At Darren's World of Entertainment - a movie, DVD and game review blog.
The latest movie and DVD reviews - plus game reviews as well. And cool stuff thrown in when I see it.
Available worldwide on Tuesday, April 12 across Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC for $6.95 AUD / $7.45 NZD!
With the Wasteland Workshop, design and set cages to capture live creatures – from raiders to Deathclaws!
Tame them or have them face off in battle, even against your fellow settlers. The Wasteland Workshop also includes a suite of new design options for your settlements like nixie tube lighting, letter kits, taxidermy and more!
Expand the capabilities of settlements with Wasteland Workshop, and then in May, travel beyond the Commonwealth to Maine for Far Harbor – the largest landmass Bethesda Game Studios has ever created for post-release content.
Stay tuned for more details on even more add-ons to be released in 2016 and on free updates like the Creation Kit, which will allow you to create mods on the PC and then share and play them across all platforms, including consoles.
The first person shooter, DOOM (or Doom 4, depending on your viewpoint) is hellishly anticipated.
Bloody, brutal and fast, the game is nothing short of a feverish and frenzied fighter that demands everything from you right away.
The closed BETA offered a look at some of the multiplayer elements of the upcoming game, which launches May 13th - yep, Friday the 13th, which seems wildly appropriate given the hellish content within.
Deathmatch is the title that most of the time was spent on and in the ten minutes duration of each game, it's all go - right from the start.
While the match-making took a little while - no doubt due to smaller numbers as it was a closed beta - the chance to customise your character was a welcome one. It's almost as if the MasterChief look has been transported over to the game and given your own look and appeal. Liveries and weapons can all be given a shiny new sheen and your own personal touch.
But really, it's all about the weapons, and about the gameplay. Once the game counts down and you're allocated to a team, it's quite simply all on. Set over a few locations, the division into two teams is simple and effective; it's all about the first one to get to 75 kills. And there are a lot of kills, some of them bloody and explosively gory.
Choosing a rocket launcher as weapon of choice proved a wiser move for taking on the opposition. There's little time to really focus an attack when you're being chased so it's very much a shoot and hope kind of mentality of the game that keeps you engaged. From racing around to shooting others, there's enough of a frenetic feel to the BETA to keep you on your toes; respawning happens very quickly and there were scant occasions when the game respawns you in jeopardy.
Backdrops are impressive (not that there's plenty of time to view them) - from pouring lava to pits of molten death, the whole thing feels like it's on a Ripley-esque spaceship in one of the multiplayer levels. There's no map to help you negotiate your way around and it's simply a case of getting used to the surroundings and getting on with it.
The biggest thrill of the multiplayer though is the chance to spawn yourself as a devil and run amok, killing with ease. When the demon option spawns, it's usually everyone rushing to get what is essentially a few moments of invulnerability. From the ripping of your arms to becoming a hellspawn to the running around blasting and essentially tearing the opposition to pieces, there's a real thrill to being the big bad. Whether this option will be available in single player is anyone's guess right now, but it could make all the difference between winning and losing.
The pace of the multiplayer means the 10 minutes goes quickly and the end of the game signals a chance to level up and gain XP as well as unlock various collectables, weapons, etc. Double jumping and thrusting gives you a chance to hurtle around the landscapes too; and teleports get you to where you need to go as well.
Quite simply DOOM's BETA has shown the game's got a lot to offer and given its frenetic pace and its killer MO, the open BETA will be fun - and the game should be incredible.
The Documentary New
Zealand Trust presents THE DOCUMENTARY EDGE
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2016
Be Here Now - the Andy
Whitfield Story opens the 11th
Documentary Edge International Film Festival (Doc Edge), on
Wednesday 4th May in Wellington and Wednesday 18th May in
Auckland. A powerful and intimate love story, the documentary follows the fight
of Spartacus
star Andy Whitfield and his charismatic wife Vashti against his cancer
diagnosis.
Doc Edge brings 37 feature length films and 15 shorts to Wellington (4th-15th
May) and Auckland (18th – 29th May).
Be Here Now marks
the international premiere by Academy Award® Nominee, filmmaker Lilibet Foster.
The film has received critical and popular praise, winning the Audience Award
for the Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2015. Both Lilibet
Foster and Vashti Whitfield will be at screenings in Wellington and Auckland.Watch the trailer.
Wrapping up the festival is Presenting
Princess Shaw,
a film that follows Samantha Montgomery, A.K.A. Princess Shaw, a
singer and YouTuber living in one of New Orleans toughest neighbourhoods. Her
soulful voice is discovered by Israeli musician Kutiman, providing the catalyst
for an inspiring musical collaboration and new friendship. Presenting Princess Shaw has
been described as “inspirational filmmaking of the first order... Astounding
and thoroughly inspirational” by Variety
and a “joyously uplifting documentary” by Toronto
Star. Watch the trailer.
In addition to the earlier titles announced, the Festival’s impressive range of
films covers a wide range of issues and follows individuals from all walks of
life: musicians, sports players, chefs, activists and everyday people with
incredible stories to tell. Several films touch on famous names such as Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Maya
Angelou: And Still I Rise and Nathan East: For the Record.
The fantastical world of Snow
White and the Huntsman expands to reveal how the fates of The Huntsman Eric
and Queen Ravenna are deeply and dangerously intertwined. Chris Hemsworth
and Oscar® winner Charlize Theron return to their roles in The
Huntsman: Winter’s War, an epic action-adventure in which they are
joined by Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain, as well as director Cedric
Nicolas-Troyan. Producer Joe Roth (Maleficent, Alice in
Wonderland) once again leads the team in a breathtaking new tale nested in
the legendary saga.
Long before the evil Queen Ravenna
(Theron) was thought vanquished by Snow White’s blade, she watched silently as
her sister, Freya (Blunt), suffered a heartbreaking betrayal and fled their
kingdom. With Freya’s ability to freeze any enemy, the young ice queen
has spent decades in a remote wintry palace raising a legion of deadly
huntsmen—including Eric (Hemsworth) and warrior Sara (Chastain)—only to find
that her prized two defied her one demand: Forever harden your hearts to love.
When Freya learns of her sister’s
demise, she summons her remaining soldiers to bring the Magic Mirror home to
the only sorceress left who can harness its power. But once she discovers
Ravenna can be resurrected from its golden depths, the wicked sisters threaten
this enchanted land with twice the darkest force it’s ever seen. Now,
their amassing army shall prove undefeatable…unless the banished huntsmen who
broke their queen’s cardinal rule can fight their way back to one
another.
You can win a double pass to see The Huntsman - Winter's War!
To enter simply email to this address: darrensworldofentertainment@gmail.com and in the subject line put HUNTSMAN. Please include your name and address and good luck!
Fallout 4 continues to grow, despite already being one of the biggest expanse of games out there.
The first DLC, Automatron is all about smashing up bad robots and using their bits for cannibalisation. Using the robot bench and adding in bits to your old bots is pretty good fun, but it does little to further the game's MO which has already traded on this currency.
Using the post-nuclear zone for Fallout's setting is genius and it allows the writers of this DLC to tap into some of the B movie trappings of the series, giving a villainous edge to the proceedings that's truly welcome. While the quests themselves aren't exactly very long, the game's desire to have you face off with The Mechanist, the baddie of the piece, is admirable and easily satiated.
But the game's real raison d'etre for this DLC is the modding of your companions, and there are vicarious thrills to be had from customising your own robot buddies and then heading out into the wasteland to get all the bits to do it all again.
There's no denying you have to be part of the Fallout faithful to overlook the rather familiar edges to the story, but if you're prepared to forego some of the minor bugs that continue to blight the game and the deja vu that haunts this DLC, you'll still have a blast out in the wastelands.
The second series of Detectorists doesn't quite match the highs of the first one, but given how high the bar was first time around, that's no major problem.
In the second batch of six episodes, the comedy's a bit more pronounced this time around as Lance and Andy continue their quest to find an ancient Anglo Saxon king's treasure.
But in this season, Andy's juggling being a new dad and trying to find work, and Lance is meeting a mystery woman. Equally, Becky, who inadvertently caused so much upheaval last season, is now off with a German looking for a crashed aircraft.
If season 1 of Detectorists was a glorious amble through the woods of life, season 2 is a little more meandering and not quite as poignant as previously hoped. However, it's still head and shoulders above anything else and proves to be a bitterly sweet ride.
Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones make the wistful watchable and consequently, while season 2 lacks a little of the punch and gives a bit more of the broad comedy than season 1, it's still worth seeking out.
Rating: M Released by Icon It could have been so good.
Using the remaining Monty Python team as the voices for aliens and having Simon Pegg as a hapless human caught in their plan, Absolutely Anything is a film that never quite reaches its potential.
Pegg plays sadsack teacher Neil, who's desperately in love with his downstairs neighbour Catherine (the ever radiant Kate Beckinsale) but who lacks the edge to do anything about it.
One day on a whim, a group of aliens presiding on high choose a random human to be granted the powers to do "absolutely anything" with - and end up bestowing this on Neil....
Riffing on Bruce Almighty, Absolutely Anything is another of those movies which had some serious comic potential, but ends up feeling like a sketch the original Monty Python team would have jettisoned or used as an ongoing non-sequitur gag in one of their films.
Boasting an incredible Brit cast (Joanna Lumley, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Eddie Izzard) who are largely wasted, Pegg flounders as Neil, trying to imbue the usual loser character with a bit of edge, but floundering around dealing with a series of silly scenarios that border on the tedious rather than the chucklesome in this what if an idiot had all the powers in the world. Pegg channels his usual charm as the hapless guy caught in the middle, and he gels well with the gorgeous Beckinsale's just looking for a decent guy Catherine, but it never quite hangs together as it should.
Rob Riggle pushes things over the edge as Catherine's stalker and even Robin Williams, in what would be his last role, adds to the syrupy mess as Dennis, Neil's dog, who's biscuit and trouser-leg obsessed. The Americans add little to this comedy except to compound the clumsiness of its execution.
Channeling some of Douglas Adams' Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy's Vogons, the Python's CGI renderings are nicely executed, but poorly scripted and fail to build on the premise of their return.
Quite frankly, Absolutely Anything would have worked better if the story had put aside its more fart-obsessed silliness and embraced its childish premise; as a kids' comedy, this film would have had some real legs and a more amused audience as it heads towards its Python-esque elements of silliness in its final stages.
NZ Audiences may get one moment of laughs when there are declarations of war towards the end, but quite frankly, Absolutely Anything offers very few laughs elsewhere. It's a mess of a film and a travesty of wasted talent.
