So, I was reading online about the new Street Fighter 2 film, and about Kristin Kreuk’s (Lana in Smallville) casting as Chun Li, and someone posted a link to this Youtube video.

I really love this kind of time-lapse stuff, and it really makes me wish I was that artistic, or knew my way around photoshop half as well.

For anyone who doesn’t know who she is and needs the reference, here’s the first official picture from the film:

Nicely timed with it being a Grant Morrison-heavy week from DC, is this rather nice article on the BBC News website, discussing Scottish creators working on US comics.

Well, the moment has arrived.  After 52 weeks of Countdown-hell (barring the ones with Superboyman Prime) Final Crisis #1 hit the stands this week.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was a bit dubious about this series.  Although I love Morrison’s writing (still got Batman RIP and All Star Superman to read - good week to be a Morrison fan), the New Gods don’t really do anything for me.  Secret Invasion got off to such a strong start, that I was really wondering if Final Crisis was going to match up.

And it does.  But in a different way.

Whereas Secret Invasion got a lot of punch from its big shock moments (the old Marvel heroes, Skrull reveals etc), Morrison and Jones deliver just a strong piece of storytelling.  Issue 1 is a setup issue for the rest of the tale.   It doesn’t rely in a lot of huge shocks (bar one, which was guessed some months ago online), and instead you get a feeling that something big is coming.   Metron delivering fire to man in prehistoric times, Darkseid converting human children using the Anti-Life equation, the GL’s investigating Orion’s death.   There’s a lot of plot threads here, and from it all I got a real sense of foreboding.  That something really bad is going to happen (which we know, it does.  The Day Evil Won and all that).

The amusing thing for me though, is how Countdown seems to have been rendered pointless.  Plot details are either very different to the events of Countdown, or there was another mini-series between them that we somehow missed.    Ok, so the New Gods are now reborn.  Hence Darkseid and Metron running around.  That’s been well established as a Final Crisis plot point, so fair enough.   Orion is now dead under mysterious circumstances.   The implication being that this is nothing to do with his fight with Darkseid at the end of Countdown.

We’re also told that Earth-51 is now gone.  It was fine (albeit having had a rough few weeks and now overrun by Furries) when we last saw it.  And its Monitor has gone from “Monitoring the Monitors” to being exiled for his failure.  What’s happened there?   We’ve also got another suspicious Monitor.  Is this meant to be the same Solomon from Countdown, or another of the Monitors?

I will say though, I love the depiction of the Monitors here.  So much better than anything that happened in Countdown.   Here they’re shown as truely living apart from the Multiverse, although they’re becoming increasingly contaminated by their dealings with its residents.  The Multiverse Machine/Orrery is a brilliant visual.

I enjoyed this issue a lot more than I thought I would.   The rebirth of the New Gods is an interesting idea, revamping them and showing them infiltrating Earth culture right from the start.  It’ll be interesting to see where this goes from here, but I’m looking forward to the next issue.

I’ve been a big fan of the Rainbow 6 games for a while, and the recent wipe of my PC gave me a good excuse to reinstall Rainbow 6: Raven Shield, the third in the series.

I originally came in to the series with Rogue Spear.  I can’t remember why, but I’d been browsing online and read about it and thought it looked interesting.

When I first played it though, it was hell.   The Rainbow 6 games brought a far more realistic tone to FPS games.   If you get shot, you’re dead.   Unless you’re hugely lucky and you’re just badly injured (or shot in the leg).  After years of shields and health bars, it was a huge wakeup call, and demanded completely binning my previous gamestyles and learning something new.

I had eventually managed to blunder my way through the first mission, quake style, and decided to hold off on the second mission until I completely sussed out how to play the game.

Key to this was the planning stage.   Before you ever get site of your target cursor, you watch the briefing for the upcoming mission (in this case, freeing hostages from a museum).   You then get to plan the assault.   You divide your available personnel into up to 4 teams of 4, and then plan out their routes through the map, setting go-codes where you want them to hold until everyone’s in position (allowing you to send multiple teams to storm a single room from different sides for example).

It was a huge amount of fun playing with the plans.  Seeing the AI teams carry out my orders as we sweeped through the museum, laying waste to the hostage-takers.

Sadly, Rogue Spear, and its expansions don’t run under Windows XP, which is a shame, so for now I’m playing the third game in the series, Raven Shield, and its expansion Iron Wrath (which is available for free on Fileplanet).  Its more of the same fun, albeit with much improved graphics.   I do miss the 747 rescue map from Rogue Spear, and the Subway map from the Urban Operations expansion though.

Its great fun online as well.   I’ve had a couple of LAN parties now with mates, where we’ve played Raven Shield and had a cracking time stalking each other through the maps.   The rounds tend to be quite quick (as long as the map’s not too big), but its intense, as you know if one of the other players sees you first, then you’re probably toast.

Well worth checking out.   These games really added a new genre, and brought something new to FPS gaming.

That was typical.   No sooner had I finished that last post, and my Ubuntu updates dialog popped up again.   I let it grab the latest Gnome updates, and then it went about configuring everything.  Including the kernel updates that hadn’t been properly configured last time.

Turns out the issue was that when they’d first installed, I tried to select some of the other options regarding the menu.lst file (display diffs etc).  That seemed to confuse issues.  This time, knowing my current menu.lst file was backed up, I simply let it write the default package one to the boot folder.   Once it was finished setting everything up, I went in and put back in the entries I needed (mainly Windows at the top of the list).  One reboot later, and everything’s working fine on the new kernel.

The new options to try and deal more sensibly with the menu.lst clashes are certainly welcome, but I guess there’s still a few bugs to be worked out there.

So, as I’d mentioned previously, following my system rebuild, my LAMP server wasn’t quite playing ball.

I finally had time to look into it the other week, and it came down to the MySQL administration.

Previously, I’d been using the MySQL-admin GUI to setup my local databases and users, but for some reason, when setting them up under my current installation, the GUI wasn’t assigning the login credentials properly.  This meant that whenever I tried to install phpBB or Joomla or something locally, the database connection kept complaining.

So, I installed the trusted phpMyAdmin and tried setting the users up with that.   It was slightly less user-friendly I thought, but ultimately, it also worked.  Login credentials were correctly assigned, and the php applications were much happier connecting to the database.

Weird one though.  The MySQL-admin package shouldn’t be any different from the one I was using previously, which worked fine.   But nonetheless I’ve got the system working now, which is the main thing for me.

Now I just need to figure out what went wrong with the latest kernel update from Ubuntu.   I installed all the latest updates the other day, and when I try and boot off the new kernel image, the NVidia driver throws a wobbly.  Fortunately I can boot off the previous image and get a perfectly usable system until I get it fixed though.

The BBC have put the new mid season trailer for Doctor Who on their Youtube channel.

Looking good. I’m not a big fan of Rose, but Silence in the Library should be good, and a big Dalek story is usually fun.

Well, as a treat to myself following my IT disaster, and since I was in the shops buying a fresh copy of Oblivion anyway, I picked up the Iron Man movie game.

Ok, so I know. Its a movie tie-in. Possibly the only thing that tends to be worse is a movie tie-in to a video game. However, I found this one to be a lot of fun.

While it borrows from the film plot, the game embellishes it a lot with elements from the comics. Of course, if it had more strictly followed the plot of the movie, there wouldn’t have been as many chances for big fight scenes, but this allows the game to have its own identity.

The action picks up in the caves in Afghanistan. Tony’s already been captured and has just finished building his Mark 1 suit. Level 1 is a tutorial to the basics of moving around as you escape from your captors. Level 2 finds Tony back at Stark Industries. He’s announced (as in the film) that he’s no longer going to manufacture weapons. However at this point we deviate from the film. Angered by the lack of new weapons, one of Tony’s biggest customers, the Maggia stage a raid on his warehouses for any remaining supplies. Fortunately Tony’s in the area conducting flight tests on his new Mark 2 Iron Man suit.

Level 3 introduces the Mark 3 suit from the movie, which remains the default armour for the rest of the game. Further levels explore Tony ridding the Maggia of his weapons (which reminded me a lot of the Armour Wars), meanwhile Obidiah is revealed to be in league with AIM, and is working with them to reverse engineer the remains of Tony’s Mark 1 armour (again, similar to the movie).

The game uses this plot to introduce more armoured enemies. The Titanium Man turns up, as one of AIM’s first attempts to duplicate the armour, and further levels see Tony trying to shut down AIM’s operation, before learning of Obidiah’s involvement and confronting him in his Iron Monger armour.

The graphics are great. The movie suits are well captured, with the flaps in the Mark 2 and 3 suits used for flight captured, and there’s a small element of free roaming as you fly around levels dispatching villains, although this is still fairly linear, with fixed objectives, compared to say, Spider-Man 2, where you could happily ignore the missions and spend all your time web-slinging around New York (heck, that was the best part of the game).

At your command you get a variety of weapons including the trademark repulsors and uni-beam, along with the more regular missles and gattling gun. Through use of these different weapons you can slowly level each up, gaining new varients, or boosting the stats of the existing weapon.

The great thing though, is the unlockable armours. As you complete certain levels, you’ll unlock different armours you can use when replaying missions. There’s 6 available on the PC, with the first 3 being the movie suits. From their they’ve included 3 classic suits from the comics: the original tin can from Iron Man’s first appearance, his classic 70s red-and-gold armour, and, a personal favourite, the silver centurion armour. I’m always a sucker for this kind of thing and its great fun attacking Maggia’s Flying Fortress in the Silver Centurion suit.

The game’s probably not going to win many awards, but I found it a lot of fun. The graphics are great, the story’s had a bit of effort put in, and there’s certainly a kick to be had flying around as Iron Man, laying waste to AIM’s evil beekeepers with your repulsors.

I’ve put together a quick gameplay video showing off the different suits of armour and a couple of the levels in the game. Enjoy

Newsarama have the August DC solicits up here.

I just had to comment on the cover to GLC by Rodolfo Migliari though.

Good lord that’s pretty. More please.

Great news for the BBC.   To make up for delaying Doctor Who for Eurovision this Saturday, they’re giving us a new trailer to look forward to.

Its on at 6:45, and will preview the remainder of the season.  Hopefully it’ll be as tantalising as the trailer we got at the end of 42 last year.

Check out the news story here.