I've mentioned this elsewhere, but it's funny enough to mention again here.

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The first real 3D First-Person Shooter (FPS) game was WOLFENSTEIN 3D for the PC in 1992, followed by DOOM in 1993, STAR WARS: DARK FORCES in 1995, DUKE NUKEM 3D and QUAKE in 1996, STAR WARS JEDI KNIGHT: DARK FORCES 2 in 1997, HALF-LIFE in 1998, RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN in 2001, and HALF-LIFE 2 in 2004.

But in 1997, GOLDENEYE 007 came out for ( Read more... )

Charlie Higson has been writing a series of Young Adult books depicting James Bond as a teenager. Sure, it's absurd that even before he joins the British Secret Service he's a magnet for supervillains, but the books are actually pretty good, and do a decent job of capturing Ian Fleming's flavor. A nice touch is they're set in the 1930s. In this ( Read more... )

I never had a Nintendo 64 (or any console game system), but the 1997 First-Person Shooter game GoldenEye 007 became legendary. Game enthusiasts still go on and on about it today.

I hadn't played a computer game in a long time, but I got a hankering to the other night, and what with SAUNTUM OF QUALACE opening next week, was in a James Bond mood, ( Read more... )

QUANTUM OF SOLACE, Daniel Craig's second Bond movie, is still five months away, but there are two new James Bond novels out.

One is DEVIL MAY CARE (Here on Amazon), by Sebastian Faulks. The other is the third "Young Bond" novel, DOUBLE OR DIE (Here on Amazon), by Charlie Higson.


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Twice each year, on July 2nd and August 16th, tomorrow, the Italian horse race the Palio is run in SienaIt's a 90-second race where horses representing ten of the city's neighborhoods race around the town square ( Read more... )

I finally saw CASINO ROYALE.

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I'm a fan of the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming. And, to various degrees, I've liked most of the Bond novels that have come since then by other authors, particularly the really strange and obscure COLONEL SUNIn 2004, the Ian Fleming estate commissioned Charles Higson to write a series of five "Teen Bond" books, no doubt trying to get on the ( Read more... )

I was going to send this link that has a cool timelapse video of the creation of a Venice set in Pinewood Studios for the Bond film CASINO ROYALE.

Official Site for the film
(click on the card on the far left, then choose VIDEOS, then the third video over is "007 Set Stage Build."

But...my agent in Venice (she's been keeping tabs on the movie, ( Read more... )

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