Welcome to the Powet Top 5, where we explore the top (and bottom) 5 items we think are relevant to any of a variety of topics that span the imagination. Sit back, read, and respond

When children think of princesses, they think of beautiful dresses, long lovely hair, and all the other great things that we expect from a Disney movie. They don’t think of Kate Middleton or some other modern relic from a political system that has survived progress through some foolish commitment to tradition. Simply put, children these days get their idea of what a princess is from TV and movies, and no one shows them princesses better than Disney.

Queens are old, evil, bitter people, but princesses are the pretty young heroins who fall in love with their prince. Is this a sexist portrayal? The level of focus grouped appeal to a young girl’s sensibilities seems to ignore all but the desire for commercial success as Disney Princess can describe both a character and marketing strategy. The Disney Princesses get a bad wrap, one I think is undeserved, as I believe them to be good role models for girls and will attempt to illustrate this.

With that here are my 5 favourite Disney Princesses. Feel free to chime in with your own.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Raventhorne is another indie Xbox game, which brings back memories of games like Actraiser and Castlevania. This 2D side scroller cast players in the role of Raventhorne, a recently slain Viking cast who finds himself in the underworld. How was he killed and why is he not in Valhalla? This is for you to find out. Along with your fighting stances, you’ll make use of several magic spells, and you’ll level up as you go along. While there isn’t a lot of variety in the game’s enemies, the game’s combat mechanics and art style make it a must buy for indie gaming fans, especially since the game is only $1. With more independent games of this caliber, we might be seeing developer Milkstone Studios’s games on Xbox Live Arcade pretty soon.

Your eyes do not deceive you. This is an actual Sonic game on the Super Nintendo. “But Sonic is a Sega game!” Yes I know. So how is this possible? Did Tengen get another Sega license? Did Sega know that they were going to fail as a console manufacturer and decided to test the waters as a third party developer years early? Is this the second coming of Color Dreams? Nope. This Super Nintendo game is a product of the wonderful world of foreign bootlegging! A Peruvian-based organization known as Twin Eagles Group hacked a Super Nintendo game called Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos, stripped out all the good stuff, and replaced the main character with Sonic. Basically, you run through each stage repeatedly freeing Mario from cages. While it’s fun for all of 3 minutes, the charm of having a Sonic game on the SNES wore off and players would realize how shitty this game was compared to the Sega titles. It wouldn’t be until Sonic Adventure 2 hit GameCube that gamers would get an actual Sonic game on a Nintendo system. As bad as this game was however, it was nowhere near as bad as the NES Sonic the Hedgehog.

There have been some famous utterances in the history of media. Famous lines such as “Yippie-Ki-Yay, Motherf**ker” and “Hasta La Vista, Baby” have been immortalized in our brains since first hearing them, and find themselves worthy of repeating upon anointed occasions. Video games are no exception, what with many games being dialogue-heavy, and thus producing a myriad of memorable lines.

However, not all dialogue is the stuff of writing gold. Indeed, for every fantastic line, there tends to be at least one line that’s so cheesy or utterly out-of-place that it defies logic to even include it in the game and makes us ponder how the game’s writers ever thought they were geniuses upon adding it. Alot of these truly awful lines are so bad, that they actually come full circle, and become immortalized even more than if they were an awesome line.

Thus, we have my Top 5 Worst Lines in Video Games, in no particular order since they’re all equally and awesomely bad.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

These past few weeks have seen ‘gamers’ exhibit some of the worst and most embarrassing behavior seen in the fandom. Weather it’s sexual harassment of female fighting game players, angry fanboys spamming metacritic over Mass Effect 3’s dlc, or those same fanboys making the charity Child’s Play an unwitting endorser of their campaign to have Mass Effect 3’s ending changed (and spoiling it for everyone else who didn’t play through the whole game in a week in the process of doing so), it seems that the behavior of certain subsets of the gaming community are hellbent on reaffirming the stereotype of gamers being losers. With that said, I thought I might use this week’s $20 Free Game of the week to showcase gamers doing good. In fact, how about showing gamers assisting with the cure of diseases?
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Disney’s John Carter is a film that’s based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “A Princess of Mars”. Or is it? The film deviates quite a bit from the source material, so fans of it should certainly check out the John Carter novels if they’re looking for a good read. The movie is a great amount of fun. The fantastic world of Mars, known to it’s natives as Barsoom, is a rich world full of amazing creatures, people, places and technology that will delight and entertain audiences of all ages.

This is a science fiction story, but based on a work so old that we’d barely started flying airplanes and driving automobiles when it was written, so it gives a perspective not seen in a modern work. The fantasy world seen in the movie, and within the pages of the John Carter stories, is one born not out of intentional ignorance of other planets as much modern science fiction is, but rather from a time when we really did not know much of anything of worlds outside of our own. The world of Barsoom is based off of ideas that astronomers from the early 20th century had about Mars. It’s not spaceships, computers and laser guns because this was all conceived in a world without knowledge of such things.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Okay, so this isn’t a video game, or even video game related (although War Machine is a playable character in Marvel vs Capcom 1 and 2, and makes appearances in other games that feature Iron Man), but it is a slept-on classic. In 2001, Marvel introduced Max comics, a sub-line of books aimed at mature audiences (a’la DC’s Vertigo). Although many of the books were hit or miss, the line was used to introduce some pretty creative concepts at the time. Alias introduced the character of Jessica Jones to the Marvel Universe, while Garth Ennis’s hideously gory take on The Punisher was a hit with readers. Writer Chuck Austen contributed a brand new take on War Machine, Iron Man’s buddy. Although he may have been one of comicdom’s most hated writers, Austen scored a hit with this series.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit the toy shelves in 1989, Playmates made a name for themselves with fun and creative figures, the likes of which we had not seen since Masters of the Universe peaked three years earlier. While MOTU, in a way, tried to take itself seriously, TMNT felt no such obligation. As a result, the toy line ranged from the hilarious to the grotesque. Today, we will take a look at the top 5 most disturbing figures from that era of the line.

We will focus on the figures released between 1989 and 1993, at which point Playmates relegated the line mostly to variations of the four turtles, Bebop, Rocksteady and Shredder.

[Read the rest of this entry…]