Magpie Gamer

Intro: This is a series on old dinosaur movies. Specifically, I am looking at anything released before 1990; before Jurassic Park revolutionized cinema with its CGI animation. I will not be covering anything "dinosaur-adjacent", such as kaiju monsters like Godzilla or the creature from The Giant Behemoth, which are perhaps inspired by dinosaurs, but clearly not meant to represent any real world genus. I will also be skipping over films that are heavily dependent on "borrowed" footage from other films, such as the Valley of the Dragons / Prehistoric Valley . Also known as: Polar Probe Ship: Polar Borer The Last Dinosaur: Sub-Polar Exploration Ship Polar-Borer Last Dinosaur - King of Monsters   Runtime: 1 hr 46 min (Japan) 1 hr 32 min (North America) Background: The Last Dinosaur is a 1977 Japanese/American film produced by Tsuburaya Productions and Rankin/Bass. Filming was done in the Japanese Alps with a mostly English-speaking cast and was intended...

Intro: This is a series on old dinosaur movies. Specifically, I am looking at anything released before 1990; before Jurassic Park revolutionized cinema with its CGI animation. I will not be covering anything "dinosaur-adjacent", such as kaiju monsters like Godzilla or the creature from The Giant Behemoth, which are perhaps inspired by dinosaurs, but clearly not meant to represent any real world genus. I will also be skipping over films that are heavily dependent on "borrowed" footage from other films, such as the Valley of the Dragons / Prehistoric Valley . Also known as: Planet of the Dinosaurs Runtime: 1 hr 24 min   Background: Planet of Dinosaurs is a 1977 American film produced by Deathbeast Productions - their only movie. Filming took place in the California desert in an area called Vasquez Rocks, where two episodes of the original Star Trek had previously been shot. Most of the movie's budget was put towards the stop motion dinosaurs, wh...

Intro: This is a series on old dinosaur movies. Specifically, I am looking at anything released before 1990; before Jurassic Park revolutionized cinema with its CGI animation. I will not be covering anything "dinosaur-adjacent", such as kaiju monsters like Godzilla or the creature from The Giant Behemoth, which are perhaps inspired by dinosaurs, but clearly not meant to represent any real world genus. I will also be skipping over films that are heavily dependent on "borrowed" footage from other films, such as the Valley of the Dragons / Prehistoric Valley. Also known as: Dinosaur...Secret of the Lost Legend Runtime: 1 hr 35 min Background: Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend is a 1985 American film produced by Walt Disney Studios under their Touchstone Films label, which they used for films with more mature themes. The movie used a combination of life-sized animatronics and puppets worn by people who had to be tended by medics every few minutes due to t...

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV is a 2016 Japanese animated film set during the events of the Final Fantasy XV video game. Kingsglaive was part of a planned multimedia project built around Final Fantasy XV and received a limited theatrical release. Production began in 2014, using discarded concepts from the game's storyline with the aim of being a self-contained story that could reach a wider audience than the video game. Approximately 50 different companies from around the world were involved in the film's production which used motion capture for the characters' body and facial movements. Credit Music: NYX (by Yoko Shimomura) APOCALYPSIS NOCTIS (by Yoko Shimomura) Spoiler Warning: I am going to give a synopsis and my opinions at the very end.

This is my annual list for my personal favorite and disappointing games of the year. To clarify, these are not the "best and worst" games of the year. They are titles I enjoyed or was letdown by based on my own preferences and expectations. Most of the titles on my disappointing list are not even what I would consider bad games, they just weren't for me, or were not what I was expecting. All the games on this list I have either played to completion or abandoned. I have ordered the list based on my overall enjoyment (one being the best) of games I played in 2023. Most of the games listed here will not be brand new 2023 releases. They are games I played in 2023 that were new to me. Anything that could be considered a spoiler has been blocked out. Highlight to reveal.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a 2001 Japanese computer animated film considered part of the Final Fantasy video game franchise. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi named the character Aki Ross after his late mother, and tried to make her as realistic as possible by rendering and animating 60,000 separate hairs on her head. Square Pictures (production company) had planned for Aki to be the world's first "artificial actress" , with modifications made to her age and appearance for different positions within multiple films. Aki appeared on the cover of Maxim dressed in a bikini, and was ranked by the magazine as one of the sexiest women of 2001, placing at number 87 out of 100 and becoming the first fictional woman to make the list. Livia Monnet (professor of comparative literature) however, argued that Aki represented little more than "an ideal, cinematic female character" and an example of the constantly kidnapped woman in Japanese cinema. At the time of its ...

Castlevania: Nocturne is an American animated television series based on the video game series of the same name. It acts as a stand-alone follow up to the Netflix Castlevania animated series, and loosely adapts the 1993 entry Rondo of Blood and its remake Dracula X, with elements taken from Symphony of the Night and Harmony of Dissonance. Select characters from the game Bloodlines also make an appearance. Spoiler Warning: I am going to give a synopsis of each episode and my opinions at the very end.