Watch our very first episode of Unknown Hosts! This week, we covered the Steam Sale, Xbox Elite Controller, Xbox One Backwards Compatibilty, the Final Fantasy VII remake.
“The State of Gaming”
Blog
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Unknown Hosts 6/24/2015
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The One I Love Review
As I’ve mentioned on this site before, I am a huge supporter of physical media. Simply subscribing to a service like Netflix and being at the mercy of whatever licenses they decide to renew does not interest me: I want to be able to view the movies that I love whenever I want, not whenever it was lucrative for a third party. I’ve never understood people who look at movies and television as mere diversions, all equal as long as they can keep you from boredom for a couple of hours.What I DO love about the digital subscription model, however, is having the ability to find something you are completely unaware of and watch it on a whim. In a world where major film releases are accompanied by massive ad campaigns intent on spoiling every aspect of the movie in question (see: Terminator Genisys), it can be a joy to just pick out a movie (possibly one recommended to you by Netflix’s scarily-accurate prediction algorithm), not read anything about it, and enjoy the narrative the way that the writer(s) intended. This was the experience I had with The One I Love, a film that I would highly recommend to others.
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E3 Wrap-Up
Yet another E3 has come and gone, and once again the gaming world is treading water in a sea of information. After hours of conferences and several more hours of demonstrations, there is almost too much information to even parse, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t try. If you want to check out the Twitch coverage I did with Unknown Hosts, go here to watch our past broadcasts from this week! Or, if you’d like to jump to our pre and post show coverage, just use the links provided below the company headings to see themc where available!But for a concise, written version of events, read on! (more…)
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Jurassic World Review
Walking 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!
(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.