In my mailbox this week:
Hot Tub Time Machine

Release Year: 2010
Staring: John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry,

Imagine if you will, the most horrible week ever. Your wife leaves you. Your friend tries to kill himself. Your live-in nephew, ridicules your non-understanding of the geek life style.

What else can you do, but take a vacation. Back to where the best times of your life were, Kodiak Valley sky resort. But the town, the ultimate memory of your youth… is in squallier. Nothing is as it was. Boarded up buildings, horrible conditions… the depression sets in.

Hopefully, some drunken antics in the hot tub can help rejuvenate the situation. But what if, just what if, that hot tub malfunctions? Turns itself into a temporal vortex and transports you back to when you were kings! 1987. But things definitely aren’t the way you remember.

….. Great White Buffalo. great white buffalo…….

Hot off the heels of a very strong Summer of Arcade, Microsoft is ready to bring another seasonal promotion into the mix: Game Feast. Starting September 29th, the Xbox 360 will see a weekly release of another highly anticipated game, ending the promotion with the “delayed for far too long” release of Super Meat Boy. The game release schedule is as follows:

- September 29th: Hydrophobia, a survival horror title touting some very impressive water effects.
- October 6th: Comic Jumper, the newest title from Splosion Man developer Twisted Pixel.
- October 13th: Pinball FX 2, the sequel to Zen Studio’s massive pinball simulator
- October 20th: Super Meat Boy, a masochistic 2D platformer with heart.

Like the previous promotion, every title can be purchased for 1200 Microsoft Points. There is no current word on if this promotion will include a rebate system.

Boom! Publishing has just given us word about the second of three new ongoing Series that have been dreamed up by Stan Lee. Soldier Zero is looking pretty damn cool, and we can’t wait to get more information on The Traveler, so keep your eyes open cause once we do, it’s going to be here on WPR. So, who are the others behind this comic? Be prepared to get excited folks, cause we definitely are!

In the first issue Lord Baltimore rolls into town and begins cleaning up the place almost like Clint Eastwood in a “Man with no Name” movie. We know very little about him and why he hunts vampires. Issue two picks up right where issue one leaves off, he is released from prison and is aboard a boat following his vampire foe. Once he is aboard he finally has some down time from the action that began in the first issue. With that down time we are given back some back story! I love a good back story, in this case we find out why and how he became a vampire hunter, and why he is following this particular vampire.

I’ll keep this short, as I can’t currently take a look at it, but wanted to let you guys, our awesome fans know about this once I saw it. Dark Horse release via twitter that you can get a Free iTunes/iPad download of the ‘Fallout: New Vegas – All Roads’ comic written by Chris Avellone. DO SO HERE So someone download this and let a dumb ass with no itunes account or internet connection at home or iAnything products to use to view this know how this comic looks! Heck review it on the site. Its Free! So download it and have fun. For those of you that download it, let us know what you think.

Ever see a movie and even though it wrapped up it’s main plot points, you know that that world is still going on and things are happening. You’ll just never know what happened to the characters after the movie ended. The Terminator movies have been like that, there are typically huge leaps between each one, you get John Conner, a Terminator out to kill him, and lots of guns, explosions, etc. At the end of the movie, you know that there is a whole bunch of the story that you’re just never going to know about. So when Titan Publishing asked me if I wanted to review a book based around characters from the last Terminator Salivation movie, and written by Timothy Zahn I didn’t hesitate to answer with a huge yes.

Mind you, I am not a fast reader. Also, yes, I haven’t seen Terminator Salvation. I know, I’m a horrible geek, I’ll make amends soon. I’m a more methodical reader, I re-read a chapter if I didn’t understand it to where I want. I plowed through this little more than 300 page book in about two solid night readings, or about 5 hours. Now, that doesn’t mean that the font is big and the spacing in the book is very generous, it’s not. The book has a great flow that is easy to get caught up in, it’s just as easy as that.

There are really two point of views in this book. One point of view is of Kyle Reese as he is stuck literally between a rock and a hard place. With the terminators up to something before his eyes, he has to act quickly and decidedly with his other comrades to save the Resistance. The second is with resistance fighters Barnes and Blair who at the wrecked out VLA lab find a large cable heading to a unknown mountain town. The two seemed to have had a falling out, and when Barnes asks for the mission to the lab to bury some dead, Conner uses it as an opportunity for the two to make amends.

That is all of the spoilers I’ll give you, which is pretty much what you could get off the back of the book but more elaborated. There is a third point of view, but I think it is better left unsaid, not because I didn’t like the character, but because when the pieces started to drop and fall into place, I couldn’t help but grin. Zahn does a great job of making the characters believable. Nobody is some stand out cliché; they are human, which given the context of the universe around it, pretty brilliant. I was more interested in the Barnes and Blair point of view to be honest. Not that Kyle Reese was boring, but with the exception of the end didn’t seem to have much action.

The secondary characters worked well, though I could see the holes in the story on one of them that had my head screaming “THAT ONE IS WORKING FOR SKYNET”. I liked the relationship between Hope and Susan, they played their small part well, and help give a sense that wrongs can be reversed. None of the other side characters really stood out for me, which is good, I don’t like a story with overflowing people that distract from the main points and people.

Overall, this book stands out for two really good reasons. If you saw the movie, this gives you a nice little taste of the world you got to experience. If you didn’t see the movie but know the franchise, the book still stands on its own because you know John Conner and that is enough for Kyle Reese, Blair, and Barnes to work off of. Since a majority of you out there are probably faster readers, this book is a good one to fill a void as you’re waiting between books.

I’ll run by a little something that I recently had happen to me. I’m driving myself in the car, the music isn’t very loud, no sense in blowing out the kids eardrums in the back seat. I’m humming the songs on the CD, which was a Kids CD with various upbeat songs and some nursery rhymes. I sing one out loud, because my son thinks it is funny, and at the high point in the song, I reach back behind me to tickle him and get nothing but air. I glance in the review mirror and remember that the kids aren’t in the car with me. That, and I’ve spent the last 10 minutes rocking out to kids songs all by myself. With a deflated sigh, I switch to a local radio station and listened to some music that was more of my tastes.

This episode we explore social aspect of assassins, extreme marriage counseling and our world if it were a video game.

In a move that can only be described as “shitting where you eat”, James Cameron has dissed the very existence of Piranha 3D, saying it cheapens the medium and brings it back to it’s bad horror movie days of the 70s and 80s. He then proceeds to stroke his own ego, stating that the current 3D push is a renaissance quoting that both Disney and Martin Scorsese are making films using the medium. What this writer would like to point out is that the franchise that even got James Cameron noticed in the film industry was in fact the Piranha franchise, as he directed Piranha II: The Spawning after the original director left.

Like all new technologies (and I’m calling 3D new very loosely), it’s to be expected that the little guys without the huge budgets will want to ride the fad train as well (and see a chunk of those inflated ticket sales as well). If I’m paying more to see a film than I normally would, I personally would rather get the goofy gimmick effects than watch a bunch of blue cat creatures leaping through the forest for nearly 3 hours. In fact, bring back the whole William Castle style of gimmick film making: hide a buzzer under the seats, drop a skeleton on the audience, anything to get the audience involved in the film.

Cynicism aside, the new controller from Microsoft will address the biggest issue most people had with the original controller: the directional pad. The “disc” that surrounds the familiar “plus” sign of the directional pad can now be adjusted back so that it is less obtrusive. The controller will be available to the general public on November 9th exclusively in a Play & Charge Kit at the “why does this cost more than a game?” price of $64.99.

Will this stop people bitching that their controller caused them to lose the round? I doubt it.

Since I’ve been going through sort of a writer’s block period. I couldn’t really come up with some such to write about. I decided that I’m going to try to talk about what I’ve been doing this week. Since the site is Watch Play Read. Thats exactly what I’ve been doing. Fancy that.

My husband and I have been married for almost six years and he is the most wonderful partner and father. But over the years I realized there was something I did not know about him…he is a Geek.  I, myself have never dabbled in the geek arts.  I do not play video games.  I do not read comic books.  The only computer game I have ever played and enjoyed was Oregon Trail and that was when I was in elementary school.  So I was not prepared for what being a geek entails. 

Got money burning a hole in your pocket? Microsoft has just the solution for you! Starting November 1st, Xbox Live Gold subscriptions will experience a price hike of up to ten dollars. The price increases are as follows:
- 12 month: $59.99USD(from $49.99)/599 pesos(from 499 pesos)
- 3 month: $24.99USD(from $19.99)
- 1 month: $9.99USD(from $7.99)/9.99CAD(from 8.99)/5.99GBP(from 4.99)

Will these price increases affect your renewal plans?

If you have been on the fence in picking up a new DSi, now is your chance! Starting September 12th, both the DSi and the DSi XL will drop in price by $20 to $149.99 and $169.99, respectively. The DS Lite, unfortunately, is not part of this price drop and will remain at $129.99.

Sounds like Nintendo is already prepping for the 3DS release, which as of this article’s publishing still has no launch date.

Enough acronyms for you? If you don’t understand the two, then you might not know your graphics cards very well. AMD, which bought ATI 4 years ago for 5.4billion had decided that ATI as a brand name isn’t up to snuff anymore. According to my source, the AMD brand name has enough weight that there is no point in using the ATI name anymore, since the graphics cards that ATI produces (Radeon and Firepro) have enough recognition to stand on their own feet. Kids, there is your corporate branding lesson for the day.

So, good bye ATI, you’re not going anywhere, and will still be making your products but under a different name. Hey, at least you gave me something to write about!