Category Archives: Articles

Countdown – My Personal Top 10 Video Games List

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Countdown –

Because of circumstances in my personal life, these last couple of weeks have been a real drag, to say the least. So I have been struggling to find the motivation to write anything of late as I binge cooking shows on TV. However, you can’t stay stuck on the couch forever, and I thought if I was going to write it should be on something I care about a lot, so bring on those video games. Much like my personal top 10 films list I needed to come up with some criteria to be able to sort through all the really good games I have played in my life.    

  • Games that are beautifully constructed (art, story, etc)
  • They have to mean something to me
  • Video Games that are re-playable
  • Games that engaged me emotionally
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Explore It – A Trip to the Footy to Watch the Brisbane Broncos take on the Parramatta Eels.

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TL;DR – Today I explore the chaos and excitement of a live game of footy

A Trip to the Footy to Watch the Brisbane Broncos take on the Parramatta Eels. Image Credit: Brian MacNamara.

Article –

One of the things I have really gotten into over the last couple of years has been NRL football, one of the three big football codes in Australia (for those playing at home this is Rugby League, not Rugby Union, or Australian Rules Football). My local team here is the Brisbane Broncos, who were also my grandfather’s team, so that felt like a good place to start. While I have been enjoying the games on TV I have not had the money to go to a live game, well that all changed last night as I made the trip to Suncorp Stadium thanks to a kind free ticket from a friend.

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Article – A New Golden Age of Science Fiction on Television

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TL;DR – After a long pause during the 2000s we are seeing a new golden age for Sci-Fi as shows go back into space and more.

A New Golden Age of Science Fiction on Television
A New Golden Age of Science Fiction on Television

Article –

The other day I was working on a review and then something dawned on me, for the first time in a long time I was excited by the many different Science Fiction shows coming out of television. We were going into the stars, exploring the future, and in some cases just getting plain weird. It was a joyous moment because I remember a time when it was like this before and the long valley in-between the two peaks. So today, I wanted to take a moment to talk about where we have come from, what is so exciting about now, and why we are seeing this new Golden Age.

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Map-It Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Full Map – Seas, Lakes, and Bays Oh My! Update Large Map Download

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Turkey map of Civilization VI Gathering Storm featuring The Ottomans, Georgia, and Phoenicia

Below you can find the large download of our full world map of Civilization VI Gathering Storm

To See The Original Civilization VI Full Map Click Here

To See The Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Map Update Map Click Here

To See The Civilization VI: Gathering Storm – Seas, Lakes, and Bays Oh My! Update Map Click Here

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Map-It Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Full Map – Seas, Lakes, and Bays Oh My! Update

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TL;DR – Every single feature of Civilization 6 (at time of posting) in one map, this time with Lakes, Seas, and Oceans

Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. Image Credit: Firaxis Games.

Article –

This week we got the latest update to Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and along with the boosted Industrial Zones and several pages of patch notes there was the announcement of the game adding water features to its growing list of geographical features. We have mapped Civ VI in the past as part of our Map-It Project, and I am always a completionist, so I thought it would be quick to add in a couple of lakes. Well three solid days of work later and it was not the quick job I expected, but it was a rewarding one as I got to learn more about the geography of the Earth while brushing up on my Māori.

 Now as always, a couple of notes before we start, first the Civilization boundaries on the map are based more on clarity than anything else, so in most cases, they conform to their modern counterparts. We have also worked using the commonly implemented political borders, not necessarily what nations claim, and this means making some judgement calls which you will see below. Also, while all attempts have been made to make sure that everything is accurately placed, putting this together meant working from multiple different sources, and map projections, and as such, no matter how much you try there might be some slight discrepancies here and there.


We will be mostly going over the new additions and changes to the map in this update, if you want to learn more about some of the location choices that we made you can find more detail in our First Full Civilization Big Map and out Gathering Storm Update Map.  

Finally, after the break there will be a lot of large images, so now is the time to check that you are on WiFi and are not using Mobile Data. Also a quick shout out to sonicmyst, God of Kings, Eagle Pursuit, Zaarin and SeelingCat over at the Civfanatics Forum for helping me with some of the obscure lakes I was having trouble locating.    

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Countdown – My Personal Top 10 Animated Films of All Time

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TL;DR – There are so many great animated films and I struggled to limit them to just 10

Countdown –

Last year I went through and made a list of my Top 10 Films of All Time, and it was only after I posted it that it occurred to me that no animated films made it into my Top 10. This was an odd revelation because I loved animated films and while a couple came close to getting into that 10th position and I think today that my top animated film would be on that list somewhere, I thought it was time to give animated films the showing they deserved.

There are so many animated films released every year and a lot of the time there are just awful, when you are aiming your films at 5-year-olds quality it seems is not high on the list. However, every year creative geniuses throw that stigma aside and create works of art that sit in my head and make me think of them years later. So today we are going to look at my personal top ten animated films of all time, but before we start a couple of quick notes. Firstly, these are my favourites and they may be different from your favourite films, so let me know what ones I missed in the comments below. As well as this, they are current to when I am writing this list in 2019, it may change in the future, and the top three are mostly interchangeable, but I had to put them in some sort of order.

As with all our lists, there has to be some kind of criteria or else there is just no way you can keep it to just 10 entries. So for this list, they are:

  • Films that are examples of beautiful art
  • Films that use the medium to tell interesting stories
  • Films that are always re-watchable
  • Films that have added to my love of the art of cinema

Now before we begin the list here is our list of ‘Highly Commended Animated Films That Almost Maybe Could Be On The List, Oh No I Am Rethinking Everything’ are: An American Tail, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Big Hero 6,Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Fern Gully, Finding Nemo, Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder, Inside/Out,Ghost in the Shell,  Kubo and the Two Strings,Kung Fu Panda, Monsters Inc, My Neighbor Totoro,Mulan, Pete’s Dragon, Princess Mononoke, Robin Hood, Shrek, Space Jam, Spirited Away, Tangled, The Incredibles, The Jungle Book, The Cat Returns, The Great Mouse Detective,The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones,The Land Before Time,  The Lego Film, The Lego Batman Film, The Nightmare Before Christmas,The Prince of Egypt,Titan A.E., Up, Wallace and Gromit, WALL-E, Wreck it Ralph & Zootopia. Well before I re-question all my list let’s dive in and explore my Top Ten Animated Film of All Time, and no they are not all going to be Disney, and there may be some spoilers in there for the films.

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The X-Men Movies Ranked from Best to Last (2019 Update)

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So Dark Phoenix came out this weekend and it was well, it was at best okay. But it had me thinking that I had not updated by X-Men film rankings in a while. So I thought it would be a good time to reevaluate the list to see if I got it right the first time, and to add some of the films I am missing.

As always with these lists, I don’t rank them 1-10 as I feel that does not adequately reflect my feeling about each of the films and where they fit in relation to each other. What we do is the group the films into categories Fantastic, Great Good, Ok, and Trash. Fantastic are those films which get as close to perfect as we can on this side of Heaven, with compelling characters, stories, and visuals. Great are those films which I thoroughly enjoyed but they did not move me emotionally. Good are solid films that while they have some issues they still work and are still enjoyable. Ok are films that work, they have some good moments, but you can start to see some of the flaws that almost scuttle the film. Trash are those films which just don’t work, whether it is the story, the characters, the visuals, or a combination of all three, they are simply letdowns. Also within those categories, I have listed the films not in a ranked order but in chronological order.

Now for me personally I’ll always be comparing the X-Men films to the X-Men Animated Series, because for me we didn’t get the comics where I lived so this was my first and best experience with the franchise, also it has the best theme of the series. Which led to it becoming my yard post to compare anything X-Men related to. So this, and the fact that personal preference is subjective means that I might have a different order than you, but that is the good thing about reviews because this is where discussion lies. Now there may be some spoilers for you in the list below, but then most of these have been out for a while, so it should not be much of a problem.

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