L.A. Noire

LA Noire is an upcoming video game developed by Team Bondi with Rockstar Games. It s set in "a perfectly re-created Los Angeles" of 1947, with players being given an open-ended challenge to solve a series of murder mysteries.

As the title suggests, the game draws heavily from both plot and aesthetic elements of film noir - stylistic films from the 1940s and 1950s that shared similar visual styles and themes including crime, sex and moral ambiguity and were often shot in black and white with harsh, low-key lighting. The game uses a distinctive coloring-style in homage to the visual style of film noir. The post-war setting is the backdrop for plot elements that reference the detective films of the '40s, such as corruption and drugs, with a classical jazz soundtrack.

L.A. Noire is also notable for using Lightsprint's real-time global illumination technology, as well as Depth Analysis's newly developed piece of technology for the film and video game industries called MotionScan, where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle. With this technology the look of the characters in the game are almost life-like. Check out a few clips for it below. The game is due out May 17th in the US, May 20th in Europe.









http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/

Gun Sales Go Up After Arizona Shooting

Spotted this article this morning and it made me cringe. Jason Linkins from The Huffington Post in the States writes about how Gun Sales in Arizona have skyrocketed since the rampage of Jared Lee Loughner.

Loughner went into a Safeway Supermarket parking lot where United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords was having a constituent meeting called "Congress on Your Corner". Loughner shot around 19-20 people, including shooting Giffords in the back of the head.

Those killed in the incident include chief judge for the U.S. District Court for Arizona John Roll, a nine-year-old girl, a congressional aide, two 76-year-olds and a 79-year-old.

Now enough of the horrific incident, onto Linkins article, heres a few exerpts from it:

"Hey, everyone. Not to unnerve you, but apparently, days after a madman went on a murdery rampage with a Glock in Arizona, Arizonans are heading to gun stores in droves to purchase the very same weapon used by Jared Lee Loughner. It's as good an example as anything to demonstrate that there really is no such thing as bad publicity, only an inplacable, gnawing cynicism that permeates our existence and sends us, sobbing, into a fetal position."

He now quotes Michael Riley from Bloomberg News, stating:

"After a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people at a Tucson shopping center on Jan. 8, Greg Wolff, the owner of two Arizona gun shops, told his manager to get ready for a stampede of new customers. Wolff was right. Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols -- popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters -- flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

"We're at double our volume over what we usually do," Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition."

"One-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent on Jan. 10 compared with the corresponding Monday a year ago, the second-biggest increase of any state in the country, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data. From a year earlier, handgun sales ticked up yesterday 65 percent in Ohio, 16 percent in California, 38 percent in Illinois and 33 percent in New York, the FBI data show, and increased nationally about 5 percent.

Federally tracked gun sales, which are drawn from sales in gun stores that require a federal background check, also jumped following the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, in which 32 people were killed."

Amazing for these gun salesman, just get one kid to go out and kill a few people to create good advertising instead of making a dumb commercial. This doesn't help America's gun-crazed attitude.

Here is the article from Huffington here