Month: March 2013

Leave a comment Posted on by Steve Murray Entertainment, Link-Off

Entertainment Link-Off: Watch This!

alison-brie-wired13-03Jackie’s busy this weekend and I’m in to cover the entertainment beat. The good news is that this weekend is a good one to catch a new release in the theatres unless you actually check out reviews. There appears to be something for everyone except those with good taste, it seems.

Dreamworks Animation’s The Croods seems to be the best reviewed movie of the weekend but don’t confuse it for a Pixar classic… Or Ice Age, even. If you’re looking for a live action comedy, Admission stars Tina Fey and Paul Rudd which sounds great on paper but doesn’t work in practice. If mindless action is your thing, Olympus Has Fallen is right up your alley.

So rather than try to wedge someone from one of these movies, here’s Alison Brie because you really should be watching Community on NBC.

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Leave a comment Posted on by Steve Murray Humour

Caption This: March 16 – 22, 2013

Inspired by the Globe and Mail’s caption writing person, we waste our time writing funny picture captions for some of the more interesting photos we come across when blogging. So here are some of the best pictures from the past week with a funny (-ish) caption. Continue reading →

Leave a comment Posted on by Steve Murray Video Games

The Showdown Effect Review: Yippee-ki… Ah, Screw It

the-showdown-effect-bannerHave you ever wondered what would happen if Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Bruce Lee and Liam Neeson did battle in a giant battle royale of action movie superstars? I’m sure a drunken conversation has resulted in a battle between movie heroes but nobody’s really gone beyond the argument over pints.

The Showdown Effect, a new game from Magicka devs Arrowhead Studios, tries to answer the question of which action star would win if placed in a battle to the death. If Super Smash Bros. dropped the more family oriented direction for the comically clichéd action ripped out of 80s and 90s action movies, it would be The Showdown Effect.

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2 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

eSports Won’t Go Mainstream Anytime Soon

mlg-dallas-2013On a whim, I watched part of the recent MLG Winter Championships. I’ve never watched MLG before and never played StarCraft 2 or League of Legends. As such, I was, naturally, completely lost at first. Over the course of the couple of matches that I watched, I was able to grasp the basic concept of the SC2 games was to kill all the opposing units but that was all I was able to grasp.

This made me think of stories and columns I’ve read over the last year or so that speculated that competitive gaming and eSports could break into the mainstream as a sport with sizable interest and possibly make the transition to TV.

While it’s entirely possible that competitive gaming might make it to TV, it’s not going to evolve past the niche audience and break into mainstream consciousness anytime in the near future.

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2 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Sports

F1 Power Rankings: Malaysia Grand Prix

We’re only days removed from the excitement of the season opener in Australia but it’s time to gear up for the second round of the 2013 Formula One World Championship. This time, it’s the Malaysia Grand Prix from the Sepang International Circuit. More often than not, the Malaysian round of the championship features heavy rain but will the forecast favour the Mercedes which is quite happy in the rain or the dry Tilke circuit loving Red Bulls?

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Leave a comment Posted on by Steve Murray Link-Off

Wednesday Link-Off: Out of the News

kim-cloutier-femilet13-01Well, I haven’t heard many good things about yesterday’s gaming column about how gamers rights are virtually non-existent. I’ve heard that I’m a bit of a whiner for thinking that gamers deserve to be treated like everyone else and trying to keep people from being hosed by terrible games. Like I said yesterday, that’s the sort of in-fighting that will hurt us all in the long-run.

Anyway, one thing I won’t get complaints about is featuring Kim Cloutier.

The legendary free weekly newspaper The Boston Phoenix is closing its doors. File this one under why we can’t have nice things. (Gawker)

It’s not just small local papers that might be on the way out. It seems as though local TV newscasts could soon follow in their print brethren’s footsteps. (New York Times)

The two Steubenville football players charged with rape were convicted. While most people weren’t exactly sympathetic to those guys, CNN treated them like victims. (BuzzFeed)

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4 Comments Posted on by Steve Murray Columns, Video Games

Caveat Emptor: What Rights Do You Have as a Gamer?

simcity-2013-connection-errorIn the last couple of months, we’ve had some very bad experiences as a gaming community. There was the abysmal Aliens: Colonial Marines that left gamers and fans of the Aliens franchise dissatisfied at best and angry at worst. The SimCity launch was a disaster of the highest proportion. It was probably worse than the Diablo III launch since EA and Maxis couldn’t be bothered to plan for a worst case scenario that we all saw coming. While, not a major issue, Tomb Raider had some serious issues on certain NVIDIA graphics cards.

The problem is that, unlike customers of most products, you have virtually no rights as a customer of the video games industry. Have you ever read the terms of service that you agreed to for digital distributors like Steam and Origin? If you have, you should ask yourself why you would ever buy a game from these people.

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Leave a comment Posted on by Steve Murray Sports

F1 Australian GP: Not Wet but Wild

The first race of the season is always an interesting one. Teams are coming to grip with new tyres, figuring out how their cars work best and where they stand in the field this year. Some teams struggle when unloading to start the season, others have it well under control.

This year, it was the Lotus team that had it figured out when the lights went out for the first time this season. While Red Bull had dominated practice and qualifying, their pace didn’t seem to translate to the race. It was Kimi Raikkonen who was the only driver to really make a two-stop race work en route to opening the season with a win.

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Leave a comment Posted on by Steve Murray Link-Off

Sunday Link-Off: Playing Favourites

olivia-wilde-marieclaire13-05It’s the end of a long week of writing. From Monday to Friday, we posted over 9,000 words. Doing a thorough week of blogging is a bit tiring so I’ll apologize in advance if next week is a bit quieter. However, we have the F1 race recap (assuming that it didn’t get rained out overnight while I was asleep) and a new gaming column coming up this week. I’m hoping to get a review for The Showdown Effect done this week too.

Right, you’re not here to hear me ramble on about blog stuff. Since Jackie didn’t feature her yesterday, here’s Olivia Wilde.

What is the Republicans’ game with the sequester? They’re actually looking to cut any specific thing. They just want cuts, wherever they may come from. (Think Progress)

Watch out, celebrity tweeters. The Federal Trade Commission is thinking about cracking down on paid ads that you post on Twitter. (Wall Street Journal)

Cardinal Bergoglio came from absolutely nowhere to become Pope Francis. After Cardinal Ratzinger won the Papacy as the favourite the last time out, you’d be forgiven if you thought that the favourite winning was the norm. However, it’s really the exception and long shots winning are the norm. (FiveThirtyEight)

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Leave a comment Posted on by J Entertainment, Link-Off

Entertainment Link-Off: Abracatastic!

gillian jacobsSorry about the delay on last week’s Entertainment Link-Off. Somehow pressing the ‘publish’ button doesn’t necessarily translate to actually publishing the post onto The Lowdown page. Technology is rather puzzling sometimes. Anyway, it’s Saturday, so it’s time for the ELO again. Let’s start this all off with Gillian Jacobs. You can catch her in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone this weekend, but to get your weekly fix, just watch Community on NBC every Friday. Word has it, the latest episode saw quite a dip in the ratings.

After the jump, Veronica Mars is back, other shows are looking to return via viewer funding, new look at Kick Ass 2 and Dora the Explorer live action joke trailer is actually turning into a real online miniseries.  Continue reading →