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I thought that series would have been improved hugely by the cast employing 'Allo 'Allo style French accents throughout.

Another good mini-article Colin and a spirited defence of latter Bad Company!

For my money Bad Company, like Star Wars, started off with a perfect couple of installments and then gradually messed itself up to its own detriment.

I loathed Hinterkind. Copra, however, is great. Looking forward to hearing about stuff I don't know!

Squid Bits RULES. My brother often sends me this from his kids copy of the Phoenix. Delighted and surprised to find it on this list.

His children love this and this kind of humour. Without wanting to do another '40 something bloke says how Regened should be', I always see this kind of stuff go over so well with children and I thought a page of little weird jokes like this would have been worth a punt.

Great choice Colin!

Lets Knife, Lovely Boy!

<Shakin Stevens plays, drop begins>

What Funt said, basically.

At my first Lawless I bottled talking to Jim!

It'll be awesome to meet you Fink.

As McFad says staying at the Hilton is great if you can as its so convenient, especially if you plan on buying anything. I think there's a Novotel and  Holiday Inn within easy walking distance too.
Traffic is Bristol is pretty awful, so if you're coming down on the day, make an early start: last year I missed the first couple of hours more or less due to that.

They're going to stay true to the original — they'll keep churning out films until the franchise has completely run out of steam, then they'll do a gritty reboot, then they'll try and mash the gritty reboot into the original continuity until no one either knows or cares what the hell is going on...

I'd like to see the traitor general escape too, although I'd be surprised (and pleased) if there's a sequel. The best ending for me is Rogue heading off into the Warzone like David Carridane in Kung Fu / The Littlest Hobo in search of a new general-hunting adventure.

And if its Welsh Rogue Trooper, I'm devastated we missed the chance to have Windsor Davies as Major Magnum.

Thank you guys! Not my favourite book but was one of my favourite write ups I think!

I take notes as I go, do my conclusion as soon as I finish, and then go back and convert the playthrough into something legible. Bit long winded but it keeps a middle-aged man occupied.

That's a good shout: take Thistlebone out, and the other non-Dredd stories felt much more like something my nephew and niece would enjoy in a sci-fi comic. That fits more my definition of 'all ages'.

Two worthy winners. I don't think you can really mix the Prog / Meg votes for a best overall due to various factors, but appreciate the effort running this.

I didn't vote on the Meg poll as I only bought half the issues last year, but Risk Assessment was incredible.

This is fantastic! McFad, you're a wonder with these.

So I groaned inwardly when I saw this was another Luke Sharp book and overall I wasn't very impressed with this one: although it's better than Star Strider and Chasms of Malice, it wasn't as good as Daggers of Darkness. It's not a crap book, it's just a bit... meh. Even the title and cover artwork are a bit uninspiring and I'm fairly sure I'll have forgotten 90% of this within a few months.

The story moves from encounter to encounter with rapid pace, which means it crams in a lot of interesting ideas but also is part of the problem, and the whole thing just doesn't hang together well. It doesn't help that his prose is quite curt and there's more than a few occasions where you're doing something and then 'suddenly orcs jump off the roof' or 'suddenly a bird takes the document out your hands'. It's a bit like playing D&D with a younger sibling who feels the need to jazz things up every 5 minutes: the story leaps about so much that it feels like nothing really makes sense. A good example is when I was captured by orcs who start arguing, then 'suddenly' a 'figure' appears in a chariot and tries to capture me, and when I beat the test the figure 'sat down exhausted' and then vanished and its onto the next bit. Who was the guy here? What happened to his chariot? It feels like a lot of ideas thrown at you at random, but so tersely described its's just a connection of 'this happens! That happens!' stuff hurled at you with almost no context.

The cube thing is a good idea, if abstract: however I had about 20 black cubes and only needed a handful and although I didn't have many white cubes it was pretty easy to offset this. The coded language thing on the other hand was a pain, it was annoying to have to keep flicking back to the image to decode things. The maze was also annoying until I figured it out (another image to have to keep flicking back to) - without the map it would have been a nightmare, because exits are listed as 'exit 1, exit 2' and so on rather than north, east, west etc. The mechanic to keep track of the walls falling seemed a bit pointless, as I never got anywhere near losing even half of the walls around Zamarra.

As with Luke Sharp FF there's a lot of 'choose x or y' bits with no context, often something fairly innocuous (twice I had to choose between two identical queues of people) than impacts things. There were also a lot of his favoured 'roll 2 dice to see how fast your horse and the other guys is' or 'roll to see how many rocks hit you' mechanics which personally I am not a fan of. One part had me test my luck three times in succession to dodge fireballs and failing all three (likely, as each luck test reduces your luck by one and there are quite a lot of luck tests) is auto death (the monster that fires the fireballs at you appears from nowhere, does this and then vanishes, another good example of what I didn't like about this one)

I also had a bit of issue with all the female characters being described as girls. A couple of times I aided warrior women from an attack and the text was all 'the girl' thanks you etc. I know it's an older book, but this annoyed me.

Art is by Dave Gallagher and it's a mixed bag: some images are very cool, others aren't the strongest. It's very old school fantasy art in nature (think early D&D etc) but when put against other FF art, it doesn't really impress. However.. the concept of finding the white cubes in the art is a really good one, and in some of the pictures these are very well hidden. Once you know what to look for this leads to you studying the images a bit more and therefore getting more out of it. This is one of the best uses of art I have encountered in a FF book.

Mainly negative then, but that said, the book does have a lot of quirky (if rushed) encounters and having had a couple of other attempts at it, there's no true path or shopping list and you can just meander your own way to the end without much worry - especially as its pretty easy with no really difficult battles although you do need a strong luck, or a potion of luck. My stamina was never in danger, despite regular losses, due to lots of provisions and restorative aid.
There being no 'big bad' is a bit anticlimactic but also kind of refreshing and it was quite a change to have a couple of paragraphs after I'd won before moving onto the classic paragraph 400. Also there is someone riding fangtigers again!

Overall a very quick book and not a memorable one. I've heard that the 40s are almost all excellent FF books so looking forward to getting into those next..

[Fangs of Fury]

Fangs of Fury

The plot is that your city, Zamarra, is under siege from the forces of Ostragoth the Grim (who doesn't appear in this book) and his wizard Jaxartes (who does). You're a generic rank and file soldier who has been volunteered to break out of the city and relight a magic fire in a volcano (The titular Fangs of Fury) that will power up some big dragon-shaped defensive weapons on Zamarra and defeat the besiegers. Zamarra has 14 walls and as well as the magic torch of relighting you're given a bracelet that will tell you when all 14 walls are broken through, at which point it will kill you. This is a weird touch as knowing the walls are down and everyone you know and love is dead should be enough for a game over condition and it feels like the killer bracelet would be better served if you were some kind of, say, captured master thief that might be better suited to sneaking out of the siege and into the volcano rather than some random mook who didn't even know what the mission was until the bracelet was on his wrist: it makes the rulers of Zamarra look pretty dumb for entrusting this mission to literally the first guy who stuck his hand up for a random task.

The city masters give you some black magic cubes and a pack of food and then you're straight down a tunnel and off you go. After wandering around in the tunnels for a bit I dug myself out by the coast where the enemy war fleet is at anchor. Some guy spots me and enlists me into moving a catapult, which I go along with so as not to get noticed before an orc takes me and some other conscripts off to load some prisoners onto some boats. I have to choose a boat, which is randomly leaky and sinks, but I swim to the other one (its the end for the prisoners in that boat, sadly) and we land at an island where prisoners are building siege weapons (not sure why this is not being done not on an island away from the fighting which will then necessitate shipping all the siege engines back to the mainland, but there you go. It meant there could be a boat bit!).

On the island I'm watching prisoners chop wood. One of them runs off but gets caught by a goblin: I intervene, kill the goblin, and then the prisoner runs off and nothing more is made of this. Instead I go back to the prisoners where an obvious monk guy is chopping wood like a madman. He asks me to join him in a clump of bushes where he tells me I'm the chosen torchbearer of prophecy and some other nonsense. He's a monk of XEN, which is a secret religion and saying its name means you must die in a year and a day (this seems a harsh religious stricture) which of course he tells me, dooming himself to some mysterious death. He says that Jaxartes the evil wizard is killing his order who guard the flames at the Fangs of Fury and I should look out for the Wazzari Silent Knights who are a bunch of knights sworn to silence and also part of this religion and can help me. Then some goblins appear and I charge off into the bushes without another thought.
(During this very strange interlude the monk also tells me that whenever I see an illustration in the book I should look for white cubes in it, and if I see any I can pick up D6 white cubes. More on this later.)

I run down some random paths in the wood until I find a shack with an old man in it who asks me to come in and then gives me a bowl of beans to eat which explode in my face and traps me in chains of smoke before some orcs jump off his roof, kill him and capture me. This sort of weirdness is par for the course with this book and all takes place in a single paragraph.

The orcs lead me off for a bit, then start dividing up some loot from the old mans hut. I easily get them to start fighting each other over unfair division of the spoils: they kill each other, then a wizard turns up in a magic chariot, tries to charm me back with a spell, then gives up  and vanishes and I run off again. WTF.
I then arrive at a port, stand in some random lines, board a ship but after several hours that ship is attacked by pirates, sinks, and I escape on a raft. That bit all happens in a single paragraph too (two if you include a sailor climbing onto my raft and attacking me for no reason)
Eventually I wash up on some land and enter a village where I take the time to chill on a bench and see a little girl walking past drop her bag of rice. I choose to help her pick it all up, she gives the rice to a waiting cart driver (who I assume did not help with the rice), runs into school, gets caned for being late, I run in and cut the teachers cane in half and then tell him why the girl was late: he apologises, then a trumpet sounds and everyone runs out. Yeah, this all happens in one paragraph too. If you're getting a bit sick of this series of random encounters where I don't have much agency, I was too at this point.

So anyway - the little girl is the ward of an elderly monk, who is a member of the Wazarri (but not a silent knight) who makes me play a dice game to see how enlightened I am. I end up moderately enlightened so he gives me access to the secret alphabet of the Wazarri (a bit like semaphore - it's shown in an illustration that I have to refer back to a LOT) and then as a bonus also tells me he follows XEN, guaranteeing his on death which is a shame as I already knew about that, before giving me some black cubes and sending me on my way!
I'm told there's evil riders on the roads so I head into the forest. Here the Wazarri alphabet comes in handy as there are some clues to the endless left or right choices I've been making at random, some of which give me some more black cubes. I'm then ambushed by a giant 2 headed fire breathing serpent. Given the choice of fight or flight I choose the latter and am able to run through the flames unharmed although one of my black cubes crumbles to dust as I do. The black cubes are anti-fire cubes! The serpent isn't mentioned again so presumably doesn't give chase.

Onwards through the forest I find a mound of earth with an inscribed block of stone on top and a neat little number puzzle, which I solve (its XEN related) and a ghost appears and tells me to follow the forest path North but not to cross the bridge and look for the warrior with the first of fire. Alright!
Unhelpfully the path choices are left, right and straight on. I assume I'm already going north and continue straight, which seems to be right as I reach the bridge, cross the stream and then spot a fist made of fire rising into the sky over a hill, so I charge over there and find a lady knight battling some Garks. I pile in and help, and she wordlessly thanks me (for she is of the non-speaking knights) and leads me through some secret paths to a hidden fort, surrounded by a ring of fire and beyond that, surrounded by an army of goblins and dark elves!

The knight (which the book refers to as 'the girl') takes me through the flames - which cooks a couple of opportunistic goblins who make a rush for it behind us -  and inside I'm dismayed to find there's only about half a dozen knights, some squires and children, all quite badly beat up. Thankfully the squires aren't sworn to silence so after telling me I'm the chosen one etc one leads me to the head knight, who is sitting in the middle of three chairs and indicates I should sit in one. I must have missed the clue to this (if there is one) but I choose one at random and he is pleased because I'm told I've fulfilled the prophecy of Te-Okin and now get to look at a map of some catacombs (this is another page I need to refer back to a lot) with some odd symbols on it that will apparently lead me to the Fangs of Fury.  I'm then given some food and led out and told to go to a nearby flat topped mountain. Sadly I don't have 'elf wings' when the text prompts me (I am disappointed to have missed this!) and so have an arduous climb up. At the top, the mountain has three large holes in it forming the point of a triangle and I'm prompted to randomly jump down one. Ok.

This leads me into the catacomb part of the book. It's essentially a maze, with various chambers each containing wooden blocks of various shapes and some clues in Wazarri semaphore. It takes me some time to get my bearings, despite flicking back to the map illustration, but to cut a long story short I eventually manage to recover all the blocks I need and a key. I also find a room with some poorly described vials in it. I open one and some black mist rushes out and strangles me. GAME OVER.

I'm not impressed by this random Deathtrap-Dungeon-esque death and have not been enjoying the book enough to restart so I just flick back to a previous paragraph, don't open the vials and use the blocks to open a door to reveal the fangs of fury at last!
The fangs are described as five upraised teeth around a smoking volcanic centre. I'm also told that Jaxartes himself is here! I randomly follow a path into the volcano until some Wazzari text keeps me on the right track (at this point my elf wings would have melted in the heat, sad days). I collect some more black cubes and face the first tough fight of the game (A mage warrior of Jaxartes with Skill 8, but I'm at -2 skill as I don't have a wand sword. Luckily I have tons of provisions).
With that goon dispatched I enter a large chamber with seven entrances. 2 monks suddenly appear and ask how many white cubes I have, as that determines how enlightened I am (ok) and also which path I may take to the heart of the volcano. I don't have that many and have to go via door three, where I solve a pretty simple XEN-based puzzle and go through a door into the next bit of the volcano. Easy! More black cubes are needed here to avoid stamina damage but I have tons of these.

I then enter a tomb, where several monks are interred: scattered about them are the charred remains of Jaxartes mage warriors. An ape monster leaps out of a passage, says it is 'Grokkar, defender of the tombs of the dead' and shoots some fireballs at me. My black cubes do nothing here for some reason and its down to luck tests. I get blown up but don't die, Grokkar isn't mentioned again, off I go.
Finally, I reach the ornate entrance to the furnace: the centre of the mountain. Jaxartes is there, chuckling away, and the flame has been extinguished (this is presented as a big shock to me, even though it is the entire point of the quest). He makes an evildoer speech, grows to giant size and begins hurling sheets of fire at me. But wait! Suddenly a giant cube pops out of the ground with fifty locks on it. I've got a key with a number on it, so I put it into the lock (presumably not being burned up by Jaxartes). The flame rekindles and Jaxartes burns to death in a huge random anticlimax! Yay!

I collapse and when I awake I am in a cool room overlooking a green valley with a girl wiping my forehead. I ask where I am and she tells me I'm in the Wazarri monastery and gives me a crystal ball where I can see the 'fangs of fury' on the city walls turn into dragons and burn Ostragoths army to bits. The winner! The bracelet 'suddenly' (there are so many 'suddenly' moments in this book) turns from an explosive tag into a bracelet studded with precious stones! I then go back to the city and get promoted to commander in chief and all is well. THE END.

[Dredd]

What a great post by Tjm86 about this Prog! Mine arrived this morning and was swiftly read over a tea break.

Nice cover from Cliff, I found once I noticed the little rat, my eye is just drawn to him constantly.

Dredd continues to be superb. The real world parallels in the first few pages are evident and there's enough there to be reminding me that this a parody, it's close to the knuckle stuff. Hernandez isn't as clever as he thinks he is, Maitland is awesome. The Major Domo stuff is the least interesting bit of this story and that's saying something.
As ever, the art and all those little panels are fantastic.

3Thriller is off to a good start - there's enough here to catch my attention and make me want to know more. The dialogue establishes the tone and the art is bright and clear, looking good!

Full Tilt Boogie returns. I thought this was a strong opening: reintroduces the characters (and I appreciated Thargs 'previously..' panel inside the cover) and piques interest for what is up next. I'm not sure if its me, but this episode felt a little more 'grown up' than previous and I had less sense of reading a Regened graduate. I'm not a huge fan of the manga-influenced art as a rule but I liked this: facial expressions are very good, and that spread of the battleship being built is very cool. Good episode.

Enemy Earth I still find tricky to read due to the artwork but I think this would have been a perfect Regened story had that been a seperate publication.

Finally Thistlebone - first couple of pages seriously grim stuff, last page heavy with the foreboding - this does capture a horror atmosphere: as a reader no idea what is going to happen, only that it will be bad. Brilliant.