Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Bruce Willis and Governator Arnie. With the most manly cast of any movie in history, you should at least have an idea of what to expect from The Expendables.
Stallone is proving himself a perfectly able director of quality action movies – 2008’s Rambo was entertainingly gory fun. The Expendables isn’t quite so brutal, but what it lacks in gratuitous gore, it makes up for in its sense of fun. It’s a simple tale about a group of mercenaries with a very diverse skillset out on a mission to stop a corrupt CIA agent in a generic Latin American island. It delivers action in spades, the entire cast are on top form, and I was kept highly entertained throughout.
So, about that ridiculous cast. Where to begin? The team is led by a haggard Stallone, who seems to be absolutely enjoying himself as the world-weary leader of the group. Next in rank is the ever-awesome Jason Statham, who plays a knife expert, then there’s Jet Li as the (what else) short martial artist. The numerous ex-pro wrestlers are all surprisingly watchable as actors, though Steve Austin stood out for me as a particularly nasty villain. Rourke’s character doesn’t play a big role, but he’s great as the guy who looks after the team’s hideout while they’re away on jobs. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cameo scene is almost worth the cost of a cinema ticket alone – its a short scene, but the surrealness of it all is absolutely hilarious.
They're expendable...
There’s some fantastic action set pieces, with huge chunks of scenery being blown up all over the place, and the gunfights are as satisfying as you’d expect. Crews’ automatic shotgun provides one of the most brutally satisfying conclusions to a fight I’ve ever seen (he’s got a gun capable of destroying BUILDINGS). The hand-to-hand fights are equally violent – with the likes of Li, Statham, and all the wrestlers, this was always going to be a key part of the action moments. But its on this note that my only real complaint with the film comes from…
I suspect this has something to do with the likely absurd insurance policies which were taken out for so many big names to gather in one place, but a lot of the fight scenes were so clearly done by stunt doubles. Statham doesn’t get any cool improvised martial arts fights like he did in movies like The Transporter, and Jet Li’s 1 on 1 battle against Lundgren was shot in such a way you rarely see that it is Li himself… Minor gripes, since even with stuntmen, all of the action is superbly choreographed and expertly shot in what is a thoroughly satisfying action movie.
It’s not a serious film by any means, but I was surprised by the odd little emotional scene they threw in, and to be perfectly honest the whole movie wasn’t nearly as testosterone-fueled as I was expecting. The characters were pretty likable and slightly more interesting than the average action heroes. Most of all, you get exactly what was promised – a huge list of A-list action stars beating and shooting the crap out of each other, and I heartily recommend it for exactly that reason.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
I’ve played many versions of Mario Kart, first on the Snes at a friend’s house, followed by my own copy of the N64 version. The Nintendo DS edition got a lot of play during the various anime conventions that I attended between 2006 and 2011, where you could LAN it up via Bluetooth with anyone else in the vicinity. But the version I truly have the fondest memories of has to be Mario Kart Wii.
Format: Sega Mega Drive
Year: 1992
Another rare game in my long list of memories that include my brother, Sam, is Streets of Rage 2. It was the best in a trilogy of side scrolling beat-em-ups on the Sega Mega Drive. (Genesis in America). We would always play as the same 2 characters: I was Axel, and my brother would be Skate. He loved the agility and bombastic acrobatics that the tiny skater dude could pull off. Many of the boss fights would end with Sam leaping onto their necks and pummelling them in the back of the head. I liked Axel’s swinging flaming punch, and his multi-hit special combo. It’s a simple but satisfying game built around stylised hand to hand violence.
VVVVVV is one of the only 2D platform games that I have completed from start to finish, which makes it special to me. I became obsessed with Veni Vidi Vici, an entirely optional sequence of deadly traps that teases you with a collectible orb right in the very first room, which is blocked off by a tiny box. You can’t jump in the traditional way as most other platformer’s, so the only way to overcome the box is by leaping up through the ridiculously cruel chambers above, navigating your way to the top…and then back down again.
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