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Heavy.com Launches Fall Season of Programming
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posted by: Shawn Rider
publisher: Heavy.com
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date posted: 03:05 PM Wed Oct 12th, 2005
last revision: 03:03 PM Wed Oct 12th, 2005



Click to read.Heavy.com is kicking off the first-ever full season of original broadband television. We\'re not sure about the accuracy of that claim, but it seems likely to us (as long as you discount longstanding webcam-oriented programming like Jenny Cam). Although, we do wonder if the old Pseudo TV episodes count? Do they?

At any rate, Heavy.com is offering a bunch of original content to users this Fall, and all of these new programs are machinima -- that is, they are all created in game engines. Machinima has been around for awhile now, and some series, such as Red vs. Blue (created in HALO, and now HALO 2), have become very popular. Heavy.com has dabbled in the machinima field before with the \"Pimp My Weapon\" series, which is created in the God of War game engine. \"Pimp My Weapon\" was targeted to PSP users and a prepared PSP package of each episode is offered in addition to the web-viewable video. So far the series has streamed over 9 million episodes.

Machinima is a natural pair for videogame promotion, because the entire entertaining piece advertises the qualities of the game. \"Pimp My Weapon\" focuses more specifically on showing off qualities of God of War than the new episodes. Machinima is also attractive to independent media producers who wish to create animated content quickly and at a low cost. Many machinima groups have been trying to stress machinima\'s rapid and low-impact development, and it looks like Heavy.com has seized on the idea of machinima to leverage these attributes.

The new series expand on the machinima method, incorporating other game engines and melding them with Heavy.com\'s signature style of humor. Two of the new series have already launched. \"Dr. Philprah: Colossus Whisperer\" is created in the Shadow of the Colossus engine, and parodies Dr. Phil and the \"improve my life\" genre of television. \"Honey, I Killed the Geezer\" takes Lucas Kane from Indigo Prophecy as its protagonist and \'humorizes\' the situations found in the videogame. It\'s crass and crude and vaguely offensive, as is most of Heavy.com, but it is well-produced and will no doubt find an audience with plenty of gamers. This is for the Happy Tree Friends and Family Guy crowds.

Most of the series sound like pretty conventional parody: Upcoming debuts in October include \"Tourettes Cowboy\" (created in Activision\'s GUN), \"Gangster Nanny 911\" (created in Activision\'s True Crime 2), and \"The Amazing Super-Powered Emo Kid\" (created in Activision\'s Tony Hawk\'s American Wasteland). But some of the new series sound truly bizarre. \"Half-Metal Jacket\" is described as \"the Bad News Bears meets Stripes\" and follows a group of down and out soldiers in Sony\'s SOCOM 3. And probably the most bizarre-sounding of all of the new series, \"Need for Speed: The Musical\" is described as \"Fast and Furious meets Knight Rider meets Cats.\"

New episodes are premiering all the time on Heavy.com.

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