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Except it was a Schumacher era Bat-film and it didn't break-even at the box-office so it was a big loss for the studio; maybe not the toy company though.

It was a direct sequel to the Burton films, and he was still a producer.  I am also not sure about it making a loss as it pulled in double its production and marketing budget and at last count had made something like a quarter of a billion dollars.  It was not as profitable as expected, perhaps.

he hadn't been in a really good film in, quite literally, years. Junior, Eraser, Jingle All The Way, Batman & Robin, End of Days, The Sixth day, Collateral Damage, Terminator 3, Around The World in 80 Days...that is a hell of a run of mediocrity, to, in many cases, down right awfulness, right there.

Except that Batman and Robin was the best of the Burton era flicks.  Subjective, I will grant you, but the fact it made a couple of hundred million isn't.  I also liked the smaller scale and bummer ending of Terminator 3 a lot more than the bloated, padded, illogical and over-rated T2, and it made a good chunk of coin, too, as did most of Arnie's flicks that you mention.  He was still bankable, he just wasn't appearing in era-defining projects anymore.

Yea! blinkered views are great!

Indeed!  That's why I like to write letters to Tharg complaining about women being shown as capable.

[spoiler]that voice recording [/spoiler] one wouldn't never stand up in court!

It's probably not sensible to overthink these shows or you end up seeing racist conspiracies or something, but yes and no to this: it's not admissible if the coppers made the recording themselves without a warrant, but a criminal (Green Arrow) made it and it was retrieved in the process of police executing their duties compliant with the law as they pursued him, and if something is in plain sight at a crime scene, it's fair game as evidence.  In most cases a lawyer can claim statements made under duress are inadmissible, but that only applies if cops were responsible for the duress in order to extract testimony, otherwise police treat the duress itself as a separate crime, which in turn brings any product (testimony) of that crime into evidence.  In theory a recording could hold up in court... where it falls apart is chain of evidence - the copper just picks it up and listens to it.  He doesn't photograph it, bag it, tag the scene, etc - a lawyer can claim he fabricated the recorder and/or planted it.  I'll bet the writers are kicking themselves about that one!

There's a great scene in the latest episode where Deadshot has the names of all his victims tattooed on his chest - which will most certainly never come back to haunt him if he's ever banged up - and "Andrew Diggle" is one of them.  So basically in this show, Andy can get his name permanently tattooed upon the skin of the world's deadliest assassin, but he can't get it to appear under the words "based on an original story by".

I have lived almost all my life in Norn and I have never heard of that, Mikey, though it sounds like a Guy Fawkes more than a Halloween thing.

I must admit to being fascinated by the thought of an SBT Halloween considering the rest of the year is already taken up by watching and reading horror with the kids.  I sort of picture him watching Will Smith films all day and reading Take A Break.

We'll have to agree to disagree (for me the story became more interesting when it moved away from the prophets assembling - think that was around issue 4?

You misunderstand.  My problem is not with the story, it is with the muddled narrative techniques which are used to tell that story.  Once the Masamune Shirow homage kicks in with the mech suits, the pages are a mess in some places, and the end of the book is basically a level from Shadow of the Colossus where Space Wolverine jumps out of the monster for some reason.

I cant wait to see how the different arcs come together).

I suspect you have made my point here: the arcs have already come together.  The disparate characters meet up and are killed in service to the living ship whose avatar is the little white ghost girl.  By the time the story picks up in issue 6-ish, some characters have been killed off-panel.

I enjoy stopping and deciphering the complex scenes, as otherwise the comic is just another title that you race through in 5 mins.

Fair play.  Personally, I don't enjoy not knowing what I am looking at.  I have this crazy idea that first and foremost a page should be visually functional in that it clearly illustrates the story - Prophet does not always manage this.

They're releasing a trilogy collection of the main console games, but it doesn't include the PSP spin-offs.  The trilogy probably sounds like great value, but you can pick up K2 and K3 second hand for buttons as it is, meaning it might be cheaper in the long run to just buy Killzone as a download and look for the sequels in bargain bins or ex-rental sales in Blockbuster.

I enjoyed it at the time, always meant to get round to playing the 2nd one, I've heard it's visually pretty stunning.

It is, but was superseded by the visuals of Killzone 3.  Fair warning: make sure you download all the necessary patches before starting K2, as there's an odd control quirk added where it feels like there's a lag between when you pull in a direction and the camera responding.  It is utterly baffling why they added this element to the controls of a fast-paced shooter, but after months of complaints they eventually added the option to the in-game menu to disable it - for my money it was only at this point that K2 became playable.

[Killzone]

Killzone is showing its age in some places, but mainly the graphics department and the thick-as-pigshit enemies who stand around in groups while you cook a grenade.  The pseudo-verite head-shaky-camera nonsense just makes it seem like your character is juddering when he walks and makes his movement feel slow, the controls largely mirror but pre-empt the now-standard COD layout just enough for the need to hold down the sprint button to annoy, and the enemies, for all their stupidity, seem to take a cartload of bullets to knock over, to the point I'm not sure now if I'm actually hitting them or the gun is spraying around them.
Having said all that, it's still great how it makes you work to progress rather than just being able to bull through enemies ala Halo or COD, and the story pits you as a guy performing strategically important missions but still just one schmuck on the battlefield and not that important to how things turn out, as pretty soon selectable characters come into the game dynamic and it becomes clear any tosser could do your job because if you play as one of the other three characters, they have different ways of getting around the field while still doing exactly what you do.  It's enjoyable and challenging, but cheap, too, and efinitely worth a punt if you like your FPS shooters old-school rather than tailored primarily for multiplayer.

I thought it aimed for 'profound', but landed on 'cringeworthy'.

When PJ and his mates were talking about it on the Sunnyside podcast, I thought the dialogue they quoted was them taking the piss.

[Dredd]

Dredd felt a bit flat to me.  It ended and I just went "what" for a bit.  I did find the absence of Hershey's massive balls to be a bit disappointing as her chewing Dredd out for his quitting every fart's end has been the best scene in the strip for ages and I'd expect it to be followed up in some way rather than ignored to the point that I could believe this script came out of a drawer to capitalise on the writer's growing profile in the US and had one or two dialog edits to make it fit into current continuity.  She is pretty much useless here, and the closest she comes to being remotely effective is when she saves herself from a grenade - by abandoning her men to die.  The ending made no sense in the context of the story, and while I know the intent was likely to create a Butch and Sundance moment, there wasn't enough of fatty's character to give such a scene any emotional resonance, and taking his family - whom he apparently loves - into a firefight in which he will be killed seems... a bit thick of him.  Also, ending a strip with a a famous ending from a movie not only seems a little cheap, it's arguably lazy because I can think of at least three Dredd tales that have ended this way already.  If it helps, one of them was some bikers jumping at Dredd and the caption was "The good times are over" and it was drawn by Simon Coleby when we apparantly hated his lovely chunky, gritty art style.  If you name the exact strip, I will give you a special prize of [spoiler]fuck all.[/spoiler]

Brass Sun was as usual the best thing in the prog for me, and this episode didn't seem to suffer as much as previous installments did in terms of backgrounds, establishing shots or detail, though there is the ongoing issues with a satisfactory sense of the scale of things - at least for me, anyway.  Still the best thing in the prog.

I try not to apply logic to Low Life as I find it to be at it's enjoyably stupid best when it's trying to be random and logic doesn't even apply to characters that aren't Dirty Frank.  I found it dull when it was just a sci-fi riff on Miller's Sin City and have liked DF's outings as the central character much, much more than I would if it was that cyber woman with the steam-powered wanking gauntlet whining on about her first world problems of the future.  Enjoyably daft stuff that wants to be Dr McNinja when it grows up, and that is probably why I and sensible persons everywhere like it.

What is ABC Warriors even about right now?  It's been a few episodes and I don't know what Hammerstein is up to, where he's going or how he ends up in some situations beyond that he just seems to stumble across stuff happening that allows him to stick the boot into capitalism via his infodump first person narration - who is he even explaining things to?  He's in a park this week not moving for some reason and I get the impression he's programmed himself to not move rather than just not moving which I think would be the more sensible approach, but I don't understand why he couldn't just hide in a scrapyard or a sewer or somewhere with no large crowds of people or easy access for tanks.  Looks nice, though.

I hate Simping Detective but try to like it because I've paid for it even when it's hard to understand some stuff as it relies so heavily on continuity from elsewhere, like whatever story it was where we establish DeMarco is a total chump who hangs out with a gorilla now.  Fair play, though, to the story for not playing along with the tiresome "monkeys are awesome" bollocks by shooting the gorilla through his stupid monkey head so I don't have to look at him do anything at all, but isn't this DeMarco's first appearance in the prog since she was an actual judge or something?  I'm not sure I like the inference that people who haven't been buying the Meg for at least 10 years can go fuck themselves - I've been reading it for years now and some of this is news to me and just looks like lazy writing by substituting an easier-to-write personality for what has already been established (and in very high-profile Dredd stories like The Pit, to boot).

Also not sure why some people have issues with the Visible Man.  We won't know if its any good until we've had a butchers at the strip as Mills can be hit or miss - it's worth the gamble.

[no purpose whatsoever]

Ah, the Quick Time Event - those interactive cutscenes in games that serve no purpose whatsoever, except to elicit on-cue positive feedback from people watching (not playing) the game at trade shows.  Nobody likes them except game developers, because the positive feedback in the needlessly self-congratulatory environment of the trade cons is a boost to their egos.  Again we are back to the arrogance of the developer...

I'm not sure disc space is an issue these days given that a single layer blu-ray disc holds 25gb, and even with Microsoft determined to hold out against admitting defeat - several years after losing the format wars - bigger games on XB just come on more than one disc.

I'm with Radiator - unskippable cut scenes are indicitive of either arrogance or bad design.  I rarely play a game for the story*, and I would be highly surprised if this was an atypical opinion.

*RPGs being the only possible exception, and even then stuff like Fallout lets you advance dialogue delivery at your own pace.

Which illogical storylines do you feel Prophet is getting mired in? I find some aspects challenging but all seems to make sense to me.

As I said, from issue 4 onwards (once the setup is established), the visuals become cluttered and how the eye is supposed to progress around some pages (the Appleseed homage sequences especially) is unclear without stopping and deciphering what is in the end just messy rather than intricate.  Complex layouts that reward repeated viewings are good when done well - see JH Williams' work in general - but it shouldn't be a chore to tell what's supposed to be going on, that's just sloppy work - there were pages I did not even know what I was looking at in some panels beyond that whatever was going on, it was happening in mud.

[Prophet]

Prophet, the first trade collection of the relaunch of Rob "the" Liefeld's Wolverine knock-off, in which the superhero trappings of the previous 20 issues are discarded in favor of a Nausicaa-meets-Fallout 3-meets-Iain M Banks style travelogue that's initially ambitious, but soon becomes mired in the kind of illogical story progression and muddled visuals that sank most anime for me once my balls dropped and I started taking an interest in stories and character instead of defining my cultural intake by the level of excess it could indulge.  Brandon Graham is clearly a fan of the same anime shows as I am, because there are plenty of story elements that will seem familiar to viewers of Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, but Prophet is still probably the closest US comics have yet got to non-English sprawling epics of the like of Betelgeuse, but it's ruined in the final pages by yet another Wolverine analogue showing up and killing everyone in a badass way, jarring it from interesting and ambiguous science fiction to something that ultimately feels like an overly-decompressed superhero origin story and in retrospect gives the impression that it wasn't even trying at all.  For the first four chapters' worth of book, mind, it was pretty great.
There's also an Emma Rios short at the back that I couldn't make heads nor tails of.  Literally could not understand what was going on or what I was even looking at, so I imagine that it was "inventive and ambitious" or something.

And I'm not exaggerating here....I personally know someone who had a forum with some lesbian transvestites after seeing a clip on YouTube from a swingers club.

Do you know anyone who did their best to sound like an arsehole on the internet?  If so, seek them out, they may have some advice you will find useful.