Hey, look. A GameFAQS review that isn’t recycled video fodder… and it’s on a game for Nintendo 3DS that you can actually still purchase because it’s available as a physical release… not that it matters for some of you folks, but anyhoo.
A Somewhat Ideal Way Of Mega Man On The Go If You Can’t Afford A Switch
Continue reading “GameFAQs Review – Mega Man Legacy Collection (3DS)”
Another recycled video review converted to text format, although I am shocked that the only review “posted” on GameFAQs is the old Classic Game Room review from ages past. If other Vectrex games are in need of local review offerings, then I might be more than happy to oblige.
The Human Adventure Is More Violent Than I Remember It
Continue reading “GameFAQs Review – Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Vectrex)”
This was posted on GameFAQs months ago and is essentially a text version of a video review that was done ages ago. Now you get to read it in slightly more family friendly terms. Enjoy.
Nobody got ready for this…
EA attempted to bring over their famed NHL series from the 16-bit consoles to Game Boy with NHL Hockey 95 to pitiful results. You could make the argument that any negative reaction to the game is uncalled for because it was taking a 16-bit game and trying to make it work with Game Boy was a tall order. But then you’ve got NHL ’96 for Game Boy, which is pretty much the same game – right down to sitting through thirty seconds of unskippable logos, copyright information, and game credits in case you want to know who was responsible for this travesty.
Yeah, listen… you’ve seen this in video form a few years back, but it’s the playoffs and I added these a while back, so let me fill the void with stuff about stuff.
The most amazing thing about NHL Hockey ’95 for Game Boy is that it was even made to begin with, let alone sold in stores for people to actually buy. This attempt to bring over EA’s famed NHL series from the 16-bit platforms to the portable format should have gotten a game misconduct call, but sadly, it was not to be.
Continue reading “GameFAQS Reviews – NHL Hockey 95 (Game Boy)”
War Of The Worlds is fucking horrible.
No, I’m not talking about the original HG Wells novel. That’s a classic. No, I am not talking about the 2005 adaptation with Tom Cruise. Not what I would call a classic, but it had its moments. Nor am I talking about the Asylum equivalent, which I’m sure is about as high-brow as all the other Asylum films that have come and gone ’round these parts.
No, we’re talking about the Ice Cube starring vehicle that escaped the Amazon mines last year. Shot during the prevailing circumstances of 2020 when everyone was stuck at home and we had to make due with our own limited means, this new take on the novel involves lots of webcam footage, lots of screenshots of social media platforms, and also most prominent of all, endless Amazon product placement. And this was sitting somewhere in the Amazon warehouses until someone found it and decided to put up on Prime Video. And somehow I sat down and watched this thing.
And it sucks.
Everything is terrible. The acting is beyond atrocious, with bit players giving off listless, almost life-draining performances while the major characters are… well, I guess they’re happy to be getting paid and are only willing to do just the barest bare minimum of the bare minimum of effort one is willing to put into a work in order to justify whatever pay they earned from their participation. The editing is awful; everyone is doing Zoom calls, facecams, we get capture footage of people’s phones and social media. And whenever we have special effects of the invaders, they look like the cheapest of the cheapest cheap end of the old Lucasfilm table scraps that were abandoned long after the Phantom Menace wrapped production. And while we’re at it, let’s pump in every social platform under the sun and make sure it gets facetime. Let’s pump in Amazon’s presence. The product placement is dreadful and I hate it.
Some people have a tendency to call some of these bad movies “so bad it’s good.” In that you can find things to poke fun of and that’s usually where the entertainment comes from. And if a film can do that for you, then that makes it entertaining in a way that wasn’t intended by the filmmakers, but that’s on them. And granted, I’ve seen my share of bad films that I could poke fun of or at least draw out some morbid entertainment value out… but when it comes to this… thing that Amazon dared call a movie, there’s no entertainment to be found here. This was probably the closest I ever came to hate watching a product because it took about five minutes to hate this film and I willed myself through the rest of it, just so I can say that it sucked.
This is an example of a movie that deserved to be shelved and filed as a tax write-off. There is no redeemable quality to be found in this movie. There is no reason for it to exist, much less be released for consumption. Everyone involved in this piece of crap should be made to take a long, hard walk off a high clifftop and land headfirst into the pavement below to destroy whatever defective brain matter possessed these people to make this film in the first place. And no, I’m not being harsh in saying that. If anything, that’s being fucking kind.
However, if you want me to say something nice about this movie… yeah, sorry, I can’t do it. I just can’t. This may very well challenge Ready To Rumble as the absolute worst movie in human history. It’s neck in neck. I’m on the fence as to which one I actively hate worse.
Every so often, someone will ask what it would take for me to give the Paul Feig Ghostbusters a watch since it’s going to be a decade old and I still haven’t watched it.
To quote a legendary and disgraced wrestling promoter…
No chance in Hell.
And you’ve got War Of The Worlds 2025 to thank for that.
Fuck this movie.
Zord Quest is a story that treads on fairly familiar territory; after an incident separates the Rangers, each one goes through their own personal trial to prove their worth as heroes in order to overcome the latest monster of the day from Lord Zedd. Chances are you’ve seen some variation of this story when it was called Alien Rangers and the little kid Rangers each went on their own personal journey to recover a piece of Zeo Crystal that would set up the next incarnation of Power Rangers.
Zord Quest almost follows that same template, but doesn’t quite hit the mark. It’s a one-shot story that gets resolved quickly. The trials that the individual Rangers go through serve only to reinforce their teamwork and apply their newly learned lessons to use in order to defeat the latest monster of the week. The trials themselves are resolved fairly quickly with no real substance behind it. There’s a sense that Zord Quest wants to say something, but fails to actually say anything.
On top of that, the continuity snafus are hard to ignore. The story supposedly takes place during the second season (or Year Two, as the book calls it), but they’re still using the Dinozords, which were mostly inactive and replaced with the Thunderzords. (Funny how all these MMPR Boom comics that wasn’t their main series always default to using the old Megazords and not the later ones despite timeline placement.) Lord Zedd is at least the main baddy. but his characterization is inconsistent with what was established during that time. It’s a story that neither fits with TV or comic continuity and as someone who followed this franchise since the very beginning, things like this do grate a bit.
Still, I’d be hard-pressed to call this bad. At worst, it’s a fairly ho-hum story with some questionable continuity snafus that almost harken back to the Hamilton Comics days, but on the other hand, it’s also straightforward in its storytelling that leads to the very obvious resolution and on that count alone, it’s more than fine. I do appreciate the much grittier artwork that’s at least a fair departure from the usual bland artwork that I’ve seen in some of these Mighty Morphin comics during that series run. It’s not quite perfect.
Zord Quest doesn’t offer much in terms of substance or anything that hasn’t been done before, but it makes for a quick read if you’ve got nothing better to do and can forgive the continuity gaffes. I’d call this “merely okay” and move right along.
This comic book is a questionable piece of shit… I say questionable because the premise that it presents on paper is intriguing and could serve as a potential dramatic piece, but the execution of that premise ends up making the concept less so.
A three-issue Elseworlds mini-series published in prestige format (fancy cardstock cover and premium paper pages), Act Of God begins with a wave of black light that permanently depowers all the super-powered beings, rendering them normal humanoids or equivalents. That means you get stuff like Superman suddenly acting like a drunkard, Green Lantern obsessing over that guy who beat him up, and other heroes being hopelessly lost before some of them decide to be trained by Batman so that they can keep fighting crime or something. Every affected hero reacts differently to their new circumstance, but most of them react so poorly and their reactions are often in conflict with their traditional portrayals.
Somewhere in the thought process lied an interesting idea that could have developed into an interesting story. What was the cause of this Black Light event that depowered the heroes? How do the heroes cope to their new circumstances? How does this affect the overall power structure and hierarchy? Is this just an Earth thing? There are so many ways you could go with this thing and Act Of God approaches this in the most banal way possible that it almost comes across as parody.
The only real positive to be found is in Dave Ross’ artwork. While there are some panels of questionable quality that might have slipped through the cracks, I thought the art was really well done here. I only wish that it wasn’t tied to three issues of utter rubbish that could have easily been confused for something that was written today.
Absolute garbage. Avoid like the plague.
For anyone who has sampled my Winners And Losers Of 2025 list, you already have a pretty good idea on what I think of this series, but for the rest of you folks – particularly you folks who are disenchanted by modern Star Trek television properties – might I recommend that you give Redshirts a shot?
Continue reading “COMIC REVIEW – Star Trek: Red Shirts (2025 Miniseries, IDW)”
30 years ago on this day, HBO released a little film called The Late Shift, a television film adaptation of the Bill Carter-penned book of the same name chronicling the David Letterman/Jay Leno battle over the Tonight Show after the departure of longtime host Johnny Carson. I recently got the chance to read the book for the first time in years and for what it’s worth, it’s a superb chronicle of all the details surrounding this rather convoluted mess of a situation as a result of pure, unadulterated arrogance and incompetence on the part of NBC… something that would be just as readily apparently over a decade later with the Conan O’Brien situation.
As for the film in question… well, you can watch the movie on Youtube; there’s at least a couple uploads of it that you can check out for free… although I would implore you not to do it and just go for the book. Naturally, there’s only so much you can do to adapt a book into a 95 minute film, but more to the point, the movie is just plain bad.
Why am I celebrating the film’s thirty anniversary if I’m calling it a bad film? Well, I can think of no other time in which it would be appropriate to talk about this film that it doesn’t feel… what? Timely? Something to that extent… but really, with all the noise of late night of the past year – the Colbert cancellation and Kimmel suspension – I can’t help but think of the days when late night’s worst controversy was Jay Leno holding onto the Tonight Show by staying in the lobby while Conan O’Brien fumbled. And while I had missed out on the initial Tonight Show noise in the early 1990s, at no point did I figure that I would get to live this nonsense live and in living color.
And at some point, should HBO or whoever decides to give this late night scene another movie of sorts, I pray that it is yards better than the utter tripe of a film that is The Late Shift.
Basically, it boils down to the portrayal of its two biggest stars; David Letterman and Jay Leno, which comes across as comically bad to the point of farce or parody. I know that Jay had a huge chin, but maybe the make-up crew probably overdid it a bit with Daniel Roebuck, who looks more like a poor man’s Jay Leno cosplayer than he does a poor man’s Jay Leno… and his performance here is obnoxiously overexaggerated Italian stereotype and less funny man trying to be a good guy by waiting in the lobby. As for John Higgins’s take on Letterman, other than the obnoxious red hairpiece, he almost kinda, sorta looks the part, but again, the performance is what turns me off on the whole deal. I can see why Letterman himself didn’t care for the film.
Ironically, the noteworthy performances of this film are the secondary characters. Kathy Bates puts on a good showing as bullish producer Helen Kushnik – even if the portrayal is tame compared to the real deal – the late, great Treat Williams is slick and suave as Michael Ovitz, and hell, I even felt some sympathy for some of the network people, even if they were – technically – the antagonists and instigators of this whole deal… well, except for Howard Stringer; he’s wonderful… and also wonderfully played by Babylon 5 regular Peter Jurasik.
The Late Shift is the sort of thing that deserved to get run over with a steamroller… or dropped from a high-rise building and exploding into a blissful red mist upon impact… or simply smashed with a hammer… it’s essentially one big 90-minute Stupid Human Trick in slow motion… even Big Jaw deserves better than what he got here.
This whole deal is obnoxiously bad. Stick with the book.
So, if all goes according to plan, today’s post should publish on the very same day that, ten years ago, the first Star Wars film of the Disney ownership era as well as the start of a new Star Wars sequel trilogy – The Force Awakens – hit movie theaters to usher in a new era of Star Wars that is new and different… although you wouldn’t have been able to tell from watching the movie.
At the time of release, people considered it to be a return to form after the polarizing prequels. For some, it felt like Star Wars again… for others, it felt too much like Star Wars; to the point of almost being a carbon copy of the original film from 1977.
And then The Last Jedi came along and pretty much shat the bed that The Force Awakens set with its dogged insistence in subverting your expectations; something that has become a meme over the years in and of itself. Regardless of your opinion on the film – and I’ve made my feelings perfectly clear – the fact is that the second chapter of the new trilogy was a divisive film and brought about an air of uncertainty among the Star Wars faithful. And then Solo came along… and finally, The Rise Of Skywalker ended the sequels and any subsequent hope for further annual Star Wars feature films, relegating the franchise to limited series runs on Disney+.
What began as a sign that things were going to be okay… turned out to be anything but… and when one revisits The Force Awakens ten years removed from its initial release, with all these other films out there and everything that has happened, is the movie as good as it was? Has it aged poorly? Was it ever that good to begin with?
The answer is… complicated.
Continue reading “THE BITE COMMENTARIES #11 – The Force Undead”
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