When I was in junior high, I remember trying to make a flip animation in the pages of my history book. I successfully made a stick figure jump one time in the air but his head kept getting bigger and his limbs lengthened and shortened. Needless to say I didn’t possess anywhere close to the talent it takes to make something like this.

Above you’ll find a flip book animation of three full Mortal Kombat rounds, drawn in a book I have to imagine is ONLY for flip book animation. Apparently this guy is known for his ridiculous flip books. Everyone needs a talent I guess.

The battle is pretty intense as you’ll see, and naturally, it ends in Fatality. You were expecting a Friendship?

ATTENTION: DO NOT WATCH OR READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THIS WEEK’S GAME OF THRONES.

I’m not going to say any direct spoilers anyway, as this entire post is before the jump, but still, better safe than sorry when it comes to these things.

Anyway, the rest of us know that some very important people met very tragic ends in this week’s The Rains of Castemere, and the Red Wedding went from a jaw-dropping literary event to a jaw-dropping television event.

There have been a ton of reaction videos posted to the internet by people who have read the books and decided to tape their friends or family reacting to the horror they knew was coming. The results? Fantastic.

But nothing is as amazing as Maisie Williams’ (Arya Stark) Vine reaction video.

There are many, many, many plotholes littering the Star Wars prequel movies, but one perhaps needs more attention than most of the others. Why didn’t Anakin save his mom? With a tearful goodbye in Ep 1, he says he’ll come back for her, but ten years later, he never does. Why?

The video above creates a deleted scene from Attack of the Clones to explain why. Turns out Jedis don’t get weekends off or holidays. Ever. They also like coffee.

I think this was just one of those “oh shit” moments someone probably realized after the fact, but couldn’t be bothered to think up a plausible explanation to actually insert in the film.

Well, we already took shots at Star Wars for plot holes today, might as well keep going with Iron Man 3. People have been yelling at me lately for geeky movies I was supposed to like but didn’t (The Hobbit, Star Trek Into Darkness) and also yelling for movies I did like but wasn’t supposed to (Fast and Furious 6, Iron Man 3). Though I did like the film, yeah, it had its holes like nearly any other blockbuster.

This four minute video continues a long trend of showing how movie should have ended using actual logic instead of “blockbuster logic” which makes for the best fight scenes. I always love this series, and this one is no exception, even if I didn’t really have an issue with the end of this film (I wouldn’t trade that final fight scene for all the logic in the world).

Thanks to Tarick for sending this in.

Riot Games has released this new cinematic because they never have expansions and therefore never have excuses to make cinematics. But they’re a part of almost any good game, so Riot makes their graphics department crank them out from time to time.

League is a game where you’re controlling characters that are about an inch tall on your screen, so you don’t really get up close to them ever. That’s why it’s really cool to see them duke it out in sequences like this.

I believe the with League’s deep roster and rather interesting lore, it could make for a good RPG or fighting game, or even a TV series or movie. What, you think no one is considering making the most popular game in the world into a movie? Yeah right.

I know, I know, but I think people have used “A Game of Drones” about ten million times already, so I went with the non-rhyme like the video is titled.

Anyway, this is a recreation of the Game of Thrones theme using in-game Starcraft footage. Fortunately the buildings in the game tend to move around a lot as they’re built, so it’s a rather perfect game to replicate the clockwork-style intro of the original show.

I’ve always maintained that Starcraft easily has a better plot than most video games out there, and I actually think that it would make for a better movie or show than Halo. At least we know it would be a hit in Korea.

So far I’ve been enjoying Anita Sarkesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series almost as much as I’ve enjoyed watching trolls’ heads explode from the mere fact that it exists. This new video, for example, was taken off YouTube for repeated (false) Terms of Service violations mere hours after it aired. And of course, dislikes and comments are closed because of the sheer volume of shit that pours into these videos that no one should witness.

Rather, I think we can debate the points of the video here instead. The first installment covered the history of why damsels in distress populated old video games (namely, everything Nintendo has made during its lifetime), and why it’s so ingrained in our culture. This video shows that though things have improved, it hasn’t gone away in modern games.

I think she makes a number of good points in this video. One is that the writers of these games are often NOT doing this on purpose. They perpetuate these plots simply because A) they were raised reading stories like this or B) it’s just an easy way to make a revenge plot when your wife/daughter is kidnapped/killed. I also think it’s a good point when she mentions that since violence is the ONLY type of gameplay in these games, it’s why we see a lot of sequences like guys beating the shit out of or “mercy killing” the women they try to save. The medium is forcing itself into these types of scenarios because violence is the only real form of expression in many games.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about this video, particularly Nick Verboon’s, so get on those comments!

I’ve been less than enthused with what I’ve seen from the supposed “next-gen” consoles so far, as the Xbox One, PS4, and Wii U as of yet don’t seem to move the medium forward in very meaningful ways.

As more information comes to light, that could change, but I will say pieces of technology being developed by these companies has the potential to be combined for amazing results.

Above we have a proof of concept video which combines an independently made (outside of the big three) Oculus Rift with Microsoft’s (old) Kinect system. The result? A VR headset which allows you to see your own body digitally, and mirror your movements. So far, the Oculus lets you look around a level with your head, which is cool, but combined the Kinect, the possibilities to create a virtual body for yourself are unreal.

Obviously from the quality we’re still a ways off from having this be convincing, but the future is on the horizon, I can feel it.

That’s a pretty damn good quote, and one that may indicate that the new Wolverine film might not be as terrible as it initially appeared. Yes, this new trailer treads much of the same ground as the first, but it’s a little better put together and there’s the goddamn Silver Samurai to boot, who may or may not be a robot.

It’s pointless to mourn for the day when Darren Aronofsky was attached to this movie, but even if the story the film is based on is a great one from the comics, there’s just an…artistry missing from this film from what I’ve seen so far. It’s being shot to much like an action blockbuster when I think it would benefit from a more careful eye. I think there’s a middleground between The Avengers and The Dark Knight where Wolverine could exist, but I don’t know if it will find it here.

I am looking forward to this movie, even if it’s overshadowed by Man of Steel. Now THAT’s a superhero movie that at least appears to have a sense of design behind it, which so far has made for some of the best trailers of the past year.

I’ve been writing a whole bunch of articles about the Xbox One reveal over at my other job, so much so that I’m sick to death of it only 72 hours later. That said, I really did enjoy this cut of the hour long Xbox presentation into a minute and a half.

You may see…certain terms repeated with alarming frequency. Granted, they did say “games” a lot too if you wanted to hunt down all those instances too, but “TV” and “sports” were certainly over-represented in a reveal about what we thought was a video game console.

And it is, but a great deal of focus was put on all the “other” things the Xbox One can do for this reveal, and what little time was devote to games was really just a 15 minute ad for Call of Duty Ghosts, which isn’t even an exclusive title for the system. It was a perplexing event, to say the least.

We’ve all seen kung-fu fighting in slow motion across countless films ever since such cameras were invented, but rarely do we see such fighting skills recording at this high of speeds without the aid of special effects.

For Earth Unplugged, they took their hi-speed camera to a bunch of Shaolin Monks who were more than pleased to demonstrate some of their best athletic and fighting movies. At first it’s mostly a lot of backflips (which is still cool), but my favorite moments occurred at the end once the weapons come out.

I like slo-mo in movies, but unassisted, non-CGI slo-mo is increasingly hard to find these days, which is why this is so cool to watch.