The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was one of the best titles in the early days of the XBox 360, giving players hundreds of hours of gameplay when there was little else in terms of content available for the system. The early concept of a living world filled with characters who would hold conversations amongst themselves and go on their daily routine without interaction from the player coupled with an awesomely fun first person combat roleplaying game earned Oblivion a spot as an early highlight in this generation of console’s lifecycle.

Finally, Bethesda has released official word on the next installment to the Elder Scrolls saga entitled The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Whether or not Patrick Steward will lend his voice to the next iteration of the game remains to be seen but the events of Oblivion look to tie in directly to the release of the denizens of Skyrim on the Elder Scrolls world.

When Sega announced they would be working on the Thor video game, the video game community responded with an astounding, “Please, not another Iron Man 2.” Now, with the full force of the Thor movie marketing to help drive it, the Thor: God of Thunder video game will make its way to consoles on May 3rd.

Interestingly enough following the announcement of both Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston taking on the vocal roles of their on screen counterparts, only Hemsworth’s voice is present in the trailer.

Take a look at the trailers for both games after the jump. Also, be sure to check out our coverage of the Uncharted 3 and Batman: Arkham City trailers from earlier today.

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Tron: Legacy‘s immensely anticipated release is only just a brief week away, so what could be more exciting than rumors about a sequel? Up until this week, the news of a secret (but brief) cameo in Tron: Legacy have surfaced, one that might hint towards a villain in a future Tron installment. Don’t keep reading if you don’t want it spoiled!

According to io9, actor Cillian Murphy appears as Edward Dillinger, son of Ed Dillinger, the former baddie in the original Tron. You can spot him in the “real world” during Tron Legacy, at an Encom board meeting.

“That was little tit-bit we didn’t need slipping out early,” said Brigham Taylor, Production Executive on Tron: Legacy. “He’s a character that fits into the mythology of Tron. He’s connected to one of the characters from the past and we’re really excited to have him involved.”

While the cameo is rather short, the fact that this was kept such a secret until now means that this character is going to be big to the Tron universe in the future. After all, they wouldn’t have casted someone as well-known as Murphy in the role, had they not had plans for Edward Dillinger.

In the meantime, charge up your lightcycles and race to the theater next Friday, December 17th, when Tron: Legacy is released in theaters and IMAX 3D.

Our friends at Activision and Radical Entertainment are back with a sequel to their best-selling game of 2009: Prototype. This new game, currently called Prototype 2, is currently in development and to kick things off we’ve got the first reveal trailer of the game for you today.

“When PROTOTYPE surpassed 2MM units we knew gamers would want a sequel to find out what happens next with Alex Mercer,” said Ken Rosman, Studio Head, Radical Entertainment. “The team here at Radical is sincerely grateful to the fans and we are laser focused on delivering an even bigger and better experience with PROTOTYPE 2!”

In case you’re not familiar with the game, it deals with the exploits of Alex Mercer (voiced by Barry Pepper) who wakes up on a morgue slab with no memory. Alex escapes and sets out to recover his memory and find out exactly what occurred. He soon discovers he now possesses powerful shapeshifting abilities that grant him superhuman strength, speed, agility, durability, weaponry and the ability to “consume” people to gain their memories, skills and appearance.

Alex is forced to track down and consume those related to the conspiracy in order to uncover the truth. During his quest, Alex must face and overcome both the military charged with containing the incident and a horde of infected monsters who’s only thought is killing him.

Click through to check out all the awesome action in the reveal trailer. Look for Prototype 2 to hit stores sometime in 2012.

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As we approach the end of 2010, we will naturally see list start to appear. List of best movies, best TV shows, best video games, best gadgets and tech and a whole lot more. In fact, you’ll see a few lists from us pretty soon too. It’s just how this end-of-the-year thing works these days.

Until we start to roll out our own lists, we have one for you to kick things off. This one comes from the American Film Institute and highlight their picks of the best Movies and TV programs for 2010. When you read over their selections, most of them pretty much make sense.

Most of the films and most of the TV programs listed here are among our favorites as well and all are of a high quality. Of course, on every list there’s always some items that don’t seem to belong. However, we won’t disparage the AFI’s list, we will just counter with a list of our own (or three) soon.

Here are AFI’s picks:

Movies

• BLACK SWAN
• THE FIGHTER
• INCEPTION
• THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
• 127 HOURS
• THE SOCIAL NETWORK
• THE TOWN
• TOY STORY 3
• TRUE GRIT
• WINTER’S BONE

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We’ve got so much to cover from Saturday night’s live Video Game Awards, put on by Spike TV, we had to break it up into a few posts. Starting with two of the biggest geek announcements from the show we get a first glimpse at Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and Batman: Arkham City.

Coming November 1st of next year, PlayStation 3′s biggest franchise returns with the just announced, but much expected, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Since its release, there hasn’t been a PlayStation 3 exclusive that has gotten such critical praise as the Uncharted series. While the first Uncharted was not a huge commercial success, the sleeper hit did prove itself worthy of many people’s attention which resulted in fantastic sales and further critical approval for the sequel.

Also, we’ve got the very first full-length trailer for the sequel to last year’s Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was not only a hit for video gamers, but a huge leap in faith for comic book lovers, as they finally had a decent game featuring the Dark Knight. This next game is going a bit more “open world” as Gotham City is now playable to patrol and take down baddies like Hugo Strange. City is expected to hit shelves late next year.

Check out both full trailers after the jump, and keep it here for more trailers and news from the VGA Awards.

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It was a pretty bland weekend at the box office considering that two big studio releases opened.  Despite the built in audience for Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the mega-watt star power of Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp in The Tourist, neither of the films managed to make much of a splash.  Both came in under the low end of their respective projected estimates.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader won the weekend with a relatively low take of  $24.5M.  This is far below the other films in the franchise. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made $65.6M in its opening weekend, and Prince Caspian made $55M in the same time frame.

The film has a reported budget between $140 and $150M, which seems rather daunting to recoup at this point.  Fortunately, the film fared better overseas, grossing over $67M, bringing its total to $81M.

The Tourist was troubled by bad reviews, but many still thought the film would benefit from its star power. However,  the film made a measly $17M.  Disney’s Tangled only dropped around 33%, earning an additional $14.6M for third place. The film has now made $115M to date.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows dropped almost 50%, making $8.5M.  Its four week total stands at $257M, good enough for placing number six on the highest grossing films of 2010.  Unstoppable was the number five movie this weekend.  Playing on over 2,900 screens, the film grossed about $3.75M.

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This is what happens when the entire office goes out for happy hour. We miss cool trailers that drop late on a Friday. Case in point is the new teaser trailer for Marvel’s upcoming sure-to-be-epic Thor.

In this new trailer, which is a mix of new bits and footage screened during Comic-Con last July, we get the basic premise of the film which is that Thor is banished from his home planet to earth by his father. Once there he meets up with a human girl and then discovers he will have to fight an evil that followed him to earth. Of course, there’s also going to be some giant battle scenes and several sequences with Chris Hemsworth, sans shirt, to appeal to the ladies.

We’ve gone back and forth on this one as it seemed like less of a sure thing than Iron Man. However, more and more it looks like director Kenneth Branagh, the cast and the rest of the team know what they’re doing. Will Thor be next year’s Iron Man? We’ll see. But as huge fans of what Marvel is trying to do with these films, we sure hope so.

Check out the new teaser after the jump. Thor arrives in theaters on May 6, 2011.

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Welcome to this week’s On the Radar where we delve into all corners of the entertainment, tech and geek Internets for news, views and whatnot that may have escaped our regular coverage this week. Let is know if we missed something interesting. Let’s get started!

• You know the world of technology is getting out of hand when we see the first ever bluetooth enabled Smart Wallets.

• Can you remember how many films have used a character saying “blah, blah, blah”? You don’t have to, this sneaky editor combined all of them into one video.

• Bye Bye, Olivia. G4′s Attack of the Show has a brand new cohost, and she’s….somebody.

• Feel like your childhood was missing too many Cylons and Daleks? That problem is fixed by the fictional “Five Sci-Fi Children’s Books”

• Comedy Central has a brand new logo, but we can’t help shake the feeling it’s infringing a copyright somewhere.

• We can’t get enough of Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy. To that point, here’s the official video for their title song, Derezzed.

• Some douche felt it was necessary to get the cast of Avatar tattooed on his back. We wonder if Cameron gets royalties every time this guy hits the beach.

• Some potentially spoilery set photos from Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class have surfaced. This is what happens when you let teens drive a stealth jet.

• Adidas has really kicked it this time. Take a look at the official C-3PO/R2D2 mash up sneakers.

• Because you love links and we love popular topics: Five Reasons Why It’s Ok to like Wikileaks.

• That does it for this week. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

Literary adaptations are always a tricky thing, especially for those of us who love the source material. Beloved books can be ruined forever by a film version gone wrong. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wasn’t even all that bad of a movie in and of itself, but it was obviously nothing as good as the book, and ever since, my warm memories of the book (which I read several times as a teen and listened to in the BBC radio version many times more) have been discolored by the movie.

And that’s hardly the worst literary adaptation there has been. When things look especially unpromising, I make it a point not to see even the trailer.

But when everything goes perfectly, from casting to art direction to all the important details of story and theme—very rarely, in other words—a film version can equal and even in some ways exceed the book. Such is the case with this third in the Chronicles of Narnia series, a breathtakingly beautiful and thrilling envisioning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley return as Edmund and Lucy, and Keynes in particular has grown into his own as the courageous and clear-eyed warrior king. Ben Barnes is even hunkier than before, as Prince-turned-King Caspian should be. He makes a puffy shirt look desirable, and that isn’t easy.

Liam Neeson voices an Aslan whose CGI being is incredibly convincing and impressive, down to the mane rustling in the wind and the mysterious, majestic eyes. Tilda Swinton must have put in all of four hours on set, as she appears for a total of 45 seconds, and that only as a misty green vision in the green mist. Simon Pegg takes over from Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep, the valiant little mouse who will be a clear favorite for the under-13 crowd.

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I don’t know about you but I never get tired of Verizon iPhone rumors. Maybe because I wish for it to happen almost more than anything. Don’t get me wrong, I do like my Android powered HTC Incredible. I just miss the iPhone but I won’t go back to it as long as it’s only on AT&T’s network.

So, if I could have something that combines the amazingness of the iPhone with the awesomeness of the Verizon network, I would be a happy person and could then go about my life in blissful contentment . . . until then next version comes out of course.

The rumor this week is about Apple’s search for engineers to work on some new projects. The info, dug up by the gang at Fortune, is about a job for a full-time Cellular Systems Performance Engineers who will deal with protocol issues and field test hardware. They are also looking for people with experience in GSM, GPRS, EDGE, and more to the point, CDMA technologies.

In case you don’t know that last one, CDMA, is the kind of network Verizon uses. That bit of info is made all the more significant by the fact that no currently shipping hardware from Apple — including the iPhone 4 — uses that technology. So, just another piece of the puzzle that when finished will hopefully reveal a shiny new iPhone for Verizon users.

I’d wait in line for that if. . . and I bet some of you would too.

There were a few competitors for this year’s biggest movie comedy but hands down one of the ones in the top 3 is Adam McKay’s The Other Guys starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. The film was a great satirical take on some of the top buddy cop films of the 90′s and had an all-star cast. Starting December 14th, you can relive the laughs from the film unrated on DVD and Blu-ray.

If Ferrell and Wahlberg aren’t enough to keep you entertained, how about Michael Keaton, Rob Riggle, Eva Mendes, Daman Wayans Jr., Dwayne Johnson, Steve Coogan, and Samuel L. Jackson? Here are the official features and bonus material from the releases.

Blu-ray Exclusive Bonus Material

• The “Mom”-mentary- Unrated Version
• Additional Deleted & Extended Scenes
• Line-O-Rama
• Gag reel
• “Pimps Don’t Cry” music video
• Alternate Action
• Bonus Featurettes:
• Extreme Close Up
• Everyone Hates The DVD Guy
• Wasn’t That
• Why Are There Brits On This Movie?
• Rob Riggle Like To Party
• We Shouldn’t Kiss a Chicken
• Mark Walberg’s Eating Contest Entourage
• Lendl Global Commercial
• movieIQ®+sync and BD-Live connect you to real-time information on the cast, music, trivia and more while watching the movie

Be sure to catch The Other Guys on Blu-ray and DVD next Tuesday from Sony Entertainment.

A staple of the classic sitcom is that, by the end of the episode, everything has to return to normal. Within the 20-or-so minutes of each week’s installment, the characters are free to travel to Beijing, adopt a koala, or make a big sandwich so long as that somewhere around the 18-minute mark, the status quo is maintained. From the ‘50s and on up to the ‘80s there wasn’t anything wrong with having normal, decent people thrown into far-fetched situations and coming out relatively unaffected—or, if they did learn some life-altering lesson, they’d forget it by next week.

Then, along came Seinfeld in the ‘90s, which broke ground by calling BS on the idea that any normal person would function like that—that’s the behavior of a sociopath, and hence Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, and Larry David’s “no learning, no hugging” rule. More than any other contemporary sitcom, Sunny lives by Seinfeld’s example.

It even goes a step further with its characters’ depravity (cheerfully paraded in ‘Dee Gives Birth’s opening when Dennis and Mac learn of Frank and Charlie’s naked, sewer-scouring hi-jinx), which is why this season’s running joke of everyone’s lack of concern regarding Dee’s pregnancy has worked so well—it threatens The Gang’s self-centered complacency. So, instead of facing the fact that Dee’s baby will force them to take responsibility for someone other than themselves, they chose to ignore it…maybe then it’d go away.

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