Geek of Oz

In “Free Guy,” a bank teller who discovers he is actually a background player in an open-world video game, decides to become the hero of his own story…once he rewrites himself. Now in a world where there are no limits, he is determined to be the guy who saves his world his way…before it is too late. In Cinemas July 2, 2020

Throughout its storied history of video game adaptations, Dragon Ball  is a franchise that has always had more hits than misses. Handheld offerings like Legacy of Goku  and more full-on platform fighters like the Budokai Tenkaichi  and Xenoverse  games far outweigh the lackluster disappointments in entries like Supersonic Warriors , Sagas  and whatever that Kinect thing was. So it comes as little surprise that Dragonball FighterZ  sticks to the rule rather than the exception, being both a solid fighting game in its own right and a highly successful adaptation of the source material. Mechanically, the game hews close to established fighting game standards with a left-vs-right battle system and reliance on combos, power attacks and dodges (so pretty much Tekken  with more yellow hair and aliens), as opposed to the full 3D movement used by the recent  Xenoverse  entries. Your team of three fighters - chosen from a possible unlockable roster...

This Friday, rather than being out in the intense heat or swimming in a public pool you're pretty sure someone's peed in, here are five video games you could be playing instead celebrating what we currently call Australia Day. 5 - HORIZON ZERO DAWN (PS4) Nearly a year on, Guerilla Games' engrossing, expansive and utterly gorgeous single-player odyssey is a good remedy for being out in the crowds or hanging with unwanted family members. Rather than hearing your drunk neighbours singing Cold Chisel lyrics for the sixteenth year running, perhaps you'd better enjoy killing robot dinosaurs in a post-apocalyptic future world? (there's also that lovely new DLC, The Frozen Wilds , which might just make the heat a little more bearable) 4 - OVERWATCH (PS4, XBOX ONE AND PC) Odds are good that the veterans will be playing this anyway, but for the rest of us, there's nothing quite like joining a team of cartoonish ass-kickers to duke it out with another te...

Today sees the twentieth anniversary of the broadcast of Stargate SG-1 's pilot episode, Children of the Gods , and it's been ten years since the beloved show concluded its landmark tenth season. To mark the occasion, I sat down last month at Supanova Sydney with the buoyant Christopher Judge, who played stoic Jaffa warrior Teal'c for the show's entire run and its two movies, The Ark of Truth and Continuum . Below, we talk about the impact of SG-1 's legacy, Christopher's upcoming role as the new God of War , and the experience of fighting Aquaman in ( Stargate ) Atlantis ! --- Chris Comerford: So first of all, how's it going? Christopher Judge: Very well, very well, thank you! CC: Excellent! So it's been ten years since Stargate SG-1 was off the air, and twenty since it premiered years. How does it feel to look back on your time with the show and its movies now? CJ: You know, it's very strange, to just see the enduring popularity of ...

As this review is a First Impressions of a game that is still in development, there will be no */10 Geeks score at the end. Any aspects of the game discussed here are subject to change in the final version. --- If you were a fan of Project CARS , the 2015 racing simulator which offered some of the highest real world fidelity achieved only by the likes of  Forza  and the original Gran Turismo , you are almost guaranteed to like Project CARS 2 . It's bigger, it's more detailed, and it's brought back much of the first game's successful micromanaging of its cars for players of the expert class. This is as close to a real world driving career as you're probably going to get. Conversely, if you weren't  a fan of the original, you're going to have a much harder time with the sequel. Project CARS 2  is a well-designed and engrossing game for those who enjoy this kind of thing, even though I once again acknowledge my personal lack of affinity for driving g...

To say I've been excited for people to finally check out Get Even is somewhat underselling it. Smartly mixing psychological horror with Bourne -style action, it was something of an oddity which greatly enthused me during the time spent with its demo. Now the full thing's out, I can rave further, and hopefully some of you will now get where I'm coming from. Be warned, though, that the biggest, most daring thing I loved about Get Even is something I absolutely refuse to talk about. But I'll get to that. I first checked out Get Even many moons ago , so I'll borrow from myself in terms of outlining the plot: "You play as Cole Black, a Sean Bean-accented mercenary who starts the game tracking down a kidnapped young woman in a dilapidated house filled with armed men. After seemingly setting off a bomb whilst rescuing her, Cole wakes up four years later outside an abandoned mental asylum, with no memory of the time in-between. A mysterious figure named...

If I ever needed a game that was wholesome, friendly and cute, Tarsier Studios would be one of my first ports of call. The Swedish developer has since moved from their colourful days as the custodians of the family-friendly festivals of Little Big Planet and Tearaway Unfolded , and is now intent on giving us arresting anxiety in Little Nightmares , a wordless story about a little girl in a yellow raincoat who moves through the bowels of a seaborne den of horror and gluttony, drawing on some of the most primal and deep-rooted fears dredged direct from my childhood. Needless to say, this is something of a gear change. I actually don't want to give much away of the story beyond that little snippet above, since part of the game's engrossing quality is figuring out the story for yourself. You play as a raincoat-clad girl named Six, who wakes up in a suitcase aboard a mammoth waterborne boat/submersible thing called The Maw. Making her way through the bowels of a bad dream bi...

As this review is a First Impressions of a game that is still in development, there will be no */10 Geeks score at the end. Any aspects of the game discussed here are subject to change in the final version. --- When I recently interviewed Katsuhiro Harada*, executive producer and franchise custodian of the Tekken series and co-director of Tekken 7 , I asked him what he thought about the impact Tekken 's legacy has had, and will continue to have, on the fighting game genre. Both he and his interpreter, game designer Michael Murray, were a bit thrown; apparently, nobody had ever asked them such a thoughtful question. If no-one was asking that then, they'd have to be asking it now. With the impending release of Tekken 7 and the end of a saga that has spanned more than two decades of gaming history, "legacy" is the word of the day. The plot, which is surprisingly accessible for those who may not have gone through the previous games, concerns consternation ...

THE SHORT VERSION Nostalgia-driven cuteness, but lacking some mechanical polish and meaty challenge. Yooka-Laylee is a decent throwback to one of the 90s' best gaming genres, despite its lack of acknowledgement for where that genre has since ventured. THE SLIGHTLY LONGER VERSION For those of you who didn't spend your childhood with Crash Bandicoot or Banjo-Kazooie on your television, Yooka-Laylee may come across as a bit of an oddball. Its simplistic style and accessible control scheme seems better suited to a younger crowd, but that same crowd already have the likes of Hearthstone , any number of recent Mario games and (for those subject to lax parenting) the Grand Theft Auto series. To bring them a game like Yooka-Laylee , genetically engineered to be a throwback to the cutesy, bright-palette platform games of yesteryear, seems like somebody has spent twenty years bringing a meatlovers pizza to somebody who's gone vegetarian since they ordered. As for ...