All posts for the month May, 2014

Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor

Those of you who keep up with my Doctor Who reviews are probably rolling your eyes at this point. “Yeah, we know that this guy has serious issues with the direction Steven Moffat is taking the series. We get it.” Well, that’s the thing. Though I only review the key episodes of the show, there were quite a few parts of the 2013 season I really enjoyed.

“The Rings of Akhaten” had some interesting character stuff in it as well as some nice higher sci-fi concepts, and “Nightmare in Silver” shows us that whatever issues I may have with it, Who is probably the closest modern equivalent we have to those groundbreaking ‘60s shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone – a show where respected sci-fi writers can just drop in to write episodes every now and again (John Scalzi, you listening? We know you’re a Whovian who has experience with writing dumb TV shows).

(more…)

Leave a comment

by Year Late Reviews on May 18, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Doctor Who, TV Show

Tagged clara oswald, doctor who, eleventh doctor, great intelligence, jenna coleman, matt smith, name of the doctor, paternoster gang, peter capaldi, tardis

Posted by Year Late Reviews on May 18, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/doctor-who-the-name-of-the-doctor/

Star Trek Into Darkness

I am a Star Trek fan.

I won’t say I’m a Trekkie, because I’ve recently discovered quite a few people of my generation and below don’t even know what Star Trek is. I’m not joking about this – take my good friend Daniel. He’s smart, likes video games, has friends, and is a pretty good representation of modern geek/nerd/plain ol’ pop culture. And when I first asked him what Star Trek was, he responded “Oh, yeah! The spaceship show that had George Takei on it, right?”

I’m just gonna let that phrase hang there. Daniel’s a great dude, but sometimes I just have to look at him and stand back, and…whatever. Point is, I’m a Trek fan – I know my Romulan Ale from my Saurian Brandy, and my multi-modal reflection sorting from my multi-spectral subspace engines. So this review of the latest Star Trek piece, Team Abrams’ no-one’s-sure-what-to-call-it-quel Star Trek Into Darkness, will be heavily grounded in my long experience with the franchise. (more…)

Leave a comment

by Year Late Reviews on May 16, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Drama, Movie, Reboot, Science Fiction, Sequel

Tagged alex kurtzman, benedict cumberbatch, big ben, damon lindelof, enterprise, into darkness, j.j. abrams, khan, kirk, leonard nimoy, peter weller, roberto orci, sci-fi, spock, star trek, star trek into darkness

Posted by Year Late Reviews on May 16, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/star-trek-into-darkness/

Metro: Last Light

Metro: Last Light is the sequel to the stellar indie game Metro 2033. 2k33 was a very intelligent game, with an excellent premise for an action-horror FPS: The game took place twenty years or so after a nuclear holocaust, where the survivors had managed to seal themselves inside the vast and labyrinthine Moscow Metro system. For a while, things were okay – subway stations turned into villages, tunnels into trade routes, and so on – but then hideous mutant creatures started appearing (I guess no post-nuclear game can escape the influence of the Fallout series, which is sorta sad because I always enjoy harder sci-fi in games). You control Artyom (You’ll be safe with “ar-CHOM”) an unassuming, fresh-faced kid who leaves his station for the first time, and goes on an expedition through both the Metro and the blasted, sterile landscape above as he finds a way to deal with the supernatural mutants once and for all.

(more…)

Leave a comment

by Year Late Reviews on May 14, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in RPG, Shooter, Video Game

Tagged 4A games, apocalypse, artyom, commu-nazis, deep silver, metro, metro 2033, metro last light, moscow, nazis, nuclear, russia, subway, thq, war

Posted by Year Late Reviews on May 14, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/metro-last-light/

Iron Man 3

Let’s get real for a moment here, and say that the multi-billion-dollar juggernaut of the Marvel Cinematic Universe needs no introduction. I’ll just briefly run down the stuff you haven’t heard before: i.e. my opinions on the movies I’m too late to the party to cover.

– The Avengers is a flawed movie, but I can tell already that it’s a classic of our times – no matter how contrived all the fighting is.

– Thor is the worst film in the franchise at time of writing – mostly for the long swaths of nothing going on that permeate most of the film.

– I don’t care about the Hulk enough to watch it.

– Captain America: The First Avenger was lots of fun, but it really dragged around the middle and lots of the plot threads were left hanging by the rushed and incongruous “freeze” ending.

(more…)

Leave a comment

by Year Late Reviews on May 3, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Movie, Sequel, Superhero