You can tell I’m catching up with the posts on Newsarama…

Final Crisis kicks back into gear this week (and my wallet starts to cry for the rest of the month) with the release of Revelations #3, and Newsarama has a preview up.

I must admit, as part of cost-cutting I was going to drop this series.  While I quite enjoy the new Spectre, I’ve never really bought Rene Montoya as the Question, and Batwoman has never really done anything for me either.  I usually really like Greg Rucka’s stuff, but the Crime Bible storyline hasn’t been my cup of tea, and while I enjoyed issue 1 of this mini, I wasn’t as bothered about issue 2.  However, it looks like that with issue 3, it starts tying in to Final Crisis in a big way, so I’m definitely picking it up to see how the story unfolds.

I’d blogged previously about this one shot and how much I enjoyed it, so I was very glad to see the news on Newsarama that Twighlight Guardian was one of the two one-shots to get picked up for a full series.

Congrats to the creative team, and I’m looking forward to reading what comes next

On the other hand, that’s another monthly I’ll be picking up.  So much for cutting down

Unusual comics post from me this week, since its been largely Marvel stuff that’s been catching my eye over the last couple of weeks. However with GL and GLC due later in the month, not to mention Final Crisis kicking back in at the end of the month, I don’t imagine it’ll be long until normal service is resumed

Captain America #42 wraps up Brubaker’s The Man Who Stole America arc, as well as many of the plots he began at the start of his run. With Bucky just having publicly launched himself into the limelight as Captain America to stop the Red Skull’s daughter assassinating the presidential candidates, he has to ensure she’s stopped, while The Falcon and Black Widow attempt to save Sharon Carter from the Red Skull’s stronghold.

Its a nice tie-up to many of the plots Brubaker’s been running. It was nice to see Bucky and Black Widow hook up at the end, and it’ll be interesting to see how Sharon’s memory loss is dealt with in later issues. I also liked the Red Skull’s fate: that scene really captured his horror at being trapped as he is. There’s still a few outstanding questions however, the exact plan that the Red Skull had involving Doom’s time machine for example. It seemed to be key to transferring the Skull to a new body, but what exactly they were trying to do remained a bit vague. We’ve also still got the 50s Captain America out there. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing where this series goes, now that Bucky’s establishing himself as Captain America.

One of my other favourite series to rave about is, of course, Avengers: The Initiative. Following up on last month’s issue, the Skrulls have arrived at Camp Hammond in force, and with most of the recruits out fighting in New York, only a few trainers, and Ant Man remain. Its yet another great issue from Dan Slott, and I just loved Ant Man. I missed his solo series from a couple of years back, but I’m definitely going to have to check out the trades. I loved his reluctance to play hero, and how his first reaction to trouble was to hide. I especially loved how that proved to give him an advantage against the Skrulls as he remains undiscovered while they took down the other heroes. It’ll be interesting to see what he’s discovered about their plans.

Well, we’re now two episodes into the first series of the new Knight Rider, and so far I’ve been enjoying it a lot.

The second episode was probably the stronger of the two so far. The first serving more to setup the arc-plot regarding Mike’s past in black ops and, of course, explain his name change to Michael Knight. This allowed the second a bit more free reign as an adventure of the week type story to throw in some nice character moments (loved the scenes with Mike and KITT watching the western) with the first episode having set things up.

Both episodes have been high on the action quota, and the second especially harked back nicely to the feel of the original series, with Mike travelling to a remote town, getting involved in street races and, as I mentioned, some nice building in the friendship between Mike and KITT.

Its also interesting to note some of the changes Gary Scott Thompson’s brought in. The “KITT cave” makes a lot of sense for the scale of the operation (realistically one engineer maintaining KITT in the back of a truck isn’t likely) although the humour from the supporting techs is sometimes forced. The arc plot with Mike’s past is welcome, and much in the style of Doctor Who, seems to be something being drip-fed into episodes for the regular viewers, while the episodes themselves remain stand-alone, probably building up to some revelations in the finale.

The changes to KITT are a bit of a mixed bag. I definitely appreciate the reasons they changes KITT’s attack mode. In the pilot, it wasn’t instantly obvious which car you were looking at in a particular scene without checking closely (the spoiler usually being the quickest give-away), and there’s no doubt this is a more aggressive-looking attack mode. However I prefer the sportier lines of KITT in his regular mode, and the blue underlighting (forming the Knight Research logo) is really just a bit over-the-top. However the good news is that the attack mode is also being used quite sparingly so far, with the Shelby remaining the main “hero” car of the piece which I definitely like.

I do miss the iPhone-inspired screen from the pilot, but the new HUD works well. Although there have been a couple of times when Mike’s been driving and its clearly obscuring his view of the road. It perhaps needs to be more obvious that KITT’s driving while Mike’s using the screen (safety first ). KITT’s new vocaliser (for want of a better term) seems a little busy to me, but I do love how they’ve included the three bars from the original series in it.

How the series fairs in the modern age of networks being quick off the mark to cancel shows remains to be seen, but, while its still finding its feet, Knight Rider strikes me as filling a gap in the market with some good “switch your brain off and enjoy the ride” action.

I’ve been having fun with my LAMP setup again at home.  I decided that it’d be interesting to setup laconica to play with (an open source implementation of Twitter, the most well-known of which is identi.ca).

Fortunately getting it setup was fairly easy to do, but I decided that I really wanted to play with it a bit more, in terms of see how it can be extended, and setting up a customised theme.

This got me to thinking.  I’m the Subversion admin at work, and recently was on a course to that effect, and I figured, why not set up Subversion at home, and bung my laconica installation into it.  Similarly, as a result of the course, I’ve been looking at Trac (wiki and defect-tracking software), and so thought I may as well set that up to play with as well.

Both subversion and trac are easily installed via Synaptic, although its not the most recent versions (version 1.4.6 of Subversion and 0.10.4 of Trac), but for my purposes these are fine.

Fortunately, the Trac website has a handy FAQ I was able to use to help set both up.  Subversion worked pretty much out the box after installation, but I wanted to get it working with my Apache installation which this helped with.  The only issue I had was that the www-data group doesn’t seem to be working properly, and I can’t add my user to it.  So I created my own wwwusers group instead, which seemed to work ok.

The fun thing for me, was that in work I work in Windows, so most of my Subversion usage is via TortoiseSVN.  At home, in Linux, I wasn’t really sure about what GUIs to use.  I’ve installed a couple via Synaptic, but I ended up using the command-line to create the repository, the directory structure, import the code and create my branch to work on.   Good practise for me.

I don’t do a lot of development at home.  But I’m hoping that as I get my environment setup I’ll get more into it, and if nothing else this is good practise for me in building my admin skills rather than just being a desktop user of Ubuntu.

We’ve now had two episodes of the BBC’s latest entry to the “Doctor Who” Saturday teatime slot: Merlin.

The show is basically Smallville meets Arthurian Legend. A young Merlin is sent to Camelot by his mother, who is finding it increasingly difficult to help him with his growing magical talents. So she sends him to stay with Gaius, who appears to have some knowledge in the ways of magic although not a magic-user himself. He quickly identifies that there’s something different about Merlin, who is able to use magic without the use of potions or spells, unlike all other magic-users. However, with King Uthar having banned all magic in the kingdom on pain of execution, Merlin has to balance keeping his powers discrete, while at the same time, embracing them.

To me, this show has proved much stronger so far than the other “Doctor Who” slot candidate, Robin Hood. There’s a confidence in this show in what its trying to be, and the cast all suit their roles well (while I’ve enjoyed episodes of Robin Hood, and its got some nice ideas, its never quite gelled for me, although I did quite enjoy season 2). The first two episodes were good fun, with some nice character building, with the first establishing Merlin and the setting in Camelot, while the second episode took the arrogant young Arthur from the first episode and showed the pressure he’s put under by his father as prince.

If I have any worries at this early stage, its that there could be a trap of falling into a predictible pattern, with some magic-related threat to the kingdom, Merlin discovers it, however is angsty about revealing the threat without being able to use his own powers.  Merlin manages to discretely foil the threat.   However, as I say, its only two episodes in, and I hope that with setting and characters established, we’ll see some more arc elements start to emerge.   We obviously know the outcomes for these characters, so it’ll be interesting to see if Morgana’s villainous future is hinted towards, and you have to wonder how often Merlin will be able to visit the Great Dragon before someone notices…

Its great teatime TV, and its definitely something I’m looking forward to every Saturday.  I’m very interested to see how the storyline develops.

Playing catchup here a bit. Wizard Universe has a great glimpse at some of Shane Davis’ Red Lantern designs for the upcoming special.

I love these small sneak peaks, and enjoyed the Final Crisis sketchbook in the same way. It looks like Davis has had as much fun designing Red Lanterns as Ethan Van Skiver did the Sinestro Corps, and similarly, it looks like there’s some pretty nasty characters here.

As I’ve said before here, I was a big fan of Mystery in Space, and Shane’s artwork on that series, so I’m really looking forward to seeing his work on Green Lantern. One thing you’ve got to say about GL is that since its relaunch, its been attracting some of the best artists DC have. At least, its certainly been attracting most of my favourites.

Geoff Johns has also been dropping some teases about the Black Lanterns, and confirmed that Ronnie Raymond (the previous Firestorm) is going to be a Black Lantern.   It’ll be interesting to see how the various DC heroes end up encorporated into the various Corps.   Something I suspect will play heavily into the discussions that had been mentioned before (by Dan Didio I think) as to whether Blackest Night is going to remain a GL-specific crossover, or be branched out into a DCU-wide crossover.   While the prospect of seeing various familiar characters recruited to the various Corps could be fun, I’d hope that even if it gets pitched as a universe-wide crossover, the structure is kept similar to Sinestro Corps, with the focus remaining on the GLs and only a strictly limited number of books containing the meat of the story.

Well, last week saw the release of the hotly-anticipated new Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed.

I promptly picked it up for the Nintendo Wii, and had been looked forward to it. I’d also picked up the novelisation (as it turns out, a good move, since sections of the story have been cut or replaced in the Wii version of the game). While not boasting the next-gen graphics or physics engine of the 360 and PS3 versions, the Nintendo version at least finally offers us the chance to control a lightsaber with the wiimote, and get a pretty fair approximation for the next-gen version of the game.

Speaking more generally (spoilers ahoy), I can’t help but be dissappointed.   To be honest, it first went wrong when I read the novelisation.  The idea of Vader having his own apprentice was interesting (especially since it was a direct contradiction of the rule of 2).   I liked the character of Proxy and the idea that Vader had an unwitting hand in starting the rebel alliance is interesting, although it does paint a picture that most of the would-be rebels (ok, Bail Organa has a good reason for wanting to keep his head down and Leia off of Vader’s radar) spent a fair chunk of the dark times not doing much to combat the Empire.   Of course, perhaps I should just take the events of the game as the first time the rebellion became official and overt.

Sadly what annoyed me were just some of the really odd bits.  The Star Destroyer sequence is probably being debated to death, so I’ll just say it struck me as too fanfic-y, but the whole issue of Starkiller’s death and rebirth is really left far too vague for something that’s actually quite a big plot point.  I mean, Vader stabs him right through the chest, smashes him off a few walls, and then spaces him.  Frankly, I’ve seen it both in the novel and the game, and I’m still unsure how he could’ve possibly survived.

As for the game itself, its deeply flawed.   As a Star Wars fan, I’m always going to get a good amount of enjoyment running around hacking up Storm Troopers with a lightsaber.  And there’s no doubt that the implementation of the force in this game is a lot of fun (pushing with the nunchuck etc).  I can’t wait to play the next-gen version in that aspect.

However, in other areas, the game is really let down.  Again, most of these are common complaints.  The camera’s awful.  If you’re mobbed by enemies (frequently the case), then the on-screen action becomes a hopeless jumble, and you’re frequently being shot from somewhere off-screen with no clear idea where.   In one-on-one boss fights, similarly, keeping track of the boss is difficult.

The basic gameplay is also another issue.  While offing Storm Troopers Jedi-style is a lot of fun for me, even I can’t fail to notice that the gameplay consists of running in a straight line, killing wave-after-wave of enemies.   There’s a definitely repetative feel to it.

Controlling the lightsaber with the wiimote I’ve also found a mixed bag.  I love the lightsaber noises coming from the wiimote’s speaker, but I frequently find myself flailing the wiimote around in the vague hope that whoever’s infront of me will die from it.   I don’t really feel in proper control of the onscreen action, and the idea of me investing in any of the “do a 3-hit combo then press C” type powers just seems laughable at the moment.    I remain unconvinced as to how good the Wiimote actually is in action games.

One plus however, is that the Wii version doesn’t contain the infamous (and previously mentioned) Star Destroyer sequence.   As well as pushing believability, its my understanding that its a hellishly frustrating and buggy part of the next-gen version of the game.  Glad I dodged that bullet at least.

I recently replayed Jedi Knight 2 on my PC and to be honest, it beat the pants off of this.   However, if they sort out the camera issues, and make the gameplay a lot less linear, The Force Unleashed 2 could be something pretty special.  As I say, the way they implemented the Force is fun, and I’m intrigued to see what the PC version ends up like.

Some new pictures of the upcoming City Commander trailer for Classics Ultra Magnus can be seen here

I can’t afford it sadly, but its certainly drool-worthy, and hard to resist for a big Ultra Magnus fan like me.

On a related note, I’m really loving the Universe Classics. Prowl and Sunstreaker have both been released over here, and they’re ace toys. I really love the way that Prowl’s shoulder-mounted missles have been integrated in, instead of left as separate pieces. They’re great updates of the originals.

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As controversial as it is hotly-awaited, I picked up Spore the other weekend.

The latest game from Will Wright, it finds you guiding a new civilisation through all stages of its development, form the primordial ooze, through to its mastery of intergalactic travel.

Taken on their own merits, each of these five stages (cell, creature, tribal, civilization, space) could be viewed as a bit simplistic (although I’ve only just gotten onto the space stage, and my feeling is that its a very different, much more in-depth beast to the other four). However this is a game that’s more than the sum of its parts. While the gameplay might be simplistic in some regards, I’m not sure that’s where the focus is. Instead for me, its simplisity is part of the appeal, and guiding a creature up from being a single cell organism is incredibly satisfying, and really helps you bond with your creations.

A huge part of this game’s appeal is the level of customisation.  From the evolution of your creature in the cell and creature stages, to customising their buildings and vehicles in the civilisation and space ages, there’s a lot of fun to be had with the very flexible in-game editors.

I’ve only just started the space stage, but I’m really enjoying the game.  And there’s an added level of fun to be had knowing that the creatures inhabiting the game can be created by other players, all sharing their creations via the online Sporepedia.

The thing I find a real shame though, is that this otherwise great fun game is picking up a lot of negative publicity due to the draconian DRM restrictions EA have placed on the game.  Regular readers will know that I’m no fan of these kinds of methods, as they largely have no use, other than to punish those who’ve legitimately purchased the product.

In this case, Spore seems to be no exception.  While the box cover makes no mention of the fact, the story is that the game only allows you to install it 3 times.  After which you need to contact EA support to get the key reset to allow you to install it again.

This is frankly just rubbish.  I know I’ve got many games that I regularly uninstall, then reinstall to free up disc space for other things I’m wanting to play at that time.

According to Wikipedia, Spore is fast heading towards the honour of being the most bittorrented game ever.  Says a lot for the draconian DRM restrictions.  They’ve clearly not prevented the piracy of the game, so you have to wonder what the point was.  All its done is resulted in the game getting some really bad press.  Not to mention, you wonder how many of those downloaders would’ve bought the game legally, if not for those restrictions.

At the end of the day, its the devs I feel sorry for.  They’ve crafted a really fun game, only to see it crippled by the studio.