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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Tag / reviews
Let’s Review: Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Tyneside Cinema
I’ve seen things, dear Hypothetical Audience, that you people wouldn’t believe. But enough about my exciting life, this week I thought I’d talk to you about recent happenings. One of my favourite films of all time is the 1982 Ridley Scott masterpiece and seminal cyberpunk work Blade Runner, a film with a noted troubled history. And by troubled, I mean there are at least 5 different versions around. Really. The most recent came out in 2007 and has been referred to as the “Final Cut.” Fast forward to a few weeks ago and the British Film Institute announced a special showing of the Final cut at cinemas up and down the country. Of course I jumped at the chance, and this Friday just gone schlepped up to the wonderful Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle to go view. Which leads me neatly on to this post, a perfect way to go back to normal length posts once again.
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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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.
Ndro's Adventures in Reality 