ROBB'S ENTERTAINMENT CLUB™

Mafia II

2010-08-24T15:41:00.000-04:00

Mafia II is upon us and ushering in a new era of wise guys and made men. If you've been waiting for this one, there is good news – the game is fun. Having shootouts in bars while bottles explode and glass flies, finding a mob hacking your friend to death, and going to brothels are all great times. Still, those moments aren't the entire game, and the accompanying parts hurt the whole.

Mafia II casts you as Vito Scaletta, a young Italian who returns from World War II to find his mother and sister on the hook to a loan shark. Like any gangster in a gangster movie, Vito decides he doesn't want a subpar life of the slums and goes down the organized crime route to make some cash. You'll be with Vito as he whacks dudes, steals cars and tries on all sorts of snazzy outfits.

All of this is going on in Empire Bay, a New York-esque town packed with people, cops, cars and collectable Playboy magazines. Now, at first glance, Empire Bay looks like an open world – one teeming with missions and quests for you to take Vito on. It isn't. You'll have one mission at any time and it's always one that drives the story forward. All the icons on the map – clothing stores, gun stores, and so on – are just ways to enhance that mission. Outgunned and dying a lot? Buy better weapons after restarting. Cops on your tail? Go pay to have the license plate changed on your ride. You're not going to wander around the streets of Mafia II picking up odd jobs and meeting strangers; this is a world built around the missions you're doing.

Is this a bad thing? Of course not – it's just something worth pointing out, seeing as it'd be easy to look at this game and think there are hours of freedom in it. Problem is, because there's only the task at hand in Empire Bay, the place feels awkwardly empty – it doesn't feel alive. You cruise the streets and see other people and cars, but it feels like The Truman Show. Everything is happening because of you. There isn't that "a-ha" moment seen in other games where you realize there's stuff going on in these massive metropolises. Empire Bay is like an empty playset, and that hurts the believability of being Vito's world.

EA SPORTS unveils Creation Center for FIFA Soccer 11

2010-07-13T20:47:00.000-04:00

EA SPORTS unveiled today a new feature called Creation Center that will provide soccer fans with the tools to customize content in FIFA Soccer 11 on Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 in new ways. Craft your own player and create the team of your dreams using a web-based application at www.easportsfootball.com. Create a player by choosing his appearance, accessories and attributes and then create an original team with a distinctive crest and kits, complete with home stadium.

Fans will be able to share their created players and teams with friends and download into their console to play online, in Tournaments and in Kick-Off matches in FIFA Soccer 11. Created players can also be used in the Arena and Lounge Mode. In addition, fans can choose player attributes and manage their created team’s formations and tactics right from the web. Creation Center will launch when FIFA Soccer 11 is available in stores on Sept. 28 in North America and Oct. 1 in Europe and Asia.

“Having the ability to customize content in FIFA Soccer 11 to the degree where you are creating players and teams, choosing player attributes and managing team tactics effortlessly from the web opens up a world of possibilities of original content that fans will be able to create,” said David Rutter, producer of FIFA Soccer 11 on Xbox 360 and PS3. “Creation Center will perfectly compliment the official league and team licenses that are the hallmark of the FIFA franchise.”

New this year in FIFA Soccer 11 is custom audio that enables fans to assign chants for every team and league. Fans can set their home club’s chants to play during player introductions, halftime, and after goals – even hearing their name echo in the stands of Old Trafford or San Siro with created chants for their Virtual Pro. Plus, fans now have the ability to play music from their hard drive in game.

'FIFA 11' Producer Q&A

2010-06-18T02:01:00.000-04:00

With World Cup fever sweeping the globe and the E3 video game convention taking place in Los Angeles, EA Sports decided to drop the first details on its upcoming soccer game, "FIFA 11."

From players that perform with more "personality" to improved goalie play and the elimination of pingpong passing, the design team has a lot planned to improve the award-winning franchise.

I caught up with Gary Paterson, creative director for "FIFA 11," to get all the details soccer fans have been waiting to hear about the upcoming game.

Jon Robinson: You always say that you're your own worst critic when it comes to designing games. What's something about "FIFA 10" that you couldn't wait to improve for "FIFA 11?"

Gary Paterson: The thing that we're working on for this year is making it a deeper game. I think we need to be careful that we don't put off people who play our game in a more casual fashion, but I think making the game deeper all the way through is something we've been striving to do. And while we're concerned about balance and how these casual gamers will find it, I think that making it deeper and making it more football authentic and contact sensitive is what we've been doing for the last four or five years and people have responded well to it. On that depth note, we've built a much stronger relationship with our community over the last couple of years, and we've built relationships with people from our forums, and we brought these guys down here to play an early build of the game and we've been listening to their feedback and the feedback they gave us about "FIFA 10."

One of the biggest things they wanted changed about "FIFA 10" was this thing they call pingpong passing. This is where a gamer could press pass-pass-pass and quickly get from one end of the field to the other and create a quick scoring opportunity, and once you mastered this passing system, you could do it so easily that it really reduced the amount of emotion and sense of achievement that went into scoring. That was one of the first things we wanted to address. We wanted to stop this pingpong passing because you can add so much more emotion into the game if you make the scoring chances slightly harder. If you have to work harder for that chance, you'll feel more of a sense of achievement when you succeed and score a goal. So we've been able to eliminate this pingpong passing in "FIFA 11" by adding more user skill into the passing system. You need to think more tactically about your passes and be a little more deliberate.

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MORE ITEMS IN THE SHOP

2010-06-05T14:54:00.000-04:00

NEW ITEMS IN THE SHOP

2010-06-05T14:53:00.000-04:00

Killzone 3 - PlayStation 3

2010-05-29T16:05:00.000-04:00

Blur

2010-05-26T01:26:00.001-04:00

Red Dead Redemption

2010-05-17T01:47:00.000-04:00

LAX

2010-04-19T18:57:00.002-04:00

LAX is the third studio album by rapper The Game. Open Copy.

God of War III

2010-04-19T18:56:00.000-04:00

Pick it up!

R.E.C T-SHIRTS. NOW ON SALE!

2010-03-14T19:05:00.000-04:00

More shirts in the shop. While you're picking up your shirts. Pick up some comic books, cds, dvds, etc.

2010 Preview: Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-06T05:00:00.000-05:00

Release Date: March 5 (in Disney Digital 3D and IMAX 3D)
Studio: Buena Vista
Genre: Family Adventure
Director: Tim Burton
Writer: Linda Woolverton (based on the novels by Lewis Carroll)
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Anne Hathaway, Stephen Fry, Christopher Lee, Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman
Studio Description: Johnny Depp stars as the Mad Hatter and Mia Wasikowska as 19-year-old Alice, who returns to the whimsical world she first encountered as a young girl, reuniting with her childhood friends: the White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Dormouse, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, and of course, the Mad Hatter. Alice embarks on a fantastical journey to find her true destiny and end the Red Queen's reign of terror.
Alice in Wonderland brings together frequent collaborators Tim Burton and Johnny Depp for an adaptation of the classic Lewis Carroll novel. Their last feature together, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, grossed $52 million, a modest success considering it was a brutally violent R-rated musical set in 19th-century London. More relevant is the box office for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, their last family-oriented live-action collaboration, which grossed over $206 million in 2005. Charlie had cross-generational appeal, reaching adults who had nostalgic memories of the book and the 1971 adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The same argument could be made for Alice in Wonderland, in that it's a classic story with a famous prior adaptation (Disney's 1951 version) that should resonate outside of just the younger demographic.

The trailers and posters prominently feature Depp (as The Mad Hatter), who has been a solid box office draw since Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was a smash in 2003. However, Depp does not play the lead character; that distinction belongs to relative unknown Mia Wasikowska as Alice. Technically, he also was more of an outlandish supporting character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well, and that didn't seem to slow that picture down.

Scheduled three weeks after Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief and three weeks before How to Train Your Dragon, Alice in Wonderland will have room to breathe competitively for the family audience, but, regardless, it's bound to attract many teens and adults unaccompanied by children, given the Burton-Depp brand and the promised visual feast. Its positioned as the first 3D and IMAX spectacle since Avatar, and the higher ticket prices associated with those formats should give Alice some extra kick.

Weekend Report: Christmas Booms with ‘Avatar,’ ‘Sherlock,’ ‘Alvin’ by Brandon Gray

2009-12-31T21:29:00.000-05:00

The combination of Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and other solid titles as well as Christmas landing on a Friday led to the highest-grossing weekend ever. Overall business came in at around $270 million, up 34 percent over the same timeframe last year and surpassing the previous high of $260.5 million set on July 18-20, 2008, when The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia! debuted.

Living up to its hype as the event picture of the season, Avatar was monolithic with $75.6 million, down a mere two percent from its opening. Though boosted by the Christmas holiday, it nonetheless broke the record for highest-grossing second weekend ever, edging out The Dark Knight's $75.2 million. The sci-fi adventure's 3D sites accounted for a 3D-record-setting $57.9 million of the weekend, and the picture posted another rousing performance in IMAX, which contributed an estimated $8.8 million of the weekend gross. In ten days, its tally stands at a whopping $212.7 million, including $158.7 million from 3D sites. It also continued to fly overseas, grossing $152 million and lifting its total to $410.9 million. That puts its worldwide haul at $623.6 million in less than two weeks.

Sherlock Holmes cracked $62.4 million on approximately 5,600 screens at 3,626 sites, handily out-drawing the entire run of the last major movie based on the famous detective character, Young Sherlock Holmes from 1985, and delivering bigger initial numbers than the National Treasure movies. Holmes was sold as a cheeky, rollicking adventure, taking a swashbuckling tone with the character. Star power is rarely a major factor, but, in this case, the casting of Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes after his well-received turns in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder seems to have played a part in turbocharging business, much in the same way Johnny Depp did in Pirates of the Caribbean. Distributor Warner Bros.' exit polling indicated that 54 percent of the audience was male and 50 percent was aged 30 years and older.

The major choice for families, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, scurried to $48.9 million on around 5,500 screens at 3,700 sites. In its first five days, it's made $75.6 million, while the preceding Alvin and the Chipmunks had $49.4 million by its fifth day. The first Alvin went on to gross a massive $217.3 million, and evidently was pleasing enough for many to opt for a second go-around, which was advertised on the basis of offering more Chipmunk antics with the addition of a female group. Considering that the sequels to Garfield, Stuart Little and Scooby-Doo couldn't even match their predecessors' openings, The Squeakquel's number is extra impressive. Distributor 20th Century Fox's research indicated that 70 percent of the audience was parents and their children, while 60 percent was female.

Below those three big guns, plenty more cheer was spread around. It's Complicated wooed $22.1 million at 2,887 sites, which was on the high end for a romantic comedy and more than director Nancy Meyers' Something's Gotta Give from Dec. 2003. Like Sherlock Holmes, resurgent actors were at the forefront of the picture's aggressive ad campaign, namely Meryl Streep and, to a lesser extent, Alec Baldwin (with an assist from Steve Martin), in what was positioned as a comedy of romantic entanglements for adults. According to distributor Universal Pictures' tracking, 72 percent of the audience was female and 75 percent was 30 years of age and older.

Up in the Air had a decent nationwide take-off, grossing an estimated $11.8 million at 1,895 sites, which was better than Michael Clayton, and its total grew to $24.5 million On the other hand, Nine hit a sour note with $5.5 million at 1,412 sites, which was a far cry from Chicago, Dreamgirls and others. Despite its name cast, the musical had an uphill battle with its navel-gazing moviemaker theme.

Meanwhile, The Blind Side kept up its hall of fame run, advancing 14 percent to $11.5 million and lifting its total to $184.1 million in 38 days. On the other hand, The Princess and the Frog didn't gain any traction, dipping 26 percent to $9 million for a $63.7 million tally.

What's Next for Abrams?

2009-12-01T16:17:00.000-05:00

With the recent DVD release of Star Trek, there's been a lot of talk about what director J.J. Abrams has been working on. While many Stephen King fans were overjoyed when news broke that Abrams and Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof were on board to adapt The Dark Tower series, those plans have since fizzled.
And as a Star Trek sequel hasn't even been written, Abrams hasn't officially committed to that project yet. In fact, he recently commented that there's no way a second spin in the USS Enterprise could hit theaters before 2012 (assuming the world is still around after December 21 of that year, of course). As for directing Mission: Impossible IV? That's not looking likely, either (though he will be co-producing the film with Tom Cruise).

FULL STORY HERE.

Angels & Demons

2009-12-01T05:01:00.000-05:00

The Pope died and the conclave has been called for. Four candidates were chosen. However, before the voting, the 4 candidates are killed one by one. The killer leaves clues that seem to say that he/she is from the Illuminati. Strangely though, the Illuminati was long thought to be extinct. Who is the mastermind? Who revived the Illuminati? What do they want? Subtitles in English, French and Spanish.