There's no other word to describe WALL-E besides "adorable". And it was expected, knowing the main character was a lonely and extremely curious robot. Writer and director Andrew Stanton melds together a creative blend of creative 3D work, real life cliches, and a memorable story that results in the cutest 3D movie, no wait, any type of movie that this year has witnessed. I've already told myself that I'll be purchasing the DVD not only to watch it over and over again, but to also see all the special features for this three dimensional masterpiece. Our beloved folks at Pixar truly has done it yet again, developing a seamlessly perfect movie that will have you leaving the theater with a grin of happiness along with the satisfaction of knowing that your $10 went to intelligently creative and well-deserved hard work.

The premise of the story starts you off with WALL-E, (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) who is the last remaining functional robot on the futuristic trashed and abandoned planet Earth. His unfortunate and routine life consists of collecting and compacting mountains of trash into cubes and organizing the condensed garbage into towers of their own, but WALL-E seems to have no problem with it. His only companion on the abandoned Earth is a resilient cockroach who follows him around throughout his daily life. WALL-E lives the mundane life of any hard working robot, that is, until the day a futuristic spacecraft lands on Earth and releases an exploration pod, named EVE. Scared yet fascinated with the new arrival, WALL-E gradually becomes friends with EVE. However, after WALL-E innocently reveals to EVE that he found a living plant during one of his usual work days, EVE takes it and goes into a standby mode and awaits her ship to bring the plant back to her masters, the humans. Not wanting to be the only robot on the planet again, WALL-E naturally doesn't want EVE to leave, so when the ship arrives again he haphazardly follows her onto the it in hopes of simply being with her.



I won't go further in the plot; I really don't want to ruin anything for anyone. It's safe to say that Pixar has created a lovable story for all ages, appealing to young children, teenagers, and adults alike. The story is cute, almost making you feel sad for the lonely little robot, but it also keeps a funny and playful demeanor.

To be honest, the aspect of the movie that I found most enjoyable wasn't the 3D animation, (though the visuals are beyond incredible) but instead the fine job they did on the sound and music design. To start, the music was well made and fit the journey of WALL-E perfectly. The sound design and engineering for all the environments, characters, and motions were flawless. The voices for WALL-E (Ben Burtt) and EVE (Elissa Knight) are also very well selected (though I suppose you can't really go wrong when the characters are mechanical beings who can only say a few other words besides their own names). Either way, it was the tone and emotion that Stanton and the cast put into making their repetitive words have meaning towards the story and ultimately, giving each character a unique and unforgettable personality.

Pixar has always been on top of the game when it comes to their animated films including: Finding Nemo, Cars, and The Incredibles to name a few. WALL-E is no exception. The environments are realistic and more vibrant than ever, especially on the humans' vessel, Axiom. Texture design, animation, personality of the characters, are all impressively depicted through the visuals. Certain people will also find some of the movie's comical connections to real life objects entertaining as well. We especially enjoyed the Apple start-up sound when WALL-E charged his solar panels.

Additionally, the story of WALL-E contains underlying themes which are openly conveyed, including precautions to save the environment and also not to heavily rely on artificial intelligence to do everything for us. The bottom line is that WALL-E is a romantic and imaginative film that will leave you with a lasting impression of loneliness that has been happily cured. After getting connected with the settings and characters, I only wish that the movie had been longer. Disney and Pixar made a winner and WALL-E gets the first (of hopefully many) perfect movie ratings from us!

RPG fans should find this one interesting. I recently played Monster's Den: Book of Dread on Kongregate. The game mimics Diablo style gameplay, including multiple dungeon levels and a plethora of equipment/skills/items to choose from. The game features a campaign mode and a survival mode, both of which you're able to pick the classes of your characters: Barbarian, Cleric, Warrior, Rogue, etc. Campaign mode takes you through the typical "rid the world of evil" story while Survival mode tries to topple your party with wave after wave of baddies. Your progress through the game is judged on a point system. You get points by exploring levels, finding loot, killing enemies; likewise you get a deduction in points for dying. Every time you progress to the next level of the dungeon, you will 'level up' and will be awarded points that can be distributed among: Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, and Intellect attributes. You are also given the choice of learning a new skill or increasing an ability modifier (i.e. you could either learn a new combat technique, or for example, increase a modifier that would raise the chance of scoring critical hits on enemies.)

The battle system is turned based, which may be a turn off for some people, but give it a chance. In battle you need to utilize the front and back rows effectively since certain classes can only attack enemies within the range of their area. Your equipment and healing items are only accessible outside of battle, so you have to plan accordingly before encountering enemies. All actions done by the player and the computer are documented and displayed in the battle screen log. Battles can get routine, but also very difficult. Effective planning of equipping proper skills/equipment are vital before you confront enemies.



The level design may also be a turn-off to some people. It revolves around point-and-click exploration rather than you actually having your characters on-screen moving around. The different levels of the games holds different monsters, some of whom have unique attacks. There are also 'legendary' monsters in the game. Obviously they're much more difficult to defeat, but have the chance of dropping some nice loot.

One of the strong points of the game is in the vast amount of items and treasures found throughout the game. The equipment boasts a huge assortments of gear for your different classes (i.e. Warriors/Barbarians wear heavy armor, Clerics/Rogue wear the lighter armor). There's also an emporium that you can go to through the use of a magic scroll. (a.k.a. "Scroll of Town Portal from Diablo") At the story you can sell the loot you've collected, restock on potions, or buy new armor/weapons. Equipment is categorized in 'normal' and 'magical'. Magical equipment usually has a noticeable increase in stats and traits, along with a heftier price tag. You can also 'socket' items with orbs that are found throughout the levels or bought at the emporium.

If you're into the Dungeons & Dragons type games and/or love RPG elements, then you'll probably like Monster's Den. If you're looking for more real-time action, then you might want to skip over it since it's ultimately a simplified turn-based clone of a Diablo. It's definitely not for everyone, but still a well-made flash game that I personally enjoyed..

It looks like Mega Man will be making an appearance on the Wii. Mega Man 9 will be released for Wii Ware, and features an 8-bit old school art style that is sure to overload your brain with nostalgia. This is the first in the series in over 10 years now, with the latest being Mega Man 8 on the PlayStation 1 back in 1997.

The 8 robot masters have also been leaked, although not confirmed, to be:

• Magma Man


• Galaxy Man


• Concrete Man


• Jewel Man


• Tornado Man


• Hornet Man


• Plug Man


• Splash Woman

Yes, you read that right. Splash Woman. No more sexist robot leaders I guess. But anyway, here are the scans of the lastest Nintendo Power:

As the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational event approaches, much speculation about what Blizzard has been up to has been circulating the internets. Not to long ago an image appeared on Blizzard's site, which depicted shards of what looks like ice covering up some standard blizzard runes. Many people wrote this off as some upcoming WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King announcement, which takes place in a winter environment. However, it has since been discovered that the image contains runes from all three Blizzard IP's: Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft.



Now what does this all mean? No one is positive yet, however I would speculate that Blizzard has some announcements about all three of these games. Warcraft and Starcraft may not come as a surprise, but Diablo? All we can say here at Cats of Thondor is FINALLY!!!

Diabloii.net has an article up about a supposed confirmation about the announcement of Diablo 3 this weekend. Not only that, but diablo3.com, which used to be a fan site, was recently acquired by blizzard and now contains nothing.

Things are finally looking good for Diablo 3, so you better start training your index finger now!

We like platformers a lot; hell, our Cats of Thondor game is going to be a platformer. Recently, a preview for a flash game called Scarygirl was released. The game's development team, Touch My Pixel, are taking the typical flash game to a new level. Using a illustrated vector type style, their game boasts some cool physics and controls along with the nifty graphics to create a colorful and interesting environment.

The game also looks like it may have some point-and-click attributes to it also (i.e. opening cabinets, talking to NPCs, and other environment interaction). Additionally, they released a video of the game in earlier stages of development, which can be found here. There is no definite launch date for Scarygirl yet, but first impressions of the game are really good. We'll keep you posted.



Scarygirl Game - Preview #2 from Touch My Pixel on Vimeo.

Majestic Studios, a small three man developer team, recently released their latest game, Limbo of the Lost. Generally this game would have slipped under the radar of most gamers... it's a generic, low budget point and click adventure. However, one of the reviewers over at GamePlasma saw a pretty striking resemblance between Limbo and Oblivion. You can read their original article here.

It would appear the developers simply took screencaps of oblivion and used them as backgrounds for their own game. Upon reading this to myself, I was pretty amazed that someone would try to pull this off. I mean, if you look at the screen shots its obviously ripped right from oblivion. I figured we'd get a nice lawsuit out of this and be able to move on with our lives; that is, until I stumbled upon a few more articles and threads on the subject.

Here is where it gets good.

Various forumers and employees of gaming sites have discovered a huge list of games that Limbo of the Lost has stolen from. Oh, wait... did I say games? I meant games and movies. Yes, thats right. They stole from movies too. At this point, I'm just completely stunned and quietly laughing to myself at the absurdity of this whole situation. Who in their right mind would expect to get away with this? The amount of comparison shots that have been posted all over the internet in the past 24 hours is ridiculous. They come from all types of games, some dating back to the 1990's!

Shacknews Article

Here is a list of games and movies that people are reporting have had stolen images, textures, FMV sequences, and even some audio/dialogue from what I'm reading.

• Diablo 2


• Theif 3


• Oblivion


• Morrowind


• Unreal Tournament 2003


• Unreal Tournament 2004


• Spawn (movie)


• Silent Hill 4


• Painkiller


• Pirates of the Caribbean


• Black and White 2


• Vampire: The Masquerade


• Crysis


• Return to Castle Wolfenstein


• World Of Warcraft

There are probably more to be found, but for right now, all I can do is laugh.

Back in January, I gave recognition to Garry Bathrick in my post "Hell Reaches Heaven" for being the first to full combo (100% without breaking your note streak) on "Jordan" from Guitar Hero 2. Now June has arrived and another very respectable goal has surfaced. Chris Chike, who's recently appeared on SportCenter for his natural knack for the Guitar Hero 3, has defeated the odds and flawlessly tapped his way through one of Guitar Hero 3's most difficult songs. Scoring an astounding 987786 points on Dragonforce's seven and a half minute song, "Through The Fire And Flames" Chris churned out 3,722 notes consecutively without making any mistakes.

Chike uploaded a video of his performance, which can be viewed below. Chris is part of the ScoreHero community and holds top rankings on numerous songs across the Guitar Hero games. Though he hasn't input scores for the majority of his songs on Guitar Hero 3, we can obviously see which song his time has respectively gone towards. With a current, whopping lead of around 44,000 points on the second place contender for the song, Chris has truly shown that he is one of the elite.

The only regret is that his older score is what made it into the Guinness World Records instead of this one. Either way, Chris' goal has been fulfilled and we can only wonder what other amazing accomplishments he plans on undertaking. SportCenter recognized you. Guinness World Records recognized you. The ScoreHero community continues to recognize you. And the Cats of Thondor also tip our hats off to you, Chris. Congratulations.

Valve has announced Steamcloud, which is a new system for storing their game data. The system stores your keyboard/game configurations, save points, and is accessible on any PC, making for a much more comfortable gaming experience when you're not in your humble, secluded gaming dungeon at home. Steamcloud will be implemented first in Valve's older title, Half Life and Half Life 2, but will eventually make its way to Counter-Strike and the upcoming Left4Dead.

Along with Steamcloud, Valve is also looking to integrate driver auto-updating for all Steam accounts. This will ultimately allow Valve to check your PC's specs and see what drivers you may need in order to play certain games. Also, Valve is looking to the community for development. They want to allow non-Valve developers to use Steam as a platform to spread and market their own games to the online world. Sounds similar to Penny Arcade's Greenhouse, but we'll see.

Gabe Newell of Valve speaks confidently of these upcoming endeavors; we just hope their final work lives up to the hype.

Source: Steamworks & Steam Cloud - In Summary
Source: Valve's "Steam Cloud" Materializes