What’s Up 2020: Week 18

Welcome to the next What’s Up! Week 18 was a rather slower one, kind of. Like I had said before, it was also a week of immense stress and lots of overtime so in turn, a lot of things suffered from it. Luckily, next week’s recap returns to normal so we’ll be all back on track with everything (hopefully)!

READING

Currently reading: Undead Ultra

Very little reading was done! My main reading material has been catching up with news mostly for work purposes. Suffice to say, not enough progress in Undead Ultra to say much more about it. I am rather frustrating for not finding more reading time though.

PLAYING

• Samsara Room

Currently playing: Pinball FX3

Last week had the release of Samsara Room, which is a remake of Rusty Lake’s first game. It was offered for free on Steam and mobile devices which is always great. The game itself is very much to Rusty Lake’s style of puzzles/escape room. It was a fun little game with some decent puzzles for sure. I’m working on some mobile games roundup posts for Game Warp currently so this might get on one after I finish up the current post. There’s some gaming reviews backlog but things are slowly getting back up and running.

On the other hand, I finally started Pinball FX 3 which is one that’s been recommended to me by my podcast co-host Elwood after I had been on the pinball craze with Demon’s Tilt previously.

WATCHING

• Escape Room (2017)
• The Edge of Seventeen (2016 rewatch, Review)

Currently watching: Fight Club (1999)

Movies was on a low. i watched a bad movie to start the week and that was 2017’s Escape Room. Don’t confuse it with the more recent Escape Room that I reviewed HERE. Very different experience. It was so bad that I couldn’t use it as my feature film so I ended up rewatching a sure-fire, The Edge of Seventeen. Its been a few years since I’ve seen this one and it still is really fun to watch.

Much to a lot of people’s surprise, I haven’t seen Fight Club and was doing it for Movies and Tea recording. Way ahead in recording so you can guess what our next season is pretty much about at this point. I got shocked by the movie’s length and lost the focus to watch so about half done and stopped.

BINGING

• Unrequited Love (2019 rewatch)
• Wolf Creek (Season 2, 2017)

Currently binging: Youth With You 2, Me To Us, The Love Equations, Produce Camp 2020, Welcome Back to Sound, Go Fridge (Season 6), Yes I Do (Season 2)

TV is still going the strongest. After The Untamed, I’m not going to lie, its not done yet. I’m still incredibly obsessed with it so I haven’t found the mood to start a whole lot of new TV dramas. There’s one that just started that I want to see but just not in the mood at this current moment. Either way, variety shows have been bursting out everywhere. New seasons for shows that I like. Everything in the “currently binging” section is all new shows updated once or twice a week so once I caught up with everything, I went back to rewatch Unrequited Love which I am also working on a TV binge for and a second watch has got me scratching my head even more why they are remaking this so soon. Either way, we will see whether the new one works as well when it gets released.

As for Shudder, it finally got Wolf Creek’s Season 2 which we’ve been waiting for since we finished the first season a year (or maybe two) ago. Luckily, this is an anthology series so every season the story is different because the first season is slightly foggy (more for my husband). This one was very different to the first season but overall, other than the first episode, it was a pretty good one. I’m not sure whether Season 3 was confirmed but I did see in my research that Wolf Creek 3 is in the plans.

The only changes for this week for currently binging goes to the newest season release for Go Fridge and Yes I Do on Tencent and iQiyi respectively.  There are some changes to the structure but overall, it seems like its going to be a good time.  Only one episode in so we never know, right?

That’s it for this What’s Up!
What have you been reading/watching/playing/binging?

What’s Up 2020: Week 2

Week 2 of 2020 has wrapped up and its been a fairly crazy time. A lot of it got affected by the fact that we had some bad weather hit Montreal and the lovely suburbs that I lived had power outage for 16 hours or something which of course, took a toll on the whole movie watching and gaming elements along with one other issue. With that said, it still is pretty balanced of late. I’m trying to start 2020 with a nice start of not procrastinating any writing so taking things a little slower to allow more time to do the write-ups.

READING

• Death in Smoke by Barbara Elle (Review)
• The Weighing of the Heart by Paul Tudor Owen

As with any power outage, my Kindle became my best friend, especially as the cell towers seemed to also be affected. I was able to catch up on some reading and finished up The Weighing of the Heart which will be reviewed in a blog tour coming up very soon. Both of these books that I finished was pretty good. I’d have to say that The Weighing of the Heart was good because of the Egyptian mythology angle as well as a quick concise story that helped keep the pacing really good.

PLAYING

Currently playing: Color Pieceout, Overcooked 2 (co-op mode)

I’ve been playing Color Pieceout for a while already but never really quite talked about it because its a mobile game. Mobile Game Roundups are hitting a little stand still over at Game Warp Blog which is mostly a writer’s block for specifically game reviews. Its coming up soon but I just need to get back into the groove of things. However, Color Pieceout is a fun little game. Its free and uses coins collected during the puzzles to unlock things which makes in-app purchases unnecessary. Its animation is similar to Professor Layton and blends Match-3 puzzles with mystery cases. So much fun!

WATCHING

• Brokeback Mountain (2007)
• Mamma Mia! (2008 rewatch, Review)
• Sinister (2012)
• The Marshes (2017)

I’m not going to lie that I started a few movies but just fell asleep so I’m not adding it in like Robocop, The Raid 2 and some other one that I can’t remember right now. However, these few are those that I did finish. We are getting back into horror, not that I took that big of a break from it in the first place. The highlight of this week goes to Brokeback Mountain which is part of the Movies and Tea season. Why it gets the highlight is simply because it surprised me how much I liked it. It shouldn’t because its Oscar fodder and it comes with its talent but I liked it a lot more than I expected that I would. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy Sinister which was a pretty tight fight between the one to highlight. Sinister did a lot of things right and had a sequence that I absolutely loved and had some clever twists to the story.

BINGING

• All I Want For Love Is You (2019)

Currently binging: The Circle, Who’s The Murderer 5, Ashes of Love

I took an unexpected turn and started watching All I Want For Love Is You, which wasn’t part of my list anywhere and just popped up on my feed and I was like, “Sure. Why not?” It turned out to be pretty fun overall. It had the whole teenage high school romance that went into university. There were some silly moments but it had some SERIOUS pacing issues. I’ll be getting the post done for this one and will talk more about it then. One the other hand, The Circle has one more week of their event to go before it ends. I honestly can’t wait to talk about it since there’s a lot to discuss about that and it’ll depend on how the final few episodes go. While I’ve started a new series via Netflix called Ashes of Love which was a big deal the year that it was released. I literally just started the first few episodes so hard to say how I feel about it so far.

That’s it for this What’s Up!
What have you been reading/watching/playing/binging?

What’s Up 2019: Week 40

We’ve swapped to the start of Q4 of 2019 now. Halloween is around the corner and festivals are coming up. I’m trying to catch up with a lot of movie watching and wrapping up TV series that I started and just piling up on content before the festival comes around. There’s also a lot of reading and gaming to do that I’m not sure I’m really on track with. I’ll give a little update on certain things in each of their sections below.

READING

• Sketch by Didi Oviatt

Currently reading: Hope by Terry Tyler

Finished up Sketch this week which is a nice little thriller novella. Didi Oviatt has quickly become an author on my radar since I have enjoyed all the stories I’ve read from her.

Talking about the Goodreads Reading Challenge, I’ve made the executive decision to lower the books amount because at this point, its not going to happen but made it still challenging for the realm and decreased it to 35 books, and still 4 books behind which might still have a chance of catching up.

PLAYING

• Lie in My Heart (2019, Review)

Currently playing: A Life in Music

A huge thanks to the dev of Lie in My Heart reaching out to us to try out his visual novel. Since visual novels are more my domain, I took this over for myself to do.

WATCHING

• The Purge: Election Year (2016, Review)
• Donnie Darko (2001)
• Boar (2017, Review)
• Get Out (2017, Review)
• Hereditary (2018, Review)
• I Used to Be Normal: A Boy Band Fangirl Story

Pretty much on track for watching schedule before heading into festival season. Its been a busy week full of different commitments and things to do. Two of the watches are for Movies and Tea and should be recorded by the time this post goes out. While the horror double features should also be all done. All the links are above so I will just say, Get Out is my top pick for this week’s viewings. If you haven’t seen it, go see it!

BINGING

• Gilmore Girls (Season 1 rewatch, Review)

Currently binging: When I Grow Up, Dream Space 2, Relation Ship, Well-Intended Love

When things go crazy and I get stressed with life and work, I always go and watch Gilmore Girls and so, it has started yet again. However, I did feel slightly guilty about this being a little slow and repetitive so started up a Netflix Original Chinese drama series called Well-Intended Love which got greenlit for a 2nd season with the same cast. Which seems to be a rarity for Chinese dramas oddly. Either way, I am halfway done and supposedly the plot twist was the dealbreaker for this show. I can’t quite say that it is for myself as I had another scenario that if that one happened, well, then it would have been a real dealbreaker and it didn’t so I am okay with it so far. Nowhere near my top 5 C-drama of the year for sure but its entertaining enough.

That’s it for this week’s recap!
What have you been reading/watching/playing/binging?

Game Warp: Interview with Urubu Studio

Game Warp has a new episode! It is time for an interview with an independent game developer. We sit down to chat with Urubu Studio who is a one man team headed by Gabriel Sauvé, who is developing a mobile diplomatic strategy game called Feudal Feud. It is currently in beta. You can find all the information on how to join in the beta near the end. Feudal Feud is a game based on the feudal system. We have a nice chat about the hurdles of developing a game on your own along with learning how to do it as you may be surprised by his background before he decided to start up this challenge.

Thanks so much for listening. Hope you enjoyed!

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