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Tuesday, April 21
Guardians Of The Gallery: Doctor Who Goes Pop, Zelda Goes Ghibli & More
This week’s round-up of some great, funny and weird sci-fi and fantasy pics and vids that have been created a buzz on the ’net…
••• Titan has started releasing various Doctor Who comic titles with variant covers by artist Simon Myers (Scarlett Couture, Ghost) that riff off from famous album covers. Keep your eye out for more in the new year. (We reckon Queen’s “The Miracle” album cover must be a shoe-in, surely?)
Specially commissioned by the fine folks at HBO, master food artist Michelle Wibowo of Michelle Sugar Art created this incredible edible seen at last weekend’s Taste of London 2015. The attention to detail fabricated into this four-by-five-foot foodie fantasy is fantastic.
••• HBO commissioned food artist Michelle Wibowo of Michelle Sugar Art to create this Gingerbread King’s Landing for Taste of London 2015. Next week, Game Of Scones. Possibly. [via Geek Tyrant]
••• Artist Matt Vince has created these beautiful posters reimagining “The Legend of Zelda” as Studio Ghibli films. Suddenly, we really need to see these films!
••• Here’s how they do weather forecasts in Finland…
••• Honest Trailers get its teeth into a Marvel film so bad even Stan Lee didn’t want to do a cameo. Fantastic Four may be a large, slow-moving target, but the Honest team still comes up with a few new ways of twisting the knife.
••• Create your own caption time (if you can stop sniggering). Tweeted by @Todd_Spence from this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
••• Reddit users have thoroughly explored the wastelands in Fallout 4 and spotted a still-disgruntled-with-the-press Charlie Sheen hiding out there…
••• Here’s why games would be a lot more difficult if the end-of-level bosses showed some glimmers of intelligence…
••• Peter Capaldi vacations in Middle-earth…
Fallout 4: REVIEW
Fallout 4 videogame review by Martin Wharmby
DEVELOPER: Bethesda Game Studios
PUBLISHER: Bethesda Softworks
RELEASE: Out Now
FORMATS: Xbox One, PS4, PC
RATING: PEGI 18
PRICE (RRP): £49.99
There’s a sad beauty to the desolate wastelands of the Fallout games. Despite the world’s drab colour palette, its tales of survival, salvaged settlements and shenanigans are fascinating – from the missions and side quests to the way stories are woven into the world itself, the very fabric of this post-apocalyptic realm is mesmerising to explore. In Fallout 4, this is better than ever.
After a brief stay in pre-apocalypse Boston, you’re frozen by Vault-Tec and awaken hundreds of years later, emerging from Vault 111 with a dead spouse and an abducted child to find. The Commonwealth is a harsh and unforgiving place, but it’s not long before you meet a few friendly faces in Lexington, who are intent on making your old home of Sanctuary Hills a new community.
The first of many settlements, in Sanctuary you’re thrown into the new base-building system. This sees you clear out ruins and build up new homes and infrastructure, planting crops and assigning settlers, as you craft defences and housing out of the junk you find while exploring – what was once vendor trash now can be broken down into resources. It’s a brilliant idea, completely let down by how optional it is, the atrocious interface, and the way Bethesda leaves you to figure it all out for yourself.
It’s a huge shame that such an intriguing new feature is so badly laid out, but thankfully many other systems have been overhauled and improved. The V.A.T.S. auto-targeting system now no longer pauses the action, making combat more immediate, and fits with the much improved shooting controls. Followers you meet can be sent back to specific settlements and will happily hold some loot for you, and certain characters will occasionally provide some insight into the situations you end up in. Looting’s now simpler, there’s a Perk that will give you routes to follow on missions, and many missions now fall under Miscellaneous, clearing up which are the more important tasks.
There are also smart changes to weaponry and armour, with degradation no longer a factor. Instead, there’s an elaborate upgrading system, as you use the scrap you collect to mod weapons and armour, customising them to your tastes and even allowing you to swap around modules you no longer use. Even Legendary items you find can be modded, keeping their special bonuses.
Fallout 4 feels comfortingly familiar for fans, and is relatively welcoming to newcomers, but there are so many predictable problems that tarnish what should be one of the best games of 2015. For a start, the performance on consoles occasionally borders on unacceptable, with huge framerate drops, regular freezes while loading in new overworld sections, and lengthy load times. It wouldn’t be so bad if the game at least looked nicer: there’s no avoiding it, Fallout 4 is not a particularly pretty game, and the amount of crazy glitches and jank dent the enjoyment.
Ultimately, these technical issues can’t undo just how incredible Fallout 4 truly is. It may seem like just more of the same, but there’s no beating that feeling of emerging from a vault and exploring every last spot on the map, and squeezing every last story from this magnificently crafted world.
• Rise of the Tomb Raider: GAME REVIEW
• Halo 5: Guardians GAME REVIEW
• Call of Duty: Black Ops III: GAME REVIEW
Guardians Of The Gallery: Star Wars Statues, Fallout 4 Princesses & More
Some of the most striking, unusual and odd imagery and videos that have been making a splash online over the last week… Enjoy!
••• Lego Star Wars creations are nothing new in Guardians Of The Gallery, but these take the form to a whole new level. They are the work of Finnish photographer Vesa Lehtimäki and started a hobby but have lead to a hardcover book, Lego Star Wars: Small Scenes From A Big Galaxy, out this week from Dorling Kindersley. [via Comic Book Resources]
••• Continuing with the Star Wars theme (there must be something in the air at the moment) French artist Travis Durden used 3D modeling softwareto recreate characters like Yoda, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett as Greek sculptures. We’re just glad we don’t get to see Yoda’s shrivelled willy (then again, considering how notoriously small the willy in on Michaelangelo’s David, that may have required a magnifying glass).
••• The latest Honest Trailer from Screen Junkies is a LARGE SLOW-MOVING TARGET. Nevertheless, they do a good job on .
••• A life-sized TARDIS, built by The Brickman, has materialised on Bondi Beach to promote Australia’s inaugural Doctor Who Festival.
••• On Monday, Woody Harrelson arrived at the Parisian premiere of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 in a gray sweatshirt, pyjama bottoms and socks with no shoes. Was he planning on sleeping through the movie?
••• For some reason this is far more disturbing than it should be… [via Geeks Are Sexy]
••• To mark the release of Fallout 4, Canadian artist Peter Slavik has reimagined some Disney princesses as they might look if they appeared in the game. Now there’s a crossover episode of Once Upon A Time we’d like to see…
