The Review Zoo

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG AVENGERS TRAILER!

Agm — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:56:50 +0000

Nuff Said!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9cuGZJ9DP0

It’s just a iPhone. Right???

Agm — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:52:32 +0000

It’s just a phone.

Seriously. I know that. You know that. The Blackberry loving fans out there that want nothing but know that.

And yet I’m a little down today.

I never met the man, never fantasized about meeting him, although I would always love to be invited to one of their keynotes one day. But I can say that Steve Jobs affected me. My journey with Mac roducts started recently. 2005 is when I think I bought my first Macbook Pro. My first Apple machine.

I had just started this site and was attending e3 and wanted something to edit footage on and all the PC programs I had been using seemed like a hassle. The Macbook Pro otherwise was like a dream.

Everything was simple and easy and understandable for a PC guy like me who regularly ripped open his tower to add memory, replace parts, adjust power supplies and play around in the BIOS or Registry.

But no more! I could just enjoy the computer and I did.

Then the next biggie was the iPhone, it was like a Mac in my hand. And it was awesome. By that point I was sold hook, line, and sinker. And every year since then I’ve sold my iPhone, jailbroken and unlocked to get enough money to buy the newest. People are always amazed when I tell them I can sell my year old phone for usually its unsubsidized retail value or at least more than what I paid. I just let them know that’s how magical the phone is.

But it is just a phone, right? Steve Jobs was a brilliant dude and from all accounts was either a dick or an awesome guy. So why does his passing affect me?

I can only reason that maybe, just maybe its because I’ve accomplished a lot I’ve been proud of over the last few years. Much of it through a computer that made things as easy as possible and in some ways helped me to be as innovative as I could. So in some ways, Steve’s vision helped my vision and because of that I mourn the world losing him.

Visionaries show us what we are capable of by being capable of it themselves. They push us to be as good as them.

And in current tech history, no one was as capable as Steve.

iThankYou

Deus Ex: The Review

Ed — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:51:56 +0000

By Edlund Gerard

They explain the origin of Adam Jensen’s prosthetics through a tutorial that teaches you the basic mechanics of the game. Then we’re off! We are flooded with missions, side quests, social interaction, loot, and crazy conspiracy theories. Deus Ex H.R. is never short of things to do.

Difficulty levels don’t really matter too much. Even when on “Give me Deus Ex” difficulty, it is still quite easy. As a matter of fact I was quickly disheartened when I broke the game. As soon as I acquired a grenade launcher through the games story, I was able to defeat most bosses in 10 seconds.

Do not let that detract you from getting this game. It’s worth every penny. There are so many different ways to finish an objective and about 40 hours of content if you like to collect things and do side quests. There are tons of augmentation upgrades to make you stronger, faster, stealthier, and enough to get your hacking skills to Anonymous levels. With the right augmentations, I can hack terminals and gain access to enemy robots, turrets and cameras and turn that against them. You’ll find virus software that can aid you into getting past high level security. Modifying your weapons is also an excellent feature. I was able to take a lowly machine pistol, and turn it into the most powerful weapon in my inventory.

The soundtrack is wonderful and goes well with the pulse of the Deus Ex universe. Following programming 101, the tempo is raised anytime there could be an intense situation ahead. There are moments of definite raging where techno music seems so obvious, but it still feels like it belongs with the style of the game. The voice acting leaves something to be desired. Adam is a very typical gruff, emo, deadpan sounding individual and it screams “I’m cool!” There aren’t any silly one-liners, but that doesn’t save the game from the rest of the voiceovers. I understand the need to make a game with diversity given the storyline. But they try too hard with the voice acting, and I felt uncomfortable atsome points.

Even with the silly animations and the undesirable voice acting, I’m still begging for more. Most of the games story is told through hacked email accounts. Therefore I felt the need to see and collect absolutely everything. This game would be a perfect candidate for a New Game +. Unlocking a harder difficulty and keeping your modified weapons and body for a second play through would be more than enough to justify the price tag. But I do see more DLC on the horizon! Can’t wait!

This game gets a whopping: 8/10

50-50 Early Screening Review

Tricon — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:06:18 +0000

What do you think of when you hear the word “Cancer”? Do you think of sports analogies that beat-writers and sports journalists seem to overuse when referring to an unruly athlete? “He’s a cancer in that locker room.” Does your birthday fall between June 22^nd and July 22^nd, and automatically think of your horoscope? Or do you think of the debilitating, uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body that’s claimed so many of our loved ones for generations?

The word “Cancer”, regardless of its context, always seems carry with it a lot of weight and negativity. So when people would refer to the movie 50-50 as “that Cancer movie”, I really didn’t know what to expect. Was it a movie in the same vein as 2009’s My Sister’s Keeper, a heart warming movie that was more about an internal family conflict than it was the actual cancer that consumed Sofia Vassilieva’s character? How about 2001’s sappy romance story Sweet November, a movie so chock full of the genre’s clichés that you could have taken Cancer out of the whole movie and replaced it with something as trivial as “She is taking a job overseas” and it still would have been the same movie.

Well, 50-50 certainly “beat the odds”. 50-50 is a story about a 20-something year old (played incredibly by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a seemingly ordinary man, who goes to the doctor after some back pains, and leaves with news that he has Cancer, and that his odds are 50-50. Not groundbreaking stuff, but it’s the writing that gives this film its wings. The character’s dialogue is so good; you sometimes forget you’re watching A-list movie stars playing the roles of everyday regular Joes. I’ve been a fan of Gordon-Levitt all the way back to his sitcom days on 3^rd Rock from the Sun, and my affinity for his work really took off when he played hopeless-romantic Tom Hansen in 500 Days of Summer. But something about Gordon-Levitt separates him from the pack of movie stars that usually get the 100-mil budget summer blockbusters. Maybe it’s his ordinary, but handsome, good looks that make him so “approachable” while watching a movie, but JGL, from the start of the movie, makes you invest immediately in his characters stock, and you just sit there to wait and see how far it rises (and drops, in this case).

A cast that is just as well written surrounds his character. Seth Rogen plays the best friend and main comic relief in the film. If you don’t like Seth’s past work, you won’t like him here. I find him hilarious, and his banter with JGL’s character (and everyone else for that matter) really standout in the film and will always make you laugh. But he’s such a good character because he matters to the story, he wasn’t just written in for comedic relief. There’s a reason the poster for the movie is of those two with the tagline “It takes a pair to beat the odds.” Definitely one of my favorite Rogen characters ever.

Anjelica Huston, who plays his mother who defaults to smother-mode once she gets the news while also dealing with her husband’s own debilitating disease of Alzheimer’s, adds another dimension to JGL’s character. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Gordon-Levitt’s girlfriend who just can’t seem to adjust to the news, and the adorable Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air), plays his too-young therapist.

The only analogy that popped up in my head was when I saw the movie Jarhead in 2005, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Without doing much research about it, I went into that movie thinking I was going to see just another “war movie”. But Jarhead was more than that. It actually wasn’t about guns or fighting or any kind of physical warfare. It was the mental warfare we witnessed Jake’s character go through throughout the whole movie, and that film really stood out for me.

So 50-50 is about Cancer, and you never forget that while watching any scene in the movie. But you won’t see any corny, drawn-out speeches anywhere, no “moments of clarity”, and no cliché’s of “last toasts” or “you only live once” late-night ideas. 50-50 is just plain-old good writing, woven into a sad, funny journey, that will make you leave the theater smiling and turning to your friend saying, “That was pretty good.”

50-50 is in theatres September 30^th. Highly Recommended!

Who Made The DC 52 Video Promos??? Blech…

Agm — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:56:54 +0000

Stop it now!

The official commercial was bad enough, but fine it makes sense, not everyone is on the internet or going to comic book stores to know about this initiative.

But these trailers need to stop. They are genuinely bad and reek of 90s promotion with their beats and sound effects.

Head below the jump to see more of these…ugh…trailers.The commercial wasn’t my favorite but fine it worked.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMk65ULWnrc

But then these other things started popping up. These….sneak peeks.

Color me excited to see Grifter as a part of the DC Universe. But man, I hate this so much. (You can actually here it with very overused music here at Newsarama. )

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1yOtIr3Oak

Stormwatch is another one I look forward too. But ugh…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cny60m1DnB0

And Scott! Man, I’m looking forward to your Static Book too, but this trailer is just the bleh. Its like a barfed up version of the 90s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaq9c4R4nEI

Look, I’m not a huge fan of motion comics, and hell I don’t even expect these to be. Also, I’m not a massive wizard at iMovie, Adobe Premiere or Final Cut, but for such a large campaign this looks and feels like someone at Warner Bros handed an intern a bunch of books and said, “Here. Make a movie out of this.”

Look you got a lot of good momentum behind this DC, just keep it going and stop making crummy promos. Get someone who knows how to make it a little more visually appealing on these or stop making them.

They are just not good.

But then again, it got me to devote a whole post to it. So mission accomplished too.

Out With The Old! The Worst of the last DC Books before DCNU

Agm — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:57:56 +0000

This week Wednesday DC Comics will relaunch its entire universe, relatively speaking, with the release of Justice League #01, which will give us the first real glimpse of the new DCNU.

But what about the current and old DC Universe? How do we say good bye to that? Well, with some of these books…painfully.

Lets start with the worst cause some of these titles aren’t pretty.

Superman #714

The infamous “Grounded” storyline. I actually had some hopes for this. As a fan of Straczynski I thought he might be able to pull off a story of Superman traveling the country of a bit of a journey within himself at the same time. Fans and DC editors did not and he got yanked off a month or two into it. And it kept going anyway.

It wraps up painfully. Its been a total waste of pages and money the last few months and this is one book that will be better for the reboot/relaunch. Just forget this one existed.

Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #13

Inherently there is nothing wrong with this book. We get a team up with Batman and Guy Gardner. Remember them? How Batman once punched out Guy with one punch and Guy kinda thinks Batman is a pain in the ass?

Yeah its a fine throw away issue, nothing great nothing horrible, but definitely a weird note to end a book which won’t exist after this issue. If you like Green Lantern and have been saying to yourself you should pick up this title while you can still find it, skip it. You didn’t miss anything unless you wanted the War of The Green Lantern tie in books. Its a forgettable foot note at this point.

The Flashpoint Tie Ins:

I’m not gonna bash these too hard. Tie ins are always throw away books. They have no real consequences. And in the case of alternate reality tie ins these usually especially don’t count or have consequences.

For the most part all the books work in that they give you more back story for the universe, let you understand the surrounding players actions and motivations outside of the main Flashpoint story, and fill in any significant blanks you may have on this current world. But unless DC plans to return to it, or bring some of these characters over, its all gonna change and be wiped from the records so to speak.

The Lois Lane Resistance series is good, even though it goes for the juglar by killing off the title character to show that even in an alternate reality the Lois and Clark relationship is still special.

The Hal Jordan series goes out of its way, once again like some many Green Lantern books, to paint Hal as this ultimate hero even though many times we still get a depiction of Hal as a total ass.

The Kid Flash series suffers the same problem as its main job is to paint Impulse’s sacrifice in this universe as the way to make Barry Allen the ultimate Flash and bring him the power he needs to fix everything, although now I wonder if the new Impulse/Kid Flash in the Teen Titans series coming couldn’t be a newly de-aged, unmarried Wally West and not Bart Allen but time will tell.

While I feel like I bashed some of these without going into a lot of specifics my main point is this. If your interested in the DCNU, read that, skip these books. You didn’t miss anything you need to know to enjoy it and you probably won’t have to refer back to it ever again. And if you were already collecting these books, what did you think? I’d love to hear it. I was fairly disappointed and hope that the new DCNU definitely ups the ante more than these finales did.

Ghost Rider rolls into theaters again this Feburary!

Agm — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:02:29 +0000

In case you haven’t seen it yet, the new Ghost Rider: Spirits of Vengeance Trailer just rolled onto the internet. This movie looks better than the last one for sure, but the pissing joke at the end makes me wonder quite a bit how good it will be. Check out the trailer in the rest of this post!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebCawfEnSWU

Thor, The Movie Review!

Agm — Thu, 05 May 2011 04:01:34 +0000

The summer movie season started last week with the release of the awesome fifth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise. This week follows up with what has become a new tradition of the summer, the blockbuster superhero film.

There are arguably three this summer preparing to duke it out, Captain America next month in June and Green Lantern shortly after in July. But this month we start things off with a hammer blow, delivered by the best hammer swinger in comics, The Mighty Thor. I forgot X-Men First Class too!

I got to see the movie earlier today at a special Marvel invite only screening. The house was packed easily with a few hundreds and everyone was excited to once more see the Marvel logo on screen when the movie began.

Thor is the story of the Norse God of Thunder. Not a crazy man who thinks he is, although we human beings are unsure whether to take his claims seriously, but an honest to god…well god.

The story is told in a way to introduce the audience to the idea of the fantastic and the idea that not only superheroes, but God’s, walk among the people of this planet. Thor’s world of Asgard stands in sharp contrast to the mortal world of New Mexico that we see Thor eventually find himself in. We see the highs of Thor’s victories against the Frost Giants and learn how he comes to be on Earth and powerless.

Every actor in the movie does a top notch job. Hemsworth is every bit the god, standing tall over the normal cast members and coming across with a self assured confidence and charm that only a god of thunder could possess. Hopkins and Portman do a fantastic job of making a serious matter of the craziness of Thor’s reality. And Hiddleston is magnificent and duplicitous as Loki, with every shot of him looking the schemer and villain. Elba, The Warriors Three, Russo, Dennings, and the rest are all regal, godly, funny and awesome which makes me want to see more of Asgard and the gods of Marvel.

The special effects rock. Whether its giant beasts, Frost Giants, or a slightly too short encounter with The Destroyer, the look of all the battles are amazing and definitely deliver.

I saw the movie in 3D and while it did feel like Asgard and the environments had increased depth, I also felt myself thinking that movie looked far to dark in some scenes which I am certain the 3D glasses were the cause of. So I can’t recommend seeing it with or without them. All I can say is the movie is awesome and if you are a fan of 3D you should enjoy it, but don’t expect it to blow you out of the water with anything you haven’t seen before. Thankfully the 3D at least isn’t gimmicky and Thor isn’t throwing his hammer at the camera for cheap effects.

The after credits teaser is a good one and definitely gives a strong hint of what The Avengers will be about and definitely who will cause the most problems so make sure to stay for it!

Personally I can’t wait till Captain America next month. I love superheroes and have always loved Marvel. With the Avengers filming starting this month for their film debut next year it’s a great time to be a superhero film fan. Thor is fantastic first step into the cosmic extra super world of Marvel superheroes. If you’ve been satisfied with the Iron Man films and the last Incredible Hulk, you should definitely enjoy this and stay tuned for more from the House of Ideas.

OMG! WTF! BBQS! Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Part 2

Agm — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:26:33 +0000

Dude, this has to seriously be the most epic series of movies ever.

Sure, Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, all those series have been around for decades and make new products on the regular.

But eight movies? Eight movies back to back, with even the idea that if one of them had failed, that they may not have finished telling the story in movie form.

Harry Potter is a damn global treasure.

Check out this trailer which rocks the socks. And dammit I better not be the only who cheered when I saw Mrs. Weasley battling Belatrix!

Wow! X-Men First Class New Theatrical Trailer

Agm — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:04:50 +0000

X-Men First Class also looked a little suspect when we first saw it.

The horrible posters that looked like a first year photoshop student created them, the odd idea that Havok might actually be Cyclops father recruited to the X-Men long before him. Xavier and Magneto at the strip club together.

Charles, are you sensing a threesome as well?

Yeah it was looking bad. But it seems like it might all come together.

Check it out.