Search Results for "the flash"

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers Review

I still reminisce every now and then about the glorious springs of my youth when baseball season would start and once our local organized little leagues were finished, my friends and I would head down to the park and play stick ball on abandoned tennis courts, wiffle ball on side streets, or home run derby on empty diamonds. Something that’s going to make me reminisce a little bit more about those days is the latest entry into the Backyard Sports series, Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers.

Video Game Films: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

For a genre where the most highly regarded films are often described as the “least bad,” it is not surprising video game movies garner little praise from critics or audiences on a steady basis. This feature could be more aptly named “The Okay, The Awful, and The Horrendous.”

So why is it that film adaptations from all other sources (literature, other movies, comic books, graphic novels, television, etc) all have their masterpieces while video games have only disaster-pieces? This subject could be analyzed ad nauseum, but the most obvious fault can be found with the studios that produce the movies. Because, according to “experts,” video games are an inferior art form (if even an art form), loved only by the geek populous, so the adaptations are treated as such: trashy, low-budget schlock.

Chuck Vs. the Subway & the Ring, Part II

A rousing finale after a handful of mediocre episodes, the final installment of Chuck’s third season was All That and Then Some. Secrets were revealed, acts of unspeakable heroism were perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience and some minor silliness can be overlooked in the face of such well-orchestrated action and excitement.

Trailer Tracker: Megamind, The Last Exorcism and more

Welcome back to Trailer Tracker, where we at Player Affinity play the role of judgmental parent to new trailers hitting the web. Finally, after some relatively clip-dry weeks there are seven newcomers to explore. We’ll take a look at a trifecta of animated films all from rival studios, the teaser for thriller The Divide, get scared with horror flick The Last Exorcism, wake up with ensemble dramedy Morning Glory starring Harrison Ford and last off take a peek at the trailer for the controversial Sundance film The Killer Inside Me.

Lost Planet 2 Review

A cold frigid land awaits us in the brink of the black canvas. Wait… isn’t this Lost Planet? Isn’t this EDN III? Well yeah it is, but… it’s tropical! That’s right, the second installment of the Lost Planet series takes us back to EDN III to envision a lush tropical land that was hidden under all that snow in the first one… who would’ve thought that under all that snow we’d actually find something that cool?  Well back to the point, this game has been long in the making and a couple demos have come to surface themselves from the ashes of the Capcom’s anticipated sequel to their hit multiplayer game from 2006, but the question still lingers… was the wait even worth all the hot anticipation?

Everything has had some sort of change in the past few years for the sequel. A lot is sort of an understatement since I last checked… and it really boils down to how you see everything. Some of the changes were for better, some were just downright periling and it kind of makes you want to scream in pain. I walked into the game with an open mind and wasn’t expecting too much as the first one for me was really a screwball hint of illustrious joy. I enjoyed multiplayer and was up in the air with singleplayer when I got my hands in on the first one, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed with a few elements with the first game, and they didn’t really fix it in the sequel (kind of breaks off that sequel monotony, instead of fixing problems, they just exacerbate them!).

Danica Patrick video interview about Blur

I had a chance to sit down with Indycar and NASCAR racecar driver Danica Patrick. It wasn’t to talk about the Indianapolis 500 or her transition to NASCAR or even those provocative GoDaddy.com Super Bowl commercials.

If you know anything about me at this point, you know it had to be about a video game. The video game in question, in which the very lovely Danica stars as the final boss, is called Blur.

Blur is a graphically beautiful game that has the real-time damage features of games like Need for Speed combined with the multiplayer and weapon caused chaos of Mario Kart.

Danica Patrick video interview about Blur

I had a chance to sit down with Indycar and NASCAR racecar driver Danica Patrick. It wasn’t to talk about the Indianapolis 500 or her transition to NASCAR or even those provocative GoDaddy.com Super Bowl commercials.

If you know anything about me at this point, you know it had to be about a video game. The video game in question, in which the very lovely Danica stars as the final boss, is called Blur.

Blur is a graphically beautiful game that has the real-time damage features of games like Need for Speed combined with the multiplayer and weapon caused chaos of Mario Kart.

Lost – The End

Odds are people will be torn by Lost’s series finale.  People likely went into the episode with expectations on how Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse would bring this landmark show to a close and they clearly were not worried about irritating anybody with their ending.  For them, this finale was emotional and spiritual; the ending went beyond plot points, beyond smoke monsters and caves filled with an eerie golden light, beyond the Dharma Initiative and the Others.  The finale was an opportunity to remind everybody what made “Lost” so great in the first place: the characters.  A show is only as good as the acting and the writing, and “The End” brought us a beautiful amalgamation of these two elements.  We were given powerful scenes lined with emotion, some great action sequences, incredible special effects that dwarf much of what’s on television right now and an ending that should leave people talking for months.  Regardless of what you may think of the finale, Lindelof and Cuse got it right, even if it’s not exactly what we expected it to be.

The Road Review

The challenges awaiting Joe Penhall and John Hillcoat in adapting and directing (respectively) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road were numerous. This post-apocalyptic father-and-son story about whether struggling to survive as long as possible is worth the pain is a bleak tale and one that grinds along much of the time. It doesn’t have more than a handful of eventful or visually stimulating scenes. They manage, however, to not only be faithful to McCarthy’s elegy, but also add great details to make The Road,now on DVD and Blu-ray, into a solid film.

The Good Guys – Pilot

I’m a sucker for a good buddy-cop story. I love the camaraderie, the back and forth jokes, the way the relationship begins on shaky terms and quickly evolves into one where the two friends trust each other with their lives. In order for a buddy-cop story to be efficient, it needs two lead characters that have excellent chemistry and can appear to the audience as if they truly are as close as the script wants them to be. Fortunately, “The Good Guys” has two excellent actors who will likely grow into their roles as time goes on. While the characters that Colin Hanks and Bradley Whitford are playing right now aren’t entirely fleshed out, there’s just enough back story in the pilot episode of Matt Nix’s new action show to help us believe these characters will be likable and realistic in the foreseeable future.  In fact, the entire show feels this way: a bit cliché and bland at times, but filled with enough promise to keep an audience willing to wait for the show to grow into itself.