Today is the Ides of March. It later became the name of a cool Iron Maiden instrumental song. As I learned from Wikipedia, Canadians celebrate the Ides of March with drinks called Bloody Caesars. It sounds like it is basically a Bloody Mary but with Clamato, and Clamato is horrifying. So what are you doing this weekend? (more…)
I don’t let my kid play lazy videogames. Kids games, “educational” games, stupid movie tie-ins: these are all verboten in our household. I am not the dad who goes to the library and picks up the adaptation of Tangled for the Wii. We play indie games, art games, weird games and snob games. Most of all, I want us to play good games – games that are well-made, and that have personality, creativity and soul.
And so I was pumped, a couple of weeks back, to bring home a copy of Ni No Kuni, the long-awaited collaboration between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. We’re big fans of Studio Ghibli, whose films are perfect for children: they are gorgeous, wondrous and sincere. This promised to be a fantastic game, a real game, a game that was watered with the sweat of its creators’ brows. I couldn’t wait for us to sit down and play it together.
So I’m a little chagrined to say that after one night, Ni No Kuni got kicked to the curb so we could keep playing Skylanders Giants. (more…)
I love dogs and I love stuff about outer space.
For many years, my family owned a dog in some capacity or another, from when I was a baby until I was twenty-one. Because of this, I’ve always been uncomfortable with malicious harm coming to dogs in TV shows, movies, books, videogames and comics. As for outer space, I became fascinated with it pretty like any other kid alive during the 70s and 80s from watching Star Wars, Star Trek, the NASA launches on TV and stock footage from the moon landings, not to mention eating astronaut ice cream. (more…)
On Jan. 25, 1915, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurated U.S. transcontinental telephone service. What do you have going on? (more…)
The first Dark Horse comic I remember reading was Star Wars: Dark Empire #2. I hadn’t thought much about Star Wars since the mid-to-late ’80s. The movies were over, the Marvel comic had been canceled and I was not yet aware of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. This was a time before Dante and Randal debated about the fates of independent contractors on the second Death Star. This was early 1992, and just two years prior, Star Wars was a dead property. Producing this comic was a gamble on Dark Horse’s part. (more…)
Well, that year went fast! It feels like just yesterday that we were getting our lists together for the best toys of 2011. This year I got a helping hand from Ian Gonzales, who took time from curating tomorrow’s best comics list comb through his own favorite toys. Perhaps because of that there is a distinctly robotic theme to the toys we’ve picked. Here’s to our mechanical friends of 2012! (more…)
The five Halo titles developed by Bungie spoke of a much larger world beyond the confines of the console games. It was a place described in incidental dialogue among the marines of the United Nations Space Command, in computer terminals found on a gigantic alien installation called the Ark and in the live-action commercials for Halos 3, ODST, Reach, and the Neill Blomkamp directed “Landfall” live-action shorts. It was a universe described in glimpses and whispers. (more…)
