Medium Mashup

Author: Ross Miller

  • Jurassic World Review

    jurassic-world_MYz6jCWalking out of the theater where I had just watched Jurassic World, I tried to figure out what, exactly, the movie wanted to be. In its marketing, everybody involved tried to stress that this was the true sequel to Jurassic Park, the first to fully capture the spirit of that initial film. This claim did not gel with the movie I saw, which seemed to have little to no understanding of what made that first film truly special.

    First of all, the sense of wonder instilled in the original Jurassic Park is completely gone here. Dinosaurs often litter the landscape, or show up as holograms in visitor information centers, but the camera seems wholly unimpressed with them.  This admittedly mirrors the feelings of many of the characters in the world, who have known dinosaurs to exist for over twenty years now, but it is jarring in a film so hellbent on recreating the splendor of the initial film.

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  • Ex Machina: Fun With Theories!

    Ex Machina(This post contains spoilers for the film Ex Machina. It is written under the assumption that the reader has already seen the movie.)

    I am not often interested in fan theories. The vast majority of the time, they consist of taking various tiny pieces of information, removing them from their intended contexts, and then placing them side-by-side with other unrelated pieces of information in order to create an argument. More often than not, fan theories just confuse the narrative further and substitute a clear purpose with wish fulfillment on the behalf of the theory crafter. In the rare event that a fan theory IS correct, it tends to be a theory that actually clarifies the narrative rather than muddling it (R+L=J, I’m looking at you).

    I admit: my theory on Ex Machina does not clarify the movie to the degree that some of the best fan theories do. I had a certain idea in my mind early in the film and, by watching the movie with the assumption of my theory’s reality, it may have colored my perception of certain scenes. That being said, I believe it to be a well-supported theory with a more interesting, complex approach than what was openly presented in the film.

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  • Community: Dan Harmon’s Story Circle and Why Community Can End Now

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    Dan Harmon’s Story Circle

    Last week, Yahoo posted the final episode of Community’s sixth season, and possibly the final episode of the series. Dan Harmon has whisked himself away from the internet to avoid answering questions, and Yahoo hasn’t made any official decisions on a follow-up season, despite claims that the show has been extremely successful on their platform. This season also fulfilled the first part of the “six seasons and a movie” fan-joke that originated way back in season 2, and ended with a “#andamovie” hashtag, suggesting that perhaps the TV series portion of Community had concluded. Combined with a season finale that actually felt like a series finale, there is a strong reason to believe that Community will soon wrap-up entirely with a movie.

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  • Catherine Review

    There are two approaches one can take in explaining 2011’s Catherine, developed by Shin Megami Tensei/Disgaea/Persona developer Atlus. Mechanically, it’s a puzzle game. The majority of gameplay consists of pushing and pulling a series of blocks, creating paths that allow you to climb to the top of a massive tower. These boxes often contain special properties that can be useful, like springs, or dangerous, like spikes. The puzzles themselves become fiendishly difficult as the game progresses, but you develop techniques through your successes and failures that start to feel like second nature. It’s a very well-designed and challenging game that (usually) plays fair.

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  • Telltale’s Game of Thrones: Choice vs Narrative

    game of thrones telltale(The following article contains some spoilers from Telltale Games’s Game of Thrones series)

    Ever since their first season of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games has been primarily known as the company that specializes in narrative-heavy, choice-driven games. While familiarity with their formula has led to slightly diminishing returns, and none of their recent titles have packed the emotional punch that the first season of their Walking Dead series did, they have been consistently entertaining and unique. The Wolf Among Us was a cool comic-based neo-noir fantasy piece, tied to the existing “Fables” property but also perfectly suited to the uninitiated. Tales from the Borderlands has nailed its parent series’ style and sense of humor, while crafting a story and cast of characters with a lot more complexity than its shooter-siblings would allow. Even the second season of The Walking Dead, while paling in comparison to the first, did a generally strong job of balancing player choice with a pre-ordained story.

    However, four episodes in, their Game of Thrones series appears to be their first major misstep. This is for several reasons, but two stand out in particular. First is that, on a conceptual level, Game of Thrones was destined to run into trouble. Unlike The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, which utilize different sets of characters than their source material, and The Wolf Among Us, which is a prequel to the main series, Game of Thrones takes place during the same time period as the fourth season of the show. It also utilizes many of the same characters. The central families involved, the Forresters and the Whitehills, are inventions for the game, but are frequently interacting with characters whose fates are set in stone.

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