Hock Show Weekend Top Five for May 3rd – 9th, 2009
Five Stories That Are (not) Changing Your World
1. Star Trek Boldly Goes Where It Has Gone Nine Other Times! Now don’t get me wrong, the buzz was the only reason that Star Trek opened at $76 million, and the second twenty minutes of the movie are terrible (basically everything after Doctor Cameron but before Sylar), but the movie itself? Money. This is how you reboot a franchise (with Nokia ads!).
2. The Wallstreet Journal Loves the iPhone. Now I don’t expect the fine folks at the Wall Street Journal to be at the cutting edge of technology, but they’re still not any good at integrating it. You see, they sell a WSJ iPhone app, which is fine, but it allows users to browse all WSJ content for free. Something regular web subscribers to the paper have to pay for. Pay a lot for. Oops.
3. 3D Realms Shutters Its Box in the Alley. Hock Show’s favorite game developer, 3D Realms the…uh…”Creative force” behind oft delayed smash hit “Duke Nukem Forever” has finally given up the ghost and…actually, I don’t think anybody’s worked there in a decade, but whatever. Our long national nightmare is over.
4. Activision Is the Best Gaming Company. Desperate to kill off their only successful franchises, Activision-Blizzard is planning on spinning off Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, and Warcraft into mid-budget film epics. Now, Warcraft might actually work, because audiences will buy into fantasy to a certain point, WoW has a huge built in audience (release on a Tuesday joke roflcopter), but CoD? Really? We need another shitty war movie? Oh, and Guitar Hero! It will be awesome. Only if Uwe Boll directs an action thriller in which Jason Statham plays a crooked who find a mysterious “axe” which plays music when you press buttons that literally “shreds” terrorists on a post apocalyptic island (where there are also vampires for some reason). Co-starring Gary Coleman as the drums.
5. Just Manny Being Manny. In a move that shocked no one, Los Angeles Dodger Manny Ramirez was suspended for 50 games for using “Performance Enhancing Drugs” (allegedly an over-the-counter female fertility drug, that is supposed to increase metabolism or some crap). Now, I think baseball (and the NFL for that matter) has gone a little off the deep end in punishing players for taking supplements that are available to any consumer (and thus any player), but it shouldn’t come as a shock that noted airhead Man-Ram was one of the big names to get caught doing it. That’s ok, he probably didn’t want to play those 50 games anyway.