Façade is an artificial-intelligence-based interactive story created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. It was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival and has been exhibited at several international art shows. In 2010, it was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.
Façade puts the player in the role of a close friend of Trip and Grace, a couple who recently invited the player to their home for cocktails. This pleasant gathering, however, is somewhat damaged by the clear domestic confrontation between Grace and Trip upon the player's entry. Making full use of the incorporated language processing software, Façade allows the player to type sentences to "speak" with the couple, either supporting them through their troubles, driving them farther apart, or being thrown out of the apartment.
Incorporating elements of both interactivity and drama, Façade takes advantage of voice acting and a 3-D environment, as well as natural language processing and other advanced artificial intelligence routines, to provide a robust interactive fiction experience. The player can take an active role in the conversation, pushing the topic one way or another, as in an interactive stage-play. These stage-plays are stored as script text files which can be read after the player has finished.
The third season of the American drama/adventure television series Alias premiered September 28, 2003 on ABC and concluded May 23, 2004 and was released on DVD in region 1 on September 7, 2004. Guest stars in season three include Vivica A. Fox, Isabella Rossellini, Ricky Gervais, Griffin Dunne, Djimon Hounsou, Peggy Lipton, and Quentin Tarantino.
A seven-minute animated short titled The Animated Alias: Tribunal was produced for the DVD release of the third season. The short takes place between the second and third seasons.
Main characters
Recurring characters
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that uses magic or other supernatural elements as a main plot element, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic and magical creatures are common. Fantasy is generally distinguished from the genres of science fiction and horror by the expectation that it steers clear of scientific and macabre themes, respectively, though there is a great deal of overlap between the three, all of which are subgenres of speculative fiction.
In popular culture, the fantasy genre is predominantly of the medievalist form. In its broadest sense, however, fantasy comprises works by many writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians, from ancient myths and legends to many recent and popular works.
Fantasy is studied in a number of disciplines including English and other language studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and medieval studies. Work in this area ranges widely, from the structuralist theory of Tzvetan Todorov, which emphasizes the fantastic as a liminal space, to work on the connections (political, historical, literary) between medievalism and popular culture.
Fantasy was a British pulp science fiction magazine which published three issues in 1938 and 1939. The editor was T. Stanhope Sprigg; when the war started, he enlisted in the RAF and the magazine was closed down. The publisher, George Newnes Ltd, paid respectable rates, and as a result Sprigg was able to obtain some good quality material, including stories by John Wyndham, Eric Frank Russell, and John Russell Fearn.
The first U.S. science fiction (sf) magazine, Amazing Stories, was imported into the U.K. from its launch in 1926, and other magazines from the U.S. market were also available in the U.K. from an early date. However, no British sf magazine was launched until 1934, when Pearson's launched Scoops, a weekly in tabloid format aimed at the juvenile market. Soon Haydn Dimmock, Scoops' editor, began to receive more sophisticated stories, targeted at an adult audience; he tried to change the magazine's focus to include more mature fiction but within twenty issues falling sales led Pearson's to kill the magazine. The failure of Scoops gave British publishers the impression that Britain could not support a science fiction publication.
"Fantasy" is the debut single by Canadian rock musician Aldo Nova and is his most popular work to date. Released on his eponymous debut album in 1981, the song climbed to #3 on the Mainstream rock chart, and #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The song was featured in a flashback sequence in the final episode of the popular television series Rob & Big. A cover version of the song, performed by Steel Panther, is the current theme song for the MTV show Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory.
VH1 listed it at #78 on its countdown for the 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the 80s.
The video shows Aldo performing with his band at a concert. It is best remembered for its intro, which starts out with a man holding an electric guitar and two bodyguards holding machine guns, waiting for someone. Then comes a helicopter, landing from the sky, and Aldo comes out in a very contoured leopard-print suit, being escorted to the stage. When they encounter a locked door, which the bodyguards can't open, Aldo grabs his guitar and fires a laser into the door and it opens.