The Lodge Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Pulling off slow-burn storytelling is no easy feat, but it’s especially tricky in horror. The genre has a lot of options for filmmakers looking to keep audiences engaged and on edge, but when the focus is on slowly building dread and forgoing a sensory overload approach, it’s important to tell your story clearly and pay that patience off throughout. When it’s done right, we get movies like The Shining and Hereditary. When things go wrong, we get something like The Lodge, directed by the duo behind 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, which has atmosphere to spare and a trio of able performers simmering in its pot, but confused themes and a lack of tension keep the film from boiling over the way those other slow-burn standards do. Siblings Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) are coping with some big, traumatic changes in their lives. Their mother Laura (Alicia Silverstone) has recently committed suicide and their father (Richard Armitage) has moved swiftly on to a new romantic interest. Grace (Riley Keough) tries to bond with Aidan and Mia, but she quickly finds there’s little common ground there. Then, family-fueled trauma is nothing new for Grace: she’s the sole survivor of a Jonestown-esque mass suicide event presided over by her cult leader dad. Richard thinks the key to getting these two camps to gel is by forcing them to spend time alone at a remote lodge together. But of course, the snow flies, the power dies, and Grace and the kids are left to fend for themselves. No power and heat is one thing, but increasingly inexplicable events force Grace and the kids to consider whether the nature of their isolation may be more sinister. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/37939E5] The remote Massachusetts cabin where most of the film takes place provides a strong setting for the film’s naturalistic cinematography. Muted light reflecting off the snow and shadows playing off rich wood-paneled walls, from which Laura’s religious icons loom, give the film a grounded feel. The visuals and similarly strong score could’ve been potent assets to telling an intense, claustrophobic story had the film done a better job figuring out what it was trying to say. The Lodge deals with themes like grief, trauma, and religion throughout, but those themes don’t feel connected to what’s going on in the film’s central conflict: an inexperienced mother figure and her unwilling charges dealing with a life-threatening situation. With much of the kids’ half of the narrative dealing with the mistrust of their soon-to-be stepmom, most of The Lodge’s thematic work comes from Grace’s side of the story. The problem there is that, just as The Lodge wants to constantly call into question what’s keeping Grace and the kids trapped in the snow, Grace’s dubious reliability as a focal character leads anything gleaned from time spent with her to be taken with a grain of salt. That means that a lot of the work The Lodge does building tension goes astray, as most of the time it’s unclear what is a real threat and what is not. It’s a narrative miscalculation that hurts a lot of the movie, particularly through the second act, as most of the film’s attempts to shock the audience out of its comfort zone don’t actually feel all that threatening. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-25-best-horror-movies&captions=true"] Fans of Goodnight, Mommy know that directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala like to play with their audience’s sympathies toward their characters. At various times throughout, The Lodge asks you to put aside your feelings towards the kids in favor of Grace, and vice versa. The problem with that here is that ask becomes harder and harder to accept, given how erratic and violent Grace becomes. Aidan and Mia are presented for most of the film as genuinely good kids, so when they cross a line in how they’re dealing with Grace, it feels indicative of a mean streak the movie has, out of character, and engineered to keep the story interesting. It’s not the only time in the film Franz and Fiala’s hands are visible moving pieces into place - convenient snowstorms and choices with ill-defined motivation keep The Lodge feeling like something you’re watching, not something you’re particularly drawn into. Speaking of Goodnight, Mommy, The Lodge shares a certain amount of DNA with Franz and Fiala’s debut, to the point where parts of this story may feel like a rehash of that less seen Austrian film. While they may enjoy playing with the motif of distrust between parent and child, Franz and Fiala retread a lot of the same thematic ground here as they did in Goodnight, Mommy. None of that should be considered a knock against Keough’s centerpiece performance in The Lodge. Keough plays Grace with a shyness and fragility that holds firm in her initial good faith attempts to bond with Aidan and Mia, all the way through her breakdown at the lodge. Impressively, despite Grace’s pretty terrible babysitting skills, Keough keeps Grace from feeling like someone to root against, even if you won’t be sure why you’d want to root for her. Likewise, Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh hold their own as Grace’s wards. Martell brings intelligence and sensitivity to his watchful big brother, traits which may evoke comparisons to his turn as Bill Denbrough in IT: Chapter One. McHugh gets the heavier emotional lifting. Mia is clearly devastated by the loss of their mother, clinging to a doll that resembles her, and McHugh does an impressive job when the film calls for her to let us see that pain. Keough, Martell, and McHugh’s interplay is the backbone of The Lodge, and if the three of them weren’t working as hard as they are, the whole film may have collapsed. Richard Armitage has very little to do, other than strand the leads together at his cabin. Alicia Silverstone gets even less screen time and considering her brief appearance teases a really interesting foil to Grace, her absence feels particularly disappointing as the film goes on.

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Star Trek: Picard Episode 3 Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Full spoilers follow for this episode. The third episode of Star Trek: Picard oddly opens with a quick montage of the Mars attack from last week, which almost plays like a dream sequence but turns out to just be there to catch us up in case we missed the last episode (which is what the “previously on” segment is there for, but O.K.). It then slides into a different flashback: the day 14 years ago that Picard resigned his commission in the wake of those attacks. In a fine bit of story back-filling, we also meet Picard’s former First Officer Raffi (Michelle Hurd), and get a real sense of their dynamic and how things went wrong between them. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=star-trek-picard-photos&captions=true"] These two approaches -- replaying or re-explaining stuff like the Mars attack, and cool scenes between Jean-Luc and some new character -- tend to be the way Picard has been rolling so far this season. The result is a frequently appealing and exciting return to the character that alternatively turns into an exposition-laden slog for half of its running time, as if the writers don’t trust us to be able to keep up -- or don’t trust that they’re getting their ideas across. In this week’s segment, "The End Is the Beginning," it’s Isa Briones’ Soji Asha who takes up a lot of our time talking about the same thing over and over again. The episode keeps cutting back to her on the former Borg cube now known as the Artifact, where she’s working to help former members of the Borg ease back into their lives. But she’s also looking, we learn here, to employ the "therapeutic utility of a shared mythical framework" with the ex-Borg. Basically, she wants to use their mythology to connect with them… or something. But that’s the thing, because even though so much time this week is spent with Soji and this idea, we still don’t really understand what it all means by the end of the episode -- despite going back to Soji and her Romulan ex-Borg patient several times. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/star-trek-picard-who-is-raffi-musiker"] Also frustrating is the fact that another classic character made his debut this week and yet we learned virtually nothing about what he’s been up to for the past 30 years. Jonathan Del Arco played a Borg named Hugh who Picard’s crew freed from the Collective back on The Next Generation. He was only in two episodes, so even fans of the old show might not recognize him here in his more human form, sans cyborg implants. Surely we’ll learn more about him eventually, but it seems an unnecessary tease to drop him here with absolutely no explanation. Meanwhile over on “current day” Earth, Picard is trying to get Raffi’s help in finding a ship that can take him offworld in his search for Soji, but he finds that his former officer is now a space-weed-vaping, hard-drinking burnout who resents him for ruining her career all those years ago. It’s an interesting idea to give us a less than perfect ex-Starfleeter like this, but the show seems to be laying it on a bit thick, particularly when it comes to Raffi complaining about the economic gap between her and Picard. Why exactly is she crying about money in a post-money society, anyway? Can’t she just have a vineyard too if she wants one? Anyway, Raffi puts Jean-Luc in touch with another ex-Starfleeter in Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera). He has cool ship -- it’s even got a slick paintjob! -- and a fun EMH (also played by Cabrera) who is like Batman’s butler Alfred, only if he got less respect from his master. Rios runs the risk of becoming a stereotype very quickly with the whole shrapnel in the shoulder/I don’t need a dermal regenerator shtick, as well as the dead-captain back story… and yet, when the EMH calls Rios on his “angsty teenage moral relativism,” you have to chuckle. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/star-trek-the-history-of-the-borg-timeline"] So Picard finally has his ship and his crew -- Allison Pill’s Dr. Jurati is also tagging along -- but before he takes off for the great beyond, there’s a nicely choreographed fight scene in his home as more Romulan baddies show up. Fortunately my favorite non-Jean-Luc characters Laris (Orla Brady) and Zhaban (Jamie McShane) are on hand to exercise their Tal Shiar training, though Picard keeps a couple of phaser pistols hidden under the coffee table for just such an occasion, so he’s able to help out as well. I continue to worry for Laris and Zhaban -- they aren’t main cast members, and therefore could be expendable. And yet there’s just something about them that works. When Zhaban is about to deliver a death blow to the sole surviving attacker, Laris scolds him in their native tongue, “We are not like them anymore.” Damned straight you’re not. By episode’s end, we’re seemingly, hopefully on our way to a less leisurely adventure than these three episodes have so far given us. Listen, I’m all for a good Picard speech -- I practically minored in that s#!t in college. But at a certain point you have to make it so already. Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• The Romulan baddies whispering in a dark hallway with canted angles is just too much.
• Soji is “the Destroyer,” eh? Sounds… bad.
• Next stop: Freecloud (whatever that is) and Bruce Maddox?!
• The EMH nailed it when mentioning several of Picard’s greatest achievements: “Chief contact with the Q Continuum, Arbiter of Succession for the Klingon Empire, savior of Earth from Borg invasion, captain of the Enterprises D and E, the man even worked alongside the great Spock…”
• I neglected to mention last week that Raffi’s home is at Vasquez Rocks, which of course has been the real-life site of many Star Trek adventures in the past, including the fight between the Gorn captain and James T. Kirk.
• We now understand what Soji’s take is on the Romulans harvesting Borg tech: “I hate it,” she says. Hugh agrees.
• Where was Picard when Raffi needed him, anyway?
• So Picard is aware that there must be Federation complicity in order for the Romulan attack squads to be operating on Earth, but when Raffi says she has evidence about the Mars attack he’s skeptical and doesn’t seem interested in even looking at it?
• Commodore Oh popped in again this week and she’s wearing… sunglasses (also, her ear prosthetics were really sticking out in that scene). As my colleague Jim Vejvoda points out, Mirror Universe inhabitants are very light-sensitive. Hmm…

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Warcraft 3: Reforged Review

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Over the course of the last week, there’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth over shortcomings in Warcraft 3: Reforged’s effort to freshen up an 18-year-old RTS classic. And while there are undoubtedly some cut corners and buggy menus dragging things down, what made the original Warcraft 3 great mostly still holds up today. After an MMO with seven expansions, a digital card game, and a feature film, Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne represent the pinnacle of the Warcraft franchise in many ways. The new coat of paint, while not as impressive as I expected, makes it even more enjoyable to revisit that peak.

What struck me the most in the seven full-length, single-player campaigns included with Reforged was how dynamic and compelling Warcraft’s storytelling used to be. Warcraft 3 hit before the constraints of a faction-focused PvP MMO and its roughly two-year expansion cycle put Blizzard’s writers in a bit of a box. But this tale of Arthas’ fall, the reawakening of the Night Elves, Kael’thas leading his people into exile, and the first major confrontation with the Burning Legion comprise a wonderful fantasy epic. And the mission design, particularly in the Frozen Throne campaigns, still holds up against the cream of today’s strategy crop. World of Warcraft, at its very best, can brush up against these heights, but it has never truly surpassed them.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/the-first-17-minutes-of-warcraft-3-reforged-exodus-of-the-horde-gameplay"]

If you’ve never experienced Warcraft 3’s story before, basking in its memorable characters, meaningful twists, dramatic changes of fate, and climactic confrontations are worth the price of admission already.

Four Nation Army

Each of the four factions presents an interesting and different playstyle, from the fairly conventional Humans, who work like a classic RTS faction, to the completely out-there undead Scourge, who collect lumber with their frontline infantry units, raise enemy corpses to fight for them, and use their food buildings as defensive towers. Winning in multiplayer still heavily focuses on heroes and who can gobble up the most experience points from neutral monsters the fastest, which can be frustrating if you get your perfect army crushed because the other team’s champions out-farmed you. But once you get a grasp on how this is a different kodo beast from other RTSes, it offers interesting new challenges and strategies.

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Aside from the hero system that would lead directly to the creation of the MOBA genre, Warcraft 3 introduced a handful of other unique and cool mechanics to the mix. The day/night cycle and how certain units interact with it, particularly Night Elves, adds some excellent opportunities and obstacles when it comes to timing big attacks or laying ambushes. The upkeep system that charges you for a percentage of your gold income when your army gets too big forces you to make meaningful decisions about whether you need a stronger force or a stronger economy. It’s much more than your typical base building game in a lot of ways that have allowed it to remain distinct and entertaining even as the genre has waned.

For a Warcraft veteran like myself, the visual upgrade here is the biggest draw aside from nostalgia. And in that, Reforged only partially succeeds. On the one hand, this is the best the characters and units from the Warcraft universe have ever looked, even including the recent model updates in WoW. The visual style is a bit more realistic and gritty, and closer to the look of a Blizzard cinematic than the slightly cartoonier, more stylized version of the world we’ve grown accustomed to. When I really zoom in to look at the details on a peon or a death knight, it makes me wish World of Warcraft looked this good.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/warcraft-3-reforged-blizzcon-2018-vs-launch-2020-comparison"]

The environments haven’t been given quite as much love though. The HD textures are crisp and attractive, and they’ve added more 3D vegetation to give the land some depth. But the level geometry is still pretty blocky and dated-looking. The trees aren’t very detailed compared to the ghouls whacking away at them. The waterfalls in particular are just plain ugly, and look like they could have been ported straight from the 2002 version.

Zug Bug

While some people have reported running into a variety of different issues, I’ve been lucky enough not to run into any serious bugs so far, but the menus do all feel very finicky and half-baked. They lag and freeze regularly, buttons aren’t responsive, sometimes the map for the next mission doesn’t even display correctly, and UI elements in the post-battle summary can overlap and become unreadable. It’s the least-polished element of the whole affair by far.

Venturing out from the excellent campaign mode and into multiplayer, I didn’t find it hard to have a good time though. There are some features from the original disappointingly missing, like custom campaign support and automated tournaments, but what is here works pretty well. You can still jump into dozens of diverse custom maps featuring everything from Lord of the Rings-inspired battles to tower defense. The skirmish matchmaking is fast, painless, and did a good job of placing me with similarly-skilled opponents. Of course, the UI still managed to get in its own way here. I could never get the custom map browser to sort properly, forcing me to scroll down and manually look for matches with low ping.

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Nvidia Shield TV Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Nvidia’s Shield TV is a high-end 4K media streamer with some gaming chops. Now the company has refreshed the Shield TV unit with a cylindrical shape, faster processor, AI upscaling, Dolby Vision support, redesigned remote, and lower price. While the odd, cigar-like shape of the Shield TV itself and the strangely triangular remote control will get your attention, the biggest change to the Shield TV is its newfound ability to harness AI to convincingly upscale HD video to 4K. And true to Nvidia’s primary calling, the Shield TV provides a number of gaming outlets, from the usual fare of mobile games in the Google Play Store to streaming AAA titles from its GeForce Now service or your own PC. It’s also less expensive than the previous model ($150 MSRP, down from $200), no longer holding the crown of most expensive streaming box, a title the $179 Apple TV 4K now inherits. Does its faster performance, AI upscaling and lower price make the Nvidia Shield TV the streaming box (or, in its case, cylinder) to own? Let’s dig in and find out.

Design and Features

Streaming boxes are usually cube-like in shape, but the new Nvidia Shield TV arrives in a drastically different form factor: the humble cylinder. With an HDMI port on one end and the power connector on the other, it’s meant to be stashed behind your TV among your tangle of cables. Next to the HDMI port is a microSD slot for expanding the Shield TV’s internal storage, and an Ethernet jack sits next to the power port if you’d rather use a wired connection to your network rather than Wi-Fi. There’s also a button that makes the remote emit a series of beeps if you ever need help locating it.

The remote control is less likely to slip between your couch cushions than the previous Shield TV remote or the skinny remotes for Apple TV or Fire TV. Unlike those thin slivers, the Shield TV remote is triangular in shape and noticeably more substantial, like a Toblerone chocolate bar. And it has some heft to it – in large part because it’s powered by two AAA batteries instead of a smaller, rechargeable battery.

The remote makes it easy to navigate the Android TV interface. It has a navigational ring that surrounds a Select button. Below are Home and Back buttons, media control buttons, volume buttons, and a voice search button via Google Assistant. Above the navigation ring are two buttons – the power button and a programmable button you can set to perform one of a variety of tasks, including opening the settings menu, muting the volume, or toggling AI upscaling on and off. After testing the AI upscaling, I ended up setting the button to act as a mute button. The bottom-most button is a Netflix button that I wish wasn’t so wide because I constantly hit it by accident. I also still haven’t gotten used to the layout of the media control buttons – fast forward, play/pause, and rewind are lined up vertically. It helps, however, that the buttons light up when you pick up the remote.

To get the remote’s volume buttons working, you’ll need to head into the settings of Android TV and connect it with your TV, speakers, or soundbar. You can do the same thing in order to have the remote’s power button turn your TV on and off with the Shield TV. Both volume and power buttons were easy to set up and seamless to use.

Like the previous model, the newest Shield TV supports HDR10 and Dolby Atmos. Unlike the last model, it also supports Dolby Vision, which is good news for watching 4K content on Prime Video, Apple, Netflix and Vudu. It lacks the HDR10+ format, which provides an even more realistic, dynamic picture – a feature you get with the Amazon Fire TV Cube. The Shield TV can also act as a Chromecast for streaming content from your phone, tablet or laptop.

Powering the Shield TV is Nvidia’s own Tegra X1+ processor and 8GB of flash storage. The new Tegra chip is up to 25% faster than the Tegra X1 chip in the previous Shield TV, according to Nvidia, but the storage capacity is half that of the previous model. You can, however, expand the Shield TV’s storage via the microSD card slot. (The previous model had a USB port for expanded storage.) Then again, given the sheer amount of streaming content available, you may not even fill the 8GB of internal storage.

Unlike the previous Shield TV, the current model does not ship with a game controller. This helps bring the price down by $50 from the previous model, and isn’t a terrible omission if you have an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 controller, either of which work just fine. I quickly and easily paired at Xbox One controller with the Shield TV, although it wasn’t always smooth sailing – more on that in the next section.

Setting up Shield TV is a snap, requiring only a power cable and HDMI connection to your TV. You will, however, need to supply your own HDMI cable; Nvidia curiously doesn’t include one in the box. With the Shield TV connected to your TV and powered on, you simply need to connect to your home network, either wired or wirelessly. The entire process took me less than 10 minutes, and that included running a system update for Android TV and pairing the Shield TV remote with my Vizio soundbar and Insignia TV.

Running Android TV 8.1, the Shield TV is easy to navigate. A row small icons sits at the top of your favorite apps; you can add and remove apps to this list and drag and drop to reorder the list. Below that sits a row of Nvidia games you can play or stream; most of the titles listed are streamable via Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, but any games you purchase from the Google Play Store also show up here. Below these top two rows of apps and games are rows of your “channels.” That is, the streaming services you use, from the Google Play Store and YouTube to Netflix and Hulu. For each channel row, you can scroll sideways to see thumbnails of recommendations.

You can customize your rows of channels, but some services, including YouTube TV and Amazon Prime Video, don’t get their own channel in this column. I accessed these two streaming services from the row of favorites at the top, which isn’t terribly inconvenient, but doesn’t show recommendations that would let me jump directly into a show.

On the whole, the Android TV interface is well organized and easily customizable – with some limitations in terms of which services can be added as a channel. And since Nvidia doesn’t offer its own streaming service outside of GeForce Now for games, it isn’t tipped toward one service. The Fire TV Cube, for instance, heavily favors Prime Video content. With Shield TV, it is a more equitable layout among the services, although it is disappointing that not every service is available to add as its own channel, including Amazon’s.

I cut the cord last year, moving from cable TV to YouTube TV, and my only complaint has been the slow speed with which my Roku TV switches channels. That lag all but disappeared with Shield TV. Flipping through channels on YouTube TV via Shield TV is much faster than with my Roku-enabled Insignia TV and on par with the speed of the Apple TV 4K.

One major Shield TV feature that you won’t find on other streaming boxes is the ability to play AAA games. In addition to downloading casual games from the Google Play Store and playing them, you can stream games via Nvidia’s GeForce Now service and from your own PC – as long as it has an Nvidia GeForce GPU. With the Nvidia Experience app open on my PC, I was able to stream games to my TV, but navigating menus of some games with a controller on my TV proved challenging, to the point that on more than one occasion I had to retreat to my PC and press enter or use a mouse to move the cursor. For the most part, games played smoothly, but I did encounter a problem with CS:GO I couldn’t solve. Although my Xbox One controller worked perfectly for the game on my PC, the controls weren’t right when playing on my TV – I couldn’t move forward without also panning up, which made the game unplayable.

While only gamers with GeForce-based PCs are able to use GameStream, any and all Shield TV owners with a 4K HDTV will enjoy its AI upscaling, which takes 720p and 1080p video and upscales it to 4K. I am generally skeptical of such upscaling, but it’s very effective and convincing on the Shield TV. It’s easy to toggle on and off, and the Shield TV even includes a demo mode that lets you move a vertical line across your screen to compare the upscaled and original image side-by-side. I found the differences between the two images to be slight but appreciated – surfaces appeared more textured and edges were crisper with AI upscaling, and it didn’t introduce any artifacts. I ended up leaving it enabled on its Medium setting (there’s also Low and High settings for Detail Enhancement), but I was disappointed to find it didn’t work with YouTube with Live TV or games. I wish I could watch live sports with AI upscaling, but I was more than happy to stream content on Netflix and Hulu with it.

Purchasing Guide

The Nvidia Shield TV is available at its MSRP of $149.99 direct from Nvidia’s site as well as online retailers, including Amazon and Best Buy. It was briefly discounted to $129 in late January, but is back to full price as of this writing.

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