Pie magazine

This year’s about to see prequel, sequel, and remake galore, so take a peek at what we think the top films you have to see are.

 

The Dark Knight Rises

July 2012

Set eight years after the Dark Knight, when Batman took the blame for Gotham’s crimes. Bane rises and overwhelms Gotham’s finest, and the Dark Knight returns to protect a city that sees him as the enemy.

Excitement rating: *****

We’ve been waiting for this for what feels like forever. Finally we get to see how it ends!!

Men in Black 3

May 2012

Agent J (Will Smith) travels back in time to the 1960s to stop an alien from assassinating Agent K and changing history.

Excitement Rating: ****

We’re excited – we’re just hoping it lives up to the greatness of its predecessors.

 

 

Prometheus

June 2012

A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of man on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight to save the future of the human race.

Excitment rating: *****

We loved Alien and now a prequel of sorts – though it does not directly tie to the Alien films – of course we can’t wait. Here’s hoping the aliens are awesome.

 

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

December 2012

A curious Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, travels to the Lonely Mountain with a group of dwarves to reclaim a treasure stolen from them by the dragon Smaug.

Excitement rating: *****

After the greatness of the LOTR adaptations obviously we’re excited! We just hope it lives up to the LOTR trilogy.

 

 

The Amazing Spiderman

July 2012

Peter Parker finds a clue that might help him understand why his parents disappeared when he was young. His path puts him on a collision course with Dr. Curt Connors, his father’s former partner.

Excitement rating: ****

We cannot wait for this film…But we’re wary. How are they going to portray The Lizard, no Mary-Jane and a new Spiderman actor? Here’s hoping it’s as ‘amazing’ as we’re imagining.

 

 

And here’s the ones that have been announced or will be coming up in the next few years that we have to mention!

Man of steel – 2013 A recreation of the superman movies. we hope they take the dark knight’s lead and make the series a bit darker.

Iron man 3 – 2013 The next in the iron man line of movies. Hopefully Robert Downey-junior will make this film just as good as the last.

Deadpool – 2013 The next in the x-men origins films. we did love the small amount of Deadpool we saw in Xman Origins Wolverine so we’re excited.

World War Z – 2013 “A U.N. employee is racing against time and fate, as he travels the world trying to stop the outbreak of a deadly Zombie pandemic.” IMDb. A zombie film?! Well – automatically we like it!!

The Texas chainsaw massacre 3D – 2013 Gore in 3d. Need we say more?!

Rumored: Fantastic 4 reboot. The flash. Anchorman 2.

 

So keep your eyes and ears open – when you’ve seen them, let us know what you think!

After the comic books we were left wanting more from The Walking Dead, so they brought us the series.

But we still wanted more, and so they gave us The Walking Dead downloadable game. But how does it compare?

First off, the controls, the key to knowing whether you’ll like a game or not are in the 1^st few clicks, and with this game it starts with you questioning, “Really? Point and click? Whaaatttt…?” But within a few tense moments you drawn in. The innovative controls bring something entirely new to the zombie genre of gaming but are so responsive you’d think controls were always this way. In conversation each response is mapped to a different button and you have mere seconds to figure out how you want to respond – and there is no hint of which is good/bad or completely wrong like some games at the moment. When in combat point and click transforms to action sequence, sure it’s only button bashing right? Wrong! It is so quick and so tense you find yourself more scared and more immersed than if you’d been sat there bashing the shoot button.

By far a mighty 9/10 – the only draw back being you can find yourself having to look around a bit for items OR click to soon on the item you need and miss all the filler. But overall – epic new controls.

 

Second up is sound. Now, finally, a game that doesn’t need epic scores to get across the tension. Instead the background music is subtle, tense and emotional – all adding to that clever Walking Dead tension. Instead of changing the music all the time the volume and speed of the music vary depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing etc. As for the zombies, well, no stock sounds here. Nope, you only have to glance at the credits to see the massive amount of voice actors that did specific zombie sounds, each one actually sounds individual rather than the same zombie with a different face. As for zombie slaying, let’s just call them ‘realistic’ noises, how you imagine slaying a zombie would sound? Yeah, that’s the sound. The voice actors in this game are amazing, it’s all so believable and you find yourself completely immersed by the characters – there’s not much worse than unconvincing voice actors.

An undeniable 10/10 here. No complaints at all.

Next up, graphics, again offering something different. The game offers cell shaded, comic book style graphics but in 3D with pretty good facial and body recognition with perfect sync between sound and face/body movement. But the background on the other hand lefts more to be desired, instead of keeping up with the foreground it looks almost like it hasn’t been rendered fully. However, everything interactable is of a great standard and very stylised. The animation itself is great, and from conversations to fighting zombies is seamless.

Overall an awesome 9/10 – losing a point for the background graphics, however this gets less noticeable the more you play as you get more involved, the parts that matter are epicly designed and animated.

As for the difficulty of the game there are 2 choices; Standard and Minimal. Standard shows interactable objects and gives you your objectives, as well as letting you know when you’ve made a decision that will later impact the story – Minimal, well, doesn’t. I played Episode 1 on Standard and can say it was difficult, not in a you die way but in the sense that there’s a lot of time pressure and it is open to human error and decisions – it’s fairly easy to make a simple mistake. The combat mode is challenging but appropriately, it takes concentration rather than just button bashing and the time pressure is particularly tense. On the other hand out of combat the environment is easy to navigate and interact with. It’s also a tough game in the sense that it’s all personal and down to you, your game may be completely different to mine. You don’t know what impact your decision will have, or whether what you said was the right thing to say, there’s no prejudging, a lot of the game is completely unpredictable and manipulated by you – your decision may impact whether you’re stood up or sat down and then that changes what’s to hand in the environment etc.

A fantastic 10/10.

Finally the story itself. It’s, in my humble opinion, a massively immersive story and probably one of my favourite game stories to date. You’re given trickles of information about your character through other characters and your responses to questions, so it’s dependent on your decisions to how much you’ll find out or what you’ll find out. The way the characters react to you is upto you, you can be busy making friends with everyone (my personal choice) or just get on surviving.

A definite 10/10

 

In a Nutshell

 Strengths

The story. Immersive. Intense. Engaging. You are the character.

Interactivity. New form of combat. The immense pressure is amazing.

Ambiguity. You NEED to know more of the story and your character.

Decisions – It’s all down to you, really makes you think. Great if you’ve planned out your own zombie apocalypse plan.

Price – for £3.99 per episode or £16 for a season pass (Incl. Free episode) Epic compared to £40 games.

Teaser – at end of episode snippets of Ep 2 mean you have to buy it.

 

Weaknesses

Having to wait for the next episode?!?!

A lot of loading because it’s a downloadable game.

Not fully roamable – lots of scenes but they’re pretty small. Done in scenes.

 

 

OVERALL 10/10

 

BUY IT!!

Game of thrones is one of the biggest television shows to hit our screen. We all know the world of Westeros and have been gripped by the saga of Game of Thrones. Based on the novels by George R R Martin, David Benioff and D.B Weiss bought the books to life.

Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Exposed” →