I know this isn’t strictly movie related, but if you don’t want to hear about Red Shirt Guy aka King of All Nerds from the other day, you can get the hell off my blog.  Red Shirt Guy, who over the weekend shockingly revealed that he has a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome, is now himself a World of Warcaft character.  As confirmed by lead designer Alex Afrasiabi on the WoW forums, “Wildhammer Fact Checker” is now a sidekick to the totally-not-dead Falstad Wildhammer, to accompany him through Aerie Peak in all of his duties as a member of the Council of Three Hammers (which I assume includes snortin’ cocaine and slaying vaginas by the dozen).

The announcement was made in pitch-perfect Warcraft fashion. And by that, I mean it showed up on the WoW forums, a bunch of people called it fake, and then the lead designer showed up to confirm that it was indeed real and made them all look like total n00bz.  Who’s a fake now, F@gzors?  PWNED.

I f*cking love Red Shirt Guy. This is my favorite story since Steven Seagal’s unique physiological reaction to arousal.  Red Shirt Guy is my write-in for governor.  Suck a wiener, Meg Whitman.

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Blizzard Entertainment held a convention celebrating their Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo games over the weekend, and in the course of the event, a great leader arose from the hordes and distinguished himself as the new nerd king.  The video is below, but here is the full text of his question, an achievement on par with removing an enchanted sword from a block of obsidian:

Red Shirt Guy: “Hello.  I just finished reading “The Shattering” yesterday, and I noticed something. It said that Falstad Wildhammer was going to be on the Council of Three Hammers, but in the beta, it’s Kurdrin Wildhammer, and Falstad is not in the game at all.  What happened to him?”

Guys at the podium: “Isn’t Falstad dead?  From… Day of the Dragon?”

Red Shirt Guy: “No.  He survived, and in fact, he was the leader of Aerie Peak and Vanilla Wow through Wrath of the Lich King.”

Guys at the podium:  (humbled) “…Thanks for pointing that out.  We’re going to get that fixed.”

(*the crowd goes wild, He has risen*)

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Spider-man director Sam Raimi is making a World of Warcraft movie, and MTV recently broke the news that Robert Rodat will be writing the script  — if this project doesn’t eventually go through at least three different writers, I’ll eat my top hat and poop some spats.  Rodat is best known for writing Saving Private Ryan (he wasn’t involved with the spinoff, Shaving Ryan’s Privates), and he also wrote The Patriot, but his family doesn’t talk about that.

“We want to be really faithful to the game,” Raimi says. “We would have our writer, Robert Rodat, really craft an original story within that world that feels like a ‘World of WarCraft’ adventure. Only obviously it’s very different ’cause it’s expanded and translated into the world of a motion picture.”

Video game movies are never good because the games rarely have a storyline, so the screenwriter basically has to write an entirely original script, all while his bosses say things like “We want to be really faithful to the game,” — you know, that thing that doesn’t have a story.  But I don’t know much about World of Warcraft, probably because I’ve had sex with women.  What I do know is that when I used to work in an office, I remember vividly some guys from IT standing around one time and one of them said, “Hey, did you guys hear about Bill?  Bill reached 20,000 nerd points (I’m paraphrasing here) over the weekend.”  Then the guys all slapped Bill on the back and shook his hand as if it were the birth of his child.  Anyway, I’m gonna have to plead ignorance on this one.  But if you wanna write up a detailed report, I can grab it when I pick up your sister in my IROC and maybe I’ll give it a look. (*pops collar on letterman jacket*)
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After Spider-Man 3, it was nice to see Sam Raimi go back to his roots with Drag Me to Hell.  But his return to smaller films won’t last long as he’s now signed to direct World of Warcraft, perhaps the ultimate no-win project for a director.

The plan is for Raimi to supervise development of “Warcraft” and shoot the picture after he completes work on “Spider-Man 4,” which gets under way early next year.  The “Warcraft” universe [and by "universe" they mean "video game"] features an epic conflict between the Horde and the Alliance. The game has developed a global following since its launch in 1994 and shows no signs of slowing. Its most recent expansion, “Wrath of the Lich King,” sold more than 2.8 million copies in the first day of release and more than 4 million its first month. [Variety]

Something tells me the movie will be more like the wrath of suck king, amirite?  Haha, good one, Jay.  Anyway, every video game movie so far has been tremendously sucky, but this time they’ve got an unquestionably huge-name game paired with an established, respected director.  If this still ends up sucking, can we all agree that movies based on video games are a bad idea and stop attempting them forever?  Haha, of course that’ll never happen, now get off my lawn.  LIGHTNING BOLT!  LIGHTNING BOLT!

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