Blog Archives
Doctor Who: The Caretaker Review
One thing that tends to happen when you tag along with The Doctor on the TARDIS is that you leave your real-life behind for a few months or years. That’s not the case if you’re Clara Oswald. Though she’s done many, many things while a travelling companion on the TARDIS, the one thing she hasn’t done is pack her things and move in.
This week, we finally gotten some semblance of payoff to Clara’s dueling lives as The Doctor becomes The Caretaker (who likes to be called The Doctor) at Clara’s school. Now she has to juggle maintaining her sanity while her personal life and time traveler life collide.
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Murdered: Soul Suspect Review: Cold Case
When there’s a game that I’m interested in reviewing, I reach out to the public relations officers at the publisher of the game (or their contracted PR firm) to see if I can get a copy for review. More often than not, I don’t get a copy of the game. Usually, I can wait for a sale and pick up a copy to play it through but usually that’s not for several months that it gets down to a price within my budget.
In the case of Murdered: Soul Suspect, I was figuring that Steam’s Holiday or a spring sale would bring it down to a price where I would buy it. Then I got it for $15 from the Humble Store in early August. Two months after the game was released, I’m already getting it for some 70% off. While I know it was a big enough flop to force developer Airtight Games out of business, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
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Haven: Speak No Evil Review
A season premiere has a tough task nowadays. Ever since Star Trek: The Next Generation’s classic The Best of Both Worlds popularize season finale cliffhangers, the practice is now common place in television. The problem is that ST:TNG never had to worry about serialized story telling. You could watch the episodes in a fairly haphazard order and you wouldn’t be missing too much.
The difference between Star Trek and Haven is the nature of the story telling. You have to watch the episodes in sequence for them to make any sense so the story has to go forward and you have to have a reason to carry on. The challenge for writers is to answer enough questions from the previous season finale to satisfy viewers while leaving enough questions to bring you back. In some regards, Part Two of Haven’s fifth season premiere succeeded. In others, I’m not particularly compelled by it.
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Doctor Who: Time Heist Review
If there’s anyway to describe the first few episodes of Peter Capaldi’s run at the helm of the TARDIS, it might be that he’s getting a lot of the standard Doctor Who adventures out of the way. There’s the Dalek adventure. He’s done the adventure with a historical figure. There’s the horror episode. This week, it was timey-wimey genre bending.
The Doctor and Clara were tasked with robbing the most secure bank in the universe. However, this wasn’t the standard bank robbery caper. Of course not. This is Doctor Who.
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The Walking Dead: Season Two Review: Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Telltale Games had a bit of an up-and-down reputation prior to the release of The Walking Dead. That game completely changed the way that most thought of Telltale and many critics felt that they set the bar for storytelling in games. After the numerous game of the year awards for TWD and a critically acclaimed launch for The Wolf Among Us, Telltale’s second comic book adaptation, The Walking Dead: Season Two was one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2014.
The problem with a game with all that hype is that it occasionally bogs down under the weight. The problem with a sequel is that they struggle to balance the needs of new gamers to the franchise with the desires of people continuing the story. There were times when TWD:S2 caved to these pressures as Telltale tried very hard to copy what made Season One so loved but missing the emotional mark that Season One hit. However, once Season Two came into its own, Telltale had put out another stellar experience.
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Haven: See No Evil Review
When we last left Haven’s version of the Scooby Gang, everybody was in rough shape. Dave shot himself thanks to Dwight’s trouble. Duke was bleeding from the eyes after all the Crocker family absorbed troubles came back on him and started tearing him apart from the inside. Jennifer keeled over dead because of evil supernatural door reasons. Oh, and Audrey’s body is now hosting her original incarnation, Mara. Just another day in the life of Haven.
So with all those plot threads left dangling at the end, there’s a lot that needs to be taken care of in the fifth season premiere.
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Doctor Who: Listen Review
Steven Moffat has two tricks that he really likes to use when writing episodes. The first is creating and/or solving problems through wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey time paradoxes. I’ve lost count of the number of times that we’ve seen that. The second is trying to scare little children of everyday things. We’ve done statues, shadows and this week, we’re supposed to be scared of being alone in the dark.
Moffat decided to hybrid timey-wimey with everyday horror in Listen. In many ways, it’s a spiritual successor to Blink, the first time we met the Weeping Angels. Maybe it was a bit too familiar, though.
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The Walking Dead: Season Two – Episode Five (Spoiler-Free) Review: My Only Friend, The End
Coming into the second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, one of the big things people were talking about is how the game would be able to continue with Clementine as the protagonist. After all, she’s just a little girl. She couldn’t fill the shoes of Lee.
Well, literally, Clem couldn’t fill his shoes. Figuratively, once we got all the character introductions out of the way and got into character and plot development, this season took The Walking Dead to heights surpassing Season One. Sure, the episodes are shorter and maybe the illusion of choice isn’t quite as strong as the first season but amazing story and character writing made this game one of the highlights of 2014.
Now we reach the end of Season Two and boy, does Telltale give this season a spectacular send off.
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Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood Review
What happens when legends meet? I don’t mean two famous people but more what happens when two mythical creatures meet. Sure, we’ve had enough cross-over movies, TV shows and comics that cross-overs have warn out their welcome but there’s still the special moment every now and then.
But what happens when two mythical creatures who aren’t all that mythical get in a battle of egos? That’s the question that is being asked and answered by this weekend’s episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor, a myth throughout space and time, comes face to face with Robin Hood, a myth of Earth. They’re very real and very spectacular.
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Doctor Who: Into the Dalek Review
Since Steven Moffat has taken over as executive producer of Doctor Who, the Daleks have been used sparingly. There have only really been two Dalek episodes, 2010’s Victory of the Daleks and 2012’s Asylum of the Daleks (which was more a Clara episode than a Dalek episode). This is in stark contrast to the Russell T. Davies era (which I have more than this issue with) which had eight Dalek episodes in four seasons and generally made them look like chumps in all but one of those stories.
For the second episode of the Capaldi era, we’ve already got ourselves a Dalek episode. There’s no better way to throw a Doctor head first into the chaos of the universe than pitting him against his arch-nemesis.
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