Friday 5 collects five of the week’s biggest news items from nerd culture. Each Friday we’ll relay the latest trailers, biggest casting news, and nerd culture’s most important stories of the week. Let’s get right to it, shall we?
Nerd Culture Highlights for the Week of May 8, 2016.
1. A new (and final) Donkey Kong high score has been achieved.
Wes Copeland is believed to have attained the highest score possible in Nintendo’s 1981 smash hit Donkey Kong. His new score of 1,218,000 bests the previous record held by Dean Saglio by more than 11,000 points. Copeland’s score is currently awaiting official validation by TwinGalaxies.com, the “official home of video game world records and player rankings.”
2. The next generation of Pokemon games’ starters have been announced.
Pokemon Sun and Moon are due out in November of this year, and we now know the pool of starter Pokemon from which we’ll choose our first companion. In classic Pokemon style, there is a fire type (Litten), a grass type (Rowlet), and a water type (Popplio). I’ve already gone on record stating that there are simply too many Pokemon, but these two new games bring at least five new monsters to the roster (the three starters and the two new god Pokemon) and that isn’t even counting the inevitable evolutions of the starters themselves. There’s really no telling how many new faces this generation will include.
But while I think there’s too many, there are some who think there aren’t enough and are still looking to catch them all. And of course the internet is already clamoring over which of the starters is best. My favorite comes from Polygon.com. The staff’s reasons for their selections made me laugh.
Related: Poor Popplio.
3. George RR Martin released (another) chapter from The Winds of Winter.
The Winds of Winter is the sixth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series by George RR Martin. Fans have been dying for him to finish the newest installment – particularly as the sixth season of the HBO hit Game of Thrones TV show is currently airing. But alas…according to Martin’s own Live Journal, we’ve still got a sizable wait ahead of us. In the meantime, he posted an Arianne Martell chapter to the internet to continue to whet your appetite…as if it needed it. You can read that chapter directly here.
He is quick to stop any rumors of the book’s completion:
And no, just to spike any bulls$%^ rumors, changing the sample chapter does NOT mean I am done. See the icon up above? Monkey is still on my back… but he’s growing, he is, and one day…
The icon he’s referring to is a monkey on his back. Get it?
Oh, and he changed the chapter from an Alayne Stone chapter that had been available for a year. Hopefully that is no indication that we’ll have to wait that long again for the rest of the book!
4. Dreamwork’s Netflix exclusive Voltron drops June 10 and the trailer is rad!
When you are of a certain age, nothing was cooler in your cartoons than seeing an object turn into another object. And if it was in the anime styling of the 1980s Japanese cartoons, even better. And honestly, that is all Voltron had going for it: a series of robot tigers piloted by a ragtag group of heroes who formed a giant warrior. To see Dreamworks launch a new series on Netflix in June gives me hope that a very good idea might be realized into a great series, especially in a genre (cartoons and family shows) that Netflix hasn’t really taken aim at yet. Great trailer and I am pumped for June!
5. The Assassin’s Creed trailer dropped this week.
Movies based on video game franchises have a really poor history. They are middling at their best and atrocious at their very worst because a lot gets lost in the translation. So here’s this trailer for Assassin’s Creed and I’m left wondering what I would think of it if video game movies didn’t have such a bad history. As it is, I remain skeptical and just can’t bring myself to be excited about a movie based on a video game franchise that I legitimately enjoyed.
Who knows? Maybe this one will break the curse and prove that it can be done well.
We’ll see you next Friday for five more highlights from nerd culture. Until then, feel free to share a highlight in the comments if we missed something.
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