Orson Scott Card dishes on the announcement that Marvel Comics have opted the rights to publish both Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow; think “story board” for the Ender’s Game movie.
Random House keeps a list of what they consider to be the 100 Best Novels of the “Modern Library”; Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game comes is listed at #59! “Cult Classic” my butt.
Seems like nobody likes Microsoft’s Silverlight; we took the liberty of reposting the Channel 10 video on YouTube (file too big) Google Video for everyone that doesn’t have Silverlight installed (does anybody?):
After reading that the Battle Room game was going to be developed by the same folks that produced another XBOX LIVE downloadable game called Undertow, I gave it a shot. But it didn’t really do anything for me. It just seemed a bit, well… two-dimensional. It was more of an arcade style shooter than an immersible virtual world that you might envision for an Ender’s Game video game. While the graphics in Undertow portray a 3D world; the gameplay is restricted to moving on an X/Y axis: up, down, forward & back. Except for the cut-scenes, there weren’t even any camera angles that give you the feeling of really being immersed in the game. And that’s really what I’d like to see in a Battle Room video game… I want to feel like I’m in there with Dragon Army.
But maybe I’m missing something. Undertow has been getting awards that are encouraging me to take another look, maybe this weekend. Has anyone here played Undertow before, and do you think this would be a good format for the Battle Room game in the works?
Here’s the Undertow trailer; what do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments box down below:
It’s almost impossible to find anything online about the Enderverse Comics; outside of the occasional press release from last year, there hasn’t been anything official out there for us to look at, which makes it difficult to spread the gospel. The DabelBrothers.com site has no info, nor really does Marvel.com; even Hatrack.com (Orson Scott Card’s official site) has little info worth mentioning. We’d love to see a more comprehensive site put together to showcase the work, hear the stories behind the story development and artwork, and perhaps sneak previews into future work. But it’s dead out there, folks. So what’s an Enderverse fan to do?
Well, it’s not much, (and we question it’s copyright usage) but there is a site “across the pond” that features some screenshots of the Gold Bug comic:
http://forum.superpouvoir.com/showthread.php?t=6836
It includes this one, also found on the Marvel.com site:
Great new games coming your way from XBOX Live arcade
While we’re optimistically skeptical about the development of the Ender’s Game video game “Battle Room”, it’s heartening to hear Chair Entertainment’s Donald Mustard talk about wanting to “not ruin” the franchise, and that he suspects this will be one of the more “fully featured” games we’ve seen in the modern downloadable games space.
It’s actually a great interview, covering a bit of Chair’s history and relationship with OSC. They apparently approached Orson Scott Card to write the book “Empire” for the video game of the same title, rather than the typically “other way around” hollywood approach; and that project eventually led to discussions around the Ender’s Game franchise. Apparently, they were involved in both Advent Rising and the downloadable game Undertow; I’m not sure that’s a good sign (I tried Undertow last week, and got bored pretty quickly.)
It was pretty difficult to find it online; we tried searching for “ender’s comics”, “enderverse comic”, “ender’s game comic”,”gold bug”, etc, but found very little information about it anywhere, including Hatrack.com, the defunct Dabel Brothers site, or even on the Marvel Comics catalog site. But we finally tracked it down. The Enderverse Comic “Gold Bug” was in fact published by Marvel Comics this summer, but not as a stand-alone comic. That’s probably why it’s so impossible to find through Google; there’s no dedicated product page for the Gold Bug title. Instead, it was printed inside of an Alvin Maker title: “Red Prophet: The Tales Of Alvin Maker”. We’re placing our order today; we’ll post a review as soon as we can.
In the meantime, you can read more about it here at Amazon.com:
If you’re a fan of Futurama (and we can only assume you’re an Ender’s Game fan if you’re reading this), than the working title of one of four upcoming Futurama movies should catch your attention: Futurama: Bender’s Game.
Can we dare to hope that they’ll do more than pay homage to the title? We’ll be waiting to find out. And we’re not alone; a Wikipedian working on the official Wikipeida entry even went so far to write that “films title is a reference to the science fiction novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.”
Just when you think nothing new is happening in the Enderverse, we’re seeing a continuous stream of new material, including this latest short novel set for release in two weeks, available on Amazon.com here:
Announcement from Hattrack.com:
“Orson Scott Card offers a Christmas gift to his millions of fans with this short novel set during Ender’s first years at the Battle School where it is forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.
The children come from many nations, many religions; while they are being trained for war, religious conflict between them is not on the curriculum. But Dink Meeker, one of the older students, doesn’t see it that way. He thinks that giving gifts isn’t exactly a religious observation, and on Sinterklaas Day he tucks a present into another student’s shoe.
This small act of rebellion sets off a battle royal between the students and the staff, but some surprising alliances form when Ender comes up against a new student, Zeck Morgan. The War over Santa Claus will force everyone to make a choice.”
Source: Hattrack.com
Found in an article in the Daily Hearald (Central Utah) reporting on a lecture Orson Scott Card gave at BYU.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Card’s best-selling science fiction novel, “Ender’s Game.”
