We should all remember the Rambo films. The first thing that comes into our heads is probably Sylvester Stallone standing half-naked and holding a ridiculously large machine gun with a red headband wrapped around his long and wavy black hair. As iconic as that image may be of the American Action Movie genre, it’s a real shame because this very portrayal of the character takes away a lot of the seriousness behind the first Rambo film First Blood which was quite decent and entirely character-focused, a bit like the first Rocky movie. And I’m sure we are already well aware that there will be a 4th instalment coming soon.

Just on headbands though, why is it that so many characters wear… Read More

There may already be hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs/articles on crappy video game movies so I have decided to offer a variation to this theme. This blog is a ‘tribute’ to talented actors who have been unfortunate/stupid enough to have been involved in rubbish video game movies, such that they either never recovered or it still remains a big stain on their CVs.

Please note: NOBODY from DOA will be featured because, cmon let’s face it, ‘acting’ wasn’t a requirement (unless you count wearing a bikini and performing crappy looking flykicks). And I won’t include the Mortal Kombat film either because that was quite decent as far as games-to-movies go in my opinion (Edit: apart from Christopher Lambert as Raiden, and the fact that Paul W S Anderson… Read More

Following my last blog on Schwarzenegger- related arcade games and because several people mentioned it, this new article will be on the classic Alien vs Predator arcade game. No not the rubbish movie, or the Jaguar first-person shooter, or even the recent AvP FPS. This Final Fight-like title was released in 1994 by Capcom and featured fantastic 4-player co-op like the Simpsons and TMNT games back then. It was later ported to the Neo-Geo I think, but honestly how many of us owned one of those?

Story: Pretty predictable – Earth is invaded by the Aliens and four heroes are summoned to save it. Yes, ONLY four. Never mind the armies around the world or anything. And two of them are… Read More

I never played the original Elevator Action which Taito released in 1983 but the closest I came was when I borrowed a Game Boy version off a friend many years later but the cartridge didn’t work and I was accused of ruining it. In 1995 though, the sequel Elevator Action II (aka E A Returns) came out and quickly became one of my favourite games of all time. It had brilliant animation, great gameplay which supported 2 player co-op, and a Schwarzenegger-type character amusingly named “Jad The Taff”, whatever that means.

Actually all 3 of the playable characters had weird names. Apart from the muscular and slow Jad/Arnie there was Kart Bradfield