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The comparisons to District 9 are overly flattering.  Monsters is dull, aimless, and if it was an episode of a tv show you were watching it would be one of those episodes that you acknowledge as not being terrible but probably the one you'll skip if you ever do a dvd rewatch, and the price of a cinema ticket is a bit of an ask in that respect.
One or two interesting visuals, while spicing up the idea of a desolate zone where no man shall tread lightly, ask questions about the movie's internal logic, such as how an abandoned hotel can be in the middle of a jungle but no other indicators of civilization, how a passenger jet is affected by what are essentially ground-based animals (however large) to the point it can crash and still be more or less intact, what practical purpose compels the aliens to move a jet plane in the water, why nobody mans the big wall meant to keep the monsters out, why they randomly firebomb bits of jungle instead of systematically burn it all after cordoning off the infected area, why the military just run around inhabited towns shooting missiles at big animals instead of redirecting or containing them - each new attempt at a visual is undermined almost immediately by the grinding of your brain cells and this is what the movie asks you to do so there's no "turn your brain off and suspend disbelief" get-out to be had.  The screenplay makes the common mistake of equating 'sci-fi' with 'magic' pretty much every time something alien arrives onscreen, but away from the script and the lack of chemistry between the anemic lead duo, it's a study in the competent construction of a movie - just unlikely to be on anyone's favorite lists.

I agree with all the above sentiments: favoritest game, stupid amounts of time played on it, perfectly happy if it's only more of the same with a new locale.

The dev team on this one are different from the first, though - F:NV is the work of the blokes who ruined KOTR and fucked up Alpha Protocol, but I'm still optimistic on the basis that screwing up a project this big would get them blacklisted from most companies.

You misunderstand the beauty of Shako,Colin.  Do you need to know what motivates the lamb chop that's on your dinner plate?  Do you want to know the backstory of your carrots?
Shako is about the bear, not the humans who comprise his next meal.

I suspect the makers may have played the Modern Warfare games.

It's no CoD, but it's pretty enjoyable stuff if you can ignore the similarities, although good luck with that, obviously - even the controller layout is the same.  Medal of Honor: Frontline is a nice bonus, too, if dated and a huge install, but on the plus side if you're a renter you get to install it on your HD.

[wasn't]

I think the reasoning behind the reboot is similar to One More Day - Spidey as a character and a franchise was pretty much painted into a corner with the last three films, which had him as a 30 something man getting married and whose villains were all dead or knew that he was Peter Parker, he was beloved by New Yorkers, and then there's the fact that he hadn't much reason to be Spider-Man anymore on account of it turns out it wasn't the burglar he failed to stop when he had the chance who was responsible for his uncle's murder.  He was a pretty unrecogniseable from the picture people usually have of the property in their heads and to top it all off, the name stars from the first three flicks took a walk - the question becomes less "why would they reboot the franchise?" and more "why wouldn't they reboot the franchise?"
They're essentially starting over in terms of production teams anyway - may as well go for broke.

I got the red ring today.

I recommend using Vaseline in future, but ideally you and your partner should take turns being the lady.

Also, don't be in a rush to replace your 360 if you can get it repaired for a fraction of the price.  Check around local electronics stores to see if anyone can fix it for you.  Then play it safe by selling it on while it's still working so you can invest in the slimline.

If you could tell how teensy PJ is from that pic, you'd know the math is closer to three and a half.

I would have thought the gimmicks would be the salvation of cinema if anything, and certainly not it's downfall.  Like it or not (I'm in the 'not' camp), going to the cinema is still a big social thing with certain groups of people.  They're usually the cunts down the front doing a running commentary.

[is]

You mention the one thing I love unreservedly about the Sony machines, Keef:

Always surprised when people say they prefer the PS3 pad

The 360 pad takes some getting used to and is not as intuitive as the PS3's, which is - to be blunt - as unoriginal as fuck in terms of design.  Back in the day, Sony clearly just painted a SNES controller grey and bunged extra shoulder buttons on it.  Then later added analogue sticks.  Then a little red button in the middle that did fuck all.  Then a bigger button that admittedly is quite handy, but on the flipside they did something odd to the L2/R2 triggers that I don't care for as now they feel a bit 'slippy' and less robust than their PS2 equivalents.
At roughly 25 years old, the design's long in the tooth, but on the other hand you can try too hard to create a proprietary controller and end up with the 360 pad (and as someone who doesn't use the pad exclusively/extensively anymore, it is a chore to come back to it every now and then).

Also - the 360's d-pad is useless.  Might seem an odd complaint, but you'll really appreciate a crisp digital input for navigating different media stored on your machines, as analogue sticks can be annoyingly imprecise with OS menus.


But it's all personal taste in the end - I also ditched the mouse that came with our work Mac for a pc one without a moment's hesitation so I might not be the one from whom to seek an opinion on next gen gubbins.
Seriously - one button?  Fuck that noise.

Hmmm...  "Early word" from whom?

Looks pretty generic even from those images - shaky camera work, maybe a bit of Carpenter-ish music and the usual Hollywood actors straight out of a jeans catalogue.  The city shots also bug me for some reason - seems at odds with the dedication to the desolate Arctic setting of the original that never left you in any doubt that the cast were fucked in the middle of nowhere.

As others have pointed out, though, it's never going to top the original.  May as well just give it a look and see if it's at least bearable and not just a sci-fi Saw knock-off with gore and a downbeat ending as is now the norm rather than the exception.

The Comicon promo in (a bit) higher quality: http://stagevu.com/video/cdxmywiyqfpz

That IS good. What's the price like for a lot of TV shows?

I shan't be coy and suggest I'm iTunes-ing them, I download from streaming websites, and a decent broadband connection gets you the shows faster than torrenting would.  You have to be quick because the tv companies have the shows pulled from where they're being hosted and they don't get archived later, but given most companies make their money from DVD collections, as a downloader I can't really complain - it'd be like moaning about being punched in the face by the guy you were mugging.

are these less traditional RPGs? (I'm not being funny or suggesting either of you is wrong, I'm aware there are sub-genres, particularly with RPG games.

Personally, I come from the Final Fantasy/Star Ocean school, and PS3 has been good to me while Microsoft had trouble attracting traditional RPG games to their consoles to the point they had to go out and buy some companies to actually make them for the 360.  There's plenty of old-school RPGs on the PS3, but the less traditional RPGs like Fallout 3 are multi-platform and probably shouldn't factor into your decision.

I.e. they had elements of RPGs, I.e. creating a character, levelling, buying, selling etc, but the fighting wasn't the usual point and click of more traditional RPGs. Essentially you sacrificed on character choice (you were bound to one class per race, for example) but you had lots more control when fighting.

A lot of games have this dynamic nowadays, even shoot-em-ups.  Dead Rising 2, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Oblivion, Mass Effect 1 and 2 - the traditional action/shooting game has in recent years had its bar raised.

If you're inclined to multimedia, go for the PS3, if you're inclined towards games and nothing else, then go for the 360, but once I realised that you can use the built-in web browser to download tv shows directly onto your PS3 hard drive (for actual storage, not just for viewing through the built-in BBC iPlayer) and watch them in either HD or upscaled SD, the fucking thing became more or less indispensable to the point that when it broke my first thought was "now how can I watch all my tv shows?"  I had no intention of using the PS3 for anything other than games and yet here we are.

I've got both, but barely play the 360 barring the odd exclusive like Mass Effect or the Dead Rising 2 prequel demo - though I bought the PS3 version of DR2, not the 360 version, as I hate the Xbox controller.  It's also deeply unreliable for playback of video files - I could go on at length about the 360 failings as a multimedia platform, but let's say it is not great on that front and leave it there.
On the backwards compatibility front, all PS1 discs run just fine on PS3, but who cares?
The 360, on the other hand, is temperamental but will play Halo 1 and 2, which if we're brutally honest is all you'll want from the Xbox library anyway unless you have a jonesing for Doom 3 or Knights of the Old Republic.

As regards the RROD - this is almost irrelevant now, as (I was surprised to discover) you can get that fixed in a half-decent electrician's, ditto most PS3 problems, though obviously corrupted firmware is the end for any console.

On the games front, bear in mind that GTA4's extra content hasn't turned up on PS3 yet, the Halo series will never show up on PS3, nor will Mass Effect 1 or Dead Rising 1, both of which are great - if flawed - games that you should definately have a spin on before making any decisions, although the sequels are better (arguable in Mass Effect 2's case) and are multi-platform efforts.  The PS3, on the other hand, has Uncharted 1 and 2, and some retarded shit with little sack people that you can dress up as Judge Dredd, which is quite popular with young girls and the gay community.
The PS3 seems to be top-heavy with traditional RPG efforts while the 360 excels in shooters washed out in brown, typified to an hilarious extreme by the 360-exclusive Gears of War series, which answers the question "what if that Rogue Trooper game had less chicks, bigger guns, and bits where it rains blood, glass and razor blades?"  They are games so manly that the comics writers brain exploded trying to explain the absence of women.

As regards online gaming, remember that you pay a subscription on the 360 but the PS3 is free.



Really, though, if it's a toss-up between the two, make sure to try before you buy.  Otherwise no matter which one you pick you'll end up with some good games and a vague feeling the exclusives on the other yoke would be fun to play.

Why it's taken this long for Marvel to join up with an anime studio to produce adaptations of their properties is anyone's guess, and as actual anime shows go it's a bit generic, but the Japanese design aesthetic works well married to the Iron Man concept, and the cgi is a lot more refined here than in shows like Transformers: Cybertron or Zoids.
Might be worth looking at if you're into sci-fi and/or superheroics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4ES3UJyof4

The West Wall thing was in a Grant Morrison story, though Mark Millar did write the prequel lead-in series Purgatory.  Being as it's Grant Morrison, though, we can't say it was 'a mistake' because Morrison is a genius and we simply don't understand when he's stretching the boundaries of the form, much as he tested the idea of the fourth wall in Animal Man and how 'work for hire' agreements work in Zenith and Big Dave.  Batman: RIP was not a disjointed collage of Silver Age ideas repackaged alongside mid-80s comic book tropes to make a self-indulgent mess of a story, for instance, it was a daring deconstruction of the needs of the medium for closure, a middle or a beginning.
Likewise, Morrison likely introduced a deliberate continuity error in Inferno to make a metacommentary on the original golden age of 2000ad and Dredd when such things as continuity were not a concern, but also, the character of Grice represents the US comics market come to plunder the plucky UK talent pool of Mega City 1.  The bizarre Statue of Judgment falling on the West Wall scene is a representation of the ludicrous 'spectacle over substance' excess of the US market that 2000ad writers aped in a desperate bid to attract employment, and Walter's intervention an unlikely deus ex machina heralding the salvation of Dredd by returning to the seemingly anachronistic 'goofy' roots of the character after the illogical, spectacle-and-soundbites uber-gritty build-up that pandered to teenage boys rather than 2000ads core audience of grown men, and so on...
Morrison was in fact creating a work of metafictional genius in Inferno that you philistines didn't understand with your po-faced stories about hitmen or draftees in the third world moaning about multinationals.  You didn't deserve him and he's doing you all a favor by not letting you read Zenith anymore.