Kill Knight takes the tried-and-true mechanics of an intense twin-stick shooter and seeks to complicate them with melee attacks and weapon reloading. The controls here are very difficult to get a handle on. It makes use of all four trigger buttons to shoot, reload, dash, fire your secondary weapon, and trigger your magic attack. On top of that you have a melee attack that is assigned to one of the face buttons. It took me hours to finally get comfortable with everything.

However, once I got going it really hooked me in. The fighting is the right level of difficulty where each death feels like you could have avoided it if you had just been paying better attention. There are also a number of challenges that keep replaying the levels interesting, and they eventually reward you with more powerful and intense weaponry.

It doesn’t quite rise to the brilliance of Robotron: 2084 or Geometry Wars but it comes close.

It’s a fishing sim with an H. P. Lovecraft twist. During the day you take your boat out, catch fish, and sell them for money to upgrade your gear. At night you need to stay near light or various horrific creatures will emerge from the depths and attack you. Your best bet is to dock and rest until morning then wake up and repeat the process. It feels like one of those cozy games that brain-dead zoomers enjoy but with just enough of an edge to it to make it seem more deep than it really is.

The dark lore is not terribly interesting, or at least it’s not presented in a way that captured my fancy. I was surprisingly engaged by the fishing parts of the game. The act of fishing is mostly just simple timing-based mini-games. Any upgrades you buy just give you access to more of the same. The game would have been much better if your skill at beating the mini-games actually determined the quality of your catch. That would have given some real purpose to the upgrades. As it is, capturing your 1000th fish is the same challenge as the very first one you caught.

In the end, this is just relaxing but mindless item collection. I enjoyed it but it could have been so much more.

Film noir starring the guy from My Three Sons as an insurance agent who comes up with the perfect murder plot. Yeah, it’s a classic.

In Mad Mission a super-thief wearing a leather jumpsuit and sporting a bowl cut hairdo steals some diamonds from some gangsters. He is then nabbed by a pair of cops and, once again, hilarity ensues. Much of the comedy here is lost in translation but there are a couple of okay stunt sequences. The most this film has going for it is it’s Pan-o-vision cinematography which can lead to some deceiving screen caps. Don’t be fooled!

Dead Island 2 is surprisingly good and it’s a vast improvement over the original game. Much of the open-world aspirations have been chucked aside and you’re limited to a group of ten or so tightly designed regions. The primary focus here is mastering melee combat and building a tableaux of effective weapons. I really enjoyed the gory combat. Also, there are just enough secrets and collectables quests to push players towards exploration without it becoming a chore.

The story is kind of basic and amounts to the obvious, “how can we get ourselves out of here” plot, but it’s told through interactions with an assortment of goofy, narcissistic characters that have managed to survive the outbreak. Despite the grim backdrop, it’s filled with humor and a touch of satire. It’s least interesting bits are the sci-fi puppet-masters plot line that is there to set the stage for any future sequels.

My only big complaint is that player deaths tend to come out of nowhere just as you’ve almost made a big boss kill. Then they require you go back and fight the encounter again but your inventory and heath kits are not restored. It’s that same Bioshock style respawn that I didn’t like in Dead Island part one. It feels simultaneously unfair but also too eager to soften the consequences of failure.

So, there is no reason to watch this other than to thrill at the insane stunt work and action. The plot is one mcguffin after another, the run time is way too long, and the dialogue is overly serious and cartoonishly cliché, but man-o-man that final biplane sequence. Yowza.

Covers three main topics: out of body experiences, near-death experiences and reincarnation. Mostly business as usual. A medium tier book in the series. Fewer sentence fragments than this review.

It’s the classic movie that Sorcerer was based upon. I liked the first act of this version much better. The truck driving scenes where tension-filled but nowhere near as intense as the remake’s bridge scene.

I watched this after every commentary on my John Woo blu-rays said that he based much of his style on this movie. Not so much the action as the look and feel of the anti-hero who lives by a code of honor. I loved how so much of the story is told purely through visuals rather than dialogue.

A young Taiwanese woman finds a message in a bottle and decides to track down the author in Hong Kong only to discover he’s gay. Then she randomly meets a rich trader (played by Jackie Chan) and the romantic comedy with a man twice her age ensues. There is also a plot about the rivalry between Chan and his brother that has to be resolved with fighting a short American kickboxer. The fights are well executed but ultimately pointless and shoehorned in. The rest of the movie is spent cringing at the May/December romance.

You play as John Marston, a reformed cowboy outlaw whose family is being held hostage in order to get him to kill his old gang partners. There’s not much more to it than that. Kill the first guy and then there’s another boss to hunt down. This all plays out in a massive open-world with tons of desert scruff to explore.

The problem I have with the Rockstar Games’ open-world formula is that, despite the freedom you are given, you are pinned into playing the missions exactly as designed. This is as opposed to a game like Fallout where you can approach obstacles with violence, stealth or intelligence. In essence, this is a middling movie western story in which you perform tasks just to see the next cutscene.

While there is an “honor” system, the story almost demands you play as the good guy. I was less inclined to just instigate mayhem like I would in GTA. Even though you are forced to align with obviously corrupt characters and kill peasants, etc., you remain the virtuous hero trying to save his family.

Yet, despite all my criticisms, I enjoyed the various shootouts and the simple bullet-time gun mechanics. The world is big and beautiful and exactly the environment you’d see in a classic western. Much of the side challenges amount to collectable quests or gambling simulations. Each is fun for a while, but I didn’t have the time or energy to go through the game 100%. I’m wondering if the sequel offers more depth.

With its wall-to-wall kung-fu and monster effects, I would have loved this film if I saw it when I was eleven years old. There isn’t any depth to the characters and it’s mostly heroes go from action set piece A to action set piece B. Everything looks great and it’s still fun to watch and that’s about all you need.

RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis) is a parapsychological term for “poltergeist” activity, describing the involuntary, repeated movement of objects or noises attributed to the unconscious mental influence of a living person. It is usually tied to rebellious teenagers or disgruntled employees. So, yes, it’s complete nonsense.

The most stomach churning thing about this Italian thriller is the mid-seventies fashion and hairstyles. A couple of models have gone missing and a journalist arrives on the scene to do nothing. The wheelchair-bound, afro-luxe photographer has found a way to photograph people’s minds and then solves the crime. The end. There’s about thirty minutes of movie here and the rest is boring filler.

So, yes, Reservoir Dogs shares a lot with this movie. And by a lot I mean the last ten minutes. The remaining ninety minutes are more about police tactics and Chow Yun Fat’s relationship troubles. It all flows together nicely, but doesn’t feel as imminently re-watchable as a John Woo film from the same era.