Posted on by Alexander Case

Movie Review: Terror in Beverly Hills (1989)

When it comes to bad action movies, there are some names in action films that can be reasonably taken as a warning sign that the film you are approaching is a stinkburger. Frank Stallone is one of those names. Frank Stallone started his career as a musician and composer and has had a reasonably successful career at that. However, as his older brother Sylvester became one of the action juggernauts of the 1980s and ’90s, Frank kept also getting action movie roles, presumably on the basis that he looks enough like Sly, that if you put “Stallone” in large enough letters on the poster, people won’t look closer and recognize that it’s actually Frank. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Anime Review: Akiba’s Trip – The Animation

Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed was an interesting RPG & brawler with something of a novel concept –  that it was set in a re-creation of Akihabara with a level of detail that was just short of being on par with the level of detail that the Yakuza series puts into not-Kabuki-cho – by which I mean that there were some loading screens dividing up areas of the game, not much in terms of real-world alcohol to drink (because your protagonist is underage), and sadly no playable arcade games. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Video Game Review: Puzzle Quest 2

The original Puzzle Quest was an interesting title, which took the concept of the match-three puzzle game and translated it to something of a larger epic fantasy context – one which lead to numerous clones in other genres, some of which I previously did a review on. However, the original Puzzle Quest also had a more epic scope to it, with you having to fight an epic big-bad in order to save the world. The sequel, on the other hand, has a more grounded scope, feeling like it is taking the Puzzle Quest formula with Diablo. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Film Review: Stop Making Sense

Live music is theater. Yes, live music is often seen in a theater, but they the act of performing music publically is, in some manner or another, theatrical. It’s a performance that seeks to tell a story or convey an emotion through music. Some genres of music try to lean away from this, like folk or punk (though arguably punk leans so far away from theatricality that it ends up accidentally leaning into theatricality). Others, like metal, prog, and some parts of pop lean into it, either through telling a deliberate story or through the presentation. Stop Making Sense definitely fits into the latter category. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Video Game Review: Pillars of Eternity

I’m a fan of the RPGs from companies like Bioware and Obsidian. I haven’t beaten a lot of them, but I do enjoy playing them a great deal. Between getting on sites like Completionator, and recently (as of this writing) finding myself in between jobs, I’ve found myself with a bunch more time to play video games (when I’m not going through the process of looking for work). That, combined with a recent hiatus in my regular D&D group, gave me the time to finally beat Pillars of Eternity – not long after the sequel came out.

This review will contain some spoilers. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Anime Review: Darling in the FranXX

So one of the things I did not know until recently is that A-1 Pictures is one of the anime studios that has benefited from the exodus from former Anime industry titan GAINAX (in addition to other studios like Trigger and Khara popping up in the wake of this as well). Consequently, a lot of discussions I encountered on the lead up to the anime series Darling in the FranXX started out as a discussion of the series as a Trigger joint, before moving on to talking about it as a sort of GAINAX reunion. I’d consider that analogy not that far off. The series feels something like the Anime equivalent of the Led Zeppelin reunion concert – the band getting back together to revisit their old hits (in this analogy, the newer staffers from A-1 Pictures and Trigger would represent Jason Bonham). Read more