Can the first third of a story be entertaining and epic enough to stand alone as its own movie? That’s the question the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, recently released on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download, asks of its viewers. When Peter Jackson took the huge risk of adapting the Lord of the Rings novels into three epic films, there were questions then if moviegoers could stick with it for the long haul. At least each movie was about one book. With this adaptation of The Hobbit, a book only one quarter the size of the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Jackson needed to be able to stretch out the book without making it feel stretched out. I had my doubts, which is why I skipped seeing this prequel in the theater, but now I believe it can be done.

Iron Man 3 wisely stays within the margins. It doesn't try to go bigger than Iron Man 2, with more men in larger suits battling with Tony Stark. So many superhero films make that mistake. It gets tiring to watch onscreen. No, this film goes darker and more introspective than many of the other Marvel superhero films that have been produced thus far.

One of the cornerstones of the original Star Trek series was its underlying commentary on Cold War politics and attitudes. When the Cold War ended and the world seemed to be taking a different direction, Star Trek as a whole evolved into new directions as well. But with political tensions rising once again in all-too-familiar patterns, the Star Trek novels have followed suit, bringing back those old Cold War staples in a new arrangement.

When I was a kid, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels. I might not have always read them in the correct order by going to the page they told me to, but they were quite enjoyable. Those were a type of "gamebook" primarily aimed at children, and during the 80's there were other writers selling variations of the gamebook format. One popular variation was an "adventure gamebook," one that combined the narrative with a solitary tabletop roleplaying experience. One of the main figures creating such experiences was Steve Jackson, co-founder of Games Workshop (not to be confused with the guy who created Munchkin) with his Fighting Fantasy series. The series of books that are not a part of the main chronology are now coming to iOS devices - Steve Jackson's Sorcery!

“The Eye of the World” hit bookstore shelves in 1990. To put this in perspective, I was a junior in high school at the time. It boggles the mind to consider just how much time it has taken for the full saga of “The Wheel of Time” to be told. 23 years, 14 volumes (and 1 prequel), and 2 authors later, the story is now officially complete. And what a conclusion it is.

When this title was handed to me to review, I was pretty pumped. Just glancing at the product description, the game is touted as being a puzzle/RPG hybrid. So in my head, I'm like "Hey, that sounds like Puzzle Quest! I don't totally hate Puzzle Quest if it's the first game!" This lead to me to watch a video of the gameplay. At first, I thought I was watching a knock off of Square Enix's Final Fantasy Theatrhythm. Then the solid colors of Dungeon's Hearts puzzle pieces came rolling down this moving invisible conveyor belt towards the brightly colored heroes and an awesome musical track playing in the background. It was at this moment I realized I was going to like this game. However, it was not at this moment that I realized the game was going to kick my butt. That came painfully later. (Click more... for more)

Time travel stories are hard to pull off. There will always be nitpickers who love to point out plot holes, citing scientific theories that they subscribe to that they believe null and void the entire plot. While I do appreciate that it gets people involved and researching theoretical time travel, just debunking the plot because it doesn’t fit your definition of how time travel should work means you may never like a time travel story. My only prerequisite for these stories is that they explain their time travel rules and as long as they follow those rules they clearly set out, then it works for me. (Click more... for more)

It’s shocking how this mini-series of novels has existed (and been released) under the radar. Enough fans were dissatisfied with the series finale, and the subsequent cancellation of plans for direct-to-DVD titles, for me to think that they would be clamoring for an in-depth, highly consistent “Season 6” in book form. After all, how often do fans say that if a show is canceled, the writers should finish out the storylines in novels?

This isn't a review of a poker game. I'm putting that up front because I think that's the most important sentence of this entire review, so much so that I'm going to put one of my trademark dashes here and repeat the statement - this isn't a review of a poker game. I don't care if "poker" is in the title or the backdrop of the entire experience centers around creating the best hand out of your hole cards and what's on the table. That's not what this is. It's a shame they lopped off the last part of the title, because while the name of the game is Poker Night 2, it really is A Night At The Inventory 2.

The fifth novel in the reconceived Chung Kuo saga, “The Art of War” reads very much like a transitional piece. That makes a certain amount of sense, given that it was originally just the first half or so of “The Broken Wheel” (the original saga’s second volume), but it also means that it doesn’t stand particularly well as a story in and of itself. It is only meaningful within the larger context of Chung Kuo.