The Green Lantern movie was something that I was beyond excited for. I had fallen in love with Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern run of comics and wanted to see what a Johns driven Green Lantern movie would have done. When I heard that the movie had the biggest budget of any other movie to date, I was even more excited since I believed they were going to go all out to create the wonderful space world of Green Lantern. Unfortunately, Green Lantern didn’t meet the hype; in fact, it’s received quite a negative reception. I was personally very let down by this film, and I feel like they made many missteps in the story. I also feel like going a different direction would have been more effective make a better film. So here I’m going to explain the problems of the movie and then provide my own amateur outline for what I think would have been a more effective movie. (more…)
Alan Wake uses one thing that is sparingly used as a major plot device in the world of horror. You have your monsters, your ghosts, and everything else in between, but there’s one very effective form of terror: darkness. You don’t know what’s in the dark, which is why it is so intimidating. And when you’re in a world of darkness, you have but one thing to save you from it: light. Few video games have really explored this concept, and so when I played Alan Wake, I was surprisingly intrigued by it. (more…)
04Aug
Read Captain Marvel by Kelly Sue Deconnick. I’m serious. Pick up as many issues of this book as you can and read it. This book is criminally overlooked for the outstandingly fun ride that it takes you on. Carol Danvers, formerly Ms. Marvel and current Captain Marvel, is a truly fleshed out character in this book that you can’t help but adore the whole time you follow her adventures. This book is among one of the best out there today in my opinion and I am going to do everything outside of demanding that you read this fabulous title, because it deserves more people to read it. (more…)
Every week, I make sure to watch only one program on TV. It isn’t a regular serialized show, but it’s actually WWE Monday Night RAW. Many people consider it a lesser form of entertainment without much depth, but I have to disagree completely. There is much to be said about the story telling elements involved in their storylines (often referred to as male soap operas) and the matches themselves. The people who go out there every week are performers, and they work to improve their craft of wrestling and entertain through a narrative performance. The main draw for WWE is the storyline aspect, and that is usually what the company focuses. There are good guys (known as faces) and bad guys (known as heels), and they general compete against each other in the story. However, fans treat some of the heels as if they are the good guys by cheering them. And that’s something I feel is worth talking about, even if WWE tries to ignore it. (more…)
For one reason or another, I don’t have as much to talk about concerning DC Comics. As I look at my list of comic stuff I want to talk about, I see much more Marvel than DC. I enjoy DC and I feel like I definitely intend to talk about them more, but I just can’t figure out what all to say about them a lot of times. When considering what to first talk about with DC, I thought about the most talked about part of DC nowadays. Soon, I came to realize that the most talked about part of DC is, well, everything concerning DC right now: the New 52, DC’s massive reboot of the entire universe two years ago. This is discussed so much because the New 52 has many good aspects and many bad aspects, which I’ll go ahead and touch upon here. (more…)
Fighting games are some of the most old-school games you can play. They’re essentially made for the gameplay for the most part, and you play them simple to brawl each other. It’s rare nowadays that you get games with minimum stories this side of indie games, but fighting games generally pull it off because of the competitive aspect of it. Who cares about story when you can just smack around each other with punches, kicks, and fireballs? Well, apparently the fantastic Nether Realm Studios did when they created their Mortal Kombat reboot and set the standard for all fighting game stories! (This will contain spoilers for Mortal Kombat 2011.) (more…)
I take one look at Under The Dome and wonder how it’s become so popular. It isn’t a great show by any means. The acting is pretty mediocre, the script is bad at times, and you find yourself thinking the characters are dumb more often than not. And yet there’s a certain kind of charm to it—the Stephen King kind of charm. And that is what makes it so enjoyable is that the show is just so Stephen King. However, to get maximum enjoyment out of this sci-fi series, you have to put yourself in the perfect mindset and understand exactly how this show is set up. (more…)
Tomb Raider is a series that is centric on one thing: Lara Croft is a chick with short shorts and a pretty large rack. Of course, that’s just the general consensus of it back when gaming was a simpler time where a game where you run around killing turtles as a plumber was an acceptable concept for gaming. So as time went on, people grew less interested in Lara Croft because her games weren’t as enjoyable as they had been. They simply didn’t find the appeal in a badass hot chick any longer since they were all over games now. Lara simply wasn’t so special any longer. So Eidos made a call to reboot the Tomb Raider franchise in order to boost sales and try telling an original story. Most critics enjoyed it, and I would say I enjoyed it to. However, there’s a lot to discuss about whether or not they succeeded in created a solid female protagonist now. (This article will contain spoilers, so read at your own risk.) (more…)
Daniel Way’s Deadpool run is left with many people loving or hating it. If you’ve been a fan of the character before, you can kind of understand why. Even though many people think Deadpool has been played out by now, he’s still kept a very large fanbase because the character is rather unique. He’s funny, breaks the fourth wall, and he’s got some pretty twisted morals. Daniel Way had an idea for Deadpool that he wanted to portray, and I don’t think it was particularly bad. I just think there were many missteps that he took in his run of Deadpool that really made people think poorly of it. (more…)
I am such a shameless Sonic the Hedgehog fan that I can’t really believe it sometimes. I collected the Archie comic books for the guy, practically owned a Sega Genesis as a Sonic-the-Hedgehog-Playing-Machine, and I would never miss a single episode of all of his corny cartoon shows. I even had a Sonic doll I used to throw around all the time. I never seemed to grow out of my love for Sonic as I grew up, and I found myself buying a Dreamcast exclusively to play Sonic Adventure (which was so the coolest game ever according to kid me). I was excited to play just about every Sonic game—even Sonic 2006, which was just so depressing. But nothing quite matched the excitement I got from playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles and experiencing the story it wanted to tell. (more…)