Video Games Archives - Page 6 Of 7 - The Wide Screen

November 7, 2021

“Arcane: League Of Legends” Part 1 Review!

As someone whose only second-hand experience with League Of Legends is through the massive multiplayer online game’s soundtrack of epic original music, I’ll be totally honest: until last week when I finally started getting bombarded with marketing for Arcane: League Of Legends, I had almost no interest in nor preconceptions about the Netflix adaptation which longtime fans of the game have been waiting for with bated breath. And the biggest thing holding me back was my concern that Arcane would be inaccessible to anyone unfamiliar with League Of Legends, its complex worldbuilding, and its sprawling ensemble cast of heroes and villains.

But for every time that Arcane suddenly throws an out-of-context piece of lore at the viewer and usually expects you to just roll with it (which is fairly easy in most cases), the animated series doubles down on establishing a single approachable storyline with just enough characters and fantastical plot devices to keep things lively, but never so many that a viewer new to the franchise will feel completely lost. Arcane‘s first three episodes provide a concrete baseline from which to expand and develop the world of League Of Legends in the near future.

And when I say near, I mean like next week. The three episodes currently available on Netflix are only the first segment of Arcane season one, which will be released in intervals between now and November 20th. Binge-watchers might take issue with this release strategy, but Arcane‘s episodes are significantly longer than the norm when it comes to animated television, so these three episodes together could make for at least one thoroughly satisfying evening. Each episode leaves you urgently wanting more, but episode three especially delivers in that regard, with a cliffhanger ending that actually got me to gasp out loud. Fans of the game are possibly familiar with certain…developments, but I definitely wasn’t.

Arcane follows two sisters, Violet (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld of Hawkeye) and Powder (voiced by Mia Sinclair Jenness), who as I understand it both become major characters in the League Of Legends game universe. Arcane, however, opens during a pivotal moment in their childhood, and explores their early days on the streets of Zaun, a dimly-lit and crime-ridden city built underneath the prosperous town of Piltover, where a steampunk renaissance is underway. Navigating a rapidly growing social and class divide requires the sisters to make hard choices and more than a few sacrifices if they’re to survive.

The series packs a surprisingly emotional wallop, wrapped up in an impactful message about how those in power will do whatever they possibly can to keep oppressed and marginalized groups at a disadvantage by turning them against each other. The series revolves around bridges built and bridges burned, whether that’s manifested in the terrifying rifts in Violet and Powder’s own family that they feel powerless to fix, the ideological divide between their father Vander (voiced by JB Blanc) and his friend-turned-supervillain Silco (voiced by Jason Spisak), or the literal bridge between Piltover and Zaun that burned during the last conflict between the two cities. Okay, so not a subtle metaphor, but an effective one nonetheless.

As much a pleasant surprise to me as its mature themes, Arcane‘s animation style should be particularly exciting to anyone looking for the next evolution of the medium – because this is it. All the depth and richness of a painting in every shot, but brought to life with the same fluidity and awe-inspiring direction that distinguishes League Of Legends‘ own cinematic trailers, which have racked up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. Video games are the blueprint for how to wed the unique sensibilities of animation and live-action, and it’s only fitting that Arcane is actually building upon that blueprint.

And of course, no adaptation of League Of Legends would be complete without a heart-pounding original score and soundtrack that makes you want to tackle a dragon or two. The game’s music has become widely popular outside of the core fanbase (as I mentioned, it’s the only reason I was familiar with the game at all), and Arcane‘s first three episodes feature catchy contributions from Bea Miller, Curtis Harding, Jazmine Sullivan, Ramsey, and a theme by Imagine Dragons. Harding and Sullivan’s “Our Love”, an upbeat yet nostalgic romantic duet, is my personal favorite track.

It’s safe to say that Arcane exceeded my expectations and then some. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next chapter in Violet and Powder’s story, especially because it will pick up after a significant time-jump during which the two characters will have matured into young women. I’m not going to get into spoilers for episode three here, but let’s just say…I’m very interested to see how the years will have changed them. That’s all I’ll say. If you want to know what I’m talking about, you’ll just have to watch the show.

Series Rating: 9/10

October 27, 2020

Netflix Developing An “Assassin’s Creed” Franchise!

As the end of the year – and the release of another installment in Ubisoft’s massively successful Assassin’s Creed video game series – draws nearer, Netflix is cashing in on the game franchise’s enduring popularity/profitability, having just announced a partnership with the Ubisoft game studio that will allow them to develop their own Assassin’s Creed universe on the streaming service, kicking off with a live-action series that is already in pre-production. Although a previous attempt to bring the excitement of the video game to the big screen proved to be pretty lackluster, Netflix doesn’t appear to be trying to develop any films based on the games: their attention is focused on creating series, both live-action and animated.

As of right now, we know very little about the series that is planned to kickstart the Assassin’s Creed TV franchise – two Ubisoft executives, Jason Altman and Danielle Kreinik, will serve as executive producers on the series, but Netflix is currently looking for a showrunner to bring this whole thing together, and we don’t know if they’ve got a writing team assembled behind the scenes just yet. It’s also unclear whether the series will adapt one of the game franchise’s eleven total installments, or combine elements from several, or act as something entirely new and different.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise’s overarching story revolves around a war between the order of the Assassins and the Knights Templar, a war spanning millennia: throughout the ages, these two opposing factions take various different forms (for instance, in Ptolemaic Egypt, they were the Hidden Ones and The Order Of The Ancients, respectively), but their goals are almost always the same – the Knights Templar seek to oppress free will and control the human race by force, through the use of magical artifacts, while the Assassins believe in free will and challenge them secretly. The game series has focused on a number of interesting historical periods, from the American Revolution and the Third Crusade to Peloponnesian War-era Greece, and over the years has gained a reputation for being one of the few video game franchises that actually takes time to research each era and achieve some level of historical accuracy.

This has recently caused a great deal of conflict in the fandom, with the newest Assassin’s Creed game (set in the Viking world) promising (historically accurate!) women warriors and same-sex romances – something that has prompted a certain subgroup of gamers to loudly object about what they mistakenly and ignorantly perceive as “the SJW agenda”. Never mind that women fought alongside Viking men or that Vikings were marginally more accepting of same-sex relationships than many of their contemporaries; apparently inarguable historical fact is “SJW” now. Anyway, I hope and pray that the Netflix series will follow in the footsteps of the most recent games and include more diverse protagonists, even if they are adapting the earlier games in the series.

The different historical settings will certainly give the series a unique selling point with which to differentiate itself from a steadily growing crowd of video game adaptations: but I worry it could be very expensive to do as many as in the games right up front, so my guess is that the first season of the series won’t jump to too many time periods, but will probably settle on one from the earlier games that most Assassin’s Creed fans are familiar with and enjoy, such as the Holy Land or Renaissance Italy. I’ve seen it suggested that each season of the series might jump to a new time period, like the games, which would definitely be exciting: but that does raise the question of whether they would follow the in-universe chronology of the plot, or the release order of the games themselves? If it’s the latter, then my favorite character, Kassandra Misthios of Odyssey, won’t be popping up for a long while. But who knows? At the moment we really don’t know anything at all about what Netflix and Ubisoft are planning to accomplish with this partnership, or how they’re going to go about this.

So what do you think? Which historical setting do you hope Netflix settles upon for this first series, and which Assassin’s Creed characters do you hope to see? Share your own thoughts, theories and opinions in the comments below!

August 24, 2020

“The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum” Video Game Trailer!

I’m not sure whether any of my readers have been anxiously waiting for me to start reviewing trailers for upcoming video games, but the lack of gaming content on my channel has bothered me for a while – even though it really shouldn’t, since I’m not a professional gamer by any stretch of the imagination. But the thing is: video games are increasingly growing more and more cinematic as time goes by, and the industry of adapting them to the big screen has become very profitable over in Hollywood. In fact, one could even say they’re becoming very prestige, with the recent news that Cate Blanchett will star in Lionsgate’s Borderlands adaptation.

It’s highly unlikely that a game like The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum will ever get that same treatment, but the reason I’ve selected this as my first video game trailer to review is simple: firstly, I’m familiar with this franchise, and I can think of things to say about it. Secondly, I’ve been considering reviewing certain video game trailers for a while, and this one just happened to land at an advantageous moment. So here we go!

The teaser trailer for Daedelic Entertainment’s Gollum is extremely brief, and features no glimpse of actual gameplay. In theory, the game is supposed to be stealth-based, with the player doing their best to control the frail, diminutive protagonist (I use that term loosely) as he switches back and forth between his two wildly different personas: the cunning, manipulative Gollum, and the kinder, gentler Sméagol. The player technically controls which persona they can play as, although game designer Martin Wilkes described it in an interview with IGN as being akin to “maneuvering a truck with two flat tires and trying not to drive it off a cliff”, which sounds…challenging, to say the least. As for exciting, well, that’s a different question entirely. Since Gollum isn’t particularly strong and rarely uses any weapons more advanced than a rock, the game is not going to feature a heavy focus on combat, but will instead force the player to use their survival-instincts to endure the horrors of Mordor and other inhospitable regions of Middle-earth.

In the teaser trailer, we see only two areas: Gollum’s cave in the Misty Mountains, littered with bones and what looks to be a recently deceased viperfish, and the rocky wastelands of Mordor, where Gollum finds himself after being taken captive by Orcs. The game will follow the events of the books and their detailed appendices more closely than Peter Jackson’s movies, although certain stylistic decisions have been made which appear to have no basis in either – most strikingly, the design of Sauron’s tower, Barad-dûr, which appears in the trailer as a thin, metallic spire with strong sci-fi influences. Since this game is set between The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, Gollum’s journey in the game likely has to end with him being captured by Aragorn and imprisoned by the Wood Elves of Mirkwood, but hopefully there’s room to explore, and/or mess about with the actual chronology of events just a little bit.

It was revealed that several characters from the books will have small but crucial appearances in the game, and off the top of my head I can think of a few who might show up: the Nine Ringwraiths, with whom Gollum appears to have had unpleasant interactions; the Orc commander Grishnákh, who instantly recognizes Pippin’s impression of Gollum’s voice in The Two Towers and knows or guesses about the One Ring; Shelob, the great hulking spider-demon dwelling in the mountains above Mordor who aligns herself with the miserable creature in exchange for new victims delivered to her doorstep; Aragorn, who captures Gollum and delivers him into Elven custody; and Legolas, who may very well have been one of the hunters tasked with trying to find Gollum, and was one of his eventual captors at any rate. Whether these characters will have wholly original designs (if they appear at all, though Shelob at least seems a given) remains to be seen.

As for Gollum himself, our main character bears a passing resemblance to the CGI version of the slinking rogue seen in both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings trilogies, although he has more hair in the video game (an attempt to make him more relatable, apparently). Andy Serkis is not believed to be reprising his role voicing the character, which is a big loss for the game studio if true: Serkis’ iconic performance as Gollum is commonly cited as one of the films’ strongest, and he still routinely slips back into character.

Will you be playing Gollum when the game arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC next year? Is Serkis’ voice a deal-breaker for you? Share your own thoughts, theories and opinions in the comments below!

Trailer Rating: 5/10

December 12, 2019

“The Witcher” Final Trailer Review!

The final trailer for Netflix’s new, completely unhinged, absolutely massive dark fantasy epic The Witcher is – all of those things, times ten. But with Star Wars dominating the news cycle and releasing in theaters on the same day as the first season of The Witcher becomes available, will the series be able to find an audience? I think it’s got a strong chance, but it needs to have a hook that will intrigue viewers who haven’t necessarily read a Witcher novel, played a Witcher video game, or ever heard of The Witcher before in their lives. So far, it’s mostly been directing its marketing toward disillusioned Game Of Thrones fans – you want something a little violent, a little dark, a little edgy? This clearly has all of that.

But the final trailer leans more heavily on appealing to fans of the source material, throwing in a bunch of new concepts we really haven’t seen much of in previous trailers and teasers: concepts that don’t mean a whole lot to me, but sound pretty awesome anyway. The focus here is on the “lion cub of Cintra”, Princess Ciri, whose character appears to be the show’s central plot-point – the people of Nilfgaard want her dead, and Geralt of Rivia has been assigned with finding and protecting her. The powerful sorceress, Yennefer of Vengerburg, presumably fits in somehow, but I honestly don’t care what her purpose is – she’s fighting bad guys while wearing a gigantic, heavy fur coat: a skill-set I thought belonged solely to Jon Snow. If we get more of that Yennefer, and less of the Yennefer who just seems to be hanging around at the palace, whispering about death and destruction, then you can count me in. I may be jumping to conclusions, but I think I like what The Witcher is doing with its female characters: they look powerful, strong (in many different ways), and cool. There are also women of color in prominent roles here, something Game Of Thrones never had.

So what’s the hook? Is it Henry Cavill in a platinum-blond wig (I will never stop making fun of that thing, even if it does actually look pretty decent)? Awesome heroines? Magic? Even as the day of Witcher‘s release draws ever closer, I’m still not sure I can identify anything that will be able to pull in non-fantasy fans. Hopefully, this will be a surprise hit, but I’m nervous to make any assumptions yet.

Trailer Rating: 7/10