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I was straining to smile through the opening sequence, bit it got a lot better as it went on.  Loved the little nods to continuity, like Fry's dog, and heaping on time paradoxes was funny, too.  Best bit was when Lars said (NOT THAT YOU'LL KNOW IT, BUT IT'S STILL A SPOILER) "I've been waiting for you all my life" and I cottoned on to a twist that I wasn't even looking for.  Good fun.


I read somewhere that suits at the Fox company don't like Futurama because - unlike the Simpsons - Matt Groenig held onto the rights and controls the franchise.  Given a choice, they'd happily not have renewed the series in any form, but the dvd sales and repeat showings were doing too well (see also: Family Guy - which Futurama shamelessly steals a post-cancellation gag from in it's opening minutes).

Pretty decent on PS3.  Never played any of the others, but the South Park blokes hate it and that's recommendation enough for me.

I remember watching a dodgy movie based on those Left Behind books, and wondered why unbaptised babies weren't left behind with all the other 'sinners'.  And what happens to babies born after the Rapture?  Is the Rapture even a Christian concept in the first place?  
Like most sci-fi concepts, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and makes me wonder if fundamental christianity isn't just a large-scale equivalent of a UFO encounters group where everyone bands together in the belief that if they surround themselves with enough like-minded nutters, they won't look half as insane to casual observers.

Abrams neither wrote nor directed it, but that never stopped Tim Burton taking the credit for Nightmare Before Christmas...

The sequel idea that sounds most likely is the idea of someone else filming events concurrent to part one on their own camera/mobile phone, but continuing beyond the bombing of Central Park.  Possibly it could incorporate several different people experiencing (and filming) the same event from different viewpoints, so we get lots of split-screen moments.

There's no lingering shots of the monster until right near the end, when you see it getting carpet-bombed by Uncle Sam through the side window of a fleeing helicopter, and about two minutes from the end, there's a close-up on its head.
Apart from that, it's quite effective just glimpsing it between buildings and in the distance as a big shape - preferable, even.  I know it's fashionable to knock CGI, but there's a reason - 99 percent of it is shit.  It really is.  Good CGI is seamless and polished to perfection and you won't even notice it's there, but the less-polished stuff deserves every last bit of criticism it gets, and the Cloverfield tick-monsters that live on the big effer's back and jump off to terrorise army and civvies alike are good examples.  They're just unpolished enough to be seen as special effects instead of a tangible and scary threat, a bit like the zombies from Will Smith's I Am Legend.  They look fake, they're not scary, so they are 100 percent FAIL.

The rest of the film is alright.  I've certainly seen more offensive stuff that outstayed it's welcome a lot more than Cloverfield does, and the initial 20 minutes (the set-up at a bloke's going-away party) are probably essential since the whole thing is about characters caught up in larger events - I dare anyone with half a brain to miss some borderline-tasteless 911 visual references.
It's an okay entry in the giant monster genre, but  the tick monsters let the side down - Return Of Godzilla did much the same thing with a giant rubbery-woodlouse looking mofo, and came off much more scary.

You're being terribly selfish, Dudley.  You should be paying twice as much for half the content like everyone else.

Is this the same film that stole its finale from The Three Amigos?  V isn't a terrorist in that, he's a plain old superhero.
V For Vendetta is perfectly fine taken on the same level as something like Rush Hour - disposable popcorn-accompaniment - but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny as anything else.  It talks a better game than it plays.

"I dunno about that, the Transformers on last night was subtitled"

That'll be Masterforce.  They were showing the English dub of Headmasters last time I checked in on the channel, and were talking about doing subbed versions of some of the shows.

Yeah, they repeat stuff, but they show them in sequence - if you miss something, you have to check back in about 24 days or so before it's repeated.
Have they started showing the subtitled stuff yet?  I find it hard to sit through English-language anime these days, as the same five people droning on in that flat, lifeless manner (that seems propietary to dubbed anime) just eats away at the soul over time - they may only be voice actors, but surely they're still supposed to, y'know... *act*, or something?
The Transformers shows on AC are something else, though - they seem to be the shows that the Americans never licenced (probably because of the high human/robot bodycount), and it's almost like some English voiceover studio has been bunged a bit of beer-money to translate the shows on the quick so they can be shown on digital telly.  There's something oddly compelling about a show that has Soundwave as a cockney bouncer.
Planetes looks interesting, too, although it's funny to see that the one thing that people held up as being half-decent about Star Trek: Enterprise - the opening sequence - was ripped-off wholesale from a low-budget anime.  But what the hell - if stealing from Japanese animators and passing off their work as your own is good enough for Walt Disney, it's sure as hell good enough for  space-fascists in boiler suits.

Fishy - I'd be more sympathetic to that view if I didn't see a blue screen EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME I turn on my computer, and then have to sit through the load-up to make sure Vista doesn't automatically enter system repair and uninstall all my art software - which it's done on more than one occasion.

Microsoft has helped enable the development of advanced OS in the early days when they had competition as impetus, but they've latterly pushed out a cash-grab turd of a product onto a market that now offers little or no alternative to it thanks to their virtual monopoly.  I can't help but think if there was an alternative product offered by a rival company that actually did the fucking job it was supposed to, Vista would have been a lot better-developed and tested before it got within a mile of a shop, but now they have a virtual monopoly, MS can afford to push out a product for no other reason than it's been a few years since the last one and they want more money coming in.

"C64 FTW "

8P

Crazy tawk!  Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Tetris, the Darling Brothers and their shameless self-whoring, and not forgetting the generation of geeks who learned to program in their bedroom and created world-renowned games all on their ownsome that can charitably be described as 'shite' nowadays - all the result of the humble zx speccy, a machine with so small a memory that the average word document is five times larger than the machine could have handled.  On the flipside, the machine is probably also responsible for the career of Jane Goldman.

Although I did like the music from the Rambo game on C64...

Beta was too expensive to produce on an industrial scale for mass public consumption, so it went down the plughole.  See also: VHS once DVD came along - one costs 10p to make, the other a penny.  I can't imagine why the industry embraced the latter...

When PS2 first came out, there was a lot of complaints that it was "too hard to programme for", but as the machine aged and the industry realised "hard" was different from "impossible", and that it was their job to programme for the damn thing if they wanted paid, we started seeing better games come out - compare the first Timesplitters* game (hailed as a technical masterpiece at the time, but in reality it was as big a pile of shite then as it is now) to Timesplitters 3 or Black.
Xbox, on the other hand, didn't see a lot of technical progression in the complexity of it's games as time went on.  I'm not sure how this observation relates to 360, though - if at all.

The dvd player in the PS3 is quite high-end, too - there's a much crisper picture quality than my actual dvd player can manage during playback, although I do miss having a proper remote.

I heard (hopefully wrongly) the RPG-lite elements like the stat bars and character customisation are being sidelined for the new one.  Hope not, though.

On a similar San Andreas note - has anyone discovered how to activate the Iron Man challenge where you have to swim, run and cycle the whole GTA:SA map in a mad race against about 30 bots?  I found it once (in a quarry just south of the northwestern town on the top-right area of the map), but have never to get it to show up again since, and I'm beginning to doubt my memory.

I'm actually praying my 360 conks it so I can get it replaced with a more reliable version at Billy Gates' expense.  I do get the odd freeze and crash, or red-ring start, but no breakdown yet.  I'm not sure if I should be jealous of the fact that so many other messageboarders have had to get their consoles replaced or repaired already, but I am anyway.

Fishy - PS3 Ratchet and Clank, barring a longer draw-distance, is identical to the PS2 versions, from what i can see so far, so you're better off just buying those on the cheap.  I'm waiting for Jak 4, myself, as Jak 3 has yet to be topped as king of platformers (I refuse to play anything with Mario in it).