Well I have just played through my first whirlwind run of Mass Effect 2 and overall I am impressed. Bioware really listened to the fans of the first game and cleaned up some of the minor issues that tended to niggle away at you while playing the original Mass Effect. Combat has been tightened up, tedious running all over the shop has been eliminated as much as possible and the very samey side missions have been done away with. Like the original it is like being in control of a Science Fiction film, scenes have a that feel of being directed by someone who knows what they are doing rather than being simply functional and everything just feels high quality. As you would expect after playing the original the game has an awesome plot and is well scripted and acted. The voice cast is enough to make a geek cry with delight.  Yvonne Strahovski, Tricia Helfer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Michael Hogan, Seth Green, Martin Sheen, Claudia Black and Adam Baldwin just to name a few. The full list is here. And the character Yvonne Strahovski plays take its looks directly from the actress too, though they have inflated her bosom somewhat for the character. Shame the characters never interact the same way as they do in Dragon Age though. Read the rest of this entry »

That was like some kind of weird anti-RTD episode of Doctor Who. Instead of getting a good first part and then getting a big pile of poop of a let down in part 2 RTD did it the other way around.He also skipped most of his usually end of series sillyness and gave us one of better ends he has done. Perhaps he used up all his quota of silly in the first part shown on Xmas day. Though he did reuse the old ‘planet in the sky’ idea from the end of last series. Everything just seemed toned down and the actors seemed to be left alone to tell the story. Which is good because the cast is made up of some really fine actors. We also got to find out why The Doctor was okay with sealing up the Timelords along with the Daleks, they had become just as bad as their enemy. Their final solution to a war they couldn’t win was to destroy all of time which they seemed to have borrowed from Davros in the last finale of the last series.

I love who it was who knocked four times.

The build up to the regeneration was fantastic. I liked how even as he was effectively dying he searched out his companions and gave them each that a little bit of help one last time. I didn’t even mind that he went to see Rose either. I really felt for the Doctor as he struggled against his regeneration because he didn’t want to go. Who would? Regeneration is not quite dying but it isn’t far off really. Most of the Doctor’s incarnations have simple accepted it or not had time to think about. This incarnation didn’t want to go. Which is the 10th Doctor all over, lovable, friendly, helpful, courageous but ultimately selfish. Even his self-sacrifice for Wilf wasn’t without a tantrum. This Doctor learn’t to love what he did again after his previous incarnation had struggled to come to terms with what he did in the Time War. Probably ended up loving it a little too much, which is why everything went a little caca. Ah mixing my time travel show terminology will get me in trouble one day.

It looks like holding back his regeneration has dire consequences for the Tardis and he still isn’t ginger! I liked the sly dig that the PC meddling brigade as he checked he wasn’t a woman after discovering he had long hair. Watch the regeneration:

No doubt the various Doctor Who internet discussion forums are already sharpening their knives to stick into Matt Smith’s back. They have already do doubt labelled him the worst Doctor ever based on his few seconds in this special. And when they see him punch a guy in the advert for the new series they will have a damned fit. Still onwards into the Moffat era and here’s to new catchphrases!

Geronimo!

I thought it showed promise at first. The characters where well acted and motivations and behavior was initially sound and consistent. Not that you end up caring as by the end of the story they have flushed all that away. I felt like the producers were laughing at me after conning me into thinking it was going to be good. Eddie Izzard is actually really good as the opportunistic survivor of a plane crash (we won’t go into the utterly ridiculous method he uses to survive the crash) who rises to power by making good use of his time. He collects guns, supplies and followers while every other sighted person is lamenting what has happened or wandering around with a sad face. He should play bad guys more often. At least they didn’t pick a cast of youngsters to make the story appeal to a younger audience. Which is probably good as it would just meant more pissed off people.

They deviated from Wyndham’s original plot more and more as they went along, until it got to the point the 2nd part of the story just made no sense. The whole we shouldn’t play god morality tale got a bit obvious and repetitive, especially the throw away scenes at the Nunnery. Talking of repetitive there is a series of flashbacks involving a tribal mask. Every 15 minutes we see the flashback with a little more detail each time. Yes we get it the mask is going to turn out to be important quit it with the flashbacks about it. Naturally it does end up being important but not in anyway that you might understand. They drip the Triffid venom through the eye slits in the mask and this makes eyes weep black and tears which has the side effect of making the Triffids ignore humans. What!? Why is that exactly? The protagonist Bill wonders aloud at one point on why the Triffids aim for the eyes but that is all we get. Why does this work? Is it because it changes the shape of the eyes and Triffids no longer recognise them as human? Do Triffids actually really like pandas? Why!? No explanation is given and the main characters happily fuck off to the Isle of Wight to fill a glass lighthouse with coloured sand, or something. Read the rest of this entry »

Lets start off with the positive stuff shall we. The CGI is phenomenal and the film is visually beautiful. It is virtually impossible to spot where the CGI ends and the real life actors begin, if not for the fantastical alien creatures anyway. Sometimes I became convinced some of the live action was actually CGI, weird. The plot is straight forward but generally well executed and the characters behave in realistically and consistently. The acting ranges from pretty good to adequate. Worthington’s CGI Avatar has twice the emotional range as its real life counterpart. Weaver is as ever spot on despite being in the film mostly for exposition. The characters resonate well and they are easy to identify with, even if you can’t quite accept Phoebe’s half-brother being in charge of a planetary scale mining operation. The Na’vi are likable and well fleshed out alien species despite looking like shaved Thundercats. The action sequences are all fantastic but this should go without saying as they are all done in the fantastic CGI.

Now the bad. Despite being solidly done the plot is clinched to high heaven. This same film has been made so many times it isn’t even funny. It has also been done better. This was particularly hammered home by the fact the coming attractions included a trailer for a CGI animated film with a virtually identical plot. The dialog regularly wanders way too close to George Lucas and Chris Claremont territory for my liking. At times it skips foreshadowing and goes straight to flat out telegraphing what is going to happen next. As soon as the mention ***ing the big **** thing you know the protagonist will ending up doing it. The film isn’t shy on delivering its morality like Hacksaw Jim Duggan either .i.e with a 2×4. The anti-war and pro-environment messages are so obvious they are more than a little bit preachy. At times the who noble savage cliche threatens to turn the film into an anthropological (Whats the alien equivalent? Anyone?) mockumentary. Which brings me to the films biggest failing, the middle of the film drags badly. I actually got bored half way into the film.

It is a decent enough film but other than setting the standard for CGI it isn’t the cinema revolution people are claiming it is. I’d give it 7/10. It was enjoyable enough but simply doesn’t live up to the hype nor its budget. The film is best seen in the nausea inducing 3D unless you wear spectacles with large frames. No doubt it is even better on an iMax screen. I’ll get it on DVD but I have no pressing need to go see it at the cinema again.

It starts off at such a pace it makes you think “Wow a lots going to happen in this special, this should be good” and then very little actually happens. They get straight into the running almost immediately so it seems initially like their is some urgency. The Doctor sits with the Ood for a couple of minutes (I’m guessing exposed brain patterns are the special effects guys’ trademark in Doctor Who) then off he goes running to get back to Earth. And then we have the resurrection of The Master who for some inexplicable reason gains superpowers and taste for human flesh (and turkey) when said resurrection gets botched. Then we spend the next half an hour following around Wilf and get to watch the Doctor be all whiny. Then after all the piffling about we get to end of the episode which includes some incredibly convenient super-tech, the addition of some pointless and stupid look aliens, everyone under-estimating The Master (again) and some kind of weird play on the fortress of solitude scene at the end of Superman 2. Finally we have the cliffhanger which has to be the most unintentionally hilarious piece of TV (The Matrix meets The Master) I have seen this year followed by a massive and pointless spoiler for the next special on New Year’s day.

It’s like Russell T. Davies has come over all George Lucas with this special and those around him have let him because this and the New Year special make up his final story. Nothing anybody does in this special makes a lick of sense and half the plot seems purely so special effects can be used. The other half of the plot seems to cater for poor bad jokes and pretty low brow humour. Are old people really all so bored they would spend their time looking for a Doctor because one of their ilk said it would be a good idea? Why has the TARDIS even got a chameleon circuit if the Doctor can make it invisible? Does nobody on TV actually partake in any fiction whatsoever so they can see these ’sudden but inevitable betrayals’ coming? When does Steve Moffat take over?

And through all this crap Bernard Cribbins, David Tennant and John Simms (even if he was chewing the scenery) act their socks off to save this special from being another ‘Planet of the Dead’. Even Catherine Tate in Donna Noble’s few scenes oozes class. Which in a way makes it all much worse as they stick out like brand new Blu-ray players in a manure pile. Lets hope the 2nd part of this tale is much better and that this special looks better in hindsight because of it. However I predict that it will just be another typical ridiculously-over-the-top Davies end of season story.

I’m 60 pages into Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” and I don’t think I can read any more of this rubbish. No I have not grown tired of Dan Brown’s average writing ability or his Claremont-esque dialogue I just can’t take anymore of the pure idiocy that passes for science in this book. It is not the first Dan Brown book I have stopped reading because of this. I put Digital Fortress back on the shelf after getting fed up of his complete lack of understanding of computers and encryption. Just half an hour of that made me want to beat my own brains out. I put it down to being to close to home and I enjoyed his other books despite their absurdity. Even the silly god particle stuff from ‘Angels & Demons’. So why have I stopped reading this one? Because apparently according Dan Brown the scientists in his world have been able to show that prayer can influence random number generators, that after 9/11 these same random generators stopped being so random because of all the grief/compassion/horror/dust. Another idea it offers up is that sending lovey-dovey feelings to freezing water causes the ice crystals to form in nice ordered patterns while being mean to the water makes the ice grow chaotically. I kid you not. The premise being that mind can win out over matter and that ancient man knew the secrets of the universe and our ’science’ takes us away from this truth. Other gems include the quantum events can be effected by the consciousness of the observer and that new particles appear because scientists want them to. I put this down to the fundamental mistake a lot of people make about what is meant by observer when reading layman’s books about Quantum physics. Lots and lots of what is called Noetic Science. Which is no different to plane old new age mumbo-jumbo with a more ’scientific’ sounding name. It is the hippy’s equivalent of creation science. In other words it is total horse shit.