If you’re in the Toronto area, you may want to catch the Wright Stuff festival kicking off tonight at the Bloor Cinema. The festival is being hosted by writer/director Edgar Wright while he is in town for the next few weeks filming his next feature.  Tonight kicks off with showings of his own Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz along with an uncut version the Don’t trailer from Grindhouse.

Over the next few weeks Edgar will also be hosting various films that he’s hand picked for viewing including Shaolin Soccer, The Warriors and a marathon of the TV show Spaced.  Head on over to the Bloor Cinema’s site to see the full schedule.

In the meantime, check out out an original short put together by the folks at the Bloor, You’ve Got Red On You.

Hey-ho its another Wednesday and time for a new podcast!

This week we introduce a new segment, “Out of the Bin” where we take a look at an older game that we think deserves some extra lovin’. This week, we head to the mall to get some new duds, an Orange Julius and whack some zombies with a sledge hammer – its Dead Rising.

In this episode we discuss:

• Out of the Bin – Dead Rising
• Oscar flicks – The Reader & The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Follow-up on Episode 2 of Dollhouse
• A quick peek at Castle Crashers
• And a look at the Wolverine: Old Man Logan & Dark Avengers reviews

Feel free to leave feedback in the comments section and let us know if you have any suggestions for future “Out of the Bin” segments.

Download Episode 5 – Double Whammy

I know what you’re thinking.  I thought the same thing when I first heard about this game.  It’s probably something like “why in the flying flaming flannigan hell would I want to play a game as an air traffic controller”, right?

Well, this game won’t be for everyone, but Air Traffic Chaos on the Nintendo DS  is a great little title that blends micro-management with mid-air collisions.  The result is a fun and sometimes frantic look into the job of an air traffic controller.

In the game, the top screen gives an overview of the airport while the touch screen displays arrivals and departures.  Touching on any of the flights allows you to issue different commands to that plane; these will vary depending on what the pilot wants to accomplish.  As the controller, you dictate when and where all of the planes move.  There can be up to four arrivals and four departures all at the same time, so it can get to be a bit hectic.

For each plane, there is a bar which indicates the stress level of the pilot, as well as one which shows your overall stress level.  The longer that you keep the planes waiting, the higher the stress levels get.  If you can’t keep everyone happy, you’ll lose your job.  Happily, you’re playing as Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, so if you mess up you can just play that day over again.  This comes in quite handy when you mistakenly order an arriving plane to go to a gate which is already occupied…causing a collision.

That’s one big issue I had with this game; once you issue a command, you can’t stop it from happening.  There is no option to correct it, or give a new order to counter it.  This means that you really have to be careful and think about every order you give.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can get frustrating.

The touch screen interface is perfect for this type of game.  It captures the feel of playing similar games on a PC, though with less depth than those full size counterparts.  The game uses a bright colour palette, which helps to offset how tiny some of the sprites are.  Overall, the graphics are quite functional, and any complaints about them really come down to the size of the DS screens.  The music, on the other hand, is crap.  Music on a handheld system does not have to be poor (as proven by any portable Castlevania game), so I don’t know what happened there.  Most likely,you’ll likely wind up turning the sound off; it makes crashing the planes much more enjoyable!

In addition to a tutorial, there are multiple levels of difficulty for each of the airports.  These should help beginners learn the ropes and offer challenges to more advanced players.

If you like management or tycoon-style games, then Air Traffic Chaos is definitely one that any DS owner should check out.

This book is also a Marvel title and is written by Mark Miller and penciled by Steve McNiven. I have been waiting for this one for some time now. Unlike the Dark Avengers I have been buying this run of Wolverine titled “Old Man Logan”. I’m not sure why, but there was a long wait from the last issue to this one and I was very excited to get it.

The concept of “Old Man Logan” is that it’s fifty years in the future. At one point all of the villains unite to take over America (yes, the rest of the world is shit and the villains only want America). They defeat the heroes and then divide America up into their own territories. Logan’s a poor farmer who, because of some untold reason, has not “popped his claws” in fifty years. He has a wife and two children, I might be wrong about the kids. There might be more or less, but who cares?

Now, after fifty years, Hawkeye seeks out Logans help to cross America. Logan agrees to this for a price because as I said before he’s a poor farmer now and needs the cash to pay off his land lords the evil Hulk Clan. In this issue Logan explains the reason why he hasn’t “popped his claws” in fifty years.

There, I think that more or less gets you up to speed.

So, lets get the good out of the way. Steve McNivens art is great. Its original and very pretty. Matter of fact, his art may be the only reason I waited so long for the latest issue of this series.

Now, I get to rip this issue a new one. The whole thing starts out with X-Mansion  being attacked by a rouges gallery of who’s who in the Marvel world of villains. At this point one gets the feeling that something corny is going to happen to explain his herolessness for fifty years because there’s a bunch of children running for cover and I thought “for Christ sake, is killing one kid going to explain this?”  But fear not no children where harmed in the making of this comic.

Instead, it turns out that the villains where not in fact villains but Logans team mates. Huh? you might ask well, an unexpected villain has clouded Logans mind and forced him to kill all his friends who then gloats  “Did you really think you could do this alone? Take down forty super- villains? Talk about delusions of grandeur. But your friends. People who would hesitate.That’s a different matter entirely”.

This is where my first problem with this issue comes in, why would they hesitate? yeah the first couple might not know what to do but this is the mother f’n X-men we’re talking about. Someone would have tried to stop him. At the end of the day all Iceman had to do was freeze him. It just seemed to easy.It made me think that he should have killed the children instead. At least then it would seem plausible.

Next, why did it take so long to come out? Maybe there’s a reason, but this was an art driven story. The dialog is none existent. It’s not until the last quarter of the book that we actually get panel by panel dialogue. Really, the whole thing only took about five minutes to read!

This issue  seems a little anticlimactic to me. I have been enjoying this run of Wolverine and I’m sure that I’ll get the next issue, but I was disappointed in this one.