Turtle Beach Recon 50 Gaming Headset Review

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The Recon 50 (See it on Amazon) is the entry-level model in Turtle Beach’s line of wired gaming headsets. There are Turtle Beach Recon 50 models "designed" for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, but they're identical in specs, features, and price - the only difference is their color scheme. We're specifically evaluating the PC version here, for what it's worth.

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Sid Meier's Civilization VI for iPad Review

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It's been a year of big surprises on small devices. I was already impressed when Bethesda showed us that you could put something as graphically intensive as the new Doom on the diminutive Nintendo Switch, but Aspyr has accomplished something almost as commendable with its wonderful iPad port of Sid Meier's Civilization VI that makes it worth reconsidering the idea that phone and tablet games shouldn’t cost as much as PC and console counterparts.

It's a bigger deal than it may sound like. Card games like Hearthstone and Elder Scrolls Legends have made successful leaps from the PC to the iPad, but for the most part iPad ports consist of old games like Baldur's Gate II or relatively simple ones like Limbo or FTL: Faster Than Light. Lately we’ve also seen ports of some of IGN’s top-rated PC and console games including The Witness and Inside, but Civilization VI represents something far more mechanically complex than any of them.

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Tiny Metal Review

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It’s always a great feeling when I can jump into a turn-based tactical wargame like Tiny Metal and feel like I’m winning battles by analyzing the scenario and making the best use of my tools. That feeling deflates, however, when I realize the AI can’t put up a good fight to (literally) save its life. Where this anime-inspired strategy excursion succeeds in personality and unit diversity, it misses the mark in trying to present interesting challenges, and again when trying to frame them with a meaningful story.

Billed as a successor to the Nintendo 3DS’ highly rated Advance Wars franchise, Tiny Metal follows that formula faithfully while avoiding some of its pitfalls like “puzzle missions” that had only one really valid way to win. You move a versatile toolbox of infantry, tanks, and aircraft with varying speeds and combat stats around a grid with the ultimate objective of capturing the enemy’s HQ building or destroying all of their forces. All the while, you vie for control of resource-generating cities and unit-producing factories on the map which can only be captured by infantry, keeping weaker, early-game units interesting and essential to protect throughout a match.

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Plantronics RIG 400HX Gaming Headset Review

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The Plantronics Rig 400HX (See it on Amazon) looks exactly like a what it is: a budget gaming headset. Its build quality is the poorest of the budget headsets we looked at recently, which includes the Astro A10, HyperX Cloud Stinger, Roccat Cross, and Turtle Beach Recon 50. Reviews for those headsets are publishing in the coming days. And it relies on a terrible design for adjusting the size of the headband. Despite these issues, the Plantronics Rig 400HX delivers impressive audio output and has an excellent microphone.

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Hawkman Found #1 Review

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Hawkman is among the most convoluted heroes in DC's massive stable, and one of the many goals with Dark Nights: Metal has been to reinvigorate the character and make him exciting and accessible for the DC Rebirth era. It's fitting that one of the many Metal tie-ins is tasked with spotlighting Carter Hall and exploring his role in this massive conflict. Hawkman Found #1 doesn't necessarily add much to the larger Metal narrative, but it does offer an enticing glimpse of things to come for this character.

As the titles suggest, Hawkman Found #1 serves as a companion of sorts to the recent Batman Lost #1. Both books follow a hero who's trapped in the murky depths of the Dark Multiverse and fighting to return home. In Metal #4, we learned that a twisted version of Hawkman now serves as the blacksmith at the Forge of Worlds. But within that monstrosity, the spirit of Carter Hall still remains, and he still dreams of flying.

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Star Wars: Storms of Crait #1 Review

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Warning: this review contains minor spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi!

Marvel is continuing what looks to be a tradition of following up on new Star Wars saga films with weirdly random, standalone one-shot comics. With The Force Awakens, we got a surprisingly good C-3PO comic predicated on explaining why the erstwhile droid hero had a red arm in the movie. This time around, Marvel is taking the opportunity to fill in the back-story on Crait, the world that serves as the backdrop for the climax of The Last Jedi. This comic does little to enhance the events of the film, but it does offer an entertaining story set in the familiar Original Trilogy setting.

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Roccat Cross Gaming Headset Review

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The Roccat Cross (See it on Amazon) looks more like something you’d find on the head of a call-center operator than on the dome of a gamer, but beneath its drab exterior is a capable and versatile budget headset. At $69.99 MSRP, the Cross headset sits in the middle of Roccat’s line of gaming headsets. One step up is the $99.99 Roccat Khan Pro, which features rotating earcups and a more gamer-centric look. One rung below the Cross is the $49.99 Roccat Renga, which features an unpadded headband.

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Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey #1 Review

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The X-Men have been stuck in a prolonged rut for the past couple years, and even this spring's ResurrXion relaunch hasn't done much to reinvigorate the franchise (hence the impending cancellations of books like Generation X and Iceman). Recently, it seems as though Marvel's recipe for fixing things mostly boils down to bringing back the fan-favorite characters they've killed off lately. Wolverine returned in Marvel Legacy #1. Professor X is back in Astonishing X-Men, sort of. And now, the most iconic, perpetually dead mutant of them all is making her long-awaited return. But just as with Wolverine and Xavier's resurrections, it remains to be seen whether Jean Grey can rekindle the spark the X-Men have been missing.

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Doomsday Clock #2 Review

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Doomsday Clock #1 established that Geoff Johns and Gary Frank are capable of the daunting task that is crafting a sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' legendary Watchmen saga. That issue didn't, however, offer much indication as to how the DC Universe and its heroes would factor into this story. As Johns himself warned back at NYCC, Doomsday Clock is much more a direct continuation of Watchmen than readers might have been expecting going in. But even though issue #2 maintains the methodical pacing of the first, it also goes a long way to uniting these two diametrically opposed superhero universes and making the scope of the conflict more clear.

Perhaps even more than the first, this issue really highlights the notion that Johns and Frank have nailed down the specific visual language of Watchmen. The creators employ the iconic nine-panel grid to maximum effect throughout the story. That structure ensures that the pacing remains careful and coordinated, while still leaving room for Frank to go big during those pivotal moments and capture the full scope of a scene. Both creators devote careful attention to the interplay between words and images in much the same way Moore and Gibbons did in the original story. There's often an ironic juxtaposition between what's printed in a narrative caption and what Frank renders in a given panel. Watchmen stands the test of time in part because it's a story that makes full use of the medium and doesn't really translate elsewhere without losing something in translation. Doomsday Clock is a story that recognizes and celebrates that fact.

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Marvel's Runaways: "Tsunami" Review

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

If there was ever any doubt that the Pride on Runaways had slyly and stealthily stolen the spotlight from the teens, "Tsunami" was here to set the detractors straight. Laced with an assortment of gallows humor antics, this chapter saw the parents scramble to get their collective s*** in order following last week's shooting of Victor.

By the end, freakin' Robert Minoru was standing in his underwear, wearing the Fistigon, professing his love for Tina in Japanese while she held aloft the Staff of One. It was a tender moment of remorse and reconciliation blended with really goofy "context is absolutely necessary" imagery and...that kind of sums up this episode, for the most part. I won't dive into everything that went on here, but all the parents, more or less, treated Jonah like he was their scary overlord. The inner-dynamic of Pride not only revealed itself more, but we also learned how the parents all, respectively, feel about their "boss." We saw, among them, who felt the most important, who was treated as the most important, and who was deemed least valuable.

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Doctor Who Christmas Special Review

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Spoilers follow for this episode of Doctor Who.

Peter Capaldi’s swan song in this year’s Christmas Special is a fun, touching, and quite excellent cap on not just the adventures of the Twelfth Doctor, but also of writer/executive-producer Steven Moffat’s run on Doctor Who as well. Connecting to the deepest recesses of Who history while also looking boldly to the future, “Twice Upon a Time” is one of the great regeneration stories -- and one of the greatest Capaldi stories too.

When we last saw Twelve in the Season 10 finale, “The Doctor Falls,” he had essentially been “killed”… but was fighting regeneration. The episode suffered dramatically because the Doctor’s motivations in this regard weren’t very well fleshed out, but fortunately Moffat completes the thought in this special as he contends with not one, but two different Doctors who don’t want to give in to the inevitability of their end.

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Olaf’s Frozen Adventure Review

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There are two ways of looking at Olaf, the ostensibly adorable snowman sidekick from Frozen: One may view him as an impish little sprite, a Puck, present in order to bring humor, support, and childlike wonder into an otherwise more mature story. One may just as easily view him as a grating cuteness factory, the latest in a long inauspicious tradition of “wuvable” Disney animated sidekick characters that includes such nightmare-inducing figures as The Black Cauldron's Gurgi.

If you're already in the latter camp, then Olaf's Frozen Adventure – the short Frozen sequel that came packaged with the theatrical release of Coco – will do nothing for you. At a whopping 21 minutes – the longest of any of Disney's theatrically-released animated shorts in recent memory – Olaf's Frozen Adventure, even with its trim premise, feels unbearably long.

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Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: "Rewind" Review

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

First off, that was an awesome little Empire Strikes Back exchange at the end of "Rewind." The whole "I love you"/"I know" scene, as Fitz got placed into cryo-freeze, was wonderful. And nicely timed with Last Jedi's release too. Off by one week, yes, but it still landed just right. I even asked actor Nick Blood about the moment when I briefly chatted with him about this week's adventure.

Secondly - and this isn't a critique or compliment - it's interesting to note that this is the second Marvel TV episode this season called "Rewind" and the other episode with that title, from Marvel's Runaways, also showed us what was happening during a certain length of time already covered in the story from a different character's perspective.

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Life Is Strange: Before The Storm Episode 3: Hell Is Empty

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The final act of Life is Strange: Before The Storm is so caught up in the interesting question of whether the truth is better than a lie if the truth only causes pain that most other things Chloe Price has been dealing with are hastily pushed out of the way. The theme is present in both the small, inconsequential choices and the path-dividing decisions presented throughout this chapter. This motif constantly challenges Chloe to question her angsty, black-and-white, no-BS views. This episode, called Hell Is Empty, asks us over and over again what justifies deceit and, if it was fine once, why not again? If dead suns can be beautiful stars, can bad people be good fathers? This constant barrage picks away at her resolve and builds into a final choice where no answer feels completely right or wrong. This constant lump of grey uncertainty in your throat brings the story to a deserving though abrupt close.

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SteelSeries Apex M750 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

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Be sure to visit IGN Tech for all the latest comprehensive hands-on reviews and best-of roundups. Note that if you click on one of these links to buy the product, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use. SteelSeries has been ramping up its hardware offerings in recent years, and seems to be continually adding new headsets, mice, and keyboards to its stable. SteelSeries “Apex” line of keyboards debuted with the praised and beloved M800 a while back, and now SteelSeries is following it up with an all-new flagship dubbed the M750 (See it on Amazon) / (See it on Amazon UK). It sports an aluminum body, full RGB per-key lighting, and some innovative software. We decided to put it through its paces, to see how it stacks up to the competition.

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2017 Wrestling Year in Review

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Yes, it's that time of year again. Time for the year to end.

As 2017 closes up shop, let's look back at the WWE and be all like "Oh, yeah. That happened, didn't it? Ain't life a kick? An unpredictable journey filled with sweeping highs and drastic lows. Really makes you think. Okay, I guess we should stop wasting time and hide this body before the cops show up."

Before I get started though, I have a gift for y'all. Right out of the gate, right off the blocks, first up at bat, here's a magical link to - *moist hoarse gasp!* - all the Wrestling Wrap Ups! I cracked the code. The unsolvable is now oh-so-knowable. For years, you peeps have been hitting me up on twitter and asking "Hey, is there are a place that lists all the Wraps? They're so hard to track down once they dissolve and disintegrate out of all the timelines. Please help make my life better!" Well, now I can because now there is. I don't know how far back this list goes, but I know it's at least a few years. Who knows? Maybe it just keeps going. Turtles all the way down, yo.

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Father Figures Review

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It’s almost impossible to really describe what kind of a film Father Figures actually is. On one hand, it’s a vulgar, absurdist comedy, but on the other hand, it tries to be a dramatic story about the relationship between two brothers and how they must move past the mysteries of their parentage to grow closer together.

Under the guidance of an experienced director and with a well-balanced script, it’s possible that a film like Father Figures could exist and be a successful studio dramedy. Unfortunately, Father Figures does not have a steady enough foundation to pull off such a complicated and ambitious construction.

Coming from longtime cinematographer and first-time director, Lawrence Sher, Father Figures focuses on the lives of Peter (Ed Helms) and Kyle Reynolds (Owen Wilson), two polar opposite twin brothers who not only look nothing alike, but also have completely different personalities. Where Peter is a hard-working doctor that’s never quite gotten over the death of his father from before he was born, Kyle is the kind of confident free spirit that drives Peter nuts. Not to mention that while Peter had to work for his career and money, Kyle has been able to spend years living off the royalties of a popular barbecue sauce, which uses his likeness on all of their labels.

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Hostiles Review

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Scott Cooper’s new film Hostiles presents the wild west as a depressing, violent, sexist and racist place where everything sucks. It’s easy to believe but not very interesting to watch.

Christian Bale stars as Captain Joseph J. Blocker, a soldier who slaughtered many Native Americans because they slaughtered many white people, because they slaughtered many Native Americans, and so on and so forth. Blocker doesn’t particularly care if his people started it, he just hates Native Americans so much that when he’s ordered to escort Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a dying war chief, to his burial ground, he does everything he can to get out of it, and only agrees when his pension is threatened.

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Paddington 2 Review

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The first Paddington was a complete surprise when it hit theaters back in 2014. Based on the popular kids books of the same name, the film’s original, uneven marketing campaign turned out to be far from representative of its actual quality. In truth, the first Paddington found a way to successfully balance its Monty Python-esque brand of humor along with the kind of heart and sense of adventure found in its source material.

So the fear going into Paddington 2 is the same kind that you face with any sequel, especially when said franchise’s first film was such a surprisingly delightful affair. It comes as a great joy then to leave the film knowing those fears were all in vain, as returning director Paul King has managed to deliver a sequel that’s not only just as good as its predecessor, but at times, feels even more cohesive, entertaining, and inventive.

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Comic Book Reviews for December 20, 2017

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2017 may be winding down, but the comic book industry sure isn't. This week saw the release of another stellar issue of Batman, the latest chapter of Dark Nights: Metal, and the debuts of Marvel Two-In-One, X-Men: Grand Design, Backways and the relaunched Quantum & Woody.

Scroll down to check out our reviews for these and various other new releases, and be sure to let us know your favorite books of the week in the comments below.

DC COMICS

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Hellboy: Krampusnacht #1 Review

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The prospect of a Hellboy Christmas special with our hero squaring off against demonic holiday entity Krampus is a pretty strong selling point all on its own. The fact that Hellboy: Krampusnacht features the pairing of writer Mike Mignola and artist Adam Hughes makes this issue all the more appealing. Taken all together, this book has no problem standing out amid the numerous holiday specials that have been hitting the stands in recent weeks.

As far as Hellboy adventures go, Krampusnacht is extremely straightforward. This standalone issue unfolds on a cold winter night in 1970's Austria, as a mournful ghost leads Hellboy into a confrontation with the dreaded Krampus.

The plot is the one area where this book struggles to measure up. Hellboy comics are rarely very plot-driven as it is, focusing more on atmosphere and exploring the supernatural world. It's a delicate struggle to maintain that approach without delivering too sparse and empty a story, and Krampusnacht doesn't quite manage that feat. The conflict is somewhat lacking in stakes, as Hellboy never seems to be in any real danger and the outcome is essentially set in stone. If anything, Krampusnacht reads more like fodder for a shorter tale in an anthology issue than a full-length, single-issue comic.

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Dark Nights: Metal #4 Review

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Dark Nights: Metal always leaves me wanting more, which is both this series' greatest strength and one glaring flaw. Metal can never be faulted for its ambition, as Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo seek to tie together all corners of the DCU into one vast, cosmic tapestry. But too often it feels as though this series is trying to do too much in the limited space it has. Even six issues and various assorted tie-ins doesn't seem sufficient for a tale this massive.

Snyder and Capullo continue to shed more light on the scope of this conflict and the ways it links so many disparate DC characters together. Most pleasing of all is the heavy focus on the Dreaming and how Daniel factors into the war against the Dark Multiverse. It's a real testament to the scope and gravity of Metal that it feels important enough to leave even the Lord of Dreams rattled, when normally superhero conflicts are beneath the notice of beings as all-powerful as the Endless. It's also a testament to the creative team's versatility that they're able to capture the lyrical quality of the Sandman comics. The storybook-esque opening page is an especially nice touch (as well as being further proof that DC should really start including recap pages in all books).

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Bright Review

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This is a spoiler-free review of Bright.

Netflix’s Bright is an ambitious undertaking from the streaming giant. Director David Ayer (Suicide Squad) takes Max Landis’ (Chronicle) script and tries to shape it into something tangible that will neatly fit into a 2-hour runtime, but Bright is a compelling narrative that needed more time to breathe. Landis is building his own version of Lord of the Rings (meets Bad Boys), which is a story you can’t rush. Perhaps a sequel or a longer running time would offer this story and the world they created the larger context it required.

In Bright -- elves, humans, faeries, orcs, and dragons all live together in a world that closely resembles ours. Will Smith plays officer Daryl Ward, who is forced to partner-up with the LAPD’s first orc policeman, Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton). Smith and Edgerton have excellent chemistry, as the two very different cops must learn to work together in a world that doesn’t think orcs and humans should coexist.

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Dreadnought Review

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With Saturn looming above me and the labyrinth of a sprawling space station below me, I can't stop thinking about Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Dreadnought’s space combat is literally worlds away from the galleons and sabers of Ubisoft's pirate epic, but it delivers the same nautical warfare satisfaction when I pull up one of the hulking titular ships alongside another dreadnought and let the broadside cannons erupt in a blaze of glory. I miss swinging abroad and taking the vessel for myself, but Dreadnought makes up for that with some Trekkie tech like cloaking devices and warp jumps.

That’s the kind of fun Dreadnought delivers in its finest moments. It’s a free-to-play, team-based PvP-focused area shooter in the style of World of Tanks, with its biggest and most distinctive difference being that it’s set in space. It thrives on the same type of slow, cooperative play that keeps Wargaming’s WW2 shooter appealing almost in spite of itself, while at the same time adding some depth in the form of vertical play allowed by the ships’ disregard for gravity.

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The Greatest Showman Review

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Phineas Taylor Barnum, co-founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, may have been one of the biggest liars in the history of the planet. The man took a monkey that had been sewed onto a fish and charged admission to see a mermaid, for crying out loud. It has even been claimed that he coined the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and guess what? He didn’t do that either.

All of this is to say that if you pay to see a musical melodrama about the life of P.T. Barnum, and you don’t expect to see the hogwashiest load of hogwash to ever wash a hog, that’s kind of on you. The Greatest Showman is a hokey glitter bomb of unbridled musical melodrama, and that’s not a critique. That’s the selling point.

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Marvel Two-In-One #1 Review

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Marvel Legacy has proven largely disappointing, even if it has benefited several ongoing titles (Doctor Strange, The Despicable Deadpool, Venom). Above all, Legacy has frustrated because there's so little genuinely new and different with this latest relaunch. With that in mind, Marvel Two-In-One is something of a bittersweet release. It's exactly the sort of comic I wanted to see with Legacy, and it's a shame there aren't more Marvel books like it.

Marvel Two-In-One perfectly encapsulates the general Legacy mission statement of honoring the history of the Marvel U. while also bravely charging forward. It's fitting that it does so by being the book to finally tackle the absence of the Fantastic Four head-on. With the Richards family still living it up somewhere in the vastness of the multiverse, Human Torch and the Thing are still trying to hold down the fort back home. And they're clearly not doing a great job of it. This series is nothing more or less than the story of how else two characters reconnect and find meaning in the absence of the rest of their family.

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All the Money in the World Review

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The moral bankruptcy of the rich and powerful has been a storytelling trope for as long as anybody remembers. Ebenezer Scrooge is the obvious old-timey example but heck, even the Bible argued that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” than it is to be rich and get into Heaven. So it takes a bit of work to make the idea that wealthy people are out of touch seem fresh again.

But good for him, Ridley Scott pulls it off in All the Money in the World, a new kidnapping thriller based on the true story of Gail Harris (Michelle Williams), who marries into the richest family in the world, only to leave when her husband sinks into drug addiction, and her father-in-law, J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer), reveals what a miserly and manipulative scumbag he is.

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Batman #37 Review

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There are a number of burning questions in the DC Universe at the moment. What will happen when Superman finally confronts Doctor Manhattan? When will the Justice Society and Legion of Super Heroes finally return? What's the deal with those three Jokers? Batman #37 has no answers to any of those questions, but it does definitively answer an even bigger mystery - can Superman throw a pitch so fast even Batman can't hit it?

That alone should give you some idea of what to expect from this hilarious and heartfelt wrap-up to the "Superfriends" story arc. Following last issue's Batman/Superman reunion, the two heroes and their significant others decide to hit up a superhero-themed carnival for a little bonding time. But because the carnival requires that all attendees dress the part, our heroes are forced to play a little dress-up switcheroo.

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Bridge Constructor Portal Review

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As a puzzle game, Bridge Constructor Portal comes as a breath of fresh air. Its Lemmings-like rules are simple and intuitive, but mesh together to create a lot of interesting depth and challenge. Plus, getting to revisit Aperture Laboratories in some form for one of the few times since 2011’s Portal 2 was a welcome treat.

The dubious science to be done in Bridge Constructor Portal involves safely guiding a vehicle with its gas pedal permanently floored across a set of clever obstacles to an exit point using metal girders and suspension wires to – as the name suggests – construct bridges. The challenging part is that the bridges, ramps, and towers you lay down can only attach to the level at set anchor points, and the realistic physics system requires that you distribute weight efficiently so that they’re able to hold up under stress.

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Alienware 15 R3 Gaming Laptop Review

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Alienware’s lineup of gaming laptops is designed to fit the needs of a pretty broad swath of gamers, as they're available in 13", 15", and 17"  options. The 15" model is the sweet spot in terms of size and performance, most would say, and the entry-level model is priced at a modest $1,249, with more powerful models running closer to $2,499.

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Dragon Ball Super Episode 120 Review

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Warning: The following review contains spoilers for the episode.

With so few warriors left in the Tournament of Power, it was Universe 3 that decided to step up and battle our heroes. Unfortunately, Universe 3 didn’t quite provide the excitement needed to make a strong episode, and although Episode 120 wasn’t bad, there was little in it to make it memorable when compared to the rest of the Tournament of Power.

Gohan hasn’t had too much time to shine yet, and sadly Episode 120 doesn’t change that though he’s in the middle of everything. While his character does have some great action moments, such as his Super Kamehameha, it’s rather par for the course at this point in time. Gohan has long been considered one of, if not the strongest warrior after Goku and Vegeta, so it seems weird that so deep into the Tournament of Power we’ve yet to truly see his character fully utilized.

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Downsizing Review

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So here’s the deal: the world is ending, overpopulation is unsustainable, non-replenishable resources are dwindling, and eventually we’re all going to die. I guess we might as well shrink ourselves, right?

That’s the premise of Alexander Payne’s very dry sci-fi comedy Downsizing, which takes place in a near future where shrinking technology exists, and many people are opting for the procedure to help save the environment and make the most of their finances. After all, extremely tiny people eat less food, use less fuel and produce less waste, and don’t have to spend nearly as much as a full-sized person on the basic amenities. It’s an extreme, but extremely logical life decision.

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Marvel's Runaways: "Refraction" Review

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

Last week, in my review for "Metamorphosis," I mistakenly thought Runaways was nearing the end of its season and that somehow this first run of episodes was only eight chapters long. As it turns out, we've been in the middle section of the season these past few weeks and that, understandably, explains why they've felt a touch chewy - a lot of running in place mixed with shifting loyalties and alliances. None of it bad, of course, but there's been a "pause" feeling, for sure. You can only play a narrative shell game for so long.

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Pitch Perfect 3 Review

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When Pitch Perfect hit theaters five years ago it was riding a wave of singing-related TV shows, YouTubers doing Acapella covers and mined the vein of raucous comedies with feisty female comedies but it still felt fresh. Pitch Perfect 2 tweaked and expanded the elements of the first film, added some new faces but it still worked well enough and felt like a progression. Pitch Perfect 3 has many of the same components from the first two films but plays around with the formula too much and hits too many bum notes.

Straight out of the gate this third film feels different. The opening scene starts off familiar enough and then lurches in an unfamiliar and totally uncharacteristic direction. Cue a swift rewind by a few weeks to explain how the Bellas found themselves in that situation. They’re now living in the big wide world trying, but mostly failing, to keep it together and hold down jobs. They get the chance to reunite for an overseas USO tour to make some music but, as we find out very quickly via leaden exposition, they are traveling with extra baggage -- the emotional kind.

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MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Titanium 8G Review

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Nvidia's newest Pascal GPU is the GTX 1070 Ti. It's a great line for 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x1440 gaming. So far we’ve reviewed GPUs from Zotac, Asus, and EVGA, and now we're taking MSI’s flagship offering for a spin around the test bench. The company is offering three versions of the card; two on the lower end of the spectrum, and one high-end model that's available in two color schemes; red and black, or silver and black.

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Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: "A Life Earned" Review

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

"A Life Earned" managed to bust through the mini-space rut of "A Life Spent" by giving us a handful of bigger moments and twists. From Deke revealing that it's his father's voice on that Earth radio, to Kasius' plan to get rich and blow the space station to smithereens, to the return of Fitz (who popped up quickly after I thought to myself "Who's that character in the distractingly badass mask?"), this episode pushed us forward through this season's on-an-island plot and raised, at least, the immediate stakes.

So where's Fitz been this whole time? Off doing his own thing, obviously. Not left behind exactly, and not off on Earth's surface as some grizzled older version of himself, Fitz did travel to the future, but maybe just at a different time. Similar to *slight spoiler* what happened in Thor: Ragnarok. Fitz maybe came through a few days, or weeks, earlier and managed to set up his own mission. Or maybe he just arrived now, later than everyone, having figured out a way to follow his friends through the time blast. Or, maybe he's just been Rosencrantz and Guildenstern'ing his way through this whole adventure and has purposefully kept himself hidden, off to the sides, while the focus was on everyone else.

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Fallout 4 VR Review

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Walking through the ruins of Boston in Fallout 4 VR is a sobering experience that makes the post-nuclear world feel that much more real. Fallout 4 clearly wasn’t built for this, as the troublesome Pip Boy menu system demonstrates all too well, but you can get around and defend yourself well enough that if you love Fallout and have a high-end PC and an HTC Vive, it’s hard to say no to.

Given the sky-high system requirements of a GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD FX 8350, it’s not all that surprising that Fallout 4 looks pretty respectable in VR. Far fewer knobs had to be turned to their lowest setting here than in Skyrim VR on the PlayStation 4, and while Fallout 4 was never a cutting-edge game when it comes to graphics, character models, textures, and draw distances are only a little bit below where I remembered them. I did have a few stutters on hardware above the requirements (a GTX 1080), but those appear to be limited to certain areas – such as Vault 111, which doesn’t make the best first impression. But it soon smoothed out, and for the most part played as expected.

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Mr. Robot: Season 3 Finale Review

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

The way Mr. Robot thrillingly drew everything back to the start in tonight's Season 3 finale, you'd think it was the actual endgame for the series. I mean, it makes sense. Elliot was out to utterly undo the Five/Nine hack (not that he could ever bring back the thousands who died in the bombings), Angela learned that Phillip Price was her freakin' dad (a twist that deftly borrowed from another sci-fi classic, The Empire Strikes Back, and not Back to the Future), and Elliot learned that his father never pushed him out a window at all. All of this had the markings for a series finale.

Of course, there was still Dom being under the Dark Army's terrifying thumb now and Elliot being beholden to Whiterose and her crazy Congo scheme. There were still issues to deal with and evil plots to thwart, but the rest of the story had all the hallmarks of a final episode. The Rules of a Part 3, as stated in Scream 3 - namely "Whatever you think you know about the past, forget it" - came alive here, giving "shutdown -r" a nice feeling of closure. As if, perhaps, mastermind Sam Esmail wasn't sure about a Season 4. Mr. Robot is uniquely and wonderfully crafted, and mostly critically acclaimed, but it's never quite been a ratings smash. There was an undercurrent of uncertainty this season, especially given its "back to basics" approach to storytelling that leaned more into the suspense of Season 1 than the "smoke and mirrors" of Season 2.

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Mister Miracle #5 Review

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Jack Kirby had a well-known saying, "Comics will break your heart." Kirby was referring mainly to the way giant publishers shew up and spit out creators without bothering to fairly compensate them for their efforts, but Tom King and Mitch Gerads include that line in Mister Miracle #5 as a way of acknowledging the melancholic quality of Scott Free's existence and the endless, destructive wars plaguing the New Gods. It's a reminder that this series is very true to the spirit of Kirby's work, even if it doesn't always attempt to replicate the look and feel of the classic Fourth World material.

Mister Miracle #5 continues the series' trend of blending the cosmic spectacle and grandeur of the New Gods with a very grounded, ordinary look at Scott Free and Barda's life on Earth. This issue could easily ditch its minimal superhero trappings and still function as a perfectly engaging look at a couple enjoying their last day together. King's script is a very sweet look at one of the most enduring romances in the DCU (it survived event the wrath of the New 52, after all). But it's also haunting and emotionally charged. How could it not be when the whole premise of this issue is that Scott is savoring every moment he can on the final day before his execution?

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Opus Magnum Review

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Beating a level in Opus Magnum is just the beginning. Sure, I built a machine to assemble that level’s target product, but how do I make it better? How do I make that machine of pistons, moving arms, and base components cheaper, smaller, or more efficient? It’s questions like this that literally kept me up at night, and what makes Opus Magnum one of the most captivating puzzle games I’ve ever played.

It’s set in a stylish, pseudo-futuristic fantasy world where alchemy is a fundamental part of life and, with a little thought, devices can turn water to fuel, lead to gold, and a whole lot more. The machines you build move and shift with satisfying, mechanical clunks that help make the 2D art pop as they operate. That mix of science and magic reinforces the idea that anything is possible, but it’s going to take work to figure out how.

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Star Wars #40 Review

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There may not be a Marvel book more frustrating in its inconsistency than Star Wars. Story-wise, the series has been reinvigorated by the debut of new writer Kieron Gillen and the effort paid to linking the events of Rogue One to the larger saga. But all that good work is being hindered by the garish artwork. You simply can't have a great comic without great art, and that seems to be a hurdle this series can't overcome in 2017.

There's plenty of compelling characterization to go around in this latest chapter. Luke is busy being exposed to the darker side of the war against the Empire as he teams up with Benthic and learn how the Partisans do business. Han shows a more sensitive side for a change as he coaxes the Millennium Falcon into performing past her limits. And perhaps most intriguing of all, Leia reflects on her late father and their final encounter before she made that fateful trip aboard the Tantive IV. All of this speaks to the great strength of Marvel's Star Wars comics. They may not affect the status quo of the larger franchise on the same level the old Expanded Universe books and novels did, but they add terrific new insight into the characters and relationships we thought we knew so well.

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South Park: Season 21 Review

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Warning: Full spoilers for South Park's 21st Season below.

South Park has increasingly focused on building and maintaining a season-long continuity in recent years. Season 20 was basically the culmination of that shift, delivering ten episodes that basically fit together as one long, rambling movie that lampooned the 2016 election. We saw the drawback of that approach, particularly when Donald Trump's election victory forced a major, last-minute rewrite. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem to have decided that they took the continuity-driven approach about as far as it could go last year. Season 21 shifted gears by returning the show to its roots, and the series became better for it.

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Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock Review

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Despite all its acclaim, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series that ran from 2004 to 2009 has been severely underrepresented when it comes to quality games. Similarly, recent choices for space-based strategy games have been limited too, especially if you aren’t looking for a 4X experience. But Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock solves all of these issues single-handedly, with tactical-strategy gameplay featuring Cylons, Vipers, and Battlestars. The best surprise, though, is that it’s all of that and a good game.

Deadlock is a cleverly designed space combat game layered on top of a challenging resource-management simulation. In this regard, Deadlock echos what makes games like XCOM so addictive: the ships you manage from a strategic perspective are the same ones you command in combat, so decisions made in one phase have significant impacts on the other. For instance, spending resources on a fleet officer might enhance a ship’s firepower in combat, but lose that ship and you will have a harder time tackling future missions. It’s a formula that’s worked in other games, and works just as well here.

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The Amazing Spider-Man #792 Review

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After so many years of writing Amazing Spider-Man, you'd think Dan Slott would have completely run out of new angles on Peter Parker by now. But somehow, that never seems to be the case. Even in a crossover that's geared heavily toward overhauling Venom's status quo in Marvel Legacy, the most fascinating element in "Venom Inc." is how Slott and co-writer Mike Costa are handling Spider-Man himself.

This second chapter of the crossover devotes most of its attention to the Spidey/Flash Thompson dynamic, one that's just been changed in a big way now that Flash has become the new Anti-Venom. At this point, it's nice just to see Flash back in action after he was unceremoniously demoted from the Venom role in 2016. But Slott does some great work here in exploring the complicated three-way relationship between Peter, Flash and the symbiote itself. Where Spider-Man is normally among the most compassionate and selfless heroes in the Marvel U., his hatred for the symbiote and all the damage it's caused over the years clouds his judgment. At one point, Flash accuses Peter of being a bully, which is a terrific subversion of the old-school Peter/Flash relationship.

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Netgear Nighthawk X6S Tri-Band WiFi Router Review

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Netgear's newest addition to its sweet-looking Nighthawk line of routers ups the bandwidth a bit over its previous models (and most tri-band AC routers for that matter) and is the first AC4000 router I've had a chance to examine. Dubbed the X6S (See it on Amazon) / (See it on Amazon UK), this is a tri-band router with two 5GHz bands and one legacy 2.4GHz band for older devices, and it also sports "Wave 2" AC features such as MU-MIMO as well as the ability to have it be controlled by Amazon's Alexa personal assistant.

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Ferdinand Review

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The pitch for Ferdinand is simple. Like so many other classic kids movies and stories from throughout time, it all stems from the idea of a character born into a certain kind of world or family, but with the unique desire to do the complete opposite of what that world or family says they must. What happens if a rat doesn’t want to steal food, but wants to cook? Or, as in the case of Ferdinand, what if a bull doesn’t want to spend his life fighting matadors in a ring? What if, instead, he’d rather spend his days smelling flowers and rolling through hills?

That’s the basic idea at the heart of Ferdinand, the new film from Blue Sky Studios, which has made a name for itself by putting out a string of mostly okay animated titles over the years, from Rio, Epic, or Horton Hears a Who, all the way to disappointing sequels like Ice Age: Continental Drift, Rio 2, and more. So the potential for Ferdinand to be either an entirely tolerable or completely miserable viewing experience was there, especially with director Carlos Saldanha on at the helm, a Blue Sky veteran whose resume is just as varied in quality as the studio’s filmography.

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Beyond Skyline Review

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Superficially, Liam O'Donnell's Beyond Skyline – a sequel to the financially successful but critically drubbed 2010 flick Skyline – contains everything a low-budget B movie ought to. Among its features are the destruction of Los Angeles, invading alien spacecraft, mammoth alien creatures with slithery human-grabbing tendrils, a machine specifically designed to suck out human brains (to then implant said brains in alien robot soldiers), laser guns, hypno-rays, an honest-to-goodness kaiju fight, and a healthy helping of human-on-human fight choreography from masters Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhain (both from The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2). If one were to judge the film solely on its gloriously adolescent mayhem tally, Beyond Skyline would be marked down as a minor classic.

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TLOZ: Breath of the Wild: The Champions' Ballad DLC Review

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If The Champions’ Ballad is indeed the last new content we see for Breath of the Wild, it doesn’t feel like much of a send-off. This web of new overworld trials and Shrines is strung together by some fairly throwaway backstory, and its rewards are minimal. And yet, as it came to a close, it was what I'd played, not the story I'd been told, that shone through. I'd just been given 8 more stellar hours of one of the best games ever made. This isn't a goodbye from Hyrule, it's a nudge to return there.

While it’s teed up as story-focused DLC, The Champions’ Ballad feels much more akin to the first DLC pack, The Master Trials, in structure. It’s definitively endgame material, focused on challenging players who think they’ve mastered Breath of the Wild’s beautifully tessellated systems.

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi Review

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Author's Note: This is an advanced, spoiler-free review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) tells Rey (Daisy Ridley), “This is not going to go the way you think.” That line proves to be true for just about every plot thread, every scene, every moment in the entire movie. Writer/director Rian Johnson packs the eighth episode in the Skywalker saga with genuine surprises of all kinds, which all amount to a thrilling, emotional, and funny film that is easily the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back.

J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens got dinged for borrowing too much from A New Hope, but recycling old material isn’t an issue in The Last Jedi. It’s evident that Johnson understands the criticisms about every preceding film and predicted the assumptions about this one (to the point where some dialogue sounds as if it was lifted right from fans’ mouths), and that he used that knowledge to absolutely shatter expectations. There are fan-pleasing moments, for sure, but nothing is included without a purpose. Johnson plays with all the toys Star Wars has to offer, and he’s not afraid to change – or break – a few along the way.

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