Lords of the Fallen on PC: When Dark Souls released in 2011, it heralded in a new genre of games, so impactful the genre even called itself, Souls-like, an obvious allusion to the game’s incredible difficulty. I even joke around with the guys I work with explaining, “There are two types of people in the world, those who have beat Dark souls, and those who haven’t. And guess what, guys? I’m one who has!” The Souls formula is simple, but compelling. One starts out as the typical RPG “chosen one,” a level 1 nobody, and you fight things and loot things, all the while building up attributes to take on extremely difficult boss fights in an attempt to level your statistics even more. The first major copycat out of the gate was Deck13’s Lords of the Fallen. Critics christened it the first “souls-like.” It is, albeit with a difficulty considered easier and much more of a storyline complete with talking NPCs. Not to mention, your player character, Harkyn, has much more personality than the desiccated husk of a being you played in Dark Souls. I’ve got almost three dozen hours in the game, and admittedly, it is a struggle. It’s giving my Xbox controller a good workout, and after beating this one (if I do) I’ll be taking a break from another souls-like game for a long while simply because they are so exhausting.


Rear Window on 4K Blu-Ray: I recently picked up a box, make that a “book” set of Alfred Hitchcock films on 4K. This first set contained four Hitchcock movies (perhaps his four most well known among the masses.) I wasn’t expecting these films to be so glorious looking as remastered 4K versions. The first movie I watched was Rear Window. It concerns a freelance photographer, played by James Stewart, who is convalescing in his small New York apartment with a broken leg. Confined to a wheelchair, he has little to do but stare out of his windows at the other tenants’ windows, in effect, becoming a voyeur of sorts. His curiosity gets him deep into hot water, however, when he thinks he sees one of the tenants murder his wife and proceed to remove her from the small apartment in little pieces. The movie is a testament to Hitchcock’s ingenuity as a director. The whole film is from the viewpoint of the photographer’s apartment. The movie is a suspense tour de force, and I can now say with confidence it has become my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Alien: Romulus at IMAX: It was on par with the first two Alien movies, and as it turns out, the movie occurs between the first and second Alien movies. Peculiarities I thought that were just that, peculiarities, were the space station the kids found they were going to use to abandon their mining planet. Hard to believe it was just hanging there all along like a ripened apple, just out of reach. And then the way the xenomorphs evolved from facehuggers to fully grown walking terrors in such a short amount of time. David Jonsson, who played the broken android, did a remarkable job. The movie made strong allusions to Alien:Isolation, one of my favorite games of all time. If you’re a fan of the first two movies, this one belongs in your collection.



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