Terror From The Derp

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Not that I haven't had a few ideas for things to wibble on about, but other stuff has been consuming my time. Firstly of course there was all that business with my xbox profile getting hacked, which required me to replay ALL THE GAMES. And then, I'd no sooner finished reordering my activity history when the earth was invaded by aliens.

"Hey guys, what's happening here?"

Yeah, XCOM happened. It happened SO HARD.

Unlucky For Some

So, my xbox profile got hacked this week. I have no idea how. I'm hardly in the habit of giving out my passwords to all the thoroughly convincing unsolicited emails I receive on a daily basis. Although since most of them are from banks and services I've never dealt with in my life that's hardly surprising.

Lovely. Wonderful.

Indeed, I'm hardly what you'd call prolific or gregarious in terms of my online activity, generally preferring to sit on my own on the corner ranting about the Myrka and giggling quietly. Nevertheless somehow I got targeted by T3H L33T HAX0RZ CR3W.

Kermit Vorhees

It is perhaps one of the greatest testaments to the quality of Doctor Who that it can produce episodes full of terrible writing, awful monsters and gaping plot holes that are still hugely enjoyable and entertaining. With the obvious exception of Fear Her.

Fuck you, fuck your crayons and fuck your episode.

Indeed, I think one of the best things about Doctor Who is the way in which has encouraged me to consider stuff like story structure, pacing, direction and all those niggly little things that people like to talk about when they're trying to sound clever. This doesn't mean that the show gets a free pass, far from it. But as with anything you really love you're usually willing to put up with a bit more then you otherwise might. However, even all that said sometimes they'll do something stupid that just kinda gets to you.

The Angels Take Manhattan is one of those times.

Zirconium

I was looking forward to seeing The Power Of Three quite a bit. And not simply because it was a new episode of Doctor Who. No, the thing I liked best was that it was the episode about which I knew the least in advance.

All that came before had been fairly well advertised. Daleks in asylums, spaceships full of Dinosaurs, Wild West Cyborgs. Hell, even the next episode was shouting it's major details well in advance, what will all the angels and melodrama promised. But The Power Of Three never really gave anything away about what one might expect from the episode. Aside from the whole Doctor stuck in a domestic situation AGAIN thing anyway. What's good about this is that it means you have both some interesting mystery and less baggage in the way of preconceptions. I wasn't really sure what to expect.

So I REALLY didn't expect The Sontaran Experiment.

"Beep Beep."

Carbonara

Isn't technology wonderful? It's astounding that we live in an age where, even if we miss an episode of Doctor Who because we're far to busy swearing at the annoying boss fight at the end of Front Mission Evolved we can just press a magic button and watch it anyway, rather than punching ourselves repeatedly in the balls as punishment.

Which, to be fair, would probably be more entertaining than this bullshit.

So, how good was a Town Called mercy exactly? Quite good actually. Quite good indeed.

X & Violence Part 11: Press X Not To Care

I finally got around to preordering X-COM the other day, because what's the point in saving the earth if you can't look like Guile whilst doing?

It took a team of 100 scientists and engineers 3 months to construct this hair.

Thing is whilst I was in the shop I managed to pick up a few new games I have poor impulse control. And the first of these that I proceeded to actually play was Splatterhouse. Overall I'd say it was a fun if flawed game. As brawlers go it's not at all bad once it get's going, but there are these various issues which got me thinking. It has several instances of things which, in my humble opinion, break the rules of good game design. And I was thinking that perhaps what I should do is try to write up these nebulous concepts as a properly defined list of commandments.

And one day I will. But right now we're going to talk about Quick-Time events.

Having A Barney

I've thought for quite a while now that the new series of Doctor Who really should do a dinosaur episode at some point. After all, the BBC should already have access to plenty of CGI dinosaur models from their various documentary programs. And it's always seemed a bit odd that a show that go literally anywhere in space and time has basically avoided prehistoric earth for almost it's entire 50 year run.

There's no lizards so it doesn't count.

Imagine then my delight when it was announced that not only was there to be a dinosaur episode, but these dinosaurs would be on a spaceship. I mean, dinosaurs on a spaceship. Could you have a premise that was any MORE Doctor Who?

A Step Backwards (In Time)

The good news is that, after yet another interminable wait, Doctor Who is once more back on T.V.  The even better news is that means we can nitpick the hell out of it, and maybe start some crazy fan rumors that everyone is secretly the Myrka in disguise.

Now, I'd like to say that Asylum Of The Daleks is a blistering return to the series and an all time classic piece of Doctor Who. But since it's full of plot holes you can drive a Dalek battle fleet through and still leave plenty of room to fit a herd of obese Myrka I'm afraid I can't. Needless to say anything I say after this point may be considered a potential spoiler.

This Is How The World Ends

So, I finally managed to finish Magna Carta 2 last night. And after all that effort spent wading through the game the question I find myself faced with is do I trade the game? Or simply set it on fire so that no one else ever has to go through all that shit?

It is not a very good game. In fact it is actually a game that I would be inclined to label as OBJECTIVELY bad. Not this game is, in my personal opinion, not great. But just..... BAD.

It's a metaphor.