Posts Tagged ‘gone’

26 Oct

Movie Review: Gone Girl

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The marathon action blockbuster season may have taken a lengthy break (for now) but my goodness, the incredible movies just keep coming in 2014.

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Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris
Director: David Fincher (Fight Club, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
Rating: MA15+
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When you go to a David Fincher movie, there are a number of things you can usually expect to find. Plenty of stylish shots, for one. A tightly wound script, for another. Perhaps also a grim tone with occasional moments of comic relief to balance things out. Then there are the plotlines, twisting and turning and keeping you guessing long into the film’s run time. Well, suffice to say that the man’s latest, Gone Girl, is no aberration. It delivers everything audiences have come to expect from the director of Fight Club and Seven, ESPECIALLY that last thing. The plot of Gone Girl is so twisty that talking about anything outside the film’s official synopsis is probably going to be a spoiler. If you haven’t read its source material, the bestselling Gillian Flynn novel of the same name, you’d best go into the cinema knowing as little as possible. I won’t be talking about anything particularly plot-sensitive in this review, but you have been warned nonetheless.

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10 Feb

New Experiences, Served Steamed

Posted by vagrantesque in Games. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

When it comes to videogames, I’ve always been a console guy. In terms of priorities when choosing how I want to play games, it has always been handhelds first, then home consoles. PC games have rarely, if ever, featured at all. That’s just the way it is. Real Time Strategy titles and MOBAs aren’t my thing and just about every other worthwhile title that comes to PC also hits the home console market in due time. Less hassle. Increasingly often, they also come to the Playstation Vita, which is an even better place to play them if you ask me. And yet late last year, I finally got a Steam account and bought a game on PC.

Why, you may ask? The short answer is Samurai Gunn, a four-player pixelated brawler I knew would eventually come to PS4 in the long run but just looked so good that I downloaded it through Steam anyway. Countless hours of ridiculous fun with friends followed, but Samurai Gunn just isn’t all that great to play solo and my Steam account was looking a little bare. So I picked up a $50 retail Steam voucher and decided to dive into some of the low-tech PC games I had seen on the big-name Game of the Year lists last year. That $50 bought me the following three games, with precisely three cents to spare. Here are my brief thoughts on them:

The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is the kind of game that could probably only work on PC. A first person experience that both is and isn’t a game, The Stanley Parable digs its self-aware tendrils into every crevice of the gamer’s specifically-trained brain and dances around gleefully. Its designers evidently anticipated just about every possible way the average player would attempt to outsmart it, up to and including editing bits of the game’s code, which just shows another level of attention to detail. To say any more would be to ruin some of the game’s appeal, but I will mention that no game has ever made me feel so foolish for being so dedicated to the endless chase of Trophies /Achievements etc.

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