The Nerd Next Door

 SPOILERS ABOUND: Avengers Endgame is the biggest film event of the decade and the perfect way to close out the 2010s by ending the biggest phenomenon of the 2010's, the Avengers. After the slam dunk that was Infinity War it has been a long year to wait, was it worth it? Well yes and no; Endgame has a lot of good, the opening is fantastic, with us being shown the immediate effects of the Snap from Infinity War on someone like Hawkeye, how he turns one moment and the next everything he loved is gone. Then there's a great fake out as everyone learns their lesson the first time and just dog piles Farmer Thanos as soon as they can. Only for it to be revealed that he destroyed the Infinity Stones meaning "ha-ha I win." Until Thor kills him that is, in a nice follow up from the end of Infinity War. Cue five year time jump and I like what they did with the world, yes it's miserable and mourning but it's not all doom and gloom; there's even bits of happine...

Dragon Ball is a franchise I've had a love hate relationship with, for every one thing they do right, they do another thing wrong. I personally fell out with the series during Super, which I found a worse show than Z. My problem is they bought Goku back after Z's Cell Arc instead of just letting his kid Gohan be the main protagionist. Also Super never felt like anything mattered even when a villain commits total genocide on humanity because "oh look at this alternate timeline we found where that didn't happen." For every moment they expand the shows mythos there's another moment where I'm reminded that nothing really matters in terms of character and universe. But of all things I hated in Dragon Ball Broly was the worst, just a muscle bound brute who existed for Goku to punch, nothing more. He had no words except Kakarot (Goku's other name), hated Goku, and liked blowing up planets, that's it. At least Frieza was so regal that his sadism threw...

Both Sony and Microsoft announced game consoles today, one was vague and was more of "hey this is coming" sort of thing and the other was "yep, this is a thing, buy it now." Both are interesting and I feel like this is a great time to talk about both it and the future of the games industry as a whole. Sony today dropped the "this is coming" news with the announcement of the Playstation 5, a brand new games console from Sony that runs AMD's Zen 2 architecture and NAVI GPU and promises backwards compatibility with PS4 games, raytracing, use of SSD's, and up to 8K support. So let's unpack all of this. I appreciate the use of PS4 games on the PS5, that was something missing from the PS4 that upset a lot of folks and only a little bit of it made sense; the lack of PS3 BC made sense because the PS3 was an archeticual nightmare but not even having PS1 or PS2 support just felt wack. SSD's are always appreciated and are slowly becoming the way ...

We all know that the Star Wars Episode IX Trailer, called Rise of Skywalker , dropped recently and everyone is hyped. And if you didn't know, here ya go. Now, while everyone is excited and is poring over it for details, there's only one that I want to talk about, the final laugh, the hint the Emperor will return in this film. Now, while the return of yet another thing from previous films is a groaner, I won't judge till I see the film. I will however point out that the return of Palpatine is nothing new for fans of the Expanded Universe, yes, let's talk about my most hated Star Wars comic of all time, the Dark Empire Trilogy . The story picks up 6 years after Return of the Jedi and has Luke struggling with trying to start a new Jedi order and the New Republic finally getting the Empire to a more manageable state and dominating it as a military power when blam, Palpatine arrives. So ya know how Anakin bought balance to the force and redeemed himself by killi...

We all know 007 Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64, a revolutionary shooter for it's time with a decent singleplayer and great multiplayer. But what some might not realize is that Goldeneye wasn't James Bond's only FPS adventure, he had plenty of them in later years going from N64 all the way to Wii U. But one always stuck out to me, 007 Nightfire on the Nintendo Gamecube, this was actually a game I grew up with, playing it on a little CRT my Mom had in her office. But it's also been almost 16 years since then, does Nightfire hold up or is this Bond adventure dead in the water? First off, Nintendo Gamecube through HDMI on a generic upscaler looks like ass, if you have the game and a decent PC you're better off emulating, which is how I did it. There are HDMI solutions and I intend to give them a shot but given space in my area is limited and that shit costs $150 anyway, Dolphin it is. Nightfire is still set in the Pierce Brosnan era of Bond so if you're ...

The Damsel in Distress, a tale as old as time, a beautiful maiden, a ferocious monster, and the dashing knight in shining armor come to save the day, whether due to a sense of duty or emotional reasons (okay, that take is as old as feudal Europe but you get the point). For a while, it was just sort of the default for female characters, particularly in the early days of film, comics, and video games. But recently (if the 80's counts as recent) there's been a push against that being the default for female characters, new characters like Samus Aran, Ellen Ripley, and Spider-Gwen have all made names for themselves kicking ass and taking names and even previous notorious damsels in distress have been either kicking a lot more ass or are just better written in general. But in turn there has been another type of character, the "action girl" who is built up as a fighter and a warrior but turns out to just be a damsel in distress and utterly helpless in spite of the build...