Ben X

I would totally buy that rucksack.

Zeus, would you be able to take a screengrab of the Kitty Hat photo, please? I want to take a look to see how clear the hats are but I can't find a shot online anywhere. The smallest hint about your line of thinking on that race ticket puzzle: And a slightly bigger hint about the forklift as it may be something you aren't able to visually discern:

Playing the expansion pack (I miss that term) now, and the gravity gun and bullet-time make this much more fun (although once again it's starting to get repetitive, of course). Whoever makes that fan mod I'm daydreaming about should definitely stick some of this in there too.

The new version of the theme tune is like a YouTube parody that someone made. I've watched the augment and Klingon eps from season 4. They were definitely more interesting, especially the clever linking of different strands of lore. The characters are all still rather dull, though, and although the action has got a bit more slick and exciting the plots are pretty formulaic. It's definitely getting better; as the list article says, it's a shame that it seemed to be just about to find itself when it got cancelled.

I edited the config file to get everything on super-high settings with widescreen, high resolution etc, and it generally looked great.

Yeah, it was very immersive, I really enjoyed the flashlight mechanic. I think I agree with you on it being superior to Rage in those respects too, although I never really experienced the racing as it was so irritating I only did the bare minimum to complete the main quest line.

Ah, okay, thanks. I always forget to check the blog and I'm not on Twitter that much. I must have somehow missed it on the podcast! I don't think I would have been able to make a valuable contribution anyway, thanks to my low-quality recording equipment and vocal chords.

I just finished DooM3 for the first time. It still looks and plays great, tons of atmosphere and meaty shooting. The only problem is it's far too long and repetitive, with a load of boring voice recordings and data logs to get through and lots of back-tracking with keycards etc. Basically, this game needs to be at least halved in length and it would be amazing. It's very similar to Rage - the data logs and NPCs which precede Rage's RPG-lite stuff, the walky robot turret friends, the Half-Lifey walking round the base at the start, the imps clambering along walls and jumping at you. If either of those games got a mod that lineared them out and cut all the bullshit and padding, they'd be fantastic.

I never saw or heard Chris soliciting for backing vocals, where did that happen? I love the new theme tune, and I'm particularly pleased that it's another change of style. I really enjoyed the jump from electric to acoustic at episode 50 (ish?) and was mildly disappointed that there wasn't another big switch-up for the next update, even though I dug the more Led Zeppeliny (right?) version. So when that brass kicked in, I actually got shivers down my spine. Well done, Chris! And thanks to all the Thumbs for over 150 excellent 'casts blasted!

I'm looking forward to The Raid 2 too. I've been trying to convince myself to go see Noah, as I'm a big Aronofsky fan and it got pretty good reviews from AV Club and Empire, but that trailer was soooo bad.

Missed this until now, thanks Sarge!

Why do you say the Kickstarter looks pretty bad, Toblix?

I haven't seen it since broadcast, so I can't really remember how gross it got; the stuff I remember is the

It's not that it was formulaic as such, I meant more that the twists and reveals were all massively predictable. My favourite super hero movies are Batman, The Incredibles, Unbreakable and Mystery Men, with Blade, X-Men/X2 double-bill, Batman Begins and Iron Man as close contenders. If we went for comic book movies, then I'd start with The Crow, Persepolis, Akira, Oldboy and Hellboy 2, Constantine, The Mask....

It's also "show don't tell" - they don't want to skip things and imply or report them later, that's bad telly. And in the books, so I guess they needed to make that believable. It's always annoying to me when that kind of thing happens over only one or two scenes in a show (Person Of Interest got around this recently by having ). There probably is a more lascivious motive there as well, but iirc it was mostly

Oh man, I just skipped to season 3 and they made the theme tune even worse!

I also prefer the blacked out lines. They allow you to spoiler a single word or sentence without making the post all ugly and disjointed. Having a button for them would be nice too...

Just went and watched this for the first time and you're right, that was the one! Thanks!

You're right! I haven't been able to enjoy any film ever, it's a curse. I got close to enjoying Back To The Future, but that line about a "rhythmic ceremonial ritual" is too cartoonish, and I was almost able to enjoy "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" - having assumed that when the German soldiers on the U-Boat say "tauchen" meaning "dive", the fact that they also mention extending the periscope means they only dove a couple of metres and Indy could have survived the trip to the island hanging onto the scope - but that bit in the marketplace where someone shoots a machine-gun directly at Indy but it hits the ground in front of him for no reason meant I couldn't. When will my quest for perfection end?!

Oh nice, I hadn't noticed that was you. Good work, looking forward to the overhaul! Udvarnosky or whatever it is wrote some of those excellent MixNMojo retrospectives, right? I'll be recommending Zeus reads through those and your site when he's through.

I don't require films to be perfect, which is what you seem to be implying, just not dull, predictable and cliched. I agree that the action is well-staged, but a lot of it is also generally quite dull - by-the-books guns and martial arts fighting. although as I say, it has a handful of exceptions. Unfortunately, it's been a rotten year for action, so it doesn't have much to beat...

It was okay. It had a fair few cool moments and scenes, but it was also far too long and often a bit of a slog. It wanted to be a Cold War thriller but wasn't sharp enough to pull it off - it was full of cliches and boring soldier men, and very predictable. It kind of made me want to be watching a Nick Fury movie instead. Two of the coolest moments featured older actors in cameos but were then squandered -

Also about a minute too long.

Watched "REGENERATION" - ENTERPRISE 02.23 (SPOILERS). It was okay. It was kind of cool seeing less well-equipped people learn the rules of the Borg at the start of an outbreak, but that's pretty much the only fresh aspect to a story we've seen plenty of times already. Unless they fix it later in the series, it suddenly makes no sense that the Federation haven't heard of the Borg before. Considering every starship captain seems to know Federation (and indeed human) history inside out, it's strange that Picard doesn't go "oh, this must be that cyborg race that lives in Delta Quadrant that we know loads about from Admiral Archer's encounter and from them being only about the third or fourth alien race to be encountered on Earth itself." You'd think this would be at the forefront of the writers' minds; I was waiting for a Revenge Of The Sith style "wipe the protocol droid's memory" type move at the end of the episode. I noticed they avoided having the Borg name themselves, but that doesn't solve it. Assuming that the drones in the Arctic are from the events of First Contact, though, the fact that they alert their collective to the existence of Earth/Alpha Quadrant does have a nice time paradox/circularity flavour to it. Also, the people at the Arctic outpost were fucking idiots who deserved to be assimilated. And I'm going to keep mentioning this fucking theme tune. "I have faith to believe" DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING.

Jeff Smith has a webcomic. I'm a few pages in and enjoying it.