There’s not much that gets me to turn on my Xbox 360 these days. A new Halo game is usually a guaranteed buy, but I find myself wanting to play newer video games less and less for some reason. I’m also usually pretty excited about new consoles, but this year I haven’t even gotten excited about the Xbox One or the Playstation 4.

However, Disney Infinity caught my eye a long time ago. The combination of a video game and cool little collectible figures as well as the ability to mix Disney characters from different properties sounded like a lot of fun, despite the high price tag. It’s obvious that Disney wanted a slice of the Skylanders billion dollars a year business model, but they created a game that is a lot of fun and (in my opinion) has a ton of potential.

Taking advantage of some launch-week sales and deals, I snagged the Xbox 360 Starter Kit as well as a few extra figures and gave the game a spin. Usually I leave game reviews to the experts, like my buddies over at Horrible Night, but I’m sure a lot of you are wondering if this game is any good, and hopefully I can help you out. Now, on to the game.
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I’ll get right to the point; Monsters University is a good Pixar film. It’s not a near perfect film, like Toy Story 3, but it is definitely a step up from both Cars 2 and Brave (both of which were enjoyable, but not quite up to Pixar snuff).

The movie tells the tale of Monsters Inc. stars Mike Wazowski (voiced by Billy Crystal), and James P. Sullivan (John Goodman, in a role his voice was born to play), as they enter college and try to become the scarers that we all know and love from the first film. As is expected in a prequel, when Mike and Sulley first meet, they instantly despise each other, and later have to learn to work together to achieve a common goal (I don’t want to give too much away, for risk of spoiling anything). The film does a nice job introducing us to characters that we already know, but in a way that makes them seem almost like completely new characters (the best example of this is the villain from the 1st film, Randall Boggs, whom we meet in this film as a shy nerd, and we get to see grow into the character we know and love to hate.)

Monsters University thrives on its extensive cast of supporting players, ranging from wild man Art (voiced by Charlie Day) and the rest of the members of Oozma Kappa to Nathan Fillion’s stuck up jock Johnny (think of Stan Gable from Revenge of the Nerds). My personal favorite character was Don, a self described “mature student” who was recently downsized from his company, and has come back to school to “learn the computers”. Rounding out the cast is Dean Hardscrabble, voiced with frightening intensity by Helen Mirren, who acts as an adversary to our heroes.
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The Top Hat Sasquatch team reads a lot of blog posts every day, and some slip through the crack or just don’t warrant their own post. That’s where Missing Links comes in. Every few days we collect the best links we’ve come across and pass them on to you.

‘Amazing Spider-Man’ Sequel: Casting Harry Osborn
Wow, Paul Dano is a brilliant choice to play the new Harry Osborn, but I’m sure it’ll end up being some young whipper-snapper that I’ve never heard of.

Frankenweenie is ‘good Tim Burton’, which as it turns out still exists
I still need to see Frankenweenie, and this write-up from Ultra Culture makes me want to see it even more. I'm glad 'Good Time Burton' is back.

Yet another reason why I love Gravity Falls – Boing Boing
I'm too lazy to crack ciphers, but this is one of the reasons I love this show too.

Adventure Time‘s Genderswapped Universe Is Getting Its Own Comic Series by Natasha Allegri!
Fiona and Cake, the comic book? Awesome.

Blue Sky to produce Charlie Brown feature | Cartoon Brew
So glad to see the Peanuts going with an animation company like Blue Sky instead of Dreamworks. It sounds like these characters are in the right hands. I hope they don't look too weird in CG though.

Website Launched For ‘Monsters University,’ The College | /Film
This is awesome. I can't wait for Monsters University, and as a web designer I would have loved to work on this project. Pixar launched a fake website for the college Mike and Sully will be attending in the upcoming sequel. Heads up, you can actually order the merchandise.

Disney just held the second ‘D23 Expo’ this past weekend in Anaheim, their membership-based fan event, and released a ton of info on upcoming movies. We weren’t able to make it (mark my words, next year) but a lot of blogs have been doing a great job of summing up the news. To make it easy to find out what was announced, we’ve compiled all the biggest stories into this roundup. I’m sure we missed something, but everything here is pretty awesome. It definitely sounds like Disney is doing a good job with these conventions.

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