Movie Theory: Anatomy of an Action Scene

While I love video games, I also love movies. And I’ve unilaterally decided that every now and then, when there isn’t anything inspiring me to write an article about games, I’m going to throw in an article about one of my other loves. So I’m going to take a little break from video games today because I want to talk about movies. Specifically, let’s talk movie fight scenes. Some movies do them well. Some movies do them terribly. I’m going to share some of my favorite fight scenes from movies and explain a little bit about why I like them but also what makes them good from a cinematography standpoint.

Warning, there will be spoilers for the movies if you haven’t seen them in these fight scenes. Obviously.

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Review: Strong Female Adventurers x3

I’ve recently been playing through a few different single player games on my PS4, and I realized that all of them coincidentally had a running theme: all of them are third-person adventure games that star a female protagonist as the main playable character. And since they’re all similar I decided to throw all three together into a comparison/review blender. So here we go. The three games are:

Rise of the Tomb Raider
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds

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Poking and Prodding – A History of Video Game Exploitation

In late 2008, Bobby Kotick – the CEO of Activision Blizzard – was quoted as saying the following after his company decided not to make sequel follow ups on certain intellectual properties they acquired: “With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of over time becoming $100 million plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us.” This caused an uproar in the gaming community – using the word “exploit” in your strategy for games was not something you want consumers to get wind of. But Kotick’s vision of “exploiting” yearly franchises was something that would be pretty regular in the years to come – not just for Activision but for other companies. Running games into the ground while they’re popular and milking every last cent out of the consumer before throwing the IP onto the trash heap and moving on was profitable for the big names.

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Review: Hidden Agenda

In 2015, Supermassive Games released a fun game called Until Dawn. It is a horror game where you control 8 different people and make choices that determine whether all 8 survive the night, or if they all end up dead. When it was released I thought it would be fun to get all my friends together and play it – when it came to important choices we’d all yell and scream and it was like watching and being a part of an interactive horror movie. It ended up being an event where we stayed up literally until dawn and finished the game in one sitting. And all of us had a lot of fun doing it.

Now as it turns out, apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this idea as Supermassive got a lot of feedback from friends about how much fun it was to play the game as an event with a bunch of people watching. So that spawned their latest game – Hidden Agenda – a game similar to Until Dawn where you have two protagonists and have to make choices to see if they survive the entire plot. Except they specifically designed this game to be multiplayer so everyone playing can put in their votes to determine the outcome. And not only that, but it was only $20 – and since my friends and I had such a great time with Until Dawn, I figured I’d get them together again and we’d play through it. Everyone was down for the idea and so this past weekend we all played through Hidden Agenda from start to finish.

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The Many Moons of Mario

When Super Mario Odyssey was announced earlier this year, I knew that it was going to be the game that I bought a Switch for. Then later in the year when it was announced that there was going to be a special Super Mario Odyssey Switch bundle I did what any video game enthusiast with no self-control would do: I pre-ordered it. For the last two weeks, I’ve been off and on playing Super Mario Odyssey (and enjoying the Switch) and while Odyssey is a great game and definitely a worthy entry into the Super Mario 3D platformer pedigree, I’ve come to one conclusion that stands out above everything else in regards to the game:

There are too many freaking moons.

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Out of GaaS

“As a service” business models have become all the rage in recent years. If you haven’t heard of “as a service” as a business term before or don’t know what it means, I’ll give you a quick explanation. In general, most things you spend money on were finite products: you pay to McDonald’s $5 and get a cheeseburger value meal or you pay Best Buy $20 and get a DVD. As the great Homer Simpson once thought: “Money can be exchanged for goods and services!” And a lot of what you buy is the “goods” portion of that. The “services,” up until recent years, have mostly been things like mechanics, or hair stylists. You go to a professional who can do something you can’t, you give them money, and then they perform the service – you get your car fixed, or your hair cut, or whatever it is you want done.

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