Members of Raven Software’s QA team - who work on ensuring the quality of Call of Duty: Warzone, one of Activision Blizzard’s biggest hits and financial successes - issued a statement announcing the intent to walk out and context behind the layoffs. Original Story: Following news over the weekend that Activision Blizzard laid off “at least a dozen” quality assurance contractors at Raven Studios, members of the team still with the company have announced plans to walk out and demand that the laid-off employees return and are offered full-time positions.
#Unmechanical extended review ign movie
If you go in expecting something in the vein of the games (like my kids, who kept issuing proclamations of, “That’s not Koopa!” and “Those don’t look like Goombas!” at regular intervals throughout their first-time watch), then those additional minutes will likely prove only more frustrating.īased on the great Nintendo franchise, this live-action movie features Bob Hoskins as the Italian plumber with an attitude as he battles Dennis Hopper as the dreaded King Koopa (Bowser) in a foreign, industrial world.Despite announcing an intent to promote 500 contractors, walkout employees say it will "not stand for a core part of the studio being the source for most, if not all, terminations." is probably still a bit too mature for the audience who would want to watch a movie based on this property. While it’s not exactly a Gothic noir-fest in the vein of The Crow (which came out around the same time), the extended edit of Super Mario Bros. This is still a really bizarre take on that world. Next question: Do those improvements make it a better Super Mario Bros. So, yes, it improves on what we got before. There’s an entire subplot added about the Mario Bros.’ rival plumbers that ties their stories closer to the mob boss antagonizing Daisy (Samantha Mathis), and several preexisting scenes are lengthened, allowing the whole thing to breathe while adding some helpful context. It’s clear a lot of big and small bits got the chop in order to hit a more family-friendly runtime, and the film suffered as a result. To that end, Ryan Hoss and the folks at Super Mario Bros.: The Movie Archive, dutifully keeping the fungus flame lit for the last fourteen years, have done a great service toward lending greater respectability to Super Mario Bros: The Movie via their release online of a heretofore lost edit, christened the “Morton-Jankel Cut.” Found on a VHS tape and laboriously restored by filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist, it adds about twenty minutes to the extant 105-minute version and serves as a pretty good proof-of-concept should the studio want to put out something more official.ĭoes the added footage make Super Mario Bros. Instead, it’s right there in the middle, which has proved fruitful terrain over the last 28 years to nurture a dedicated fanbase ready to trumpet praise for the fascinating ways it stands apart. There’s just something punk rock about their approach (call it “future-meets-fungus”) that I can’t help but admire even while admitting there may simply have been too big a chasm between their high-flying intentions and the expectations packed in with the brand (which had already been turned into a Saturday morning cartoon and breakfast cereal by this time).Īlthough the theatrical release is perhaps too narratively disjointed and tonally dissonant to qualify as “good” (at times it’s almost like a Funny or Die parody of a “serious” attempt at Mario and company), it so proudly brandishes its bonkers, go-for-broke aesthetic (I mean, how can you not love Dennis Hopper playing King Koopa?), one hesitates to label it entirely “bad” either.
#Unmechanical extended review ign series
As directed by Rocky Morton & Annabel Jankel (co-creators of another cult artifact, 1980s sci-fi series Max Headroom), it didn’t always work, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it.