Francois

This list might seem bizarre when compared to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but these are all pretty much method standards, except for the Nintendo tracks, of course. And since music education is the model upon which Wii Music is based, the list actually makes sense.

In motion, I said. Screenshots always look good.

Watch a movie, push some buttons? It's still doesn't look as good in motion as an actual animated feature. I'd say this about looks the level of Resident Evil 2's FMV. Which is an achievement in its own right, but still nothing to write home about.

I don't know what's more disappointing; the filmmaker George Lucas has become, or the filmmaker he could have been, had he not had the laurels of Star Wars to rest on. Anyways, Red Tails looks sufficiently out of the Lucas comfort zone, so it may yet prove to be a renaissance for him... or a confirmation of his fall from grace.

It's sort of funny to read about C.R.A.Z.Y. struggling with distribution, because here in Québec, its home and native land, it was a huge success in its theatrical run. In fact, it's probably the greatest critical and popular success the province has ever known; it also won the Jutra (Quebec's version of the Genies) for best film and it was the highest-grossing local film of its year. Of course, in Québec the film was the equivalent of Brokeback Mountain; it featured a recognizable star in Michel Côté and had a lot of buzz going for it.

I wouldn't describe myself as a Harry Potter fan, but I did see all of the movies when they came out, though I haven't read the books. "Prisoner" is one of my least favorite of the films, in fact it was my least favorite before "Order" came out. To me, "Prisoner" dragged on because I felt like it contributed little to the grand saga of Harry Potter. I didn't feel like I learned anything new; the greater story was at a standstill.

My favorite movie was "Goblet" for the opposite reason: the resurgence of the villain, Cedric's cold-blooded murder and the impact it had on our hero propelled the series forward with newfound momentum. I couldn't wait to see what would happen next.

I felt "Order" sort of killed that momentum, though, and brought everything back to a standstill. The bickering over whether or not Voldemort had actually returned, the secondary nature of the Order of the Pheonix itself, fighting an epic battle you never actually see, and Voldermort's underwhelming cameo didn't thrill me at all. Plus, the movie sort of assumed you read the books; the room where the Order fights the Death Eaters seems awfully important but I, having only seen the movies, had no idea what it was.

What I don't understand is, if Cassamassina knows a Kid Icarus game is in the works, if he knows who's making it and if he has concrete evidence, why isn't he breaking the story? Why isn't he forcing a confirmation out of Nintendo or Factor 5 or whoever? He's a journalist, for God's sake, not part of the NOA PR departement. What's all this horsing around with vague declarations in podcasts?

I don't like Cassamassina and that's a big part why. It's like he's trying to bolster his own legend. I don't know what would be the best outcome; the rumour turns out to be false and he loses his credibility, or the rumour turns out be true and everybody wonders why the heck he played coy all this time.

I don't think Nintendo will ever produce a game that would require a hard drive. Well, not anytime soon. I think they'd stick to the system in place with the Virtual Console, where the long-term storage solution is Nintendo's own servers and you can just delete and redownload anything you've already purchased at will. There's a large part of the consumer base that's already used to such a system with devices like the iPod nano and their music, photo and video collections. The bottom line is, any amount of storage ends up being limited, and having multiple hard drives, or making backups and transferring data to a larger hard drive is just as inconvenient as deleting and redownloading.

The Virtual Console system could work for DLC, but I understand how Harmonix would deem it impractical for Rock Band. But the company has also proved that it wasn't all that forward-thinking when it came to Wii by porting the PS2 version of their game months after its initial release. I don't think anything about the Wii makes DLC impossible, it's just a matter of implementing it right.

I've done more research, and I realized that in fact, it's not Quebec's 16+ that has no equivalent in the MPAA system, it's actually the 18+ rating. In the US, pornography or extreme gore are simply left unrated, whereas in Quebec, they get the 18+ rating.

Which makes NC-17 the "worst" rating a movie can get, and does nothing to remove any stigma. Perhaps the better solution would be for the MPAA to bring back the X rating or some such tag on pornography so there could be something "above" NC-17. Would it help people differentiate the two?

In Quebec, we have a fairly interesting classification system in that we don't really have an equivalent to the R rating, but we have an in-between of sorts to R and NC-17.

Our categories are G, 13+, 16+ and 18+. The trick is that children under 13 may attend a 13+ movie with an adult guardian, but only persons over the age of 16 may attend a 16+ movie. The rating is sparingly attributed, but a film like Lust, Caution is a prime candidate for 16+, which leaves the kids out, but doesn't place it alongside more sexually explicit content that gets the 18+ rating. Same goes for horror; Saw got a stricter 16+ rating here. It can even benefit serious dramas; Tout est parfait, a new Quebecois film that deals with suicide, got a 16+ rating even though it doesn't feature particularly objectionable violent or sexual content.

Either such a rating should exist in the MPAA's categories, or they should start using NC-17 more in that way. Anyways, you can learn more about the Quebec classification system at http://www.rcq.qc.ca/mult/process.asp?lng=en.