A Self-Proclaimed Dreamer

      Walt Disney World is probably my favorite place in the world, and it has been for about 10 years now, although for most of that experience, I'd only ever been to Epcot and Magic Kingdom. It wasn't until three years ago when I finally was able to go to Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios and finish up the park tour. Animal Kingdom is cool, and I liked it a lot, though most people have taken to calling it a half-day park. Even with the addition of the Avatar portion, it only added two more rides, and one of them doesn't have a great reputation, making the best liked ride in the park still Expedition Everest, though the two rides in Pandora certainly help raise the appeal of the park as a whole which is always good. Hollywood Studios, on the other hand, is huge for me. As someone who has always liked movies and will constantly point out references to other things, Hollywood Studios is a great time for sure, and it's gotten even better since the last time I was there

      In the year 2014, platformers were dying out. It seemed that the genre was old hat, and everyone wanted to play the latest Call of Duty or Battlefield game. Other than Nintendo, most companies had shifted away from or completely shut down whatever little focus they originally had on the genre that Mario had built. That is, until a little indie dev called Yacht Club stepped in with a new idea, built on top of several old ideas. Shovel Knight is a strange concept for a character, much less a game. He's exactly what you'd expect, a knight with a shovel. The story of the game is nothing special, though it still does a good job of making the player invested in seeing the hero proceed through tough trials to get to the end. The amazing thing about this gameplay is that it takes a lot of different moves and aesthetics from different NES era games, but combines all of these things to make them very unique and original.     Shovel Knight's move set is genuinely fun to play ar

     Show of hands, people, who is excited to see the four sequels to the 2009 box office hit, Avatar? Hmm... nobody? Interesting. Why is James Cameron teaming with Disney to tell everyone to be excited for those sequels with a really cool themed land in Animal Kingdom? Why, it's simple! They needed to have a cool theme park land to compete with Harry Potter World across town. Unfortunately, it seems that they didn't think about the fact that no one really cared about Avatar once it left the theater. After Disney announced that they were making a land based on Avatar, people were asking themselves, "Why?" and, "Why is this not Star Wars instead?" The answer to that is mainly because Disney hadn't purchased the rights to Star Wars at that point. They had already jumped in with both feet on what the 20th Century Fox Marketing had been trying to sell, that 2009's fantasy smash hit was a new way of life. In this case, this area came long after people had

      In the year 2009, a little known developer named Rocksteady, put out a little gem into the world known as Batman: Arkham Asylum . In the years and years leading up to the release of that game, licensed games were known to be not great. Most were viewed as shameless cash grabs, mostly based  on the well known characters of whatever movie or tv show that the company had gotten their hands on, however, Arkham Asylum truly broke that mold. Batman is undoubtably one of the most celebrated and beloved characters in Pop Culture today, but most Batman games created before that game and what would become the Arkham Series amounted to mostly just beat 'em ups. Not to say that those were bad, but they were very much a product of their time (as the ones that I'm thinking of came out for the NES and SNES). Sure, there were some good ones, I've heard that Mask of the Phantasm was actually really good, but I never played that one, and as I only speak from my own experience here, I c

      If you were to tell someone in 1980 that in five years, the world would be introduced to an Italian plumber that would some day hold nearly as much space in pop culture as Mickey Mouse, you would have some pretty weird looks coming your way. That is exactly what happened, however. First introduced in the arcade game, Donkey Kong (1981), as Jumpman, he was a carpenter who had to save his girlfriend, Pauline, from a giant ape. He wouldn't be known as Mario until he was introduced later on in 1985 in Super Mario Brothers for the NES where he had to save Princess Toadstool from King Koopa, and the rest is history. There are a lot of people who even attribute Super Mario Bros. for saving the video game industry as a whole, as there was a huge crash after the licensed ET game for the Atari ended up being so bad that they took copies off shelves and buried them in a desert in New Mexico. This year is the 35th anniversary of the original Super Mario Bros game, and to celebrate, I tho