The Critical Corner

When Marvel announced their initial slate for the MCU's Phase Four, the project I was looking forward to the most from the initial offerings was definitely "Falcon and the Winter Soldier". Even before the pandemic shuffled things around (this was going to come out after "Black Widow" and before "The Eternals" and "WandaVision"), I was looking forward to this simply because both "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War" are my top two favorite movies of the entire MCU. The later movies of the "Captain America" trilogy stood out to me not just because they were some fine action movies, but married their action to thrilling, thought provoking themes you don't see elsewhere in the MCU. Anchoring those movies obviously was Chris Evans' Steve Rogers who proved to be the heart and soul of this shared universe. With "Avengers: Endgame" essentially retiring the character seem...

  It's crazy to think 2020 was the first full year where the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't release a single piece of content since 2009. With the COVID-19 pandemic closing down theatre chains across the globe, and Marvel's production pipelines being halted mid production, the start of the MCU's Phase 4 didn't go according to the original plan. If things had gone differently, by now we would have already seen movies like "Black Widow" and "The Eternals", and we would have gotten the MCU's first TV show under the Marvel Studios umbrella, "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" with the fourth show in the schedule, "WandaVision" next in the pipeline. As we all know, the order of things ended up being way different. And to Marvel's credit, "WandaVision" works surprisingly well as the opening salvo for their new phase of content. If there is anything you can takeaway immediately from "WandaVision", is that th...

Hello! Now that I have made the list of my honorable mentions (you can read it here ), it's time to talk about the ten games that made an impact to me in the year of our Lord, 2020. Without further ado, here is the list: TOP 10 GAMES OF 2020 10. Resident Evil 3 2019's remake for "Resident Evil 2" remains one of my favorite survival horror games of all time. The amount of care and detail Capcom poured into a remake which puts many new game releases to shame is something that has stuck with me, and left me craving for so much more. Thankfully, Capcom was able to slightly satiate my hunger by releasing a remake of what I've learned is one of the more polarizing entries in the series, "Resident Evil 3". I'll be upfront and say this remake doesn't reach the highs from "Resident Evil 2", and in some ways it is a step backwards by being a game more focused on the action than the tension filled moments of the previous game. Despite this, the le...

2020. Where to even begin with this year. Coming into 2020, it was hard not to feel exuberant excitement. For all intents and purposes, we were in the endgame of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation that started all the way back in the ancient times of 2013. A new generation of consoles was on the horizon. The last big hurrahs of these systems were getting ready to ship. For many gamers out there, these are the most exciting of times. Then COVID-19 happened.  No matter which way to slice it, the COVID-19 pandemic that shrouded the entire world for the entirety of the year cast an unflattering pall over what should have been the victory lap of this past console generation. For a virus that ravaged and continues to ravage many different corners of the world, leaving lots of dead in its wake and hitting all sorts of working industries and economies hard, focusing on something relatively "unimportant" as videogames would seem like something a little irresponsible when lookin...

Let me preface the Game of Thrones series finale review with this: based on the trajectory of where the series was headed over the past few weeks (specially a penultimate episode as bad as what we got), there was no way that “The Iron Throne” was ever going be the ideal ending for the series for most fans. The way the fanbase has been split will ensure this will be one of the most divisive series finales in recent memory. It was always going to be this way. Last week’s episode left my feelings about the series pretty shattered. The way a very important plot point like Daenerys Targaryen’s journey from would be savior to mad queen was handled brought to life the fundamental problem about the series in the last two seasons: shortening them up was a bad idea. There were small hints of Dany’s potential mad queen turn seeded throughout the entire series if you go back and look for them but theexecution in the hastily paced final seasons made it seem like a left t...