It really is nice to be back reviewing Game of Thrones again, as out of every program I’ve covered, it always seems like there’s just so much to talk about. I like Dexter, but Game of Thrones makes it look about as deep as Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

In this week’s episode, I was surprised to see that once again, every single major character group was covered, save Rob Stark, but I consider the Greyjoy outing part of his storyline. As such, we only spent a few minutes with each of them. I really wish this show was like three hours long per Sunday.

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I’m not sure there’s been another television event that I’ve looked forward to as much as the second season of Game of Thrones, outside of perhaps next year’s Arrested Development resurrection. It was clear after the GoT pilot that the show was here to stay, and when it ended, it seemed like an eternity until we’d get to see it return.

And now that it has, it’s time to start up my weekly reviews that I enjoyed doing so much last year. This time around, I actually get to review the show the very next day, as opposed to on Tuesday, and I’m hoping that inspires even more conversation in the comments.

For the uninitiated, the reviews are a mix of recap, analysis and speculation about what happens next. I have not read the books, nor have many readers, so I beseech you to please leave out spoilers in the comments, even if you identify them as such. A stray eye can reveal things it didn’t want to see, and most of the fun of the show is not knowing how things will play out. With all that said, let’s begin!

Usually the show focuses on a handful of areas, as with so many characters, there often isn’t time to cover them all. But as this was the premiere, we got a look at what literally every single main character is up to. As such, we didn’t see most of them for more than a scene, but it was necessary in order to let us know what’s happened to the cast which keeps growing even bigger.

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With Harry Potter off being an auror and Bella about to bite her lip for the final time, a void has opened up in the movie industry. What new series will set aflame the audiences that have made these franchises such huge hits for their studios?

I was surprised to learn that it was The Hunger Games, a series whose central plot point is a contest which has teenagers murdering each other with blades, bows and their bare hands in an arena for the amusement of the elite. But throw in a high fashion makeover here, a love triangle there, and the concept can become decidedly young adult.

The first film in the series is opening to great reviews and massive fan turnout. The series lacks the flowery prose of Twilight or the whimsicalness of Harry Potter, but is a rather fascinating creation in itself.

The post-apocalypse world we see here is different than most we’ve heard of before. After nuclear war (or something like it), the fraction of the US population that remains is called “Panem.” The land is divided into 13 districts, each specializing in a different sort of resource. While sectors like 1 and 2 are full of the wealthy, the rest are often exceptionally poor, with our hero’s district 12 looking like a coal mining town stuck in 1930.

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I’m all about cheering for the underdog, and that extends to films as well. The idea of a 21 Jump Street reboot starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill is seemingly as about as dumb of an idea as any Hollywood has come up with in recent years. And that’s saying something when there’s a Battleship movie on deck.

But against all odds, 21 Jump Street manages to embrace its absurdity, poke fun at itself, and show that even the most unlikely of comedy duos can produce a hilarious movie when given the right material to work with.

The premise is the same as  the 1980s TV show that gave a young Johnny Depp his first real role. Two underachieving cops are placed in an undercover program at a high school with the goal of finding out who is supplying a new designer drug that’s making kids OD after a particularly epic trip.

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After a long deliberation process and probably a bit too much internal (and external) debate, I finally decided to take the plunge and get Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I’ve never been an MMO man myself, not because I have anything against the genre in particular, but more due to the fact that I have an addictive personality when it comes to games, and I was a bit afraid that in a few months I could be one of the news stories you see about the guy who died after playing World of Warcraft for 36 hours straight.

But I’m a bit more grown up now than I used to be, and I believed I could keep my compulsions in check. And I have, so far, and am ready to report my findings on my first stretch of playtime with the highest budgeted video game of all time.

I’ve got two characters right now, so that I may balance both the light and dark side of the force, and also experience different play styles between ranged and melee. Thus, I have a level 14 male Jedi Knight, and a level 11 female bounty hunter.

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A  movie shot in one take? It’s a feat that sounds too impossible to be true, but it’s the hook that Silent House uses to draw you in. It’s a horror film “presented as one continuous shot” which documents an hour and a half of a young girl’s life on a day where things go horribly awry at her lake house.

The girl is Elizabeth Olson, younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley, who after this film and Marcy Martha May Marlene this year, is establishing herself as quite the horror icon. Here she’s Sarah, a girl up at her lake house with her father and uncle. Vandals have smashed the windows out, and the entire place remains boarded up as a result. Lanterns and candlelight make for a perfect setting for spookiness.

And spookiness does ensue. Sarah hears noises, then sees an unknown figure moving throughout the house. The keys to unlock all the doors are missing so she can’t leave, and after her father is attacked, she must find a way to get out without alerting the home invader.

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Read Journal #1 here first.

Well I did it. After thirty hours, adding on to probably a hundred more I spent on past titles, I’ve saved the universe. I think. Probably.

The grand finale of the Mass Effect series is both epic and frustrating, and though we’ll discuss it later, right now it’s time for some talk about everything that came before it. I could have squeezed in another journal installment before this one, but I saw the finish line, put my head down, and just went for it.

Usually I’d do a follow-up entry after this where I report what it’s like playing through with my hardassed renegade female Shepard, but this is one time I don’t think I’m going to do that. Why? Well, outside of the fact that she’s just kind of a dick, there are no real “opposite choices” to be made here, with the only important one being in the game’s closing moments, and I could just reload that segment and pick another option if I really wanted to. Not that it would really matter.

No, rather being a Renegade or Paragon doesn’t have nearly the implications it used to. Decisions you made in past games will have big repercussions here, but as this is the “final” installment, there aren’t really many opportunities to make choices that matter, and often times the game forces you into a “Renegade interrupt” as the only way of saving your own skin or that of someone close to you. The fact is either path leads to the relatively same conclusion, it’s a bit frustrating that the illusion of choice existed in this series at all.

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John Carter will be one of the most profound movie tragedies of our time. It’s a good movie, maybe even a great one, doomed to failure because of a bloated budget, confounding marketing and unimaginative critics and audiences.

I’ve been predicting the spectacular failure of John Carter for months now, and last week wrote an entire column explaining why the film would be a bomb of legendary proportions. I argued that quality had little to do with it. Rather, there’s no star actor or director, there isn’t a series behind it that general audiences are familiar with, and the two minute trailers displayed a confusing mess of action that left even sci-fi veterans like myself unclear of what exactly was happening.

And bomb, it has. John Carter made around $30M this weekend, when modest expectations were at $50M. It lost to the second week of The Lorax by a full $10M. But the real tragedy comes when you see just how bad Disney will be hit by this. The movie cost $250M to make, and untold hundreds of millions more to market. The bar was set at $700M worldwide that would warrant a sequel, and original source material ensured there were many more stories to tell.

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It’s a game I’ve been putting off playing since the day I got my PS3, but one I’ve been told is essential if I’m trying to get through all the best Sony exclusives, which is the purpose of this ongoing series.

Demon’s Souls’ difficulty is supposedly the stuff of legend, and I fully expected that with my short temper when it comes to particularly challenging titles, I probably wouldn’t make it through the whole thing. What I did not expect was how far I was actually able to make it before I quit.

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Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are Mass Effect 3 reviews. I can only play so much of a game on day one, and judging by my 40 hour save file from ME2, it’s going to be a long journey.

This day one journal installment will just give you a taste of what I’ve experienced in the first six or seven hours, which isn’t much because as always, 80% of game time is wrapped up in dialogue. I’m a “pursue every conversation tree” kind of guy, and the story and characters have always been my favorite part of the game over combat, which is the focus of most similarly themed titles.

It’s been about three years since we last saw Shepard, and despite his insistence that the sky was falling (that was literally one of the DLCs, wasn’t it?), the universe is stunned when the Reapers finally invade and start wrecking everyone’s shit.

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