Go back a few years and the problem of having yet another plastic instrument taking up space in your house seemed like it would never happen again, but apparently both Activision and Harmonix think that enough time has passed for people to spend more money and find the floor space for a new one. Personally, I love rhythm games and I’ve put more than too many hours into both the Guitar Hero and the Rockband franchises, so I'm totally up for some new entries. However, whether the general audience is on board for more remains to be seen.
At the Eurogamer Expo this month both Rockband 4 and Guitar Hero Live were on display, and both were high on my list of games I wanted to try out. Since the over saturation of the market, only games such as Rocksmith have tried to fill the guitar playing void left by these franchises. This is now their chance to win back their previous audience as well as trying to gain some new fans at the same time.
In my review of last weeks episode of Doctor Who I mentioned how much I was looking forward to seeing how "Before the Flood" would conclude what I believed had the potential to be one of the best stories the show had produced since Stephen Moffat took over as show runner. Well it turns out that my optimism wasn't misplaced - after seeing "Before the Flood" I can confirm that the "Under the Lake" and "Before the Flood" double bill is indeed one of the best stories of Doctor Who since David Tennant left the show. Maybe I'm psychic (paper).
After a brief monologue from The Doctor explaining the concept of the bootstrap paradox before the opening credits roll (reminiscent of last seasons "Listen") we are sent straight back into the action, picking up right from where we left off at the end of "Under the Lake". "Before the Flood" is fairly neatly separated into two parts, one half following The Doctor and a couple of the bases crew members in the past as he investigates the spaceship they found, and the other following Clara as she and the crew members that stayed on the base wait for The Doctor to return.
I'm not really big on Assassin's Creed. I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game since Assassin's Creed 2 (despite owning most of them on Steam) and I've never been overly impressed with them anyway - fun free running mechanic and historical settings aside, I've never really found anything about them to be particularly enjoyable, from the repetitive combat to the dull present day parts of the story that focus on Desmond.
Maybe I'm not the best person to be doing this.
Regardless, I had the opportunity to play Assassin's Creed Syndicate on PS4 at the 2015 Eurogamer Expo (more commonly known as EGX), spending about 15 minutes on an assassination mission that gave me a couple of different ways of approaching my target. Naturally, I tried to do it sneaky - under the guise of having been caught by a guard (who was secretly on my side) I started to work my way through the building, avoiding getting too close to enemies who would be able to tell I wasn't really a prisoner, focusing on remaining undetected and slowly but surely making progress towards my target before finally pouncing on her. That failed and I died though, so I ended up punching my way through with ease.
If I'm being perfectly honest, Just Cause 3 is the reason I decided to attend the 2015 Eurogamer Expo (more commonly known as EGX). I'm a big fan of Just Cause 2 (which must be one of my most played Xbox 360 games) and I've been looking forward to a sequel for some time now, an anticipation that has only been heightened by the game play footage and trailers released recently.
I spent 20 minutes with Just Cause 3 in total, which was running on PC and played using an Xbox One controller. The demo opens with Rico leaning against a fancy looking sports car, looking calm, collected and inherently cool as he smokes a cigarette. After a second or so, he flicks it away from him, stands up and... that's the end of the only scripting or forced direction that the demo of Just Cause 3 contained. From then on I was given complete freedom of choice of what to do, the only limit being the amount of time I had to play with.
It seems like it's been a long time since we had a 'base under siege' episode, which is a shame - as far as Doctor Who episodes go they are often amongst the best (such as The Waters of Mars or Midnight)
thanks to the way they confine The Doctor to one space and make him use
his own intellect in order to solve the problem at hand. Not only that,
but the focus on the monster of the episode often makes them more...
well, not scary exactly, but at least more tense that the average
episode of Doctor Who.
"Under the Lake" sees The Doctor and Clara stumble upon an underwater mining station that, as we learn from the episodes pre-opening credits scene, is apparently being haunted by what appear to be ghosts after the crew of the mining station found a spaceship. After accidentally making the ghosts target them, The Doctor and Clara join up with the remaining crew members in order to try and figure out what is going on.
I have very mixed feelings about Ridley Scott. Despite directing one of the best science fiction films of all time and one of the best horror films of all time (Alien on both counts) I'd find it hard to disagree with anyone claiming that Ridley Scott's filmography is something of a mixed bag, especially as of late. His last five films have all seen a somewhat muted reaction from critics and audiences alike, and his inability to leave his older films alone (does anyone actually want a sequel to Blade Runner or another prequel to Alien?) has seen some people question whether or not he still 'has it'. It's not an unfair question really - his ratio of good to bad films has been slowly getting worse for nearly a decade.
After seeing The Martian, I can confirm that Ridley Scott still 'has it'.
The Martian follows botanist/astronaut Mark Watney as he attempts to survive being stranded on Mars after a sudden storm separates him from his crew, who are forced to abandon their mission and return to Earth. Presumed dead by both NASA and the crew of the Hermes, Mark must figure out a way to produce food and water on the inhospitable red planet while also attempting to work out a way to make contact with NASA without any of the equipment he needs to do so.
I said last week that I was very nearly done with Doctor Who altogether. A combination of poor pacing, a lacklustre story and an overwhelming amount of fan pandering made "The Magician's Apprentice" one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who I thought I had ever seen, an episode so bad that I was certain the the second half of this two-parter would be unable to make up for it. Following on immediately from "The Magician's Apprentice", "The Witch's Familiar" first deals with the continued existence of Missy and Clara (obviously - anyone who genuinely thought they might be dead must be an idiot) before jumping back to the main portion of the episode - a long overdue conversation between The Doctor and a dying Davros.
It should be clear to anyone who read my reviews of Doctor Who season eight that I am no 'Whovian', the name that the fandom of Doctor Who refer to themselves as. I haven't really enjoyed watching Doctor Who since David Tennant left the show, my interest only sparked in the show again when it was announced that Peter Capaldi would be playing the newest incarnation of The Doctor. So I stuck with Doctor Who through it's shaky eighth season, always willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and another chance being as it was Capaldi's first run on the show. But after watching "The Magician's Apprentice", this review was nearly titled "Why I won't be reviewing Doctor Who anymore".
The story this time has The Doctor stumbling upon a planet in the midst of a war. On the battlefield, he finds a child in dire need of help - trapped on a small patch of land, booby traps block the scared child's route to safety. But when the child reveals to The Doctor that his name is Davros, he has a rather important choice to make about the fate of the child.
Set in London during the 1960's, Legend tells the story of gangster twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray from the viewpoint of Frances Shea, Reggie's girlfriend and later wife. Already self made men by the time the film starts, Legend is mainly concerned with Reggie's relationships with both Frances and Ronnie, but also tries to take a look at the investigation into the Kray's by Scotland Yard and the events that led to the twins downfall.
It can be hard to write a review. Sometimes I find it difficult to look at something critically because of how much I enjoyed it, and at other times it can be hard to find something good to say about something I strongly disliked. But this time, a complete lack of any feelings one way or the other makes reviewing American Ultra hard, a film so unremarkable in every way that I'm certain I'll have forgot I even saw it in a few months.
American Ultra is the story of Mike Howell and Phoebe Larson, a couple of unambitious stoners who live together in the town of Liman, West Virginia. Unbeknown to Mike, he's really a secret CIA asset from an Ultra program, a highly trained killing machine who can be activated with a coded phrase. When the person responsible for the Ultra program that created Mike learns that he is to be taken out by a rival CIA agents operation, she travels to Liman in order to activate Mike and save his life.
