Just as they did a few months ago with Avengers: Age Of Ultron, the good people at Zen Studios are celebrating the new Ant-Man movie with a pinball table for Zen Pinball 2 (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Vita), Pinball FX 2 (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC), Zen Pinball (iOS), Zen Pinball HD (Android, Amazon), and Marvel Pinball (iOS, Android, Amazon). But while the table has some elements fans of the comic might expect, it also has some unexpected elements that make it an addictive table.
In 2000, writer Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man) and artist Michael Avon Oeming (B.P.R.D.: The Soul of Venice & Other Stories) combined the police procedural tenets of Law & Order with superhero archetypes for their comic book series Powers. Well, now — after fourteen collected editions and two spin-off collections — things are coming full circle with Powers Season 1 (Blu-ray, DVD), which collects the first season of the superheroic police procedural TV show that originally aired on the PlayStation Network (via PS3, PS3, and Vita). It’s just too bad the show is a pale imitation of the original comic.
Spirited Away is arguably one of the best animated movies of all time. But while the new Spirited Away Blu-ray — which comes in a new Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and marks this film’s high def debut — doesn’t have any new extras, unfortunately, just having this visually-arresting film looking way better than it ever has before makes this new version a must-have.
At their best (The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., Wall-E), Pixar movies are hilarious, emotional, clever, and insightful. At their worst (Cars, Cars 2), they’re cliché and obvious. And it is somewhere in between that we find Inside Out, which is funny, touching, and perceptive, but also sometimes rather obvious and narratively problematic.
There are some very simple truths about characters. For instance: good guys have to be somewhat likeable. If the good guy in your story isn’t likeable, even a little, it’s hard to root for them. Sadly, this is just one of many problems with CHAPPiE (Blu-ray, DVD), a misfiring sci-fi movie from District 9 and Elysium writer/director Neill Blomkamp.
jupiter riAfter seeing their cinematic adaptations of the anime Speed Racer and David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, fans of The Wachowskis were probably hoping that the duo would go back to writing their own movies, as they had with Bound and The Matrix trilogy. Well, as they say, “Be careful what you wish for,” because the Wachowski-penned space opera Jupiter Ascending — which is now available as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, a 3D Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and on DVD — is not the comeback their fans were hoping for.
As we’ve seen so many times, reunion albums are, at worst, unlistenable, and at best, pale reflections of what once was great. Just consider the recent ones by Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Soundgarden…the list goes on. But just as they’ve so often bucked trends, musically, so too do Faith No More buck the reunion slump with Sol Invictus (CD, digital, vinyl), which mostly sounds like they’ve picked up where they left off nearly twenty years ago.
It was recently announced that like some of the bands that may be in them, the music games Guitar Hero and Rock Band will be making a comeback with Guitar Hero Live and Rock Band 4, maybe even before the end of the year. But if you hate music, don’t want to buy a guitar-shaped controller, or just can’t wait that long, you can sort of get the same kind of gameplay, and more, from Color Guardians, a side-scrolling endless runner, platformer, and color matching game for PlayStation 4, Vita, PC, and Mac.
Thirty years after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the cop-turned-apocalypse survivor Max Rockatansky is finally taking another road trip with Mad Max Fury Road. But while this is an exciting action movie, it’s not without its problems…starting with Max himself.