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Wednesday 25 September 2013

Dodging Bullets, Stealing Guns and Reversing Death - Time Manipulation in Gaming





The winner of this year's 7 Day FPS Challenge hosted by Steam is a tech demo called SuperHot. SuperHot takes place in a strange, Art Deco world where faceless people try to kill you. The premise is interesting enough even before it's novel game mechanic is explained in big, white letters at the start of the game: "Time Moves When You Move". SuperHot's brilliant use of time manipulation is the latest in a long line of games. Here, in chronological order, are five of the most important ones:
  

Friday 20 September 2013

Gone Home Is Pedestrian


 Video games are great aren't they? You put the cartridge/CD/DVD/download from steam and boot up your game-playing machine and while away as much time as you like shooting baddies/slaloming/pointing and clicking your woes to oblivion. There's some people who think this isn't enough, though. They think games approached in an unorthodox way could give users a completely new experience. They feel that this new experience would provide something different from film, books or television. Gone Home has been lauded by some as this new kind of game.

Saturday 14 September 2013

Nostalgia for the 1980s




Off the top of your head, what’s a quintessentially 1980s film? Using the powers of the Internet, it can be determined that every single one of you has answered Robocop. The 1987 film was both a popular and cult classic, nominated for and followed up with sequels and TV adaptions. But that was a 1980s audience which is less developed than we are today. Audiences today probably want something thought-provoking, like Elysium or Riddick, right? Apparently not, if the new trailer for the Robocop reboot’s anything to go off. And it’s not just Robocop that’s getting a revival: Evil Dead, Miami Vice, GI Joe, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career – the same things are repeating themselves. How’s this happened?

Friday 13 September 2013

6 Extraordinary Reasons Why J.K Rowling Is Writing Harry Potter Again




Yesterday, J.K. Rowling announced that there would be a spin-off to the Harry Potter series. It will be a film based on an earlier spin-off book, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. This new endeavour comes after two failed attempts at non-Harry Potter material. Her first experiment, The Casual Vacancy, was panned by critics. Rowling then wrote a detective novel under a pseudonym which was rejected by publishers and then sold poorly until it was leaked she had written the book.

Many may say that Rowling is only revisiting Harry Potter due to the lack of success she has had in her other projects. In true SpontaneousWriting style, though, here are 6 outlandish reasons which would explain the turn of events:

Thursday 12 September 2013

Mark Wahlberg - Bad Actor or Bad at Picking Films?




The frenzy surrounding a flippant remark Mark Wahlberg made about wanting to play Iron Man has safely died down after only one short month. While the public was blinded with rage, it could be forgiven for ignoring the two films he had released: 2 Guns and Pain and Gain. According to reviewers, these two films are actually pretty good. This must come as quite a relief to Mark as he’s not always the best at picking films. On the one hand, Wahlberg has critically acclaimed work (Boogie Nights, The Fighter) but on the other, he has some giant flops (Max Payne, Planet of the Apes). How is it that Mark Wahlberg can pick up an Academy Award nomination one year and a Razzie the next?

Friday 30 August 2013

What Would We Do Without The Internet?


It’s been a worrisome week for the Internet. Last Sunday, Google went down for five minutes and 40% of internet traffic upped and disappeared. A day later, the same thing happened to Amazon. In the forty minutes it took their tech staff to get the website up and running again, the company had lost $40 million dollars. It seems that the future of technology isn't as rosy as we're led to believe.

Al Gore warned us against relying on machines in America's foremost educational cartoon: Futurama. He said that we could only stretch the goodwill of the Internet so far before it turned on us. Instead of listening to him, we torrented David Hasselhoff's entire discography and frivolously bought a Starship Enterprise pizza cutter. When the robots decide they've had enough and pull the plug we'll regret all the data we've wasted.

Friday 23 August 2013

Riddle Me This And Riddle Me That: Did You Hear That Ben Affleck is Playing The Bat? (Batman)



It was announced today that Ben Affleck has been chosen to play Batman in the currently untitled sequel to Man of Steel. There has been a mixed reception to this, with the negative commentors understandably having PTSD-type flashbacks to Affleck's 2003 film, Daredevil. Nevertheless, Ben's been cast and he now stands alongside a long line of other actors who have played the Caped Crusader. While we can’t know for sure in which direction Affleck will take the role, we can look to the previous actors who have played Batman to get some hints.