Take a look around the room you’re in right now. Have a wander around your house or apartment or whatever you’ve got. Try to look at it through the eyes of a stranger. The expired milk left out in the kitchen, the stack of old bills on the windowsill. What sort of story does your home tell? Is it one you’d want other people to hear?
Read MoreA while ago, I finally got around to seeing Disney™ Presents Rogue One™: A Star Wars™ Story. Based on the title of this post, you might assume that I hated it. But I didn’t! I actually liked it better than The Force Awakens, which surprised me since most of the buzz around the movie was pretty downbeat.
However, the movie does have a lot of pretty serious flaws, and they’re pretty much the same flaws that I keep seeing time and time again in big Hollywood blockbusters. Why don’t we go through them in internet-friendly list form?
Read MoreLong time followers of my opinions will know about my vitriolic love-hate relationship with anime. My experience with American TV cartoons is a lot more lacking, as I’ve largely missed the new wave of internet friendly kids shows that Adventure Time ushered in (although I am currently watching Steven Universe).
It’s the episodic nature of these shows that puts me off. My patience wears thin after too many instalments of status-quo maintaining wacky shenanigans, even with the promise of a continuing story somewhere down the line. Over The Garden Wall largely solves that problem by adopting a miniseries format: ten episodes that aired over the course of a single week, telling a story with a defined end point rather than carrying on for as long as the ratings remain positive. It’s an atmospheric, engrossing tale that feels like a much more daring creative exercise than Cartoon Network usually plays host to. Given its subject material and spooky tone it feels like it should have aired in October rather than November, but we’re going to rectify that now by reviewing it as part of our Spooktober celebrations.
Read MoreDespite being a huge fan of the burgeoning genre, I have never played the original "walking simulator", Dear Esther. I have, however, played The Chinese Room’s follow up, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, and thoroughly enjoyed its atmosphere and smart writing. Now they’re back with the long-gestating Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a PS4 exclusive that feels like an attempt to make a bigger, more ambitious sequel to genre codifier Gone Home.
The premise: it’s the 80s and something very strange has happened to the rural Yaughton Valley region of Shropshire. Dead birds litter the ground, all the clocks are stopped at five past six, the radios are all broadcasting a creepy number-station style message, strange balls of golden light float along streets and country lanes… and everyone is gone. It’s up to you (it’s not entirely clear who you’re actually supposed to be) to explore the valley and piece together the mystery of what happened.
Read MoreBack when I was a wee person, I discovered Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights (released as The Golden Compass in the US) and absolutely loved it to pieces. Then I found the The Subtle Knife in a library and didn’t read it for ages because I didn’t realize it was a sequel. By the time The Amber Spyglass came along I was fully on board the parallel-dimensions-secular-humanism-war-against-heaven train and the His Dark Materials trilogy ranked among my all time favourite books.
That was a long time ago though, and I haven’t re-read all three books in quite a while. So I decided, why not blatantly rip off Ferretbrain’s Reading Canary format and do a mega-post on them, with brief detours to cover the movie and the two companion novellas Pullman put out? The aim will be to expose the books to the light of cold, objective analysis and discover if they’re actually as good as I remember them being.
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