Action Figures, Video Games, Comics, Toys, Superheroes, Wrestling — We've Got Game.
Author: Destiny Edwards
As for a bio: Destiny Edwards is feminist-y awkward blerd and musician with strong opinions about wrestling, comics and Star Trek. Catch her on a bad day and you might earn yourself a SUPERKIIIIICKKKKK!!! Give her a tweet @mochaloca85
Sometimes a piece of media comes along that you can tell that everybody involved just had a blast making it. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is one of those films, and it shows in every single frame. The audience for this movie will definitely have as much fun watching as the cast and crew seem to have had making it, and its infectiousness makes it one of the better movie-going experiences of the past few weeks.
The movie opens with two members of our party in what’s basically a parole hearing. Bard Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine at his absolute Chris Piniest) provides backstory for him and barbarian Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez, who I’m 1000% sure rubbed being in this movie in Vin Diesel’s face on the set of Fast X) like he’s a player introducing his new character to his friends at game night.
And that’s likely by design. Writer-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley clearly wanted this to feel like you were watching someone’s D&D campaign. Both have gone on record as being D&D players (though they didn’t base the movie off any of their campaigns), and had a rules specialist on set to make sure most story elements followed established guideline – one plotline, for example, involves Simon (Justice Smith), a sorcerer, struggling to attune with a magical helm before he can use it. The other characters refer to Simon as being a bad sorcerer, and when we meet him at the start, he has low self-esteem and lacks charisma (aka the ability sorcerers use to cast spells).
Not only do Goldstein and Daley spend a lot of time on making the setting mostly game accurate, they also inserted Easter eggs to previous adaptations of the game. Edgin finds himself in a predicament similar to Snails (Marlon Wayans) from the 2000 movie. And we straight up see the party from the Marvel-Toei animated series in the High Sun Games. Antagonizing our party is Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), a rogue who turned on the party on the mission that landed Edgin and Holga in prison. Grant is a delightfully over-the-top villain and my personal favorite character. His line delivery for some of the most ridiculous things is one of the best parts of the movie. Imagine telling someone with a straight face that stealing their kid has made you a better person. That is a thing that he does…and it’s fantastic.
Get your gaming group and go see it immediately.
4.25/5 Tankards.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is currently playing in theaters everywhere.
As the MCU continues dealing with the fallout of a broken multiverse thanks to Loki and Peter Parker, Sony’s Spider-lessverse continues to limp along. Following October’s hilarious Venom: Let There Be Carnage comes the yawn-fest known as Morbius…
For those unfamiliar, Jared Leto (Suicide Squad, House of Gucci) plays Michael Morbius, a doctor with a rare blood disorder who turns himself into a vampire while trying to cure himself and his best friend/surrogate brother Milo (Matt Smith, Doctor Who). People die and some cops (Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal) try to track down Morbius, who is running around the city in a hoodie looking like a Great Value CM Punk.
Fights ensue and we wind up with some mid- and post-credit scenes (that don’t actually make any sense if you think about them for any length of time) trying to shoehorn themselves into the MCU’s multiversal shenanigans and set up what’s probably going to be the Sinister Six.
I really wanted to like this film. I like Leto in general – Requiem for a Dream is one of my favorite films and I’m a 30 Seconds to Mars fan – but his performance here falls mostly flat. There’s a scene towards the beginning where he’s cracking jokes with a young patient named Anna, but it’s just slow and dry. We’re supposed to believe that Morbius and Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona, Good Omens) are in love, but there’s zero chemistry between the two. Not for Arjona’s lack of trying, though – she does the heavy lifting in most of their scenes together and was probably the standout performance in the movie.
Whereas Leto was mostly dull, Smith was basically Eleven as a vampire. Once Milo took the cure and was able to walk without a cane, everything sped up, including his speech. Frankly, I was half-expecting him to say something like “Bloodsuckers are cool” just to drive home how Doctor-like his performance was. And it didn’t really fit the dark tone of the film.
There’s a scene where Morbius scares a criminal and says he’s Venom as joke. All I could think was how much I’d rather be watching Venom. I know Morbius isn’t technically a real vampire, but I’d raise my rating by a half-point if Blade had been in one the credits scenes – it’d only make slightly less sense than what they actually were. 1.5/ Whiskeys.
After a decade of development hell, FX and Hulu finally present Y: The Last Man, based on the comic of the same name by Brian K. Vaughan (Saga) and Pia Guerra, both of whom serve as executive producers on the show.
YTLM’s setting is in a post-apocalyptic world in which all the mammals on earth with the Y-chromosome spontaneously died. Except one: Yorick Brown, played by Ben Schnetzer (Warcraft) and his capuchin monkey, Ampersand. And while that population is mostly cisgender men (hence “The Last Man”), the comic briefly mentioned trans men were not affected.
https://youtu.be/0EEQ5Lj-cXM
Showrunner Eliza Clark (Rubicon) makes this even more explicit by introducing Sam Jordan (Elliot Fletcher, Shameless), a trans masculine character who doesn’t have a counterpart in the comic. She has also stated in interviews that many non-binary and intersex people died in the event alongside trans women and cis men, and that what specifically sets Yorick apart is his Y-chromosome. To further clarify this, Yorick’s mother (Diane Lane), a US Congresswoman who became the President because it’s believed that everyone ahead of her in the line of succession has died, says before his discovery “We’ve found plenty of men; just none with a Y-chromosome.”
While the show centers around Yorick, a professional slacker who proposes to his girlfriend despite not being able to afford cheese, we are shown how other people are navigating the world, post-event. Agent 355 (Ashley Romans, Hermione Granger and the Quarter-Life Crisis) is a spy who becomes Yorick’s bodyguard and her life is made harder by Yorick constantly doing stupid things like running off into police-only area because he thinks he saw his girlfriend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdyxBewlS8w
Yorick’s EMT sister, Hero (Olivia Thirlby, Dredd), and her friend Sam are attempting to reach Yorick and Hero’s mother in DC. Kimberly (Amber Tamblyn, Joan of Arcadia) is the conservative daughter of the deceased president and is trying to stage a coup. There’s a lot of moving parts that intertwine, which makes it a very good thing that it ended up as a show rather than the film it was originally going to wind up as.
The show sheds a light on a lot of issues plaguing the actual world. The reason everything goes to crap in such a short time is that things like supply chains are male-dominated industries and without there being many women in the field, the world goes to a complete standstill. It can be a rough watch at times, but hey, so is real life. Not to mention Yorick is pretty much the absolute worst person to be the last man standing – he has no skills, can’t be bothered to follow directions and has the attention span of a fruit fly. I’m sure he’ll grow as the series goes on, but damn does he suck.
“You DON’T tug on Superman’s cape!”
Also truthfully, aside from being a trained medical professional, Hero is only marginally more sympathetic than her brother. She’s incredibly selfish and I kinda wanted to punch both Brown siblings in the nose while watching. Which says that Schnetzer and Thirlby are both incredibly good at their jobs. The entire cast is. 3.5/5 Y: The Last Whiskeys.
If you get Super Mario 3D World for the Switch, it comes packed in with a little gem called Bowser’s Fury. We at GHG are reviewing this gem as a standalone since I’m waiting on a group of friends to enjoy 3D World to the fullest. It’s cool to have this little addition to somewhat justify a $60 price point for a re-released game and to have a single player experience included…
Bowser’s Fury mixes up the Mario 3D formula by making it open world. Perhaps this was a test to see how a mainline open world 3D Mario game would be received. I think it worked well, although it’s not necessary. Simply a cool way to keep the formula fresh.
Despite being open world it’s still very contained as there’s only 100 cat shines which are like the stars, moons, or suns in other 3D Mario games. You can approach cat shines at any order but you do need to earn a certain amount to unlock other areas in the open world. Once you unlock every piece of the map, you can travel in between each area at any order you wish. When you get a handful of cat shines in a specific area you unlock a lighthouse warp point for fast travel. This open world freedom feels convenient since you can move on from an area if you’re stuck and just keep the flow going. Then when you go back to clean up it’s pretty seamless because the map provides markers for cat shines and a check mark for the ones you completed. When you enter an area, the HUD will show you how many cat shines are in that specific area. Navigating the open world and collecting all 100 cat shines is a fun treat.
Ding, dong, the bitch is dead.
Well, it’s only a treat until Bowser rises into Fury, which is kind of like when the blood moon rises in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You can see a spikey ball of black goop slowly rising above the water, ready to erupt an angry, bad ass looking, Fury Bowser who looks like he was taken over by the symbiote. In these moments you need to hide behind cover or try to go for the cat shines while he shoots out lasers, drops fire balls, and jumps to wherever he can get a good angle and destroy you. The more cat shines you collect, the more powerful Fury Bowser becomes and the longer he sticks around to make your cat shine hunt more difficult.
As annoying as it can get, you’ll sometimes need him to blast special Fury Bowser blocks to get certain cat shines. As Fury Bowser slowly rises, the music subtly changes to feel more ominous and when he’s finally summoned and in full Fury, cool head-banging music will play. As expected in Mario games, the music score always fits the environment, and Fury Bowser added a cool mix to the score.
Ironically enough, you team up with Bowser Jr. to help his dad become free from the black goop that’s making him even more evil than before. Bowser Jr. fights with a paint brush and can help you clear enemies. Another player can control Bowser Jr. if you want a co-op experience but if you’re playing solo, you can pick how much you want Junior to help. Bowser Jr. is effective in helping Mario with crowd control and booping enemies that are too high for Mario to reach. He will likely clear enemies in your vicinity without prompt, but you can also direct him to where you need. He’s even helpful in revealing secrets like invisible blocks!
Sticking to gameplay, Mario is given an arsenal of six transformations: · Super Bell – Cat Mario to claw, pounce, and climb walls. · Super Mushroom – Super Mario to increase size and survive a hit. · Super Leaf – Tanooki Mario to tail attack, tail spin, and float. · Boomerang Flower – Boomerang Mario to throw boomerangs LOL. · Fire Flower – Fire Mario to throw fireballs. · Lucky Bell – Same as Super Bell plus invincibility during ground pound.
Where’s Nelly when ya need ’em?
Mario can hold up to five of each ability at a time and they are found around the world, within walls that Bowser Jr. can paint, or every time you collect 100 coins. Although I found use with all of them at a certain point, Super Bell was the most useful throughout my 100 cat shine journey. This makes sense considering everything in this open world is a cat. EVERYTHING!
The bushes have cat ears, trees have cat ears, even goomba’s and bullet bills have cat ears! The damn kitty bullet bills are so cute! As a cat lover, this game is a dream come true. Everything is adorable! Instead of finding baby penguins for a momma penguin, you’ll find kittens for a momma cat (and yes you can throw them off a cliff). Everything around the black goop is so colorful and each area in the open world will have different biomes (e.g. lava, grass, ice), which is pretty standard for Mario games. Aside from running around and fast travel, you can also jump on your plessie, which is a fun and quick way to travel around the water. There are things to do at almost every corner of the map and exploring is really fun. Meow!
Where things get super fun is when you have enough cat shines to activate a giga bell, which turns you into a giant Super Saiyan Kitty Mario! This is when you can finally fight Fury Bowser and chip away at his health bar, which you won’t be able to fully achieve until you get 50 cat shine’s. You can scratch away at Fury Bowser or throw pillars at him, leaving an opening for a ground pound on his belly. During these fights most of the map is dark and filled with the black goop. Fury Bowsers very last form is the strongest and as a last boss fight, I had a lot of fun with the combat shift. My only complaint is I really wanted to see Bowser with cat ears, but he was ultimately the only enemy who wasn’t blessed with such cuteness.
I don’t necessarily think 3D Mario games need to be open world, but this is surely a nice way to mix up the 3D Mario formula. Keeping the map contained with only 100 cat shines really helped the experience feel enjoyable and not over stay it’s welcome. Nintendo making everything into a cat definitely added to the enjoyment. Bowser’s Fury somehow made it to my top 5 favorite 3D Mario games along with Mario 64, and both Mario Galaxy games. I liked it more than Mario Sunshine and Mario Odyssey. 4/5 Bowser Bibles.
“Haha! It’s the end of #AEW! That damn Outlaw Mud Wrasslin’ is dead! DEAD, I tell ya! All Elite, my a$$!”
Um. OK, Twitter troll. So, the sparks didn’t always fly at AEW Revolution, but beyond a terrible end to an otherwise great main event and an underwhelming ex-WWE signee, there was a lot of good to be had on Sunday night…
Yours truly Travis Moody and Destiny Edwards also break down the first 3 nights of the NJPW New Japan Cup!
It’s another awesome wrestling review show from the Apostles, so don’t miss it. Subscribe here.
In a trash year that has canceled so much wrestling, AEW has been a bright spot. Dark gives exposure to talented indie wrestlers who would’ve lost work in the pandemic and Dynamite consistently puts on great matches. Last night’s Full Gear was one of the most enjoyable pay-per-views I’ve watched in a while.
So here’s the match-for-match breakdown.
NWA Women’s Championship: Serena Deeb (c) vs Allysin Kay – The Buy-In started with Deeb’s title defense against recent free agent (and another former champ) Kay. It was a solid match between two veterans who could really help elevate AEW’s women’s division – a roster full of talented women who are floundering because the division is basically an afterthought. After Deeb retained the belt, Thunder Rosa came out to issue a challenge for what she still considers her title. Their matches so far have been really good, so I’m looking forward, eventually, for Round III. – 3/5
Eliminator Tournament Final: Kenny Omega vs “Hangman” Adam Page – One of the longest-running angles in AEW has been Kenny and Hangman — from a reluctant tag team to the inevitable break-up, the changes between the two (Kenny’s return to being the Cleaner and Hangman leaving the Elite). This match was a hard-hitting war and a phenomenal opener for the main show. While Focused Yeehaw Man — thanks, AEW lower third — winning the title shot would’ve been a good redemption story (the commentators frequently mentioned that Hangman’s loss to Jericho in the promotions first championship match), no one in their right mind would’ve had him winning this match.
We all know Kenny’s the protagonist of this story and his nickname of “Best Bout Machine” says it all; I thought this was going to be my match of the night (I didn’t realize what was coming later) and is a legit MOTY contender. – 4.5/5
Orange Cassidy vs John Silver – If your squad don’t ride for you like the Dark Order rides for their members, do you really have a squad? John Silver has been the breakout star of Being the Elite over the last few months and this match against Orange Cassidy was just what we needed after the power and emotion of the first match. It had just the right amount of comedy (Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets! How dare he?!) to balance out the high-energy of the rest of the match. – 3.25/5
TNT Championship: Cody Rhodes (c) vs Darby Allin – That’s right; Cody has a last name again! If you want to know where AEW’s storytelling is, watch this match. I heard someone say that it was great David and Goliath story, which is accurate. The promos talked about how Cody has put on muscle to become a true heavyweight and how Cody has crushed Darby every time they’ve wrestled (which Excalibur disputes, pointing out that Cody has beat Darby “by the skin of his teeth”) and how Allin should never be the face of TNT. Even their entrances tell the story, with Darby and his skateboard riding atop a car that would be more at home in a junkyard than Daily’s Place vs Cody and his entourage with their slick matching tracksuits.
This was my match of the night. The emotion, the story…The wrestling, admittedly, was not as good as Omega vs Page, but it didn’t need to be. The story carried this, which was driven home by the final image of your new champ (post-beatdown by Team Taz) lying motionless on his car on top of the words “The Face of TNT.” – 4.75/5
AEW Women’s Championship: Hikaru Shida (c) vs Nyla Rose – The challenger came out in some gorgeous Mega(n) (Wo)Man gear – Nyla’s wife Kel is one of my favorite gear-makers right now and she knocked it out of the park. Not important even slightly to the match, but it needed to be said.
Nyla has been on a rampage ever since she lost the title to Shida and both of these women came to fight with stiff strikes. That said, I liked but didn’t love this one. It went on a touch too long and I’ve seen both have better matches. – 3/5
AEW Tag Championship: FTR (c) vs The Young Bucks – The Bucks declared that if they lost, they’d never challenge for the titles again. Seeing as Cody is already living that stipulation in regards to the world belt, we pretty much knew this was gonna be our second title change of the night.
Like FTR, I’ve been disappointed in the build to this match. The two teams have been teasing this match for years, and if the build had been better, it would’ve been co-main event with the world championship match. That said, it lived up to my very high expectations. Everything about this match said it was important, starting with the Lakers vs Celtics gear. And the best part was all the references to great tag teams of the past, everything from the Dudleys to #DIY. It brought a tear to my eye.
As a fan of tag team wrestling, this was everything that I wanted, down to FTR losing because Cash Wheeler – Mr. “No Flips, Just Fists” himself – decided to do a flip. If we didn’t have Cody and Darby earlier or if this dream match just had gotten the build it deserved, it would’ve been my MOTN. – 4.75/5
Elite Deletion: Matt Hardy vs Sammy Guevara – I like cinematic matches, but they’ve run their course. I liked most of the weird stuff Matt does at the Hardy Compound, but this one went on way too long and I got super bored, super quick. – 2.5/5
MJF vs Chris Jericho – The big stipulation for this match is that if MJF wins, he joins the Inner Circle. I didn’t realize how much I missed fans singing Judas until Full Gear, and the look on Jericho’s face showed he missed it, too. Also, MJF has a light-up robe now. Heel vs heel matches are always weird for me as fan – who do you want me to cheer for, dammit?! – but the crowd had no problems knowing who they were backing because Maxwell got the loudest boos of the night.
It was a good match, a little long, but a reminder of how good MJF is at such a young age. The Demo God has seemed impressed with him over the course of this angle and I’m not surprised that MJF came out on top – he did say he’d do anything to win. The entire “feud” has been goofy fun and I’m excited to see MJF be goofy in the Inner Circle. – 2.75/5
I Quit – AEW World Championship: Jon Moxley (c) vs Eddie Kingston – There’s not a lot I can really say about this. It was brutal and exactly what we expected. Eddie Kingston is a fucking star. But you knew that already. Last night wasn’t his night, but eventually, he’s going to have AEW gold. – 4/5
