Messages

[Red Dead Redemption]

It was more street level and gritty

The jetpack was a bit outre, but the tone of GTA has always been immensely juvenile and that worked because it's a version of reality and not a recreation of it.  With GTA4 it's taking itself too seriously, however if that kind of thing is your bag, you want to be checking out True Crime New York, Scarface: The World Is Yours and The Getaway: Black Monday, all of which GTA4 borrows heavily from, all of which are good games, but all of which I got bored playing because of the almost adolescent atmosphere of 'grittiness' - though obviously if you don't actually mind that sort of thing (and plenty don't) you're in for a treat.

Red Dead Redemption is worth a punt.  The setting and the various things you get up to differentiate it enough from GTA to avoid just being 'GTA in the wild west'.
Dead Rising is an Xbox 360 exclusive and well worth playing, but resign yourself to leveling up your character for a bit before it really opens up as a game.  Also make sure you find the car and take a drive in the underground tunnels for maximum carnage.

...my inability to master driving games in general but I also found the on foot / shooting stuff difficult to work up any enthusiasm for. Maybe it's just me.

I hate gangster movies, macho cliche, racing games and the speed-boy mentality, but GTA3 was the first PS2 killer app for me.  Likewise, my brother couldn't comprehend the appeal of the series until GTA4, which I'm not terribly fond of - technically impressive, but it plays more like a GTA knock-off (particularly a Driver or a True Crime entry) than a GTA sequel, so you may agree with it more than what went before.

I would have to disagree there - Al Ewing, for example, has written some of my favourite Dredd. And there have been other Non-Wagner Dredd stories that I have immensely enjoyed.

True dat, brah.
However: while most of the good non-Wagner Dredds are far in the past at this stage and pride in Al for hitting the big time is overshadowed by the fact that he does indeed write a very good Dredd (the only time the oft-bandied accolade "he actually gets Dredd" has turned out to be true for my money), of late every time I see a Dredd strip without Wagner/Ewing on it I immediately go "ach fuck..." and it's not helped by the words 'part one' just after the episode title.  "Oh goody! 6 weeks of crying orphans/wangsty first-person narratives!*"

Just my take, though - Your Mileage May Vary.


*This is a broad generalisation.  Which is not to say it hasn't sometimes turned out to be the case.

Its usuually a dangerous game to give strips to others, and has blown up in the faces of the reader on more than one occasion!

Its blown up in the face of 2000ad on occasion, too.  Medivac/Satanus, anyone?

Spent about 2 hours this afternoon getting the original Knights of the Old Republic working on Vista.

Ah, [spoiler]fuck [/spoiler]Vista.  It is a thing of last resort.

Shop around and you can pick up an old Xbox for about 20-30 quid, with the games for less than a tenner if you'll trawl Amazon marketplace and the like.  There's plenty of good gaming to be had on the last gen that would justify shelling out for a decade-old console, and I speak as someone who's still happily playing GTA: San Andreas.

I don't think he expresses that "he was wronged" but that the series of films declined and he's right, they did.

"He was wronged" was a poor choice of words on my part.  My take - that should have been expressed better - was that this as a talking point of note rather than the everyday process almost any (would be) summer blockbuster goes through infers Kurtz knew better, the movies would have been better if he'd been in charge, or the original pitch would have been a superior movie, which as I say we can never know and only speculate about.

Hindsight is 20/20 - it's easy to say after the fact that X or Y would have been better than whatever poop we actually ended up with, but we'll never know.  Chances are just as likely that we'd be lamenting that Lucas killed off the best character and ended on a downer rather than going for Vader's redemption and a happy ending for Solo if the original pitch had gone through.

Fallout 3 isn't much good.

Story ideas change all the time before a movie goes from plot to actual film.  I don't see how Kurtz is wronged or anything for going through the usual processes - on a property he didn't even own, no less - just as he likely had many, many times before and after.

Does anyone know if there's ever been a map of the Cursed Earth printed in any of the Progs or Megs, and if so, what needs adding or taking away from it to keep it up to date (nuked Mega-Cities or new townships)?  I'm curious to see if it's worth trying to run one up.

Is there a name for this anthropomorphic, hybrid, fluffy animal genre? There seems to be a lot of it about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-t1eFQdQNY

Online is fun for five minutes, but after that you aren't there for the game, you're there because you're invested in a conversation about the large success rate of people of Hebrew or African descent finding employment - and in fields that I assume must be quite competitive given how passionate the debate becomes! 

My headset was poached by my MW2-addicted nephew, mind, so I don't see the point of just wandering about with no clear goals getting into fights with strangers while barely managing to stay on good terms with your supposed 'friends' - and online gaming isn't much fun either, b'dum tish, etcetera...

A little more about 'Batman Inc' from CBR here

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/08/morrison-on-batman-inc-team-ups-and-that-yellow-circle/

Yellow oval debate, on your mark, get set... GO

"You made it through years of shitty writing but the yellow oval is a game-breaker?"
American comic book fans commenting on change in their books should be made into a spectator sport:

[is]

I would go as far as to say that this was the last time Batman had a coherent and consistent creative team and direction to match.  I have a soft spot for Peter Milligan's short and seemingly forgotten stint with the character, but Grant and Breyfogle made even daft crossovers and leftfield editorial edicts like the return of the Joker work as part of the book, and even 20 years later DC are both eroding the contribution they made (by killing off the likes of Scarface - probably the only decent post Silver-Age villain in Batman's gallery of rogues - or turning Anarky from a socially-conscious saboteur whose political ideology stems from the anarchist belief in individual responsibility for actions as a social collective to a guy in a cloak who shouts at his TV), and also strip-mining it.  If you think it's odd that it hasn't been collected, take a look at the 2nd/3rd issue cliffhanger of the story 'Mud Pack' where Clayface [spoiler]pretends to be a resurrected Jason Todd to throw Batman off his game, only we don't know it's Clayface and the whole thing is played as if it is really Robin[/spoiler].  This was ripped off not once but three times in the last ten years, first as the only decent idea in the atrocious Hush, later as the basis of a series of comics by Judd Winick whose only purpose seems to be to show us a Batman so sad he might cry, and latterly as the basis of a terrible animated film where Batman talks about his sorrow with Alfred for ten straight minutes while Dougie Howser MD takes time off from killing Eye-rachnids to voice the gayest Nightwing that has ever graced creation - and if you've read a Nightwing comic in the last ten years, you understand that this is really saying something.
Do Grant and Breyfogle get credit for coming up with the Jason Todd shell game around which a great deal of Batman output has been based these last few years?  Do they fuck.

If you like Batman, you should read the Grant/Breyfogle run.  It was a little darker when Wagner was on board for introducing Scarface and that dissolving guy and the heart-eating chap, but Grant on a solo trip is no less entertaining.  They are damn good comics, and a reminder that Batman can be a great superhero title rather than just a book about a guy in shadows who acts like a cock.

"I don't like this story so it's not actually canon and here is why..." is exactly why I avoid places like the Comic Book Resources Forum and Newsarama.
Fans are consumers of a product and not the originator and if you don't like it then that's your personal opinion, but fan opinion doesn't directly invalidate published stories unless your name is Geoff Johns.

I thought this was an average shooter with some decent attempts at an actual story and the odd atmospheric moment.  If you've played FEAR 2, it's pretty much some more of that.

If you can get it cheap, it's worth checking out.

Im certainly not being 'overly defensive', and if your appraisal of Walking Dead is 'a very talky comic', then absolutely yes, i agree wholeheartedly. It's very talky. But talky is not 'over-written', which is what you originally said.

I stand by 'over-written', and I'm pretty sure most technical appraisals of what is reasonable comic book wordage per panel/page would back me up.

Another case of over-writing is Kirkman's penchant for having a character (1) explain what is about to happen (2) show us what is happening (3) talk about what happened. Again, it's as if he doesn't trust us. If there's one complaint I have about Kirkman's writing it's the lack of show and way too much tell...and tell...and tell.

Kirkman does this in almost everything from Brit, Astounding Wolf-Man, Marvel Team-Up, Ant-Man and Invincible, so I think it's probably just the method with which he's most comfortable.  In open-ended stuff like WD and Invincible it works fine - in contained arcs like Marvel Team-Up, not so much.

And I can't recall every detail, but I think Michonne might be the exception to the dialogue-vomiting you mention.  Could be wrong.