pix courtesy of blackjackskanz

Like the setting of the sun, when one Corey dies another must make a statement. On his WordPress blog:

I was awakened at 8:30 this morning by my brother and sister knocking on my bedroom door. They informed me of the loss of my brother Corey Haim. My eyes weren’t even open all the way when the tears started streaming down my face. I am so sorry for Corey, his mother Judy, his family, my family, all of our fans, and of course my son who I will have to find a way to explain this to when he gets home from school. This is a tragic loss of a wonderful,beautiful,tormented soul, who will always be my brother,family, and best friend. We must all take this as a lesson in how we treat the people we share this world with while they are still here to make a difference. Please respect our families as we struggle and grieve through this difficult time. I hope the art Corey has left behind will be remembered as the passion of that for which he truly lived. ~ Corey

Chance has to deal with a bunch of greedy military types, along with some guerillas, but the main antagonist is a fellow named Bertram, whose specialty is “Salvage and Reclamation.” Meanwhile, Winston and Guerrero have had their escape plan compromised which complicates matters quite a bit.

Chance hooks up with an old lady friend named Maria, which adds most of the subtext in this story. There’s a softer side of Chance we get to see as he tries to rekindle the flame with Maria. One could imagine that guys like Chance don’t get very many opportunities to settle down and be vulnerable with someone, and there are many tender moments for these two, in-between scenes of them getting shot at and running for their lives. It’s cute, but fairly implausible at times, and it’s a theme that has been done to death in Hollywood.

- FOX

As usual, the show flirts with some old cliches that border on cheesiness. There’s the hot exotic gal with a romantic past with the male lead, and a corrupt military leader, etc. It’s all right of the old adventure book bag of tricks. Most of the time, this series can dabble in old tropes and add enough fresh ideas to make it work, but things don’t work out so well here.

This episode has plenty of action, but the story is a bit lacking. It’s too linear, the jokes often feel kind of forced, and I think this episode finally did cross the line into the land of cliches. Worst of all, our bad guy of the week, Bertram, isn’t all that menacing or much of a challenge for Chance, though the door is open for him to make some appearances later in the series. The character is at least interesting enough to warrant some more development.

Despite the flaws, Winston and Guerrero continue to be a treat to watch. The interactions between the two characters give actors Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley a chance to show off their comedy skills, which they don’t too often get to do in their more serious roles. The series seems to have a good formula with Chance leading the story while his partners take us through a side-story to provide back-up and/or save Chance from certain doom.

As far as Human Target episodes go, this isn’t one of the best of the series. But it’s still fun, and it provides another link in the long chain of events that slowly reveal the histories of our main characteristics. Although this story is kind of a letdown overall, it’s still an entertaining hour of television and it’s worth a few laughs.

Fighting games have always been awkward—and a little sad—as portable experiences, like Rottweilers stuffed in sweaters. Touchscreen controls, you’d think, would be adding a bowtie. But Street Fighter IV iPhone is a poodle in a cardigan. It fits.

It’s a gorgeous port of Street Fighter IV, from flaming dragon punches—when you can pull them off—to ultra moves, which retain the quick cut scene close-up as a prelude to beating the unholy crap out of your opponent, to the booming, overly enthusiastic announcer that no Capcom fighting game is complete without. If you remember the days of Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy, it’s kind of awe-inspiring how richly they’ve translated the audio and visual experience, even if the framerates do get a little choppy on anything pre-3GS.

What’s missing? A bunch of characters, namely. You get just seven and a half: Ryu/Ken, Guile, Bison, Axel, Dhalsim, Chun Li and Blanka. Where’s Honda, or Zangief? Multiplayer is over Bluetooth only—no Wi-Fi, no online service to get your ass beat by Japanese dudes who can EX counter your every move, half a world away.

Oh yes, the controls. The make or break. You have a sparse selection of buttons, at first glance, just four onscreen, plus the virtual joystick: punch, kick, special attack (which can be used for fully automatic specials, or just be the button you tap after performing the full movement for EX specials), and saving, which is used for focus attacks and counters. What you didn’t know is that the ultra and super meters are buttons themselves, which you can tap to unleash ultimate destruction, if your meter’s filled. Truthfully, this layout is as good it could get. It works, and feels as natural as it possibly could, tapping on a piece of glass with no feedback as to whether you hit the right “button.” You won’t even notice all that much that you’re covering a bunch of the screen with your meatnuggets, honest.

What’s both shocking natural and at times utterly frustrating is the joystick. It’s awesome and smooth when you want to do nothing in particular. Like jumping, or moving back and forth. But when you NEED to nail that dragon punch, it will fail you more often than not. If it’s more complicated than a hadouken, you will not pull the maneuver off flawlessly ever single time. I guarantee you. (This, I suspect, is one reason Zangief, my main character, got ditched. I’d have a stroke trying to pile drive people.)

If you’re using a notebook right now, I want you to make a dragon punch motion on the trackpad with your thumb. See how weird that feels? Also, notice how you have no feedback as to whether you actually swiped correctly? There’s no precision. And nothing guiding you to be precise. So, if you’re a skilled player, who expects to nail your god combos flawlessly, you’ll be frustrated by the touchscreen controls, because it’s not going to come out every time you want it to. In fact, the better you are at Street Fighter, and the more skillfully you try to play this, the more this game will piss you off.

But! If you’re in their spamming fireball motions, jabbing at punch and kick trying to kick the shit out of somebody for fun, you will have a blast. It’s real Street Fighter, in your pocket, and it looks, sounds, feels and just plain is awesome. [iTunes]

Developer Rockstar needs more time to polish the game, which *fingers crossed* means a better finished product. Still, that leaves us with some dead time this coming April.

Kotaku previously posted the first part (music!) of its Red Dead Redemption Survival Guide. This is the second part: cowboy movies. You know, Westerns. Dudes on horses. Dudes with guns. Dudes.

Like the list of yakuza films Kotaku posted, this is a personal list. Those were the favorite Japanese gangster films of Otaku USA Editor-in-Chief Patrick Macias. These are my favorite Westerns. Not yours, mine. Cool? They are not in any particular order.

Once Upon a Time in the West
A financial and critical flop when released in the U.S., Once Upon a Time in the West starred Hollywood star Henry Fonda (Henry Fonda!) in an epic revenge telling of Western gunslingers, the railroad and the West. And it’s got Woody Strode and Charles Bronson in it! Director Sergio Leone had planned on moving on from Westerns after his brilliant opus The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. This is the film that brought him back to the genre. Fun facts: the film’s story was conceived by Dante Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, and Charles Bronson accepted the role of “Harmonica” after Clint Eastwood turned it down. Bronson had previously turned down the role of The Man With No Name in Fistful of Dollars. Watch the film’s opening.

Stagecoach
Starring a young John Wayne, Stagecoach isn’t only one of the greatest Westerners ever made, it was of the greatest films ever made. The pairing of John Wayne and John Ford continued throughout their professional careers, and Ford was one of very few directors (if not the only one!) who could treat Wayne like utter crap onset. The reason he got away with it? He made Wayne a superstar. The movie’s most memorable stunts inspired this sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Naked Spur
Director Anthony Mann let Jimmy Stewart do something few filmmakers ever did: let the actor be a badass. Mann and Stewart made a series of Westerns during the 1950s that includes Winchester ‘73 and Bend of the River. Bend of the River has been described as “Jimmy Stewart being Rambo”. The Mann Westerns were uncompromising, cynical and tough. The Naked Spur with Janet Leigh of Psycho fame and Ralph Meeker who was in Kiss Me Deadly is one of many of Mann’s masterworks.

Mann made a name for himself during the 1960s by directing a handful of sword and sandal films. He was the original director of Spartacus, but after a row with star Kirk Douglas, he was fired. Stanley Kubrick, whom Douglas thought he could control but ultimately couldn’t, ending up completing the film.

Red River
Howard Hawks, America’s greatest 20th century filmmaker, made a handful of Westerns with John Wayne. They didn’t have the bawdy humor that the John Ford Westerns did, but rather, Hawks’ trademark dry, talky wit. They are landmark films of the genre. Red River has what many consider to be John Wayne’s best performance because director Hawks didn’t let John Wayne simply be John Wayne. He got him to act.

Actor Walter Brennan, as usual, is superb. John Ireland, who gives one of the film’s most memorable speeches, was apparently high on marijuana during the entire shoot.

The Wild Bunch
When the Wild Bunch premiered in 1969, it incited cheers, and it incited booing. Director Sam Peckinpah was attempting to outdo the violence in Depression Era gangster yarn Bonnie and Clyde. He did. One patron got so ill that he threw up during the final gunfight. Another theater-goer said, “I never thought I’d see the day that William Holden called a woman a ‘bitch’.” Holden had been a big star in the studio system (he was Hollywood’s “Golden Boy!”, appearing in romantic comedies like the original Sabrina and war films like Stalag 17. Sam Peckinpah was a hard man and an alcoholic, who would end his career directing music videos. His use of slow-motion and different film speeds were revolutionary for its time. Violent and beautiful, The Wild Bunch would later inspire a generation of American, European and Hong Kong filmmakers. Check out the trailer.

First, a quick lesson in the history of iPhone Twitter apps! Once, there was an app called Birdfeed. It was clever, fast, and visually distinctive. In fact, it was (up until just now) quite possibly one of the best Twitter apps available. It was also expensive, at $5. The developer, who was tired or something, sold the app to a little startup called Brizzly, which aggregates Twitter and Facebook feeds into a single interface (it’s actually kinda neat, as an online service.) And so here we are.

Brizzly’s rerelease (not an update; Birdfeed is no longer in the store) of Birdfeed changes the name, tweaks the UI, and slashes the price down to zero. The interface isn’t as dazzling as it was before, and Birdfeed’s trademark lack of a menu bar has given way to a standard row of icons. Brizzly actually adds a few new features, including a trending topics-esque News tab, for explaining what’s going on in your feeds, and the same lovely pull-down feed refreshing as the other best iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie.

Even its apparent shortfallings aren’t so bad: Yes, you have to sign up for a Brizzly account in order to use the app, but one you have, it’s completely transparent. It’s like Meebo in that sense. And no, the app doesn’t have push notifications of its own, like Echofon does, but premium Twitter apps have long offloaded that responsibility to dedicated push apps like Boxcar. (Which is great beyond Twitter, by the way.)

In short, if you need a Twitter app but don’t want to pay, Brizzly’s the one. [iTunes]

A year after our first hands on, they’ve improved speeds to a point where it actually looks really good. Latency didn’t seem like it was a huge problem (on stage, in their demo), and in controlled quarters, they’ve said that focus group participants had no idea that they were playing a game streaming over the internet.

Some slightly new details. They’ve got two ways of rendering games. You can either natively on their own servers using their own SDK system—which requires game publishers to go and adapt existing games onto their platform (an easy task if it’s a Windows game, slightly more difficult for, say, PS3 games)—or they can render it natively on the console it was intended for, and stream that to your PC/Mac, which causes more latency than the “native” method.

OnLive will charge you $15 a month for just having the service, which includes playing demos and live-spectating people who are playing games (which is essentially in real time, letting you, combined with the chat function, basically play a game with a buddy across the country and give him real-time tips as he goes). If you want to play a game yourself, they’ll sell you both games and rentals, with a price TBD. The subscription service is preliminary, and they’ll have cheaper packages if you sign up for 3 or 6 months.

The upside for the platform, as OnLive puts it are the instant play (because games are rendered and already slotted up on the server), easy multiplayer, saving games in the cloud, always-updated games and instant downloading of add-ons, because there are no downloads (it’s all server-side).

A couple future-looking announcements they made were that they’re going to focus on Macs and PCs first, but have a Microconsole TV adapter in the future in order to get this onto your TV, plus maybe support specialty controllers and motion gestures depending on the demand for these games. They’ll also have 1080p, 60FPS streaming some time in 2011, depending on how many of their customers actually can support 1080p60.

One illustration of how this thing actually works is when the developers pulled out an iPhone and streamed Crysis—downrezzed, of course, to the iPhone’s native resolution—and played it quite smoothly. There’s no way the iPhone can get anywhere near running Crysis in full details, so this demo can drive home the point that all this processing is going on on the server side. They then spectated the same game, using another account, and that ran at full resolution smoothly as well.

Again, the ultimate test is getting this into our homes and hooking it up to our Comcasts, or DSLs, or U-Verses and our FIOSes and seeing whether or not it performs up to par, compared to a standard console experience. If it actually is as transparent as they say, it kinda paves the way for people to eschew consoles in order to get straight to the gaming. And the way OnLive is positioning themselves really is as an Xbox Live-esque service, which is kinda impressive if they can pull it off. [Onlive]

Conviction on iPhone borrows a lot from the console edition. The plot is very similar, with Sam being pulled back into the world of Third Echelon and international intrigue. Michael Ironside voices Fisher in the iPhone game, as does the remainder of the cast. Conviction also mirrors several gameplay concepts from the console game, such as the use of mark and execute to tag enemies and then eliminate them with lightning fast shots before they can react. Fisher can also use a last known position technique to lure enemies into disadvantageous positions, which is something I employed in the windowless building mission to get an enemy to step into Fisher’s home turf: the shadows. As he investigated where I was recently spotted on the rooftop of a security checkpoint, it was easy to creep down and pull him into a hand-to-hand kill.

These hand-to-hand kills are critical in Conviction because that’s what awards you the ability to use mark and execute actions. There are multiple types of kills, from pulling an enemy over a ledge if you shimmy beneath them to drawing them into a human shield position, which protects you from incoming fire.

Please remove your belt and shoes before stepping through the scanner.

Though the version of Conviction I played was in that nebulous zone between alpha and beta, it was already featuring some nice touches, like the painting of objectives on walls. The controls are a little touchy right now, but moving Fisher around with the virtual stick was fine. Scrolling through gadgets such as frag grenades and camera grenades, though, needs some tightening. Too many times I wanted to use a camera to spy on an enemy outpost, only to roll a frag into their midst and reveal my position.

Conviction on the iPhone lacks multiplayer, so no co-op missions or deathmatches. But with 10 missions stretched from Malta to Iraq, there should be plenty of action to keep gamers busy. As Conviction draws nearer, look for additional details on IGN.

They know this because these are the chips they’re designing right now. The way the development process works for phones is that Imagination comes up with a chip, which they license, and that works its way through development cycles and people like Apple or HTC, which then incorporate them into their phones, which they in turn have to productize and bring to market. The whole thing takes three years. But in three years, says Imagination, you’re going to have a PS3 in your pocket. And that’s not just running at the 480×340 resolution that most phones have now, that’s PS3-esque graphics on 720p output via HDMI to a TV. Hell, some phones in three years will have a 720p display native.

But there are going to be some interesting things between now and then. Imagination is still working on support for the products out now—the chips in the iPhones and the Droids and the Nokias that use PowerVR. The two most interesting things are Flash acceleration in hardware and OpenCL support, which enables GPGPU computing.

The first is obvious. By utilizing a software-based update, phones on the market right now can run Flash acceleration. Imagination’s been working with Adobe for about three years now, and they’ve gotten the acceleration up to about 300% compared to using just software. They think they can do even better. Even still, 300% is pretty damn good for just pushing what you can do with your current phone.

Secondly, there’s OpenCL support, which allows devices to utilize the GPU—the graphics chip—to help out in general purpose computing. For a more in depth look on what this means, check out our feature on GPGPUs, but in essence it’s going to allow multi-threaded tasks to be executed faster than they would be otherwise.

I also asked Imagination about what’s going to be different about their chips that will hit the market one, two and three years from now, and they say one of the big things is going to be focused on multiprocessors. Theoretically you can get about three or four into a phone without going too crazy on power demands, which will help them pull off that PS3-equivalency we talked about earlier.

Keep in mind that this stuff is what’s “possible” in three years, based on what hardware is going to be available in the phones released then. A lot of this is still based on phone makers like Apple or HTC or Palm or Motorola to make these features available. But since most of the major phone manufacturers are going to have essentially the same chip, it’s in everyone’s self-interest to push as much power out from their phones as possible.

But if you’re looking forward to what’s coming one year from now, check out the screenshots in the post, taken from the demos they had running on sample hardware.