// Category Archive for: Gaming

Assemblog: December 14, 2012

Tron: Legacy still from The CillianSite

New this week on Popshifter: I provide a Krampus primer and talk about what works and what doesn’t in V/H/S; Paul puts together a playlist for “Music To Make You Human”; Chelsea recommends the reissued A Charlie Brown Christmas for listening and gift-giving; Danny is stoked for Dave Grohl’s upcoming documentary Sound City; and Lisa recommends 666 Park Avenue if you’re not already watching it.

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Toronto After Dark 2012: Full Lineup Released

By Less Lee Moore

Like I said in the interview with Paul Corupe and Andrea Subissati from The Black Museum, Toronto is a wonderful city for genre fans, especially horror fans like me.

The 7th annual Toronto After Dark Film Festival is quickly approaching. This year’s TAD Film Fest starts on October 18 and runs through October 26. TAD Film Fest has expanded from four to nine nights since its inception in 2006.

There are 210 features screening this year, along with 29 short films, many of which are making their North American or Canadian premieres and the list of features this year is spectacular.

The full lineup includes: A Fantastic Fear of Everything, After, American Mary, My Amityville Horror, Citadel, Cockneys vs. Zombies, Crave, Dead Sushi, Doomsday Book, Game Of Werewolves, Grabbers, Grave Encounters 2, In Their Skin (formerly known as Replicas), Inbred, Lloyd the Conqueror, REC 3: Genesis, Resolution, Sushi Girl, Wrong, and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. If you’ve been reading my Assemblogs for the last few months, you’ll recognize quite a few of these titles.

You can watch all the feature trailers on the TAD Film Fest YouTube page here.

This year will also be the first for the Toronto After Darkcade, which will feature independent horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action, and cult video games.

The complete festival schedule, which includes all feature and short screening times will be announced on Tuesday, October 2, so check the Toronto After Dark site for details. You can also by all-access passes from the site to get the most out of the festival.

Five Reasons We Love Nathan Fillion

By Lisa Anderson

Nathan Fillion as
Mal Reynolds on Firefly

Few Canadian actors have been as beloved in the 21st century than Nathan Fillion. He’s perhaps best known for his role as spaceship smuggler captain and war veteran Malcolm Reynolds, in Joss Whedon’s short-lived but influential Firefly series. It’s true enough that Browncoats (Firefly fans) still love their Captain; he even unintentionally set off an online fundraising firestorm last year by suggesting that he would buy the rights to the show and distribute it for free if he had enough money. There are many other reasons that Nathan Fillion has as many fans as he does, though—even aside from being handsome and seeming friendly and funny in interviews and at conventions. Here are are just a few.
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More Modern Noir: Max Payne 3

By Paul Casey

Noir has been having a good time in video games, over the last few years. Quantic Dream’s high profile Heavy Rain, and last year’s L.A. Noire (which we reviewed here) both used noir as their foundation. Max Payne 3 arrives as the third in a trio of story-driven, highly stylized games indebted to the classics—Raymond Chandler, John Huston, anything starring Humphrey Bogart—as well as modern creators who have ensured that noir and hardboiled fiction stay vital—James Ellroy, Frank Miller, Michael Mann.

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Thomas Dolby, A Map Of The Floating City

By Jemiah Jefferson

It’s somewhat startling to realize that this is Thomas Dolby’s first album in twenty years. Since the 1992 non-success of Astronauts & Heretics, his last album of originals, Dolby busied himself in Silicon Valley, inventing and patenting applications involved in ring tone technology. This is the sort of thing that the cerebral, nay—pointy-headed—Dolby would do when the music industry started to bore him. But what happened after the man created his patents, got rich, got bored (again), and went home?

Once a musician, always a musician. Dolby began touring again, solo, several years ago, and to his audiences, dropped teasing hints that he was working on new music. A Map of the Floating City, in all its forms, is the result of that lengthy process, revealing painstaking perfectionism that occasionally gets in the way, but mostly creates a multilayered experience that develops in complexity with every revisit.
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Arkham City: World Of Echo

By Paul Casey

Arkham City, released October 21, is an important Batman story. While perhaps not as unexpected as its predecessor, Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady have turned in a Batman game that builds on that one’s many successes. As someone who has been obsessed with Batman for a couple of decades, with changing degrees of intensity, Arkham City is literally a dream come true.

To have an interactive slab of Gotham City with such extremely detailed and well observed parts of Batman’s long history concealed for your own brand of detective work . . . well, it makes me feel both old and lucky to have been around this long. That the game is actually a wonderful, expertly paced, physical experience is something else entirely. As with Arkham Asylum, it still seems quite unusual to have a great comic book like Batman finally tap into why video games are such an exciting medium.

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Such Dulcet, Horrifying Tones: The Music Of Silent Hill

By Jonathan Barkan

When I was 14 years old, my friend Alex rented Silent Hill, the first of the now infamous Konami series. He invited me over that night, full well knowing that this game would appeal to my horror fanaticism. Little did he know that he was going to ignite a passion for the Silent Hill franchise that has yet to diminish. Also, little did he know that after turning the game off that night, the two of us were so scared that we sat back to back the whole night, steel baseball bats in hand, ready to fend off whatever creatures came our way.
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Batman: Arkham City—The Album

By Paul Casey

Arkham City is the sequel to 2009’s Arkham Asylum, the very surprising critical and commercial success from Rocksteady Studios. This soundtrack of “interpretations of the stories surrounding Batman” features a set of Indie Rock Heads doing songs that are in no real sense representative of 1) why Arkham City has a shot at game of the year or 2) why Batman is such an enduring character. As a collection of low-grade Indie Rock, it is mostly intolerable.
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No Gods Or Kings. Only Man: Bioshock

By Paul Casey

“I am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat on his brow? No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor. No, says the man in Vatican, it belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers, instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture. The city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be restrained by the small. And with the sweat on your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.”

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He Is the Night, He Is Vengeance, He Is Batman: The Animated Series

By Paul Casey

Batman: The Animated Series was the cause of my love of Batman, superheroes, and later, comic books. I had seen Tim Burton’s wonderful 1989 adaptation early on and went to the cinema to see the underrated and childishly maligned (though rather too scary for my youth) sequel, Batman Returns. I was also aware of the 1960s Adam West TV show.

Even though I enjoyed these, it was the Noir shadows of The Animated Series which got to me. The vision of Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, Alan Burnett, and Paul Dini would stay with me. The opening is perhaps the most evocative and perfect definition of who Batman is as a character. Danny Elfman’s score is Batman.

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