Morning Roundup: Neil Patrick Harris Fights Ninjas

Fri
Feb 24 2012 8:00am

Morning Roundup: Neil Patrick Harris Fights Ninjas

You Shall Not Pass paper stamp by greyskieseternal

It’s Friday and we are really bummed out about the grade we got on our Interstellar Physics paper. If only our teacher would help us instead of stamping hilarious messages on our test!

We hope we get a good grade on this collection of offsite links that we rounded up for you. We can’t afford to get kicked out of this program!

Highlights include:

Neil Patrick Harris in a toga fighting ninjas. The knee-wibbling picture is below the cut.
Stephen King reads from his Shining sequel, Dr. Sleep.
Isaac Asimov used to tell people there was a time travel chemical.

Every day Stubby the Rocket jets around the internet looking for links of interest. When Stubby finds these links, they get put in our handy Links of Interest section and sometimes on our Twitter and Facebook! Here are today’s:

This Etsy seller was offering this special Lord of the Rings-themed stamp for teachers yesterday. (Already sold out, unfortunately.)
Listen to Stephen King read from Dr. Sleep, his still-in-progress sequel to The Shining.
Dude, there is no time travel chemical, Asimov is just fucking with you again. This io9 article delves into the history behind a prank Isaac Asimov played on SF writers.
Will Edgar Wright and Johnny Depp revive Kolchak: The Night Stalker? We’d like Jason Henninger’s opinion on this, please.
Collapsing a star still only gets you 3% of the way towards the speed of light. New measurements reveal the “wind speed” around a black hole is 20 million MPH. (Wish we’d known that before we collapsed Romulus’ sun!)
The pros and cons of a third Bill & Ted movie are many in this original article from Den of Geek.
Want to take CO2 out of the atmosphere? There’s money in that.
How to save the Legend of Zelda series from ~~Ganon~~ its creative rut.
Neil Patrick Harris. In a toga. Fighting ninjas.

Neil Patrick Harris fights ninjas

Trailer for new Doctor Who game The Eternity Clock. Featuring the voices of Matt Smith and Alex Kingston!
This new trailer for Battleship makes it very clear that it’s basically Armageddon 2 + Transformers 4.
Oh, and there’s a new trailer for Wrath of Titans. Release the... something!
Finally, watch this trailer for Morgan Spurlock’s new Comic-Con documentary. (Or is it a mockumentary?)

Stubby the Rocket is the voice and mascot of Tor.com and could fight ninjas in a toga but shouldn’t steal ALL the spotlight from NPH.

1. ZetaStriker

view all by ZetaStriker | Friday February 24, 2012 11:01am EST

Interesting Zelda article. I don't wholly agree with it, as I like the new gamesand the secret peripheral items like heart pieces still give the exploration feel of the original, but I would like a totally open world Zelda game again. Provided they don't build it like GTA or Skyrim, but instead like the original NES game.

2. SaltManZ

view all by SaltManZ | Friday February 24, 2012 11:40am EST

I was introduced to Zelda with the SNES, so that article, which makes its share of valid points, still mostly comes across as "I don't like this because it's not the first one", like the other article that Tor.com linked recently. Speaking as someone who considers the SNES the system I grew up with (my friends had NESes, but I never played Zelda), I've tried to go back and play the original via emulator, and I absolutely hate it. Most NES games are simply unplayable to someone who didn't grow up with them—terrible graphics, iffy controls, and off-putting difficulty—and the NES Zelda games are no different.

It's funny how the article barely mentions Twillight Princess; for as much as I hated the game until I really got into it (10 hours or so) it hits most of the aspects the author seems to want: sprawling overworlds to explore, with lots of nooks and crannies hidden away and not important to the main plot; minimal handholding by the "companion" character, and dangerous enemy encounters.

3. TorChris

view all by TorChris | Friday February 24, 2012 03:05pm EST

The argument you make in regards to new players coming into games with older graphics and interfaces is something we've been brewing on in-house a lot, actually. Gaming is now old enough that it contains several generational divides and I'm personally very curious about how gamers raised with 3-D gaming react to "the classics." It'd be great to do a feature on that someday.

I agree with the article as far as its insistence on not making fetch quests too key to the order of the game, and giving things a looser narrative. (Also I'm really tired of starting with a Deku Tree dungeon every time!) But I also think Wind Waker and Twilight Princess were extremely solid. Far more than the first two Zelda games, anyway.

4. subwoofer

view all by subwoofer | Friday February 24, 2012 10:44pm EST

Nice toga:)

Woof™.

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