Tag Archives: Lost
Saints Row developer lost money on recent Red Factions
Before Saints Row took off with The Third, Red Faction was one of Volition’s staple franchises. But when the studio was purchased by publisher Deep Silver in THQ’s bankruptcy auction, the rights to Red Faction weren’t part of the deal–just Saints Row.
Senior Producer Jim Boone told Polygon that his studio loves making games, but he realizes it’s a business; open-world diamond-in-the-rough Red Faction: Guerilla and its linear sequel Armageddon “lost quite a bit of money.”
“And when we lost as much money as we did with [Red Faction Guerrilla] and when we lost as much money as we did with [Red Faction Armageddon] I think you know, in our hearts we certainly love Red Faction, but at the same time it’s kind of hard to look at that business and think, you know gosh, how come we didn’t get that too.”
More people at the studio are interested in making another FreeSpace, design director Scott Phillips said. Until then, the influential space sim franchise still lives on through the FreeSpace Source Code project, which continually expands and updates the code to 1999′s FreeSpace 2.
No heads lost in Thatcher statue debate…yet
A visitor views a statue of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher by Neil Simmons, 2001, on display in the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London April 8, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Olivia Harris
LONDON |
LONDON (Reuters) – Revered or reviled, history shows that the placement of a public statue of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher anywhere in the capital risks becoming a lightning rod.
Reactions to the idea of Thatcher atop the empty fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square mirror the emotions stirred up by the death of Britain’s “Iron Lady” on Monday.
Some mourners left flowers outside her home, while others “celebrated” with a street party and buying so many copies of the 74-year-old “Wizard of Oz” song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” that it surged into a top 10 spot in the UK charts.
One small indication of the future prospects for a public statue of Thatcher happened more than a decade ago.
Theatre producer Paul Kelleher decapitated a statue of Thatcher in 2002, saying it “looked better that way”.
The work, created by sculptor Neil Simmons, was on display at the time at London’s Guildhall, just a short walk from St. Paul’s Cathedral where her funeral will be held on Wednesday.
In a telephone interview with Reuters, Simmons laughed as he recalled hearing of the attack on the statue, adding that he knew it was a “poisoned chalice” when he took on the commission.
“I thought it might be sprayed with graffiti, maybe a few eggs thrown at it, but the decapitation was something else,” he said.
Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson said his office would do everything it can to ensure Thatcher gets a high profile London memorial.
A tribute in Trafalgar Square would put Thatcher on equal footing with King George IV and British army generals Henry Havelock and Charles Napier who occupy the other plinths. Though she would still be some way below the 50 meter-high monument of naval hero Horatio Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar.
London Labour leader Len Duvall said on Thursday that such a gesture would be “crass triumphalism”, particularly as the popular tourist spot was one of the sites of the riots over a deeply unpopular “poll tax” which contributed to her downfall.
Visitors to the square on Thursday were split over the idea.
“It would become a monument of hatred, you’d have a deluge of people coming from the north to vent their anger,” said 57-year-old Glasgow-born Laurie who declined to give his last name.
But 20-year old Mia Cook said Britain’s first female prime minister did a lot for the country.
“I think it would be a good idea and right now there’s only men around here,” she said.
Kelleher’s first attempt at the Thatcher statue in 2002 with a cricket bat failed to get the job done, but a second swipe with an iron pole took its head clean off.
“Mr Kelleher was an Englishman armed with a cricket bat and inevitably destined to fail,” the prosecution noted. Kelleher was later sentenced to three months in jail.
Simmons’s original 2.6-metre likeness of Thatcher was designed for the Members’ Lobby of Britain’s House of Commons where a new larger-than-life bronze statue was placed in 2007.
“I might have preferred iron, but bronze will do,” Thatcher quipped to laughter and applause at the statue’s parliamentary unveiling. “It won’t rust. And, this time I hope, the head will stay on.”
(Additional reporting By Dasha Afanasieva, editing by Paul Casciato)
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Rail dig may have found London’s lost “Black Death” graves
Archaeologists work on unearthed skeletons in the Farringdon area of London in this undated handout photograph released March 15, 2013. Archaeologists said on Friday they had found a graveyard during excavations for a rail project in London which might hold the remains of some 50,000 people killed by the ”Black Death” plague more than 650 years ago. Thirteen skeletons laid out in two neat rows were discovered 2.5 metres (8 feet) below the road in the Farringdon area of central London by researchers working on the 16 billion pound ($ 24 billion) Crossrail project.
Credit: Reuters/Crossrail/Handout
‘Tad, the Lost Explorer’ Becomes Spain’s Top Animated Film
In 2012, while American animation fans were enjoying the usual handiworks of DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, Sony and Fox, Spanish audiences chose to take in a home-grown feature about a Peruvian treasure hunt called Tad, the Lost Explorer. Directed by Enrique Gato, the film has made $ 24 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing Spanish animated feature of all time. The pic’s original title Las Aventuras de Tadeo Jones is a wink at the Indiana Jones franchise.
Distributed by Paramount, the 3-D comedy adventure follows a construction worker who becomes a daredevil treasure hunter in Peru. Tad debuted in Spain on August 31 and opened in Russia on Dec. 6. It will also roll out in Eruope and Brazil in the first few months of 2013.
Based on the 2007 short Tadeo Jones and the Basement of Doom, the film was produced by El Toro Pics, Lighting Ent. and Ikiru Films, alongside Telecinco Cinema (Mediaset) and Telefonica Productions and Media Networks. Mediaset Espana helped with the film’s promotion by advertising it on its seven channels. Tad is also the most popular Spanish movie of the year and the number-two best-selling feature of the year, right under the number-one pic, the live-action tsunami movie The Impossible, which has made close to $ 53 million in Spain.
Here is the trailer:
Tad, the Lost Explorer
