Games Review: Tales from the Borderlands and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequal

It's fair to say I'm a big fan of the Borderlands series of games. Over the last few years I've got a lot of play out of both Borderlands and Borderlands 2, mostly playing co-op with a freind, so the gaming experience has been greatly enhanced by good company and the occasional outburst of mutual competance. It's a series that has an emphasis on pace, humour, and a lot of loot, and Borderlands 2, especially, managed to bring all it's disparate elements together in a mechanically solid, and flashily entertaining way. This year I've had a double bill of the Borderlands universe, with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and the more offbeat Tales from the Borderlands. They've very different experiences. 

DVD(s) of the Week: Ex Machina and Foxcatcher

Yes, it's catch-up time. I've been pretty busy - exams, Thoughtbubble, attacks of Real Life, but we have managed to squeeze in a couple of movies in the last couple of weeks. So, lets dive right in. 

Movie Review: SPECTRE

Having failed to go and see SPECTRE a couple of weeks back, we seized on the opportuity this weekend, prior to Thoughtbubble, to catch up with it. After all, we've seen every Bond film since Goldeneye together - even the bad ones - and it's important to keep these traditions up. Also, Ewan saw it with my dad already, and we can't have him seeing films we want to, but can't! Before we get onto SPECTRE, it's worth mentioning that we got the full Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer on the big screen, and boy does it look pretty. And if the silent excitement from the audience anything to go by, it may as hard to get tickets for early on as the lastest Bond outage has been. So, Bond is again a big box office draw, but this far into an actors tenure, it's usually starting to creak. How is Daniel Craig's Bond doing? Warning - Spoilers.

Audio Review: Welcome to Night Vale

It's fair to say that I've been neglecting my growing backlist of podcast listening in the last few weeks. Hours of content lie dusty and unheard, voices crying out into the digital wilderness, their stories left unheard. I have been distracted, absorbed, and entertained by something new and strange, something that has drawn me in obsessively, in a way that feels pretty rare, these days. In a lot of ways I should have been onto this months, if not years ago, only picking it up as it's popularity seemed to explode across the wider geek-scape through the summer. But I'm here now, and, after about 6 weeks of commutes, totally up to date. I am speaking, of course, of Welcome to Night Vale. 

Book Review: Career of Evil

There was a bit of excitement yesterday when J K Rowling mentioned on a Radio 2 interview that she has "written some of a childrens book", which more than anything else seems to demonstrate the hold that Harry Potter maintains over our collective imaginations. It also helps to vindicate her decision to publish her crime series under the pseudonym "Robert Galbraith", helping to to differentiate it from the Potter brand and avoid some of the snobbery about a "childrens author" writing "grown up" books that affected reviews of The Casual Vacancy. To be honest though, as much as I enjoyed the Potter series, I am quite happy with Rowling/Galbraith the crime writer, and she can keep writing books like Career of Evil for as long as she likes.