Masterminds (2016)

Masterminds starring Zach Galifinakis and Kristin Wiig is the story of a robbery gone right believe it or not. A cool $17 million and a trip to Mexico. The problem is after David (Zach) is sent to Mexico before meeting up with Kelly (Kristin) whom has no intention of going there he is betrayed by Steve (Owen Wilson) and the feds are now after him.

Things get worse for David when Steve sends an assassin, Mike (Jason Sudeikis). Luckily for him the fake name they used for Dave happens to be Mike McKinney. Yes they used the assassins name and life as his alias. In a weird twist tho they become friends.

The movie itself is pretty solid but isn’t great. The most interesting thing about it tho, is it is actually based on a true story and to this day around $2 million dollars of the $17 million in the Loomis Fargo  Bank heist is still missing. Feel free to check this one out, if only just for the story. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Daddy’s Home 2 (2007)

Daddy’s Home 2 is a rather odd movie for me. The movie has a ton of talent with Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell,Mell Gibson and John Lithgow. The movie weirdly tho bounces between a by the numbers comedy and a hilarious comedy. The acting as you would expect is always top-notch however.

The story is quite simple. Take two families, and 2 grandparents with mixed style of parenting and stick them in a cabin and watch as things progress. The issue is the laughs that exist are amazing, they just come few and far between. There isn’t anything wrong with the story or anything like that it is just hit and miss with the script.

There are some memorable moments tho, for example the hunting scene is one of my favorite scenes in recent memory and it was quite hilarious when Wills character cut down a cell phone tower instead of a tree. The movie isn’t truly bad, it just isn’t as good as one would expect. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Hatred Revisited (2017)

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It wasn’t to long ago I watched this movie, and honestly I didn’t really know what to do with it. Here is my original review. The Hated (2017) I decided to watch it again because honestly I forgot I watched it already until about halfway through. Maybe that should be an indication of how good the movie is. You can see from my other review the movie had potential,and I stand by that. The movie could have been amazing, and the acting was really well done, I have no complaints there, and there is a scene where the little girl insist her baby sitter checks under the bed and when she does it’s the little girl telling her to shush because that isn’t her. When the sitter looks up, yup its a ghost.

Many aspects of the movie are great like that, and even the beginning explains how the house got into the state it was in showing an Nazi post WW2 living in America hiding an old object given to him from a friend as a reward from Hitler and a letter telling him to protect it.

The movie is definitely worth checking out tho, with how torn on it I am I can see other people enjoying it tho it does have pretty bad reviews from IMBd (3.7/10) and 59% from  Google users, so maybe not. Maybe do like the girls in the movie and drink a bottle of wine before deciding anything, best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Our Favorites Day 31: Slither (Savior)

Here we are, Halloween and the final day of our favorite horror movies. You will notice that me and @torstenvblog are both doing a movie today and it happens to be the same movie, Slither Slither 2nd opinion (2006)

Why are we both covering a movie we have both already reviewed? Well a long time ago we both worked at the same place and didn’t know each other. He was some guy pushing carts in the parking lot and I worked in the garden section. He did his thing and I did mine. One day I got dragged out of my department and sent outside to help that dude in the parking lot and while bullshitting about our shared hatred for our job we discovered we had much in common. Video games, books, horror movies and mostly that we hated our damn boss.

About 6 months later I left that hell hole for good, but he needed help moving and of course I had my friends back. We got him settled in, unpacked played some games and decided to get together for what would become a tradition we have followed ever since. Once a year for Halloween we get together and watch horror movies, but the first one I remember was this movie.It had it all, some silly jump scare attempts, a mayor screaming for his Mr. Pip, death and gore and the greatest love song of all time.

I don’t care what you all say, it’s a love song. “Queue The mother fucking Yahoos!” Seriously, I got that text from @torstenvblog the day him and his girlfriend broke up. She was insane. Seriously upper tier insane.

Regardless that is why I love this movie, it solidified what became the best friendship I have ever had and gave us one of the best inside jokes I have been part of. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Pumpkinhead 2:Bloodwings (1993)

Pumpkinhead 2 starts out in a flashback to the 1950’s where a group of kids hunt down, torture and kill a disfigured kid and drop him down a mine shaft. Years later another group of kids rob a witch, and summon Pumpkinhead. Pumpkinhead goes on a killing spree for the teens that robbed the witch and killed the disfigured boy.

This is a short synopsis and I kept it short because honestly the movie was awful. The acting is pretty solid and the monster still looks good enough but everything else is just horrible. The story makes no real sense, the dialogue is corny and the plot is full of holes and doesn’t even make much sense. For example the slam this witch with a car doing about 40 miles an hour and she gets right up and walks away but a quick hit with a flashlight and she is down for the count. Pumpkinhead in the first movie is well documented as only being summoned for truly horrible things and now its being summoned for petty theft and attacking people who had nothing to do with the crime?

Even with all of this aside much of what made the first movie interesting in the first place is also gone. There isn’t much redeeming about this movie at all, in fact it is better off avoided. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Project Hospital

As some of you may remember it wasn’t to long ago Oxymoron Games Hooked me up with a beta of Project hospital, which you can see my thoughts on here. Well the game today, and the fine folks at Oxymoron games were kind enough to toss us a copy last week so we could review it. It is always appreciated and never goes unnoticed to be chosen.

I won’t go into too much detail about the beta, you can go back and read that yourselves if you are interested. But a lot of things have changed. The graphics don’t appear to be greatly changed but do seem a bit more polished, the tutorials are still intact as you would expect but now there is full on campaign and challenge modes. (screen shots taken before they were played)

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As you would expect each one gets a bit more challenging as you unlock each one new level. There are also more options for the sandbox mode.

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There are various sizes of empty fields to build your own hospital or different pre-started hospitals, and you can even turn off deaths. If you turn off deaths the patients will simply be taken to a new hospital.

The game play is solid and is more simulation oriented than you will find in Two Point Hospital and less about laughs. ( Not that i have an issue with that, loved Theme Hospital) There are a few issues with the game however, for example tutorial 3 had a small glitch where the doctors and nurses wouldn’t treat the patient but when I restarted it I had no issues at all and once when patients were going into an x-ray room the chose to go outside and around the side of the building and hopped on the machine thru the wall. It was actually kind of humorous and was probably caused by my placement of the machine but realistically shouldn’t have happened and will probably be patched anyway.

Neither of these issues took away from my enjoyment of the game,but I felt obligated to mention them regardless. The day-to-day running of the hospital, the ambulances coming and going can all be very exciting. There is also the new twist of managing a day and night shift of the hospital which was a different and yet nice experience. Once while playing he day shift left and I realized i had zero doctors on my night shift to run my emergency room.

The game isn’t perfect but no games are, and if you love simulation and tycoon games this one is worth checking out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

PumpkinHead (1988)

Oh Pumpkin Head, the 1988 cult classic. The story is simple, some city folks accidentally kill a child with their dirt bike, and dad (Lance Henriksen) goes to an old witch type woman to call upon the folklore monster of Pumpkinhead to come and kill those city bastards. The problem is when Ed Harley starts to actually see the deaths happen he starts to have some buyers remorse. When it turns out he can’t undo what has already been done he sets out to stop the monster himself.

The creature actually looked pretty solid for the 1980’s and the story itself is pretty fun. The movie isn’t actually all that special and offers nothing new really. It is just a tail of revenge and a creature being fought, but what makes this different is that Ed really seems to regret it and tries to stop it even tho he is the one that was wronged in the first place. Pumpkinhead himself isn’t even truly evil as he can only be summoned by someone against someone who has done something really bad against them. You can’t summon him because your neighbor like keyed your car or because she won’t go out with you on a Friday night. The movie is a fun watch, but it isn’t a great movie. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

As always feel free to help us out if you want the movie by picking it up on Amazon

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Razerewire:Nanowars

Over the weekend I got to talking to one of the guys making Empire In Ruins ( you can learn more about that here Empire In Ruins, Revisited.) and he hooked me up with another game he made with Screwdriver&Pigeons. You can find them on Twitter here @screwdriver&pigeons or here @eir_td ,where they are making Empire in Ruins. They are great guys that always seem to make time to for fans so go give them a follow.

As for Razerwire, I was not sure what to expect. I kind of thought I was getting an Indy twin stick shooter that I would play for an hour think it was pretty neat then never touch again because I don’t much enjoy them. This is not at all what I got. What I got was an easy to play hard to master addictive game that had me saying one more round for 5 hours the day I started playing it. In fact I said “I just want to get into the top 10” on the global leaderboard then the top 5, well at the time of writing this I am #1 in both score and kills.

Graphically the game has a very nice retro feel to it with the bugs and colors looking great and the ever-changing background never-failing to match what it is going on.

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Free advice by the way, don’t shoot the jack-o-lanterns. The controls are flawless, they work off your mouse and you simply slide it around your wire follows you around the screen killing the enemies, with a catch. If you go to fast it will go thru the enemies without killing them. This isn’t a glitch or anything, the game actually warns of this and tells you it has something to do with particles or something. There are also numerous power ups to help you in your quest to knock me off the top of the leaderboards.

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The icons to the left will upgrade your overall abilities such as how fast shields recharge or max health. The icons to the right are all your semi randomly appearing power ups. They do various things from killing everything on the screen to slowing down enemy movements.

The game is fun and oddly addictive and at its price point of $2 ($3 if you want the DLC) there is honestly no reason to not try this game out, so head on over to Steam and give it a shot. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Project Highrise: Architect’s Edition

As always, time for a full disclosure moment. I did receive a review copy of this from Kalypso Media for which I am extremely grateful and honored. These things are pretty limited so being chosen is pretty cool. That being said, lets get to the nitty-gritty of it all.

First the game is a business sim and tower builder. I played it on PlayStation 4 but it is also available on Xbox one and the Nintendo Switch as well as Steam and comes with the Las Vegas DLC as well as the content packs for Miami Malls, Tokyo Towers, London Life and Brilliant Berlin.

Graphically the game is not the greatest looking however the graphics are perfect for what they are trying to represent. Watching the characters go about their daily lives in their offices or apartments is a pleasure. The sound falls into the same category with elevators making a satisfying ding or hearing the slots on the casino floor. None of the noises ever feel annoying or out-of-place. The sound and graphics aren’t the best out there, but they fit the game, get the job done and are quite enjoyable.

The game play however is where this game is at its best. You have plenty of options to choose from when you start from money to the background and even the amount of space you have to work with. And for those that just want to build there is an option from the start for unlimited money which had led to some impressive things being built by people who aren’t me as you will see soon enough.

My first go was an office setting. I started out by building a small entrance to welcome people and a place to buy some lunch.

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From here as a small profit started to come rolling in I added to it quite a bit with more offices.

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Each office requires certain things to be present in order to move in and stay happy, for example a water service for delivery or phone line. As you advance they want more expensive services like copying services. For me the different types of buildings you could go for actually acted like a difficulty setting with offices being pretty easy. Next I set up an apartment complex.

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This was actually a bit more difficult for me as they want more stuff from the very start. Still quite manageable tho, as you can see I managed to set up some parking and stores. This was really my only issue with the game. You can’t actually just set up an apartment complex or office building as you will need to add stores and restaurants as well since some of the other building options are locked behind having an assortment of those.

Another major thing people should rightfully be worried about are controls. Many games like this simply do not control well on console, which makes sense and is understandable. It has far less buttons and no mouse. I am happy to report however the controls work just fine. Obviously they are most likely better on PC, but I never had any issues controlling or building things.

Now for the end, is this game worth your hard-earned cash? Short answer, yes. This is honestly the best tower building game I have ever played and I happily sank many hours into it and will sink many more. If you like the management genre this game is great and allows you to build many interesting things. Of course the game isn’t perfect and if you aren’t a fan of the genre this game won’t hold much for you, but if you have been waiting for this style of game to hit console there is no reason to wait, 9/10 must buy for fans of the genre. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

As always if you want to support the blog and pick the game up you can do that here at Amazon.

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Seven In Heaven (2018)

Seven In Heaven is a Blumhouse production and damn is this movie weird as hell. Two teens at a party are not so willingly sent into a closet to play Seven Minutes in Heaven, and end up in an alternate dimension. Think more realistic Chronicles of Narnia. As soon as they get to the new place they find themselves in the same house, at a similar party, yet much more violent. Jude(Travis Tope) is kind of the class nerd and  June (Haley Ramm) is sort of dating the class bully that most people don’t like. These two will be stuck on the other side, and things aren’t pretty. In fact Jude is accused of stabbing the class bully Derek (Jake Manley)

I don’t want to go to in-depth with the story since honestly all of the joy in this movie is in figuring out what the hell is even going on in the first place. Not that the movie is confusing by any means, it just leaves you to figure it out right up until the very end and has a few twist and turns. The acting and visuals are nice and honestly I see no real reason for the low scores the movie has on IMBd as I rather enjoyed it myself. If you have the time check this one out on Netflix. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.