We are happy to announce our latest contest, Legendary Tales, inspired by the upcoming Paramount Pictures movie Beowulf. In the style of a graphic novel, tell us your story of overcoming a seemingly insurmountable foe in World of Warcraft. Simply create and submit a screenshot-based photo journal of your in-game exploits, and you could win! Whether you held off the fel orcs of Hellfire Citadel or overcame the chicken scourge of Goldshire, your story should dazzle and amaze.

Five winners will be chosen to receive a one-year subscription to World of Warcraft!

(WoW page for submissions and other details.)

Which sounds lovely, but I doubt very much that this contest was “inspired” by Beowulf, but rather was *paid* by Beowulf. There is a difference.

And I think it would be nice if we just called it like it is instead of pretending the Blizz dudes were “inspired” to create a Beowulf-like contest because it seems like a really cool movie.

Each of the 7 mini-episodes of “My Second Life” explore a different subculture within the virtual world, according to HBO …

Oh god.

(Via Washington Post)

SPOILER … There’s zombies of various levels of zombieness, they die, people die, there’s chaos, The End. That wasn’t much of a surprise, was it?

Naturally, I didn’t have a lot of hope for this movie, even on the very loose “Action Movie Quality Scale”, but the opportunity to make sarcastic remarks to friends and strangers alike was irresistible. (Think: LOTS of opportunities for sarcastic remarks.)

The movie could have been vastly improved if the small band of heroes ran across boxes of ammo and health kits like you do in the game. “Shit, we’re running low on ammo. Hey, here’s a box. Wonder what’s inside.” “Jesus, if only my health would regen faster, I might make it to the med lab. By the way, what was inside that box?”

The BFG makes a brief appearance, but the movie shitheads are such noobs they only fire it a couple of times. (idiots) They even find the damn gun early in the movie, instead of much later on like in the game. Hi. Big Gun Made by Advanced Weapons Lab. Use Please?

The best part is a short couple-minute segment where the camera perspective is like a first-person shooter, like it was in Doom, the Game, not the ass Movie: he’s swinging his gun (not the BFG, of course) from side to side, picking off the zombs here and there, switching to the trusty chainsaw when appropriate. Sadly, that part is over too soon and it’s back to being an idiot noob.

While brief glimpses of horrific monsters in flickering overhead lighting is very effective in a game environment, it’s just damn annoying in a movie. Crimony, let us see the damn things, that is kind of the point in a movie … visuals. Or, how about this — a boss monster? The fuck, is there one around here? Bah, I’d settle for seeing the boss wtfpwn all the Marines because they’re noob idiots that don’t use the BFG and I hate them.

Good thing for the Marines that the movie was set on Co-op Multi Player Easy Mode. No way they’d survive on Nightmare.

Learn to play.