The recent Jem & The Holograms feature film is not what anyone would call successful. With an estimated $5,000,000 budget and a worldwide gross of only $3,000,000 it could be argued that the team behind the film really missed the point. That’s exactly what the all girl YouTube group known as CreatureTubes felt when they released a Jem Reacts video with the original cast reacting to the new feature film.

After a positive response to their video (and likely more viewers than the movie garnered, the group decided to take a step in a positive direction and instead of looking at what didn’t work and focus on creating what they feel should have been the Jem film. But since no studio is going to touch that property for a good decade, the girls are turning towards Kickstarter to make it happen.

Back in the N64 days, Perfect Dark was the shooter that was second only to Goldeneye and that’s probably because it was from the same developers but was a brand new IP that didn’t have the cache that something like the James Bond brand brought to the table. A generation later when the XBox 360 launched with Perfect Dark Zero alongside it and helped hold fans over until Halo made its leap to the generation.

Later in 2010, five years after Perfect Dark Zero was released, there was an XBox Live version of the original Perfect Dark. What other reason could there be for the rerelease of a classic title if not to promote a new one? And then in August of 2013, Rare said they had new ideas for a Perfect Dark game that involved the Kinect (keep in mind this was before the lackluster reception of the Kinect on the XBox One). Since then… nothing.

Some games are defined by very clear mechanics. These games like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh or even Pokemon come down to two things, the draw and the ability to strategically exploit said mechanics. As with a game of chess, a game of Magic can be decided within the first three turns. Then there are the other games that are all about personal taste and even what some could think of as a trump card can be defeated out of nowhere. Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples are two such examples. Ultimate Battle looks to join that group with their Kickstarter that launched yesterday.

Ultimate Battle is what appears to be a nerd’s dream with a solution for solving the most unreasonable arguments. Players draw their own avatar on a play mat and get some weapon cards. They then theorize how their character would kill another using their items then the defending player comes up with how they’d defend it. If they agree that the defense works then the next player goes.

If the argument continues, there is a deck of dispute cards meant to solve the argument fairly, and by fairly it is by completely arbitrary and unrelated methods like Rock, Paper, Scissors or whoever has the shortest hair. It ends up being the best way to solve these kinds of arguments anyway since neither side is going to concede if Batman could use a blue whale to kill the Terminator whose only defense is spiders.

Friends, Shakespeareans, gamers, lend me your ears! IDW Games has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Kill Shakespeare board game, based on the graphic novel series.

With a goal of $25,000, Kill Shakespeare is the first joint venture between IDW Games and Pandasaurus Games. The campaign includes perks such as lithographs, posters, custom dice and of course the game itself, at a deeply discounted rate. Stretch goals are also in place to expand game content to include additional characters and quests.

The game itself is a semi-cooperative board game where players are one of Shakespeare’s heroes battling against his villains while completing quests from the Bard himself.

About a year ago, crowdfunding was the big buzz word. If you had talent but wanted to remain independent or you just weren’t big enough to make it to the desk of a major studio, developer, publisher or manufacturer, you would head to Kickstarter (or maybe Indiegogo) and put a call out to your audience and see what they could do to help get your project going.

Early on, there were some huge successes with millions of dollars going into funding. But then, you couldn’t escape it. If you were an entertainment writer of any kind be it movie, music or gaming, your email box didn’t go a week without hearing about “the next big thing… that just needs crowdfunding” and quickly that frequency has continued to increase.

If somehow it was possible to ensure that the projects being put on Kickstarter and then publicized everywhere were of a certain quality, this wouldn’t be an issue. But the more I hear about and see the bad ones, the less likely I am to check out the good ones. Now instead of going and browsing Kickstarter on my own, I only head over if someone has directly recommended one to me and that has to be someone I trust the opinion of.

This is especially evident in the gaming category. You have one or two higher profile titles and everything else is derivative and unoriginal fluff.