Author: Jim McLennan

Hot-Blooded Angel

  By

★★
“Luke-warm vigilantes.”

Watching this one, I had a very strong sense of deja-vu, to the point I started looking for a previous review. Turns out, none such existed, because I think my previous encounter with it was on one of those dodgy, “pirate” YouTube channels, under the different name of Scarlet Strike. I skipped writing about it, since I wasn’t able to determine any information off that, such as cast and crew. Because, it turns out, that wasn’t its real title. A month later, I watched this official copy one morning, while Chris was taking our new cat to the vet to be neutered. There were points where I suspect the cat had the better day. 

Ok, it was not quite that bad, but coming the morning after Lamb Game, the gap in quality was palpable. It takes place in Chinatown, so I guess… not in China? A dubious businessman, Mr. Ba is seeking to knock down all the small businesses and family homes for the usual property development reasons. Standing against him are a pair of orphan sisters (Feng and Sun), who run a sweet shop, as well as the “Guardian Angel” (Xu), a masked vigilante who keeps the area safe from predators of all kinds. Basically, it ends as a team-up, especially after Ba decides to kidnap one of the sisters for use as leverage. The other sister and Guardian Angel then have to go rescue her from his headquarters. 

From a technical point of view, it’s competent enough. However, the characters all seem the epitome of blandness. There is what appears to be an effort to inject some kind of romantic interest in the shape of honest cop, Officer Wu (Huang). However, there’s absolutely no chemistry between him and any of the three female leads, so I’m not sure why they bothered. There are also a series of confusing flashbacks to childhood, though I’m uncertain to which character they refer. I’m still trying to work out whether the Guardian Angel is intended to be a long-lost sibling. Between her and Ba’s pair of minions, it appears Chinese orphanages may be a hot-bed of martial arts training. 

Looking at the poster, it’s either generated by AI or bad PhotoShop. The former would make sense, if only because the script could be from the same source. The action is rarely better than mid-tier, and there’s a lengthy section in the middle where it vanishes entirely. Instead, we get some genuinely bad attempts at comic relief, and it’s at that point I would have happily swapped places with the house feline. A brief spurt of fighting towards the end briefly reawakened interest. However, we suffer through a poorly-conceived finale involving a device, not previously mentioned, that can decrypt Mr. Ba’s hard-drive, and a coda which feels longer than the one at the end of Return of the King. This one certainly coughs up a hair-ball. 

Dir: Jin Xin
Star: Xu Dong Dong, Feng Yan Yan, Huang Tao, Sun Wen Xue

Lamb Game

  By

★★★½
“Ribbons and bows.”

This kinda teetered on the edge of inclusion or not, for about 90% of the movie. The heroine is quite passive, and the action is largely handled by others. It’s still solidly entertaining, and is definitely upper-tier as Die Hard knockoffs go. But it didn’t have a sufficient action heroine quotient… until the very end. There, she finally gets her act together, and takes the fight to her opponents. Was it enough? I was still on the fence, until one bravura shot convinced me. It doesn’t necessarily make logical sense, sure. However, it was just so damn cool, I had no option but to stamp its card and allow the movie entrance through these hallowed portals.

It begins at a wedding, where Shirley (Hung) is about to get married. A gang of jewel thieves led by Di (Chan) shows up, and a firefight with the authorities breaks out. Her husband-to-be decides to have a go. It does not end well for him. A few years later, Shirley gets locked in the building where she works at an archery hall, during a typhoon. By chance, Di and his cronies are also there, working on another robbery. He’s not happy when he realizes Shirley has witnessed him killing his target, and sends his over-sexed brother and another minion to hunt her down. Fortunately for Shirley, another resident in the building is blind martial artist, Nan Ge (Cheng, who used to be married to Yukari Oshima).

This is supposed to be set in Hong Kong during the late nineties, not that any Western viewer could probably tell. But especially in the opening scene, at the wedding, it does feel like a throwback to the golden days of Hong Kong action cinema, before the British colony was handed back to the Chinese. There’s some glorious slo-mo, blood squibbing and gun-fu, that really had me thinking this might be an undiscovered gem. The rest can’t quite live up to the same, heady delights. Yet it’s still a nicely crafted piece of low-budget entertainment, with some particularly impressive photography, which seems to have strayed in from a much bigger production. The setting is cool too, although it appears nobody in Hong Kong has heard of “fire exits”.

Shirley does spend most of the early going running and hiding, with the most memorable bit of violence an encounter with a protruding nail. Eventually, though, Nan Ge is no longer around to protect her, because… of reasons, and she has to fend for herself. Shirley’s employment might be a factor there. It’s a shame, from our perspective, this took so long to show up, since there’s potential for a lot more. To be clear, I was still enjoying proceedings – just on a non-GWG level. When “Action Shirley’ finally does appear, it’s more like dessert than the main course. Go in with that as your expectation, and you should still find yourself enjoying the meal.

Dir: Huang Yi
Star: Lynn Hung, Ricky Chan, Mark Cheng, Zhao Jing Shu Yu

Stone Cold Fox

  By

★★
“For Fox’s sake…”

I think, if you’re going to try and recreate the eighties, it might help if you were there. I was. Co-writer/director Tabet? Not so much. She seems repeatedly to confuse the look and feel of the decade with the seventies. The repeated needle-drop of Sweet song “Fox on the Run” – actually released in 1974 – is the most blatant example. It explains why the results are a bit of a mess. A well-intentioned mess, to be fair, and you can usually see what they are aiming for. However, throwing a character in solely so they can refer to eighties films like Commando and Cobra, is painfully clunky, and is a more accurate reflection of the approach in which this indulges.

It takes place, as noted, in some vaguely historical period, where troubled teenager Fox (Shipka) runs away from junkie single mother, and younger sister Spooky. She’s taken under the wing and becomes the lover of Goldie (Ritter), a criminal entrepreneur. But after she catches an apparent glimpse of Spooky, Fox feels guilty at abandoning her sibling. She lifts a large duffel-bag of drugs, stolen by Goldie in association with her corrupt cop partner, Billy Breaker (Sutherland) and goes on the lam, looking for Spooky. Naturally, neither Goldie nor Breaker are pleased by this development, and set out to recover their ill-gotten gains. However, Fox has allies on her side too, including ex-combat medic Frankie, who has a Lebanese almost but not quite brother (the film fan mentioned).

While in pre-production on this, Tabet said, “I plan on genre-bending: gut-punching, pulpy, queer stories told with a habibi flare.” Well, apart from having to look up what “habibi” means – and I’m still confused what was intended there, in relation to movies – I guess this kinda works? It’s not very genre-bending, with a random, one-off breaking of the fourth wall at the start the closest we get. And I didn’t feel like it provided any punches to the gut, beyond a gentle tap regarding something regarding Spooky. Pulpy and queer? More so: indeed, it does seem at times like the script is more intent on ticking diversity boxes – not something exactly common in the eighties – than telling a story. This is my unsurprised face, that the film ended up on Netflix. 

It was a little ironic watching Sutherland playing a lawman, the day after his arrest for allegedly assaulting an Uber driver. Such things aside, there are some positives. Ritter makes for a decent villainess, and Mishel Prada is so much fun as Frankie, I’d perhaps have preferred the film to have focused on her story (the synchronised nunchaking was my personal highlight). But for every step forward, there are two back: Chung’s newly-transferred cop character serves no real purpose, and is just a cliché on legs; the same goes for Goldie’s henchwomen. There was more to the eighties (and to eighties action movies as well) than training montages. I should know.

Dir: Sophie Tabet
Star: Kiernan Shipka, Krysten Ritter, Kiefer Sutherland, Jamie Chung

Notebook Mysteries ~ Emma, by Kimberly Mullins

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

This begins with the Great Chicago Fire, an 1871 conflagration which killed around three hundred people. One of those is the mother of Emma Evans, and ten years later she’s a bright, inquisitive 16-year-old. She works part-time in the family bakery her mother previously ran, and also helps our her civil engineer father, but is also learning more… unusual skills, such as escapology and self-defense. These come in handy, as when she’s out carrying out deliveries with her friends Tony and Tim, Emma’s observational skills allow her to notice suspicious behaviour. When she has gathered enough evidence, she can then pass matters on to the appropriate authorities.

However, these activities don’t exactly win her friends in the criminal underworld, and she gradually discovers that her mother’s death might not have been the terrible accident it appeared to be. There’s also the matter of an unknown person who is clearly keeping a very close eye on Emma’s daily activities. Are they doing so for good or evil? All is eventually revealed – though oddly, after what feels very much like it should have been the climax, the book then meanders on with another investigation for another half-hour. Truly anti-climactic, literally. Mind you, I was still coming to terms with the facile ease Emma kills someone during that confrontation. While arguably justified, she does not seem particularly bothered about it afterward.

The historical setting, nineteenth century Chicago, was a fresh one, and this was quite evocatively handled [though I’m disappointed my Kindle copy didn’t contain the baking recipes other reviews indicate were present! I checked. Twice.]. There are some elements which feel like they don’t quite fit with society of that time: everyone seems remarkably chill with Emma learning how to throw knives like a circus performer, and going out with one strapped to her leg. Formal education also seems notable by its absence, despite Emma being smart and from a middle-class background. It does feel a little “young adult”-ish, perhaps aimed even at an early teen crowd. Which is interesting, because later books in the series definitely have Emma all grown-up. I wonder if the language matures with her.

It all feels a fraction too sanitized for my tastes, with only an occasional suggestion of actual peril for her heroine, despite her poking her nose into some potentially dangerous locations. The main antagonist is… Well, there isn’t really one specifically, it’s more of a nebulous concept of “organized crime in Victorian Chicago.” There were some twists I didn’t see coming, and appreciate the way that not everyone was as good, or bad, as they initially appeared – our heroine’s skills at observation definitely don’t extend to reading people’s intentions! While I didn’t dislike this, there were not sufficient positives for it to come close to interesting me in further installments. It’s very much a one and done.

Author: Kimberly Mullins
Publisher: JKJ Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 7 in the Notebook Mysteries series.

Rogue Angel

  By

★★
“Time is not on its side.”

There is certainly something laudable taking on the challenge of making a feature film in seven days, and on a budget of seven thousand dollars. Doing so, and coming out the far end with anything remotely watchable, requires discipline and commitment. However, it also comes with certain penalties. The end consumer isn’t going to care about any of those constraints. They’re going to look at the screen and see takes which are “good enough,” rather than good, and particularly among the supporting cast, performances by people selected more for availability than talent. I tend to suggest it might be better to put the time and resources into making the best movie you can, rather than the cheapest and/or quickest one. 

Here, we have Angie Baker (Gerhardy), former member of an all-women platoon in the Middle East, who has returned to the town where she was brought up, as her grandmother nears death. There’s a lot of baggage here, including the younger sister she left behind, Lexi (Krause), and the family mine, owned by the grandmother and coveted by certain other relations. Most significantly though, is her fraught to the point of non-existent relationship with her father, Jake (Woodman). There was an incident – we find out the details right at the end – which is why Angie left. And is why Jake ends up buried alive in the woods. Hey, his coffin does have a breathing tube: Angie is not a monster… 

This was Daly’s first feature, according to the IndieGoGo page, and while I have certainly seen a lot worse, you can tell that’s the case, along with the limitations of the schedule and budget. The highly unconvincing attempt to be Afghanistan should have been canned, for instance, and there is an inconsistency of tone in Angie’s character. Particularly at the end, she goes full Rambo, gouging out eyes and slicing off body parts, in a way that seems out of place. Admittedly, at that point we aren’t aware of the full truth – which may or may not justify such nastiness: I’d have preferred to know from the start, bringing us along on her journey of revenge. Trimming 15-20 minutes would have made for a tighter and leaner product too.

It’s interesting to note this was written and directed by a woman: not often the case in the movies we review. Although it’s not often the case in action film-making generally: without being prejudiced, the fact is that women tend to gravitate to other genres. Perhaps as a result, Daly does bring a different perspective to this, though it’s one which paints with a broad brush: about the only man here who isn’t a Neanderthal is the local sheriff (Fowlks). As a starting point, this is okay – it is obviously a start, however, and is likely more successful as a learning experience than as a feature, only occasionally achieving any genuine emotional connection. I would be curious to see what Daly could do, when she takes her time. 

Dir: Brenda Daly
Star: Jackie Gerhardy, Sheila Krause, Dan Fowlks, Allen Woodman

The Cost of Something Priceless

  By

★½
“The Price of Something Worthless”

I think it was the start of the closing credits where I realized why I disliked this so intensely. The film describes itself as, “A Flick by Adam ‘Ace’ Silva.” There’s hardly a part of that which does not make me cringe. Having the nickname “Ace” is one thing: it should only apply if you’re a sixties test-pilot. But putting it in your film is… yeah. Then there’s calling your movie a “flick”. No. Just no. It’s an attitude which, in hindsight, infuses the entire production. But what do you expect, when Silva didn’t just direct it. He also wrote it, edited it, did the cinematography and composed the music. All one hundred and eleven minutes of it. 

The story is about as much of a mess as the movie poster, with a lot of ideas, and woefully little idea of how to put them into a coherent structure. The heroine is Carmen (Maya), whom we first meet ripping off a former boyfriend for some drugs and money, leaving him for dead in the street. Key words, “leaving him for”. He’s not actually dead, and nor is he happy about it. Naturally, retribution is on his mind, and from this spirals off a slew of violent incidents and kooky characters, such as a weird, bald assassin with a foot fetish. Meanwhile, Maya attempts to make her way through the carnage and be re-united with her long-lost daughter, alongside somewhat faithful sidekick Tobias Anderson (Swain).

It’s not so much a question of being unable to figure out what’s going on, and more a case of finding myself unable to give a damn. Carmen isn’t a nice person to begin with. Had we, for example, been given an indication of her maternal leanings early on, that would have been something on which we might have been able to hang our empathy. Instead, we are repeatedly told how she doesn’t care for anyone else, although this is painfully apparent from the get-go. Rather than developing other characters, the film flings them at us, quickly getting bored and moving on the next. Some do have potential, such as the double-act who refer to themselves as Jack and Jill. Don’t expect much more.

I will say, there is plenty of the old ultraviolence. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with some of the worst digital muzzle-flashes I’ve ever seen. The last 20 minutes are a parade of completely unconvincing gun battles, with no noticeable damage to property at all. The fisticuffs are better, simply because they don’t need to have digital garbage pasted on top. Carmen does kinda look like the sort of person who would kick your butt: both she and Jill (Krueger) seem to do a fair amount of wandering around in their bras, which is not unpleasant. However, it all becomes a chore, long before an ending which came as more a relief than anything else.

Dir: Adam Silva
Star: Lina Maya, Davone Swain, Steven Staine Fernandez, Jessica Krueger

American Woman

  By

★½
“Doctor in the house.”

I guess some credit is due here for going against type, at least. Molly Reese (Stack) is not your typical vigilante. She’s actually a doctor who works in an emergency room, and suffers a debilitating mental blow when her husband and daughter are both killed in an accident. She subsequently goes to a very dark place psychologically, telling her therapist she has thoughts about killing people. This is particularly unfortunate, after she is unable to save a local mob-boss, and his gang decide she is to blame. For Molly gets to put all those murderous impulses into action, under the guise of self-defense, and then proceeds to take the fight to the gangsters, all the while becoming increasingly unstable. 

It’s an interesting concept, and the potential is there: a doctor using her medical skills in ways of which the Hippocratic Oath would not approve. As noted, she doesn’t initially look like a crazed vigilante, and that might have been leveraged to good effect. However, the execution here is flat-out terrible, in a variety of ways. Stack as the protagonist isn’t particularly one of them, though her descent into insanity is largely depicted by Molly pulling increasingly deranged faces, and steadily worse hair-styles. It’s everything else. For example, the gangsters, who could not be a more shallow cliche of Italians if they tried. We know they are gangsters, because the restaurant where they hang out plays Nessun Dorma on a loop, I kid you not. 

Their competence leaves a huge amount to be desired too, perpetually losing fights – both gun and hand-to-hand – against a middle-aged physician with no previous experience. This makes them largely useless as villains, since they’re no threat. Though Mikey (Rosing), the one mostly in charge of hunting Molly, at least looks the part, ponytail and all. However, the actual battles are terribly staged, such as a lengthy gun-battle in a bowling alley, where none of the bullets seems to hit anything at all. There’s another member of the gang, Vito (Zambrano), who seems to have a thing for Molly. Don’t worry, since this proves to be of no significance. It’s all unfocused and poorly structured, up until an ending so abrupt, it suggests everyone involved suddenly realized they’d made a terrible mistake.

Probably the worst thing in the movie though, is Mollie’s neighbour, David (Tyler). I’m not sure if this depiction of a mentally-challenged individual was intended to provide humourous relief. If there’s blackface and brownface, is there such a thing as “retardface”, where someone pretends to be intellectually disabled for comedic purposes? Even if Tyler is genuinely like that (doubtful), it’s horribly exploitative, and would be among the most cringe-inducing portrayals of the year. It sums up a severely misbegotten adventure, that might have worked better as a short. It certainly has “Not ready for first feature” written all the way through it. Although for writer-director Siegel, the only way from here is up. 

Dir: Artie Siegel
Star: Katelin Stack, Joe Rosing, Frank Zambrano, Vic Tyler

Paradise

  By

★★★
“Death in Paradise”

Despite coming in as a “Tubi Original” – a badge which has previously been as much a warning as an incentive – this isn’t bad at all. It doesn’t especially push any envelopes, yet what it does, it does well enough, and with sufficient variations on the theme to keep me interested. Ella Patchet (Allison) is the daughter of Dan, the local police chief on the island of Paradise (it was shot in Hawaii). She’s rather hot-headed and a big fan of guns, to the concern of her father, who prefers to do his job without being armed. He gets tipped off about the return to Paradise of the gang led by Lee Paige, whom he ran off the island years previously. Shortly after, Dan turns up dead.

Needless to say, Ella is not happy, and vows to bring Paige to justice, despite the warnings of local mayor Calvin Whitney (Donovan), who does not want her going all vigilante. His concerns are not Ella’s concerns, to put it mildly, and she begins working her way up the chain of crime to the reclusive and mysterious Paige. However, you likely won’t be surprised to learn there are surprises for her on the way, and things aren’t exactly as they initially appear. From the opening credits, it’s clear that Isaacson is going for an “ocean Western”, for want of a better word. He largely succeeds: you could relocate this to 1860’s Texas without too much effort, though it’s beach-centric.

Patchet makes for an interesting heroine, whom we first meet getting thrown out of a bar. In some ways, she acts like she is about fifteen, but in others comes across as very mature. Certainly, she’s an unstoppable force, who’s both intelligent and driven. It’s definitely a case where firearms act as a great equalizer. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief about a smaller woman taking down larger men, because she simply shoots them in the head. This is undeniably violent, Ella racking up a fair body-count, and it works both ways, with a couple of unexpected, almost shocking deaths. There’s a scene-stealing turn from Tia Carrere, while I  enjoyed the villain’s lead henchmen basically saying “Screw this” and walking away.

In general though, the plotting is nothing special: the twists come as far more of a shock to the characters than the viewers. It’s also a little implausible how Ella can leave a trail of corpses, including state police, without becoming the subject of a massive manhunt. [Also, in reality, Hawaii has some of the strictest gun laws in the whole country] It feels as if the script would have benefited from a further revision or two, and if you are paying attention, you’ll work out where the final confrontation is going, a long way before it happens. But between Ella’s charisma and the style with which Isaacson delivers things, it held my attention without these issues becoming problematic. 

Dir: Max Isaacson
Star: Patricia Allison, Tate Donovan, Myles Evans, Adam Lustick

Code Name: Tiranga

  By

★★★
“Moderately spicy.”

This Indian movie flopped at the local box-office, and comes limping onto Netflix with an IMDb rating of just 3.2. Reviews there are largely scathing, calling it “unrealistic.” Oh, sure: but people bursting into song for elaborate musical numbers – that totally happens in Mumbai. To be clear, I love the likes of RRR. But realism, or anything in that solar system, is pretty low down on the list of reasons I watch Bollywood films. This is… well, serviceable, is what I’d call it. It is too long for the material, at 137 minutes, but again – length goes with the territory, it’s more a question whether the film is capable of filling it adequately. Here, not so much, at least in the second half.

The heroine is Durga Devi Singh (Chopra), an Indian spy whom we first meet honey-trapping Dr. Mirza Ali (Sandhu) in Afghanistan, in order to set a trap for terrorist leader, Khalid Omar (Kelkar). The trap fails, but Durga feels bad at having betrayed Mirza, for whom she has genuine feelings. A subsequent mission sees her sent to kill a captured operative, to prevent him from spilling secrets to the Pakistani intelligence agency. She ends up rescuing him instead, but is hurt in the process, which brings her back into the company of the good doctor. During the rescue attempt, Omar’s wife is also killed, a death for which the terrorist blames Durga, and is now prepared to go to any lengths for revenge on her.

As spy stuff goes, it’s all fairly generic, with other threads such as the presence of a mole inside the Indian spy service. There is not much novel or exciting here, but it is carried out with an adequate degree of skill, and really only one particularly gratuitous song, when Mirza goes all karaoke at a wedding for what seems like half an hour. The camerawork is nicely scope, with a lot of exotic locations, and while Chopra won’t be winning any awards for her action, she functions decently. It’s just pleasing to see a genuine Bollywood action heroine in this genre: things like the YRF Spy Universe are typically so macho, they’re in danger of choking on their own mustaches.

The first half definitely works better, with the plot consistently moving forward. The movie feels, from an action point, that it peaks too early, and then lumbers its way through the final hour, before the inevitable face-off between Durga and Khalid, which goes about as you would expect. Things then continue to run on, as the mole’s identity is revealed, and the story rehashed in flashback to that end. I may have been hunting for snacks in the cupboard by this point. There’s a truly weird sequence where the film inexplicably goes into first-person shooter mode for an extended period, which had me trying to figure out if it was entirely CGI. They likely should not have bothered, yet it’s a rare blatant misstep, in a film which seems to pride itself on aggressively mediocre competence.

Dir: Ribhu Dasgupta
Star: Parineeti Chopra, Harrdy Sandhu, Sharad Kelkar, Rajit Kapur

Cloak Games: Thief Trap, by Jonathan Moeller

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I previously reviewed Moeller’s Ghost in the Cowl, which comes from a different series, and enjoyed this every bit as much. Indeed, I think the premise here is better, rather than the fairly generic (if well-executed) fantasy of Cowl. However, in terms of action, the heroine here is second banana, and just as with Cowl, this consequently falls fractionally short of Seal of Approval. In this case, Earth has been conquered by a race of elves, whose High Queen has taken over and now rules with an iron fist. They had been booted off their home world, and traveled the Shadowlands, the path between the worlds, before breaking the seal to Earth.

Doing so allowed magic to come with them, though elves are largely the only ones allowed to practice it. The human race is now effectively indentured servants or worse. Which brings us to our heroine, Nadia Moran. To save her little brother Russell from a lethal disease, she agreed to work for an archmage called Morvilind. But now, she’s his slave, constrained both by him being the only one keeping Russell alive, and his magical skills which can kill her at any time. He trained her in certain areas, in order to become his personal thief, liberating magic artifacts, antiquities, art, etc. This included spells, of use in these jobs. But she’s not happy about it, wanting freedom for her and Russell.

Her latest task is particularly tricky, stealing an Assyrian tablet from a human industrialist. She’s not given the whole truth about either the object or its current owner, and it becomes apparent someone else is interested in him too. The someone else is Corvus, a sorta-human (it’s complicated…) who has abilities of his own, and handles the action elements here. They eventually agree to team up to help each other’s overlapping goals, but will face threats both temporal and almost indescribably Lovecraftian, emanating out of the Shadowlands. It makes for highly entertaining reading, and at only 180 pages, I raced through it very quickly. For ninety-nine cents, it’s fine, but I would hope further installments offer a little more bang for your $3.99. 

There were a couple of bits of world building which didn’t quite gel. The conquest happened in 2013, and we’re now three centuries past it. But it feels like technology is unchanged: Nadia still drives a sedan, for example. If you consider how radically different life was three centuries ago, it’s odd: maybe the High Queen dislikes innovation? It’s a minor, albeit niggling, glitch in what’s otherwise a fun scenario, with a well-constructed heroine who offers plenty of room for development. And with eleven books to come, that’s certainly necessary! By the end of this one, she has an ally in Corvus, some additional talents of which Morvilind is unaware, and appears slightly closer to achieving her eventual goal of freedom. I’m looking forward to that journey. 

Author: Jonathan Moeller
Publisher: CreateSpace, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 12 in the Cloak Games series.