Crystal Dynamics may have made a conscious choice not to sell the new downloadable Lara Croft game under the Tomb Raider brand name, but don’t be fooled. Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light is the best Tomb Raider game that this console generation has given us. The game eschews the third-person camera of traditional Tomb Raider games in favour of an isometric view on the action. Despite the change in perspective, this is a Tomb Raider game in every way that matters, from the devious environmental puzzles to the treacherous traps and precarious platforming.
Browsing: Weekend
Sharlto Copley and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, two of the stars of The A-Team movie, were in SA this week for premieres of the film hosted by Nu Metro and MTN. Copley is already well-known in SA and the rest of the world for his star turn as Wikus van de Merwe in District 9, the SA-flavoured science-fiction hit of 2009. In the A-Team, he takes on the role of HM Murdock, the nutty military pilot played by Dwight Schultz in the original television series.
Predators, a reboot of one of the most loved 1980s action franchises, wants so badly to be badass that you almost feel sorry for it. It’s like a gawky adolescent straddling uncomfortably on a big motorbike he can barely control in a bid to impress the toughest kids in the schoolyard. At its every step, the film invites you to compare it to the manly swagger of the 1987 classic, Predator, which paired Arnold Schwarzenegger with Die Hard director John McTiernan when both were at the top of their game. But the comparison does it no favours.
In a gaming industry where developers release sequels at the rate of one a year or every two years, a 12-year wait for a new game in a franchise is a lifetime. But that’s how long we have had to wait for StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, the follow-up to a real-time strategy (RTS) game that has sold about 10m copies worldwide and still commands a fanatical following. Rival franchises such as Command & Conquer have Zergling-rushed retail with a string of mediocre sequels over the past decade. Blizzard, by contrast, has turtled in its base for years to create something truly special. Initial impressions are that the game has been well worth the wait.
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” is the advice that one character gives another in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. With this film, the director of The Prestige and The Dark Knight proves once again that no other big-budget filmmaker has dreams quite as large as his. Part existential spy film, part science-fiction epic and part heist movie, Inception is by far the boldest and best film in a disappointing Hollywood summer season.
If you played videogames in the early 1990s, you probably spent many hours engrossed by the devious puzzles and tight storytelling of LucasArts adventure games such as Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island. Though LucasArts itself has since become a sausage factory that churns out Stars Wars games of variable quality, some of the maverick designers and writers responsible for its classic adventure titles are still around.
Flabby, fatigued, housebroken, over the hill. That description applies as much to the Shrek franchise as it does to its ogre protagonist in Shrek Forever After. The fourth (and supposedly final) film in the animated series picks up with a middle-aged Shrek wrangling with the drudgery of day-to-day family life. Worn down by days of burping babies, the evenings of repetitive dinner table jokes and the nights without sleep, the ogre is in the grips of a mid-life crisis.
One day in February 2003, there was a massive disturbance in the force, as if the voices of millions of geeks suddenly cried out in anguish. They’d just learnt that Matt Groening’s animated science-fiction series, Futurama, had been cancelled in its fourth season by the bigwigs at Fox Television. The off-the-wall television show originally ran for a respectable four seasons between 1999 and 2003, but was never as much of a hit as Groening’s other show, The Simpsons. Everyone knows The Simpsons’ catch phrases, but
Zoo City, the new book from SA author and journalist Lauren Beukes, synthesises a mix of volatile ingredients into an…
The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles wrapped up on Thursday. Lance Harris looks at the best and worst…