[This review covers the initial model of Echo as delivered to pre-order customers. There may be slight differences when compared to the final release version. Pre-orders also included the now-optional remote control.]
Amazon Echo is a set-and-forget, hands-free voice assistant for your home. It was first offered (at a substantial discount) by invitation to Amazon Prime customers and so we’ve been using it since February. It’s now generally available to all. With a few minor caveats, our experience has been very good.
There has been an unending glut of young-adult fantasy romance adapted to film since the successes of “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games”. Authors are going to have to start leveraging love trapezoids because we’ve literally run out of triangles.
Still, it was my daughter’s 13th birthday and she wanted to watch this with her friends. They were deeply invested in the books and they promised – cross their hearts! – that they would watch it.
Teenage girls lie.
Teenage girls lie a lot.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I don’t think that they intend to lie, but lie they do. I was able to capture this timelapse of them “watching” the movie. Does it look like much watching is getting done?
Phones, giggling, moving around, phones on sticks, snacks, jumping on each other and jumping off the furniture. These are, I remind you, huge fans. Personally, I was less animated and able to pay more attention.
Not that I really needed to. The basic framework is so terribly familiar: a blank teenage girl discovers that she’s actually incredibly special and is part of a fantastic hidden world. She then spends the whole movie moaning over, but never choosing between, two guys. The teenage girls squealed like… well, like teenage girls, when the blank girl started kissing the amazingly effeminate guy, but a few did argue for the merits of the nerdy guy.
The plot is built from common ingredients in a different blender: angels and demons, werewolves and vampires, secret societies and ancient feuds. The good guys have hidden a magic cup that the bad guys want. Really important information is delivered with a British accent, because.
The special effects are nice enough and the pacing is pretty good when not bogged down by the kissing parts. Teenage girls seem to enjoy ignoring it while looking at their phones. The whole thing is basically harmless.
Vanquish is yet another game that I found only because of my PS Plus subscription. I download all those free games and then promptly forget them. Later, when trying to reclaim some disk space, I wonder what they are and fire ’em up. Sometimes I find gold, sometimes not. This one was was all gold.
I’ve written at somelengthabout The Last of Us in the past. Recently, having never played the “remastered” PS4 edition, I’ve restarted the game. It’s sparked the same depth of interest that I had initially and I came across this wonderful video that had slipped past my attention.
To promote the PS4 edition of the game, Naughty Dog and Playstation arranged for this one-night-only performance of the games most memorable scenes and music by the original cast and composer.
[Although this is the official video, Playstation inexplicably kept the 30 minute timer countdown intact. I’ve skipped it.]
The joy and passion that the performers bring to the roles and the camaraderie that clearly developed offers a clean, new perspective on the work. The writing and performances are top-tier regardless of the genre or medium and seeing them celebrated this way is a real treat for fans.
At some point in his life, Tom Six [IMDB] thought that sewing people’s mouths to other people’s buttholes would make for a cool movie. He was so enthralled with this idea that he’s spent the greater part of the last decade writing, directing and producing three movies about it. You probably already have an opinion about whether his time was well spent or not.
After several days of teasing the Internets, Bethesda Game Studios have come through with the first trailer for the insanely anticipated Fallout 4. Confirming prior rumors in grand form, this game will be set in Boston, baby!
I lived most of my adult life in Boston and am now salivating even more for this game. As much as I adored “The Last of Us” [My Review] and its Boston-based areas, it was a linear game that featured just a small handful of well-known locations.
The pedigree of Fallout guarantees that we’re sure to see dozens of landmarks, buildings and neighborhoods (come on Davis Square!) and be able to spend hundreds of hours poking through every dilapidated corner.
There’s no release date yet, but we can only hope for more details to be revealed at Bethesda’s E3 Showcase, a first for them, on Sunday, June 14th at 7:00pm PT.
As we watch a mute, faceless killer explore their house, we learn from answering machine messages that they have recently moved out of the city and into this large country house. The killer then methodically prepares the house – sealing all escape routes – and himself for their arrival.
In the past decade we’ve been flooded with gimped, sanitized PG-13 action movies. Bloodless, asexual, effects-driven action replaced the hard-hitting, foul-mouthed classics of the 80’s and early 90’s. Similarly, spy movies drifted away from fun, gadget-filled contests between womanizing gentlemen agents and volcano-habitating super-villains to gritty, dystopian melodramas featuring corrupt governments and more double-crosses than a confirmation ceremony for twins.
Sucker Punch revisits the successful formula of 2011’s “inFamous: Festival of Blood” (a follow-up to inFamous 2) with this sorta-DLC, but still stand-alone follow-up to “inFamous : Second Son” [My Review]. For $15, fans get a huge addition to the original game, while the curious can enjoy a beefy stand-alone adventure.
Model: SK70501
Reviewed on Playstation 3, 
Zombie alert!
Reviewed on Playstation 4, 