Japanese Smiley-Bots Will Kill You For Your Name

Kevin Kelly — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:00:35 PST

In the movie Onigocco or The Chasing World, a Japanese teenager gets flipped into an parallel world where everyone who has the last name Sato is being ruthlessly hunted down. Of course, that just happens to be his last name. While trying to evade the smiling cyborgs, he encounters alternate versions of his girlfriend and school buddies, and finds himself protecting them and trying to escape from the clutches of the King of Japan. Check out the trailer below, and find out more.

This film sounds like Terminator meets Stephen King's The Long Walk, combined with alternate reality elements from The Matrix. In Japan, "onigokko" is a version of the game of tag, with a players chasing down others. Of course, in this movie it's cyborgbots with creepy heads, red vision, and some strange weapons chasing down poor Sato. If he evades his pursuers for a certain number of hours each day, then he gets various wishes granted. Although it looks like everything starts over the next day, so good luck wishing for the nightmare to end... or an unlimited number of wishes.

The film opened on February 2nd in Japan, and with any luck will be finding its way over here on a DVD platter.

Giant Robot Repairs the Arc de Triomphe

Kevin Kelly — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:55:54 PST

We hope that upcoming MMOThe Day manages to look like its sumptuous concept art, pictured above. That image of the Arc de Triomphe being repaired, upgraded, or duplicated is just simply amazing. The premise of The Day is that two parallel worlds smash together, and we've got a whole gallery of strange history-mashup imagery from The Day for you to gawk at.

Choosing a main image was especially difficult because here's this amazing crashed FedEx plane with a bridge for a wing, these enormous turrets that look like they've grown out of the landscape, or this massive coastal battle.

Korean developer Reloaded Studios has only been open for a month, and this ambitious massively multiplayer action game is scheduled for release in 2010 and will be their first.

Set in the near future, The Day finds mankind discovering a way to travel between two connected parallel worlds. Players will face a changing world never before seen in an online game as they travel back and forth between the past and present, accomplishing critical missions that extremely influence and affect their present-day world. With the fate of mankind at stake, players are thrown into brutal warfare and a fight to keep humanity from slipping into self-destruction across time.

If the game maanges to look half as good as this artwork, we're onboard. And if for some reason the game never makes it out, we hope they'll publish these pictures in a huge coffee table book.

The Day screenshots [Gamers Hell]

io9: parallel world

Japanese Smiley-Bots Will Kill You For Your Name

Giant Robot Repairs the Arc de Triomphe