| With the recent announcement from Be that BeOS 5.0 would be available for free download, the market has a much higher probability of taking advantage of some great developments in the BeOS game arena, notably some ports by Next Generation Entertainment. Here's an announcement from Gord McLeod, Vice President of Production at NGE: We've put up our brand new website today, hope you like the new look! We've left the stone age behind where it belongs. You'll also note that we've updated the Corum porting schedule and added new news to the front page - Corum III is going gold! Thanks Gord!
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| I went into the cinema thinking "James Spader, he's cool. Angela Bassett, she cool too. And a seemingly hard-SF story." I left the cinema thinking "Nifty effects. Flat story." Okay, so the premise is that there's this deep space emergency medical rescue ship (although seeing that space is Big and travel times fairly long, I dunno how effective a 911 call is Out There) crewed by a couple of pilots, a doctor, two medtechs and a computer tech. The co-pilot, played by Spader, is a recovering-junkie-ex-military-type who requested placement on a medical mission. Bassett plays the ship's doctor. The rescue ship gets a distress call that they have to jump outsystem to reach. They reach the target system, which turns out to be a blue giant star that's sucking in all the debris around it (thanks to the mighty reach of a blue star's gravity). They find the mining station where the call came from, and from that point on the story takes a dive. I can't say much more without giving away parts of the movie, but I will say this: screenwriters who do SF, especially hard SF, need to get away from the "let's use a SF setting for this slasher/mystery/action film" and *really use* the setting and circumstances instead of just using it as an excuse for cool effects (qv. Alien by Ridley Scott, yup, a horror flick, but it was done with the setting and circumstances as an integral part of the story). Thankfully I watched this on cheap night, in a big-screen cinema. It's worth the five bucks that way, if only for the spiffy eye-candy. I love big space effects though, a la 2001, so keep in mind that bias of mine. Do I recommend Supernova? Yes, sort of. Cheap night only, at a big screen, and even then it's a bit of a push.
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