Stuart's Blog

Fiction Snob

2012-01-19T22:53:00.004Z

My attitude towards fiction based on games and TV shows is to generally avoid unless it is really, really compelling stuff. A certain someone describes me as being a bit snobby towards these books.

It's for that reason I've never read a Star Trek novel (except for the first Shatneverse novel, and that was originally as a comic). I view reading a book as a commitment and since most TV/game spinoff fiction is dismissed almost instantly as non-canon (you'll never see an episode of Battlestar Galactica that references the novels or comics) and is a cheap disposable way of ringing money out of a fans of a franchise with prose that might as well be written by monkeys intent on churning out 5 cents a word.

It started when I was beginning to play Dungeons and Dragons. I found Dragonlance in our school library and rapidly developed a love for Krynn. After reading the six prequel books, the six books on how the main characters met, the main trilogy, the secondary trilogy and the trilogy of short stories, as well as numerous other spin-offs I rapidly felt I was reading the same book over and over. I finally stopped Dragons of Summer Flame, which was arguably an unnecessary novel.

I've rapidly found - for instance reading an HP Lovecraft or Robert E Howard tale is far more satisfying than reading Kevin J Anderson's Star Wars/Dune/X-Files churned out crud. So you probably won't catch me reading Halo novels, or Dragon Age: Story of Minor Character Bob on my kindle.

There have been exceptions to this - I've read the Star Wars Zahn Trilogy (good, but didn't really feel like Star Wars and the author tended to give all the characters identical tics - count how many characters exclaim 'Point' in those books). Another was the Babylon 5 novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows (I like the character of Sinclair and wanted to know what happened to him, and JMS, the B5 head-honcho states in the foreword this book is completely canon/accurate).

Since getting an e-reader though I've become more willing to experiment with my reading - to the point where I've read some uncharacteristically unusual stuff. Some reviews of this will be forthcoming shortly.

Stuff I've Been Reading: George R.R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg

2011-11-06T21:50:00.004Z

A whileback when HBO's Game of Thrones was on TV I whizzed through the novel like the devil was on my tail. When the time came to get into Book 2 I started reading and while I have to admit I enjoyed it I did stall round about the one-third mark and started reading (of all things) Ravenloft fiction instead.

What brought me back to Martin's epics (I'm now just finished A Storm of Swords:Steel and Snow) was when I sat down to read his three short stories, The Tales of Dunk and Egg. These are 3 novellas that feature in different fantasy anthologies George R.R. Martin has written. They are all set in Westeros and set 100 years or so before Game of Thrones. As novellas they weight in at around the 100-200 page mark, which is as punchy as Martin gets, suffering from as he describes it "diarrheoa of the wordprocessor".

As a prequel they've often been described as analagous to the Hobbit, but really they are three episodic tales featuring Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge-knight (wandering knight in the ronin tradition) and his unique squire, Egg. Typically Martin has indicated there will be several more stories, as many as nine to twelve, covering much of the life stories of the two protagonists. There are only three written, with a fourth on its way. Additionally mention is made of unseen adventures that take place between the novellas, including mention of a meeting with a minor character seen in Game of Thrones.

It is more high-adventure than Song of Ice and Fire. While dragons are no more the Targaryen dynasty are still in charge, albeit having to fight a rival branch of the family who are trying to usurp their rulership, and in true Martin tradition killing each other. Also, given Martin's page count is restricted the stories tend to be quite well pace.

The first story, Hedge Knight, takes place as Dunk encounters his new squire whilst vying for a minor victory in a grand tournament. This being Westeros he encounters a prominent member of the nobility being not very nice to the peasantry and being true to his knightly ideals ends up insulting said douche. Needless to say this ends up with our hero in a joust for his life against some of the most prominent warriors in the realm. The resultant fight is brutal in typical Martin tradition. One major revelation in the story stretches the credulity of this series given how dark and dangerous Westeros is, but other than that it is a good read.

The Sworn Sword sees Dunk and his squire swear loyalty to a really poor lord and get involved in a land dispute with the lord's neighbour. This starts off a little Seven Samurai but ends off going of in its own direction. The harsh life of the peasantry and the effects of a drought are typically gritty Martin story elements but the ending of the story is remarkably upbeat for a George R.R. Martin fantasy story. Ultimately this is probably the weakest of the three stories so far as the main characters' development is non-existent and an adventure that is mentioned having taken place between Hedge Knight and the Sworn Sword sounds just as interesting.

Mystery Knight takes place at a tourney again, with Dunk abandoning all reason and tactics we saw in the first story. It features some really nasty grey characters and this tournament is somewhat more unique than its predecessor. There's some nice character moments and development, particularly of Egg.

This is where the series ends, though Martin has a fourth one in the works called "She-Wolves of Winterfell", which is being published in a book called "Dangerous Women" - a fantasy book about warrior women one presumes. There's also vague mentions of the stories one day being reprinted together in a single volume (currently they're a pain to get in three different books), which will presumably feature "exclusive" short stories. This is of course if Martin writes them since he is supposed to be writing Books 6 and 7 of a Song of Ice and Fire. Currently I expect all these to be released in 2020.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Noblesse Oblige

2011-07-09T23:14:00.014+01:00

This is an account of a game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I ran on 9/7/2011. The scenario won the Black Industries scenario competition and all artwork was included with the original scenario by Charles Morrison.

Axelbrand Riese awoke on the cold hard floor of a Talabheim gaol. His only company was the snoring dwarf who was face down in a puddle of urine until the jailer came to wake them. Axelbrand discovered he had been arrested for drunkenly singing lewd songs about Herr von Sachs, one of the city fathers, and the dwarf had taken exception to their attempts to silence the bard, injuring three guardsmen in his drunken brawl. The gaoler explained to them that with the city under threat of skaven attacks and with the Emperor making demands of the Elector Counts' men they were offering Axelbrand and his friend a pardon if they were to escort the Sigmarite priest Erasmus Heger and his ward, the lady Rosalin Faulkenheim to a meeting with two noble families that had been engaged in a 'private war' for years. Preferring not to rot the two agreed, and being introduced to Erasmus - a cold zealot - and receiving payment of 10 gold crowns in advance they assented.

Their equipment returned to them, Axelbrand and the dwarf, Thrumbor Grimigson joined the noble and priest outside the Temple of Sigmar and travelled north towards Hochland and the peace talks.

For the first night the companions stayed in a coaching inn - their only company the innkeeper, his barmaid, a drunken roadwarden and an imperial arbelester with whom Erasmus played cards. During the course of their meal the lecherous roadwarden made a pass at the barmaid, ripping her dress to reveal a monstrous green hand shaped growth on her left shoulder. The girl was a mutant.

Ignoring her pleas for mercy Erasmus insisted the girl be burned at the stake. Thrumbor readily assented, while Axelbrand felt some pangs of remorse but ultimately obeyed the priest's order to build a stake and gather wood. The arbelester, disgusted by the incident, gifted Axelbrand black powder to place round the girl's neck and kill her quickly. Axelbrand thanked the man and granted the girl a swift death. Rosalin fainted with the excitement, and after the burning discovered her room was downwind from the stake. Erasmus, in an uncharacteristic show of chivalry, swapped rooms with her.

The next day was uneventful and ended as the companions camped by the roadside. On the next morrow the company caught up with the carriage of the two noble houses, the Creutzfeldt and the Durrenbach. Erasmus left the group to join the Sigmarite initiates who dwelt within a third carriage, while Rosalin found herself talking with the Creutzfeldt captain, Arent Stretstorpe before joining the two commoners in conversation with some minstrels in the employ of the Durrenbach at the rear of the train.

The group learned that Jakob Creutzfeldt had been ordered by Elector Count Ludenhof to marry Darathee Durrenbac, herself a novitiate in the Church of Shallya, the Goddess of Mercy and Healing.

As the group talked Axelbrand noted a mutant approaching the train, a strange creature with eyes on each of his fingers. The creature rasped, begging for gold and received a thrown dagger from Axelbrand in the chest. A thick scaly carapace caused the otherwise expertly thrown dagger to clatter, and the mutant pocketed the dagger. Alexbrand was hit by the certainty there were more in the forest beyond the road Rosalin dropped gold at Axelbrand's feet. The many-eyed mutant cautiously approached and grasped for the gold, offering to return the thrown dagger in return for coin. While the creature returned the dagger to Axelbrand Rosalin grabbed a sword and swung at the mutant's head, severely injuring but not killing it. The creature's neck was scaled, and the scales acted as a gorget as they turned Axelbrand's blade.

More mutants crashed from the bushes to protect their injured comrade, startling the company, and they were joined by guards and mercenaries from both houses. However the many-eyed mutant was able to grab the gold and get to safety while the others backed into the scrub. For her trouble Rosalin was narrowly missed by a crossbow quarrel that embedded itself in the Durrenbac caravan. Axelbrand threw a knife at the mutants, but missed as the forest scrub provided them cover as they scurried to safety.

As the company took stock and Rosalin tried to persuade the guards to hunt down the mutants and retrieve her coin the cry from the Sigmarite caravan came that during the confusion Erasmus had been murdered. The company found three acolytes bearing the dead priest's large corpse out of the caravan. Axelbrand noted a faint piercing mark on Erasmus's corpse and concluded murder. This observation prompted recriminations from both families, and the party were introduced to Brigit Durrenbac and Jakob Creutzfeldt, the respective heads of the two families. Eventually it was decided by Reymer, the senior most acolyte of Sigmar, that Lady Falkenheim and Axelbrand would be best suited to investigate on his behalf, while Thrumbor would augment the guards. Each noble person would be guarded by one soldier from both houses companies.

Returning to the minstrels at the back of the train the two investigators learned Jakob Creutzfeldt was ordered to force Darathee Durrenbach as part of the peace accord by the elector count. They said Darathee Durrenbach was a Priestess of Shallya who had taken the habit since the death of her young husband Helge. Jakob Creutzfeldt's father (also named Jakob) was ill with the pox and had not been in his right mind for several years. He was of course on the Creutzfeldt family estates.

Old man Durrenbach was said to have suspected his son Ruprecht wished him dead in order to gain control of the family and so had chosen Brigita to succeed
him. Ruprecht Durrenbach obviously still resented his sister because she was
chosen to lead their family instead of him. There were however rumours that Brigita was nymphomaniac, and her perversions marked her a follower of Slaanesh, the Chaos God of Pleasure, Passion, and Decadence.

They also mentioned the younger Creutzfeldt brother was in the company, along with his consort Grethe Rozenow, said to be a fortune teller.

The pair first went to Brigita, a stunningly beautiful woman clad in fine clothing sporting a small tiara, mark of female Durrenbach leaders. She had been in the coach with her brother, Ruprecht when the attack took place. She knew little, but suspected Friedrich as the pair had embarked on an affair six month previous, ending with her catching him in bed with her chamber maids. His hatred of her family knew no bounds and he spread foul rumours as to her virtue.

Next they spoke to Ruprecht outside the coaches, who also knew little but kept watching the baggage within the family coach. He did however pay lip service to the rumours regarding Brigita's inclinations, stating it was his duty as brother to protect her as best he could despite herself.

Then they spoke to the priestess, Darathee. She claimed to have seen a child in the woods during the beastman attack and had been slowly following him alone. Axelbrand noted she smiled when they mentioned the rumour of the forced marriage to Jakob, suggesting the marriage - and the end to her time in the clergy as an initiate of Shallya - pleased her.

The pair overhead Brigita questioning Jakob about mutant movements on his lands. Jakob listened to her concerns impassively but dismissed them, saying he had doubled the groundsmen on his lands to deal with the problem.

Speaking with Jakob the pair learned he and his brother had been within the family coach. Jakob also mentioned he had already proposed to Darathee and was to announce their engagement, stating they saw eye-to-eye on many matters.

His brother Friedrich was unwilling to be interviewed by Axelbrand and Falkenheim until they played him at cards. Friedrich, despite claiming this was a new hobby, took several silvers from the lady but graciously furnished the investigators with wine. He laughed at notions that his consort Grethe was a fortune teller, saying she simply practiced card tricks for his amusement. He also went over his relationship with Brigit, stating he had ended it because he grew bored of her, and intimating he had seen certain sigils and suchlike in her boudoir that lent credence to the rumours she may be a worshipper of Slaanesh.

The pair also spoke to the two captains of the guards - noting the Durrenbac had hired a mercenary captain, Everd Setzingen as their own house guard were garrisoned on their lands due to fear of the increased number of mutants on their lands. They learned Captain Arent had served in the Imperial Guard with Everd but his career had ended abruptly. An incident had occurred while their compsany was in Talabheim where Everd witnessed him attacking a priest of Sigmar, a priest of Sigmar named Erasamus Heger!

Realising there were many grudges between both houses the pair returned to the Durrenbac coach. They spoke to Brigita about Darathee and Rosalind persuaded her ot let them search Ruprecht's belongings. There they found a chest containing 500 gold crowns. During the excitement Axelbrand noted a piece of parchment in the folds of Brigita's dress. He clumsily removed the note and the outraged noble woman forced him and Rosalin from the coach. The note read:-

Brigita,

Ever since you were accepted into our Sinful Order, we have eagerly awaited your passage from Ignorance to Chaos by way of the Ritual of Initiation. That Time has now arrived. Please meet with your Superior at the Appointed Place when Morrsleib next waxes full.

Praise be to Slaanesh!

Having found something of note the pair hastily alerted Captain Arent and went to Reymer. Before long Brigita was accused of being a Chaos worshipper before the camp by the youthful initiate and was restrained within her coach, tied by silken ropes.

Returning to the coach, the two investigators searched her belongings and Ruprecht's clothing. In a secret compartment they found several drafts of the letter they had accused Brigita with. Realising they had been duped they showed her this evidence and attempted an apology. The proud noblewoman did not accept, particularly when they insisted she remain bound to keep Ruprecht thinking his plan had worked. They also queried her about Helge's death by poisoning and Brigita confessed, her emotions near breaking point, that Darathee had poisoned her husband and that Brigita had paid the imperial officials to find her innocent.

With this information the pair of investigators left the coach and eliminated Brigita from their list of suspects - but it seemed no-one was what they seemed, and that nobleman and commoner alike had secrets within this company.

To Be Continued...

Masque of the Red Death Thoughts

2011-05-02T20:49:00.005+01:00

I've been flicking through the 3.5 version of Ravenloft: The Masque of Red Death. This setting detailed Gothic Earth, a world much like the 1890s of our world with added weirdness due to an entity known as the Red Death. Players tended to play 1890s characters such as aristocrats, Holmesian detectives or the like. You could be excused for thinking it is a Cthulhu clone, but there is more emphasis on D&D supernatural elements rather than the alien science-fiction explanation of H.P. Lovecraft's universe.

Sadly the mechanics the original Red Death used belonged to AD&D 2nd Edition - a rather odd system that did not have any skills system and was relatively cumbersome. A D20 conversion was cobbled together for the RPGA Living Death campaign - which I would think on the surface would be a better system as it actually has a skills system.

Shockingly the RPGA conversion was carried over into the professional Masque books. The class system therefore a bit rubbish. While some classes are almost 1:1 retreads of their D&D 3.5 counterparts (for example a Soldier is pretty much a D&D fighter, a criminal is a D&D rogue in the old thievery sense). On the other hand some classes are a bit crap - for example a parson (i.e. priest of a real world faith). While you would expect the parson to be equivalent to a cleric, the parson gets no spells, and at 8th level can turn undead as a mystic of 4 levels lower.
Obviously it would be a bit odd if every rabbi/priest/whatever goes around casting cure light wounds. Which makes one wonder why you don't play a mystic, but whatever...

Also don't get me started on the dandy (d4 hit points, some skills, same starting money as a tradesman, physician or performer). This poor guy gets some vague influence power and nothing after level 2 except some bonuses to a new skill called Appraise).

I've a vague idea to run Masque of Red Death mixed with an Innsmouth/Broughty Ferry setting (seriously some of the inhabitants you see during working hours in the real Arbroath look like Deep Ones). But I'd rewrite a lot of the classes to be worth taking.

Random Musings on Horror in Broughty Ferry

2011-05-02T00:15:00.006+01:00

As a child I used to hate trips to Broughty Ferry as I viewed it as a dull, empty place. As an adult I think with its increasingly ramshackle shore front that Broughty Ferry makes an excellent Scottish version of H.P. Lovecraft's Innsmouth. I've been dabbling with a short story set in Broughty Ferry in the vein of Ashton Smith/Lovecraft. I might post what I've done here oneday. Anyroads, a little search for historical information on the Ferry revealed in the mid 1800s it was linked to the city by a bus service...

"At this point regular communication with Dundee was maintained by coach service which ran between the Dundee P.O. and the Eagle Inn in Broughty Ferry which ran three times a day."

Sounds like the Joe Sargent Innsmouth bus to me.

Maps

Thoughts on Twitrelief and Celebrities

2011-03-10T19:48:00.009Z

Today Twitrelief launched - a series of ebay auctions whereby you can 'win' a celebrity as a twitter follower for 90 days, and they are obliged to tweet to you once. Naturally these auctions are going to be bid on regularly and will probably make a lot of money for charity, which is laudible. Reading the news on Google you'd think we were all shiny happy people.

However a lot of the Twitter community have reacted negatively, yours included, stating that this is a grandstanding event, where it's celebs vs plebs and this has prompted some equally vitriotic responses from the celebrities and their supporters with a level of righteous indignation and melodrama on the level of Commodus's "Am I not merciful?" speech in Gladiator.

Ah, you say, surely having a celebrity who has better things to do than read your 140 character length drivel as he/she commands a fee that can be measured in pounds per minute, drag their mouse pointer over the follow button next to your name has some monetary value (though why they have to 'waste' such time unfollowing you after 90 days is beyond me -- are non-celebrity tweets really that offensive?).

Do we live in different worlds? Depends on your metric - but some seem to measure it by success. As an academic, and a reasonably well paid one I could argue that my time is worth more than yours or better spent talking to my 'fellow intellectuals', and you could make the same point in reverse I'm sure. I personally wish we lived in a world where fireman, medical doctors and nurses were the highly celebrities as their jobs have real merit. Imagine a world where David Beckham (or rather his equivalent, if I'm stretching credulity) was a world class surgeon who was Britain's best surgeon, rather than someone who kicks a ball pretty well.

I've spent time in a queue at the post office or whatever calculating the monetary worth of the time I've wasted. Sometimes that seems relatively ass-holish thoughts - I'm no better than thee or Fred Bloggs at the end of the day, and thankfully I have people around me who'd keep me grounded if I started getting delusions of grandhood.

Celebs on the other hand don't get this kind of reality check. Some of them end up like Lohan or Sheen. Others do douchebaggery - for instance charging for access to their exclusive blog when or running their own fan-club for profit. WilliamShatner.com is hawking Star Trek props, when quite frankly Shatner could probably buy every Star Trek fan in the world a plastic phaser by this point. It goes to their heads.

As for some of these celebs - c'mon! Would they get involved if there was no exposure? No good PR? Take John Prescott - his achievements are (IMHO - I'm an equal opportunity politican hater now) being part of a government that has bankrupted the country, and himself is a champagne-socialist hypocrit who has managed a transformation that is practically taken out of the final pages of Animal Farm when he joined the House of Lords. Given he has fed his Dickensian frame on the tax payer, why is having him join twitter worth any money? Yes it is for charity, but if 1 person pays £310.00 to go out with him for pies (subsidised by the taxpayer in the Parliament bar) is it better than a well-thought out scheme that gets 31 people to donate £10. (Incidentally these charity auctions where things go for masses of cash seem less effective than something where lots of people donate small amounts of cash).

Interestingly the cult of the celebrity has even gotten to 'internet celebrities'. There are vitriotic blogs about the gang at http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/ about how they indulge in e-begging and ego trips. For example one guy charges for autographed pictures for him, not for charity but for his own pocket and all these guys do is give amusing pub-level commentary on films and games.

Tangentially a twitter-ego rating can be obtained by dividing the number of followers of a person by the number of people they're following. I come across a mildly humble. Stephen Fry's ego in this metric is massive.

As I've said these auctions will go for lots of money. There will be a lot more losers than winners though - surely a system where 320 people donate £1 and get a thank you is better than one person donating £310 and winning a brief chat with a celeb? I've often looked at ridiculously expensive charity auctions for things like movie memorobilia or walkon roles in movies and shaken my head. Who has thousands of pounds to spend on such things? Certainly no-one I've met. Why not do a raffle? £1 an entry. Winner gets celeb X to follow them. £1 is pushing for something that really has no value, and prevents (the admittedly extreme case of) some eejit getting themselves into debt by charging £3000 to get Celeb Y to follow them to a credit card they shouldn't be allowed.

So Twitrelief is endemic of a larger ego-problem. Just because it's for charity doesn't make it automatically brill, and the reactions from some of the celebs makes it even worse. And it makes money for charity. Which is brill. But so could robbing banks, shooting the teller at gunpoint and donating the proceeds to charity. Nothing wrong with critiquing that methodology.

It's all relative. (As an aside Twitrelief is more like kicking the low-income in the gut for charity, not shooting an autoteller).

A Rare Politics Post

2011-02-18T19:09:00.006Z

No2AV Video

* Comments disabled
* Looks very professional
* Comes from a very professional shiny site.
* Nice shiny people, doing jobs like "Retail", "Finance", "Technology" and giving us some lovely soundbytes that are a little vague.
* Doesn't explain where this £250 million bill is coming from (surely all you do with AV is print a slightly different ballot system).

Yes2AV Video

* Comments enabled
* Looks alright, with sound issues.
* Comes from a blog.
* Looks like it was shot live.

Hmmm... I know which one seems more convincing to me.

Demon Quest: Not So Good

2011-01-14T18:24:00.009Z

Over the Christmas Break I listened to the remaining audios in the Demon's Quest series, a fourth doctor audio series the BBC brought out. I'd listened to part 1, but had tried to listen to part 2 several times and either fell asleep, lost concentration or just didn't care.

Sadly the latest five offerings slowly began to wear me down and it took a long drive back to Scotland to get me to listen to them. First a little background...

Two years ago Tom Baker surprised everyone by getting out the right side of bed and deciding he wanted to play the Doctor before. This was after years of refusing Big Finish's offers to lure him back, including one alleged incident where he may have made disparaging remarks about the scripts belonging in the bin. Incidentally the scripts he is supposed to have been offered were reworked for other doctors and were in my opinion universally good. They are the Holy Terror (now a 6th Doctor audio), the Stones of Venice (which became an 8th Doctor audio - one I'm relatively cool on to be honest) and the Spectre of Lanyon Moor (a 6th Doctor and Brigadier adventure).

Unlike the other Doctors, the audios featuring Tom Baker were to be made by the BBC, not by Big Finish. Given Big Finish have to pay the BBC for the license to make classic Doctor Who audios I'd be a bit miffed if I were them. (I also live in fear the BBC will decide Doctor Who is so successful they will overprice the license or refuse them the license).

One of the reasons Tom said he wanted to do audios as the Doctor was he wanted to work with Nicholas Courtney - the Brigadier. Sadly before recording Nick had a stroke and was unable to do the audios. The audios were rewritten to feature Captain Yates - a companion who betrayed the 3rd Doctor and thus was last featured in Pertwee's swansong. This was less than ideal as he'd never met the 4th Doctor, though it was said early in the first Hornet's Nest he'd met the 4th Doctor at one of the Brig's UNIT Christmas parties.

The Hornet's Nest featured Yates meeting a pre-Romana Doctor in a cottage in 2010 Surrey he owns - called Nest Cottage. He also runs into the mysterious housekeeper, Mrs. Wibbsey. The baton of narration passes to the Doctor narrates four stories to Yates relating to his current predicament relating to a race of interstellar hornets, with the odd additional cast members interacting with Tom. In the fifth CD the Doctor, Wibbsey and Yates go off and finally deal with the Hornets.

It worked on some levels, but failed on others. I thought the acting was at time wooden (occasionally from Yates), and the idea of the Doctor telling us what he's thinking does away with the whole Who part of Doctor Who.

Tom Baker sounds in both series of audios like he is playing an old man. He portrays sherry and brandy swilling 4th Doctor sat by the fireside in a cottage, walking the dog and complaining about his old bones. Personally I always saw Tom Baker's doctor as an energetic (mostly) tea-totaller.

Anyroads here is a review of the latest series of audios.

Here Be Spoilers!
Turn back if ye be not wishing to be spoiled

The Relics of Time: The Doctor loses 4 bits of his TARDIS thanks to Mrs. Wibbsey and traces one to Roman Britain via some artifacts a stranger swapped Wibbsey for the TARDIS parts. He encounters a figure from history who has the missing TARDIS piece and narrowly avoids being taken off in his dematerialisation chamber. This is sadly starts a theme of a character being the titular demon in disguise, the Doctor narrowly avoiding being taken in his dematerialisation chamber and a TARDIS piece being found at the end of the first 4 audios.

3/5

The Demon of Paris: This is where my attention really nodded off. This is a 19th century mystery featuring the Doctor and Wibbsey around the Moulin Rouge. They meet the artist Toulouse-Lautrec, an absinthe-swilling artist who may be committing atrocious murders under the influence of absinthe and who painted the famous bohemian art piece that the 4th Doctor's look is said to be derived from. Given the remaining cast consists of his cemetery trudging concierge, La Charlotte - a slattern both of whom seem to appear and disappear whenever the plot requires it I worked out they were the baddies and were trying to get the Doctor into a dispersion chamber. It failed to grab me or be as charming as say City of Death.

1/5 (Jeez!)

The Shard of Ice: Probably the best part of the series this features the Doctor and Yates (who they've recruited as he decided to come to Nest Cottage for no apparent reason and features in the 3rd artifact). They are in the mountains of Germany with Albert Tiermann, a literally cold-hearted story teller who has sold his heart to a demon in order to gain the inspiration to write stories. The majority of the story is Albie trying to steal the Doctor's book of his future-stories that lured them to the area.

This turns out to be a red-herring, as it's part of the Demon's plan to lure the Doctor into his lair and dematerialisation chamber. He escapes, finding another bit of the TARDIS and releasing Tiermann from the demon's influence.

4/5

Starfall: Wibbsey, Doc and Yates turn up in New York, lured by a comic cover featuring them and a girl getting changed into a superheroine by a meteor. This happens, with the girl becoming Miss Starfall and flying around New York, while the Doc and Yates get arrested for murders the demon is committing when they find some bodies. Wibbsey hangs around with Starfall's employer, an actress called Mimsy.

The whole superheroine plotline turns out to be a rather daft red-herring, as it's part of the Demon's plan (who is Mimsy) to lure the Doctor into its rooms and the dematerialisation chamber. There's also a cult of people dressed like 4th Doctor doing a ritual that can somehow weaken the Doctor, like Kryptonite. This again doesn't really lead anywhere. We also learn the Demon is from a place called Sepulchre and that this is probably where the Demon keeps trying to take the Doctor. It does capture Wibbsey though.

The story is narrated by Ms. Starfall's Stan Lee-esque boyfriend, who has to preface a lot of his narration with "I did not see this part, but the Doctor then..."

1/5 (3/5 until the whole creation of the superheroine was revealed to be the Demon's plan to lure the Doctor into its clutches, considering she uses her powers to save him).

Sepulchre: The Doc and Yates go to rescue Wibbsey on Sepulchre. This kind of makes the whole collecting TARDIS bits a little redundant since this was where the Demon wanted to take the Doctor for the last 4 CDs.

Unable to escape as the TARDIS disappears (d'oh) the Doctor is captured and hooked up to a machine to make a star atlas. The Demon turns up to be working for... a single surviving hornet from the previous CD series. Also GASP! Wibbsey was possessed by the hornet which is why she gave away parts of the TARDIS. The Doctor outwits the hornet, the Demon escapes and everyone else escaped back to Nest Cottage, for another Christmas. But then Wibbsey is captured, meaning there'll be a 3rd series of these...

3/5

Overall Arc: 2/5 (sorry - it makes no sense).

As a whole the arc between the 5 CDs is like a dreadful RTD arc. Large portions of the individual stories are red-herrings (namely the appearance of Emperor Claudius in CD 1, the paintings of Latrec, the fairy-tales and demon's persona Snow Queen in CD 3 and the superheroine in CD 4).

The whole story arc could have been 1 CD long - in that Hornet-possessed Wibbsey could have hit the Doctor on the head in his cottage or put a reefer in his tea/scotch thus knocking him out, called the demon, taken him to Sepulchre and he would've had to escape. Or it could've made an army of superheroines that were actually loyal to itself. Or any one of a number of things.

Yates's involvement was pointless - seemingly included just because he was in the previous series of stories. I wish they'd brought the Brig back, but at 81 I suspect he should take it easy.

Big Finish are still rumoured to be making finally 4th Doctor audios starring Tom Baker. His reservations about the scripts seem ironic given the problems with these scripts. Unlike Hornet's Nest and Demon's Quest these will most likely be full cast audio without linking narration. I suspect they will replace the seasons of Eighth Doctor adventures that are sadly coming to an end, though we'll likely not see them until 2012. Big Finish have a habit of announcing products a year before they come out to court subscriptions to fund productions. Given we've heard nothing official I suspect there'll be a wait.

I don't want you to think I'm down on narration in audios. One of my favourite 8th Doctor audios - Season of Fear - features Paul McGann giving linking narration in the vein of his monologues in the TV Movie. Given this was a 4 part story set across over 4 time zones (ancient Rome, the time of Edward the Confessor, the 19th century and 1930s Singapore) one can forgive them for cutting the story down to ~100 mins with narration, most of which gets the Doctor back to the TARDIS and on with the quest.

If they do a third series of BBC audios (which apparently will not affect Big Finish's ability to produce their own 4th Doctor audios) I, in my armchair quarterback capacity, would suggest they avoid hornets and remove the "talking book" parts of the scripts. I love the Wibbsey character, but ditch Yates. They should also ditch the arcs and try some one-offs, perhaps also throwing in some traditional Doctor Who elements. I'm loathe to suggest Daleks or Cybermen but something like that might revitalize the series. Also - rather than having 1 script writer, Paul Magrs (who has written some good stuff in the past, but seems a bit stretched to write 5 1 CD adventures) perhaps they might want to try some other writers.

Sadly this is my least favourite Dr. Who audio series in a while. They were only £6 a CD I suppose, so I got what I paid for.

Squatting on the Window Ledge

2010-11-01T15:11:00.003Z

Managed to find a bust of Patrick Troughton as the 2nd Doctor to match the 8th Doctor one I have on my window ledge. It's not bad as a match - though some have intimated the face looks a bit like Steven Moffat squatting for... unsavoury reasoms.

You decide...

Yup, it's not official...

2010-10-28T00:55:00.003+01:00

But it was interesting while it lasted... but as I predicted it is not official. Still the rumour mill went into overdrive about the 8th doctor - some folk thought it meant he was coming back to the TV series, others assumed it was for the audio cd sleeves and others like me realised there was no hope in hell. Still it got folk talking...

It doesn't work for me still without the Eighth Doctor's hair...

and a scarf or cravat

He's Back and It's About Clothes.

2010-10-23T18:47:00.005+01:00

The Eighth Doctor appears to have been given a new costume at a New Zealand convention. It consists of a blue buttoned coat, a man-bag and a very nice steampunk sonic screwdriver. I have to admit I wasn't too keen on the jacket - perhaps if it was velvet instead of leather. It does seem to have the "is it blue? is it black?" quality his old coat had and perhaps under professional lighting it might look better.

As it is a work in progress it looks okay - the sort of thing that Benedict Cumberbatch would wear on Sherlock. Put a waistcoat and a wing collared shirt on him and he still dresses like the Eighth Doctor - my only concern is the hair, or lack thereof. And don't get rid of the cravat - unless you replace it with a short scarf or some such!

Without a TV appearance making a new costume seems a little pointless - the Eighth Doctor had a distinctive costume that has been shown throughout the new series.
I doubt this is official - the video itself says it is the official unofficial unveiling of the new costume. Most likely it is the fans having fun in New Zealand. I doubt it will lead to a TV appearance.

Incidentally the Radio Times did something like this for Doctors 5-7 in 2003, as usual #8 was forgotten. This is him catching up I guess.

Star Trek Sequel Amusement

2010-10-20T15:20:00.001+01:00

I just laughed when reading this trivia on IMDB concering the next Star Trek movie:-

Sceenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman explained that the dilemma for the sequel was whether to pit the crew against another villain, or to have an "exploration sci-fi plot where the unknown and nature itself is somehow an adversary," like in "Star Trek" (1966)

Nah... you don't want to do anything daft like make it like Star Trek mate!

Elite Space Ship to Crash in Dundee in 2014.

2010-09-30T16:03:00.006+01:00

Dundee's waterfront is being rejuvinised again. This time it's getting another museum and every award-winning architect is pitching for the lucrative contract. Here's what we got last time - a wooden eyesore:-

Now there are numerous planned buildings, which look like we're trying to build the Louvre in Dundee. However my personal favourite is one that looks like a crashed Gecko ship from the 80s game Elite... complete with Close Encounters of the Third Kind glowy entryway.

If they're going to waste the taxpayers cash on a mini-Scottish parliament egotrip I vote for this absurd entry.

Paladins

2010-09-25T01:40:00.003+01:00

Made a couple of paladin models for the heck of it. If anyone can guess the actors the likenesses are based off you win a no-prize.

Situation Vacant (Spoilers)

2010-07-25T17:50:00.004+01:00

Episode 4.1 was out at Christmas. It involved the Eighth Doctor and Lucie parting ways sadly after the events of The Zygon Who Fell To Earth came to the fore. In many ways it was the bookend to Season 3 as that ended with the Headhunter dying, effectively ending Lucie's other arc.

Despite a bonus story featuring Susan and her son Alex, the Eighth Doctor was now companionless, which leads into Situation Vacant, or Doctor Who Meets The Apprentice (from the people who brought you Doctor Who Meets Top Gear and Doctor Who Meets The Office).

The genius is that the Doctor has been put in a situation where he has to choose a companion from four candidates who include:-

Hugh Bainbridge - an amiable public school type who, though perhaps not the brightest tool in the box, is happy to rush in where Time Lords fear to tread. James Bachman from That Mitchell and Webb Look and Bleak Expectations was cast.

Juliet Walsh - a tough cookie. A driven and highly successful career woman, there is nothing she won't do to close the deal. Juliet Walsh's is played by Niky Wardley who has appeared as Lauren's sidekick in The Catherine Tate Show; All the Small Things; Benidorm and Shameless.

Asha Qureshi - a no-nonsense, capable young woman with a tendency towards precociousness and a surprising ability to cope with the unexpected. Shelley Conn is Asha whose previous projects include the BBC's Party Animals.

Theo Lawson - Theo is King of the Geeks; an introverted and computer savvy teenager who knows more about gigabytes than he does about girls. Joe Thomas, who is Simon from The Inbetweeners plays him.

It's worth noting that each of the candidates is played by a 'celebrity' who you might have heard of. Just as Sheridan Smith (Lucie) had the cache of having been in Two Pints of Lager and other shows (including a stint with Paul McGann on Jonathan Creek) each of these potential companions has been in something you're likely to have heard from.

Spoilers...

Stop Reading

Lest Ye Be Spoiled

Hugh and Theo were sufficiently goofy that it was clear to me that they would never make it to companion status. At the end of the first part the Doctor dismisses Juliet for, quite fairly, a major cockup involving a bottle of orange juice. This of course made it clear she would redeem herself later.

However the episode keeps you guessing - at the end of the story the Doctor appears to offer Hugh a place in the TARDIS. Given James Bachman has a pretty cool voice (you'll recognise it if you listen in) this was a punch-the-air moment - until Juliet appears at the 11th hour.

It's hard to be tough on this story as it is quite cleverly written, explaining why the Doctor is in this situation. He's not actually the one who has organised the audition, but rather he's investigating the message that was sent to the candidates. He also learns that these 4 candidates were rejected for being evil or an actress. The thread of who was auditioning companions is left dangling for resolution elsewhere this season.

I'm not over the moon with the choice of companion. I was always going to discount both the lads as they were portrayed very bungly. Later we learn Theo and Hugh are both sadly evil (Theo is a megalomaniac who tries to take over every computer on Earth and Hugh is a vampire) and dispatched accordingly, Asha on the other hand is the wrong side of slightly nasty and Juliet turns out to be called Tamzin and is a slightly past her prime actress thinking she's appearing on a reality TV show.

Thinking about the companion it was pretty obvious. Sadly the Doctor never travels solely with a male companion these days. Poor Arthur Darville seems an afterthought in the 11th Doctor era, and I wonder if he'll last long during Matt Smith's 2nd season. Nicky Ward's status as Catherine Tate's sidekick makes her Doctor Who cache all the more obvious.

Part of me suspects we'll still see Lucie return this season. The Eighth Doctor adventures mirror the current TV series - which could include kitchen-sink finale. The Daleks will be back. Susan will be back. Presumably we'll find who the time traveller who was auditioning companions is.

There are 9 more episodes this season - which is the last Eighth Doctor Adventures season. Don't ask me why - the 8th Doctor will continue as his adventures are rolled into the regular releases again. Tom Baker is reportedly joining Big Finish, and perhaps they want to make monthly releases with him. It is also possible Big Finish's partnership with BBC7 is not paying off as much as they'd like - only half of Season 3 was aired with them to date.

However this year's special is going to be the Four Doctors - starring Doctors 5,6,7 and 8. Lots of McGann this year before the famine next year.

You Spoony Bard!

2010-07-11T19:13:00.000+01:00

I installed Final Fantasy on my iPhone for £5.99. I have to admit that other than getting halfway through FFVII I have let the FF series pass me by.

There is a reason for my adversion - I hate the random encounter aspect that makes up the bulk of the game. The separation between the combat engine and the exploration of the world lower the immersion I feel. Combat becomes a chore that interrupts the flow of the plot It's for similar reasons I never bother with Ultima III, IV and V but in Final Fantasy the baddies are invisible and arbitrarily jump out.

Anyroads after grinning and bearing masses of invisible random encounters in FF1 the game became interesting. There are often fewer random encounters in the dungeons and though the plot is wafer thin it does pass time while you are waiting or having lunch in the park.

Intrigued I have obtained FF2 and FF4. 4 is meant to be the zenith of the early series. Time factors mean I am unlikely to get to 7 and The Spoony One has pit me off playing FF8. 4 looks good although at this stage 2 of my 3 party members are weeds. And yes one of them is a Spoony bard.

My New Pride and Joy

2010-07-09T12:24:00.002+01:00

Bought a Limited Edition 8th Doctor figurine which looks cool. Not convinced by the hair, but there you go...

Now the Power Is In My Hands

2010-07-08T20:13:00.000+01:00

Finally I have blogging on my phone.

Mobile Blogging from here.

More Screenies

2010-06-22T23:27:00.003+01:00

Starting to get there with this game lark...

Dr Stu on the New Dr Who

2010-06-09T01:06:00.005+01:00

Here's my thoughts on the new series of Doctor Who. I'm really liking it - which is odd as a lot of folk are giving it a bad rep. It's easily the most solidly written season for me ever.

Pros: Matt Smith is nailing the Doctor. He is much more of a relatable character than Tennant's Fonzy-Cool Doctor. This is a Doctor who cocks up and who realises he does this. There are also consequences to his actions (unlike Waters of Mars which seems to have no repercussions that even remotely led to Tennant's regeneration).

The scripts are actually intelligent. It's worth rewatching episodes by the main scriptwriter. The scripts actually feel more like a 'proper' sci-fi show rather than a London-based melodrama with aliens in it.

Every 2nd character doesn't telegraph their sexuality loudly though we do still have a lot of "unrequited" love situations in everyday places (the older guy and gal at the drill, the couple in next week's episode). And instead of every other character being obviously gay they're obviously Scottish instead. :)

Cons:

The budget - this has been clearly slashed so the series has to make do with some wonky CGI (Prisoner Zero and the Eyeball Ships looked like something I could've rendered for them) and invisible or "edge of the camera") monsters. While there's nothing wrong with being creative it makes me sad when you think how much money RTD managed to waste on farting aliens, the obligitory horde of Daleks or Toclafane zooming into Earth and back through a plot device at the end of every season and the doubtless expensive pointless cameos or appearances by Barrowman (shakes fist), Piper, Freema, Tate and so on who don't work for free.

Amy - I'm not so down on her being blazé about Time Travel and I suspect the actress's manner makes her difficult to relate to. Thankfully this is easier to explain than say, Rose Tyler, as Amy is bat-crazy thanks to meeting the 11th Doc in her childhood.

---

Here's some notes on every episode so far:-

The Eleventh Hour - a very good post-regeneration story with typical Moffaty timewimey the only shame is we miss young Amelia 4/5

Beast Below - while this is not particularly well thought out, surprising for Moffat, this is an interesting satire of the British voting system. 3/5.

Victory of the Daleks - even Iain McNeice cannot save this one from being a bit crap. Daleks again. Thankfully they won't be the last survivors of their race... yadayada... anymore. 2/5

Time of the Angels, Flesh & Stone - Genuinely creepy this is Moffat at his best and may be the best 2 parter in a long time. 5/5 - despite the perhaps more creepy ending to part 2.

Vampires of Venice - a fun romp that amuses and looks good. I do hope we get a proper Vampire episode at some point. 3/5

Amy's Choice - another good episode that reminds us this is actually meant to be a sci-fi show. Very clever - almost feels like a clever episode of Star Trek or some such. Hope the Dreamlord comes back. 5/5

The Silurian 2-parter - This is relatively ho-hum and by the numbers, though not so much as the Dalek and Sontaran mid-season 2 parters of yesteryear. The ending to part 2 is a good idea that is not particularly well or dramatically executed. Given the author's track record I think he actually exceeded my expectations. 3/5

Vincent and the Doctor - Pretty good portrayal of a manic-depressive this episode is surprisingly tearjerking. 4/5

Some Promo Images

2010-04-27T01:15:00.002+01:00

HP Lovecraft's Insomnia

2010-04-12T17:04:00.003+01:00

I have to give a big shoutout to this very simple and yet elegant game based on a synopsis H.P. Lovecraft once wrote

“The man who would not sleep—dares not sleep—takes drugs to keep himself awake. Finally falls asleep—and something happens. Motto from Baudelaire p. 214.”

Very cool free game. Grab it here.

Newest Batch of Renders...

2010-04-12T01:05:00.004+01:00

... are not about to all be posted here. I have been really busy lately and I should make like this guy...

(Alright - here's one. Spoiler Alert!)

McGann's TARDIS Rocked

2010-03-24T17:43:00.002Z

And now it will hopefully continue to do so... With glowy post-production effect.

This Week's Renders

2010-03-22T00:51:00.002Z

And this weekend's shorts are...

Meanwhile Inside The Gothic TARDIS

2010-03-14T23:45:00.004Z

Relaxing weekend where I got round to playing with rendering this scene in Lightwave 9.

TARDIS interior by Brian Taylor from www.smartdesign-u-need.com

And now...

2010-03-13T02:53:00.000Z

My latest screenshot...

Computer Game Project Update

2010-03-05T00:58:00.005Z

And some more screenshots charting the evolution of this game...

I've created a GUI with appropriate icons (though I need to stop it obscuring the action text onscreen), as well as fully animated the 8th Doctor sans coat.

There's also my first NPC, Stohl the Sontaran, who will act as the companion in this adventure in lieu of any blond chavs or posh received pronounciation radio stars.

More Game Mucking Around...

2010-03-02T16:54:00.003Z

In case you were wondering if my Daz3D graphics are paying off...

Evolution of a 3D Model Part 2

2010-02-17T01:21:00.007Z

Yet more tinkering with the 8th Doctor model. It seemed it didn't look much like the character so with some advice and a morph file provided by CD2010 for reference I rejigged the face (and thankfully I would add, saved the resultant morphs).

Although I felt the morph I was given looked a little like it was more like Rocky Balboa I used it as a reference to modify my original model... (here's a morph video that shows how far CD2010's morph was from my original model)

Then I had a complete Daz3D crash (probably due to me trying to rearrange all my assets into a logical filing system) and had to work from the ground up again - which in the long run was good as I used a slightly different ensemble to create a more accurate costume...

which I then modified the material of to make it appear to reflect light and give off a more subtle green (or any colour I wished)...

Then I played around with lip-syncing, although rendering these movies was an overnight job.

Lately I've replaced the hair with... er... one that fits. It's a little too OTT on the curls for my liking but it seems to do the job - especially when you play around with the lighting on Daz3D to create some rather nice scenes.

Couple of More Models

2010-02-16T00:52:00.003Z

Here's a couple of more models I may use in my game... if I don't stop playing in Daz3D.

One is a potential companion for the Eighth Doctor who's costume is designed to compliment his...

... and the other is this guy. Hmmm...

(Actually I used a morph made by a nice chap called Charles or CD2010 for this one but getting the rightish clothes took a while.).

Babylon 5 Viewing

2010-02-15T17:06:00.004Z

Been watching B5 with the missus and we've made it a fair chunk of the way through the 2nd series. Sadly Naomi agrees with me that there is no subtely in the way in which Michael O'Hare is replaced with Bruce Boxleitner. A lot of folk diss O'Hare as being at times wooden, including certain co-stars but I felt he needed to be in the first few episodes of season 2 at least to transition from one CO to another.

It does seem for a few episodes that Sheridan is walking around being really nice to people for no apparent reason, and that no-one is resentful that poor Sinclair got transferred finally. For Naomi though the point where the obvious tipexing of Sinclair with Sheridan hit home was in episode 2 of season 2 when Captain Sheridan volunteers to give some of his life-energy to save Garibaldi. This doesn't really work from a dramatic point of view as Sheridan has never met Garibaldi, while it would make sense for Sinclair to do so.

Still one does wonder how the show would've been with Sinclair... probably not as good if this account is accurate. Though I think this was probably just the rough draft of Seasons 1-5.

Evolution of a 3D Model

2010-02-01T19:57:00.007Z

Recently I bemoaned my inability to produce some decent graphics for my games and twittered about finding a decent package to render walkcycles (making the walkcycle for TARDIS Trouble was tough using a pretty awful freeware walk cycle editor for AGS). Thankfully Korvar aka Big Mike of DURPS fame came to my aid - he does visual effects for the USS Intrepid fan films and like many of the other Star Trek fan films the special effects are state of the art - and recommended Daz3D.

The main drawback of Daz3D is that it comes with minimal content preinstalled - Victoria 4.2 - their female model - and a few (skimpy) outfits for her to wear. Daz makes most of its revenue off the model addons it produces and vends for 3rd parties. Thankfully the base models were free for the moment so I was able to install a male model (Michael 4) and with some browsing on their site I was able to find the content I needed for my model.

I decided to model the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann. Surprisngly there's a derth of Doctor Who models on Daz3D.com and other such places - I've seen a really good Chris Eccleston model, numerous Tennants and even a really good Matt Smith, so I decided to give the neglected 8th Doctor a whirl.

Here is where things went a little squiffy - oddly (IMHO though in Naomi's opinion this is unsurprising) there is a lack of male clothing packs for Daz3D compared to the dearth of female packs. You certainly don't get any male stuff with the default Daz3D install - though the Daz3D book I have later acquired gives you a lot of base stuff to work with.

Firstly I installed some packs allowing me the use of a frock coat, frilly shirts and waistcoats. I then fit these to the 3D model and after being told by Korvar how to prevent the "bleed" problem that persists when you try to dress a model in multiple layers of clothing.

My next problem was that despite the effectiveness of my ensemble my model looked like Ken from Barbie:-

(As an aside I do like the pose in the last image there - very Ascension-like).

However the good people at Daz3D were able to give me some hints (the face should be thinner, the chin longer etc.) Truth be told it would really be the hair that made or broke the model, as Doctor Who is a hairjob.

I then morphed the face - which basically involved turning dials until it thinned the face and made the chin more pronounced. I got carried away...

Then I managed to go from that baseline to something looking a bit more realistic...

And here is a comparison with images of the source face... which I think shows I did a fair job for someone who'd never used Daz3D before.

After that it was mostly touching up the model - changing the hair colour slightly, reworking the clothes. I decided I didn't really like the original waistcoat I'd given the model so I swapped it for a silvery "tuxedo" vest. I even found some ready made walk-cycle poses which has enabled me to generate a walkcycle...

and FYI don't ever have a character wearing a frock coat... talk about a nightmare to make a walkcycle...

Next I want to make a better cravat, create more animations for the character and trying to get rid of the jaggedy edge on the transparent renders.

More Adventure Game Mucking Around

2010-01-20T21:47:00.007Z

A while back I got bored and made Doctor Who: Tardis Trouble, which for all its stolen graphics and the fact I've not quite uploaded the finished product wasn't actually that bad for a first attempt.

Anyroads over the last year or so I kind of realised that my ambition as always exceeds my grasp. I'd visions of churning out a regular series of games using the AGS engine.

I am going to have a 2nd bash at it - Doctor Who: Tales From The Time War. A small adventure set with the 8th Doctor at the beginning of the Time War (not the entire bloody thing!)

Last time some folk emailed me asking, "Why don't you use David Tennant's doctor?"

Because... I prefer the McGann doctor over the 'hip and modern' Tennant and there's no 'official' story for his doctor (though I believe he's the one who fought in the Time War and whoever wrote Doctor Who: The Forgotten agrees). It'd be easier to use Tennant though - there's a lot of art available to half-inch on the net. :)

The programming side is easy, even cobbling together the occassional object graphic to represent a bag of jelly babies, sonic screwdriver or other object is a doddle. People on the other hand take ages - mainly because I don't have a decent program to animate a walk cycle, and because my characters look an awful like characters from Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis (the McGann is a paint job on the Indy sprite - I though I did a pretty good job hiding it, but there ya'go). I have toyed with learning Maya and pre-rendering 3D human characters in it to use in my adventure games, and possibly even pre-rendering 3D scenes by creating the same scene and rotating the camera to render "unique" scenes.

Are there any packages that make it really easy to customise and prerender a convincing 3D human (or humanoid) models?

In the meantime - here's one of my less 'convincing' creations, Rufus the Jailor (probably going to be replaced by a less interesting character):-

Mincing About

2010-01-05T15:44:00.005Z

In this wintry climate I've been bored rigid and have taken to playing a remake of Elite 3: Frontier First Encounters. As a testament to how little there is to do I've made it to the Elite ranking of Below Average and have bought a new ship, which in true Kerrigan tradition is the most silly looking thing on the market.

Ladies and Gentleman - in the tradition of such great ships as the Millenium Falcon I present a Cobra Mk 1, the Mincing Leopard...

Not all the other models look so... camp... in the remake.

Dr. Stu on Doctor Who End of Time 2

2010-01-01T22:13:00.002Z

This was definitely better than Part One. However it was most definitely not Doctor Who at its best (i.e. Human Nature/Blink levels) and sadly once more my expectations were much higher than the actual events of the episode.

Some folk had been predicting an epic finale appearance of the 8th Doctor (?) and the reintegration of the Time Lords to round off the Time War stories, leaving Stephen Moffat with the opportunity to make his own mark on the Doctor Who universe. Given it was an RTD finale I doubted this...

Every single finale has had some sort of 'reset' device - the first season had Uber-Rose conveniently kill every dalek and resurrect Captain Jack (though not anyone without a player character badge like Lynda with a 'y' or anyone else on that station). The second season had the Cybermen and Daleks on Earth sucked into a void. The third season had a paradox machine that reset the entire events of the episode. The fourth season had Donna push a few levers to destroy the entire Dalek armada. And now this fifth mini-season had the Doctor shoot a machine to send every single Time Lord back into the time locked Time War.

I personally didn't like the idea of making all the Time Lords evil - smacks too much of racism for me (like saying every Welsh person became evil) - and I wish we could've had more exploration of the Time Lords and their newfound evilness. Of course it might be possible in this episode for other Time Lords to have snuck through and remained on Earth, and I did like the fact that they alluded to two Time Lords disagreeing with the President - though I hope a few more were 'co-erced' in their voting by that handy glove device.

We do not know who the mysterious lady was (Susan? Romana? The Doctor's mother?) but then this is typical of RTD finales - the reasons for things are less important than the sheer showmanship. We never understood why Bad Wolf appeared everywhere at the end of Turn Left, exactly what Bad Wolf was or why Rose was able to appear on TVs throughout Season 4 - she never even mentions trying to contact the Doctor this way in the Season 4 finale. However I'm less bothered by not knowing who the lady in white is than these other things - I've come to expect it I guess.

True to form contradictions arise - Donna remembers her time with the Doctor and suddenly zaps every Master in the vicinity unconscious rather than exploding - which is what the Doctor said would happen to her. This is just like how Rose could never ever get back from the parallel universe... but did and then got taken straight back by the Doctor.

There was some good stuff however - Bernard Cribbins was excellent. The revelation of 'he will knock four times' was clever. The cactus guys were good.

The last 15 minutes of the show were absolute self-indulgent nonsequitur with lots of ex-cast members cameoing in a shameless nostalgiafest that makes me wonder why the production team criticise multi-doctor stories so much.

6/10

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who: End of Time Part 1 (long)

2009-12-26T23:57:00.001Z

So... Waters of Mars I didn't blog about but it was pretty darn good. Especially the end where they finally acknowledged that Tennant's doctor has always had tendencies to be an arrogant twat and needs a companion to keep him in check. To be honest I never felt Rose would be the one to do it - she was always eager to fan the flames of 10's ego. But its always nice to see Tennant's sometimes smug Doctor taken down a peg or two. This only really started happening in Season 3 with episodes like 42, Human Nature and the Master Trilogy taking the Doctor to the very edge.

I must admit I was somewhat wary of Simm's master returning... as you may know I didn't think too highly of the original John Simm episodes. Derek Jacobi on the other hand was the bomb - he nailed the part in the 5 seconds he played the Master. The Master is supposed to be like Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock. A true Moriarty Master hardly ever gets his hands dirty - he has minions for that. He is a sinister, distant and aloof figure - thinking of the grand scheme. He should appear austere, respectable and sophisticated on the outside and yet is completely evil. Instead we got a Master who listens to Scissor Sisters, is clearly barmy and yet became Prime Minister of Britain for no reason that seemed relevant to the plot later on...

Anyroads - I was sure it wouldn't be that bad? Simm can do nasty when he wants - perhaps the script would be better.

Mother of All Spoileryness Warning for End of Time Part One

The End of Time Part One

The episode starts off rather nicely with Wilf and a mysterious woman (who I think is meant to be a Time Lady) chatting about the Doctor in a chapel in (drum roll...) London, Earth, 2009/10. Then we see the Doctor turning up on the Ood Sphere listing all the unseen Big Finish adventures he's had. It's all a bit silly and I wished we'd followed him immediately after Water of Mars's great cliffhanger. He meets the head Ood and is given a ~~peak at the script~~ visions of Wilf, Dave Harewood, Lucy Saxon and the Master.

There's a rather pointless sequence where the Disciples of Saxon, a group who believe Harold Saxon (the Master) should live again ('cos he was such a wonderful chap who inspires loyalty) break Lucy Saxon out of jail to extract DNA or some maguffin off her to resurrect the Master. We learn who took the ring off the remains of the Master in Last of the Timelords and are completely underwhelmed as it is a random unnamed woman. Lucy however thought there was a possibility the Master might come back and made an anti-Master-Resurrection potion and has moles who have infiltrated the Disciples of Saxon. She uses it while I ponder the following nits/plotholes:-

1: If Lucy Saxon thought there was even the most remote possiblity the Master might come back WHY DIDN'T SHE TELL THE DOCTOR ABOUT IT?
2: Doctor 10 didn't notice that fecking massive ring in the cremated remains of his nemesis? What - is he attention deficit? Was there a mirror nearby when he was cremating the master...
3: Why did the Master bother to kill himself and go through this whole convoluted resurrection scheme?
- What if the Doctor had put his corpse in the TARDIS?
- What if the Doctor had cremated him in the TARDIS?
- What if the Doctor had taken his ring off him?
- What if the Doctor had taken his wife away from Earth?

The Master's escaped from the TARDIS and the Doctor before you know - ask the 7th Doctor if you don't believe me. This resurrection put me too much in mind of the ridiculously convoluted plot in the Torchwood episode They Keep Killing Suzie wherein Suzie relied on a resurrection glove that had never worked in the past to bring her back to life.

Most of my concerns are rendered moot as there is a massive explosion killing Lucy, the Disciples of Saxon, and any point to this scene*. We then cut to David Harewood, staple of all BBC drama at the moment (and wasted as he was in Robin Hood), talking about some alien technology they've got off Torchwood's** latest car boot sale and how they reckon the Master is alive and will prove useful. The narrator tells us they're idiots so we don't have to worry too much about their scheme, whatever it is, coming to fruition.

We then cut to scenes of the Master inexplicably wandering round some (fairly extensive) ruins near Lucy's prison in present day London. He seems to have developed superpowers, including lightning, flying and turning into a Martian from Mars Attacks! Which leads to niggle 4:-

4: Why did the anti-Master solution turn him into Superman?

He needs to keep replenishing his lifeforce apparently, as he kills some homeless people and the staff of a burger van that operates out of these London ruins (obviously the derelict area is a good place to sell sausage in a bun) whilst eating like Mr Creosote from The Meaning of Life. He pointlessly bumps into the Doctor and runs away from him, leaving him in the clutches of Wilf's randy OAP army - the Silver Cloak. We learn in 21st century BBC tradition these unlikely pensioners tick every Politically Correct box in the book, flirt with the Doctor and then bugger off. This leaves the Doc and Wilf to actually act - after all the "essential" plot development so far there's a nice scene where the Doctor tells Wilf he's dying (after all if some psychic bint on the Number 200 Bus told me I was dying I'd be buying a plot of land for my grave), and some talk about Donna marrying a guy who looks a little like her old fiancee. Inexplicibly the Doc ditches Wilf and runs back to the wastelands and into the Master again. The Master beats him with his lightning and flying powers, but not before the Doctor gets to listen into the Sound of Drums the Master's been harping about since ~~RTD rewrote his character~~ forever.

To be fair this is one occasion where Simm's*** Master actually stopped chewing the scene for a few minutes but before long he's captured by David Harewood's marines. Which leads to concern #5:-

5: Oh come on - you're saying that with all his new powers the Master was captured? You could argue he allowed himself to be captured, but given he knows nothing about Dave Harewood's alien device plot there's no reason for him to do so.
6: Why not capture the Doctor as well? Dave Harewood seems to know all about the Master but nothing about the Doctor which is... unlikely given how active Drs 9 & 10 have been and that we had a group of OAPs recognise him earlier. (Yes - I know Wilf told them about him, but still).

The Doc meets up with Wilf again and through some oblique clues provided by Donna rushes through some plot developments and porcupine aliens to fail to stop the Master accomplishing his latest "plan" - to make everyone on Earth (except the Doctor, Wilf and Donna) into clones/copies of himself****. Obviously he's never read Shatnerquake - that's not as much fun as it sounds.

It finally seems we're in danger of having a cliffhanger which involves John Simm clones "humorously" in variety of getups (including women's clothing - thanks RTD!) giving the thumbs up and generally mugging the camera. Thankfully for no discernible reason we cut to the narrator of this episode, Timothy Dalton, who it appears is a Time Lord and starts going on about how somehow the Master has inadvertently brought them back. He then starts yelling about the End of Time and For Gallifrey, leaving us going OMG The Time Lords are back! Yay! And wondering how all this mess is going to be neatly resolved in 75 minutes on New Year's Day.

Although I'm often critical of RTD's episodes I did love Rose, The End of the World, Midnight and even Love and Monsters (right up until we had the implied oral sex with a paving slab, something I'm amazed wasn't censored). However for every Rose there is at least two World War Threes, with farting aliens talking about dalliances with farmboys. Aside from the fact I don't think he sees the Master in the way I see him his season finales have had plotholes you can drive flying double-deckers through - preferring emotional content and a bullet point list of 'memorable scenes' over sensible well-thought out plots. To be honest RTD would make an amazing co-author but as the dominant force behind Doctor Who he has a tendancy to write plots that any script editor worth his salt should send back covered in red pen decrying the lack of logic in them.

So in some ways its good that RTD is leaving - I feel I'm going to like a Steven Moffat penned finale more than an RTD finale. He really should've let someone else write the major 'event' stories. Moffat on the other hand is capable of writing very, very clever scripts - akin to the Douglas Adams scripts Tom Baker excelled at. RTD's turkey is getting a little cold - I'm glad there's only another round of turkey sandwiches to gobble, but put me down for that last helping - it might still be good. Or it may fail to explain everything to my satisfaction*****.

5/10 - Could Try Harder (To Be a Coherent Story)

---
And now the ranty footnotes:-

* My comment, over the pandomonium of my folks chatting was, "I liked it better when the Master came back to life without any explanations."

In my view if you had to do this kind of scene it would've been more spooky if it was a brief flashback when the Doctor first re-encounters the Master.

Doctor: You are dead.
Master: So you thought, but I prepared for that contingency. My followers on Earth, the Disciples of Saxon, had orders to perform a ritual to resurrect me if I died.
(Cut to people in Satanical robes performing the resurrection stuff we see in the episode)
Master: Something went wrong though...
(Cut to explosion)

** Gaddamit - another reference to Torchwood and how useless they are with keeping alien technology under wraps! Seriously - the show went from 1963 without mentioning Torchwood (~~because RTD hadn't taken over invented them~~ they were so secretive) - now they're behind every alien tech disaster in Doctor Who! Even old ladies in downtown Cardiff know about them.

*** Simm is a good actor BTW - watch any episode of Life on Mars or his episode of Cracker. He is especially good at scary murderers, but in my opinion his acting chops are wasted playing the Joker-Master. Of course from interviews I've read he enjoys playing the part as a kind of panto villain.

**** One thing I'll hope we'll ditch in the Steven Moffat era is the routine plethora of 'world-shattering' plotlines. Since 2005 the entire planet has experienced the following:-

has seen ghosts

has been invaded by said ghosts who turned out to be Cybermen

has been invaded by Daleks, twice in some cases!

saw the President of the USA killed by the Master and aliens

had the planet moved

had all the people of a correct bloodtype stand on the edge of a ledge

had all the children stop what they were doing and acting as mouthpieces to a bunch of aliens

had bad dreams about John Simm, and been unable to concentrate because of him

turned into John Simm

The last 4 in particular realistically would have incredibly widespread effect on people. Consider for example people worldwide in 'critical' jobs and situations - for example defusing a bomb in the bomb squad, driving a car at high speeds down a motorway, operating heavy machinery, walking the tightrope in the local circus and so on. Bear on mind it's the entire planet - statistically a lot of these situations should pop up and a lot of unfortunate people would all probably die. Repeatedly.

***** Concerns like

1) Why are the Time Lords back?
2) Why do they want the End of Time to happen - doesn't that mean they're out of a job?
3) How on Earth does the Master's latest idiot plan lead to them existing again? (I think I know how they'll explain this - if they bother)
4) What's so special about Wilf?
5) If Donna gets her memories back then why doesn't she explode as previously promised?
6) Why are the Ood appearing to the Doctor? Why is their future connected with 21st Century Earth? Surely they'll be better off without humanity enslaving them (which might explain their advances in civilization)
7) What exactly does the Immortality Gate do? Does it heal entire civilizations?
8) Why hasn't the Master made the Master-clone-Martha-Jones jump off a roof in revenge for her part in deposing him in Last of the Time Lords?
9) Does the Master now know everyone on Earth's thoughts and secrets?

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who

2009-11-17T21:08:00.004Z

No - not Waters of Mars. I'll maybe blog about that again at some point. For now move along if that's what you're interested in.

I've not been blogging a lot recently - I'm twittering a lot more these days. One of the results of my twittering was that recently the lovely people at the WhoCast reviewed the Company of Friends, a Doctor Who audio play starring my favourite Doctor, Paul McGann. I felt it was only fair I reciprocate and make my thoughts known (particularly as one of the podcasters sounded in physical pain due to his experiences).

I personally was not too fussed about this release - I'd rather Big Finish had created 4 short McGann plays in keeping with their own continuity. In my mind the McGann audios are the canon eighth doctor era and creating a series of 4 short audios that link with the novels and comic books was a cluster-frak in terms of continuity. There are events in these separate continuities that invalidate the other continuities and at times don't even link with the current television series.

For example in the comics Ace dies, the 7th Doctor and Sarah-Jane hang out and Rassilon is a good guy who the Doctor has met time and time again. In the novels Gallifrey is destroyed, but not by the Daleks, Romana regenerates again and becomes an enemy of the Doctor and so on.

As for the novels there are dozens of 8th doctor novels, but I'm not that much of a fan to read them - especially as they did not conclude before the 2005 series came back.

It's also worth considering that the last time Big Finish explicitly addressed the separate 8th doctor continuities it was in Zagreus - and was (in my opinion) a bit of a disaster. With this trepedation in mind I did however listen to the plays over the summer break, whilst in darkest Exmoor and have finally got round to blogging about them. Here is a breakdown of the 4 plays:-

Benny's Story - I'm not familiar with the Bernice Summerfield range. I have some Benny novels, but they were given to me for free as the result of a botched order from Big Finish and currently take up space in my wardrobe rather than my bookshelf (don't ask!). She was a companion of the 7th doctor for a large portion of the pre-1996 novels and teamed up with the McGann doctor in another novel, and (in a wafer thin example of author-surrogacy) may have slept with him. This story is unremarkable and seems to play off the novelty of having McGann and Bernice in a fairly ho-hum corridor chaser. Sadly, not being a fan, the novelty is lost on me. 4/10 - but as Lisa Bowerman (Benny) has graciously added me as a friend on Facebook I'll up it to 6/10 and promise to one day listen to the Bernice Summerfield range.

Fitz's Story - I -really- liked this one. Maybe I miss the fact that the Doctor never seems to get a 'normal' bloke as his companion. Case in point, Captain Jack, C'Rizz and Turlough all having their own peculiarities. It's a light, comedic episode which is hilarious partly due to the infomercials that McGann's doctor performs against his will (and is that him doing additional accents?) and due to Fitz's comedic nature. The only problem is the continuity of Fitz's tenure coincided with another companion, Anji, who (suspending disbelief) spends the whole episode badly hung-over and unable to take part in the episode. 7/10

Izzy's Story - I actually bought the 4 volumes of the McGann Doctor's comic books - this is where Izzy comes from. Izzy, a very loud shouty girl, leads the Doctor off in search of a rare 2000AD-esque comic book. Hilarity ensues - though I was not taken with the actress playing Izzy. This was a reasonabble showing however - and weird enough to be an example of the daftness of the 8th doctor's comics. 5/10

Mary's Story - This was the one I expected I would like the most as it did not have to frak around with the 8th doctor era. I did like it the most, though the writers felt the need to have McGann list companions from all the different types of spin-off novel, audio etc. at one point.

Storm Warning, the first McGann audio, had a throw away reference about Mary Shelley (as did Shada if I remember correctly, though that also implied Chronotis was there). This personally annoys me slightly as I liked to assume Storm Warning was set immediately after the TV Movie.

A later McGann play (Terror Firma) made it clear it was not as it retroactively added two companions called Samson and Gemma who had been adventuring with the 8th doctor prior to Storm Warning. Interestingly the reason for this addition was because an earlier McGann play had referred to "Sam", a companion out of the novels. This was meant to allow the audios to exist in their own continuity as the Sam was retroactively made to fit "Samson", a male companion. Of course these plays have references to the novel-Sam as well as the audio-Samson.

Argh!

This episode shows Mary Shelley become a full blown companion and of course has some very clever Frankenstein allusions. As the WhoCast pointed out technically it's a multi-doctor story, and one that would be relatively easy to do in the TV show. It takes place both at the start and possibly near the end of the McGann era. It is very clever, aside from the unnecessary fanwank of having the Doctor feverishly name Gemma (retconned audio companion), Compassion (novel companion), Destrii (comic companion), Charlie (audio), Lucie (audio), Alex (unknown), Tod (unknown) and Retha (unknown). Tin of worms for table one!

It would be very easy for me to be harsh in my criticisms of this play but it is very clever, very well acted and despite its continuity headaches is the best of the bunch. I do hope we see more of Mary's saga however. 9/10

Let's Play Ultima V Lazarus - Warriors of Destiny

2009-10-12T18:11:00.005+01:00

Over the past few months I've been amused by a Let's Play of Ultima VII - one of my all-time favourite games as long-time viewers will no doubt be aware. A Long Play (LP) is basically a semi-humorous commentary when playing a game, a bit like Rifftrax or MST3K.

It looked like fun so I decided to try one for Ultima V: Lazarus - the fan remake of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. Feel free to watch as I find new ways to plumb the depths of dorkiness. Here is a link to the full playlist - I've posted over 10 videos to date.

Fistful of Audios: Hornet's Nest 1

2009-09-11T23:11:00.003+01:00

I listened to the first Fourth Doctor audio. Sadly I was underwhelmed by this audio - it wasn't bad, but sadly it was nowhere near as good as the first Eighth Doctor audios.

Tom refuses to work with Big Finish - the audios are from the BBC Audiobook team who up until now have only had Tom reading novelisations of old TV episodes. Tom has a habit of avoiding working in the same area as other Doctors. When offered scripts from Big Finish he unkindly mentioned he put them in bin - amusingly one of these scripts is by the guy who wrote all five of these new audios. Supposedly he suggested doing new material and is more comfortable working with his chums at BBC Audio than Big Finish. Perhaps he feels more comfortable with them than the Big Finish crowd (who are by all accounts nice people who make nice lunches).

The format is somewhat schizo - switching from audiobook to audioplay for certain scenes, but with dollops of narration (mainly from Tom). The basic story is that Retired Captain Yates has been lured to The Nest, a cottage the Doctor owns in Sussex. (Let's be honest it was never going to be outside the home counties). He proceeds to tell Mike about his recent adventures relating to a group of hornet-like aliens that he has trapped in his cottage - or have him trapped?

The Doctor is suspiciously similar to the 70 odd-year Tom Baker. He complains about his old bones, lives in a cottage and walks his dog (called Captain) in the countryside. There's the occassional witty remarks but most of his time is spent narrating his story to Mike.

The guy who voices Captain Yates is relatively flat. As the initial narrator he is competent but when he reacts indignantly to the Doctor, demanding to know what's going on, it does not sound so different from the tone he narrates with.

Truth be told this would be a reasonably good story but some of the really witty bits are narrated flatly rather than acted. There's still some good stuff from Tom when he's not in narrator-mode, but the only characters with voices are Mike Yates, the housekeeper and Mister Noggin.

Additionally this is 1/5 of the full story, and despite appearances to the contrary does not stand on its own terribly well. It ends with a cliffhanger of the Doctor preparing to tell yet another story to Yates. Will Yates survive? Probably. Will my interest survive? For now. I do hope this series is a success and leads to a proper series of audio plays.

The 100 Best Computer Games Ever?

2009-08-14T19:15:00.006+01:00

Ok, been reading the Empire Magazine Top 100 games list and thought I'd weigh in on it. I never owned a console prior to my Wii, so the games I have played on this list are mostly limited to PC, Amiga and Commodore 64.

Firstly, there is no clear indication how the Top 100 were assessed. I personally think it should be on durability technical merit and originality. Looking at this list there are too many FPS games - Doom and Quake are fair enough. But Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Halo and so on? I suspect like "Who is the best Doctor Who polls" there is a slight bias to newer games.

Secondly there are too many series of games salamaied. While I agree Resident Evil or Grand Theft Auto (probably) merit mention I don't think a series should count more than once unless the game is sufficiently distinct from its predecessors. So GTA 1 and GTA 4 are fair game, but GTA 3, Vice City, 4 and so on are all essentially the same game tarted up slightly.

#100 Speedball 2 - I never really saw the appeal of this game. I guess it was Grand Theft Auto for the 90s.

#98: Worms 2 - Worms is pretty good isn't it?

#95: Alone in the Dark - no, not the new quasi-emo version Atari made, this is the 1920s era Call of Cthulhu inspired masterpiece that basically launched the 3D survival horror genre. Personally given this ground-breakingness I would rate it higher than any subsequent 3D horror game.

#93: Dungeon Master - this was similarly groundbreaking, the first 3D realtime RPG. I personally preferred Eye of the Beholder or Knightmare but this clearly belongs here on this list.

#91: Another World - actually really surprised to see another Amiga game. This isn't particularly significant in my mind beyond some pretty graphics.

#88: Thief II - Thief defined the sneak 'em up genre, while Thief 2 was pretty much the same game, only prettier and with more sneak 'em up type missions and less Raiders of the Lost Ark scenarios. This game came with medieval robots. And some neat fan missions.

#87: Lemmings - surprised this is so low. Good game. Loved the music.

#86: IK+ - this was an awesome game. I have it on my Wii. Should be higher in the list. Should also be remade... hmmm.

#81: Sim City - this is too addicitive and too lowly rated here.

#77: Day of the Tentacle - great game.

#72: Diablo 2 - never really saw what people saw in this game. Diablo 1 & 2 seemed very shallow dull games to me.

#71: Quake - never got into Quake like I did with Doom.

#70: Guitar Hero - not sure this belongs on this list.

#69: Secret of Monkey Island - should be higher. Recently remade, with (I wish) MI2 to follow.

#61: Gauntlet - classic!

#54: Silent Hill - this was quite a scary surreal game. I really need to reinstall this and finish it. The movie wasn't bad (despite what everyone else thought).

#53: Tie Fighter - a good solid flight-sim that was much much better than X-Wing.

#49: Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion - I have to admit I was hooked on Oblivion for a while, but after completing both the Knights of Nine expansion and the main plotline I began to by the Shivering Isles feel it was a bit repetitive and samey feeling, with any characters you meet lacking any depth. A bit like how Elite gets if you play it for waaay too long. Not really a classic, but very very pretty - I also find its predecessor Morrowind lacks any real direction in how to get started which makes it difficult to play.

#43: Sensible Soccer - Despite a lifetime aversion to football I believe I found this quite fun on the Amiga, although when I played it there were absurd scored like 42-26. Good football simulator and actually fun as well.

#41: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - This is probably the game on the list I've played most recently on my Wii. It's really quite good and has the distinction of being a game that made me scream like a little girl whilst playing it in front of Naomi and Claudia. Lovecraftian horror agogo with time-hopping sections involving characters going from Ancient Rome to the Gulf War and the ability to suffer insanity. It starts with screaming in the background, then you start walking into rooms upside down. Flies crawling inside your TV. Phantom ammo and hallucinated enemies. Messages telling you that you must buy the sequel or that the game has crashed. Scary stuff!

#34: Resident Evil 2 - yes, this is a serious scary game, but is it scarier than Alone in the Dark was?

#31: Knights of the Old Republic - this is the best RPG I've played in a long time with a plot to rival Empire Strikes Back. Slightly hampered by a dodgy rushed sequel that promised an as-yet undelivered 3rd installment, which is now going to be the MMOO.

#30: Resident Evil 4 - wow, they really like Resident Evil. Certainly a better game than RE2 I wonder, was it really scary and such a big advance? Fuelled my fear of masked men with chainsaws.

#28: Tetris - should definitely be higher in the list. This game's got some serious durability and replay value.

#25: Resident Evil - ok, this list is definitely overdoing it on RE. This is not as scary as 2, but does have 'excellent' voice acting in the original version.

#22: Grand Theft Auto 3 - I presume they are going to have IV or Vice City (my favourite), San Andreas (2nd favourite despite the gangsta talk subtitles really needing their own English subtitles!) show up later.

#19: Baldur's Gate 2 - excellent RPG, though I feel it is a little too high in this top 100.

#17: Mario Kart - the original. Me-likey. Wii version is a fixture in my household.

#16: GTA IV - haven't played this but I told you it'd be here.

#13: Elite - oh hell yeah! But why isn't it in the Top 10? Or is Elite 2: Frontier going to be there?

#11: Planescape Torment - surprisingly higher than BG2 this is a game I continually start to play and end up stopping. Perhaps I find Planescape too weird for my tastes compared to conventional D&D (Baldur's Gate) or Star Wars (Knights of the Old Republic). I need to reinstall it though and give it a 20th chance.

#10: Goldeneye - personally I thought this game was overrated.

#7: Doom - I was wondering when we'd get to this. Technologically I would say Wolfenstein 3D deserves an honourable mention too!

#6: Street Fighter 2 - I used to be a master at this, tanning all and sundry when I was a teenager and hearing cries of, "Stop using the same sets of moves on me." Definitely a fair ranking.

#3: World of Warcraft - haven't played it (which is why I occassionally see sunlight and feel the sun on my skin) but this is overrated. Ultima Online was the first successful MMO and should occupy this spot if you have to include an MMO. Which you shouldn't IMHO.

#2: Final Fantasy 7 - suffers from Planescape Syndrome - I keep promising myself to play through it fully so I can watch the Advent Children movie. FF7 personally I find less immersive than Knights of the Old Republic or Baldur's Gate 2 (which in turn are less immersive than Ultima 7 or Ultima 5 Lazarus). Good game but massively overrated, including sadly in this poll.

#1: Super Mario World - again good game but overrated! Is Mario World the greatest game really? It's fun, but it's not exactly a classic as its superceded by later Mario games.

What's missing?

Personally I'm sad Frontier, Elite 2 didn't get in. With a realisticish physics engine, a good representation of our solar system allowing you to fly from London to Tokyo, or off to Alpha Centauri and beyond it's a classic I still reply.

If Mario World is #1 surely Sonic should be in there somewhere. (Personally I think Super Mario Bros was more significant than any further Mario spin-off).

Ultima Underworld - the first ever game to use proper 3D rather than the 'cheat' that Doom or Wolfenstein 3D, allowing you to swim under bridges whilst maintaining the ability to walk over the bridge, not to mention its relatively more sophisticated interactions.

Return of Tom Baker to Doctor Who

2009-07-29T10:33:00.004+01:00

No Tom's not going to appear in the TV show in some kind of Time Crash event as he told Doctor Who Magazine he would not want to do that. Instead he is starring in a new series of Doctor Who audios, called Hornet's Nest, featuring his doctor post-Invasion of Time, travelling to 2009 and renting a cottage on the south coast of England and getting into all sorts of whacky adventures.

These are made by the BBC, not Big Finish, which is a little bit of a kick in the teeth to that company, but sadly Tom Baker seems to do things his own way, rather than associating with anything involving the other doctors. His reason for doing these audios is (very Tom Bakerish) that he was sick of saying no to the various reprisal offers he gets, and because he wanted to work with Nicholas Courtney (or more likely go down the pub with him after recording).

Interestingly his companion is Mike Yates, a Pertwee-era companion. Sadly it was originally intended to be a very old Brigadier, but poor Nicholas Courtney is not very well. I hope he has a speedy recovery and gets involved in a 2nd series of Tom Baker audios. I also hope people's bank balance can afford all these radio plays from Big Finish and the BBC.

A dedicated website is being setup by the BBC and it looks like just the thing before the next season of McGann audios start up in December again!

Ultima: My New Project (2)

2009-07-24T23:53:00.001+01:00

Posted a youtube video of the game.

Highlander Audios

2009-07-23T23:24:00.004+01:00

Big Finish, the guys who make Doctor Who audios, Stargate audios, Sapphire and Steel audios, 2000 AD audios and even audios for the recently cancelled Robin Hood have started making Highlander audios. Yay!

I recently purchased the first one with a view to listening to it on holiday it looks very cool and is explicitly set during Highlander: Endgame and Highlander: The Source, even explicitly referencing significant events in Endgame (no - not that one - they reference the villain!) It's narrated by Adrian Paul, who has a bit of an accent, but with a 2nd voice typically as the villain of the piece.

I've bought the other 2 audios as well and hope to have the last one when it is released. Sadly given the dismal activity on their forums and the other Highlander forums I don't imagine a 2nd season being commissioned - I never thought of Highlander the TV Series as that popular in the UK - which is Big Finish's main market. However if I'm wrong I'll be queueing up to buy more.

Ultima: My New Project

2009-07-22T18:30:00.008+01:00

For the last month or so I've been experimenting with XNA and C# to see how difficult it is to write a complex game. I've decided to remake Ultima 1 - the old RPG that launched my favourite series of games.

Ultima 1 was programmed by Lord British, the cool yet eccentric game-pioneer who is now so rich he is one of the first space-tourists and lives in a castle full of secret doors and medieval memorabilia. (Who wouldn't given the option?)

He had a bit of a kitchen sink approach to Ultima 1 - it was a learning exercise in programming rather than a commercial product. While ostensibly a fantasy game there are definite sci-fi elements. You can pick up a pistol or a laser gun, at one point you must enter a space-ship and shoot down 20 enemy craft and so on. I probably won't remake the space portion or include the 'sci-fi' elements - except as an easter egg - rather I will try to reconcile it with later Ultimas which became much more fantasy and less sci-fi.

I've stuck to using a 2D tile engine, even going so far as to use the original map bin files as a basis of recreating a detailed map of Sosaria.

This was relatively challenging as the information in the original map files was so crammed (2 tiles per byte) that the C# libraries were relatively poorly equipped to hanlde them. They can read bytes, but I found it difficult to read in a 4 bit number. I can't remember how I got round this, but I did.

Character generation is almost finished.

You can create a fighter, druid (who used to be clerics in Ultima 1 but changed as there are no clerics in later Ultimas but plenty of druids), thief (who'll be good at stealing things) and wizards (who'll be pretty powerful spellcasters but weak at everything). I won't include the option for changing races, except possibly as an easter egg. So there will be no playing elves, dwarves or bobbits (hmm!) as the protagonist in later Ultimas is revealed to be a human from Earth.

Currently you can wander around all of Sosaria (though I plan on doing a major inclusion of details to make it a little more interesting) and both towns and dungeons are awaiting placement.

Limited combat is possible, as is the inclusion of wandering monsters.

However this will not be a 1:1 remake - the plot will be different. In the original you had to collect 4 gems to use in a time machine. In this plot you will have to find the gems and summon a silver moongate. There will be subplots and the hero will initially be confined to Lord British's lands.

I still have to build towns from scratch, implement some sort of dialog system and ideally have guards patrolling 'civilized' areas. I also really need to find some way of getting my own tiles - the ones here are modified from Ultima 6 and really need replacing to take advantage of the higher resolution XNA offers. Sadly, not being an artist myself (obvious by some of the screenshots) that could be a while.

Guess Who Avoids B&W Films?

2009-05-28T20:50:00.008+01:00

Oscar Meme

Films that have been nominated for the Best Film Oscar. How many have you seen?

1920s

1927-1928: Wings; The Racket; Seventh Heaven

1928-1929: The Broadway Melody; Alibi; The Hollywood Revue of 1929; In Old Arizona; The Patriot

1929-1930: All Quiet on the Western Front; The Big House; Disraeli; The Divorcee; The Love Parade

1930s

1930-1931: Cimarron; East Lynne; The Front Page; Skippy; Trader Horn

1931-1932: Grand Hotel; Arrowsmith; Bad Girl; The Champ; Five Star Final; One Hour with You; Shanghai Express; The Smiling Lieutenant

1932-1933 Cavalcade; 42nd Street; A Farewell to Arms; I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; Lady for a Day; Little Women; The Private Life of Henry VIII; She Done Him Wrong; Smilin' Through; State Fair

1934: It Happened One Night; The Barretts of Wimpole Street; Cleopatra; Flirtation Walk; The Gay Divorcee; Here Comes the Navy; The House of Rothschild; Imitation of Life; One Night of Love; The Thin Man; Viva Villa!; The White Parade

1935: Mutiny on the Bounty; Alice Adams; Broadway Melody of 1936; Captain Blood; David Copperfield; The Informer; The Lives of a Bengal Lancer; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Les Misérables; Naughty Marietta; Ruggles of Red Gap; Top Hat

1936: The Great Ziegfeld; Anthony Adverse; Dodsworth; Libeled Lady; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; Romeo and Juliet; San Francisco; The Story of Louis Pasteur; A Tale of Two Cities; Three Smart Girls

1937: The Life of Emile Zola; The Awful Truth; Captains Courageous; Dead End; The Good Earth; In Old Chicago; Lost Horizon; One Hundred Men and a Girl; Stage Door; A Star Is Born

1938: You Can't Take It with You; The Adventures of Robin Hood; Alexander's Ragtime Band; Boys Town; The Citadel; Four Daughters; Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion); Jezebel; Pygmalion; Test Pilot

1939: Gone with the Wind; Dark Victory; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Love Affair; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Ninotchka; Of Mice and Men; Stagecoach; The Wizard of Oz; Wuthering Heights

1940s

1940: Rebecca; All This, and Heaven Too; Foreign Correspondent; The Grapes of Wrath; The Great Dictator; Kitty Foyle; The Letter; The Long Voyage Home; Our Town; The Philadelphia Story

1941: How Green Was My Valley; Blossoms in the Dust; Citizen Kane; Here Comes Mr. Jordan; Hold Back the Dawn; The Little Foxes; The Maltese Falcon; One Foot In Heaven; Sergeant York; Suspicion

1942: Mrs. Miniver; 49th Parallel; King's Row; The Magnificent Ambersons; The Pied Piper; The Pride of the Yankees; Random Harvest; The Talk of the Town; Wake Island; Yankee Doodle Dandy

1943: Casablanca; For Whom the Bell Tolls; Heaven Can Wait; The Human Comedy; In Which We Serve; Madame Curie; The More the Merrier; The Ox-Bow Incident; The Song of Bernadette; Watch on the Rhine

(at this point, sanity prevails and the Academy only accepts five nominations each year)

1944: Going My Way; Double Indemnity; Gaslight; Since You Went Away; Wilson

1945: The Lost Weekend; Anchors Aweigh; The Bells of St. Mary's; Mildred Pierce; Spellbound

1946: The Best Years of Our Lives; Henry V; It's a Wonderful Life; The Razor's Edge; The Yearling

1947: Gentleman's Agreement; The Bishop's Wife; Crossfire; Great Expectations; Miracle on 34th Street

1948: Hamlet; Johnny Belinda; The Red Shoes; The Snake Pit; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

1949: All the King's Men; Battleground; The Heiress; A Letter to Three Wives; Twelve O'Clock High

1950s

1950: All About Eve; Born Yesterday; Father of the Bride; King Solomon's Mines; Sunset Boulevard

1951: An American in Paris; Decision Before Dawn; A Place in the Sun; Quo Vadis; A Streetcar Named Desire

1952: The Greatest Show on Earth; High Noon; Ivanhoe; Moulin Rouge; The Quiet Man

1953: From Here to Eternity; Julius Caesar; The Robe; Roman Holiday; Shane

1954: On the Waterfront; The Caine Mutiny; The Country Girl; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Three Coins in the Fountain

1955: Marty; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; Mister Roberts; Picnic; The Rose Tattoo

1956: Around the World in 80 Days; Friendly Persuasion; Giant; The King and I; The Ten Commandments

1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai; Peyton Place; Sayonara; 12 Angry Men; Witness for the Prosecution

1958: Gigi; Auntie Mame; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Defiant Ones; Separate Tables

1959: Ben-Hur; Anatomy of a Murder; The Diary of Anne Frank; The Nun's Story; Room at the Top

1960s

1960: The Apartment; The Alamo; Elmer Gantry; Sons and Lovers; The Sundowners

1961: West Side Story; Fanny; The Guns of Navarone; The Hustler; Judgment at Nuremberg

1962: Lawrence of Arabia; The Longest Day; The Music Man; Mutiny on the Bounty; To Kill a Mockingbird

1963: Tom Jones; America, America; Cleopatra; How the West Was Won; Lilies of the Field

1964: My Fair Lady; Becket; Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; Mary Poppins; Zorba the Greek

1965: The Sound of Music; Darling; Doctor Zhivago; Ship of Fools; A Thousand Clowns

1966: A Man for All Seasons; Alfie; The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; The Sand Pebbles; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1967: In the Heat of the Night; Bonnie and Clyde; Doctor Dolittle; The Graduate; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

1968: Oliver!; Funny Girl; The Lion in Winter; Rachel, Rachel; Romeo and Juliet

1969: Midnight Cowboy; Anne of the Thousand Days; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Hello, Dolly!; Z

1970s

1970: Patton; Airport; Five Easy Pieces; Love Story; MASH

1971: The French Connection; A Clockwork Orange; Fiddler on the Roof; The Last Picture Show; Nicholas and Alexandra

1972: The Godfather; Cabaret; Deliverance; Sounder; The Emigrants

1973: The Sting; American Graffiti; The Exorcist; A Touch of Class; Cries and Whispers

1974: The Godfather Part II; Chinatown; The Conversation; Lenny; The Towering Inferno

1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Barry Lyndon; Dog Day Afternoon; Jaws; Nashville

1976: Rocky; All the President's Men; Bound for Glory; Network; Taxi Driver

1977: Annie Hall; The Goodbye Girl; Julia; Star Wars; The Turning Point

1978: The Deer Hunter; Coming Home; Heaven Can Wait; Midnight Express; An Unmarried Woman

1979: Kramer vs. Kramer; Apocalypse Now; All That Jazz; Breaking Away; Norma Rae

1980s (where I was born and thus might have a chance?)

1980: Ordinary People; Coal Miner's Daughter; The Elephant Man; Raging Bull; Tess

1981: Chariots of Fire; Reds; Atlantic City; On Golden Pond; Raiders of the Lost Ark

1982: Gandhi; E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; Missing; Tootsie; The Verdict

1983: Terms of Endearment; The Big Chill; The Dresser; The Right Stuff; Tender Mercies

1984: Amadeus; The Killing Fields; A Passage to India; Places in the Heart; A Soldier's Story

1985: Out of Africa; The Color Purple; Kiss of the Spider Woman; Prizzi's Honor; Witness

1986: Platoon; Children of a Lesser God; Hannah and Her Sisters; The Mission; A Room with a View

1987: The Last Emperor; Broadcast News; Fatal Attraction; Hope and Glory; Moonstruck

1988: Rain Man; The Accidental Tourist; Dangerous Liaisons; Mississippi Burning; Working Girl

1989: Driving Miss Daisy; Born on the Fourth of July; Dead Poets Society; Field of Dreams; My Left Foot

1990s

1990: Dances with Wolves; Awakenings; Ghost; The Godfather Part III; Goodfellas

1991: The Silence of the Lambs; Beauty and the Beast; Bugsy; JFK; The Prince of Tides

1992: Unforgiven; The Crying Game; A Few Good Men; Howards End; Scent of a Woman

1993: Schindler's List; The Fugitive; In the Name of the Father; The Piano; The Remains of the Day

1994: Forrest Gump; Four Weddings and a Funeral; Pulp Fiction; Quiz Show; The Shawshank Redemption

1995: Braveheart; Apollo 13; Babe; Il Postino (The Postman); Sense and Sensibility

1996: The English Patient; Fargo; Jerry Maguire; Secrets & Lies; Shine

1997: Titanic; As Good as It Gets; The Full Monty; Good Will Hunting; L.A. Confidential

1998: Shakespeare in Love; Elizabeth; Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella); Saving Private Ryan; The Thin Red Line

1999: American Beauty; The Cider House Rules; The Green Mile; The Insider; The Sixth Sense

2000s

2000: Gladiator; Chocolat; Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon; Erin Brockovich; Traffic

2001: A Beautiful Mind; Gosford Park; In the Bedroom; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; Moulin Rouge

2002: Chicago; Gangs of New York; The Hours; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; The Pianist

2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; Lost in Translation; Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World; Mystic River; Seabiscuit

2004: Million Dollar Baby; The Aviator; Finding Neverland; Ray; Sideways

2005: Crash; Brokeback Mountain; Capote; Good Night and Good Luck; Munich

2006: The Departed; Babel; Letters from Iwo Jima; Little Miss Sunshine; The Queen

2007: No Country for Old Men; Atonement; Juno; Michael Clayton; There Will Be Blood

2008: Slumdog Millionaire; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Frost/Nixon; Milk; The Reader

Stuff I've Been Reading 2: Chaosium Cycles

2009-05-28T20:25:00.000+01:00

These books, published by Chaosium - the ones who brought you my favourite RPGs Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon - are a series of tie-in fiction for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. I originally bought the Klarkash-Ton cycle and the Tsathoggua cycle as they seemed to be the only reasonably priced Clark Ashton mythos fiction collections on the market. The Tsathoggua Cycle had quite a lot of other authors writing about the frog-faced Old One and the standard veered from okay to pretty good.

However reading the adverts in the back made me desperate to buy the the Antarktos Cycle, a rather weighty tome consisting of fiction relating to HP Lovecraft's novel At the Mountain of Madness.

The idea behind each of the Cycle books is that they show the evolution of a theme or character used in Lovecraft's fiction. They typically start with the precusors to Lovecraft (such as Machen, Poe or so on), reprint one or two stories by Lovecraft and move on to the better pastiches. Each story has a short introduction by the editor explaining its reason for inclusion (and giving the end away in one of them dammit!)

The Antarktos Cycle starts with stories such as Edgar Allen Poe's Narrative of Gordon Pym and The Thing From Another World (or rather Who Goes There?). Neither are Cthulhu stories but they are linked by a common theme of alien evil in the Antarctic. I was especially keen to devour The Thing and was surprised to find how close to the John Carpenter movie it was, even explaining more of the Thing's nature and psychic powers.

Over the course of my holiday in York I devoured the Innsmouth Cycle - which contains precursors to Shadows over Innsmouth like "The Harbour Master" by Robert W. Chambers and Fishhead. The Harbour Master is about a fishman menacing a small cove with unique wildlife while Fishhead is about a mutated fishlike fellow who is murdered by a group of hicks and gets revenge from beyond the grave. The later pastiches that follow Shadow over Innsmouth are pretty good. The Deep Ones was a bit 60s for me, while Live Bait was full of twists and turns.

Another good collection is the Hastur Cycle which reprints classic Chambers stories like The Yellow Sign and the barmy Repairer of Reputations as well as a rather freaky story called The River of Night's Dreaming.

Sadly it seems to be a bit of a trek to track down these books. I assume they had limited print runs but there are quite a few I fancy. Bizarrely the Cthulhu Cycle is near-impossible to find for less than £60, as is the Ithaqua Cycle, the Book of Eibon (the third Clark Ashton collection, though to be fair it only has 2 of his stories in it), the Mysteries of the Worm, the Sub-Niggurath Cycle, the Azathoth Cycle, Robert E. Howard's Nameless Cults and other collections. There is over 20 titles here - yet only about 5-10 seem to be readily available.

There are also some "new" collections from Chaosium like Frontier Cthulhu, High Seas Cthulhu and so on. However I suspect these will not be quite so good - besides I really want a copy of the older material first!

York

2009-05-28T19:29:00.005+01:00

I've been away to York with the Lady over the bank holiday weekend, finally making use of the arbitary holiday I am forced to take. In this time I managed:-

To board a Tour Bus of the City

Walk the Walls

Visit the Jorvik Viking Centre - which sadly loses steam after the rides

Undertake the seemingly obligatory ghost walk in the evening with a theatrical fellow in a frock coat and top hat

Overheat on a boat cruise

Eat too much nice and expensive Italian food

Walk so much I got a little sunburned while da south was drenched in rain.

The last time I was in York was with my primary school in 1990 or so. Thankfully this time there was no weirdness with closets. I was sharing with Hoppy in 1990 - if you know him you'll not be surprised by this revelation.

Pictures to follow.

Lovecraft on YouTube

2009-05-13T14:52:00.003+01:00

Here are some of the best Lovecraft movies on YouTube IMHO... Shadows over Innsmouth - The Musical

The Terrible Old Man - the Cartoon

Shadows over Innsmouth - The Radio Theatre Version

Shadow out of Time

The last two are radio shows I really want from here.

New Lord of the Rings Movie Online!

2009-05-09T22:42:00.004+01:00

Honestly - this is very impressive for a $5,000 movie - the Hunt for Gollum is based on some of Tolkien's notes on how Aragorn and the elves of Lothlorien captured Gollum and learned that he had told the forces of Mordor about the name of Baggins.

Visit the site and see the movie now!

Stuff I've Been Reading 1: Robert E. Howard's Horror

2009-05-09T17:35:00.004+01:00

Reading the works of Robert Howard and HP Lovecraft has reawoken my mythos obsession to such an extent that lately I have come to the realisation that there is an extensive amount of Cthulhu mythos stories not penned by the gentlemen of Providence himself. As a learned fellow with a thirst for knowledge I have been dipping in and out of collections of these works for a while. Conan stories on their own can be repetitive.

Firstly I obtained a Wordsowrth edition of Robert E. Howard's horror stories. Many of the stories therein are part of Howard's contribution to the Cthulhu mythos. However Howard differs from Lovecraft in that his hardbitten main characters do not go insane
but rather tend to go beserk and rip the tentacles of the evil critters to pieces. Also a lot of these heroes seemed to be named Steve for some reason. Another recurring trend, which I must confess I was getting a tiny bit tired of, was that in a REH horror story the hero bangs his head and remembers a previous life experience, such as becoming a raider named 'Conan of the Reavers', that relates to the
catacombs he is exploring, or the cairn he is excavating. Thoth-Amon, a villain from Conan, is mentioned in a few of REH's stories. Thankfully the reincarnation stories have varied resolutions and one of them, "The Cairn on the Headland" is excellent in its use of Norse mythology.

Howard has also written more conventional horror stories featuring Hitchcock-like bird (""Pigeons from Hell"), vampires ("The Horror from the Mound") and Werewolves ("In the Forest of Villefere" "Wolfshead"). Annoyingly the book points out that Villefere and Wolfshead are part of a trilogy of stories Howard wrote. The third story, aptly named Wolfdung, is not included - why is never quite explained. I suspect Wordsworth editions only republish work that is now in the public domain and I believe Wolfdung is not in the public domain.

Overall any of Howard's horror work is well worth a read. Just do not read three 'bump, oh I was a Viking raider in a past life and now know that Ianto Davies is descended from my hated enemies the Welsh and must now I must murder my friend" in one go.

Inalienable

2009-04-30T16:19:00.009+01:00

I finally got round to seeing Inalienable on DVD. This is a film written by Walter Koenig and stars a virtual who-is-who of science fiction. The main character is played by Richard Hatch who is most famous Apollo from old Battlestar Galactica. Hatch is a research scientist who is infected by an alien parasite that forces him to give birth to a child.

Now you'd think that the parasite would be evil - mutating Hatch's character or turning into a Godzilla type monster. It actually protects Hatch while it is gestating and after the kid is born Hatch actually bonds with the child when the US government then takes that child away and separates Hatch and the alien-child. It becomes obvious that Hatch and the alien need each other for their physical and emotional well-being.

Hatch's lover starts a massive campaign to free and reunite the 'father' and 'son' which, with the aid of some leaked footage on the internet, culminates in a massive legal battle between Hatch and the US Government. Sadly the entire story is rended moot by a hasty ending that neatly resolves everything in far to neat a manner - which is sad as being a single standalone movie it could end however its author sees fit.

The first third of this film feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone, the second third is definitely ET and the end is a legal drama with a sci-fi twist. It actually works quite well - the lousy ending aside and is thought-provoking, if the morality is perhaps a little too "thump on the head", and a little black and white.

For example - Koenig plays Hatch's hateful boss, who inexplicably is put in charge of separating Hatch and his kid by the US government. Koenig relishes this role as it is in the vein of Bester from Babylon 5. While this relationship is explained in the third act he is portrayed as evil with a capital E. Amusingly Patricia Tallman, Walter Koenig and Marina Sirtis all play various bad guys working for the government. Which struck me as odd as they all played telepaths in their various sci-fi incarnations.

There is little moral ambiguity in the 2nd and 3rd acts - the Feds are evil. In particular the government prosecutor in the trial does not seem to have to rely on any facts, making claims like "There might be hundreds of these parasites out there!" without any evidence. They also cheat - wheeling in last minute evidence on two occasions.

The film is well worth checking out! 7/10.

Site Migration... Sometime Soon!

2009-04-02T22:03:00.005+01:00

Finally got round to launching my personal domain http://www.skerrigan.co.uk and a hosted site archiving all the Onnwal material from the Living Greyhawk campaign. It's hosted by http://www.byethost.com who actually seem to be providing a pretty good free hosting package - you get FTP accounts, php and MySQL thrown in for free!

As soon as I figure how I will be migrating this blog over to http://blog.skerrigan.co.uk - don't hold your breath though, that might be a while.

Doctor Stu on Doctor Who

2009-03-27T21:05:00.004Z

This year is apparently going to be the year of the McGann. As David Tennant is taking the year off and there's hardly any shows on TV Big Finish have ramped up production of the 3rd season of Doctor Who starring Paul McGann.

There are 9 episodes as part of the regular season - Orbis, Hothous, The Beast of Orlok (which sounds interestinh), Wirrn Dawn, The Scapegoat, The Cannibalists, The Eight Truths, Worldwide Web and a Christmas special called Death in Blackpool (which I hope will write Lucie out, not because I hate her but I'd rather she left before the doctor-companion relationship gets stale like with Charley).

As if 9 audio plays is not enough there are two more releases - Company of Friends is a series of audio adventures featuring the 8th doctor and a non-audio companion. The first one features Izzy, the 90s sci-fi geek he hung out with in the comics (which aren't half bad!). The second stars a guy called Fitz from the Eighth Doctor novels that never really concluded because of the new series (though to be fair with over 73 novels in that series they could've wound it up I'm sure). The third features Bernice Summerfield who appeared in other novels I've not read and really can't be botherred to. The last one however team McGann's doctor up with Mary Shelley, a story that has been referenced a lot in the Eighth Doctor audios.

I must admit I am quite meh about Company of Friends. It sounds interesting but in terms of Eighth Doctor continuity it's a cluster-frak. The novels and comics completely contradict the audios and TV show (Ace dies, the 7th Doctor and Sarah-Jane hang out, Rassilon is a good guy, Romana regenerates again and this time becomes evil) and at times are completely bizarre (the Doctor and Izzy meet the actor Tom Baker in one comic). I'm not so sure why they feel the need to do link the disparate continuities - I'd like a series of audios with new companions rather than ones taken from various spinoff sources.

An Earthly Child - this could be interesting. It's the subscriber special and it looks damn tempting. The 8th Doctor returns to Earth to check on his granddaughter Susan. Except she has had a son, played by Jake McGann, Paul McGann's son.

Orbis

2009-03-27T19:54:00.003Z

Finally listened to the Eight Doctor audio Orbis. Despite some negative reviews I found this story to be quite fun and yet has the underlying darkness of the Vengeance of Morbius.

Basically after Morbius the Doctor was marooned for 600 years on the planet Orbis which is inhabited by peaceful jellyfish who are under attack by a race of evil oysters.

It does have some really nice bits like the Doctor being more pleased to see his companion is wearing tights than actually seeing her for the first time in centuries. The quote "Tonight we bury our dead, tomorrow we build stilts" is awesome BTW. Also it looks like an arc may be in store for this season which is good as season 2 really suffered from a lack of a coherent storyline.

xkcd is real!

2009-03-25T21:29:00.005Z

I have to admit this cartoon struck a chord with me as it literally happened to me the other fortnight. I had this bizarre dream I was in an English exam and was suffering extreme writers cramp as it's been far too long since anyone made me write an essay by hand. Then for some bizarre reason I decided to ask the invigilator if I could use the bathroom (feeling especially ashamed as never once in an exam have I had to bother the invigilators).

Then things got a bit more bizarre...

Rather than going to the bathroom I discovered I was in fact in the little woods near my home in Monifieth, trapped down a steep slope by the riverbanks and struggling to climb back up due to the writer's cramp. Somehow I managed to get back to the exam room and write my essay, which I just knew was really rubbish and didn't answer the question at all.

Then I woke up, remembering I'd graduated. Twice. Not in English.

I'm sure you really needed to know this.

It is Happening Again...

2009-03-24T11:34:00.001Z

or for those on facebook

They Bleed Me Dry...

2009-03-16T22:14:00.002Z

As I noted earlier I'd bought the Centenary Edition of Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories. It's a beautiful black hardback volume. True to form I've discovered there are at least two companions volumes I'd like to get my hands on.

Firstly there is Conan's Brethren - a forthcoming volume collecting Howard's other creations including Solomon Kane and other characters I know nothing of. However I have heard of Kull - another barbarian who used to act as a backup feature in Savage Sword of Conan.

Kull I am reasonably familiar with -- I've plopped the kingly sum of £3 (inc. p&p) to buy the 'awesome' Kull the Conqueror movie on DVD. It stars Kevin Sorbo of Hercules fame stretching his acting range as a barbarian in a mythical world. Originally intended to be the third Conan movie (King Conan or some such) it was turned down by Arnold Schwarzenegger and rewritten to be a Kull movie. It's genuinely held as a bad movie and airs on sci-fi but it certainly isn't Uwe Boll.

Apparently Red Sonja was not a creation of Howard's but rather an addition from the comics in the 70s. This is interesting as the character went on to spawn a dreadful movie starring Briget Neilsen and Arnie (not playing Conan in name due to some bizarre movie rights thing). She nows stars in her own comic series and there is a new movie in the works by Robert Rodriguez with his missus in the titular role.

Second up is this amazingly neat volume collecting some of Lovecraft's best stories. I probably already probably have all these in some scruffy paperbacks back in Scotland but a volume like this is beautiful and apparently comes with a map of Arkham.

It does worry me though that most of my current reading interests are more at home in magazines than books, but hey ho!

Literally Raising the Dead

2009-03-16T20:01:00.004Z

So, new Red Dwarf in less than a month's time. Not bad since it's been nearly 10 years since the last episode ended on yet another cliffhanger. Given the delay between Red Dwarf VI and VII due to rape trials and so forth I was always surprised Red Dwarf VIII ended on a cliffhanger. This cliffhanger was of course like the last one resolved in a deleted scene which could easily be tagged on to explain it. In case you have no idea what I'm gibbering about here's the cliffhanger and deleted scene...

Not sold on the need to resurrect Red Dwarf. I personally liked Red Dward VII (Stoke Me A Clipper was my favourite ever episode of RD) but when I hear about things like :-

No Kochanski - she has apparently died... again

Rimmer is a hologram. He died... again.

No Holly... again. Apparently Lister left the taps on. In real life Norman Lovett reckons they were too cheap to bring him back

Some sort of bizarre Coronation Street crossover.

I don't exactly overflow with confidence. Add to the fact the cast look ancient, as evidence by the following:-

Hmmm...

The Actor We Need Right Now...

2009-03-12T00:27:00.001Z

You need to have seen Dark Knight and be up on Bale's T4 rant to appreciate this:-

A Rant About Drizzt

2009-03-11T23:48:00.004Z

In addition to enhancing my literary collection I've recently purchase graphic novels of Dragonlance and 'the Legend of Drizzt' off Amazon. I have to admit that I only bought the first book, the Crystal Shard because it was so unbelievably cheap, but I enjoyed it enough to buy all but the Halfling's Gem in graphic novel form (because it's a bit more expensive).

I'm not a big fan of the novels. I read 'The Crystal Shard' a few years ago when a friend lent it to me (and now I think on it I need to return it). I believe it was R.A. Salvatore's first book and dear god I hope so, it was dreadful. It doesn't help that I loathe Forgotten Realms, viewing it as a rip-off of Greyhawk (where drow, duergar etc. originate from) and Lord of the Rings (meddling pipe smoking wizards anyone) with a smorgasboard of whatever else people were working on for TSR at the time. So I am a tough audience. You may wish to avert your eyes from spoilers....

The part that really sold me on the dreadfulness of the Crystal Shard was the start of a chapter that went something like, "Drizzt readied himself to attack the crystal fortress armed with his scimitars, magical panther and the flour he had stolen off the giants he had just slain and decided on a whim to take as a souvenir."

Can you guess which item Drizzt uses to save the day? Well it is the clearly telegraphed souvenir flour - used to cover a magical solar-powered crystal that receives its energy from the sun and weaken it. Now Drizzt isn't portrayed as a kleptomaniac who insists on stealing something from every fight, nor is he ever shown to be a baking enthusiast, so this smacks of very, very lazy writing. Especially when the drow can magically by will create magical darkness - though having Drizzt's racial abilities save the day is only marginally above John Barrowman's Captain Jack's immortality being the only thing that can stop a massive demon from destroying Cardiff in terms of sheer cringe factorness. But better than inexplicably stealing flour to use later.

Thankfully the graphic novel does not include the awful flour scene, which gives it bonus points in my book. I even had to reread the Crystal Shard in Waterstones to make sure I didn't imagine the flour incident.

Overall though the series still lacks any real characterization. Drizzt and his chums are all invincible at the start of each book and never really seem to develop. Drizzt's development in his prequel trilogy is as follows:-

Book 1 - Drizzt is well hard but unhappy because all the drow are evil.
Book 2 - Drizzt is well hard but unhappy because he's living underground and having to fight monsters and his own people.
Book 3 - Drizzt is well hard but unhappy because everyone on the surface judges him by his dark skin (gee, there's a subtle metaphor).
Book 4 - see Book 3 for details, except now he has some invincible friends.

Bruenor - a gruff but secretly caring dwarf (gee!) who remains gruff for the two books he is in before, in an underground dwarven city lost to a great shadowy evil, he appears to die falling to his death with said shadowy evil. He gets better and comes back to life in later books. I think he is then called Bruenor the White but I could be confusing this with a better book. He also finds some magical armour his dad owned in the Mines of Moria... I mean Mithril Hall.

Wulfgar - a barbarian eventually raised by dwarves he starts off not very hard. Then Bruenor gives him a magical warhammer. This makes him as hard as nails.

Cattie-Brie - raised by dwarfs and inexplicably a hard-as-nails fighter. Her character development is that she finds a magic bow in a dwarven fortress (why dwarves have magic bows I dunno) and kills a human being (which is apparently a lot harder to do than killing evil dwarves and makes me wonder how in D&D terms she could be as hard as nails and yet still).

Anyroads, it's the lack of any depth or character development that make me feel these stories work best as comics rather than as novels in themselves.

By Crom a Good Read!

2009-03-11T23:40:00.002Z

I recently bought myself the Conan centenary edition as a prezzie. I'm not much of a book reader (preferring audiobooks lately, though my interest in them has waned). I've only ever really read the comics as a kid and of course watching the two Arnie films (which were intended to be but 2 in a long series of movies).

The first two short stories, "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel" are brilliant, if a little unoriginal (though given they're early pulp fiction they were probably original in 1933, which is pre-Lord of the Rings). The stories in the book are sorted by publication date, which is a little odd as both stories are set when Conan was king, i.e. towards the end of his career. However Howard writes incredibly vivid battle scenes and there seem to be a lot more resplendant mailed knights in Conan's world than I remember in the comics - probably more my unfamiliarity with the King Conan era.

Lynching Jedi

2008-06-10T17:00:00.001+01:00

David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive - in short a lot of scary shit) was approached to direct Return of the Jedi by George Lucas. He refused. But if he'd said yes, I bet RotJ wouldn't be regarded as "mediocre" by people who don't know what they're talking about... as this movie proves.

PhD: The Comic

2008-06-04T15:50:00.006+01:00

Someone sent me a link to PhD: The Comic. Now no work is done as I sit reading it and going, "Man this is so true!". Especially:-

This one was extra true in our lab:-

Dramatic Chipmunk

2008-06-04T13:04:00.002+01:00

I'm sure I'm the only person (except maybe Horton) on the internet who hadn't seen the Dramatic Chipmunk/Prairie Dog, but I now really really want to adopt a prairie dog...

Star Wars Deleted Scenes

2008-06-04T11:05:00.001+01:00

Jimminy Cricket - the whole Biggs subplot from Episode 4 pretty much restored. The first scenes are pretty awful but the one with Biggs at the end sure would've paid off later in the movie.

I didn't expect to ever see this...

2008-06-03T14:44:00.001+01:00

Eh?

I always knew that R2D2 was a wrongun.

That Show I Like Comes Back in Style

2008-05-28T12:05:00.003+01:00

Been watching a lot of Twin Peaks. Which is nice as I managed to snag a R2 copy of the Twin Peaks Gold Edition (which despite being a gold edition doesn't have all the extras from the Season 1 discs but it does have loads of other stuff like second season, all the outtakes and even finally a complete set of the coffee ads).

In the meantime I discovered an awesome Black Lodge simulator (click on the sycamore grove and don't take the ring unless you want to leave!)

Oh, and Tibet.

Lost Interest Galactica

2008-05-14T18:33:00.001+01:00

Spoilers ahoy, so if you're watching either Lost or Galactica, prepare to get spoiled.

I'm getting a little jaded with Lost and Galactica in their latest seasons. Lost in particular is getting silly and the show has just moved too far beyond being about a struggle to survive on a strange island into some inexplicable James Bond/Sci-Fi thriller for my liking. Sayid is now James Bond, the annoying guy Ben is still alive and a bunch of the main cast are all trying to get back to the island. There is some sort of weird time-travel thing on the island and they've introduced a new cast of scientists and marines who are on a ship. Except nothing's been explained yet.

Battlestar Galactica is similarly getting a bit long in the tooth. Somebody should shoot Baltar. I could believe that after being forced to deal with the Cylons on New Caprica and being 'abducted' he would somehow survive the mob justice and impromptu executions that claimed most of his underlings. I could believe that in his big show trial he got off – to be honest after the closing arguments of Apollo I'd have let him off. However his name should still be mud. He's been seen canoodling with cylons and let's be honest it's a bit suss he survived for months on one of their ships. What I can't believe is that he is inexplicably now the head of this bizarre monotheistic god worshipping cult (in a society used to worshipping the Greek pantheon) that is based on the Galactica and populated primarily by nubile young women all too eager to service him in Baltaresque ways. Is he a good guy? Is he a baddie? Am I supposed to feel sympathy for him? He seems to be doing exactly what he normally does, lying, sleeping with sexy women and talking to the ghost in his head that now resembles him. Are the Cylons baddies? I mean they did nuke 13 planets worth of humans, and Baltar was unwittingly complicit. His complicity did come out under some truth drugs last season and was pretty much ignored.

By Season 4 it seems like the conflict is getting rather stilted. Apollo disagrees with Adama and takes a stand, humiliating him for the billionth time. Apollo disagrees with Roslin and takes a stand, humiliating her. Roslin fights with Starbuck. Starbuck acts like a loony and pisses everyone off. There's yet another mutiny. The Cylons start blowing each other up. Where's it all going? It seems like people are fighting with themselves purely for the sake of it. They've also revealed characters as Cylons who could easily have sabotaged the fleet anytime in the last 3 seasons. Clearly that's not the plan – but it is getting a little old. Fortunately this is the final season – so hopefully it'll all make sense.

Oh and for the record my bet is the final Cylon is Roslin.

Disturbing

2008-05-13T12:50:00.002+01:00

It's official - Neil "I don't look like David Schwimmer Steve" Gaiman is disturbing - here's a graphic novel version of his short story Babycakes I just listened to over lunch break. Urgh...

Have to admit, he made his point nicely.

The Problem with Susan

2008-05-09T15:53:00.004+01:00

I've been listening to a fair few interesting audio books. Finally after years of not bothering I have begun listening to the Silmarillion. I've also got the complete Chronicles of Narnia to listen to at some point, having listened to radio dramatizations of Prince Caspian and the Dawn Treader (amusingly with Sylvester McCoy as Reepacheep).

I'm planning on hitting the Last Battle soon, though to be honest I didn't like it when I read it as a child. Aside from its apocalyptic overtones which make it unlikely to ever be adapted it's probably the first book I thought of as being "a bit gay" to be honest (though as a child I probably didn't use those words). I vaguely remember King Peter turning up inexplicably and a fair bit of boy-on-boy (platonic but I was 9 remember) kissing at the end.

Worse it turns out almost all our beloved main characters from previous books have died horribly and are now going to "true" Narnia. The thinly veiled Christian allegory is laid bare, which is fair enough, but it's a pretty horrible way to do it in my opinion. The Last Battle really didn't need to be written.

Of even more discomfort is the fact that Susan does not appear in the Last Battle, having refused to attend the "Narnia Reunion" that resulted in everyone else dying horribly in a train crash. Apparently she is "no longer a friend of Narnia... she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations". Again rather troubling in what was for a 9 year-old me a very very uncomfortable read.

Apparently I was not alone - as when more recently I started working my way through Fragile Things, a collection of short stories by Neil "Does Not Look Like Ross From Friends Steve" Gaiman I came across his story, the Problem of Susan.

I should point out you can read The Problem of Susan online. It's a well-written story but like a lot of Neil Gaiman's non-kiddie Stardusty stuff it's rather disturbing (particularly the image of the White Witch literally riding Aslan) though it does paint a rather sad picture of poor Susan.

Also he does seem to take the rather disconcerting view that Susan didn't go to Narnia because she got interested in sex and boys, rather than what I read to be being interested in ephemeral trappings (makeup and so forth). Me personally - I like to think she would've mended her ways and gone to "true" Narnia in the future. After all heaven without your friends is like being locked up in a small room with your friends forever.

Die Ticket Man, Die!

2008-05-06T20:36:00.005+01:00

Got my first parking ticket yesterday. Paid £2+ for 1.5 hours under the glare of the parking attendants who were doing a good impression of sharks in Leicester's city centre, obviously to take advantage of the bank holiday. Seriously I passed 3 of them on the main street at one point.

Sadly I took 1.6 hours to get back to car and found a ticket on my windscreen. A massive missive was contained in the ticket explaining my ticket expired at 2:51pm, the attendant had checked my car at 3:02pm and I only turned up at 3:05pm. He was still standing there, where I'd left him 1.6 hours ago, but as these people are remarkably unreasonable once they've written you have a ticket I merely vowed vengeance on him and his sires and drove off.

In short - I'll be walking into town from now on. It's a lot cheaper!

Dr. Stu on Torchwood

2008-04-16T15:00:00.003+01:00

This video, round about the 4:12 mark does an excellent job of summarising my feelings towards Torchwood. Apologies if you've heard this before, but I thought it was cool.

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who Triumphantly Returns

2008-04-15T22:16:00.002+01:00

Yes, it's been a while. I'm not going to blog about the new series, or the improved but still excessively-mincy 2^nd season of Torchwood. I've listened to a lot of Big Finish over the summer and winter and as you know I like the Eighth Doctor.

The Girl Who Never Was didn't quite get rid of Charley "Good God You've Been in 112 episodes – Call It A Day" Pollard, a companion who had lately begun to get very stale and rather annoying. Ironically it was her posh manner and voice that was beginning to grate. Anyroads the play, which is very good and harks back to the excellent 2^nd season of McGann & Charley audios, ends with Charley marooned in the distant future and the Eighth Doctor suffering from amnesia, forgetting all but the first five minutes of the play and assuming that Charley has buggered off and left him. Sadly the play ends with Charley being rescued by...

Colin Baker's Doctor.

Yup – somehow Miss Pollard now travels with the Sixth Doctor, trying to pretend she's never seen a TARDIS or travelled in time with such great bluffs as "Why don't you use the scanner or... err..."

Somehow the Sixth Doctor (whose TV persona I loathe, though in all fairness his audios are very, very good) is going to forget this Miss Pollard, making it a bit pointless. I'm personally not in favour of diluting McGann's seasons by moving his companion into Colin Baker's era. It seems a little fanwanky. However Big Finish seem to be very loathe to let the actress who plays Charley go. I guess they like her a lot. Despite listening to and enjoying Baker and Pollard's first outing I think they're eeking the Pollard character too much. There's even a near identical sister in one of the spinoffs for frick's sake!

Meanwhile it's time for a new season of Eighth Doctor adventures. Not with Charley Pollard (thank gawd) but with brash Blackpool lass Lucie Miller, played by Sheridan Smith (that girl off Two Pints of Lager).

Dead London is an interesting idea – a maze of interlocked chunks of London (where else) from various time periods – Roman, Blitz and of course 2008. This is something the new series has not done yet – an episode that spans multiple time periods in any great depth. It features the bloke who plays Lord Ashfordly from Heartbeat playing many many characters. It's pretty good.

It's not as good as Max Warp though. It's a Top Gear rip-off, with Max Warp being a suspiciously similar show presented by a Clarksonesque misogonist, "Timbo the Ferret" who is no way a riff on Hammond the Hamster, and the boring third guy who is voiced by the guy off the old Rory Bremner show that wasn't Bremner or the one with the goggle eyes. While showing off the new Kith spaceship, Hammond – sorry Timbo has a terrible accident that is a little close to the knuckle and appears to have died. This is bad as the Kith and humans have recently been at war and one side is keen to accuse the other of starting trouble. The Kith are a sponge like race with Somerset accents voiced by the guy who was Little John in that classic movie Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. Add in a president advised by a spin-droid, an Agatha Christie style murder mystery and some good one-liners and it is quite fun.

As you might have guessed it's not the most serious Doctor Who story.

Brave New Town is an interesting idea – a village of Auton people being used by the Soviets during the Cold War to train for infiltrating the UK. Only it's 2008 and no-one's told the Autons that are trapped in 1991 listening to Bryan Ferry. Sadly not as fun as the previous two it does however feature the image of the Eighth Doctor rescuing people in a double decker bus.

Blogging from Microsoft Word 2007

2008-04-14T13:26:00.001+01:00

Apparently Microsoft Word 2007 does blogging. I'm not convinced but I want to see if this works before nipping out to lunch.

Semi-regular bloggage to resume at some point in the not too distant future.

Sweet!

2007-12-19T00:53:00.001Z

News just in...

Director Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc said on Tuesday they have agreed to make two movies based on the book "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien, ending months of legal wrangling.

Jackson, the director of the smash hit "Lord of the Rings" movies, and producer Fran Walsh will executive produce both a "Hobbit" movie and a sequel, but no decision has been made about who will direct the films, Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, co-chairmen and co-CEOs of New Line told Reuters.

I'd say squee but that would be hideously inappropriate.

Darth Vader in Love

2007-12-01T01:01:00.001Z

This is awesome...

Oh Puleeeze God No!!!

2007-11-27T21:56:00.001Z

Peas and rice! As if Catherine Tate's return wasn't bad enough. One companion too many will be back for the new series of Dr. Who methinks!

Actress Billie Piper is to return to Doctor Who, the BBC has confirmed.

She will star in three episodes of the sci-fi drama, reprising her role as the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler.

Rose's return will mean the Doctor has three assistants in next year's series - Donna, played by Catherine Tate, and Freema Agyeman as Martha.

And Captain Jack no doubt. The Tardis is going to be crowded - and I suspect this is going to be Tennant's last season.

Sci-Fi Reviews

2007-11-25T23:21:00.000Z

Still recuperating I'm afraid, but enough time for a blog post on some internet TV I've been watching (Yes! I have internet again and can watch TV again for the most part. Yippee!)

Star Trek: New Voyages has released a new episode. It's called "The World Enough and Time". The crux of this is that in a freak transporter accident young Sulu is aged 40 years or so and is then played by George Takei for the remainder of the episode. This is pretty cool, but unfortunately the previous episode featured young Chekov contracting an aging virus and ages into Walter Koenig. Not that the original series didn't rehash concepts in rapid succession, the Menagerie and Court Martial occurred in rapid succession as if suspiciously using the same court set they'd obviously spent some dollar that needed a return.

Anyroads at over 60 minutes this is pretty good -- it's better than the Chekov episode simply because they killed Chekov off with his rapid aging and for some inexplicable reason he's as young as ever and alive in the next episode.

You can watch it here with Flash. I must confess to misgivings over the preview for the next episode.

I've also seen Babylon 5: Lost Tales finally.

The problem with previous Babylon 5 spinoffs is they've had a different feel to the original series (IMHO good in the case of Crusade, bad in the case of the Legend of the Rangers). Even more-so is the fact that each spinoff has from the word go had an "epic" premise. In Crusade it was a 5 year mission for a cure to Earth's plague. In Legend of the Rangers it was the Hand, a race more powerful apparently than the Shadows (who were supposed to be the most powerful and the last of the First Ones). This meant that when Crusade was cancelled and Legend of the Rangers failed to merit a series (quite rightfully, as I recall it was awful) this left a massive unresolved backstory in the B5 universe.

With the Lost Tales JMS has obviously learned from this mistake. The first Lost Tales is unabashedly small-scale in stature, with the first story relating to a demon aboard Babylon 5 while the second story relates to a Dead Zone-esque moral quandry in the vein of the old "if you knew Hitler as a boy and saw his future would you kill him?" Both stories are roughly 35 minutes in length -- shorter than an episode of the B5 series.

Not a lot of money was spent on this project. A lot of the sets are pure CGI. The first story features literally 3 characters - Colonel Lochley, a character introduced in Season 5 of B5 and carried over into Crusade that JMS obviously likes even though she's a poor man's Ivonova (she was left in charge of B5 at the end of the original series though, so her involvement isn't exactly inappropriate), the older gentlemen from "7 Days" as a very convincing and refreshingly wise and witty Catholic priest and a possessed man. The second story has 5 characters - President Sheridan, Galen (a very cool character from Crusade that JMS is taken with), a reporter, a Centauri Prince and Lochley briefly.

Very small scale, but ultimately entertaining. The writing is stellar, the dialogue witty and there are seeds for a larger plotline in there somewhere. There's also tributes to G'Kar and Dr. Franklin's actors who died in recent years.

If Lost Tales goes the way of Legend of the Rangers then I'll be disappointed - I hope there's more of these to come.

Dragonlance The Movie Trailer

2007-11-13T00:43:00.001Z

The trailer for the new Dragonlance movie that's coming out in 2008 is here. If you're not in the know Dragonlance is the Dungeons and Dragons book range answer to the Lord of the Rings. This is the first in what will presumably be 3 animated movies. My impressions are the animation looks akin to the old D&D cartoon, except for the way-too jarringly different CGI for the dragons. But I'll see it - the story is pretty good.

Lucy Lawless (Xena) is playing Goldmoon, a character who largely becomes irrelevant after the first story, while Kiefer Sutherland plays Raistlin, a character who becomes increasingly important in the first books, and the focus of the second trilogy. Michael Rosenbaum is doing Tanis's voice which means, given how he voiced the Flash in JLU, Tanis probably speaks with a strong US accent. Hmmm...

Fear of Girls 2

2007-11-11T23:57:00.000Z

They've made a sequel to Fear of Girls, which looks very very amusing. There's only a trailer so far...

Needless to say the movie is a bit unrealistic. I mean 3 female roleplayers? A gaming table where there's more girls than men? As if... :)

Oh and here's the first video in case you've no idea what I'm wittering on about

Need Translation Work

2007-11-11T23:47:00.000Z

This film is a stroke of genius, Like-Fox!

Bus Pirates Return

2007-11-09T23:44:00.000Z

Arr, there be 2 new episodes of Bus Pirates on the fine ship YouTube:-

A Study in Emerald

2007-11-07T23:05:00.000Z

Watching TV's been difficult for a while, so I've been listening to a lot of audio drama. I listened recently to a Neil Gaiman short story called "A Study In Emerald". It's part of an anthology of HP Lovecraft meets Sherlock Holmes stories called "Shadows over Baker Street", a book I intend on buying at some point when I start earning money for unnecessary things like books, food and petrol.

Anyroads Neil Gaman made the short story available on his website here. It parallels the original Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, where Holmes meets Watson. Obviously Study in Emerald is somewhat different, but if you don't understand it (and you need to be up on your Holmes-mythos more than your Cthulhu) the Wikipedia page explains everything here.

By the way, does anyone think Neil Gaiman looks like David Schwimmer (Ross from Friends). I just don't see it, but my esteemed colleague, Dr. Steve thinks otherwise... you decide...

More McGann

2007-11-07T01:49:00.000Z

I've finally got round to listening to the rest of the Paul McGann plays as I rest up. It has to be said that a lot of the radio play blurbs sounded a little dull and out there in the 8th Doctor, Charley and dull-as-dish-water C'Rizz range. I was surprised that they were at worst average.

Time Works - the TARDIS materialises in a place where the people are virtually slaves to a race of clockwork men that exist out of phase with time and effectively eliminate those workers whose usefulness is at and end. The doctor gets puts in prison immediately... something that happens a lot in all these audios... Decidedly meh.

Something Inside - the Tardis materialises in the Cube, a prison for psychics that resembles the Cube from the movie the Cube. They get chased by something called the Brainworm. Surprisingly more compelling that the crap synopsis I have just given - I really expected this to be rubbish, but it wasn't. It's good.

Memory Lane - the TARDIS materialises in a prison that takes the form of a 1980s suburban street that stretches forever, with an ice cream van that swiftly steals the TARDIS and where every house houses an old lady watching the snooker and her inexplicably child-like adult grandson. C'Rizz is actually useful in this one. It's very good.

Absolution - this one is as I expected, bye-bye C'Rizz. Charley accidentally unleashes all the souls C'Rizz has been carrying around with him, hurtling the TARDIS into some sort of purgatory world of lost souls (yup, you could argue it's a prison again). C'Rizz then proceeds to become all-powerful, go bananas (much like he did in a couple of other stories) and kill a lot of people before the Doctor persuades him to stop and commit suicide. And this upsets Charley into leaving. It's okay, and presumably sets up Charley's final story.

As I've said before I think C'Rizz is as dull as dishwater as a chameleonic humanoid in an audio drama. The actor's voice never sounded particularly alien and he had a slight penchant for seeming shifty and untrustworthy. As to Charley, considering she has been a companion for 28 stories, it's also time for her to leave.

It's worth noting another season of McGann stories featuring Sheridan Smith have been commissioned - Dead London, Max Warp, Brave New Town, The Skull of Sobek (sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons module), Grand Theft Cosmos (a brilliant name but doubtless not involve the TARDIS shooting pimps and prostitutes), The Zygon Who Fell To Earth (a sequel to the Horror of Glam Rock) and a 2 parter called Kidnapped / Vengeance. Unlike before they'll be going on to CD before BBC 7 get their hands on them.

Ideas Move at the Speed of Time

2007-11-01T00:40:00.000Z

This commercial they made on the show is why I love the US version of the Office.

Politically correct it is not. (now fixed to actually play the movie)

And Now A Real Life Post

2007-10-29T14:34:00.000Z

You're probably wondering why this blog has been so quiet lately?

Well, there's been a few changes. A lot in fact of late. I was diagnosed with a fairly serious debilitating illness. I decided I wasn't going to post on my blog until I was better, but 4 months on I'm still feeling a little poorly, off work, and rather bored. It's not life-threatening, but it is sufficiently serious that I'm still not 100%. To reassure y'all I'm certainly a lot better than I was. If you're really desperate to know more, get in touch, I won't be posting specifics here for a while at least.

I will now try to resume normal bloggage.

RTD's Latest Brainwave

2007-07-05T13:12:00.001+01:00

OH DEAR GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! She was fine for 1 episode, but please no more!!

Catherine Tate accepts proposal to star in fourth series.

Catherine Tate is set to return to the TARDIS for the complete 13 week run of Series Four of Doctor Who.

Award winning comedian Tate will reprise her role as Donna, the runaway bride from last year's Christmas special, despite turning down the Doctor's invitation to travel with him at the end of that adventure.

When Catherine was asked if she would like to become The Doctor's new companion at the press screening of The Runaway Bride, she replied, "I would love to, but no one has asked!" Well, now they have.

"Catherine was an absolute star in The Runaway Bride and we are delighted that one of Britain's greatest talents has agreed to join us for the fourth series," announced Doctor Who's executive producer and head writer, Russell T Davies. "Viewers can expect more ambitious storylines and a whole host of guest stars in 2008."

Catherine Tate added : "I am delighted to be returning to Doctor Who. I had a blast last Christmas and look forward to travelling again through time and space with that nice man from Gallifrey."

Freema Agyeman who has played Martha Jones, The Doctor's companion throughout the critically acclaimed third series, will return to the show to join The Doctor and Donna mid series.

(Martha will appear in Torchwood for 3 episodes, no doubt to "experiment" with her sexuality and possibly even release a mass-murdering monster on the public).

Vengeance Competition

2007-07-03T13:12:00.001+01:00

I appear to have won an autographed DVD of Highlander: Vengeance. This is nice as I don't usually win things in competitions, I don't have this film on DVD and it's actually not that bad a movie.

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who

2007-07-01T20:38:00.001+01:00

Blogging at home in Dundee. RL postings to resume this month - honest!

Season 3 of Dr. Who has been amazing, but again the drag factor of having RTD write the end of season finale has lowered the quality of what has been without a doubt the best season so far.

Utopia started out as a so-so episode, slightly better than Gridlock. It seemed to be a loveletter to Captain Jack, who is of course utterly amazing and can charm all species/genders just by saying hello. I've never been that taken with Jack as I've always felt he's pushed a personal agenda in Dr. Who for RTD that really wasn't within the scope of the original show. Plus there really wasn't much for him to do in the 3-parter other than fix an engine, provide the Doctor's hand and transport to 2007.

Not that I object entirely to Jack, I like the character but am not so sure about liking the "message" behind him. He does get some good lines with the Doctor. There were also references to Torchwood (laughably setup by Jack to honour the Doctor, but as we know a club for sexually deviant weirdos). The Master distracted them with a wild goose-chase (probably by simply organising an orgy being held in Cardiff centre).

Utopia was saved by Derek Jacobi rather nicely switching from the wonderfully Cadfaelesque Professor into the Master. Played with a real sinister gleam, Jacobi casually murdered his best friend and stole the Tardis, but not before being forced to regenerate into John Simm.

I was hoping for a mass-murdering Sam Tyler, a silent, lonely renegade. Unfortunately I expected the Mayor from Buffy. John Simm delivered campness, and naturally was forced to travel to London, 2007, to begin his rather mundane plot for world domination, complete with tacky pop music soundtrack. And they complained about the Master in the McGann movie?

Anyroads, part 1 was good (especially the end), part 2 was so-so and could've setup a promising part 3. Part 3 was a mish-mash of as many sci-fi cliches as could be found. To wit I present the following graphical representation of the 3rd part of the Master story I nicked from Outpost Gallifrey:-

(Yes - 1 year later the Master has decided not to kill any of the Joneses or the Doctor)

Originality is not RTD's suit. It might also be nice to have a finale without a reset button of some sort (Rose's powers, the vortex suction thingy, the paradox) some impact - not emotional impact but rather some sort of change to the cozy 2007 Earth we live in where Cybermen, Daleks and starships are all acknowledged by the public but seems to cause little dissimilarity to our own "real world".

Last of the Timelords could've been amazing. It could've been the Master trying to use the paradox machine to rebuild Gallifrey, or a battle starting on Earth and raging across time and space. Instead what we got was entertaining but a whimper compared to the bang of the season.

Epilogues and Interludes

2007-06-18T16:24:00.000+01:00

So, long time no blog. There is a reason why. I've been ill.

I've left Leicester Uni now and am now a researcher at DMU. It's a bit of a culture shock (though see below again). The office I share is akin to the one in Leicester - out of the way, away from the academics and a little cluttered. Everyone seems really cool. It is pretty convenient if I need to buy something in town in a rush..

Anyroads, back in late May I had a nice series of leaving events. I spent my last week or so in the Loaded Dog shooting pool with the guys or in the Redfearn when not packing or wrapping things up nicely. The staff at Leicester Uni signed a card and got me a bike as a leaving present - which will be handy for commuting between sites. I shall have a picture of them all assembling it here shortly.

The saddle (still) needs adjusting as no sooner did I triumphantly cycle away from the department than it tried to tilt to a rather odd and uncomfortable wedgee-inducing angle in the middle of Victoria Park. No Stuarts were permenantly harmed or rendered infertile in the making of this anecdote.

As to my arrival at DMU (a day early, I was being paid by Leicester Uni and yet attending this day as it was the last one the expert could attend) I had a fairly intense training session on the code of the package I will be developing, going from 9am-6pm and followed by a curry and drinking, meaning it was 9:30pm by the time I got home.

Unfortunately since then my stomach and various other things have decided to throw a nervous reaction to my change in working environment. I was my usual Jedi-like cool but began to notice that my first week of work was spent half-asleep at best (I even forgot my contract on the first day after having left it out the night before to slip into my bed), going to bed at 11pm and waking up around 5am exhausted. My second week saw me have to take a day off work to try and finally shake this off. I looked so bad the doc gave me sleeping pills, which I'm sure are not actually helping as rather than feeling tired from not sleeping I felt drowsy. For example I had to leave the pub yesterday at 6pm as I was falling asleep.

Not fun. Still haven't really had a decent 8 hours kip since the end of May, but I am starting to feel better.

Anyroads, while all this was going on the nice chaps at Leicester Uni took me for a leaving meal at El Apperativo (which alas Claudia is not as good as La Tosca IMHO). I gleaned several pieces of information on things in Charles Wilson 303 post-Stu.

There's a possibility I will hopefully still be occasionally poking around Leicester Uni next year teaching Information Management (i.e. Word and Excel) part-time.

So other than sucky health problems, a total lack of sleep and generally being a bit irritable things are going well.

Dr. Stu returns from the void to talk about Dr. Who

2007-06-08T13:04:00.001+01:00

Expect a deluge of bloggage shortly.

For now I'd like to say Human Nature was without a doubt the best Tennant-story yet for me. From the sketchings of all 10 incarnations of the doctor, the cricket ball, the epic and yet non-violent ways of dealing with the evil-doers and the fact for once the historical period was not white-washed BBC PC-land really worked for me. Finally someone was rather rottenly racist to Martha who gave as good as she got (albeit when said pompous schoolboy had exited scene-left).

I still have a hard time envisioning the original 7th Doctor novel, with Sylvester McCoy playing tongue-hockey to the Jessica Hynes character. McCoy's doctor was not a lady's doctor thankfully. Nonetheless this romance worked far more than the one in the Girl in the Fireplace. Mind you in my book a courtesan is a courtesan, not some glamorous role model.

Overall this season has been an improvement on the last. It's more science-fiction than soap this year. Martha's family (especially her mother) seem more integral to the plot than Jackie, pizza, chips and her quest to grab a bloke ever were. And they're far less irritating - the mother's fear and loathing of the Doctor are pretty understandable. Doubtless they're going to pull out the footage of the Doctor killing a pretty similar looking girl to Martha at some point - according to Martha's myspace account her mother was pretty upset when the cousin died in Doomsday.

This season the Doctor has seemed more vulnerable and the various challenges have taken him to the edge. In short, he's scared, which is good. In Season 2 he and Rose swanned about various places, wise-cracking while people were savaged by werewolves and like, seemingly unphased by anything (except possibly in the Impossible Planet but that contained the cringe-worthy bit at the start where they burst out laughing at the possibility of immediately fleeing in the Tardis) and always getting off scott-free. Let's be honest, Doomsday wasn't really a suitable payback for their cockiness.

End of Days

2007-05-29T19:08:00.000+01:00

So tomorrow is my last day at work for the University of Leicester. It's actually a little sad, especially considering it's been 2 years, 2 months, and 16 days since I started work there. Yes - blogging and B. help you remember the exact dates. Today was the last day I'd see A. as he is off chasing a new job.

One of my coworkers is leaving, his contract coming to an end and bizarrely not being renewed. I'll let you guess which one it isn't (hint: not the one they should get rid of). Even crazier is B. is going to get his own office (damn did I spoil my brain tease), or rather a different office, further away from the students as he might actually snap properly if he interacts with them on a full-time basis and has to come out of his corner.

I've read my papers and though there's plenty I don't understand about water networks I feel somewhat confident about the job, though time will tell. It's going to be weird, but hopefully it's going to be worth it.

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who

2007-05-27T02:18:00.001+01:00

All I have to say so far is, this new 2 parter is so cool, and we likesie this...

Movie Round-up #2

2007-05-23T00:05:00.000+01:00

So I finally got to see Highlander: The Search For Vengeance, a film with a subtitle even worse than Highlander: The Source. This is the story of another Macleod, Colin, and is in a separate continuity to the movies and TV show. So no Duncan, Connor, Methos, Ramirez or whatever. What we do have is Colin Macleod, an immortal who is a bit grumpy because about 2000 years ago his wife was killed by the head of the invading Romans, Marcus Octavius.

Colin has spent the ensuring 2000 years or so chasing Marcus, always getting close but ultimately failing. His quest for vengeance has taken him to Rome, Feudal Japan, Trafalgar, the Battle of Britain, all of which show his disastrous attempts at chasing after his nemesis. In the meantime Marcus has quested for perfection, mastering art, music and craft. He's still evil, but he's a very refined and cultured type of evil, an opposite to the Kurgan. He even questions whether Macleod has wasted his immortality while he has tried to rebuild and move on. Unfortunately this 3rd dimension to his persona is discarded in the final act.

Colin becomes a highlander eventually when he is adopted by the Macleods when he fights at their side. Octavius was working for the English. The ensuing brief flashback in the Highlands is reminiscent of the original film - bad guy is a black knight on horseback, there's a battle, our hero "dies", comes back from beyond the graves and is banished from the clan by a benevolent elder. The only difference is his girl, Debra, does not hate him for resurrecting and wants to come with him. Debra is in fact the reincarnation of his wife Moya from his first death.

When not flashing back we are in the 22nd century where society has collapsed. There are cannibals (much like in the Source but handled a little more convincingly) and people live in giant walled metal cities patrolled with spider robots, ruled over by tyrants. Marcus is one of those tyrants and he rules by over a virus infested New York that cows down to him in fear. Colin gets the chance to side with the resistance (led by a suspiciously familar prostitute who is the reincarnation of his dead wife again), but it may be his desire for vengeance will work against the resistence.

It doesn't all work - there's a spirit following Colin, Amergan, that talks to him through electrical signals and animals. It works as a Ramirez type figure (explaining the concept of immortals etc.) but there's little explanation for Amergan being around. Was he immortal? Is he there to only guide Colin? Is he setup for a sequel? Who knows Highlander? Who knows?

I haven't watched much anime, except Akira and Ghost in the Shell but neither of those really worked for me. However because of the funkiness of this movie I will most assuredly be checking out Ninja Scrolls.

Next time: More Christopher Lambert

An Interesting Find

2007-05-22T16:11:00.000+01:00

Trawling through the net I've found a website selling interesting looking Call of Cthulhu movies - Rough Magik, which is an abandoned BBC pilot for a series starring Paul Darrow that sounds like Cthulhu meets Ultraviolet, Out Of Mind (featuring also an adaptation of the story Music of Erich Zann, not the actual music itself which causes insanity and thus not the best choice for a movie soundtrack) and Pickman's Model. They also have Cool Air but I've seen this story adapted already in the movie Necronomicon and it's not one of H.P. Lovecraft's better ones.

Stuff I Like: Turrican 2

2007-05-21T20:28:00.001+01:00

Okay, it's well documented on this blog that I owned a Commodore 64 and from it inherited a deathly phobia of giant worms that burrow out of the ground. I should point out I am dealing with this phobia - I now own Forbidden Forest 3D for the PC and there is nary a worm in sight. Ironically it's two giant acid spitting serpents that keep sealing my doom, but that's another story for another day.

My family were fairly loyal to Commodore. We had a VIC-20 in the loft, a C64, and umpteen Amigas because basically my brother and I couldn't share one between the two of us. Of all the games I acquired for the Amiga Turrican 2 is one of the two games that I still dust off and play with WinUAE (the Amiga emulator). I'll post about the other one, but Alex might be able to guess what it is...

The basic plot of all the Turrican is that you are a guy who gets into a powersuit and goes off to kill mutants because they killed your chums. It's a multi-directional 2D platformer in the old school fashion - you kill monsters, grab powerups and choose from an array of weapons to aid you in your quest. Repeat and rinse.

I didn't say it was deep.

Also at about the midway stage of the game you also find a space ship and fly around in a suspiciously R-Type-esque set of stages. Which are amongst the most pretty space levels I've ever seen.

Its fair to say Turrican 2 is a relatively superficial game - indeed what makes it in my mind so great is the graphics and the music which really pushed the envelope in terms of the Amiga's capabilities. I even bought the soundtrack to Turrican on CD a while back.

This review shows the main points of Turrican 2 with some annoying commentary and also in sheer randomness soundbytes of Bruce Campbell in it - which I suppose is worth some bonus points.

Turrican 1 is pretty much more of the same, but just doesn't feel as classicly polished as its sequel. Turrican 3 is a major disappointment and the fact it was developed first for the console makes it

Remakes are available here for the PC but in my not-so humble opinion nothing beats the original.

I Googled Me

2007-05-17T18:36:00.000+01:00

Typing "Stuart likes to" into google revealed the following pearls of wisdom:-

1. Stuart likes to consider himself the infra-structure of the band in terms of organisation, decision making, song writing, guitar playing, humour...

2. Stuart likes to mend things, he can gets angry when things don’t go his plans and really hates it when people intervene... (so true!)

3. Clients tend to want finished artwork in ten days, and Stuart likes to take a couple of weeks.

4. Stuart likes to work closely with his clients to understand what they’re looking for and to develop a mutual ... (I have a lot of clients).

5. Stuart likes to twist things around, adding in bluegrass flourishes and hints of mad, twangy rockabilly.

6. Stuart likes to spend as much time as possible on their small farm and enjoys biking, skiing, and horses. (I've a small farm? Cool)

7. Stuart likes to work from photographs, either from magazines or ones taken by himself.

8. Stuart likes to pretend that he is a musician. He plays electric bass and banjo (yes that’s right banjo).

9. Stuart likes to say I’ve known him since he became a Member. of the Bar, and, in fact that is correct. (Go Farmer Lawyer!)

10. Stuart likes to blog about:. stuart has not yet defined her blogs. >> stuart's Blogs. stuart is the (co-)author of the following blogs ...

So much I never knew about nyself.

Movie Roundup #1

2007-05-16T09:11:00.000+01:00

Mirrormask was brilliant. Reminiscent of Labyrinth (angst riddled teen girl who was played by a 21 year old actress I found to my relief) this involves an imaginative heroine who wants to escape her life in the circus and is transported to a bizarre realm where everyone wears masks and there is a mirror opposite to everything. She must rescue her mother, who has slipped into a coma, and return to the real world where her "opposite" has taken possession of her life.

Robert Llewellyn (Kryten from Red Dwarf) and Stephen Fry are in the cast (as is Ben Miller's doppleganger Rob Brydon). Very good fun, if a little too stylistic. I should also say that my test audience is very discerning and they liked it.

Day of Wrath was surprisingly good. It did feel like it had been editted with a sledgehammer (there were references to conversations that I must've blinked and missed etc.) but definitely a murder mystery in the vein of Brotherhood of the Wolf (minus the wolf and the kung-fu). Brian Blessed was in it a lot, though Christopher Lambert looked as haggard as he did in Highlander: Endgame. Given that he is a drunken sheriff locked in an unhappy marriage, not an immortal, he can get away with it.

Blake's 7 Remake

2007-05-15T14:03:00.000+01:00

The new Blake 7 Audio is being streamed on the Sci-Fi website, which is a bit of an odd way to distribute a radio drama on a BBC franchise, but hey-ho. Never really got into B7 - though I watched a reasonable chunk of the first season. Plan on giving this a whirl though.

Stuart's Blog

Fiction Snob

Stuff I've Been Reading: George R.R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Noblesse Oblige

Masque of the Red Death Thoughts

Random Musings on Horror in Broughty Ferry

Thoughts on Twitrelief and Celebrities

A Rare Politics Post

No2AV Video

Yes2AV Video

Demon Quest: Not So Good

Here Be Spoilers!Turn back if ye be not wishing to be spoiled

Squatting on the Window Ledge

Yup, it's not official...

He's Back and It's About Clothes.

Star Trek Sequel Amusement

Elite Space Ship to Crash in Dundee in 2014.

Paladins

Situation Vacant (Spoilers)

Spoilers... Stop Reading Lest Ye Be Spoiled

You Spoony Bard!

My New Pride and Joy

Now the Power Is In My Hands

More Screenies

Dr Stu on the New Dr Who

Some Promo Images

HP Lovecraft's Insomnia

Newest Batch of Renders...

McGann's TARDIS Rocked

This Week's Renders

Meanwhile Inside The Gothic TARDIS

And now...

Computer Game Project Update

More Game Mucking Around...

Evolution of a 3D Model Part 2

Couple of More Models

Babylon 5 Viewing

Evolution of a 3D Model

More Adventure Game Mucking Around

Mincing About

Dr. Stu on Doctor Who End of Time 2

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who: End of Time Part 1 (long)

Mother of All Spoileryness Warning for End of Time Part One

Dr. Stu on Dr. Who

Let's Play Ultima V Lazarus - Warriors of Destiny

Fistful of Audios: Hornet's Nest 1

The 100 Best Computer Games Ever?

What's missing?

Return of Tom Baker to Doctor Who

Ultima: My New Project (2)

Highlander Audios

Ultima: My New Project

Guess Who Avoids B&W Films?

Stuff I've Been Reading 2: Chaosium Cycles

York

Lovecraft on YouTube

New Lord of the Rings Movie Online!

Stuff I've Been Reading 1: Robert E. Howard's Horror

Inalienable

Site Migration... Sometime Soon!

Doctor Stu on Doctor Who

Orbis

xkcd is real!

It is Happening Again...

They Bleed Me Dry...

Literally Raising the Dead

The Actor We Need Right Now...

A Rant About Drizzt

By Crom a Good Read!

Lynching Jedi

PhD: The Comic

Dramatic Chipmunk

Star Wars Deleted Scenes

I didn't expect to ever see this...

That Show I Like Comes Back in Style

Lost Interest Galactica

Disturbing

The Problem with Susan

Die Ticket Man, Die!

Dr. Stu on Torchwood

Here Be Spoilers!
Turn back if ye be not wishing to be spoiled

Spoilers...

Stop Reading

Lest Ye Be Spoiled