It’s a board-game movie, so I don’t think anyone has their expectations especially high, though the only other board-game movie I can think of off the top of my head is Clue, and it was fantastic. And Connect Four, but I think that’s a porno. Seriously, we all kind of knew this wasn’t going to be that good.

Anywho, the plot can be deduced from the trailer: Aliens come down and get nasty with the Navy, leading to an all-out aquatic assault. Wedged in between there is a love story involving a plucky, up-and-coming Lieutenant Alex (Taylor Kitsch) and the daughter (Brooklyn Decker) of the fleet Admiral (Liam Neeson).

There’s more: Alex’s brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) is a Commander aboard the destroyer USS Sampson, while Alex is aboard the USS John Paul Jones. Alex wants to marry his girlfriend but is worried about asking her father. The girlfriend is a physical therapist helping out an amputee.

Continue Reading →

War has been said to be 99% tedium interspersed with 1% pure terror. And so it is with pregnancy, childbirth and baby rearing, only thankfully (else who would do it?), in these pursuits there are also intervals of intense joy. Perhaps appropriately then, something akin to this ratio of tedium to pain and pleasure obtains in the new romantic comedy What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

With a title based on the famously alarmist, best-selling series of pregnancy advice books, one might expect this film to be a cautionary tale of the innumerable ways the process of pregnancy can go wrong, but not to worry. This is a Hollywood product; like a anesthesiologist with an epidural syringe, it does its best to deliver easy laughs and a feel-good ending.

Following the stories of five interrelated couples, the plot is as crammed as a uterus in the ninth month (yes, the pregnancy metaphors must continue). Little wonder few of them make emotional or comic impact, or that several wear out their welcome. Although she’s as impressively long-stemmed and perky-bodied as humanly possible, the appeal of Cameron Diaz has always been inexplicable, and here again she left me wondering.

Continue Reading →

To say Minecraft: XBox 360 Edition is already a success is an understatement. The game literally became profitable within the first hour of sales and boasted 400,000 users in its first 24 hours, breaking all XBLA records including the one set by fellow Arcade Next member Trials Evolution with its quarter million first day sales. But does commercial success equal a great game? In the case of Minecraft: XBox 360 Edition, the two are one in the same.

Gameplay

For those who haven’t played Minecraft yet in either its PC or mobile incarnations yet, the game is an open world where players must mine resources around them in order to craft tools and build structures including buildings, mine cart pathways and increasingly complex machines. On the surface, Minecraft looks incredibly simple as players only need to hack away at or place objects in the world around them.

But there are tons of layers of depth. Players literally start in a world with nothing but their fists to punch out sections of a tree. Once they have some wood, they start constructing tools to make these tasks easier. They also can craft weapons and armor to help defend themselves from the world around them.

Continue Reading →

Whether you call it MOBA or DOTA, the genre that best fits Awesomenauts didn’t exist even a decade ago. Spawning from the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III, MOBA games are traditionally controlled as a isometric RTS style game. Awesomenauts changes things up a bit with the first major 2D side-scrolling release to the genre.

Gameplay

Awesomenauts follows the traditional MOBA formula of a team of players making their way past set defense points to reach an opposing team’s base. Each team consists of three players (which can be filled in with bots if someone is playing during slower hours) and the constant stream of less powerful computer controlled minions. Different from most MOBA titles like the DOTA mod is the game’s classic style 2D environment.

While greatly detailed to fit in a next gen world, all the action occurs on a 2D plane. Action is still fast and frantic though with players running in to battle, having rapid exchanges before someone is killed or forced to flee and most matches are over in less than fifteen minutes.

There is a somewhat limited supply of characters with only six playable Awesomenauts to choose from, each with different combat roles. Some act as tanks, others as damage dealers and others as more stealthy assassins. Players start off with only three unlocked and must earn combat experience to level up and unlock more. Hopefully Ronimo adds more through DLC or updates since the matches are usually matching teams with players already trending towards a few core characters rather than a variety that could come from an expanded roster.

Continue Reading →

Forget about it being AMC’s top rated series. Forget about Volume 1 being the number one selling graphic novel of April 2012 despite it being published more than eight years ago and seven other volumes filling up the top 10. And even forget about it being the title that made Robert Kirkman a superstar comic writer.

The Walking Dead is now a video game too. And yes, we were just as hesitant when we heard about it as anyone else. As much as we appreciate a studio like Telltale with a pedigree of former Lucasarts employees and titles like Monkey Island franchise and Sam & Max, we know the dangers of a licensed franchise being brought to the gaming world. Luckily, Telltale showed us once again that the right team working with the right property can bring magic on screen.

Gameplay:

The Walking Dead comes to players as a newer style of point and click adventure game. Traditionally, the genre revolved around players sorting through an environment with trial and error until they found the proper combination of items and persons needed to solve a puzzle. Now, The Walking Dead steps up the ante with a faster paced and more natural feeling action oriented adventure.

Continue Reading →

I feel bad being so late to this movie—granted this is the opening day, but it seems that for the past two weeks, everyone in the world has seen it already. And so, for the past two weeks, everyone’s been raving about it and saying that it’s the greatest superhero movie ever made; it’s the best movie of the summer; it’s better than a big sex sandwich, and so on.

The premise, if it weren’t already evident from the stingers Marvel’s added to the very end of every one of their movies for the past five years, is that a group of superheroes—Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), The Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)–need to recover the Tesseract, a glowing blue cube that generates unlimited energy and also, somehow, opens the portal to the realm of Asgard.

No sooner does S.H.I.E.L.D., a shadowy government agency overseen by a committee whose purpose in the film is somewhat tenuous, discover this than the Tesseract’s stolen by Thor’s adoptive brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who also hypnotizes Hawkeye and one of the scientists from Thor, Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) into doing his nefarious shenanigans, namely, opening a bigger portal to Asgard and invading earth.

Continue Reading →

The films put out by Marvel Studios have been excellent in most ways possible. Really nailing the tones of a wide variety of Marvel superheroes. One thing these movies have been lacking, however, is a strong musical presence.

Going back to the original Iron Man, these films have not really had the same level of film score heights that we have come to expect from comic book movies in the last decade plus. The tide began to turn with the last released film, Captain America, which brought in the fantastic Alan Silvestri, but even that didn’t really live up to its potential.

Well Mr. Silvestri is back with the biggest and most epic Marvel film yet, so can he deliver on the promise his name and this property offers? In one word, yes. In seven words and three exclamation points, hell freaking yeah! he totally nailed it!!

Continue Reading →

And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against a common threat. On that day, the Avengers were born—to fight the foes no single super hero could withstand! 

Yesterday in select cities nationwide, thousands of people were treated to a back-to-back marathon screening of all six Marvel Studios films. From Iron Man all the way to the midnight premiere of The Avengers, this epic, butt-busting extravaganza was sold as THE best way to celebrate the arrival of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

The roster of films was impressive, but the time commitment was daunting. For true Marvel movie fans was this celebration a good thing? Is the act of subjecting yourself to hours upon hours watching these films worthwhile? Does it diminish the quality or enhance the context when you watch them all back-to-back?

These were all questions I had to ask myself before settling in on my seventeen hour quest through the Marvel Movie-verse, and they were all questions that were answered quite emphatically by about the fifth hour.

Continue Reading →

While [Prototype] had an insane world with an incredibly selfish and callous anti-hero protagonist, the title was hindered with some gripping gameplay problems. Many times, the player wasn’t given a fair opportunity in the game world. Rockets would come from off-screen opponents or as a player fled from an unwinnable conflict, they’d find themselves being chased by an ever spawning flock of Hunters appearing from water towers littered throughout the city.

It is a game notorious for many people not finishing because of a unfairly difficult final boss fight. But there was something that kept the franchise alive despite the more well received Infamous coming out at the same time. Three years later and Infamous 2 being on shelves for a year already, Radical Entertainment brings Prototype 2 with some pleasant and unexpected results.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Prototype 2 takes the concepts from the original and makes some minor tweaks to make the game more approachable and enjoyable. The open world of NYZ starts off with just initial conflict with Blackwatch military personnel. Slowly, the infected are thrown into the mix which gives players a much easier learning curve for their powers instead of just being launched into the middle of a battle royal in Times Square.

Combat has been changed up some since [Prototype] as players can now assign two different powers at the same time. With one to the X button and one to the Y, players can combine strategies depending on the opponents in front of them.

Continue Reading →

My affinity for Doctor Who has to be well-known at this point in time, but there is another Brit series that really floats my boat these days. Coincidentally, or more likely not, both shows are currently headed by the same mad genius, Steven Moffat.

Sherlock co-stars one of my favorite british actors, Martin Freeman, and introduced me to the wonder that is Benedict Cumberbatch. But the show has another secret weapon that I am excited to dig into today, a wonderful score by David Arnold and Michael Price.

The name David Arnold should ring a few bells for a few of you, he is most well-known for his many recent James Bond scores, in fact he the second most frequent Bond composer right after the legend, John Barry. Aside from Bong, Arnold also has several other geek cred credits, most notably writing the scores to Independence Day and Startgate.

Continue Reading →

The original Trials HD came to the XBox 360 in 2009 in what was considered one of the best Summer of Arcade promotions the XBox has done alongside titles like ‘Splosion Man and Shadow Complex. The time trial based off road biking became a smash hit with its addictive nature and online leaderboards. It was going to take something different to make the next Trials a success. Just simply adding new races wouldn’t be enough since those could simply be new add on DLC packs for the original.

Gameplay:

Much like the last Trials HD, Trials Evolution follows the same formula with most of its levels where players must take physics and momentum and use them on their side to get the rider from point A to point B. Along the way, environmental hazards like exploding barrels, bottomless pits and oceans pop up to impede the player’s progress. Luckily, for those just hoping to complete the level, there are lots of checkpoints which players can revert back to if they miss a jump or crash to their doom.

As with the previous Trials, the addiction to the game comes from trying to make it through a level with no faults to earn the gold medals on each track and top the leaderboard. Players will find themselves sometimes annoyed with certain sections but quickly overcome that as soon as they hit the “back” button to restart the current track.

Continue Reading →

One thing will be certain in a few weeks. Once Summer starts there will be more high profile scores than Fridays and some good music might fall through the cracks. Which is precisely why I am so excited to bring you this early review of Danny Elfman’s score from Dark Shadows.

This score ranked as one of my most anticipated of the early summer season, and that anticipation was made all the more severe when we listened to the expanded preview a few weeks back. So suffice to say I am ready to dig into the 14th collaboration between Danny Elfman and Tim Burton.

That is a lot of feature film scores from a director with a very distinct style, and recently there has been a lot of concern about repetitiveness in Elfman’s music. You can only go to that stylized dark well so many times, and eventually it will be dried up completely.

So does this umpteenth collaboration yield beautiful sonic rewards, or is this little more than a Beetlejuice or Sleep Hallow remix album?

Continue Reading →