Bioshock Burial At Sea: Episode 2

Worthwhile DLC has always been something of a rarity but Bioshock Infinite's Burial at Sea Episode 1 was genuinely enjoyable... mostly because the original Bioshock (unlike Bioshock Infinite) never showed you Rapture before the collapse.

Burial  at Sea allowed you to wander around Rapture and get a feel for that city under the sea before it was exclusively the preserve of murderous freaks... which was a pleasant change of pace because, regardless of what people say about Bioshock - it's gameplay is not (and never was) "genre busting".

In fact, Bioshock Infinite marked a fairly substantial regression to the rather wearisome status quo of console gaming by way of Halo's seemingly inescapable two weapon limit and regenerating health - although, there's no regenerating health in Episode 2... but still a two gun limit, although it's rather more stealth orientated and even has a mode focused EXCLUSIVELY on non-lethal takedowns but as with the first episode, it's the NON-COMBAT sections which are that much more interesting.

The fights aren't particularly interesting and in fact for the vast majority of the time, you can effectively avoid them either by being stealthy or simply by running away or using your invisibility plasmid. In fact, you fight generic Rapture (and SPOILERS! Columbia) goons almost exclusively and are even denied the opportunity of a Big Daddy beatdown - the game puts you in an area with a Big Daddy and then goes "Yeah, you can't kill him."

There's one section where there is the arbitrary "kill x many goons to proceed" but that's pretty much the only time fighting is mandatory. The rest of the time stealth or speed are pretty much expected - on the higher difficulties just one hit can be enough to wipe out your health bar - and are helped with the new "peeping tom" vigor/plasmid and the ability to use vents.

The real problem - aside from the lacklustre gameplay - is the story... the ending of the first episode was good but it didn't lend itself to a continuation... and episode two seems to demonstrate that in spades, unfortunately mistaking a lot of technobabble and pseudo-philosophical navel gazing on the nature of choice as an alternative to characters and story.

Between that and some forced attempt to tie Bioshock Infinite to the original and trying to be entirely too clever (and failing) again... it's a rather unsatisfying finish to the franchise and while it's nice to return to Rapture (and Columbia) again... there's nothing of value added... Episode 1 succeeded because it offered an insight into what had been alluded to but never shown in Bioshock... Episode 2 just feels like it's riding coattails.

Ended these Clone War have

The Clone Wars (the animated show) was really the one redeeming feature of the entire sorry mess that was the Star Wars prequels, managing to offer fantastic action as well as an idea of what the new trilogy could have been, if not for George Lucas.

The Clone Wars (the CGI show) has - by contrast - been a pretty bumpy ride. The tone has - even within some of the story arcs - changed with sufficient speed to give you whiplash. Going from comedic japes with misfit bands of droids, to serious heroic self-sacrifice. Big space battles and lightsaber fights to tedious discussion of galactic finance and lawmaking.

It was - in essence - the same panoply of ill fitting ideas that were cobbled together to form the prequel films... the problem is that some of these stories really didn't need to be told... did the world NEED Jarjar centric episodes? It would seem someone out there - perhaps Jorge himself - thought so... and one might argue "but hey, Star Wars is for kids!" Uhuh... that'll be why we have lengthy discussion of the taxation of trade routes, complex (and oft nonsensical) political machinations and let's not forget genocide, implied rape and torture, dismemberment and child murder! Oh, sorry - YOUNGLING murder (that makes all the difference, dontcha know?)

The issue is really that there were glimpses of greatness in the Clone Wars but attention seemed to shift all too quickly or there was a radical shift in tone but you would think that with the last season, they'd at least go for some kind of grand finale... such as they could within the confines of the time frame... but no, there's just a lot of navel gazing about the imminent destruction of the Jedi.

Now, if this was coming out BEFORE Revenge of the Sith (and we didn't know about the upcoming Jedi massacre) then this might have some dramatic weight but... the only reason to watch this is because you're a fan and that means you know what's coming... and really, season six is pretty weak.

We KNOW that the Jedi aren't going to find out about the plan against them - although, the information they discover makes the whole "A PLOT TO DESTROY THE JEDI?!" bit in Episode III seem that much more idiotic but not by much because... well, it was already really stupid. It's just that after however many years of fighting, we have - near the end of the Clone Wars... the Jedi council going "You know, it IS kind of weird that a dead Jedi secretly commissioned the creation of a clone army that we JUST so happen to need to fight this war." Especially as the reason for finding said army was because of some elaborate machinations anyway...

It's all completely unnecessary set up for a film that came out nearly ten years ago... and it's not as if this is some complex backstory... Hell, compare the season 5 finale and this is just FLAT. In fact, bar an appearance in a vision absolutely no Ahsoka at all...

To sum up season six of The Clone Wars is easy - it feels like a bunch of ideas that had been deemed too lacklustre but ended up getting made for an unexpected final run.

Elysium: The Heaviest Handed Message

Neill Blomkamp is best known for District 9, a well received film with a none too subtle message about racism and the racial segregation of Apartheid... With Elysium, the message about healthcare and illegal immigration is less subtle than repeated punches to the groin...

Rich people live on the space station called Elysium where they have magical medical bays that can seemingly heal any injury short of death. Whereas - at least from what we see - Earth is grim and gritty. There's actually very little to say about the plot... because it's so generic and unimaginative.

Matt Damon is... well, Matt Damon. He's a small time crook, working a lousy job... he gets exposed to a lethal dose of radiation (no superpowers?!) and is told he has four days to live but obviously, if he gets to Elysium their magical medical bays can save him... so, he decides to do a job.

Fortunately for Matt, he chooses the guy that runs his lousy factory who is on Earth, which is apparently the best place to do coding... as he is the guy who coded Elysium and all it takes to change who the president of Elysium is putting back factory settings... The funny thing is, we see that this data is encrypted and LETHALLY protected. When does that become relevant? The end of the film. Everyone is able to tell what the data is though...

Oh and despite having a lethal dose of radiation sickness, Matt Damon is running around fine... The kind of radiation exposure he had should mean he's pretty much incapacitated in a matter of hours, regardless of what futuristic pain meds he's on... Anyway, the one last heist goes wrong because Jodie Foster needs the factory reset that is now in Matt Damon's brain... so, he's pursued and eventually turns himself in because his girlfriend and her daughter get captured.

Then he's taken to Elysium where he predictably escapes, fights a bit and then dies allowing everyone to become a citizen of Elysium... at which point it becomes apparent that Elysium has giant shuttles with HUNDREDS OF MAGICAL MEDICAL BAYS IN THEM.

Why are the greedy bastards hogging them all for themselves then?

For that matter, if people flying onto the station illegally are such an issue - why is it open plan? It's all rather silly and EXTREMELY heavy handed.

Total Recall - The Total Remake

Let's initially give the 2012 remake of Total Recall a pass on being a remake of the 1990 Arnie film and also for the somewhat questionable elements of the premise - namely the ability to construct "The Fall", a tunnel that goes through the CENTRE OF THE EARTH but not create more housing... With that out of the way, let's begin, shall we?

The film starts with textual exposition on the world before we cut to Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) having a dream about a mysterious woman (Jessica Biel) and him, trying to escape robots from Mass Effect. He wakes up to see his hot wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale) and bemoans his boring life. He's located in the "The Colony" (which is in Australia - but looks like a mix of Bangkok and Hong Kong if they got fused with Blade Runner on steroids and for some reason, has to commute to the United Federation of Britain which is the only other place in the world that is still habitable (because of some kind of nuclear/chemical/biological war at the end of the 21st century). As if living in a post-apocalyptic world wasn't bad enough, trouble is brewing between the UFB and the resistance (led by Bill Nye) - whose goals and motivations are never really explained beyond being there to oppose the UFB.

Quaid continues to express his discontent to his best friend Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) and mentions that he's thinking about going to "Rekall", to have memories implanted. Harry tells him that this is a bad idea but another co-worker says it was super special awesome! He also gets turned down for a promotion - despite having put in lots of extra work and his boss telling him that he's better qualified but the other guy got the job as he's from the UFB.

Quaid wastes some talking to Harry at a bar, where he again gets warned against going to "Rekall" and FINALLY, at the twenty minute mark (after a very random scene paying homage to the infamous three breasted woman in the original), Quaid gets to "Rekall" where we have a John Cho cameo that is pretty much wasted and something ACTUALLY happens.

So, seconds after Quaid is strapped into the chair - a bunch of soldiers burst in and shoot everyone except Quaid. He's able to Jason Bourne them to death (although, with direction and editing that not only doesn't induce seizures but actually allows you to see what's going on!) a second team turns up before he manages to escape and heads home to see his wife... who responds by trying to kill him. Marriage ain't what it used to be... She immediately spills her guts and tells him that their marriage is an implanted memory and she's a secret agent there to keep an eye on him before he runs off again.

A phone in his hand rings and an old friend - called Hammond - tells him that he needs to go check out an old safety deposit box and get rid of the phone. Apparently cutting a hand phone out is easy though, all you need is a piece of broken glass and it comes right out! So, he goes to get the safety deposit box which is full of all kinds of things that help progress the plot - namely a video of himself, telling him to go to his old apartment in the UFB... he doesn't seem to question how the video got to the safety deposit box despite the fact it ends with him GETTING CAPTURED.

As should be obvious, what happens next is another chase sequence (after a joke only people that have watched the original will get) this one feeling very Minority Report influenced with cars moving vertically as well as horizontally. During this long and rather dull sequence, Jessica Biel is able to turn up at JUST the right time to save Quaid but she gets injured (as she is but a weak and feeble woman) and he has to carry her to his old apartment. He activates a message from himself that basically explains that Quaid is actually Hauser, someone in the UFB who defected to the resistance and had a kill-code for the synthetics that Cohagen was going to use to invade the Colony - handy for the rebels!

Police are surrounding the building and Harry tries to convince Quaid that this is all just a delusion brought on by the memory implantation and that to escape, he has to shoot Jessica Biel for uh, some reason - it's not explained... Instead, also for no adequately explained reason, her tearing up leads him to shoot Harry in the face and despite the fact the opening scene of the film shows us that there exists a very effective non-lethal takedown, Quaid and Jessica Biel manage to escape (despite being surrounded) via another - you guessed it! - long and tedious chase scene involving Willy Wonka lifts. YAWN.

To give us a break from this, Quaid gets to see Bill Nye - sporting an American accent but we'll get to that shortly. They try and get the kill-code from Quaid but faster than you can say "IT'S A TRAP!" the storm troopers have busted in and killed everyone and Quaid's faux wife (who has been trying to murder him the whole film despite orders not to) and Chancellor Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston) are there for good measure. Heinsenberg delivers a big dollop of exposition, this was all just a means to kill Bill Nye and launch the invasion of The Colony. Sadly, there is no evil laugh... but he instructs his soldiers to restore Quaid to his original personality and to take Jessica Biel with him on his invasion of The Colony (because all invasions are led by politicians with dangerous rebels along for the ride).

Taking a leaf right out of the Doctor Evil handbook, everyone leaves except for a couple of guys... even though there is NO rush to invade The Colony and it would make a lot more sense to just sit here and make sure they restored Quaid to Hauser... but nope, they all leave and apparently Hammond was one to go above and beyond the call of duty because he's there and loosens Quaid's straps - what a stroke of luck!

Hammond gets shot when Quaid is freeing himself - too bad, so sad - and then rushes off to The Fall to rescue Jessica Biel and stop Chancellor Heinsenberg from invading The Colony. How best to achieve this? BOMBS! Lots of bombs. Shame no one in the resistance was clever enough to come up with such an ingenuous plan before... so predictable as ever, Quaid frees Jessica Biel and after a pointless fight scene to pad the already overly long run time - we get a fake-out where Quaid is unconscious and wakes up to Lori pretending to be Jessica Biel... no explanation as to why she didn't just kill him while he was asleep but that's it.

This film has a lot of problems but most of it comes down to the pacing and the flat characters. The chase sequences are quite often quite visually impressive but as the characters are so unengaging, there's just no real reason to care what happens. Farrell phones in his performance - spending most of the film looking surprised but neither Biel nor Beckinsale do much better, struggling to muster two facial expressions between them. Given that we take a full twenty minutes to get to the action part, this is especially inexcusable.

The pacing is also very off, this film is only two hours long but it feels a lot longer. Some scenes - such as when Quaid goes to Rekall - feel as if they're too short and the action scenes almost all feel overly long, becoming rather numbing... On top of this, there's no real sense of scale or anything at stake. We've no real idea who the resistance are or what they want, we just know the UFB are the cartoonish bad guys and that the invasion is bad... for some reason.

About all you can say is that it looks nice and even that is somewhat backhanded as the visual style is really just a collage of designs out right lifted from other better films. Even without comparison to the original, this is a subpar action film that just falls flat.

World War Z Trailer

Any fan of the zombie genre worth their salt will at least know of World War Z.. in a world where zombies are now an overused and somewhat tired (but still tremendously popular) monster, it actually offered an interesting take on the zombie apocalypse both in its scope and its narrative style. Rather than the usual, struggling-to-stop-the-infection or ragtag-group-of-survivors-must-reach-safety that have been done a hundred times a piece, it took the perspective of a writer chronicling the tales of people AFTER humanity had survived the catastrophic effect of the titular zombie war.

It's really the logical conclusion of the Romero ideal, where the slow moving zombies are merely an external means by which to expedite internal conflict. Except that this story plays out on a global setting and we're perceiving the world through a number of very different individual (and at times, unreliable) perspectives. In a genre which has inexorably moved toward the more immediately threatening running zombies since 28 Days Later, World War Z was a good way of showing a (relatively) realistic scenario for the way the slow mving undead might be able to almost destroy mankind.

So, naturally the film adaptation was ALWAYS going to be fraught with problems and the production seems to have done little but lurch from one disaster to another, enduring serious amounts of rewriting and reshooting - something that would almost certainly have sunk a film with a lower budget or less star power. Regardless of these problems, the trailer has just been released!

And while trailers are by no means a good way to judge a film, this seems judged to systematically disabuse anyone of the notion that this is based on the source material in anything but name alone. First of all, this is set  at the BEGINNING of a zombie apocalypse - not at its end. Secondly, these zombies are not the slow shambling kind - they're track and field zombies ON STEROIDS. Hell, these zombies look like they could outrun a car! Thirdly, from the looks of things... this isn't going to be a multi-faceted narrative, it's going to be a vehicle for Brad Pitt single handedly saving the world. That's not exactly surprising and is one of the reasons why an A-lister was always going to be a bad idea.

The most notable thing is how TERRIBLE the special effects in the trailer are - for a film with a budget of $125m you'd expect something good. If these are actual effects in the cut that is released... just, wow. We're talking about the kind of effects people cringed at in The Mummy and those looked better AND had the excuse of being from 1999. We're talking about zombies behaving like some kind of gigantic kind of giant ball that has properties of a liquid and a gas... it's truly bizarre and sticks out like a sore thumb. All the WORST excesses, everything that people complain about when it comes to CGI... this trailer seems to almost perfectly sum it up.

It's hard to know exactly what this film will be like but if this is the best it has to offer then it looks as if Paul W.S. Anderson is in for some stiff competition as regards bad big budget zombie films...

Forward Unto Dawn

With Halo 4 out this month, now is as good a time as any to mention the Forward Unto Dawn... part of the rather considerable pre-release hype... it's somewhere between a mini-series and a short film, covering events preceding any of the games right at the start of the human-covenant war with short interludes that show the increasingly rampant Cortana (stuck on the eponymous ship - or rather, half ship - with Master Chief following the end of Halo 3) at the start of each episode.

It does start out feeling a little bit generic but given the time they have, they actually do a pretty decent job with the characters and this definitely has the feel of the Halo universe. Also, for a fairly small production it's actually quite impressive. Not only do we get to see Elites and Hunters but also Master Chief himself in an actual Warthog.

This does somewhat highlight that it would be difficult to build a film around Master Chief - what makes him work as a protagonist of an FPS (being a bad ass of few words), makes him rather uninteresting as a character. There's no doubting his bad ass credentials here but as usual, he's just a big ol' power armour wearing glass of water, all of the interest really coming from the students.

A must for any Halo or sci-fi fan.

The End Of Dire Spy Schlock Hunted

And so, Hunted ends not with a bang but a "wow, that's eight hours wasted." You can't blame the hacks that wrote this drivel though - actually, you can and should - they did their best (which would have to work hard and buck up its ideas to aspire to be mediocre)  in this last episode to make this try and seem like it was all terribly clever.

The attempt to make Hunted look like some intelligent interweaving story is truly laughable as an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach would be underselling the desperation apparent here. The gangsta's son (Steve) wife didn't commit suicide - SHE WAS MURDERED! But wait! THERE'S MORE! She was murdered BY HIS HALF-BROTHER! Tyrone - the nefarious black guy that worked for Dave. At his father's behest, of course.

Still not sold on how clever this is?! What if they explain why gangsta dad is hellbent on getting this dam? Because his son (the one that got murdered) was murdered by Polyhedrous - one of the evil multi-national corporations - twenty years ago and he wants his revenge! Except that his plan is upset by the fact the blackmail material he had on Polyhedrous (who killed over six hundred people) is fake!

Luckily for our heroine, being drugged and then drowned isn't a serious setback to her, so she activates her Jesus powers to resurrect herself and murder gangsta dad - just in time for her boyfriend(ish) to come in and inject her with the antidote because obviously for her to shake off drowning AND poison THAT would break the suspension of disbelief! Oh and being drowned let her remember the pivotal(?) event from her childhood that links in to the whole Hourglass thing. Handy that!

Oh and Sam gets shot. Again but shockingly - DOESN'T DIE! AND SHE GETS HANDED A BABY! What a twist?

Starship Troopers: Invasion

The latest adaptation of the hugely influential Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers: Invasion is a bit of a mix of the various different adaptations that have been made over the years... perhaps the most notable difference from the best known iteration of the franchise - the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film - is that this is fully CGI and that the titular Starship Troopers are indeed wearing at least some kind of power armour.

This particular outing returns to main the characters from the 1997 movie, although several years on with the Federation still at war with the Bugs. The first thing to note about this film is that it's very limited in its visuals. If you feel that too many sci-fi films end up us as endless succession of identical corridors, this film will do little to disabuse you of that notion. We start out on a space station, move to a spaceship and then on to another spaceship and that's pretty much it. It's almost certainly due to budgetary constraints but it makes the  whole thing feel very limited - granted, the 1997 film was mostly set on a series of big ol' sandy planets but we had a number of different locations there... ravines, a fort and tunnels. Enough to give variety... and of course in the 1999 CGI TV show we had a number of substantially different places in each campaign.

Starship Troopers: Invasion offers us little more than the same metallic hallways and bland rooms every step of the way and while that isn't something that makes it inherently bad - it's very limiting and when you've got the ability to make any kind of world you want inside a computer it just feels a little disappointing.

Storywise, this runs with Carl being a creepy black ops type who steals Carmen's ship to run experiments that naturally pertain to Bugs and end up goin awry, killing everyone and leading to the eponymous invasion... there's not really anything remarkable in terms of story or character. It doesn't rely entirely upon the cookie cutter military cliches but it really doesn't matter as the power armour does precious little good and the weapons remain as useless as ever, so most of these characters are just meat for the grinder.

It's enjoyable as a standard sci-fi action piece, the CGI animation is actually fairly impressive (if lacking in variety) but it lacks the satirical kick that made the original film stand out from the crowd. You'd have thought someone would want to bring back the tongue-in-cheek propaganda stuff but admittedly, they'd probably feel somewhat out of place here as this is far more serious in tone than the often cartoonish Verhoeven film.

All-in-all, it's a good effort and not a bad way to spend ninety minutes and definitely something fans of the franchise (or sci-fi or creature feature fans for that matter) but there's nothing particularly iconic here... so, while even years on people will probably still remember some of the stuff from Verhoeven's gloriously over the top film, Invasion is something that is unlikely to be anything more than a series of long, grey corridors...

New Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Show - Revolution

With the Walking Dead about to return for a third season (that hopefully doesn't bore us to tears like season two) and Falling Skies having finished not so very long ago, it seems that the post-apocalyptic genre is in favour and here is Revolution to jump on the bandwagon.

The start is one of those horrible, badly written scenes that only ever happens on film or TV. Someone rushes home and makes an urgent phonecall - in this case, a husband and father rushes home and calls up his brother and knowing that time is short, starts in the middle of a sentence so that instead of imparting useful information to his brother, he can waste time spouting lines for use in the trailer. Needless to say, that "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO TURN OFF!" is probably the least useful thing to tell someone thirty seconds before the "The Blackout"occurs - pretty sure your brother would have worked that out.

Anyway, this isn't just a power cut or EMP or anything like that but rather something that leads to ALL electrical devices (and even car engines, apparently) no longer functioning. So, as one might imagine, electricity being the basis of all modern society, things go to hell pretty fast and within a decade massive numbers of people have died due to starvation, government has collapsed and now an agrarian society has arisen - with militias pushing people around.

The show starts with the idiot from the start getting killed because his son is even stupider than him. For no particular reason, the militia take him instead of his dead father. Well, obviously his father is dead so he wouldn't be much use but as this pertains to the power going out - why exactly would he be useful given that the reason his father is being taken is because the head of the militia suspects his complicity in the Blackout? Not only that but as we find out at the end of the first episode, the head of the militia is not just friends with the protagonist who got a call from his brother about the Blackout but was RIGHT NEXT TO HIM when he got the call, seconds before the lights went out... and yet it took him YEARS to piece this together?

Also, granted this IS a post-apocalyptic fallen society and it's established that only the magical USB necklaces are somehow able to activate technology but the producers of this show DO realise there's a lot of technology in-between medieval and modern day, right? Granted, there's the small fact that we've had the apocalypse and to restructure society but surely this is a great fucking excuse for steampunk? Or at least SOME use of steam? It has been over a decade and apparently the militia has thousands of men in it... you know what would give them advantage? TRAINS!

Not to mention how unspeakably awesome that would be, to combine the post-apocalyptic and steampunk genres. Granted, this is a TV show and I get the impression that it's probably already horrendously expensive and that having a steampunk theme in it would make it crazy but this is one of those issues that needs to be addressed. OK, maybe they can't get electricity working - they're a little fuzzy on why car engines don't work but just kind of toss it in - but there's a LOT of stuff that's relatively easy to make that ISN'T electronic... and it's not as if they burnt all the libraries down.

Anyway, the main protagonists are the cynical swashbuckler (because bullets are rare and people have resorted to the use of muskets) that shall be named McGuyver (he seriously looks like his brother... no mullet though) and the plucky daughter that is trying to save her brother. The brother gets his own story too, being abducted by Fring from Breaking Bad and there's also a former tech millionaire and mother who lost her kids who are hiding the magical USB necklace and serve to forward the mystery plot.

Perhaps the nicest thing in this show so far is that in the second episode, McGuyver is about to ice some guy that is after him because of the bounty on him (basically, he's now wanted for the same reason his brother was and Plucky dun goofed and blew his cover) and of course, Plucky goes "YOU CAN'T KILL HIM!" In a lot of shows, we'd get shown that of course, Plucky was right... somehow the guy would help them later on or something and we'd all learn the "love thy enemy" stuff.

What ACTUALLY happens is that not five minutes later, he's escaped and has set up McGuyver and is going to haul him off for his reward. Naturally, this leads to the guy ACTUALLY getting killed and Plucky having to realise she dun goofed. Also, the episode rounds out with her killing a guy in cold blood - flashing back to a scene during the first weeks after the Blackout where her mother killed a guy who was stealing food from her family.

So, if there's any hope for this show, it's that it's not going for the usual cookie cutter morality tale. Or at least, that it has the potential to be something other than that. The militia have certainly been established as the bad guys but we'll just have to see how that goes... the mystery plot has already shown us that people secretly with technology are being stalked by someone... and really, the people behind the Blackout are the worst mass murderers in history... so, we'll have to see how that goes.

BBC's "Hot" New Cliche Wrought Spy Thriller - The Hunted

Since the worst excesses of the James Bond era -  where over the top gadgets, ridiculously oversexualised names and an abundance of one liners, it feels as if the spy genre has been trying relentlessly to purge itself of anything like that... unfortunately, the pendulum has really swung too far the other way and has created a tiresome sea of similarity, into which the BBC has now hurled another wretched offering - The Hunted.

From pretty much the first moment of the show, you're going to notice the washed out colours and you should get used to it because it's constant. As is the cutting of the camera, the director and or editor are seemingly unable to allow a shot to last for more than three seconds at the best of times and as soon anything remotely interesting happens (don't worry, these moments are few and far between) the cuts start to become so rapid they mean you've little idea of what's going on. With one notable exception, where we see a gratuitous shot of someone having a syringe stabbed in their eye... but this is from the people that made Spooks, a show most people will remember for having a rather graphic death by deep fat fryer, so presumably this is attempting to ape that.

Washed out colours and ham fisted directing and editing aside, the story has our main character get shot TWICE in the first twenty minutes and yet, at no point is anything other than dull. A first episode really needs to grab you and yet, this was as dull as dishwater. The camerawork is so terrible that the action scenes - far from being exciting breaks from the awful dialogue are more likely to induce an epileptic seizure than actual tension.

And the dialogue really is poor. Another spy thriller cliche box ticked with the terse dialogue by various tight lipped characters... and it might be acceptable if it was just used occasionally to highlight stress and the rest of the time they talked like ACTUAL humans but these characters can't help but talk in soundbites and cliches.

There's no chance this can be a slow burner either, it's an eight parter... one doesn't really have time to burn anything but quickly when one is limited to eight one hour episodes... Really, there's just nothing to say about this show other than "don't bother". It has been done better in every conceivable way by others, so... there's no point in wasting time on this.

Cowboys & Aliens

Genre mixing and versus battles are all the rage these days. Pirates vs. ninjas, zombies vs. anything and now Cowboys vs. Aliens.

There REALLY isn't a lot to say about this film - it's very much a case of "does exactly what it says on the tin". You've got the Wild West setting with cowboys and injuns and then - BOOM! ALIENS!

Daniel Craig - with plot convenient/lazy writing amnesia and a bracelet that fires lasers - and Harrison Ford are the driving forces here but there's no real characterisation. Harrison Ford is a gruff cattle rancher with a pissant son (who gets abducted) and about all his character does is say that he looks at a native American guy is like his REAL son. Daniel Craig is suffering movie grade amnesia and is plagued with a severe case of flashbacks... it's nothing that hasn't been done a hundred times before and as always, it's just a case of the writer either not having the talent or inclination to write something better. He's a bad ass with a criminal past - that he can't remember - and the only weapon that works against the aliens.

After the aliens have abducted a bunch of people from the town, Indiana Jones and James Bond get a posse together and head out to find the aliens and that's really the meat of the film. We find out that the aliens are there FOR GOLD... which... doesn't really make a lot of sense. If you're capable of interstellar travel and can detect gold from orbit... why the hell do you want to waste all the time and energy of going down into a gravity well as big as Earth? Just go asteroid mining! And if you're thinking "aliens coming to Earth for our gold... that sounds familiar!" that'll be because it was the plot for the cinematic masterpiece known as Battlefield: Earth.

Also, the reason for the abductions is apparently because the aliens want to find out our weaknesses. This kind of thing always strikes me as silly. Unless you're going to develop biological agents SPECIFICALLY for humans, it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that humans are incredibly frail. We're meatbags that can die by falling down a flight of stairs - it's not like we're Kryptonians or Terminators, we die REAL easy. There is the insinuation that the aliens will also descend en masse to wipe humanity out - there's no explanation given, that's apparently just how these aliens roll.

So, naturally after following a wounded alien, they manage to find their ship and decide to engage in what might as well have been dubbed "operation suicide", which is basically most of the people riding around outside the ship and getting massacred by the nigh invulnerable aliens, that are apparently capable of just ripping people apart... all of this after they recognise that they want to keep to the high ground.

Naturally though, main characters are immune and Han Solo and James Bond are fine, aliens are killed and that's about it. Very average.

Superman vs. The Elite

So, as we all know - when it comes to live action films, there is no right DC can do for doing wrong... the exception obviously being Chris Nolan's Batman but fortunately, it's continuing to quietly produce animated features.

Superman vs. The Elite is their latest offering and is actually rather good. It's not QUITE in the All Star Superman league but it is good, following - as that did - a pre-existing and critical acclaimed storyline in the comics, which is really how these things should go.

The problem with Superman as a character - regardless of medium - is that a lot of people find him dull. He's   pretty much the dictionary definition of a flying brick (or a physical god) and has about a bajillionty superpowers - to the point that he has to have THREE glass jaws just to compensate for it... and a weakness like kryptonite makes things a bit prosaic because, when you know Superman is essentially invulnerable EXCEPT to kryptonite - well, it doesn't take a genius to work out that people are going to have krptonite... It's either that or Superman is just up against someone he can punch a lot and destroy the city.

Superman is generally considered the quintessential boyscout and hence, being a physical god who personifies hope - the polar opposite of the brooding mere mortal Batman, who is the only Mary Sue that it's acceptable to not just like but openly hero worship. This is the real problem with Superman - it's hard to relate to the guy.

Superman vs. The Elite is essentially a response to all the darker, edgier heroes that are (at best) morally grey and will kill and commit questionable acts to achieve their ends vs. Superman's faith in the justice system and humanity. It's exactly what Superman needs - a problem that he can't punch his way out of. The moral quandary is really the heart of the story.

The Elite are four anti-heroes led by Manchester Black - a Mancunian with immense telepathic and telekinetic powers, a big black guy who is superstrong and has some kind of energy power, a horny succubus type girl with the ability to create snakes or something and The Hat, who is constantly drunk and summons demons from his hat and has various other non-specified magic.

The conflict arises from Superman's belief in the rule of law and The Elite's amoral pursuit of who they judge "the bad guys". The Elite are seen as heroes for their uncompromising treatment of criminals and terrorists and while they both seemingly serve the side of right, a conflict is inevitable.

All-in-all, it's a good offering and if you can suffer through all the awful British accents - it's worth a watch.

John Carter Of Mars

John Carter of Mars - the live action Disney adaptation of the oldie timey work of the same name - is likely to be remembered for how catastrophically it tanked at the box office, putting it up there with other similarly high outlay/low return flops as Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in the Disney hall of shame...

The thing is - as with Treasure Planet and Atlantis which between them pretty much killed off Disney's traditional animated features for a decade - John Carter of Mars... isn't bad. It's actually considerably better than either of those two offerings but it's really not good either.

There's nothing that sticks out as memorable beyond the visuals. Despite clocking in at two hours, there's no real investment in any of the characters and there's never any real suspense or tension. Not to mention that the fish out of water device isn't particularly well used - John Carter arrives on Mars and seems to work it all out pretty quickly and once a magical plot device (never explained) allows him to understand the language of the people on Mars, it's all pretty straight forward. The strange thing about the universal translator is that it doesn't translate the weird words and so, almost half the dialogue is people saying silly words or names.

There's nothing wrong with that occasionally but the words in question are just so ridiculous that it makes it hard to take it seriously... and the film plays it very straight, that alone makes the film feel rather stilted which is worsened by the pacing. Really, the two hour run time does drag and it feels as if this could have been cut down to ninety minutes and it would have been for the better.

It feels as if this really WANTED to be a kind of fun sci-fi romp - possibly in the manner of Pirates of the Caribbean - but it got bogged down in the source material. The plot is pretty straight forward - John Carter dicks around a bit to give us some minor character development and then ends up on Mars, find out he's super strong and can jump like a kangaroo on steroids and saves a princess...

This princess is not only hot (pretty much a given) AND a super science boffin (having discovered the "ninth ray", which is apparently super special awesome) but is also an accomplished sword fighting bad ass, so... she's a keeper. Anyway, evil shapeshifting monks want McNulty from The Wire to marry her, allowing them to rule the planet... or something, the motivations of the "Thurn" are never really explained beyond vague insinuation that once they've got a puppet ruler on Mars, they'll turn their attention toward Earth.

Anyway, John Carter and the princess run away from the four armed green guys, find out the plans of the evil shapeshifting monks (because apparently a race capable of instantaneous interplanetary travel don't know about passwords) and have the mandatory chases and escapes. It's all very paint by numbers and really, there's just nothing to set this apart from the crowd and the ending just feels like clunky framing with obvious sequel baiting for a sequel that will never come.

It's not good, it's not bad... it's just average and despite some nice visuals, it's easily forgettable. Something to watch when you're not really feeling like paying a lot of attention, really.

The Mass Effect 3 Ending And Why Indoctrination Isn't Big And DEFINITELY Isn't Clever.

Let's take the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle as read and jump straight into this, shall we?

The ending to Mass Effect 3 is bad. Objectively, it's bad and it's not a case of people "not getting it" - there is nothing to get. It's riddled with plot holes and from pretty much every technical aspect of writing it's at best a horribly flawed car crash.

Now, in an attempt to cope with this clusterfuck of an ending some have posited that the ending is a hallucination - which would be INCREDIBLY STUPID but could kind of make sense. It would be utterly ridiculous and a complete cop out for any number of reasons but it's an easy fix for the end - you get up, shake it off and go get a REAL ending.

The alternative to this is indoctrination theory - which is basically the same, except it requires Shepard to have been indoctrinated. Beyond the obvious Occam's Razor violation here is the exact same one that faces the end just being a hallucination. It's still STUPID and it still means Bioware shipped an unfinished game PURELY to dick with their fans. That's not genius. Hell, given the monumental furore - so great that even the NON-gaming press have taken notice - and 80% drop in sales, there's a lot of evidence that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is wrong.

Not just that, for indoctrination to be true, you basically need to put on your confirmation bias blinkers. Yes, there are SOME things that suggest it but then they could just as easily be down to the lazy writing that pervades the game. Especially as the camp is split - either thinking Shepard is (somehow by means unexplained and certainly never shown in the game) being indoctrinated THROUGHOUT the duration of the game in a slow and insidious way (despite at no point showing ANY of the signs of indoctrination expounded in both the codex and ME1, ME2 AND ME3) OR even MORE ridiculous and utterly against canon - he just gets insta-indoctrinated at the end. Neither of these make a lick of sense and are the exact opposite of genius - if Bioware changes the ending to one of indoctrination it WON'T be genius, it WILL be a lazy last minute ass pull to save face.

And the notion that the ending somehow indoctrinated the PLAYER?! Well, I've yet to hear that one explained in a way that doesn't sound desperately like "I DON'T WANT THE ENDING TO SUCK! PLEASE LET IT BE GOOD!"

So yeah, don't drink the koolaid chaps - it's full of bleach.

Bioware and the tale of the ultimate trolling/April Fool's!

Mass Effect 3's release was for literally millions something orders of magnitude more anticipated than any summer blockbuster - hardly surprising given that many consider it the defining science fiction franchise of a generation.

Pretty much everyone squeed as they relentlessly played 20+ hours to get to see trans-galactic bad ass Commander Shepard round up a fighting force almost as enormous as his (or her) big brass balls while the Reapers invaded Earth and inevitably craved the moment 5 years in the making! The finale! The conclusion to the epic! The final showdown! One last epic battle to free the galaxy from the Reaper threat forever, maybe getting some answers along the way and then, finally! Seeing how all those decisions - good and bad, right and wrong - over the 100+ hours of gameplay all panned out. Who lived and who died and what happened to the galaxy for good or ill!

Of course, we all knew that was going to happen, right? Bioware had said repeatedly there would be several different endings! That our choices would have BIG consequences! The whole trilogy was ALL about that - so, it's not like they'd lie or anything, right?

And then people got to the ending! Except, something was wrong. It didn't make any sense. It was wrong. It felt rushed, contrived, stupid even! Surely, this couldn't be real! Surely, millions of this wasn't what they had spent five years anticipating?!

As one would expect in an age where communication is really only limited by how fast people can mash buttons on a keyboard through tears of bitter despair - people started to respond in their thousands and realised they were not alone. It wasn't that they didn't get it or that they hadn't done something right - they hadn't missed some crucial detail the ending was bad not just subjective but OBJECTIVELY!

Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned, so a movement began - Retake Mass Effect and to show that the Internet is a force for good and not just cute kittens and porn, they even decided to use the opportunity that such a gathering of people presented to raise money for charity!

http://retakemasseffect.chipin.com/retake-mass-effect-childs-play

This has all snowballed now, going beyond even the gaming sites (many of whom are foaming with rage that people dare chastise the people that pay their wages) and reaching the likes of Forbes! It has taken on a life of its own, Bioware say they wanted to polarise fans - mission accomplished! They wanted the ending to be remembered - it's going to be hard to forget now but what's really happening?

Bioware has been EXTREMELY cagey since this all started - there has been nothing said beyond the fact that they're "listening". An equally vague mention that they're waiting for more people to finish and can't go into specifics. So what does it all mean?

Bioware certainly aren't infallible - the utterly dire hack job that was Dragon Age 2 proves that and everyone has whispered of a decline in quality since they were bought by EA. Furthermore, the ending is nigh identical to one from a script leaked last year. Could it be that they just horribly misjudged it all and ruined everything forever with a lazy hack ending that even Star Trek: Voyager writers would think was stupid? It's entirely possible - deadlines are unrelenting and time is money, there isn't always time to put everything in and evidenced by Dragon Age 2, it's clear Bioware will rush out a hacked together game of inferior quality.

The problem there is - most people agree that ME3 is great UNTIL the last ten minutes. Epic, cinematic, emotional and high stakes, everything that was expected - it definitely doesn't feel rushed or slap-dash, just the opposite. That said, it was NEVER going to be easy to come up with an ending to an epic that would be satisfactory. It's really that it feels that Bioware gave us the most brutal ending of all - NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTHING!

No matter what choice you make all that happens is sonmeone shouting"NOOOOOOOOOOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! YOU SO STUPID!"

So, what exactly are the options?

1. Bioware are sitting on a truly awesome ending and are getting ready for the biggest April Fool's joke in history! Come April 1st they'll don their troll face masks and shout FOOLED YOU! Then release a patch that puts in an ending that the series deserves.

Analysis: Definitely proof that collectively the fanbase is still in the "bargaining" stage of grief. The hope against hope that Bioware are a pack of cunts who toyed with our emotions just for a joke. In the short term, it's likely that will get a LOT of negative reaction from the fanbase but if it's free, it's likely all would be forgiven and forgotten in a short while. As with any prank where you're the butt of the joke - you're angry for a while but you can look back at it as funny in the future.

Probability: Bearing in mind the script leak in November - although Bioware went on record as saying that was an old script and things had changed since then - this seems, unlikely. First of all - it's just a huge gamble and given the levels of hate and the actual FINANCIAL damage that has been done, it seems improbable that EA wouldn't have said "YEAH, IT WAS A JOKE!" because they only care about the bottom line.

Not only that, the behind the scene footage in the back patting circle jerk of "Final Hours" shows pretty much the exact form of the current ending. It would be an EXTREMELY elaborate deception and really - it seems stupid. The first time you do anything is always the most memorable, everything is fresh and new - for good or ill, it's human nature to form an impression based on a first impression. So, basically - people walk away with a bad taste in their mouth and the whole game is tainted. Hell, the whole FRANCHISE is tainted.

If they're holding out for the 1st of April they have balls a LOT bigger than Shepard.

2. Bioware have a truly awesome ending but they're planning on price gouging a game that already had Day 1 DLC by making people pay for a "proper" ending DLC.

Analysis: Games ain't cheap to make and companies have bills to pay. DLC price gouging is only going to get more common - especially as physical media becomes sidelined. Fixing a bad ending? That's shooting fish in a barrel.

Probability: Even lower than the first - the negative backlash is already costing Bioware good will that hasn't exactly recovered from DA2. While EA is greedy, they aren't stupid and even a child could see that they'd galvanise opposition and likely be a nice big "company holds fans to ransom" title across the Internet.

3. Bioware for whatever reason utterly fucked up and don't have a clue what to do.

Analysis: Again - Bioware aren't infallible. Deadlines, fatigue, burn out, corporate culture doesn't usually encourage original thought and sometimes people just go "meh, good enough!". It's really the only realistic explanation - Bioware's pleas for patience just a vain hope that maybe people would just simmer down and it would blow over and they could plan some kind of PR spin - with the usual bullshit words like "challenging", "bold", "visionary" or "ambiguous".

Probability: Sadly, close to 100%.

Well played Bioware - it took George Lucas hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of employees to alienate a huge chunk of his fanbase and poison a franchise, you guys did it with one lead writer's half-baked concept and 10 minutes of gameplay!

Let's give Terra Nova a pass on it being a show that described ITSELF as "Lost meets Jurassic Park". OK, so the temporal whatjamacallit let's them live in dinosaur land and because one of the idiots from Star Trek: Voyager (Brannon Braga) is the showrunner, it's vaguely explained with some technobabble that may or may not become critically important at some later juncture...

But let's examine the idiocy of the show itself, beyond the premise. Now we have our people from 2149 living 85 million years in the past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth... because dinosaurs are cool! Now, the problem of the week in episode 1x07 is that a meteor went BOOM and caused an EMP - amazingly, this is actually something that even relatively small meteors can do! It's happened a few times and has taken down power grids etc.

This seems to be relatively common knowledge as both Colonel Badass and Data (the brainbox daughter of the protagonist) almost immediately identify it. The first problem we encounter is that while the EMP is created by the meteor "exploding" in an air burst above the ground, the remains still hit the ground and cause a "sonic shock" (presumably, a regular shockwave wouldn't be science fictiony enough). Now, as the barrier for Terra Nova is just wooden bars with great big gaps - this means everyone has to hit the ground... a solid barrier would at least have mitigated that and prevented any dangerous high speed projectiles being hurled into people.

The second - and more obvious problem - is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING has a computer chip in it. EVEN THEIR GUNS! This is a period which had a considerably higher level of meteor activity and yet they didn't think about this? Oh but they might have back-ups, you say! They do! Phew, problem solved! Oh, wait - no. The EMP is capable of slagging ANY circuit in range - active or otherwise... oh, they're kind of fucked then... Oh! No, of course not - they've got a machine to make replacements! Thank goodness all of Terra Nova hasn't been reduced to a pre-electronic age! Wait, what's that? The machine that makes replacement chips itself requires one that was melted by the EMP?! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Hilariously - and for the purposes of dramatic convenience - there is one guy in the whole colony that can fix microchips that have melted. It's the evil Ozzie bartender! Quite how he's supposed to fix something that has presumably melted is never explained - these days, if a CPU breaks... it's pretty much done and these are chips from 150 years into the future (and hence presumably even smaller and more complex), it seems unlikely that even a trivial problem could be fixed - least of all by a guy in a bar with no tools.

But the whole situation is made even MORE ridiculous when we have Colonel Badass pronounce that their perimeter - which is apparently will with microchipped landmines... OK... - is down and that any number of beasties could charge through the barrier like it wasn't there... NO FUCKING KIDDING! If only you came from the future and could somehow make... some kind of METAL WALL! Seriously, what is WITH these people? They've brought through dozens, if not hundreds of lovely prefab buildings, enough weapons and vehicle to supply a small army and a state of the art medical facility and as revealed in this very episode, the sum total of ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE (oh, don't worry - THAT was shielded from the EMP!).

Yet, at some point during the planning of this second chance for humanity someone thought they'd just skimp on the walls and just have a bunch of logs a full grown man could fit through - or a dinosaur the size of a full grown man! Oops! In fact, Colonel Badass actually decides that as they're down to a useless barrier and harsh language, they need another line of defence - which turns out to be a big ditch that they fill with petrol or some such and ignite with flaming arrows (naturally when handed a compound bow, Timecop knows EXACTLY how to use it - because... well, because he's a main character damnit! Having one of the minor supporting characters who actually might have been trained to use a bow is stupid!). Hey, you know what would be sensible? Maybe if you hadn't waited until the last minute to dig a ditch to stop the hundreds of different species of 40 tonne beasties that run around all over this place!

Of course, the EVIL Sixers use the crippling stupidity of the Terra Novans to try and get the magical box of McGuffin because the Spineosaurus was just a distraction while the Sixers sneak in to get the McGuffin. They go on to exposition that this surgical strike was clearly the result of a mole - not just the fact the box was in a cupboard and in the most obvious location possible. Which rather begs the question - the mole clearly knew exactly where the McGuffin was - it was easy to get to and there was no one guarding it... it seems a regular occurrence for kids to sneak out of the colony, so you'd assume that as it's essentially just locked in a stationary cupboard the mole could just break in and sneak it out - no need for a potentially dangerous diversion or surgical strike.

Idiotic.

For over a decade, Duke Nukem Forever has been the punchline of many jokes throughout the gaming community - due in part to its unfortunate choice of name and for the rest of it, the fact it spent twelve years in development hell, repeatedly winning vapourware awards with scarcely anything to show for it didn't help... and then 3DRealms itself went tits up and everyone assume that the forever would become a literal one... but here we are and the Duke has finally returned.

One thing to note is that Starcraft 2 was in development for around the same amount of time as well and while it may seem unfair to compare an RTS and an FPS, there are certain obvious differences... Starcraft 2 FELT like it had been in development for that length of time and it felt like a game that had endlessly been tweaked and polished at every stage of production.

There was absolutely no need for Blizzard to do that, all they really needed was a game that was properly balanced for the obsessive competitive multiplayer market and they'd have coined it in... but they produced a single player game with elaborate cutscenes - a few of the typically gorgeous and amazing fully rendered CGI ones and dozens of ones that were in-game and still managed to look better than most fully rendered cutscenes in other games - which offered a variety of missions in the generally very bland world of RTSs, a few choices, plenty of laughs, an entire soundtrack JUST for the bar! Lots of little extras you could pick up, a whole entirely unnecessary mini-game of Starcraft themed shoot 'em up you could play just for laughs... and lots of character interactions that were entirely optional but all very enjoyable - not to mention a spoof of FOX news. In other words, it felt like the time take had been time well spent.

Why go on about an unrelated game of a different genre? Well, despite their comparable times in development the same cannot be said for Duke Nukem Forever. It's no secret that the development of Duke Nukem Forever was troubled and the final product clearly shows that. The word on the street is that Gearbox pretty much ended up with various bits and pieces of what 3DRealms had made in the past decade and then basically hacked them together to make the game that was just released... that certainly seems about right.

That isn't to say there's no enjoyment in the game - it immediately harkens back to the Duke Nukem 3D with Duke casually relieving himself in a urinal. It takes a while for the game to actually get going after the little opener - which turns out to be a Duke Nukem game, played by Duke (complete with snark about how it took 12 years to make, hohoho). After this, there's wandering around Duke's building which seems to comprise his penthouse, museum, a TV studio and casino... at pretty much every instance, people will gush at Duke and tell him how awesome he is and pretty much everything with a vagina will hit on you - which varies in amusement.

After that, it's straight into the action... which is... unremarkable. This isn't helped by the fact that for reasons best known to the developers, the game decided to limit itself to two weapons and replaced the health bar with a shield... oh, sorry "ego". What is with the aversion to health bars these days? Regardless, it invariably means that shooting involves you running out and then ducking for cover although the game offers you a few power-ups... beer makes you tougher (but makes the screen blurry), steroids increase the power of your melee attacks and you've got the ol' Holo-Duke to distract the enemy... given that you've got a recharging health bar and even on hard, the enemies aren't particularly challenging, these are really more novelty items. Although, the ability to execute enemies is quite useful - restoring your ego immediately.

Your ego can also be supplemented by a number of different items that you'll find around the level. These can be something as simple as looking at pictures of boobs, to bench pressing or getting a good score on Duke's own pinball machine. It's a nice touch but really, it's not that critical to pick these points up - it's just nice to have some interaction with the world... it kind of breaks up the shooter stages...

Not that the standard FPS sections really require any real break, they're pretty much dealt out in bite sized pieces. You run to area A, you fight a few waves of bad guys, you kill them all... and then you run to area B, where you fight a few waves of bad guys, kill them and move on... Rinse and repeat. About the only reason it's amusing is because of what Duke says but even then, as short as this game is you're probably going to get a bit bored of hearing about pork chop sandwiches - that or get hungry... or both.

Of course, there's more than just the mini-games there are two bits to distract from the run-of-the-mill shooter this game is. First off are the driving sections, there are actually two of them. One at the start of the game, where you're shrunken down and using an R/C car to drive around in and another where you're in a monster truck which apparently has the fuel capacity of a thimble. Again, there's nothing much to comment on here... they're pretty standard driving sections - you drive along the road until run out of gas, then fight some bad guys and then run back to your truck... It's neither good nor bad, it was simply... there.

The other notable break in the game is about a third of the way through, where Duke - despite having the ability to shrug off bullets and grenades TO THE FACE - gets KO'd (eh, happens to the best of 'em) and enters a dream sequence which has... well, no bearing on anything. It's a chance to enjoy the strippers that Duke Nukem 3D was so infamous for and play a number of mini-games (notably, air hockey and a variation of whack-a-mole) while essentially doing a fetch-quest that gets Duke out of his coma... this part is really what contributes to the whole thing feeling like some kind of Frankenstein's monster of parts, sewn together to make one uneasy whole.

Yes, it has Duke Nukem being himself and there is plenty of the kind of humour that you'd expect - including copious references to other game franchises and games... but it's more than a little ironic that Duke proclaims "power armour is for pussies", when this game seems like a late to the party Halo clone in many respects. We've got the regenerating health/shield, limited to two weapons + grenades, a very linear style of map progression, the occasional somewhat awkward driving section (Duke even gets to jump out and flip his car, just as if it was a Warthog!) and of course, jumping puzzles... oh, wait - that's really more Half-Life's bag.

It's also incredibly short... which is in some ways a blessing, given that there were a pretty limited number of weapons and enemies, which made it all feel perhaps more repetitive. One of the loading screens tips - if you get to a stage of the game that makes you die a lot, you may want to get a book because the loading time aren't fast - suggests that different weapons do more or less damage to enemies... maybe they do but given the fact more than half of your enemies are "pig cops" and they mostly carry machine guns and shotguns, expect those to be your bread and butter.

Not to mention that all bosses require you to use explosives or a turret to kill them and those are naturally on hand with infinite ammo... which makes them ridiculously easy to kill, especially as the RPG can actually lock-on... Which surely makes the purpose of a boss battle somewhat ridiculous in itself? Oh and the game also bubbles over with such imagination that you get to fight two identical bosses twice. Oh, sorry - did I say identical? Well, they're exactly the same except that instead of just bringing their health down to zero once, you have to do it more than once.

It's really hard to know who this game is aimed at. It's obviously not for anyone looking for a serious FPS game but at the same time - because even the average Halo clone has set a higher bar than this... OK, so maybe nostalgia? Well, it does have Duke in it and the humour certainly hasn't matured in the past decade... but given the fact the single player campaign is so laughably short, even by the low standards of contemporary gaming - even if you love every joke and get every reference and find it hilarious... is that really worth the price of admission? Because this game almost certainly isn't going to have a big multiplayer community and it's hard to imagine people buying the game for the multiplayer because on the PC and consoles... there are just better games you could spend your money on for a multiplayer game.

In short, there's no real reason for anyone except the most die hard fans of the Duke to even consider handing over money for this game. If it wasn't for the titular character and his jokes, this game would be so forgettable you might not even be able to remember what you were playing as you played. As it is, to say that this is an inauspicious return to gaming for Duke Nukem would be a massive understatement. Perhaps if it comes out in a budget pack with some other games you want, then maybe it would be worth considering spending some money on - but really, it's just not that good.

The UK has a history of SCI-FI that is chequered.

In recent years about all there has been is Doctor Who and Primeval... which are respectively mostly good and rubbish.

But the BBC will keep trying... and so, OUTCASTS!

A show that is struggling to get as many cliches as possible!

It's post-apocalyptic, it's an off-world colony, they had a virus that killed only kids, that have clones, they blamed the clones for the virus that killed their kids, the clones weren't able to produce BUT NOW CAN and as we're all of two episodes in - you can imagine we'll get some pay off on the vague and mystical notion.

The horrible acting, dialogue and just general tedium does NOTHING to make this show good.

Did the BBC learn NOTHING from The Deep? This is just another car crash. It doesn't matter if you get the budget or the high profile actors if the script is rubbish - it's going to be a bad product.

Why, oh why must the business hate and belittle writers? THEY MAKE THE SHOW.

Perhaps there was nothing to ruin here.

Batman/Superman: Apocalypse - let's begin, shall we?

This follows right on the heels of the previous Batman/Superman animated feature - Public Enemies and in much the same way as that, it follows the comics in a general pattern of story... so, if you've read that - you'll know pretty much the entire story.

If you haven't - this picks up almost immediately after the end of Public Enemies, with the giant kryptonite mountain... sorry METEOR impacting into Gotham river. Batman turns up and finds a ship... and in that ship is SUPERGIRL! Except, it's comic book land so... y'know, a fight between Supergirl (only just learning to use her powers) and Batman begins.

Naturally, he eventually just gets some kryptonite out and we cut to some time later. Kara is at the FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE with Bats and Supes... Batman is naturally suspicious about a hot girl with super powers, claiming to be related to Superman and all that kind of stuff... Anyway, Superman trusts her and they take her to Metropolis... whilst trying to fit in, Batman and Wonder Woman essentially spring a trap that shows Supergirl isn't ready and she goes off to the Wonder Woman's magical lesbian island of Amazons for Spring Break for some hot girl on girl action... y'know catfights.

As one might guess, this is all going fine until Dark Seid turns up, abducts Supergirl and brainwashes her.

Supes, Batman, Wonder Woman and Big Barda get together to save her... Batman might be the world's greatest detective but going to Apokolips seems... fairly insane... but as this shows, being THE GOD DAMN BATMAN or his Bat Armour... or... SOMETHING allows him to be thrown against pillars and damage them and still be... well, alive. Most people who get thrown against a solid stone surface with any force would just collapse and die. Batman is fine though.

Anyway, Batman - being THE GOD DAMN BATMAN - basically beats Dark Seid saying "Oh, yeah - armed a bunch of world destroying bombs and if you don't let Supergirl go - BOOM! I'M THE GOD DAMN BATMAN!"

So, everyone goes home and all is well - OR IS IT?! Superman and Supergirl get jumped at the Kent's farm by Dark Seid... who points out that he just said he wouldn't mess with Supergirl... So, I guess he's lawful evil? Amusingly, Supes gets KO'd very early on and Supergirl does most of the punching. Predictably, evil is vanquished and good triumphs!

If you liked Superman/Batman: Public Enemies - this is pretty much more of the same. The story is neither complicated nor deep but it's very tight - that's presumably a function of the limited length of these features - and as far as action goes, it delivers. The quality of animation is impressive... one curious thing is that Granny Goodness not only LOOKS quite mannish... she sounds like a man. That's a minor quibble though, most of character design is great and the voice acting is all pretty good though.

Overall, probably the best DC animated effort thus far.

Being the massive cultural phenemenon it is, changes in the actor of the eponymous Doctor of Doctor Who are inevitably burdened with people shaking heads and saying doom. So, when Matt Smith was announced - there was a great deal of clucking about him being a mere 27, the youngest Doctor ever.

Needless to say, the first episode Eleventh Hour has silenced many critics because Matt Smith and new head writer/executive producer Stephen Moffat kicked the living daylights out of everything that fanfic writing loser RTD ever did. He's energetic but not like a child sans ritalin (Tennant) and expressive but not gurning (Eccleston) and while it's just the first episode, there is no sense he's going to spend his whole time moaning about how he killed all the Timelords or how he's "so sorry" about absolutely EVERYTHING.

The episode starts right where The End Of Time left off, with the new Doctor, trying to stop the TARDIS crashing into Big Ben... amazingly, instead of crashing into slum council estate to a Billy Piper wannabe, we get him going into a village. A village that is not London... OR CARDIFF. Admittedly, the series has gradually moved away from the extreme constrictions of the first RTD season but this seems a a good fresh start and the Doctor running through a village is distinctly old school Who...

There's no pointless referencing of pop culture, gratuitous injection of homosexuality and no horrible cheesiness that makes you cringe... not to mention that technobabble and ridiculous fixes for problem are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the Doctor himself observes that he saves the day with no TARDIS and no sonic screwdriver. Which is a nice touch - a far more innovative solution to the problem presented than the Doctor simply babbling wildly while jumping around like a jack in the box with ADHD.

There's a great deal more subtlety to both the Doctor and his new companion, Amelia Pond. They are much more understate... the show does not feel as if it is going to lapse into slapstick or schmaltz and the second episode had a chance for both. It's the kind of subtlety that you'd never see in an RTD script and generally struggled to emerge under his auspices and the Doctor has yet to be venerated as some incredible and infallible person - one of the primary flaws of RTD's writing of the Doctor was that in all of three seconds, everyone would think he was the best thing since sliced bread... things with Amelia have been a little different as the Doctor kind of dicked her around a bit... and she's apparently running away from her wedding.

So, thinks are looking interesting.