Medium Mashup

Category: Reviews

Reviews of Movies, TV, and Games

  • The Last Man on Earth Season 1 Review

    the_last_man_on_earth_cast(This review contains spoilers. Also, too many instances of the name “Phil Miller.” Having two characters with the exact same name makes writing hard!)

    I wrote about The Last Man on Earth roughly halfway through its season in my “Deep End” section, which you can read here. At the time, the show’s success or failure was still in question, as it was changing its status quo on a near-weekly basis. Now that the season is complete, it is a little easier to put everything into perspective. The Last Man on Earth may have been built on a high concept (the extinction of the majority of life on Earth), but it ultimately settled for a pretty standard premise.

    While many praised the early episodes of the series, focused on Will’s isolation and his forced relationship with Carol, the season started to derail around the time the character of Melissa showed up. From that point on, every episode could be summed up by saying “Phil wants to have sex with _______, but _______ is getting in his way.”

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  • Marvel’s Daredevil Review

    MARVEL'S DAREDEVILThe most immediately noteworthy thing about Marvel’s new Daredevil series, the first of five planned series for Netflix, is how little it feels like the rest of Marvel’s cinematic universe. Netflix lists Daredevil with a TV-MA rating, and the show earns that rating with nearly every episode, portraying a gritty and violent Hell’s Kitchen. Even the texture of the image, captured with late-Michael-Mann inspired low-light digital photography, creates a gritty canvas for the show to work on. With an emphasis on street-level crime and political corruption, Daredevil never comes across as a series that coexists with colorful Gods and superheroes like Thor and Captain America.

    Yet, from a narrative standpoint, they DO coexist. Multiple mentions of the “Battle of New York” make their way into the story, along with some newspaper headlines and plot-points. Much of Hell’s Kitchen’s redevelopment, spearheaded by Wilson Fisk (known as Kingpin in the comics, although never referred to that way here) is supposedly due to the damage that occurred in the first Avengers movie. Even if the characters only make one or two passive references to Captain America and The Hulk, the events that drive Daredevil can be traced back to their actions.

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  • Broken Age Review

    broken age

    (You can watch me play Broken Age Act 1 and part of Act 2 here)

    The adventure game has had something of a resurgence in recent years. After being a dead genre since the late 90s, developers have started to realize how well it fits with the mobile marketplace. The basic gameplay mechanics of clicking things on-screen and dragging items out of your inventory to solve puzzles make quite a lot of sense on smartphones and tablets, where touching and dragging are the only real ways to interface with a game. Meanwhile, Telltale Games’ adventure game efforts ultimately led to their re-alignment as a Bioware-esque creator of player-driven narratives with the success of The Walking Dead. However, the basic “click around a screen to explore the environment” model of the classic adventure game still shines through these later efforts.

    Despite this resurgence, though, adventure games are simply not marketable enough to greenlight without an attached license (like Telltale’s Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, Borderlands, and Game of Thrones series) or a very small budget (like most mobile games). While an adventure game would never require the budget of a Call of Duty game, the game industry somewhat mirrors the modern-day film industry in that moderate-budget projects are no longer considered viable. So when Double Fine, headed up by adventure game writer and legend Tim Schafer, decided that they wanted to build an adventure game, they went to Kickstarter.

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  • Dragon Age Inquisition Review

    dragon age inquisitionIf there’s one thing that Dragon Age Inquisition does especially well, it’s world building. While the first game in the series, Dragon Age Origin, felt like “Tolkien for Adults,” Inquisition seems to model its world and lore a bit more after George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. Different races and factions have deep, complex histories, with their own myths and legends, and very different accounts of how certain events occurred. When it comes to the various religions and supernatural forces that make up the Dragon Age world of Thedas, all of it is presented with uncertainty. Like the giants and children of the forest in Game of Thrones, it is unclear to the majority whether or not these things actually existed or are simply stories.

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  • Gone Girl Review – Playing with Genre

    gone-girl_c99723(Because Gone Girl has been out and available for some time now, I will be talking spoilers in this review. Also, because this review skews toward a broader discussion of genre, I am including it as a “review” and a “deep end” piece)

    Six months after its release, I have finally gotten around to watching David Fincher’s Gone Girl. During that time, it had been nigh-impossible to avoid spoilers altogether (Neil Patrick Harris even spoiled his own death during the Oscars), but I did my best, and it ultimately paid off. Much of Gone Girl’s success comes not only from its twists and turns, but from how surprisingly early they come. Each major twist reshapes the narrative, as well as the genre.

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