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For me the fundamental problem they'll face, as with the strip, is the led character is so bland.

Just play him as a cool, laconic soldier, the grounded straight-man to the three much more extreme bio-chips. I'm not expecting an adaptation of Cinnabar, but that's how you do the bio-chips - Gunnar as the venomous, smart-mouthed bitch, Bagman as the seemingly sensible one who's quietly but profoundly insane, and Helm trying to convince everybody (himself included) that everything's fine and he's got this.

Aside from that, I'm with Leigh S - a surreal, OTT journey into a bizarre future-tech-strewn landscape in which the madness of war is turned up to 11. Plot optional.

Pretty sure he's only ever referred to as Cal in the actual story - the Titan collections were titled Judge Caligula though.

I have some sympathy about getting someone in to finish one already started in IP, but handing over Devlin Waugh and Tyranny Rex?

Agreed - not to mention Revere, whose appearance, whilst possibly intended as tribute to Smith, jarred horribly.

But you are happy for the artists to be reshuffled despite their authorial voices?

You do indeed make a good point, Bolt, and I don't want to give the impression that I think the artist on a comic strip is somehow of lesser importance than the writer. That's not my belief. However, I do feel Slaine and the ABCs are defined more by Mills's voice than by the work of any individual artist. I'm not saying you can't get interesting one-offs or stories with different writers – as Jim suggests, few would fault Cinnabar – but for the most part I'd rather new creators came up with their own unique stories.

From my perspective, continuing ABC Warriors and Slaine without the unique authorial voice of Pat Mills would be a creatively worthless endeavour, just as continuing Indigo Prime and Devlin Waugh without John Smith is.

I would hope that when Pat is no longer with us, 2000AD would retire his characters. All current evidence suggests that won't be the case, unfortunately.

Greg's right about the difficulty too, the first one is way less forgiving on the default. I'm sure I read the devs felt like they balanced those difficulty levels one notch too high, so for the second game Hard is closer to the first game's Medium etc.

That bit towards the end of the first game, in the fleshy, spiky, eyebally arena - that took a few goes! At one point I ran out of every type of ammo, but succeeded in punching the chainsaw dude to death. And as for that bloody [spoiler]squid[/spoiler]...

The lure of owning Impetigo Jones (and Brute Mosely) proved too much - pre-ordered it.

Honestly, its now Sister Sledge, the Scan Sector Dancing Queen, Venus and now bubble girl as bad uns... it is worse than the casual comedy racism for me as a "hard to justify to modern eyes" flaw of those early progs.

In a comic aimed at young boys, the 'Ugh! Girls!" aspect of Rogue Trooper is more akin to Calvin's G.R.O.S.S. club than anything. I've long found it amusing how much the bio-chips echo the playground attitudes of the prog's then-contemporary readers: "Stop being all mushy and hanging out with girls, Rogue! Get back to shooting people!"

Really want to get round to this, but I keep telling myself I should play the first one first. Will I be completely lost or will it be fine just jumping in to EW2 do you think?

I don't think you'll be lost - it's less the second half of a story, and more a retread of the same central conceit - but it does reference the previous game with some regularity, particularly towards the end. I was glad I'd played EW1 first, mostly because EW2 is significantly better, so it feels like a real step-up in comparison. EW1 is a lot harder and much more old-school in its approach.

[The Evil Within 2]

Just completed The Evil Within 2. A huge improvement on the previous game - the 'open world' take on survival horror (for the first two-thirds of the game, anyway) is extremely refreshing. Eventually it lapses into the linear style of its predecessor, but the story is much more satisfying, so it gets away with it.

Well, fair enough - in that case, I can see where you're coming from. As you can tell, I like taking a more loquacious approach - Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) are both much more conducive to that style of play.

It was (is) exactly like Fallout 3. I mean that as a compliment. I don't understand how anyone can distinguish the two.

The games are similar, but far from indistinguishable. Fallout 4 gives the RPG elements far less prominence, stripping them down in favour of the FPS aspects. As such, I greatly prefer 3. Your ability to talk your way out of situations is much more pronounced and precisely measured in 3, to the extent that in 4, you're not even sure what you're about to say some of the time. 4 also lacks the consistent eccentricity of 3. It's not wholly absent - the USS Constitution quest in 4 is pure 3 - but the game feels much more tailored to mainstream 'serious' tastes.

Addendum - forgot to mention Anderson, whose recent Crusade storyline of kidnapped children was baffling to me.  Was the baby behind it a character from the Megazine?

No, Hope was introduced in the Anderson story Engram in 2000AD. Crusade is indeed a spectacularly terrible story though.

It's a good start - the idea of bringing Hulk back to his horror roots is definitely better than anything that's been done with him in the last few years. I wasn't blown away by it, but it clearly has potential, and I prefer it to virtually all Ewing's other Marvel work. It'll be interesting to see where Ewing goes with the idea that Banner can be temporarily killed, but will rise again as a vengeance-seeking Hulk.