Christmas has now come to mean the Doctor Who Christmas Special - amongst other things.

This year saw the Doctor - somewhat inexplicably - have the TARDIS crash into the Titanic... Not THE Titanic, A Titanic... which is in SPACE. So despite managing to plough into the interior of the TARDIS (which seems rather silly), it seems to be OK. Naturally the Doctor starts to schmooze and nose around on this space bound Titanic... as it turns out, said Titanic is in orbit around the Earth and filled with aliens... most of whom are indistinguishable from normal humans... but then, so is the Doctor...

After the mandatory foreshadowing of the - let's face it, inevitable - disaster to come, the Doctor meets Kylie Minogue (who is a serving wench). She doesn't burst into song... which - given RTD - one might have expected at some point but no, she does a solid job of acting the part, nothing to wow... but hey, this is Doctor Who... you can't ever expect any really stellar performances because the format practically necessitates hamming up.

Anyway, tis Christmas eve and people want to go visit Earth. The Doctor takes Kylie along for the ride. Meanwhile, Captain Birdseye has gone a bit bonkers - which is what we were all waiting for. The ol' cliche of someone condemning a whole load of people to death - just so their family is looked after. We should probably be glad that a giant space iceberg wasn't what struck the ship, I suppose... not that a comet would have been so out of place...

Naturally, big rocks vs. space ship = bang! Of course, while most of the people are killed the Doctor and Kylie are fine. Along with them are two space Scousers (also, space working class - they won a contest) man and wife... Then there's space jerk... the kind of arrogant high flyer that everyone hates. The space tour guide - who knows the square root of bugger all about Earth and got his diploma from the same place as "Dr" Gillan McKeith... and of course, what voyage in space would be complete without a space alien. In this case, a red midget cyborg space alien... who is some kin of bastardisation of Darth Maul, Mini-me and a gay Satan.

As if being stuck on a damaged ship - sans TARDIS - wasn't enough... the creepy looking angels - fittingly called "The Host" - that populate the ship have gone from mildly unhelpful to straight forward murderin'... with their halos, no less... Oddjob would be pleased. It's not too long before Darth Midget has used his cybernetic bits to generate an EMP to take down some of the Host... quite how a piece of equipment designed to keep him alive can generate an EMP pulse isn't explained... or how it only takes down the Host... Best not to get hung up on these details - especially given the fact the Sonic Screwdriver can do anything from open doors to make a cup of tea.

So, obese space Scouse heroically sacrifices himself by falling into the engine... then Darth Mini-me... then the other space Scouse can't bear to go on living without the other space Scouse and tosses herself into the giant reactor too... what is it with health and safety in the future? Is there such a massive backlash that you're just allowed to have a giant open reactor? With regulations like that, it seems unlikely you'd need meteors to crash into you for a serious accident to happen.

By this point the Doctor has - naturally - twigged that there is more going on here than just a nasty accident... because it's not just the ship that's going to go down... for some reason, the ship crashing into the planet will kill EVERYONE on the planet (that's probably also down to a lack of health and safety regulations... who'd have thought they were ever useful?).

The Doctor being the Doctor - and everyone else being relatively safe for the time being - goes off to get to the bottom of the matter. He does this by just asking the Host some questions. It seems pretty silly, really. You've got your robots set to kill... but if someone says a magic phrase, they stop killing and answer your questions... even aliens are sloppy coders, it seems.

Nevertheless, he manages to get there and finds out Max Capricorn - the same Max Capricorn who owns the company - is hiding out on the ship, in an "impact chamber" that will allow him to destroy the ship and Earth and hence ruin the board that spurned him and land them in jail and then let him quietly sneak off to retire... I suppose we should be glad... at least it wasn't the old insurance scam.

Anyway, Kylie tagged along after the Doctor and appears just after his spiel has run its course. Quite why the Host ignored their order to kill the Doctor and gawked at Kylie driving a forklift at their boss is a mystery... as is why he doesn't ask for help - he's stuff in a life support unit the size of a big fridge/freezer combo. In any respect, enter heroic sacrifice the third.

For some reason, having just killed their boss - the Host decide to help the Doctor who then sets about stopping the ship plummet into Buckingham Palace... with a real cameo from the Queen... didn't the BBC get in trouble for that earlier? Naturally, the Doctor averts crisis for the third year running... Not that a giant ship crashing into London could really make it any more of an urban death maze than it already is... Also, best not to think too much about how the Doctor was able to violate the second law of thermodynamics.

The Doctor then realises he can save Kylie! For obvious reasons of real life practicality - the attempt to revive her fails. Which is a crying shame. Kylie "dies" and Catherine Tate didn't even get horribly mutilated. Well, no one can say the show doesn't make life unfair. So, the day is saved... the Doctor cringes when he realises that the self-serving douchebag survived but a girl he could have had sex with - died. Well, who wouldn't be crushed... Kylie may need to stand on a box to kiss... but she's a fine filly. Much of the nation would have paid for Catherine Tate to fall in an actual nuclear furnace... where was your quality destroying populism then, eh RTD?

The Doctor and the doddering space tour guide abscond via teleportation - whatever happened to TRANSMAT? - to the TARDIS's landing place on Earth where it's snowing. In keeping with previous years, the snow is actually from the spaceship rather than being real. Space tour guide has a credit card with a million pounds on it... how does that work? Regardless, the Doctor says "I travel alone" - a bigger lie than his Scottish accent - and waves goodbye to the senile coot, who is babbling about a house. The blithering space idiot doesn't know a million pounds wouldn't buy you a potting shed in central London.

It worked quite well as a bit of Christmas fun... it felt like it was aiming for a send up of the Poseidon Adventure... but in truth, probably ended up being more of a parody of itself... the overly dramatic music (even the intro and outro). Repeated heroic sacrifices (clearly more is more), the cheesy villain, all the clumsy editing/directing, the stereotype characters, the cliches... OH, the cliches. Still, passes the time... and as Doctor Who goes, it's pretty passable.

It's fair to say that - like an increasing number of people in TV and film - Ricky Gervais opened up with a closing down sale... Or rather, started with something that he was never -realistically - going to top. The Office was - to say the least - a seminal success on every level. Popular, critical and... the other one.

The fact that even the closing episode of The Office was generally met with contempt - quite why it needed a Christmas special, beyond further enriching Gervais, is beyond anyone's ken - showed he was already a one trick pony.

Of course, like many people that have met with some degree of success in comedy the BBC couldn't deny him. Which isn't surprising given the perpetual absence of good or even tolerable comedy on the BBC these days... outside of panel games. So when someone who wrote, directed and starred in a show that won about a dozen awards in two consecutive years...

So, the "safe bet" of Gervais got another show... Extras. In many ways, it follows the traditions of cringe worthy comedy... but it falls short in so many ways... not least the pointless popularism. The main flaw was always going to be... while many people might have spent a summer in an office job, how many people have ever been an actor? It totally removed the element that everyone could relate to. Millions of people in the West must surely have done SOME office work, if only for a a few weeks. How many people ever tried to be an Extra?

Anyway, after two - quite frankly dire - seasons of Extras... Gervais presumably chose to end the agony of the backlash and contempt for him... Not that it's ever likely to stop. Ironic that he set himself on a pedestal of not doing commercials... presumably because that's "selling out". If Extras and The Office Christmas Special weren't selling out... what is?

The Extras Christmas Special... well, fairly dire and pretty much what anyone who has had the misfortune of watching Extras would have expected. It's hard to see the funny side of celebrities making fun of themselves being fame obsessed. They are... it's just the kind of show that would make you want to stab yourself rather than watch another minute of the laboured, played out jokes with CELEBRITIES. It's just unrelentingly trying to hammer home a message as facile as the faux sitcom.

It would be ironic - not to mention gratifying - if Gervais's career was to follow a similar fate of his screen counterparts. Suffice to say, the same mistakes were made as in The Office Christmas Special. He shows little innovation, originality, humour. People need to stop feeding people that live on the gravy train. Gervais had a single good idea that he did well... Extras, Flanimals (how isn't that a sell out?)... his atrociously awful stand-up routines... all simply proved he was a chancer. Let's hope this timorous effort is a final nail in the coffin.

For many years, Microsoft have been considered by most of those with the technical prowess to use a computer for more than five minutes before demanding they be assisted in the strenuous task of sending an e-mail to be the industry's great Satan.

In fact, so ingrained in the psyche is this disdain of MS that we even have companies like Apple basing their corporate image on "Hey, Microsoft suck! We're for the cool people! Or stupid people with money who want to think they're cool! Or maybe just exclusively the latter." Which is fair enough given that most people would generally agree that, yes - Windows sucks.

Which of course makes it somewhat amusing - not least to Bill Gates et al - that it still accounts for 90% of operating systems and pretty much has, since home computers became something that were affordable by the masses. Needless to say that this leads to an almost inexorable truth that most people will eventually be coerced into upgrading Windows when they buy a new PC.

The latest offering being Vista - presumably after you announce the name of a product and then go "oh, uh... did we say 2002? We meant 2003, oops." and then "2003? Noooo, we said 2004!" and so on, someone twigs that perhaps it's best to go with something that can remain the same, regardless of the release date. Vista has pretty much made alllll the promises that all other versions of Windows have made.

It'll be more secure! Faster, stronger! Consume more resources than you ever dreamed! More pointless shiny things to impress slack jaw simpletons and so on. The real problem here is surely this... generally by the time a new Windows platform is released, the old one is getting to be fairly robust. The bugs are ironed out, most of the giant gaps in security have been patched, code has been optimised and things run on it without you needing to run off and get some special new patch or the like. So - just as XP becomes something you could actually think of as a solid, reliable platform... here comes a brand new set of problems!

Vista isn't quite the car crash that 98 and XP were but it's a massive resource whore. All the gains one might make with a new machines evaporate and a machine you thought would be able to calculate the square root of infinity finds itself spending half the time making shiny pointless things flash... and even if you deactivate those, you're likely to find that Vista seldom uses less than a gig of RAM. Granted RAM might be comparable in price per meg to the hourly rate of a Dundonian crack whore but that hardly excuses such wanton squandering when two gigs is only starting to become the standard on new machines.

All there is to look forward to now is the next Windows platform... which will be everything that every Windows promises to be...

Thus far, films of games and games of films have generally failed on many fronts.

Licensed games tend to be thin, unimaginative cash ins... and Uwe Boll is the foremost maker of films of games... If that doesn't sum up the dire nature of them... then you're truly experiencing the bliss of ignorance.

Now Hitman has been "blessed" with a film based on the popular franchise... The game revolves around the antics of bald headed super assassin, Agent 47. Genetically engineered to murder and look damned good in a suit.

The film gets the bald part right, he also kills people and wears a suit... of course, there isn't really much more to it. Naturally, things do not go smoothly for our super assassin. Which means that the film is really more of a poor man's action film. 47 supposedly botches the assassination of the Russian premier but this is actually all a ploy. A vague, dull, generic ploy that is pretty much irrelevant.

It means 47 and some Russian girl run away from people shooting at them... with precious little assassinating and far more bland, generic action which in no way redeems the film. Beyond the protagonist being roughly the same in appearance to 47... there's little to connect it to the game and even less to recommend it as something to watch.

They should have just left it to gamers.

It would be fair to say that Saw has become the bankable horror franchise of the decade. The torture porn exploits of serial killer Jigsaw plenty of fun for the whole family... more or less.

The writers of the series are aware that the secret of a good serial killer film is that, the death of the serial killer is little reason for him to stop murdering. Somewhat differently from other killers, this is a non-supernatural revenge. Nope, as far as can be discerned - Jigsaw is dead as it gets. Lying on the autopsy table, organs all over... and unlike Jason or Michael Myers - he isn't going to sit up and kill anyone... that's not his style.

The plot of the film is... rather irrelevant. Oh, sure - you could follow it and try and work out the twist but that's not really the point. Nope, you want to see the confusing, winding narrative and the torture porn. Yup and the twist.

It lacks the originality of the first film or the polished nature of the second... it's just not that great unless you want to see gore... and the lack of Tobin Bell, well.

The most likely thing to strike you when the first cut scene goes into actual gameplay on Crysis is that it's very pretty. That's of course assuming your graphics card doesn't have a fit at the amount of stuff it has to render and summarily explode. If you're fortunate enough to have a machine able to render the game closer to its upper settings though, you will often be impressed by the game world. The flora and fauna, buildings, vehicles, allies and enemy combatants are all things of beauty... until they're rendered asunder by your murder and wanton mayhem.

Not only are they lovingly detailed but they are also far more interactive. Enemy combatants can be grabbed, tossed or killed silently, (some) trees can be mown down and (some) buildings can be smashed apart. It's rather rewarding to toss a grenade and have a house collapse or use a machine gun and bring down a line of palm trees. Naturally, Half Life 2 had the physics first and the pretty graphics first but Crysis has raised the bar on both. The environment isn't quite as destructible as it might be... but then, this game is already beyond the reach of most without rather new graphics cards... so, presumably the ability to mass murder was paramount over EVERYTHING being reducible to rubble.

Not that Crysis forces you to run around like Rambo, single handedly taking down the entire Korean People's Army or alien hordes by yourself. Stealth and avoidance are perfectly valid tactics here - mostly thanks to the nanotech suit you have. It's rather strange to start a game with essentially the full gamut of abilities but Crysis lets you use all the suit's functions almost from the word go.

The four modes it offers being:

Super speed - running and shooting faster.
Super strength - increased melee damage, jumping higher and tossing stuff further.
Super durability - considerably increasing your ability to take damage.
Cloak - rendering you invisible to enemies.

It also fills up your health over time and offers night vision... Naturally, all these abilities use energy when active. Cloak is easily the most useful, allowing you to take out one or two enemies and then hide and then rinse and repeat until all enemies are dispatched... or simply avoid enemies altogether. Strength is useful for getting onto rooftops and navigating to otherwise inaccessible areas - and punch enemies to dead... speed seems of limited use, given that it can be expended so quickly. Durability is pretty much the "vanilla" flavour here and makes you akin to some kind of... Master Chief.

The suit isn't the only interesting angle to the gameplay. Weapons are all customisable - to various degrees, with different modules you can stick on them. Different types of scopes, flash lights, laser pointers, grenade launchers... nothing that will make them a great deal more efficient but it's a nice touch... even though sticking a sniper scope on a shotgun may be about as useful as putting a rocket engine on a carrier pigeon.

So, you have your super suit and your sniper scoped shotgun and you're ready to murder Korean soldiers like it's going out of fashion... and this game let's you do it in style. Thankfully the KPA has hundreds of them just waiting to meet any number of ends at your hands. Initially, you're just skirmishing. Running around the pretty island, trying to find some wayward hostages... but of course, the course of true gaming seldom runs smooth and you'll soon find yourself in full on hostilities with the KPA, performing tactical missions and such. This is really where the game excels and easily pushes for a place in your FPS affections.

The maps are large and the paths of attack varied. You can creep through the jungle, all sneaky and sly - not killing anyone at all. Or just hop in a vehicle, drive along the roads, mow down the soldiers and smash buildings. Not that that approach is necessarily the best one... there can't be any doubt that your supersuit affords you many advantages over the hapless KPA troops but on Hard difficulty, you can't just wade in and expect to win against a dozen troops - or even a half dozen.

The AI isn't quite as impressive as that in F.E.A.R. though and it's not that uncommon to see it sometimes see it looking in the wrong way when you shoot someone or cloak, although - frequently they'll continue to fire at your last position or creep around on the alert. Fairly competent, certainly and given the large scales of the map, quite effective although it might have been nice to see troops running away but all in all, solid AI.

As implied - there are aliens... that's obvious pretty much from the start but they don't really debut until two thirds of the way through. It's at this point the game goes all Xen on us. What made the game fun was running around large maps, shooting other humans - as sociopathic as that might sound... but after a headache inducing float through an alien city (they clearly forgot to pay their gravity bills) the Koreans are gone and here come the aliens.

The aliens look copyright infringingly close to the "squiddies" from The Matrix. Except they're turquoise instead of red... oh and they fire flechettes instead of using lasers... but otherwise very similar. The aliens like it nice and cold, so the island is turned to ice for this segment of the game... as you might imagine, it's fairly standard - aliens are attacking, get the hell out of dodge. The excitement of the initial part of the game is more or less totally killed - you run from point A to point B. Most of the time, there is little point in doing anything other than running away - being big and metal, the robots take considerably more ammo to go down and their aim is pretty piss poor... so there isn't exactly a reason to hang around unless it's required as an objective.

The game ends with a bit of running around an aircraft carrier and then TWO boss fights... all of which feels totally at odds with the initial segments of the game. While that felt somewhat challenging, the aliens just felt like a tedious objective to slog through and quite at odds with the fun of the tropical island. It's not QUITE the jumping puzzles of Xen or the animal infested final level of Deus Ex but it really robs the game of any greatness.

That isn't to say the game isn't enjoyable - when it excels, it's excelling on several levels but then it feels as if the story of aliens became MORE important than the enjoyability of the game... shooting Matrix style robots is not fun and flying a VTOL that handles like a cow against them is a lesson in tedium. It really feels as if the guy in charge of the level design got up to entering the alien city and then went out on a break and by the time he got back, everyone else had rushed out the last bunch of levels.

It's not the first game that flags after initially impressive levels and it surely won't be the last but with Crysis, it feels as if it actually missed out on the opportunity to be a seminal single player campaign by resorting to the old "Oh, aliens!" shtick and really... boss battles aren't what games like Crysis should be about. Still, despite that the impressive visuals, physics and gameplay in the first segment of this game still shine through and it's easy to find yourself regaling people about your escapades. Anyone with a penchant for supersoldiers or FPSs should play it... just be ready for the little bit of alien heart break.