Above Average Joe Blogs

By the time I'd sprinted to the end of Outlast 2's lean campaign of around 6 hours the opening tension had long since died out to be replaced by utter confusion, bewilderment, and jaded cynicism at the amount of violence, only punctuated with the occasional creepy image. Australia's Funniest Home Videos got dark. That isn't to say Outlast 2 is a bad game, far from it, but in terms of horror it is decidedly average, too eager to the throw gore and obscenities on top of gore and obscenities, when a quiet lull and sinister shadow would have made you tremble from head to toe. I think the intensity of my negativity above stems from the fact that the game has at its core an interesting premise. Much like the original Outlast your character is in the reporter/journalist school of archetypes, which serves as the reasoning for why he insists on filming everything. That's right, for the uninitiated the Outlast series focuses on first person horror with the option of...

A Shared (Collapsing) Universe  One happy family A "shared universe" is the hip new cool thing to have. Everyone's got one, from the Avengers and the Justice League, to Godzilla and King Kong, and now Universal is banking on The Mummy being the tentpole film for their Dark Universe. The Dark Universe is set to comprise of resurrecting the vintage Universal monsters of the black and white period. This means, pending good box office returns (not so much critics, sorry The Mummy) we are set to see Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Invisible Man, and The Creature of the Black Lagoon return to the silver screen.  But doesn't this beg the question: aren't we a bit fatigued by this whole shared universe idea though? Can't a film just stand on its own two feet, propelling its own narrative forward without having to make concessions to another 6 potential movies, some that many years off too? Whilst Marvel's cinematic universe has proven fertile gro...