With the release of Pinball FX2 for Xbox One, Zen Studios have finally brought their pinball program to every game system that matters. But unlike other system transitions they’ve made recently, Pinball FX2 for Xbox One isn’t just a slightly better looking version of an earlier model.
In Akiba’s Trip: Undead And Undressed, your main goal is to tear people’s clothes off. But while this is done under the guise that you’re destroying bad, vampire-like super humans, let’s not kid ourselves: this is a game about sexually assaulting people. Which is why I, in good conscience, cannot recommend anyone buy this game.
That it’s also a bad game is just the icing on the cake. A gross, gross cake.
Over the years, there’s been a lot of bad movies based on good video games. And some of the worst have been animated. But Batman: Assault On Arkham — which Warner Home Video has released as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, on DVD, and digitally — bucks this trend by not only being a great ’toon based on a game, but by also being a great animated movie for Batman fans who don’t play the games that inspired it.
In NBC’s espionage thriller show The Blacklist, a former intelligence officer turned master criminal turns himself into the FBI, but will only speak to an profiler named Elizabeth Keene, even though she hasn’t been on the job long enough to find the coffee machine. Which may sound ridiculous and unrealistic, and it is, but in rewatching the show on The Blacklist: The Complete First Season DVD (or, if you prefer, Blu-ray), it’s clear that the ridiculous unrealism is what makes this show so much fun.
In The Amazing Spider-man 2 — which has just come out as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, a 3D Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and on DVD — Harry Osbourne says that Peter Parker’s life is always complicated. But someone needs to tell the people who made this movie that this film didn’t need to be complicated as well, since it’s that complexity, and the ensuing convoluted story, that ultimately undermines this movie.
When you consider that people have been making video games for decades, you’d think, at the very least, that everyone would get the fundaments right. But after playing the World War II first-person shooter Enemy Front — which was made by CI Games (Sniper: Ghost Warrior), and published by Bandai Namco on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC — I’ve learned that, sadly, that’s not always the case.
In the mid-80s, when I was in high school, my friends and I used to drive up to the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, New Jersey to go to Fun N Games, the biggest arcade around. But while I dumped plenty of quarters into the latest arcade games, I also spent a lot of time playing the new pinball machines as well. Which is why I was excited to try out “Black Knight 2000,” “Junk Yard,” “High Speed,” and “WHO Dunnit,” the four new tables for The Pinball Arcade that FarSight Studio have just released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and Vita. But while they’re a mixed bunch, they also kind of made me feel like I was back at Fun N Games…save for the lack of Jersey metalheads hanging around.
In the movie Guardians Of The Galaxy, a kid named Peter Quill is kidnapped by aliens and taken into space where, as a grown up, he becomes, “the legendary outlaw Star-Lord.” Which may sound cool, but it means that he may never have played a game of pinball. Good thing he can make up for it with Zen Studios’ Guardians Of The Galaxy table, which is now available for Zen Pinball 2 on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Vita; Pinball FX 2 for Xbox 360 and PCs via steam (as well as Xbox One when that version of PFX2 comes out in August); and Zen Pinball for iOS, Android, and Amazon devices.
It goes without saying that if you played the third-person stealth action survival horror game The Last Of Us when it came out on the PlayStation 3 last summer, there’s no reason to buy The Last Of Us Remastered on the PlayStation 4, since all it adds is upgraded graphics, minor changes to the controls, and the previously released add-ons.
But for those who haven’t had the pleasure, The Last Of Us is a engrossing, challenging, and often horrific journey through a rich word fraught with danger…regardless of which version you play.