If you've been on the internet since forever, you know that The Onion is a humor site that satirizes the news. People's Daily didn't seem to know that when it ran a top story, stating that North Korea's supreme leader—and fellow nerd like us—Kim Jong-un as the "The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive for 2012". People's Daily apparently confused People with The Onion. Sure, that happens all the time!

As Twitter user Adam Minter showed, the snafu even made the People's Daily front page (not sure if the story made its way into the print edition).

China's paper of record quoted this bit from The Onion:

"With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman's dream come true. Blessed with an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle, and, of course, that famous smile," it said.

"He has that rare ability to somehow be completely adorable and completely macho at the same time," said Marissa Blake-Zweiber, editor of The Onion Style and Entertainment.

And boy is he ever sexy! He's sexy when he's looking at things, and he's sexy when he's on a horse.

As website ShanghaiIst points out, People's Daily showed off just how smexy Kim Jong-Un is with a fifty-five page gallery (FIFTY-FIVE) of the supreme leader. Here's a sample:

SO HOT. Of course, gamers will know that Kim Jong-Un was way sexier in the first-person shooter Homefront when a professional actor played him.

This is like an Onion article that's about an Onion article being turned into a real newspaper article.

North Korea's top leader named The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive for 2012 [People's Daily via ShanghaiIst]

This past weekend, the video up top made the Twitter-rounds. It's of a failed quicktime event from 2007's Spiderman 3, and it is hilarious.

Watching it over and over, while laughing, got me thinking: There are so many terrible quicktime events in gaming, it'd be fun to put together a huge list of them. And while you may think that bitching about quicktime events is so 2008, well… I've got some upcoming fall games that would like a word.

So, have at it: What's your favorite terrible quicktime event?

If you played Homefront, the new trailer for the remake of 1984's Red Dawn is going to seem like déjà vu all over again.

When THQ's ambitious but shallow 2011 first-person shooter first started its hype machine, the comparisons to the 1980s Cold War action movie rampant. Part of that is because the movie and the game shared the same core premise, where a foreign power invades and occupies American soil.

The two projects shared a creative contributor, too, in the form of John Milius, who wrote the screenplay for Red Dawn. Milius helped Kaos Studios shape the dramatic scenario for Homefront, which also had an ordinary town torn to shreds by the army of another country.

In Homefront, the invaders were from a unified Korean army. The villains in the new Red Dawn trailer are Korean, too, led by Will Yun Lee, who voices the lead character in the upcoming Sleeping Dogs game. The remake, like the game, has America invaded by the Koreans (who were, as with the game, supposed to be Chinese). The remake was in the works before the game, though.

Not surprisingly, you'll see some motifs repeating in the trailers for Homefront and the new and old Red Dawn films. Armies marching down suburban streets, swarms of enemy aircraft hovering ominously overhead, a ragtag rebel force fighting back… all of those plot points get trotted out in game and movie teasers.

The new Red Dawn comes out in November. We'll see if they go as far as Homefront did in its depiction of an American occupation.

In a superb autopsy of Kaos Studios, closed three months after it finished Homefront for THQ, Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander paints a vivid picture of a studio doomed by meddling, duplicitous executives, and filled with underqualified managers, overworked developers and even an overflowing urinal.

There's a lot of anonymous sourcing, which means there's a lot of mud flung by pissed-off people who lost their jobs. And a huge wad of it lands on the guy whose name helped sell the game's concept to the public from the day it was announced.

That would be John Milius, the screenwriter known for, among other things, 1984's Red Dawn. Milius was invoked the day THQ announced the game in 2009, as Red Dawn's story closely mirrors that of Homefront's.

However, "Although ... Milius is credited with writing the script, multiple staffers tell Gamasutra he ultimately wrote not a word of it, despite the game containing at least 20,000 lines of dialog," Alexander reports. "Most former employees credit Kaos writer C.J. Kershner with Homefront's script."

Kershner, in the game's credits, is credited with "associate designer, writing, QA."

[Update] Back in 2009, THQ clarified to Eurogamer that Milius' role was more as a story consultant than a screenplay writer. Eurogamer quoted a THQ representative as saying he was "definitely involved in the dialogue," however. Still, ""He's not writing the story per se but he's heavily involved in structuring it and increasing the quality of it really," said Kaos' Erin Daly at the time.

The remainder of the original post follows.

Danny Bilson, the THQ's former executive in charge of core games, is portrayed as having more of an influence over Homefront's story—good and bad. Bilson, himself a Hollywood screenwriter who was run out of his THQ job in late May, "came up with much of the high-level story ideas for the game," Alexander reports. However, he also insisted on the scenario involving North Korea as the invading force—a situation some critics laughed at as wildly unrealistic—because original concepts depicting China as the aggressor were seen as harmful to THQ's business ambitions in that country.

That only scratches the surface of this tale of ambitious failure, unreasonable expectations, undue credit and stinging recriminations. My favorite detail was the "Urinal Bucket," which came to symbolize the mordant humor with which Kaos staffers viewed their plight, many convinced their shop would be closed even before Homefront released.

Kaos Descends: How Homefront's Developer Met its End [Gamasutra]

Kim Jong-il, who has ruled the Communist state of North Korea since 1994, has passed away. Which means 2011 shooter Homefront was only two weeks off making one of the most timely (if accidental) fictional statements in video game history.

In Homefront, a game which takes the death of Kim as the catalyst for a series of North Korean actions which culminate in a Communist conquest of Northern Asia and subsequent occupation of much of the United States, his demise is listed as having taken place in 2012.

With North Korean authorities reporting that he died two days ago, on December 17, 2011, that's pretty damn close. Two more weeks and they'd have been right on the money.

Developed by Kaos Studios, Homefront's overall story was actually penned by John Milius, who not only co-wrote Apocalypse Now but, more poignantly, both wrote and directed Red Dawn, another tale of Communists invading the United States.

In the real world, it's expected that rule will pass to his third son, Kim Jong-un, otherwise known as "The Brilliant Comrade", who the BBC speculates is in his late-20s.

In Homefront (the above image is a screenshot from the game), Kim Jong-il is succeeded by...his third son Kim Jong-un, who quickly moves to unify North and South Korea before annexing Japan and South-East Asia. Then invading Hawaii. And then the continental United States.

According to Wikileaks reports made public last year, Kim Jong-il's second son, Kim Jong-chol, "is 'more interested in video games' than governing".

Kim's death was announced on North Korean State television earlier today, with the cause of his passing said to be due to "physical and mental over-work". It's reported he died while onboard a train outside the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-il suffered a series of health setbacks in 2008, including what was believed to be a stroke, while in 2009 it's suspected he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Homefront had to be edited for its Japanese release on the grounds that it portrayed Kim as having passed away, which at the time was not the case. Whether THQ bother re-editing the game now that it is true is unclear, given the game was released a while ago and wasn't exactly Japan's biggest-selling game of the year.

Few tears will be shed outside the Communist state over his passing. So let's take this opportunity to take one last look at the wonderful "Kim Looking at Things" site instead.

Back in March, PR firm TrashTalkFCM thought it'd be a good idea to promote upcoming shooter Homefront by releasing a ton of balloons. It wasn't.

Not only did the game stink, but when most of the balloons ended up in San Francisco Bay, it attracted the attention of Bay Area water control officials, who have decided to fine the company $7,000 for the stunt.

While publisher THQ initially defended the move, saying they were "soy-based, biodegradable balloons", San Fran officials said their landing on the water presented "a hazard to birds and aquatic life".

They did not comment on the hazards Homefront posed to people who paid money for it.

Red Balloon Marketing Ploy Gone Awry Ends In $7000 Fine [SF Appeal, via VG247]

Would you shoot someone responsible for America's horrible housing market? Would you like to? What if you met his wife and kid first?

How did we get here, and where are we going? What happens when the 99% rise up, and more to the point, how happy will you be to play a video game that casts you as one of them? Or what if you're playing as a police officer, an enforcer of the status quo?

The recent economic recession—and its fallout—looms over most everything these days, and video games are starting to reflect that. From Grand Theft Auto V to the newest Rainbow 6, it's looking as though amid the zombies, aliens, cops and foreign soldiers we'll be fighting, it's the economy that will be the next big video game bad guy.

Given the time it takes to make a modern video game (generally a year at the fastest, and often two or three), it makes sense that big-budget AAA games would be a little bit behind the curve when it comes to tackling relevant social topics. It wasn't until several years after 9/11 that we started seeing games referencing the "war on terror," placing Homeland Security and FEMA center stage, and sometimes openly referencing the attacks on the World Trade Center. (I should note that in this post, I'm discussing AAA games, not faster-to-make newsgames, though I don't doubt there are plenty of those that deal with the economy already.)

Big-budget game makers are often skittish about approaching topical material. Hot-button issues don't guarantee sales, and often they're more trouble than they're worth. Take, for example, the saga of Atomic Games' Six Days in Fallujah, a documentary-style war game that attempted to show aspects of the grisly human costs of the war in Iraq only to be dropped by its publisher and never see the light of day. Or, look at the foofaraw that erupted just last year over Medal of Honor naming one of its multiplayer teams "The Taliban," only to back off at the last minute and rename them "Opposing Force." Whether it's due to games' spotty history with controversial material, their interactive nature, or their presumed audience, topical AAA games can be a tough sell.

In the first trailer for Rockstar's just-announced Grand Theft Auto V, (among all the other things we noticed), we saw several signs of economic woes and general down-and-outness. An encampment of homeless people under an overpass, a guy begging for beer money on the street.

The most recent Grand Theft Auto, 2008's GTA IV, was an at-times scathingly topical game. Between the right-wing blabbermouths on "Weasel News," the constant looming threat of terrorism, and the internet-addled populace of Liberty City, I'd even go so far as to call it the most effective video game rendition of "America ca. 2007" anyone will ever make.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Rockstar capture the new American zeitgeist, four years later. And while it's likely that while the nation's economic woes will provide a backdrop for GTA V, it wouldn't surprise me to see it play a more integral role in the storytelling, as well. I can easily imagine the economy factoring into the protagonist's return to a life of crime, or a storyline revolving around helping out a homeless former banker, or a story about taking down a corrupt financial institution, or even a few missions poking fun at the Occupy movement.

In Take-Two's earnings call today, a spokesman described GTA V as a story of the "pursuit of the almighty dollar." For any other game, that would just sound like vague marketing language, but Rockstar tends to choose their words more carefully that most. GTA IV was described time and again as a story of the "pursuit of the American dream," and the finished game very emphatically focused on that theme. Hearing GTA V described as a story focused on the pursuit of money makes me think that the American economy will be front and center.

Kaos studio's Homefront dealt with the economy in its own twisted, interesting way. In the game's fiction (written by Apocalypse now co-author John Milius), America has lost its world standing due to economic imbalance and a shortage of oil, and as a result has become susceptible to foreign invasion. The main character is cast as an insurgent, the very same sort of "freedom fighter" that other war games label as terrorists. The game was a bit of a flop, but it's heartening to hear that acclaimed developer Crytek has assumed the reins of the franchise. Kaos was playing with some very compelling stuff: What makes an insurgent? What drives us to acts of terrorism? What does it mean to truly have nothing to lose? One can't help but hope that Crytek will explore those questions further.

Terrorists make for effective cannon fodder in games, but as villains, they can be difficult to write. One of the easiest ways to give a character or group of characters depth is by adding backstory—you know, "why did the chicken cross the road?" But with terrorists, it's a bit more difficult to write motivation. For various reasons, religious beliefs are generally off the table with big-budget games, so most video game terrorist groups are motivated by some sort of vague anger at America and the West for imperialistic tendencies. And most if not all modern-day military shooters are perfectly content to avoid these sorts of questions entirely, often by putting some sort of Bond-ian villain behind it all. How many games have crudely taped a megalomaniacal mastermind and an army of "Russian Ultranationalists" onto their story in an attempt to give Western gamers a more palatable enemy to kill?

Ubisoft's just-announced Rainbow 6: Patriots also features terrorists, but with a recession-flavored twist: they're fueled by rage at the nation's economic elite and have risen up and begun destroying national landmarks. At the start of a new video of prototype gameplay, a man and his family are taken hostage by terrorists who tell him, "You really did cash in on everyone else getting foreclosed, didn't you? Today you're going to make up for that."

In the game itself, players will be controlling law enforcers facing an armed uprising. It echoes real life in ways that may be uncomfortable to acknowledge—what will we do when pitted against an enemy with whose cause we may sympathize? As I imagine a law-enforcement or SWAT video game based on the recent Occupy Oakland protests, I have to wonder: would players be cast as beleaguered public servants trying to do their best or the jackbooted thugs who violently put down dissent?

Economic anger feels intense and relatable, and it can make games more believable, complex, and scary. It remains to be seen whether economic issues will merely be the latest window dressing for video game carnage, or whether some developers and writers will choose to go deeper.

I find myself expecting a lot of the former, but hoping for at least a little bit of the latter. The recession is here, and whether our on-screen characters are fighting around it, against it, or because of it, it's not going away anytime soon.

Is the new Homefront necessary? Pardon that imprudent question, but when a man is drowning in a sea of first-person shooters, may he question the next bucket?

This morning we got the non-surprise news that THQ will bring us a Homefront 2 coupled with the surprise news that the game will be made by Crytek, people who have made first-person shooters that people love.

There is a chance that this could turn out really well, if a few key things happen. And there's also one big problem that could render the project a big waste of time.

A year ago, the whole Homefront effort felt impressively bold. THQ was trying, as most game companies do, to have their own Call of Duty. But they were simultaneously doing something that felt fresh and edgy. That's how it seemed when Homefront was all tease and promise. It would be a shooter set in an America over-run by the invading force of a unified Korea. Players would fight through internment camps of Americans, liberate the parking lots of hardware stores and save at least part of the nation from invaders.

The game hobbled to its release, disappointing people who played it with its short and constricted storyline campaign. Its competitive multiplayer that, like most competitive multiplayer modes in most modern first-person-shooters could barely draw a small crowd. Too many potential Homefront customers were busy playing their 1000th match of Call of Duty, which is the self-defeating reason competing shooters like Homefront both exist and fail to catch on.

Today, THQ says Homefront was "commercially successful," and, hence we're getting a sequel. THe game wasn't successful enough to keep the studio that made it, Kaos, from being shut down in expensive New York City. The sequel was initially out-sourced to the tax-subsidized game-making mecca of Montreal, but now the future of Homefront will be taken even further from the country it portrays, to Crytek, a company that makes most of its games in Europe.

How does this path lead to an FPS sequel that we've got to play?

Crytek can fix a big Homefront problem. The best games that Crytek is known for, Far Cry and Crysis were beloved for their beautiful graphics and for their un-funnelled action. These games knocked the walls out of the standard corridors of the first-person shooter and broke down the invisible barriers that constrained much of the action in Call of Duty and other modern gun games. In Crytek's best games, players could more freely go where they wanted to, experimenting with tactics by approaching a combat zone from various angles, testing an array of weapons and exploring what worked best in a specific skirmish.

The point of Crytek's open approach to first-person shooter level design is to give players the freedom of a guerilla fighter, to let them get out of the marching lane of most FPSes and into the jungle sidelines of an insurgent combatant. The Homefront fiction calls for players to fight as a guerilla force, to sabotage and antagonize an occupier. That should suit the makers of Far Cry and Crysis perfectly.

If one of the problems with Homefront is that it felt to narrow and too linear, THQ couldn't do better than Crytek to open things up. Of course, graphics probably sell more than open-FPS-gameplay does and it is Crytek's formidable graphics tech that likely helped THQ sign Crytek for the sequel. But look at what Homefront is—or at least what I think it is: it's a game about America. America, as people who've traveled through it know, is big. It's defined by its expansiveness, its cities' broad streets, its vast plains, great lakes, its super-sized landscape. It doesn't seem right that a game about America would feel as constricted as the first Homefront did. If Crytek opens things up as only Crytek can, that would feel right.

This expansive-America approach could be a misreading of THQ's plans, mind you. Compare the American focus of THQ's description of Homefront back in March, when the game was brand-new…

2027. A once proud America has fallen, her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray. Crippled by a devastating EMP strike, the USA is powerless to resist the ever expanding occupation of a savage, nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic.
Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs.  This is a police state where high school stadiums have become detention centers, and shopping malls shelter armored attack vehicles. A once-free people are now prisoners… or collaborators… or revolutionaries.

…to the more global description of the Homefront franchise in today's Crytek press release….

The year is 2027. The world as we know it is unraveling after fifteen years of economic meltdown and widespread global conflict over dwindling natural resources.
 
A once proud America has fallen, her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray. Crippled by a devastating EMP strike the USA is powerless to resist the ever expanding occupation of a savage, nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic.
 
Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs.  This is a police state where high school stadiums have become detention centers, and shopping malls shelter armored attack vehicles. A once-free people are now prisoners … or collaborators … or revolutionaries.
 
Meanwhile, the splintered nations of Europe struggle to maintain peace at home, as the global economy continues its downward spiral, and civil order disintegrates. The world is teetering on the brink of ruin …

Are we simply in store for another multi-theater globe-trotting first-person shooter in Homefront 2? Been (Modern Warfare) there repeatedly, already about to (Battlefield 3) do that again.

Crytek could use a dose of Homefront. When many of us last had a chance to play a new Crytek game, we were playing Crysis 2, a game that, like Homefront was supposed to grab the FPS player during the Call of Duty off-season. It was a game that, like Homefront was set in an invaded America. Crysis 2's invaders were aliens who resisted the player in a partially-toppled New York. That scenario signaled Crytek's desire to tap gamers' zeal to defend an iconic American metropolis. It didn't, however, distinguish its enemies or its take on America in the process. These alien invasions and detonations of America blur into one.

We're at the precipice of subjectivity here, but a resistance against Korean occupiers in the American west feels fresher and more distinct than the repelling of another alien invasion of New York. Homefront's fiction therefore doesn't just suit the style of game Crytek excels in, but also could help make Crytek's new game feel more relevant and more special.

None of this matters without genius multiplayer. Modern first-person shooters don't sell millions because of their storyline campaigns. They don't stay in people's game consoles eight months after they were bought because people want to relive the narrative again.

Multiplayer is the draw. Multiplayer is the past-time. Multiplayer is what no Call of Duty competitor has been able to make much of a dent in. Battlefield 3 will try next month, but already this year, Homefront failed, Crysis 2 failed, F.E.A.R. 3 failed, Killzone 3 failed, Duke Nukem Forever failed and so on.

CoD is still king. Halo still hangs around, too. This is where the "why bother" question seems Quixotic to answer. To get Homefront 2 to be a hit, Crytek needs to figure out how to do multiplayer that matters and, well, uh….that's like asking someone to make a subscription MMO that can knock off World of Warcraft. Surely someone is going to do it some day?

The people who brought us Crysis could give us a terrific Homefront 2, one that could have an excellent and interesting big-sky-America adventure. There's just that multiplayer question…. Good luck, Crytek! Maybe make it free-to-play?

The folks behind Crysis and Far Cry have teamed up with THQ to work on the next Homefront, the publisher said this morning.

The game isn't due out for another 1 1/2 to 2 years, the company said in a press release.

"We see Homefront as a really strong universe that has a lot of potential and that has been expertly created and marketed by THQ," said Cevat Yerli, Founder, CEO and President of Crytek. "We believe that bringing our level of quality, creativity and production values to the next Homefront title creates an opportunity for both THQ and Crytek to deliver a truly blockbuster game. It's really important to us that THQ has the faith in giving us a lot of creative freedom over one of its most important properties to allow us to bring the Homefront world to life in a new and innovative way."

Homefront, which hit earlier this year to mixed reviews, took place during a future America occupied by North Korean forces. The game featured brutal portrayals of an occupied country in the year 2027. The game ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with rebel forces taking back part of the country, but with still much to do.

THQ says Homefront was a commercial success and that the "yet-to-be-named sequel" is scheduled for release during THQ's fiscal 2014 on console and PC. THQ's 2014 fiscal year runs from April, 2013 to March 2014.

However, that commercial success didn't prevent THQ from shuttering the New York City-based developer behind the game. Kaos Studios was shut down over the summer as part of a "strategic realignment within its internal studio structure," the company told Kotaku at the time. THQ also said at the time that THQ's Montreal studio "will take over product development and overall creative management for the Homefront franchise."

So why shift gears and go with an outside studio?

"Selecting Crytek to take Homefront forward underscores our strategy of working with the industry's best talent," said Danny Bilson, EVP Core Games, THQ. "Homefront's unique setting and storyline captivated gamers the world over. With Crytek's industry leading technology and legendary experience in the FPS genre, we're supremely confident that the next Homefront will deliver that AAA-quality experience that players demand."

The New York City-based developer of Homefront, Kaos Studios, has been shut down, according to a source close to the studio. It's not clear if the shutdown was due to the performance of the game, the high cost of operating a studio or some combination of factors. We've reached out to THQ for official confirmation.

UPDATE: Describing it as "a strategic realignment within its internal studio structure," THQ confirmed in an e-mailed statement that Kaos and the company's UK studio have been shuttered. THQ's Montreal studio "will take over product development and overall creative management for the Homefront franchise," the company noted. While declining to answer direct questions from Kotaku about whether the cost of living in New York or the quality of the first Homefront were factors, the company did not that it is hiring for its Montreal, Vancouver and Austin, Texas studios. Plus: "THQ's UK studio and KAOS employees will have the opportunity to interview for open positions with the company globally."