The Big Bang Theory: Season Finale Review

Note: Full spoilers of this episode to follow.

I always love a good framing device, and tonight's episode of The Big Bang Theory featured a pretty awesome one involving Wolowitz reflecting – just moments before blasting off into space – on his wedding with Bernadette, and the events that lead to their decision to quickly elope.

Not only did this framing device set the episode apart from the rest of the season, but it killed two birds with one stone, allowing fans to see both events without stretching things to two untidy episodes. And, despite having both the space launch story and the wedding in one episode, the framing device allowed us a taste of the hell Wolowtiz will likely endure in space, while enjoying the more character-centric, and touching, aspects of this season-long arch.

Also, since wedding episodes are pretty common for season finales, the launch subplot added a flavor to the narrative that freshened things up. In fact, pretty much every aspect of the wedding felt fresh, right down to Sheldon's Klingon officiation.

In many ways, "
The Countdown Reflection" represents what many fans have longed for all season – a better balance of geeky jokes, relationship humor, character and Sheldonisms. Pretty much everyone hit their marks tonight (
Sheldon was on fire, by the way), and yes, this includes
Amy Farrah Fowler, who got at least three solid laughs out of me.

The episode also hosted a decent share of touching moments, starting with the first scene between Wolowitz and Bernadette, where he gives her a little star pendent he plans to take into space, so he can bring her home a star (awww). It was an honest moment that felt both real and cute, and was followed by a pretty solid laugh. And the final scene, between all the couples, was also honest and sweet, and a pretty great payoff to the previous episode.

As is sometimes the case with The Big Bang Theory, this season in particular, the characters are pretty clumsily written and half-cocked. But a great many of the issues did manage to get cleared up here, paving the way for a sharper, potentially funnier sixth season...hopefully.

Sheldon and Amy's relationship will finally move forward, likely in some rather hilarious and awkward ways.
Leonard and
Penny deepened their feeling for one another. Wolowtiz and Bernadette, now married, must now mutually endure Wolowtiz's overbearing mother, or purge her from their lives. And
Raj, well...he seems to have finally come to terms with being a bachelor.

Let's hope the kinks of this season won't rear its ugly head next fall, and tonight is just a twinkling of things to come. I will leave you with my favorite line of the episode that, in spite of my optimism and love for the show, seems somewhat fitting,"That's what you said about the Green Lantern movie. You were 114 minutes of wrong."


Source : http://tv.ign.com/articles/122/1224582p1.html

Tron: Uprising/Once Upon a Time Producers' Live Chat

Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz were writers on Lost for all six seasons, and since that acclaimed series ended, they've kept plenty busy. This past year, the writing duo launched Once Upon a Time on ABC, one of the season's biggest new hits. On top of that, a new animated series they are consulting producers on, Tron: Uprising, is about to debut on Disney XD – as the two continue to craft tales in the Tron universe, after writing Tron: Legacy.

This past Wednesday, May 9th, Kitsis and Horowitz took part in a special one-hour live Facebook chat, to discuss the upcoming season finale of Once Upon a Time and the premiere of Tron: Uprising. I moderated the discussion, and you can watch highlights below.

Once Upon A Time Live-Stream Highlights:



TRON: Uprising Live-stream Highlights, including the special Microsode debuted during the conversation:



Once Upon a Time presents its season finale, "A Land Without Magic," on Sunday, May 13th at 8pm ET/PT on ABC. Once Upon a Time stars Ginnifer Goodwin as Snow White/Mary Margaret, Jennifer Morrison as Emma Swan, Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold, Lana Parrilla as Evil Queen/Regina, Josh Dallas as Prince Charming/David, Eion Bailey as August, Jared Gilmore as Henry Mills and Raphael Sbarge as Jiminy Cricket/Archie Hopper.

Tron: Uprising follows the heroic journey of a new character, a young program named Beck, who becomes the unlikely leader of a revolution inside the computer world of The Grid. The series, produced in CG animation with a 2D aesthetic, is set in the era of Tron between the stories in the 1982 feature film and Walt Disney Studios' Tron: Legacy. Disney Channel will present TRON: Uprising - "Beck's Beginning," a 30-minute uninterrupted prelude to the series on Friday, May 18th (9:30-10:00 p.m., ET/PT). The special will encore uninterrupted on Disney XD on Monday, May 21st (7:00-7:30 p.m., ET/PT), followed by the series launch on Thursday, June 7th (9:00-9:30 p.m., ET/PT) on Disney XD.

Tron: Uprising stars Elijah Wood as Beck, Bruce Boxleitner as Tron, Mandy Moore as Mara, Emmanuelle Chriqui as Paige, Nate Corddry as Zed, Lance Henriksen as General Tesler, Reginald VelJohnson as Able, Paul Reubens as Pavel and Tricia Helfer as the voice of The Grid.


Source : http://tv.ign.com/articles/122/1224490p1.html

Botanicula Review

Playing Botanicula reminds me of being a child and seeing epic fireworks displays. Despite knowing explosions were coming, and repeatedly thinking I'd seen the coolest setup yet, I still found myself regularly awed. Likewise Botanicula, despite inundating me with cute characters, adorable visuals and delightful music all within the first few moments, never ceased to charm and surprise me right up until the end of the credits. It's an audio and visual journey unlike anything else out there right now – something everyone should play, if for no other reason than to remember what it's like to experience wonderment in a video game again.


Watch a Botanicula Commentary


Botanicula comes by way of
Amanita Design, the team responsible for the indie hit Machinarium. Like its predecessor, it's a point-and-click adventure game. You play as a team of five plants and insectoid characters, taking them through a perilous journey to save their tree from life-sucking parasites. That's all you need to know going in, the rest is best left unknown.

The simple premise betrays the depth of Botanicula. Yes, a large part of the game comes down to clicking around the environment in an effort to find interactive points, and, yes, these tedious parts temporarily detract from the joy of exploring the bizarre environments, but Botanicula has many more smartly designed parts. At no point are you given a tutorial, it's simply up to you to experiment to find out what you're missing. Every action in Botanicula comes down to clicks and cursor movements, but Amanita figures out clever ways to keep you guessing. Sometimes you might have to use your cursor to push objects around the environment, while other times it might be as deceptively simple as clicking and dragging on some part of the world. You never know going in, and Botanicula inspires creativity while daring you to try whatever it is you're thinking, often rewarding you when you do.

Let's be clear: Botanicula maintains a pretty slow pace from start to finish. Puzzles range in challenge, sometimes coming across a bit too obtuse. Other times the solution is so easy it's hardly a puzzle, but instead an excuse for you to click everything until some bizarre action eventually takes place. A great majority of the environmental puzzles you encounter sit right in a happy medium, though, making you feel intelligent for parsing them out.

The aforementioned occasional tedium that comes from pixel hunting in an environment, or the sometimes overly simplistic puzzles, are some of Botanicula's few issues. The only other substantial complaint I had during the six or so hour story was that the video options are incredibly limited. Botanicula's art looks good even at low resolutions, but there's no real way to get it to operate at full screen if you have a larger monitor. Playing with black borders is tolerable, but it'd be nice to see this updated if possible.

The use of colors create quite the spectacle.

It's surprising to say, but, despite being a point-and-click puzzle adventure, these features take a back seat to Botanicula's audio / visual experience. Solving a puzzle gives a little ego boost, and often comes alongside an unpredictable and impressive sensory barrage. One second you could be mindlessly clicking a sphere only to have it burst open, turn into a series of planets, and then have music fill your ears that sells the beauty of the moment. Or perhaps your little troupe of would-be heroes wanders into a den of a great genie, leaving you to experience a taste of each of their greatest fantasies. Just what do the fantasies of anthropomorphic seed, fungus and insect people look like? You have to see it for yourself, because instances like that are what make Botanicula so special.


Source : http://pc.ign.com/articles/122/1223867p1.html

Prototype 2 Tops April Sales; Overall Gaming Sales Down 32 Percent Ads By Google » Blog Tags Today's Most Popular Videos »

Prototype 2 was the top-selling game in April. The supernaturally tinged dystopian action game beat out Kinect Star Wars and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, numbers two and three on the charts, respectively. This is great news if you're a fan of publisher Activision or developer Remedy, but April was not a good month for gaming software as a whole. According to the figures released by industry analysts at the NPD Group, sales were down 32 percent versus last year.

“I think what the new physical retail content sales reflect a very light release schedule in terms of the amount of compelling new games," said the NPD's Anita Frazier in a statement. "Last April, the top seven titles outsold the top-selling title this year, and, simply stated, there were notably fewer new market introductions. I think it’s a simple as that because when we see compelling content come into the market, the games are still selling as well as ever – we just saw a lot less this April as compared to last.”

If you'd like the full top ten list of the best-selling games in April, click the "Read More" tag.

All of the best people are following Stephen Johnson's twitter feed. Also, email me if you wanna.


Source : http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/723687/prototype-2-tops-april-sales-overall-gaming-sales-down-32-percent/

The Future Starts Today - USC Demo Day Ads By Google » Blog Tags Today's Most Popular Videos »

The future of gaming graduated this year from USC, the number one game-design school as ranked by USA Today, and I was there this year to take part of their Demo Day activities.

Among the student and their projects, you couldn’t help but run into some of the big names in gaming like EA, Sony, and 2K Games. All of them were looking for their next superstar. With games like flOw and The Misadventure of P.B. Winterbottom coming out of this program, it’s little wonder why everyone is looking to grab the talent coming out of this school.

While you might not have made it for the finger food and cups of coffee, here are some of the big games you need to know about from the USC Demo Day event.

Blink

Not all student games need to look as though those who have never dipped their feet into the professional waters made them. Take Blink for example. From the very first cut scene, you feel as though you’re playing a triple-A title.

As a spy caught by the evil corporation, they try to make you into the perfect warrior by giving you the power to warp over short distances or blink. Even tied down and surrounded by an army of bots, you find a way to escape. (When will evil corporations ever learn?) Now with a new ability and only a knife by your side, you navigate the twisted hallways and training areas as you try to escape.

The blink ability lets you cover distances quickly and attack your opponents before you know what hits them. The bots roaming around change from a pleasant green to a raging red glow when they see you. Blink to them when they’re green and you get in a one-hit kill. Find your next victim and you can warp from place to place, leaving behind a heap of scrap metal in your wake.

Quick, kinetic, and beautiful; Blink proves that the line between student and professional sometimes blurs if not disappears all together. After the students presented their project, the auditorium erupted in applause. Clearly they impressed their peers with this one.



Combiform

Move the purple. Don’t touch the blue.

With every move, the lights in the boxes strapped to our hands changed colors. Magnets on the side snapped the boxes back into a two-by-two grid with every move. Even though the screen kept the score, our eyes were glued to the blocks in our hands as we danced around each other keeping the blues together and moving only the purple. We ended the session with the highest score of the day. But that was only the beginning.

Combiform is more of a platform than a video game though you’ll be using video elements to play many of the games. Each of the four units comes in a self-contained box with lights, a nob, a button, and one sturdy handle underneath for you to hang onto as you pull apart and reassemble each of the units.

From these four units, you can play dozens of games from an electronic form of hot potato to a fighting came where you need to shake and pose in order to fight. Even in such a crowded room, every game of Combiform drew a crowd of spectators watching and laughing at a distance. Part performance and part game, everyone needs to get their hands on these cubes.



Nevermind

Take a trip to the dark side of the looking glass. Nevermind takes you into the minds of patients wrestling with their own demons and disturbing past. Your job is to piece together past memories through pictures collected through the level. Five of the photos will show you the truth while the other five will be lies. By using the clues found in each of the levels, you can figure out what really happened.

As an added twist, a heart monitor keeps track of every scare and disturbing image you come across. As your heart begins to race, the world around you distorts and twits. Sound slows down and the image becomes nearly incomprehensible. You’ll need to catch your breath and calm down if you want to make it through meat lockers of hanging bodies or the twisted rubble of bloody cars. Here is where the game reveals it’s dirty secret – it wants to help you.

By monitoring your stress level, these junior developers hope to teach people how to regulate their stress. Think of it as gaming as therapy. While you see and experience a horror game, you experience low levels of stress that you can manage through calming techniques. With no zombies to shoot or platforms to jump, the students behind this title are looking to get it into the hands of many non-gamers in order to help them in life.



Tales From The Minus Lab

Some people have that crazy uncle that they never talk about. This one has their very own mad scientist. When your bother goes missing after trying to clean up around the lab, you go in after him only to get caught in the same shrink ray as before. Hot on his trail, you’ll need to use your new diminutive size to explore the lab, solve puzzles, and hopefully, get back to something close to normal.

What’s most astounding about this game is that it all takes place in one room. No loading screens. No weird elevator sequence. You move from one section to the next without a pause in the game.

Puzzles take advantage of your changing. Growing in size lets you get to new heights and weigh down object while being small lets you find new areas and ride on a solid updraft. As you gain the power to grow larger and smaller, more puzzles open up for you to explore. Soon, you’ll be larger enough to move sections on the outside only to shrink and manipulate the puzzles from the inside.

Quirky and ingenious, Tales From the Minus Lab displays the kind of fun and ambition you rarely see in even professionally made games.


Source : http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/723685/the-future-starts-today-usc-demo-day/