To appreciate Shadowgrounds, you have to ignore the story . Like any other arcade-styled shooter (or your typical run and gun FPS for that matter), the story should be of no consequence next to the action. To its detriment, Shadowgrounds tries to emphasize the story. And like Doom 3, a game that has influenced it in many ways, it has fallen victim to that mistake.

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Ask anyone which chapter of the Indiana Jones trilogy is their favorite and they will name Raiders of the Lost Ark (mine) or The Last Crusade. I have not met a single person who told me that they felt The Temple of Doom was the best, as it is largely considered the weakest of the trilogy by both fans and critics. Why? While it may suffer from being the middle movie in the trilogy, the film stands solidly on its own as a typical Indiana Jones adventure. Part of the problem is that you can’t help but compare it to the other two chapters in the Trilogy, and as a result seems terribly out of place due to its unfamiliar cultural backdrop. After watching it recently I’ve collected some of the reasons how this movie dissociates itself from the Indiana Jones oeuvre, and likely influences its standing in the minds of viewers.

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I intended for my recent article about the state of the comic book movie to be comprehensive. I assembled the micro-reviews by memory, and last year’s Constantine (a somewhat loose adaptation of DC’s Hellblazer series) somehow slipped by. Though I guess that says a lot about the quality of the movie. I’ve added it to the article for completeness.

X-Men: The Official Game makes an attempt at tying together the events after X-Men United and The Last Stand where you actually get to find out what happens to Nightcrawler. I was fully prepared to write an overbearing examination of why multiplatform games frustratingly insist on low-res menus and keyboard-only input for their PC counterparts. I was going to complain about how after 10 years of 3D platforming there are still a bunch of assclowns out there who can’t get a camera right. I would have been sure to demean the bad art in the still cutscenes that only work in a game like Thief that has style to match. I usually take pleasure in disassembling such disposable entertainment as this, but the inadequate collection of moves spread across three playable characters combined with the infuriating controls serve as an excruciating reminder that it’s nothing more than a movie tie-in.

I see that the rumour mill is once again in full effect saying that Blizzard is going “all MMORPG on the games industry” based on a slide taken out of context from a presentation to some pack of clueless businessmen. Regardless of whether this might actually be true (just look at the amount of backpedaling Gamespot has done!), I find it hard to believe this is coming as a surprise to anyone. There have been talks about Blizzard turning their three franchises into MMORPGs since World of Warcraft was released. What’s the big deal? It’s not like Blizzard had plans to create anything new…they’ve been milking their trinity of IP for almost eight years! Even if their new game wasn’t an MMORPG, what was it going to be? StarCraft 2?

The real surprise in all this is the lack of any snide commentary from Matt Gallant, who usually goes out of his way to slag off the gaming website community when they parrot frivolous rumours like this.