New Video Game Releases of the Week Spotlights (March 25 - 31) - Predictions

Any new games look interesting this week? Click "read more" and I'll point out a few stand outs.

Team Fortress 2 (steam)

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      Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is a Valve developed game that was released all the way back in 2007. It became free 4 years later in 2011. There are many ways of looking at the game as many people play it differently. As such, I will have to cover those ways differently.

Green Phoenix - Walking With Dinosaurs (1999) Review

As stated many, many times during my various Jurassic Park reviews, I was absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs and paleontology growing up. A love I have actually healthily maintained to this day.

While I enjoy the fictional portrayals of dinosaurs, that passion also helped me to develop a love for documentaries and educational television and films. So much so that I even have a subscription to CuriosityStream simply because I want to have access to documentaries that I can't get on Netflix, Disney +, and Amazon. I had considered acquiring the documentary streaming service for a few months, due in no small part to the recommendation of some of my favorite YouTube educators and theorists. But the information that finally convinced me to purchase CuriosityStream was the knowledge that they had the entire Walking With... series available for viewing.

In the wake of the release of Jurassic Park in 1993, public interest in prehistoric life reached a fever pitch. This public excitement inspired Tim Haines with the idea of using ground-breaking computer effects and animatronics, similar to Jurassic Park, to create a dinosaur-centric documentary miniseries. Collaborating the Jasper James and special effects artist Michael Milne, Haines succeeded in creating the most advanced paleontological documentary ever seen to that point.

Walking with Dinosaurs is easily one of the most notorious and influential nature documentaries in recent memory and the progenitor of an equally influential franchise. It was a game-changer in the field of nature documentaries, utilizing state of the art animatronics, computer graphics, and the top paleontological knowledge of the time to bring the world of dinosaurs to life.

While dinosaur nature documentaries are a dime-a-dozen nowadays; back in the late 90s, Walking with Dinosaurs was truly revolutionary and the chance to talk about it in detail is exhilarating to me.

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Dynasty Warriors 2 (PS2) - Review (Dynasty Warriors Retrospective)

Continuing this look back on Dynasty Warriors, we have the second title that is the first hack & slash that this series in known for. While marketed as a sequel in America, it was actually the first in another series in Japan under the title Shin Sangoku Musou. This title change lead to a numbering difference in regions that still persist to this day. (Shin Sangoku Musou 2 = Dynasty Warriors 3, ect.) But, enough history lessons, (for now), click "read more" and let's see how this title holds up.

New Video Game Releases of the Week Spotlights (March 18 - 24) - Predictions

Hello again. Any new games on the horizon this week worth checking out? Let's take a look.

Sonic Movie Sequel Ideas - Red Shard Prime

So I posted my review on the Sonic movie and went into great detail about what I thought of the film.  However, as the ending set up the way for a sequel and the movie is doing well enough, I want to express my thoughts on what I feel would be good for a sequel and what I feel should be some ideas to go through with and ones to not go through with, at least not for the second film.

Also, MASSIVE SPOILERS, so heads up!

Green Phoenix - Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) Review

A few weeks back, Red Diamond and I decided to check out the new Sonic the Hedgehog film. While I initially had no plans to review this particular film, I felt motivated to do so after seeing all the effort on the part of the production to...correct...some rather infamous glaring issues.

Video game films tend to have a, not all undeserved, reputation for terrible quality and when this film was first announced last year, it looked like that statement would continue to hold water.

And it all had to do with the design of Sonic himself.

Being as honest and as frank as possible, Sonic looked like absolute dogshit in the very first teaser posters and trailers. Looking far too cartoony to be real but far too realistic-looking to ever be considered cartoon cute, the original Sonic design essentially took a massive deuce in the uncanny valley.

And the internet made sure that absolutely everybody knew about it.

It was actually kind of incredible to watch a video game movie implode before it even reached the theatres in real-time. The design of Sonic could've very nearly sunk the entire project just from the teaser alone. It was then that the production team behind the Sonic the Hedgehog film decided to delay the film's release and completely revamp Sonic's design.

The result is what was delivered to theatres. A level of post-production on this scale for a video game movie due to public backlash is almost unheard of. And it is an incredible achievement what the CGI artists were able to accomplish. I felt like I had to support such a project.

Perhaps studios would listen to real audience feedback instead of "supposed" audience feedback.

So how did the film turn out? Is it an amazing work of art? Or is it like nearly every other video game movie?

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