I dreamed a dream in times gone by

Not entirely enamoured with being recruited for babysitting duties, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) invites the Goblin King (David Bowie) to whisk away her shrieking sprog brother, Toby. Overcome with guilt and remorse, thus begins a cat and mouse chase to recover the pest before he is lost forever. Embarking on an odyssey teeming with intrigue and wonderment, we're introduced to a cast of larger than life,...

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Once upon a time in the west

In Back to the Future III, the final entry in the trilogy, Doc and Marty find themselves in the wild west era of 1885, once again desperately striving to fix the future by meddling with the past.Trilogies tend to deliver diminishing returns as they run out of steam, and that's definitely the case here. Part III is only 98% perfect and was choked to the rafters with steam, if you know what I mean.Perfect...

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You mean you have to use your hands. That's like a baby's toy!

Back to the Future II will forever be remembered for tricking us into believing that one day we'd be ecstatically flabbergasted to find a hoverboard in our Christmas stocking. That in just 30 years time, cars would fly and everything - no matter how convenient and effortless it already was - would be automated, just for the hell of it.I examine the fantastic, timeless (hoho!) movie and assess how...

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Wolfie's fine, honey. Wolfie's just fine.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 reassured us "I'll be back", he can't have been referring to the franchise or merchandise as a whole. Is it possible to come back if you never went away in the first place? It's a mixed blessing in that not everything the series has spawned is a masterpiece like the first two entries in the celluloid field. Luckily I only cover Terminator II, the movie. Oh, and its...

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Merry-go-round broke-down

Disney's live-action, animated mystery comedy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, is so surreal you'd be forgiven for thinking you were looking at an anything-goes video game. It's funny you should think that right after I'd deliberately planted the idea in your head... because there is one. Inspired by several pivotal silver screen moments, it's a hodgepodge of action mini-games developed by 'Silent' and published...

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Licensed gaming finds a way

Jurassic Park and the prehistoric lifeforms (hopefully) contained therein. Has there ever been a movie franchise or chief supervillain more suitable for conversion to the medium of video gaming? My pet Tyrannosaurus rex insists the answer is an emphatic no, and who am I to argue? 42 licensed games published between 1993 and 2019revolving around themes emerging from Michael Crichton's novel source...

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Is that all you've got little one?

Dark high fantasy adventure movie, Willow (1988), starring everyone's favourite Ewok, Warwick Davis, spawned a smattering of accompanying video games of widely divergent quality for various platforms. I take a bewildered look at Mindscape's contribution to the franchise for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and DOS, attempting to link its core elements to those of the far more cherished source material....

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A storm in a proton pack

Ghostbusters II's pixely interpretation sequel is a menagerie of three disparate arcade-action mini-games that attempt to capture the exhilaration of a key sequence taken from the celluloid blockbuster. Comprising 2D scrolling and isometric viewpoints, they range in difficulty from hair-pullingly insane to a walk in Central Park, some more tedious than challenging as a result. Whatever the case, they're...

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Worst feature - nothing dies

Owing to Disney's timely morality-steering interventions - specifically their animated musical fantasy film, Pocahontas - we've learnt that it's wrong to invade the land of indigenous American Indians, plunder their precious resources, and even annihilate them should they dare to object. Thanks Disney, I'll give that a miss in future then. Featuring the voices of Mel Gibson and Irene Bedard, it's...

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In memory of Caprona

In 1988 Denton Designs made their Great Escape from 3D, isometric, arcade-adventure games... slamming down smack bang in the middle of a prehistoric lost world where ferocious dinosaurs stalk a Land That Time Forgot. It's an isometric, 3D, arcade-adventure game in which four hapless survivors of an aerial crashlanding must Escape from various perilous threats to their wellbeing and sanity.'Where Time...

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I Know Kung-Faux

Contrary to common wisdom, you don't have to visit a parallel universe to witness Ted 'Theodore' Logan playing Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It truly-really-genuinely happened back in 1992 and performed pretty well at the box office. Produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola believe it or not.A year later, Keanu was further immortalised in pixels courtesy of Psygnosis. First in a platform...

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Might as well face it, you're addicted to spuds

Amiga public domain games generally had a reputation for embracing slap-dash, amateurish production values. Despite essentially being a Lemmings clone with bells on, Blobz by Apex Systems broke the mould upon release in 1996. It's faster and prettier than DMA Design's classic rodent-herding, genre-defining, head-mashing puzzler, but can it compete in the all-important gameplay stakes? I investigate...download...

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Angel of the City

Sylvester Stallone's maverick cop vs deranged Night Slasher flopbuster, Cobra, turned out to be one of the worst of his career. Ironically, the off-kilter platform game developed by Joffa Smith, published by Ocean, was considered one of the most technically brilliant for the underpowered ZX Spectrum upon release in 1986.I give them both the once over, obviously through the lenses of my celebrity Ray-Ban...

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Ordinary Superman

Of all the mass appeal entertainment franchises to be converted to video game format, Superman is perhaps the one to have fared the worst. One of the earliest titles - Superman: The Game published by First Star Software in 1985 - is a classic example. Inspired by vague tropes surrounding the Kryptonian superhero, rather than a specific movie, we're required to rescue civilians of Metropolis from imminent...

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I am lucky rabbit?

I answer one of life's most thoroughly perplexing, impenetrable BIG questions; who are the people featured in that wall mural in the beat 'em up arcade and home computer game, Shadow Warriors? Also known as Ninja Gaiden.I suppose I may as well give it a quick review while I'm on a roll.download ebook in epub for...

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My friends call me Murphy. You call me... mean names that hurt my feelings.

A retrospective review of the third entry in the futuristic, dystopian sci-fi RoboCop franchise and its inevitable adaptation to the medium of 90s style platform gaming.download ebook in epub for...

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You ain't no witch! Witches are girls.

A retrospective review of the often overlooked Warlock supernatural horror movie trilogy and its curiously loose translation to the realm of SEGA and Nintendo console gaming.download ebook in epub for...

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Fight fire with marshmallows

Toys - the 1992 satirical fantasy film directed by Barry Levinson, starring Robin Williams - is the most bizarre, yet intriguing commercial flop ever committed to celluloid. Fight fire with marshmallows is my (no doubt inadequate) effort to make sense of it, as well as its unlikely adaptation to the world of licensed video games. Published in 1993 for the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive and Super Nintendo...

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