Review: "Pacific Rim"

If the idea of a director at the top of his game making a movie solely on the basis that it excites his inner child somehow doesn't appeal to you, I need you to stop reading. Right now. This film isn't for you. Go and watch The King's Speech or something droll. Alright? Alright.

So. Guillermo del Toro is indisputably an expert filmmaker, having mastered a fair degree of genres and amassing well-deserved popularity, and that might just be me, but I'm pretty certain it's an established fact. He explored similar "monster movie" ideas in films like Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy series - so, in a way, Pacific Rim is a culmination of his previous interests into one colossal, big-budget summer release - a film where giant robots punch giant lizards in the face, with all of the polish such a concept has rarely deserved (or afforded).

Review: "Deadpool"

It was around the time Deadpool went up for pre-order that things started to seem… off. High Moon was hit with layoffs, the team working on Deadpool hit hardest. The release date of June 25th seemed too early for a game with such a high-profile company’s license attached to it, and the fact that Activision didn’t send out early review copies made it all the more clear that they were kicking this one out the door as quickly and quietly as possible. For $30.

I was all good and ready to either love Deadpool like one would love an ugly, braindead puppy, or hate it with an unbridled vengeance. It was either going to be a diamond in the rough, a fantastic game struggling to find its time behind a low budget and a butchered development team, or it was going to be a throwaway piece of cash-grabbing garbage. A masterpiece, or a failure. A hit, or a flop. I didn’t consider it could be a third thing.

Because what I got was much worse.

Review: "The Darkness II"

Afraid of the Dark

review for The Darkness II (PC), 1-4 player first-person shooter, out now

The Darkness was pretty cool, I guess. The first time I heard of this early next-gen title, was in a glowingly positive review by the Official PlayStation Magazine, calling it things like "absolute must-buy" and "system seller" and "9/10". When I played it myself, I found it was a wholly entertaining - if not mind-blowingly incredible - shooter wrapped in an utterly boring and lifeless shell of an open-world. When The Darkness II was announced, fears were that it was going to ditch the open-world and be a more traditional, linear FPS experience. Everyone seemed to be really disappointed.

I, however, was happier than ever. And The Darkness II secured its place on my "must-have" list.

Review: "Serious Sam: The Random Encounter"

Friends, Shoot Him In the Face

review for Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (PC), 1 player action/RPG, out now

Serious Sam 3: BFE is out right now. It's Croteam's love letter to first-person shooting, an excellent game with a bevy of multiplayer options and extraordinary polish and attention to detail. The gameplay is classic Serious Sam; wide open spaces filled with relentless enemies, a non-linear ludo-narrative, the likes of which naturally come about when you dump the player in with the AI and let the destruction unfold without the aid of gratuitous set-piece cutscenes. And it's a lot of fun. Despite all this, there's are more interesting Serious Sam titles, and they all came out in 2011.

The Serious Sam Indie Series is what it is. Part marketing experiment, part unprecedented opportunity for indie developers to play around with the established formula of a well-known franchise, it's essentially publisher Devolver Digital throwing Serious Sam's assets and rights the way of a couple of independent studios with the simple instruction of, "do what you will". From the Serious Sam model of first-person shooting, the three titles made somehow included a gun-stacking 2D shooter, a survival-platformer for iPad, and... a Japanese-style, turn-based RPG. It's that RPG that we're going to look at now. It's called The Random Encounter. And you see what they did there, indeed.

Review: "L.A. Noire"

The City of Angels

review for L.A. Noire (Xbox 360), 1 player action/adventure, out now

Go Australia! After 2K Australia made the critically acclaimed and damn awesome original Bioshock, I was pretty sure that Australia was the greatest video-game creating superpower on the planet. Up next, of course, was L.A. Noire by Team Bondi, a Sydney-based studio working on what was sure to be an innovative cop drama filled with adult suspense, murder, and mystery. Four boring un-Australian years later and L.A. Noire has actually been released. Developed by Team Bondi, sure, but under the wing of Rockstar, the people behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. So, here's L.A. Noire, a shitty action sandbox.

Review: "The Darkness"

Life is a Lie We Shall Conquer

review for The Darkness, 1 player first-person shooter, available now

Jackie is a hitman. He's also in the mafia. All his buddies are in the mafia, also, and speak in that thick Italian-American accent that the Godfather seemed to popularize. They're about as threatening as a cliche can be, and sometimes even a little comical. Jackie's long, flowing hair makes him look more like a goth chick than a trained hitman, and his wacky one-liner's during the loading screens will be sure that you have nothing but utter contempt for him and his personality. Oh, don't worry though, he's just the main fucking character. Christ almighty, after Starbreeze studios made Escape from Butcher Bay with Vin Diesel's unlikable Riddick character, it's almost like someone said, "hey, we're on a roll!" and vowed to make Jackie as much as a whinging unlikable little bitch as possible.

On the other side of this coin is The Darkness, who is voiced by Mike Patton, and is possibly the coolest freaking supernatural entity ever to grace a videogame. His voice drizzles with malicious intent and despise, the vocal tones reaching into eerie treble and bone-chilling bass. Honestly, I don't think I can do justice in words how incredible Mike Patton's performance is inThe Darkess. Every line of dialog he has is pure gold, the characterization is perfect, and it's probably the best villain in a game... well, ever. Yes, even better than GLaDOS. Yes, even better than Arkham Asylum's Joker. Patton's Darkness is just orgasmic, and that's not hyperbole, it's the goddamn truth. Patton won a lot of awards for his role as the titular Darkness, and he deserved every one of them and more.

Review: "John Woo's Stranglehold"

Slick as Oil

review for Stranglehold, 1-player third-person shooter, available second-hand

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, as a gamer primarily partaking in the action-adventure-shooter genre, it’s that we – that is to say, shooter fans – are very much connoisseurs. Moreso than any other breed of gamers, we very much refine our palette, so to speak. ...okay, I can't finish typing that sentence and take myself seriously at the same time. But the point I'm making is, is thus: perhaps a fan of fantasy RPGs can accept a slightly half-good goblin-hunting elf-romping MMO-ish-athon, but here in shooty-wizzy-bang-bang land, mediocrity is very much frowned upon. This is perhaps why RPG fans very much enjoyed Mass Effect, but those of us drawn in by the third-person shooting aspects were left disappointed – because we hate sub-par action. It’s all about big, epic gunfights, tight controls, fast pacing, and awesome - yet dignified! - set-pieces. And any “action” game sneaking in under our radar without these things will get chastised for it - indefinitely.

Review: "Halo: Reach"

Reach for the Stars

review for Halo: Reach, 1-16 player sci-fi first-person shooter, available now

Contrary to what I may have said in the past, I don't "hate" Halo. I hate that it's a cog in the Microsoft money-making, customer-screwing, Xbox World Domination machine; I think its popularity to quality ratio is unfortunately high, considering what little it brings to the table with each installment. But, regardless of its rather crippling issues of repetitiveness and lacklustre storytelling, the Halo franchise is, at best, actually pretty damn good.

It isn't fantastic by any stretch of the word, but it is, especially with friends, fun. Halo, as a social multiplayer experience, is as fun as it was when Halo 2 came out, and Reach raises the benchmark higher with a staggering array of multiplayer, co-op and Forge modes available. The multiplayer is, however, as unbalanced as it has always been, usually devolving to "whoever has the biggest gun or vehicle, wins". Which is, to be honest... sort of refreshing, in a Quake Arena sort of way. Co-op, however, takes a bit of a hit narratively. The whole game is actually pretty retarded in that department, but doubly so on co-op - unlike in Halo 3, where Player 2 was thrust into the role of The Arbiter, in Reach your partner plays as an unexplained replica of your character, Noble 6. Is this second Noble 6 a clone? Brother? Pretender to the throne? Whatever it is, it really doesn't help the immersion any. ...and that's the good stuff out of the way.