Monte Carlo

Anything Victorian sucks. Hmmm. No. Look up the old 2000AD comic book story Nemesis The Warlock, where a race of aliens is heavily influenced, cargo cult style, by media images of Victoriana and Empire. It's a treat and it might even change your mind. Alternatively, try one of George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman novels. Cheers MC

^ I know, I took one look at one of those power-gaming character-building websites and got a nosebleed. Not that I dislike powergaming, it's just that I much prefer lazy powergaming. This is why Sawyer's core class hardcore approach has my approval. I'm currently going with a Human Ranger / Rogue (no PrC planned), an Aasimar single-class Cleric (PrC Warpriest), an Elf Ftr / Wiz (PrC Arcane Archer) and a Dwarf Ftr / Bbn (no PrC). For some reason it just isn't working for me. I'm tempted to make four Gray Orc barbarians and simply smash my way through the thing instead. Cheers MC

Storm of Zehir, trying to figure out the right party. There's too much choice. I think I might be radical and go for Fighter, Mage, Cleric & Thief. A concept so radical it might actually rip a hole in the space / time continuum. Cheers MC

OK, so I saw Rocknrolla last night. Genre: Typical Guy Ritchie London crime caper Monte Score: 7.5/10 Best comedy villains: The two bondage-loving Russian ex-commandos who spend a lot of time comparing scars I have to open this short review by admitting that I am a big fan of both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Ritchie drives a lot of people up the wall with his alleged adulation of London's criminal classes, which I can see, but I view him as the bastard offspring of the Ealing comedies, Carry On movies and hard-arsed 1970's crime drama. Rocknrolla is already a period piece: it opens during the climax of the London property boom (i.e. the summer of 2007) where Lennie, a London gangster is embroiled in a number of planning scams for crooked property developers. People laughed at this when the movie was launched on D-Day +1 of the property crash, but if you were living in London in late 2007 you'd recognise the sleezy aura of money and greed is simply indicative of it's time. So it's no biggie. The plot concerns Russian kleptocrats, small-time villains, a washed-up junkie pop star who happens to be Lennie's stepson (a roman a clef I suspect, because he's a bit like Pete Doherty) and a beautiful accountant (Thandie Newton) with too much time on her hands and terminal ennui. There's also a classic Maguffin (a Russian icon) that is clearly trying to compete with Marcellus Wallace's mysterious briefcase from Pulp Fiction. Gerard Butler is one of the small time villains. I like him, he's an easy to watch screen presence although I expect him to scream SPARTA! at any second and run around in his swimming trunks. He gets involved in two robberies. There's also a subplot about who's informing for the police, the aforementioned Russian ex-commando hitmen and one of the wittiest sex scenes I've ever seen in a film (it's completely chaste). Is it ground-breaking or astonishingly original? No. It's actually less stylised than either of his two previous London crime movies, except for some obvious Tarantino-esque genuflection. Is it a well-made, stylish movie that does exactly what it says on the tin with a superb cast of character actors? Hell, yes, and for this alone it comes recommended. Cheers MC

^ Converting folks to your religion improves public order in that province. It's far from useless. Well, that's how it worked in all the other games. Saw this game in the shops today and it's the first TW title I didn't swoop on and buy. Why? Like I said, the historical period doesn't fire my imagination and (more importantly) I really really resent having to download Steam to install it. If I buy a hard copy of a game from a shop I expect to be able to play it out of the box, period. This creeping online control of digital media by the producers is wrong. Cheers MC

I remember one of the climactic battles of XCOM: Enemy Unknown where my victory was largely due to the Stormtrooper-like marksmanship skillz of the aliens, who kept shooting each other. Doom is another classic. Open door, room full of zombies and demons, fire gun, run away. Go back to room and enjoy the carnage as they all frag each other in their hurry to get you. Cheers MC

Under Siege was awesome. That's the only Seagal film I can remember enjoying. I like Chuck Norris, but only because I'm scared of him. Cheers MC

I don't think Troika would ever have been capable of making a genuinely successful mainstream game. Their vision of what they wanted to do was so strong, it morphed into arrogance. I've played two out of three of their releases (Vampires? Meh). Both of them were deeply flawed, ToEE could have been great but wasn't. That makes their failure even more acute. Having said that, it's not like I wish them any ill, in fact IIRC they're all doing pretty well working elsewhere. You might be the greatest games design genius in the world; it clearly doesn't mean that you're going to be able to run a successful development company. As a customer, my view of Troika was that they weren't really interested in engaging with fans in a meaningful way (which I know is probably hard work, but it pays dividends), their products were buggy and rushed and in the case of TOEE, the relationship with Atari seemed, ahem, difficult. Cheers MC

^ Although I love action movies, including pulp action movies, I've never been able to get into martial arts movies. Except Jackie Chan, who is completely brilliant on a number of levels. BTW, this week I'm going to be watching Guy Ritchie's new movie RocknRolla. Will let you know what I thought of it, although I'm biased because I like his crime capers (favourite line from a Guy Ritchie movie: Q: What's that? A: It's me Bren gun, innit? Not to mention Brad Pitt's turn in Snatch, which makes me giggle just thinking about it. As another aside, I'm seeing lots of very mixed reviews of the new Watchmen movie. When I first heard about it I thought "Er, that'll go the way of the movie Dune if they're not careful..." Cheers MC

4 Euros for an ice cream in Florence? By Odin's Raven I never suspected that was even possible! I concede that The Eternal City has it's charms, I'm sure gelato is one of them. Bread is another. However, on my forays to Italy I seldom venture that far south. Am happy that this otherwise rather dry thread has meandered so agreeably off-topic.

I've actually been to that ice cream shop in Florence (near the Ponte Vecchio I suspect). They were, indeed, delicious. However, the bill for two was eighteen euros, and that was almost four years ago. As for top hundred games designers, where's the dude who wrote 'Adventure' for the original wood-panelled Atari? Cheers MC

My post wasn't a jab at Heinlein, who is clearly a prophet. Apart from the bit with the bugs, of course. Cheers MC

Saw Babylon AD last night. Struck me as a graphic novel adaptation - a bit cyber-punk with Bladerunner overtones (aren't they all?). Turop (Vin) is a heavily tattooed skinhead who has to escort a mysterious girl and her nun-minder to New York. Straight off, I'll say that I like Vin Diesel, he's a credible movie action hero and clearly loves the genre. However, the movie suffers from some very average action scenes (shooting out the tyres of a fast-moving range rover with an MP5? No) and Michelle Yeoh (for it was she) is wasted and only gets minimal butt-kicking opportunities (which is a bit like putting Jack Black in a movie and only giving him a single smart-arse one-liner). Bizarrely, Gerad Depardieu has a cameo as a Russian gangster (who travels around in a pimped-up armoured car full of wide screen TVs), Mark Strong is a mercenary with a Duran Duran haircut and Charlotte Rampling is the high priestess of a strange cult based in New York. I liked the setting though, a sort of post-apocalyptic, dystopian Russia and all points East. To be honest, though, this movie was like somebody watched Children of Men and said 'lets make this movie for attention-deficient kids whose primary frame of reference is anything on Playstation 3.' Monte's tip? Watch Chronicles of Riddick instead, then watch the really rather good Children of Men. Unless, of course, you want to see Gerard Depardieu with modelling-clay on his nose doing a very bad Russian accent in the back of a tank. Cheers MC

I like FO3 a lot, but kind of gave up on it because of (a) lack of stability and (b) repetitive combat. I also don't like the scrounging / scavenging - it just gets a bit stale for me, as do weapons breaking all the time. Seriously, you can bury an AK in gravel and sewage for years, slap a magazine in, ready it, pull the trigger and it'll likely go 'bang.' So why does my FO:3 AK degrade after I fire a couple of hundred rounds through it? That's not immersion - it's a pain in the arse. I can understand it with energy weapons, because they don't actually exist... Having said that, I love the sandbox aspect and the art direction: I'll defiintely be coming back to it when it's patched and I've figured out which mods to use (hint - more durable weapons, please). Cheers MC

Have work commitments until next week, then have free time to play Storm of Zehir. Still agonizing over a good party, too much choice. In the meantime, a turn or two of MTW2: GC mod every now and then (England, turn 112). Cheers MC

I didn't like NWN, but I can appreciate why lots of people did - not least the toolset aspect. Looking back on it, one of the reasons I didn't like it was the hype, and marked the end of a fairly fan-boyish attitude to Bio. Bioware's hype for NWN was overblown and inaccurate. The OC was awful, a bolt-on to what was a superlative D&D toolset for builders. This wasn't what was promised and as someone who bought it for the single-player experience that was a big let down. HotU, OTOH, was a solid, enjoyable product. If the OC had been of comparable quality then I'd have been a lot happier. Oh well, water under the bridge. Cheers MC

I live in London, which is a pretty big place. Yes the 50 megaton effort destroys it fairly comprehensively, with the tertiary effects covering the entire M25 (the orbital motorway, most of which isn't actually in London). OTOH, Little Boy, at a mere 15 KT, only zaps Westminster and a few outlying areas. I'd probably be faraway enough to see the mushroom cloud and catch radiation sickness. Cheers MC

^ Clearly not, then again I have a day job, a family and other stuff going on. You could enlighten me as to how these games worked, rather than sneer at my lack of available idling time. Cheers MC

^ Yes, I'm sure we all get the Fonz / Jump the Shark reference.

One of my favourite games, ever, is Hackmaster. A parody of 1st Edition AD&D, it works because it is clearly a homage to a much-loved original. It manages to tread that difficult line between parody and actually being playable. A Hackmaster session, with the right players and some alcoholic refreshment, really is like spending an evening in your very own Monty Python movie. On the computer, this seems to me to be a trickier premise. Having said that, DungeonKeeper struck me as not just witty and playable, but a game where the humour wasn't a bolt on. I'm struggling to think of others, maybe because games like Evil Genius (I think that's what it was called, was really looking forward to it but the less said the better) don't cut the mustard. So, where do we stand on comedy and parody in computer games? Hackmaster would, in my opinion, utterly rock. I'm sure you could tinker with the NWN2 engine and do a Hackmaster mod. Cheers MC

Or Wrongtastic. Wrongifullnae. Wrongtabulous. Those aren't new words, they're existing words with an annoying suffix. I'm completely aware of the evolution of language. That doesn't mean that the future of English being determined by Micro$oft spell-checker is necessarily a good thing. Cheers MC Edit: I can't be bothered to argue with Vol.

That was a good review, even if it did confirm some of my worst fears about deus ex machina gameplay via origin stories (i.e. the arc is fixed, you only make tweak-decisions, we are all goldfish in Dave Gaider's aquarium). However, and this cannot be forgiven, the author used the word 'impactful', which isn't a word and annoys me greatly. On the other hand, I simply cannot wait to see what the community does with the cutscene dialogue tools. It's gonna be a riot. Cheers MC

^ I was on my own in a house in Dorset (very rural), drunk and watching The Shining. It was pretty scary, although not as scary as my hangover the next day.

That would be Doomsday from writer/director Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent) with Rhona Mitra, Sean Pertwee, Alexander Siddig, Bob Hoskins, and Malcolm McDowell. That's the one! Rhona is extremely lovely, but she does scowl all the way through the movie. There's a Vin Diesel movie on pay-per-view at the moment called Babylon AD. Mrs. Carlo likes the look of it and so do I. Has anyone seen it? If so I'd be grateful for a quick review, although the synopsis seems reminiscent of the sci-fi movie with Bruce Willis and Gary Oldfield... blimey I'm getting bad at remembering movie titles at the moment! Cheers MC

Am very lucky, Mrs. Carlo hates sci-fi (i.e. "anything with spaceships") but really likes, er, non-spaceship based sci-fi. This is the way her mind works. Anyway, I've now indoctrinated her with the core message that it cannot be sci-fi if there isn't a spaceship. Therefore she swooned all the way through the trailer for Death Race, both at hunky Jason as well as the silly cars and OTT action sequences. It's all a question of semantics. Cheers MC