In the past, Hypothetical Audience, I’ve mentioned how I’m somewhat a fan of the current crop of Marvel Comics-based films, albeit with some heavy caveats. As is a natural progression, they’ve also done a couple of shorter-format series (I’m not going to call them TV for reasons that will swiftly become apparent), helmed by Agents of SHIELD. I will freely admit that that particular series didn’t gel well with me, something about how the characterisations were handled and the story was paced really gelled badly. Now recently, I have been getting into this whole Netflix streaming thing, mostly for old Graham Linehan sitcoms and the American remake of House of Cards, so when news of Marvel’s recent deal with them came through I was initially apprehensive. However, when the first fruit of this collaboration, Daredevil, hit the… series of tubes (what’s an appropriate equivalent of Airwaves for the internet), I was quite surprised by the amount of good press it got compared to it’s forebears. I decided to give it a go, and y’know what? It didn’t totally suck!
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Category / Media
Let’s Review Jazzpunk and Grim Fandango Remastered
I love old school point-and-click adventure games, Hypothetical Audience. Indeed some of my earliest experiences of videogames, after the myriad platformers on the Mega Drive in the mid nineties, was playing Discworld on my families Mac Performa 5200 and things like Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island on my uncle’s Windows 3.1 machine. The immersive interactive storytelling, and the often insane logic puzzle, had a deep influence on me growing up and I still have a massive soft spot for the genre as it stood back then. Unfortunately, once we began to be able to produce visually interesting backdrops in other, more faster paced game genres, point and click began to die out beyond relatively obscure and indie title. But recently there’s been something of a mainstream revival, with Telltale Games producing things like The Walking Dead and the Monkey Island Revival. This makes me very happy indeed. So for this week’s Let’s Review I thought I’d have a look at two games that at least embody the ideas of the Point And Click Genre, first a very modern take in Jazzpunk, which while a first person game it does have a lot of what made the earlier games work, and secondly a rerelease of an old classic, in the shape of Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango Remastered.
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Let’s Review: And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer
Trying something new this week, Hypothetical Audience, and one I’ve threatened for some time now. You may remember I’ve called myself something of a “Media Soak,” as in I tend to absorb media from all kinds of sources and formats, gaming, books, films, the lot. It’s kind of a hobby, you see? Anyway, with this in mind I thought I’d put this media absorption to good use and share some of my opinions with you lot as a way of giving recommendations (or otherwise) to the internet masses. Yes, it’s kind of a cheap way to fill blog lines, but thats the way things are. So, without further ado let’s jump into the first of probably many and have a look at And Another Thing, book six of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy by Eoin Colfer.
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On Scored Reviews
So, now I’ve gotten the angry political satire out of my system, for at least the time being anyway, I thought this week we’d go back to old staples and talk about the state of video gaming today. Always good to have a routine back up, eh hypothetical audience? Anyway, this month gaming press luminary Joystiq declared that it was to stop issuing scored reviews of new games in favour of adding a summary of key points to the end of each piece. The logic behind this was to both do away with the awful “8.8” thing that blights gamer culture, but also to do away with their role in Metacritic-style aggregators. The response was mixed, to say the least, but has rather conveniently brought back to the forefront an issue I feel affects not just gaming reviews, but any form of media review that exists at the moment.
On Shared Universes and Marvels
Hello Hypothetical Audience, did you have a good Christmas-solstice-whatever and New Years? Brilliant! But now we must face facts, accept that 2015 has now occurred and get on with things once again. So, for the first column of the year I thought I’d share some thoughts I had while watching films over the break. Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching an awful lot of films that have come out of the Marvel film studio, and for the most part they’ve been very good (the only dud I’ve seen so far being Iron Man 2, which was merely a passable filler), and they’ve been attempting to do what the comics have been doing since time immemorial by tying all the characters and events in to a single shared universe. This is a departure from how this has been run previously, mostly due to the fact that all the licences are now being held under a single studio rather than the mess that previously existed, allowing for multi film-, and even franchise-, arcs to exist. This is certainly the first time something like this has been tried with such a large scope, however it may not be as good a thing as it sounds, depending on how it’s handled, and I shall tell you for why after the read-more-thing.
On Christmas Songs
So this is Christmas, and what have you done? No, really, what have you done, hypothetical audience? Anyway, now that’s out the way, I thought I’d use the last blog of 2014 to talk about Christmas Songs, or more specifically Christmas Pop Song, since I don’t want to get into the tangled mess that is carols. Yes, every year from around about halfway through November until about Early January every publicly tuned audio system up to and including radio stations in the UK are saturated with pop songs that came out at, are about or even just loosely associate with the festival of Christmas. There is literally no escape, no matter how hard you try, so best hope you enjoy that kind of crap. I, as you can probably predict from the tone here, don’t (with a few caveats) and thought I’d go into why.
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On the Love of Bad Movies
Apologies for this one being a bit late, as I have had yet another busy week dashing around the country and had no time to write & polish this before Monday evening.
There’s been a lot of negativity in the air around this blog the last few weeks, so I thought I’d redress the balance and talk about something I genuinely like this week: Terrible Movies. No, really, there’s something incredibly entertaining to me to sit down and watch a film try it’s hardest and yet fail so hilariously completely. It’s something that’s becoming increasingly common across the media consuming public, especially with the rise of the internet as a corner stone of modern culture. But, still there are some in my experience who don’t fully get why we do, so here I am, explaining my reasonings to you in blog form. You lucky, lucky people.
On Ultraviolet and Further Adventures With DRM
This isn’t what I originally intended to write this week, but goings on on Sunday changed my mind a bit, and people who follow me on Twitter may guess where this is heading. Anyway, if you cast your mind and browser back, dear hypothetical audience, you’ll remember I’ve spoken about the problems Digital Rights Management software and their effect on consumers in the past. Well, I’ve now experience their icy grasp in a medium other than video gaming. Recently I decided to wake up and join the mid-2010s and finally start buying BluRays. Progress and all that. Anyway, thanks to this I’ve come across the “Ultraviolet” scheme where in addition to the physical media you just bought, you get an additional download copy to play on mobile devices, computers &c. In theory anyway. This is, if you ask me, a brilliant idea on paper. The actual execution? Whhhoooo boy is that a whole different story.
Ndro's Adventures in Reality 