Dragon Age - Bioware finally escapes the strictures of licensed properties and establishes its own intellectual property... which is being dubbed "dark fantasy". It's really just takes the traditional fantasy mix and moves things around... and yes, probably slightly more dark in tone that the average fantasy franchise, with the near total destruction of humanity in the past, dwarves locked in a constant battle for survival with the darkspawn (who periodically try and wipe out everything in Blights - which you're trying to avert) and elves are second class citizens, often used as slaves and treated with open contempt.

As a Bioware game, the writing and story is top notch and is the greatest strength in a game that drags on. The reason for this is very simple - the gameplay isn't particularly exciting. It's standard D&D stuff - all tick tocking masked behind a friendly interface and the player able to stop and issue orders at any point to your party. For the most part, the RPG element of the game has been stripped down to bare bones. Rogue, mage or warrior... and depending on your class and racial choices, you have a number of different possible starting missions which make some trifling difference to the game after they're done but it's a nice touch.

Thankfully, the party is not limited to the Mass Effect group of three but rather you get four in your party... not quite at the Baldur's Gate levels but still, an extra party member is always a bonus - especially as there are the occasional interactions between the NPCs... again, it's not on the same level as Baldur's Gate but it's still nice to have it there. Regardless of that, in camp you can interact extensively with your entire party to get their backstory and gain influence with them. Influence is gained by making choices they approve of when they're in your party, saying the right thing to them or just giving them gifts. This is really where the game shines - the characters are all scripted wonderfully and the voice acting is really top notch, making interaction with the characters a joy rather than a chore.

The game almost manages a wonderfully cinematic quality, right from the start. Again, scripts and acting are superb and the action and direction of the cutscenes is great. They seem to almost effortlessly manage to incorporate a sense of epic scale at times and at others, quiet intensity. It's very impressive to see this all done almost entirely with the in-game engine but then, the engine is quite impressive.

Where the game falters is the gameplay... the difficulty randomly varies, meaning sometimes attack will be easy to shrug off and other times, they'll be inexplicably harder, despite a similar number of identical enemies and when it comes down to it - it's also very rinse, wash, repeat. By halfway through the game, the combat are starting to get tiresome and by the end, it's little more than a chore to be rushed through to beat the game. Compared to something like KOTOR or Mass Effect where combat was fun AND challenging, this is a real let down and easily the weakest of Bioware's latest. There are some nice touches - like the ability to have spell effects combine - but really they're just minor and the game is in danger of having grind.

All-in-all it's a good game and worth playing for the story, if not the gameplay.

Regardless of how much contempt, loathing and hatred is showered upon Twilight - no one can deny that while it has been roundly critically bent over a table that it made money. And so, it came to be - vampires were the new fad!

So - someone thought it was a good idea to make a Twilight imitation with the original title, Vampire Diaries - so you know it has vampires in it! This shows première is mind crushingly banal, it makes the last season of Smallville seem like Shakespeare by comparison. For no reason, we have our main vampire character enrol in high school. He establishes he's over 100 years old! Oh, there's something about one the girls being something important or something stupid like that and while vampires here don't sparkle... they're entirely immune to sunlight, apparently. Hence their ability to stalk girls at high school.

The female protagonist is some vanilla blandness that had her parents die - presumably of boredom. What is there to say of her? Oh, she has a brother who is apparently doing the drugs - coz he's sad. It's just so hard to care about this, it's generic good looking high school drama WITH VAMPIRES. Honestly, regardless of what you had to say about Buffy - at least it had characters that weren't such cardboard cut outs. It's ironic that one of that the brother is on the drugs because the acting in this show isn't bad - it simply isn't there.

If there wasn't much to say about Defying Gravity - there's nothing to say about this. It's just so insipid and derivative. Sure, Defying Gravity stole a pre-existing concept down to the ship design but at least they tossed in mystery. This is just Twilight: The Series.

Bottom line: Try and forget that shows like this even exist - they will only diminish your will to live and increase your hatred of humanity.

So, as if Demons wasn’t enough for you to contend with – the BBC has also managed to turn the pilot of “Being Human” into a full blown series. It’s the simple tale of three supernatural beings – a new werewolf, an old vampire and a ghost – living in a house together.

One of the obvious irritations of the show is something that seems to be increasingly popular – Vampires waltzing around in daylight. At least they aren’t sparkling but it’s just rather tedious to have their weaknesses eroded… At least in Blade, the guy had some SPF50 on to stand in the sun. Here, they don’t seem bothered at all… and they suffer from “Buffy syndrome”. Which is to say, that they bite some and have maybe a mouthful of blood… then the person dies. Granted biting into the jugular is going to lead to you dying pretty quickly by bleeding out but as with Buffy, it’s rather ridiculous that it seems to be INSTADEATH!

Anyway, the basic dynamic is – the girl ghost hangs around the house, while the guys go to hospital. For some reason, our old vampire chap is “off the wagon” and so doesn’t need to get his teaspoon of blood via murder. It’s not really explained how he manages to survive/be immortal WITHOUT blood. He just does.

The werewolf guy has the angst shtick. Which is a bit of a change from the broody vampire – not that he doesn’t have issues but it’s fair to say, the werewolf issue trumps that. How is it trumped? Because he gets to moan about how once a month he become a ravening beast. Yeah, they seem to like the monster root… because, the people are shown to be the exceptions to the rule. Anyway, he likes to be a whiney little bitch about his problem a lot.

And finally ghost girl… yeah, it’s fair to say that most of these characters are pretty much summed up by their monster characteristic because even after a few episodes they’re pretty flat. She’s got the beyond cliché UNFINISHED BUSINESS… and only other supernatural beings can see her. She pines for her fiancé who is now hooked up with someone else.

Somewhere in the background, there’s an evil vampire plot but don’t get too excited. Things are moving along slowly... so, it's likely the run will end before anything much happens. About all you can say for it is... it's a relatively novel concept as far as things go. Shame about the execution.

If there's one things that British shows should know not to do - it's try and imitate American shows.

Why? Money, mostly. American shows have more of it -a lot more, overwhelmingly vast oceans compared to tiddly little paddling pools, really. That isn't to say it's impossible for British shows to match the US in this department... Doctor Who probably proves that there's the ability, if seldom the inclination... and really, even Doctor Who can't regularly compare to even a lightweight like the later seasons of SG-1. Outside of period dramas, it's just hard to compete in terms of on-screen wow.

Despite these obvious disadvantages, ITV felt compelled to give us "Demons". The Buffy wannabe that's the better part of a decade too late and far, far behind the curve.

The parallels are there - teenager (although, this time a boy) finds he has a destiny fighting the forces of the supernatural and here's his team to help him fight it with ask kicking and quips. He's apparently a descendent of Van Helsing... they might as well just have said he was the new Slayer. Of course, as noted above - this is like Buffy but not as good.

In fact, in essentially every aspect of its nature it fails to compare favourably to even the later, boring and wangsty Buffy seasons. Budget and writing are very much lacking here... and if you don't have one, you really have to compensate with bags of the other... Sadly, here we lack much in the way of plot, dialogue, action and a lot of the time even the acting is poor... Gene Hunt doing an American accent... why? Like much of the show, there is only "why?"

Thus far there have been five episodes in which the characters struggle to move beyond broad stereotypes of the kind of characters these shows contain. There just isn't the amount of stuff you'd fit into a Buffy episode - where you'd have time for laughs, drama and the mandatory ass kicking. In its defence, Demons doesn't even TRY for the comedy side of thing... but then, that just places the show somewhere in the middle of the road. It's not REALLY got all that much action in it, the drama is pretty thin, the effects aren't anything to write home about and it's not really going to have you laughing - except at the idiotic characters.

It's perhaps not overly awful - in the way that Bonekickers managed to be... but then, at the same time... you could ENJOY Bonekickers because it was such an overwhelming unspeakable abomination, that one had to ask if it was just an elaborate prank... so, memorable in the "so bad it's good". Demons will probably not linger so long in the memory. Barely worth the waste of 40 minutes...

Good TV shows are fleeting things... to be treasured while they last... even seemingly untouchable shows like Lost, Prison Break and Heroes can quickly succumb to the high bar their own first seasons sets.

The easiest way to explain True Blood without giving too much away is...

It's a world much like our own... the only difference being - vampires are real and have revealed themselves to the world at large after the advent of a synthetic blood product called "Trublood", which allows them to be sustained without feeding on humans. As one might guess, this leads to a number of tensions - which form the backdrop for the story.

Much of the story focuses around Anna Pacquin's character - Sookie - a psychic girl, waiting tables in the deep South and the events surrounding her friends and family... To say more would be saying too much...

The show effortlessly balances drama and humour, with liberal helpings of suspense (the kind of fairly regular cliffhangers Heroes had in it's first season) and sex and violence and all that jazz. The vampire aspect is pervasive but not overwhelming... in fact, there's something of a magical realism here... this IS a world where things considered supernatural dwell but - much like Heroes - it's never to play second fiddle to the subject of interest... although, often the two are interwoven wonderfully.

The show masters magical realism in a way that few others can dream of... and in many respects, you can see this as being a suitable rebuttal to the notion of the ass kicking girl fantasy - namely Xena and Buffy and the imitators as numerous as they were unmemorable - where one felt that the comedy and slapstick of everything was upped to a point where it was clear that it was all rather tongue in cheek.

True Blood is... rather more mature - which isn't to say it lacks humour, far from it... but it's a rather more serious animal. Not that Buffy didn't love to indulge in endless vampire wangst but with True Blood it feels like something more than fodder for fangirls. There is a depth to the characters that means, they're not just "troubled vampire" or "psychic southerner"... and really, that's what puts this show a country mile above anything else to do with vampires.

Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 has made what should be dubbed "The Matrix Mistake".

What is The Matrix mistake? Well, The Matrix was a good film that was a big hit and - magically - became a trilogy when this occurred... a trilogy that consisted of part 1 and part 2a and b... not much of a trilogy.

Pirates seems to make an almost identical mistake... although if there was any coherent vision of how the 2nd and 3rd film should fit together, or indeed any coherent vision for the third film at all, it wasn't anywhere to be seen. There is simply a string of happenings that feel as if they were cobbled together at the last moment, with little rhyme or reason.

Concepts and ideas that are entirely new are treated as if they've been around since the start of the franchise - when it felt as if they'd just been tossed in to move the interminable plot along. The writers surely thought they were being clever but they utterly missed what made the original so charming, an interweaving multi-threaded plot... Were the original film to have a plot akin to a tapestry then PotC 3 would have one more like a tangled ball of string that had been toyed with by a dozen cats.

The action is there but one has to question the motivations of the characters and of course... the fact that not one but two characters are brought back from the dead just makes the notion of suspense ludicrous... after all if they can resurrect people once, why not twice? Just another example of how no one really thought this through.

All in all, it's a jumbled mess of a movie that will doubtless make a lot of money but will probably never enjoy the fond memories of the first. Certainly, the action is in there but really... that's about it. The humour is forced, the performances so-so... forget the romance angle and of course, get ready for the backstory to get periodically yanked from beneath your feet as another new idea is talked about as if it was always there.