Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
Game Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Let’s be fair, even as eleven years have worked hard to ravage the mechanics it was built on, an epic task lay before anyone attempting to top the original Deus Ex, the ultimate in cyberpunk shooter/RPG greatness. I’ve made my thoughts known on Human Evolution‘s legendary predecessor and its, uh, not quite as good sequel, but Eidos Montreal (not involved with the development of either game) have worked many long years now to create a worthy follow up that wisely pulls from the strengths of both games, but in adhering so close to a winning formula, ends up inheriting some of their flaws. Still, Human Revolution is a solid title with one of the most riveting presentations I’ve seen in years.
TV Review: Entourage – The Final Season
To quote the editor-in-chief of The Verge:
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…and, well, it’s true. After eight years, the Mark Wahlberg-produced HBO show about up and coming actor Vincent Chase (Adrien Grenier) and his titular homies has now rolled to a conclusion. Or stumbled. Or flattened. We’ve certainly seen a lot of drama over the years (as well as Vince’s brother Johnny Drama), agency swaps, the rise and fall (and subsequent rise and fall) of superstar agent Ari Gold, lots and lots of phone calls, and more than a few fictional movies, and a borderline Simpsons quantity of celebrity appearances, but this last season of Entourage was hardly the best way to send the show out.
Nick Reviews Whiskey Media’s Big Live Live Show Live! The Second One!
It’s been a year since the Whiskey Media family of sites (Giant Bomb, Tested, Screened, Comic Vine, Anime Vice) went with premium plans to start driving revenue since they had passed on advertising to that point. Blowing out the announcement was their inaugural Big Live Live Show Live!, an eight-hour, telethon-formatted web show. Despite a few technical gaffes and some content that just wasn’t appealing, Whiskey set off to show that their programming is prime cut across their various properties. Since then, the company has committed to weekly ‘Happy Hours’ that have served as smaller editions, but I honestly couldn’t find two hours a week for their video programming. Now a year later, how does the BLLSL’s sequel hold up?
Half An Hour of Dead Island Co-op!
Nick and Kelly just got into some zombie smashing with the latest and greatest from Poland! Check out its co-op action right after the break!
Retailers Are Ruining Video Games
So tonight, Kelly informed me that he was interested in the new open world, zombie-a-thon game Dead Island, but only if he had someone to play co-op with. I offered, right there and then, to pick the game up if we dropped by Best Buy. We talked about how janky the game had been revealed to be in recent reviews and with a 74% GameRankings score, we figured we could probably overlook a lot of the game’s flaws if it had a decent cooperative mode. So we arrived.
And they were sold out.
And so was everyone else.
How Do You Even Fix Yahoo?
Don’t you remember when Yahoo! was the shining knight in a sea of failed dot-com companies? Y’know, back when people thought it would be profitable to do everything through the internet, like grocery shopping? As a contemporary to the dial-up service providers like America Online, it served as a one-stop shop for basically anything. Wanted to know the weather? How your stocks were doing? Sports? Yahoo did it. But time has not been kind to Yahoo as today, the company’s board of directors ousted Carol Bartz, their latest CEO. Their previous chief exec and co-founder, Jerry Yang, was removed not long after turning down a lucrative buyout offer from Microsoft. The problem the company really faces however, is what their business is and what it needs to be, something Bartz couldn’t even explain.
Movie Review: Red State
It seems easy… too easy. Red State, Kevin Smith’s horror opus, opens with three kids looking to score. Somehow the one with the curly hair convinces them all to go down on a chick he met on the internet in some glorious foursome with little more incentive than a faceless thumbnail on a tacky hookup site. It’s not long before they’re on their way to her trailer in the woods to get down when – bait and switch! – they wind up prisoners in a crazy church run by a fictionalized, militant version of Fred Phelps (y’know, the guy who runs the Westboro Baptist Church, the one that pickets soldiers’ funerals with ‘God Hates Fags’ signs? That one.). What begins as a colossal mess ends as one while writer/director Smith fumbles through a movie that doesn’t seem far removed from a fevered dream – not disturbing in any sense of terror, but at how awfully languid it is.
Hardware Review: Samsung Galaxy Tab (7″ model)
Tablets, tablets, tablets! We live in a renaissance age for slate computers, ushered in by Apple’s iPad and followed up by… well, miles and miles of desolate wasteland. The New York Times recently did a study amongst current and potential tablet owners with nearly 95% of respondents hopping excited to own an iPad. The next closest option, the HP TouchPad, held out at a mere 10%. But why is there such a disparity, even when Android trounces Apple in smartphone marketshare? The answer is plainly obvious with Samsung’s original 7″ Galaxy Tab, a lazily-upscaled version of their original, and crazy popular, Galaxy S phones.
The First Two Weeks of ‘The Trenches’
It makes sense that if Scott Kurtz and the Penny Arcade guys are co-inhabiting the same workspace, they’re gonna start churning out some product together. The result is last year’s announcement of The Trenches, a webcomic from the perspective of game testers. The trio write the strip while Kurtz does the artwork (Krahulik assists). News about the strip went dark for almost a year, but it finally emerged from the sea of simulation and we’re treated to what may be a very interesting series.
Goodbye, webOS
First off: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! …*sniff* now that that’s out of my system, let’s skip to the soul-crushing side-announcement today that, on top of HP’s desire to spin off it’s PC hardware business in its potential acquisition of Autonomy, the tech giant is also nixing its webOS operations, effectively killing the reason they acquired Palm for $1.5b a year ago.
