Star Trek: Discovery returns with a bang, but also an uncharacteristic sense of confidence and playfulness (which may well be due to the return of Jonathan ‘Riker’ Frakes to the directors’ chair) but also, unfortunately, this otherwise excellent episode evokes one of sci fi’s worst tropes: the result is still a great start to the […]
Let’s Do The Timewarp Again Some of Star Trek’s greatest stories have taken place in a timeloop (you can kill the cast and blow up the ship SO MANY TIMES) and Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad is no exception: we get lots of dramatic deaths, ‘this could only happen in the timewarp’ […]
Tom McGee
“Lethe” is an interesting oddity in Discovery so far, in that it feels the most like a stand-alone episode we’ve seen to date. We get to see some major character growth from Burnham, see more of Sarek’s history, and gain further insight into Lorca’s state of mind, but ultimately the episode feels more like classic […]
Guardians of the Galaxy Episode Four: Who Needs You has a serious identity crisis going on: at first, it seems like one of the most legitimately episodic adventures do date, with our heroes trapped underground and on the run from rock-eating space worms. While the change in scenery from temples was nice, the scenario felt […]
In thinking about last week’s episode, I made the argument that the reason for the ‘grimdark’ tone of Discovery was to show our characters struggling to evolve from morally ambiguous, wartime characters into the hopeful utopians of The Original Series and happily this week’s episode, Choose Your Pain, re-affirms this by taking a key opportunity […]
We’re starting to see how the show runs, now that the set-up is done and I’m pleased…
Tom McGee
Who knew a game about talking corn would have one of the best narrative twists I’ve ever seen in a video game? Maize, the irreverent new puzzle and exploration game from Finish Line Games is an imaginative, funny, atmospheric experience featuring everything from the aforementioned talking corn, to an irritable cyborg Russian teddy bear, to […]
Now that’s more like it. After a slow start and a remarkably incomplete two-part premiere, we now have an actual sense of the kind of show Star Trek: Discovery wants to be. And while it’s a departure from Treks of yore (as advertised), what Discovery has finally set up is extremely promising. Picking up six […]
Tom McGee
Damn it’s exciting to have Star Trek back on TV. With last night’s premiere, Star Trek Discovery has finally stepped into the public eye, after years of secrecy, delays, staff changes, and troubling production reports; we finally have something we can actually watch and analyse rather than speculate about… Well, almost. There is a lot […]
An interesting thing happened when Overwatch was first revealed: a bunch of relatively unknown voice actors suddenly became celebrities – and with good reason! The greatest strength of Overwatch is its brilliant and diverse cast of interesting characters, whose voices and catchphrases are a constant in each match. The community is active and passionate, generating […]
Tom McGee
As a long-time Midnight Madness viewer at TIFF, I’m always surprised to find a horror film screening in the main festival (under Contemporary World Cinema) but given the tremendous cinematography and complex, if somewhat under-utilized, psychological study underlying Paco Plaza’s supernatural thriller, it makes sense that Verónica was deemed fit for a wider audience. If […]
There’s a true joy (somewhat lost in the modern age of internet gaming) of yelling at your friends next to you on the couch in either victory or defeat. Whether a well-placed red shell near the end of a race in Mario Kart, someone managing to grab the Golden Gun first in GoldenEye 64, or […]
Tom McGee
2003 was a pretty magical year for early online gaming: with the advent of Flash sites like ebaum’s World and NewGrounds.com, suddenly computer class went from being somewhere ICQ and MSN Messenger were banned to an arcade. I got addicted to Jet Slalom, a game where you maneuver a hover speeder between triangular cones, as […]
Every year, buried deep in the Fan Expo programme book are hidden gems that are tremendously easy to overlook. Often, these are lectures, debates, or conversations with an expert applying their knowledge to fandom or sketch duels between great artists, who chat during their impromptu sketching, providing insight both into the artist and their method. […]
So, you might not know Jennifer Hale’s name, but chances are you know one of her many, many voices. Perhaps most famous these days for her iconic role as Commander Shepard (lovingly known as FemShep for ‘Female Shepard’) in the Mass Effect trilogy, Hale has been in the voice game for a long time. To […]
Sitting down to Tim Curry’s first-ever audience Q&A, I was filled with both antici….PATION…
There’s a distinct problem starting to rear its head in the Guardians series and unfortunately it’s becoming more pronounced as the game goes along: everyone blames Star-Lord for everything, no one takes responsibility for anything, and all the characters are overwhelmingly selfish. There are a few exceptions to this, Rocket apologizing for being a dick […]
I’ve loved Batman since before I can remember – the character and mythology has seemingly always been with me, from my early days laughing along with Adam West and Burt Ward as they fended off rubber sharks with Bat-Shark-Repellant Spray, to the seminal 1990s cartoon (still the greatest version of the mythology ever put to […]
Micro-Review Walking Dead Season Three is a bit of a departure for the series, taking the focus…
Tom McGee
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con I was sitting in a slightly overpriced, but breezy coffee shop just west of the Convention Centre, typing up my notes from Day One: “You have to be absolutely cut-throat about what you want to see and willing to sacrifice anything else […]
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con First, a confession: when I first played the Overwatch beta, it didn’t blow me away. The character design was exemplary, but the gameplay felt limited to me. The lack of single player seemed odd, given how much story had been built for […]
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con There has been a lot of cause for concern surrounding Star Trek: Discovery, the new CBS Trek show that will be airing on their streaming service in September: first and foremost, Bryan Fuller, the visionary mind behind Hannibal, American Gods, and my […]
Tom McGee
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con This year, DC Comics is attempting one of the hardest games in comics: inventing new heroes. This happens all the time in comic books, shows, and films, but it seldom sticks the way characters did back in the Golden Age of Comics […]
Tom McGee
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con First, a confession: I didn’t have much interest in this panel. One of the best/worst things about Comic Con is that unlike Toronto’s Fan Expo, they don’t clear the hall after each panel. This is a clever bit of crowd control, as […]
Tom McGee
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con Size matters (during scheduling) So, this probably goes without saying, but Comic Con is big. Fucking big. Fan Expo in Toronto has grown steadily over the years, but it pales in comparison to the sheer size, scale, and scope of Comic Con. […]
Tom McGee
Click Here to read all of our coverage from 2017 San Diego Comic-Con One of my earliest memories is Ghostbusters. To this day, I can’t tell you when I first encountered the film or the cartoon (The Real Ghostbusters, none of that Gorilla with a net nonsense from Ghostbusters), but pretty well since I can […]