My latest Anime UK News review is for the first three volumes of Blood Blockade Battlefront, and can be found HERE.
Always fun to see your favourite manga turn into an anime (well, so long as it’s handled well…), but it’s also fun to watch an anime and then go back and see what inspired it…
So kicking off the gaming side of the DBZ movie/game marathon-thingy is the game that feels like it kicked off Dragon Ball games, as it was the first released here in the west that was any good (for context: you can find my reviews of “Ultimate Battle 22” and “Final Bout” by clicking on them here…) Admittedly as with most things that are the start of a series with multiple sequels this game is quite lacking in polish and modes it still created a solid framework to build on, and has a few unique gameplay ideas that I hadn’t experienced before or really since beyond its sequels. Sadly it looks like crap (even at the time I thought it looked off) but hey-ho. Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
Time to kick off the “reviewing films/specials alongside a game after reviewing a chunk of the Z series” thing with the first movie… of fifteen, by my count (even if that last two are more well known as DB Super story arcs at this point…) which sounds crazy until you remember the first thirteen run under an hour and were just shown at summer festivals in Japan, rather than an actual big cinematic thing. Still though, they often offer fun mini-stories with good animation and some fun villains, so I’ve enjoyed them as the side-dish that they are. “Return my Gohan!”, or “Dead Zone” as it’s known in English speaking markets, is a fun one to start with as the characters are set at a pre-Z but post-Original DB state, making this rather unique. Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
Thunderbolts, or “Thunderbolts* *The New Avengers” was probably one of the most uninteresting MCU films announced in recent memory, but I don’t know whether it was because of extremely low expectations or if it is just that good, but I really enjoyed it! The cast was fun, the lead “villain” was a good adaptation of a particular favourite obscure comic character of mine and generally it was a good time. Was it perfect? Well no, for example the ending felt a tad anticlimactic, but it was at least a whole film that didn’t feel like it was coming apart at the seams like some recent efforts… Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
Always a pleasure to return to the Third Doctor era with this mini-marathon, and especially always a pleasure for it to be an Earth-based UNIT-laden Master-roaming six parter! The Mind of Evil was one of, if not THE last Third Doctor story I saw but it was a good one to go out on, the setting in a prison is a unique one and there’s still plenty of guns, explosions and an alien creature to keep you entertained, even if the alien creature is a teleporting box… Let’s take a look!
Continue readingHi all, just a quick site update. As you may have been able to tell my current life schedule has led to me having the odd week here and there were I can’t find the time to write a review of a “current” thing, which has led me to fall behind even more on the “archive” reviews. For example, I keep nearly but not actually catching up with Doctor Who Big Finish releases, so the older Who reviews that were supposed to be put on the site during weeks where there aren’t new BF reviews have gone unposted for literally years in some cases. Likewise after covering the Saiyan arc of Dragon Ball Z (over a lot longer a period than I wanted) I was going to do a movie/TV special paired with a DBZ game, like I did with the original series, but again new anime or Anime UK News stuff kept “taking the anime slot”, so to speak.
So starting next week both the older Third Doctor reviews and the DBZ movie/TV special + Game reviews for the Saiyan Arc will start being posted on regular schedule of DW on Tuesdays and Saturdays, DBZ on Thursdays, irregardless of if this ends up causing several Who reviews to go up in a row, something I normally avoid for variety’s sake. This will be a thing going forwards too, new shows/audios/anime/films/games etc. will be going up whenever I get the time, but “marathons” of older shows/audios/anime/films/games etc will be going up when the whole set is ready to go on a regular day. This means, yes, there may still be weeks when nothing goes up if I don’t have a marathon on the go and I can’t find time to write a new thing, but it also avoid things like the Saiyan Arc of DBZ being split up over nearly three months despite only being four reviews long… Hopefully it works out, at least I won’t feel so constrained to “get this new thing reviewed quickly” at the cost of something I might be more inclined to put up. I guess we’ll see!
Finishing off this two story boxset, “Red For Danger!” is set in a particularly bad boarding school where not only is there regular bullying and hazing going on but aliens make up the faculty and a lot of the bullies too. It’s a… mildly interesting concept, but sadly the story doesn’t really climb out of mildly interesting, mostly due to setting being a naturally dull one and a “big twist” that wasn’t as fun to follow as the writer I assume hoped it would… Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
When I first heard about Alien: Earth, or rather just heard about an Alien TV series, I was sceptical to say the least… until I heard who was helming the show. Noah Hawley is the man behind both Fargo and Legion, two of my favourite TV shows in recent memory, so I instantly became excited, and now all this time later and it managed to meet and possibly even surpass my high expectations. Taking lots of great sci-fi ideas and philosophical subjects and then blending in plenty of Alien horror and gore alongside it was quite the winning combination, though I have to say the Xenomorphs were actually one of the least interesting things about the show, which is weird to say and not actually be upset about… Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
The latest Sixth Doctor boxset is neatly split into two three parters, but sadly neither were all that memorable. Not bad, not great, just… average. Oh well, let’s take a look at the first one then, that being “Saoirse of the Seven Seas”, which features an Irish female pirate called Saoirse O’Grady taking on not just the greedy British fleets but aliens, too…
Continue reading
It’s time to immediately finish off this return to the Game to Movie Marathon as I finally got a chance to sit down and watch the third live action Sonic film, a series that still baffles me how it’s not only a thing but a good thing and a successful thing. My main gripe over STH2 was a few long scenes of the human characters and some really poor humour and thankfully for this third film they seem to have fixed both of those issues as the human characters take a backseat for the most part and the humour is the fun kind of kids film humour that I can still enjoy as an adult, rather than … whatever that stuff was in the long wedding scene last time… Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
Hogan Reviews 