacco, 200 hollow cigarette tubes and the use of the machine. Employees tell customers how to operate the computerized rolling machines.

Pictures: Big Cats Smoke Shop

Journal file photo by Tim Hynds

The Argosy Casino Sioux City riverboat. The nonprofit group that
holds the state gaming license for Woodbury County wants to replace
the boat with a land-based casino that would include greater
amenities, such as a mid-size entertainment venue.

The attention mobile gaming has received as of late is mind-blowing, and so is the distance it has come in such a short time. Smartphone games have made us question the viability of dedicated portable gaming consoles such as the Nintendo 3DS and Sonys PlayStation Vita. And they have also called into question the pricing of games for such handsets.

Back in my BlackBerry days, Brick Breaker and Spider Solitaire were all it took to keep me happy. Even the first days of Android werent nearly as well equipped with games as it is today. The ever-popular Angry Birds didnt make its way to Android until late 2010. Until recently, the best smartphone games were to be found in Apples App Store, and even those games were nothing more than slightly modified and touchscreen-optimized versions of popular flash games. Back then, I could spend hours on end playing games like these and never get bored.

Now, I couldnt imagine playing something so boring, repetitive or … dare I say, old school. My attention begs for developed characters, in-depth story lines and interactive gameplay something to keep me interested and to keep me coming back for more. Luckily, mobile games of today are slowly starting to offer just that.

Last week, popular game maker Rockstar released a 10th anniversary edition of Grand Theft Auto III for iOS and Android. As Rockstar explains in the app description on Android Market, GTA3 is one of the most influential games of all time, and this version features updated graphics, custom touchscreen controls and gamepad USB support.

I didnt purchase it right away because it didnt support the Galaxy Nexus at first. However, Rockstar updated the game yesterday to support both versions (GSM and LTE) of the Nexus and I figured I would snag it while it was still on sale. (Normally, it runs for $4.99, but its 40 percent off until December 29th.) I blame my childhood love for the game for my inability to resist. I was only 11 when Grand Theft Auto III was originally released and although I probably should never have known about half of the stuff that goes on in the game at that age, I loved it and played it religiously.

Immediately after purchasing, I downloaded the additional 400MB package and got to playing. Before I knew it, it was an hour later and my phone was screaming at me, telling me it was time to plug it in. Ive never gotten so carried away when playing a game on my phone before. The most time Ive spent playing mobile games recently has been probably 20 or 30 minutes at a time, at most. But Rockstar did a terrific job at making this game actually fun to play from a phone the on-screen controls arent terrible and it plays buttery smooth.

Is it going to replace my desire to play, say, Skyrim on my PS3? Obviously not. Among many other things, touchscreen controls are still a bit unwieldy, the graphics clearly pale in comparison to any game on a full console and … well, its on a tiny display. But I cant take my PS3 with me everywhere I go either. And thats the point. For a game that works so well on a device you can stuff in your pocket, its amazing.

Console-like games on smartphones or tablets are still ages away. We need phones with more RAM, much better GPUs and more storage space before we will be able to throw out our ol consoles for docking our smartphone into a TV and pairing up a wireless controller for serious gaming. But for the time being, games like GTA3 will suffice. With emulators galore and the attention of major gaming companies like Rockstar, EA and a plethora of others who are finally starting to realize that games from the original PlayStation and PS2 (or any other console of that era) can run perfectly fine on modern smartphones and tablets (with the right tweaks, of course), mobile gaming in quickly turning into a gamers nostalgic wonderland. Over the last six months, Ive played The Sims, SimCity, Twisted Metal and Super Mario Brothers on my tablet, and I enjoyed all of them just as much as I remember enjoying them the first time on their respective consoles.

I have a feeling Im going to be doing a lot more mobile gaming in the very near future. Now, to order an MHL adapter for my Nexus and to get a Sixaxis controller working …

Did any of you purchase Grand Theft Auto III? What about any other games from a decade or so ago? Do you dabble with emulators, or do you stick with whats in Android Market? Do you think mobile gaming will ever catch or threaten console gaming (even 10 years down the road)?

A fire early this morning destroyed a building at a popular amusement park in central Iowa. Altoona Fire Captain Ryan Young says the fire at Adventureland was discovered at 3:30 am

A security guard whos on site heard a boom. The guard shack is outside the fence and he turned around and said he saw the flames above the fence area, Young said. The building, which was fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived, housed a corn dog restaurant.

No one was injured. Young said its likely there was an electrical problem in the building, but the cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Its the second major fire at Adventureland in recent years. A fire in February 2010, sparked by heavy snow that brought down a roof and ripped electrical wiring, burned down a large structure that housed a restaurant, video arcade, bingo parlor, souvenir store and more.

The fire this morning did not spread to other buildings or rides. Thats what our initial fears were because a couple years ago we had that fire on the main street area, Young said. This was a stand-alone building and there was really nothing else it was going to endanger. It stayed contained to this one building.

The now destroyed corn dog restaurant, which includes a large awning for outdoor seating, is located on the west side of the amusement park near the log ride. No one was injured.

MORE than 100 shops will be keeping their doors open on Wednesday afternoons, after a campaign to get people shopping in Ilkeston.

A survey by Erewash Partnership this week revealed that shops have responded well to calls to break with tradition and trade all day midweek.

A trial run started yesterday with independent and chain stores in the town agreeing to stay open all day Wednesday until the end of January.

Paul Calladine from the Partnership said: “The response so far has been positive. A fair number of shops already do stay open on Wednesday afternoons, contrary to popular perception, but the fact that more are prepared to take the plunge is encouraging.”

And Cllr Geoff Smith, lead member for planning and regeneration, said; “This trial could be a shot in the arm for local businesses.”

Some traders say they have already gained from opening on Wednesday afternoons ahead of the initiative.

Sandra Lee, who opened Harpur and Finch in Bath Street last month, said: “We have opened the last two Wednesday afternoons and the response from the public has been fantastic.”

A free promotional package, including posters for shop windows, can be found at www.ilkeston.biz.