Armada [BOOK REVIEW]

Posted By JT Hanke on Jul 14, 2015 in Featured, Origin: DGM Staff, Review: Books, Reviews, Type: Article (Text Only), Type: Article (w/ Videos)

In the near future, Zack Lightman is a video game savant at one of the most popular games in the world: ARMADA. Armada allows people with souped up VR control rigs to control flying robots and attempt to fend off an alien invasion. In a case of pop culture déjà vu harkening back to The Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game, Lightman discovers that the game is a training simulator designed to find the best and the brightest pilots on the planet to defend the earth from a real alien invasion. However, after a hurried recruitment, Lightman discovers that deception lurks…

Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! 3: The Seven Serpents [VIDEO GAME REVIEW]

Posted By JT Hanke on Apr 22, 2015 in Featured, Origin: DGM Staff, Review: Games, Review: Video Games, Reviews, Type: Article (w/ Photos), Type: Article (w/ Videos)

In concluding the last game, Kharé, Cityport of Traps, we unraveled a mystery involving mages and an invasion that permitted our adventurer to escape Kharé with our hide intact and made our way into the forbidding wastelands known as the Baklands. In this new chapter, we find ourselves in the Baklands blazing a trail for the metropolis of Mapang—home to the deadly keep where the Archmage who has taken the stolen crown has fled—only to discover that 7 deadly serpents are hunting us. These serpents are the treacherous servants of the Archmage and, those who don’t kill us, will rush back to…

Blind Night: Could Netflix’ Daredevil become the most successful Comic Translation? [EDITORIAL/ARTICLE]

Posted By JT Hanke on Apr 15, 2015 in Article, Article: Books/Literature, Article: Games/Media, Article: Movies/Television, Editorials, Editorials: Comics, Editorials: Film, Editorials: TV, Featured

For those of us who love comics, the announcement that Marvel TV inked a four franchise deal with Netflix in 2013 to take some of their grittier properties and make TV shows out of them was a little confusing. Obviously, Rated R properties have no place in Marvel Studios new cinematic feature film universe which is decidedly PG-13, but would the Netflix shows be cheap, hokey takeoffs on these Marvel properties? (After all, Marvel TV’s own Agents of Shield on ABC has been hemorrhaging fans since its creation.)

The Last American Vampire [BOOK REVIEW]

Posted By JT Hanke on Mar 4, 2015 in Featured, Origin: DGM Staff, Review: Books, Reviews

If you’ve been following DarkestGoth since we began, you know that I personally loved the film adaptation of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. It seems like those critics that missed the point on this film failed to understand the premise of fantastic historic fiction…that the goal is not to tie into ones’ own preconceived notions, but to meet the facts that we currently have and fill in gaps with story arcs that are plausible and, moreover, interestingly insightful into a time and era that is often a mystery to the modern…

Meta-Art: The New Face of Interactive Expression, Part 3 [ARTICLE]

Posted By JT Hanke on Feb 11, 2015 in Article, Article: Art/Theater, Article: Books/Literature, Article: Current Events/Awareness, Article: Games/Media, Article: Movies/Television, Creative Arts, Creative Arts: Films, Creative Arts: Multimedia, Creative Arts: Stories/Serials, Editorials, Editorials: Gaming, Featured

Due to the power of these sort of “meta-art” concepts, the draw of incredible, tense movies like The Game, Inside Man, and Ocean’s Eleven, and the popularity of things like LARPing, some companies, like Lexington, Kentucky’s The Breakout Games, have decided to see about bringing the metagames found in complex board games and video games and the scenarios reserved to for edge of your seat thriller films to real life! (There are other companies with similar types of offerings out there, so, if you’re not in the Kentucky area, you can likely find places like this in your area. I’m going into…

Meta-Art: The New Face of Interactive Expression, Part 2 [ARTICLE]

Posted By JT Hanke on Feb 4, 2015 in Article, Article: Art/Theater, Article: Books/Literature, Article: Current Events/Awareness, Article: Games/Media, Article: Movies/Television, Creative Arts, Creative Arts: Films, Creative Arts: Multimedia, Creative Arts: Stories/Serials, Editorials, Editorials: Gaming, Featured

When video games grew popular, it was assumed that people would play these animated games when they were children (when children already play a lot of games) and then grow out of them. But we began to learn that people didn’t grow out of them, but instead craved more complex mysteries and stories as they aged. This led to pivotal games like Myst and Rivven, which started the modern video game trend of well-created story and making your players use their brains, not just their reflexes. At the current rate of consumption of complex and morally challenging video games, in the near future…

Meta-Art: The New Face of Interactive Expression, Part 1 [ARTICLE]

Posted By JT Hanke on Jan 28, 2015 in Article, Article: Art/Theater, Article: Books/Literature, Article: Current Events/Awareness, Article: Games/Media, Article: Movies/Television, Creative Arts, Creative Arts: Films, Creative Arts: Multimedia, Creative Arts: Stories/Serials, Editorials, Editorials: Gaming, Featured

It’s hard to be a modern creative person without having been exposed to conversations about the “meta-game” or the “meta-content” that’s behind modern creative works. This is made all the more confusing due to the fact that the concept behind how it’s now use in New Media is a hybrid of the noun version of this word, the adjective version, and something else. The French have a phrase called “Je ne sais quoi” which literally translated means “I know not what”—as in, there’s something else about what I’m talking about, but I can’t put my finger on it. It would be appropriate…

Morganville Vampires brought to YouTube: Geek & Sundry Attempts Impossible [VIDEO]

Posted By JT Hanke on Jan 14, 2015 in Article, Article: Movies/Television, Creative Arts, Creative Arts: Films, Creative Arts: Stories/Serials, Featured, Geek & Sundry, MorganVille, Origin: DGM Staff, Playlists, Type: Article (w/ Videos), Type: Video

If you’ve read Rachel Caine’s interesting and slow-burn developing series, The Morganville Vampires, you probably never thought it could be brought to anything other than network TV. However, Geek & Sundry, after launching other original shows like Spellslingers, TableTop, and the Guild, decided to help bring the kickstarted campaign for film to their YouTube channel through the mini-medium of web-length episodes.

DarkestGoth Girl Holiday Products: The 2015 Calendar [ANNOUNCEMENT]

Posted By JT Hanke on Dec 19, 2014 in Announcements, Article, Creative Arts: Photography, Featured, Model: Danna Victoria, Model: Laila Black, Model: Mariarita Cupersito, Model: Women, News & Updates, Origin: DGM Staff, Type: Article (w/ Photos)

We’re now into the last minute shopping before the holidays and what better way can you show someone you love them than with the calendars of one (or three) of our beautiful DarkestGoth Girls!

Blue Labyrinth [BOOK REVIEW]

Posted By JT Hanke on Dec 10, 2014 in Featured, Origin: DGM Staff, Review: Books, Reviews, Type: Article (Text Only)

When a lethal relative shows up dead on FBI Agent A.X.L. Pendergast’s doorstep in New York City, our favorite Gothic detective is prompted to explore places he never wanted to go.

Struggling to figure out who could have killed a man whose genetically enhanced abilities should have made him unkillable, Pendergast is provoked to look still deeper into the deadly secrets that enfold his family tree. He quickly discovers that, if he has any chance of surviving the chain of events this death kicks off, he’ll have to rely most on the very people he’s tried desperately to keep out of the line…