A Movie Review of The Purge (2013) and Welcome Back!

They are back! Yes they are! Movie Reviews!

Because you requested them! (not really)

Here at Subculture Times, we like to give you more content! and we are going to bring back our written content, because I know you are tired of those pesky videos (which you can check out over HERE).

Before I start my rant... I mean... review, I feel like I need to give my little disclaimer to everyone reading:

All I ask is that you keep in mind that I AM NOT a professional critic of any sort, and all my reviews mean nothing. I write not to tell you that something is good, or terrible; but simply to share my opinion.

Read with an open mind and feel free to contact me and tell me how wrong I am about everything.

So with that out of the way, lets get to the review!

A Movie Review of The Purge (2013)

In a the very near future, the US Government has implemented what the call "The Purge", which is an annually held, 12-hour period, where there are no laws and people can commit any crimes with no repercussions, even murder. Great premise! The movie is about a family that is being attacked by a group of people, for protecting the group's target for the purge.

It is the night of the purge, and the Sandin family are ready to lock down for the night. Everything seems to go according to plan, until the youngest son Charlie hears a man yelling for help outside on the streets. In Charlie's infinite wisdom, he decides to let this stranger into the house. Soon after there is a group outside demanding the family give them their "kill for the night" and insist that they will not hesitate to break in and kill everyone. It is the purge after all.

This movie is not great. I'm not saying don't go watch it, I'm saying don't expect much from it. First of all, most of the actors are not that great. And that antagonist! I wont spoil The Purge, but I found his acting a little over the top. And speaking of antagonist, "wearing a mask" is so cliche, I feel they could had done away with it completely. Beside the acting I also noticed that they kept using close-up shots, maybe to convey that they are trapped. I also saw this movie on the bottom rows so everything was up close, but the comment stands. Shaky camera and cheesy jump scares round off this not-so-great movie.

But not all is bad. Ethan Hawke gave a great performance and is easily the best part of the movie. There is some good suspense towards the middle, and also some good gore moments that the horror fan in me really enjoyed. I feel like the end was really solid, and you can feel the tone of the movie change as the sun rises. One last thing i want to comment on is the way the news serve to explain a little about how the purge came to be; and the psychological aspect of it, as well as the economic ramifications that it has had on the american society. I thought that was a neat way to explain it without having to stop the plot or interrupt it at some point.

Overall The Purge is just another suspense movie, with a healthy amount of killings at the end. Its a fun movie, but not a great movie. This is a type a movie you watch a year or two after it comes out, and you go "Hey! that movie looked interesting" It is a good idea, a decent execution, but at then end a very forgettable film. 

Movie Score: 

• 7/10 
• P (O.W.L. Standards, its a Harry Potter thing, look it up) 

Subculture Times vs. Wild

Hey, all you Subculture'd folks! Check out the Subculture crews trek through the Los Angeles National forest.

Stay Tuned for Subculture! 

Happy Zombie-Holidays!

Stay Tuned for Holidays! 

Borderlands! Come Out to Play!

Want more Borderlands 2? Well, Gearbox Software has officially announced the next add-on downloadable content: Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt.

This new dlc is set to hit digital shelves on January 15 for PC and Xbox 360 and January 16 for the PS3.

Big Game Hunt follows the intrepid Vault-Hunters to the continent of Aegrus in search of dangerous predators.

Hit play on the video below to see the promises of "Danger! Excitement!" and, more importantly, "Mustaches!"

Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt will be free for players who've purchased the season pass. For the rest of you Borderlands folk, this dlc shall cost $10 on the PC and PlayStation Store or 800 MS points on the Xbox 360. 

Meanwhile, if your lust for loot is far from satiated, jump into Borderlands 2's previous dlc: Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty and Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage. Also available for download is the Mechromancer class.

Stay Tuned for Subculture and EXPLOSIONS!

Steam's Winter Sale Begins.

Ladies, gentlemen, and the Subculture'd: Steam's winter sale has officially begun!

Daily deals, flash sales, community choice games, and publisher packs are sure to hit some very low prices between today, December 20, through January 5.

Visit Steam often as dozens of video games may be 50 to 75% off at any given time.

Today's deals include Gearbox Software's Borderlands 2 for $29.99, Hitman: Absolution for $24.99, Liohead Studios' Fable 3 for $12 or Batman: Arkham City - The Game of the Year Edition for an unbeatable eight dollars!

Not sure what kind of games to get your friends, family, or beloved during the winter sale? Steam shoppers may visit the official website and purchase gift cards or wallet codes for that special someone.

So, enough of news. Get out there and start downloading those games.

For more news and views, stay tuned for Subculture!

The Steam Autumn Sale

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! And yes, it is that time again to not only give thanks for your friends and family, but also for video games! Today marks the official start of the Steam Autumn Sale.

The autumn sale will run from November 21 through November 26.

Now is your chance to take advantage and finally save some money buying video games. Discounts for you PC gamers may run up from anywhere between 25% to a whopping 75%.
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Today's Steam deals include Prototype 2 for $20, the Hong Kong, action-thriller sandbox of Sleeping Dogs for 24.99 and Max Payne 3 for a very clean 14.99, which, people, I do have to say is one of the best deals for one of the best games to have been released in 2012!

Visit the Steam often and obsessively as flash deals occur every few hours and there are always new games discounts every single day.

For more turkey and pumpkin pie surprises, stay tuned for Subculture! 

You are not the only one, Dovahkiin....

Following Skyrim's Dawnguard and Hearthfire DLC, The Elder Scrolls lore expands as players will soon be graced by Dragonborn, which is set to come out early December.

Don't be an N'wah! 

Through this new expansion, players can travel to Solstheim, an ice-cold island near the now-volcanic laden Dunmer homeland of Morrowind, where they will discover the mystery and danger behind the original Dragonborn's lust for power.

The Elder Scrolls website states players will "Encounter new towns, dungeons, and quests as [they] traverse the ash wastes and glacial lands. . . . [Their] fate, and the fate of Solstheim, hangs in the balance as [they] face off agasint [their] deadliest enemy . . ."

Along with these new goodies, you can look forward to exploring a new Daedric realm, fighting new enemies, and discovering new thu'ums and armors.

You lookin' at me? 

Though little detail exists of this new system, the Dragonborn DLC looks to have...DRAGON MOUNTS!

Yup. It looks as if players will soon be able to ride a dragon. So, with any luck, you can throw away that  horse-powered horse and exchange it for a brand new shiny dragon.

Check out the trailer below at Bethesda's Dragonborn DLC. 

For more news and views, stay tuned for Subculture! 

A Machine for Pigs

Fricitonal Games on Wednesday released  a new trailer for the upcoming horror game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.

Unlike the stifling, stone castle corridors of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, it looks from the trailer that fans of the original game can look forward to creeping through the dark, foreboding halls, streets, and lonely basement refineries of a Victorian-era London. (check out the scary for yourself in the trailer below)

The Machine for Pigs official website sets the year in 1899, sixty years after the first game. Players will take on the unfortunate role of "industrialist Oswald Mandus," who "has returned from a disastrous expedition from Mexico, which has ended in tragedy. Wrecked by fever, haunted by dreams of a dark machine, he recovers consciousness in his own bed, with no idea of how much time has passed since his last memory. As he struggles to his feet, somewhere beneath him, an engine splutters, coughs, roars into life..."

Looks like a fun time.

In a PC Gamer interview with The Chinese Room, the company in charge of developing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, David Pinchbeck said, "It's fairly true to the spirit of the original game. There's a definite case of 'don't fix what isn't broken.' We're not going to be arming the player up at all - you're still going to to be hiding for most of it and running and peaking and not wanting to open doors and things like that."

The atmosphere definitely mirrors The Dark Descent. Just discovering this game, I am already both excited and scared for its release. I have not yet seen what exactly stalks Oswald Mandus through these horrific, ill-lit halls, so my anticipation of seeing these other-worldly monsters is through the roof.

This new title in the Amnesia franchise is not a direct sequel, but rather another tale in the same universe.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is set to release in early 2013. In the meantime, The Chinese Room developers want your fear! Yes, they want recorded screams, shrieks and whimpers of your terror and anguish. The recorded files, in formats of Wavs, Oggs, and MP3s, may be sent to piggies@thechineseroom.co.uk

For more information, visit www.aamfp.com.

Stick around, folks, and, as always, stay tuned for Subculture! 

Shit Outta Class. Hell's Worth of Fun.

Bulletstorm is crass, brawny and raw. Revenge, of course, is rehashed to drive the plot and character dynamics are nothing new. Save from a few key features, Bulletstorm is far from innovative. But, that's not the point of this article.

This dissection and analysis is not a review, but rather a discussion of how and why Bulletsorm is so much fucking fun. 

It's a murdering party! 

Bulletstorm's simplicity offers the breath of fresh air the video game culture needs. While series such as Metal Gear, The Elder Scrolls or Mass effect offer amazingly fun, immersive and vast worlds to explore, games such as these often harbor convoluted and hardcore elements. Bulletsorm is one of the more recent games to challenge that avant-garde direction of video game companies with its back-to-basic attitude. 

I'll admit it: this game may be classified in the genre of brainless-shooters. Epic Games gracefully embraces this idea. However, in doing so Bulletstorm, in regards to its shooting mechanics at least, avoids feeling dumbed-down and shallow. 

In fact, Bulletstorm offers a palate of gore for those that are experimental. In Minecraft, players gather and stack dozens of different environmental-blocks to achieve whatever they wish to build. Similarly in Bulletstorm, players use their environment, and of course their guns, as tools for dealing fountains of death in different ways. These are called skillshots.  

Time to paint the town red 

Need to put down a group of baddies? Activate the Sniper's secondary firing-mode and it shoots an explosive round into an enemy, which the player can then maneuver, with said enemy still attached to the bullet, into the rest of the group of bad guys and "Boom!" Instant ground beef! Or, assuming these baddies are indoors, use the Energy Leash's thumper ability to sweep all the bad guys off their feet and gravity-slam them to their chunky, rainy red demise on the low-ceiling.  

This crimson-colored, lego-blocks style of murder bolsters the adventures within Bulletstorm. Each new gun expands the arsenal of carnage and discovering new ways to annihilate all your foes only adds to the bloody fun. 

Like its action, this game's dialogue and characters are very base. The colloquialism divinely adheres from words such as "fuck," "shit" and "dick." Just check out the video below and see for yourself! 

Awesome, right? 

While many may find Grayson Hunt and his band of merry pirates immature, the language of Bulletstorm falls back to the concept of rawness. The brutality of skillshots and its shades of violence are meant to reverberate the basic shooter. The vulgarity of this title, on the same lines, reflects contemporary societal standards of vocabulary.

In an era past post-modernism, there are fewer and fewer original niches narratives can exploit. Simply put: audiences everywhere think they have already seen and heard everything. So, what is the consequence of including a shit-storm's worth of f-bombs and dick jokes? The answer is simply comedy. 

These jokes, like the violence, communicate through fundamentally basic human aspects. Comedy revolving around sex and bowel-movements can even be traced as far back to Aristophanes and the ancient Greeks. 

"Son of a dick"

The reason such comedy persists today is because of its universality. Everyone farts, burps, takes dumps and  urinates. And because the complexity of language allows it, these everyday, hilarious functions are labeled and survive through base language.  

This universality also equalizes all classes of people. Stripped of possessions, hierarchies and ideals, humankind is homogeneous. And through this basic ideal, Bulletstorm, at its core, reflects that essence of similarities.

Its simplicity mixed with its base-language and kill-creativity brings hours of entertainment. Nonetheless, it follows a basic system of call and response: you fire a gun and the enemies skulls shatter upon impact.

 Again, the cadence of language and the cacophony of battle stirs up the basest pleasures in a medium that sometimes attempts to complicate the concept of fun. 

Bulletstorm's facet of minimalism reflects older games such as Super Mario Brothers and even Pong. While it is far more technologically advanced than the latter titles, its entertainment-value feeds off the same nuances that make simplicity so good. This title didn't make promises to be something that it wasn't. Bulletstorm is simply a shooter basked in blood and fun. 

Stay tuned for Subculture! 

Podcast #3!

New podcast, for all your podcasting needs. This week: Zombies

Zombie-cast! No, the cast are not zombies, but we do talk about zombies. In this episode, we discuss The Walking Dead, find out that Frank has a weird taste in literature, and we figure out what would happen if the zombie apocalypse starts while we record the podcast.

We also have Production Value! And better quality audio! We are getting the hang of podcasting.
Give it a listen! and let us know what you think.