Iron Man 3 Trailer

Way back in the Cretaceous Period of 2008, a little film called Iron Man was released, a Marvel film adapting a character I had no particular interest in on the grounds that all the comics of his I'd read he seemed to be a boring industrialist with a stupid mustache who constantly moaned about being rich, desired by women and owning a home made suit of armour that fired magnets and lasers. The film turned out to be a hit and resulted in a series of adaptations of the other of Marvel's lesser used properties, cumulating in the childhood realising masterpiece that was The Avengers.

Three trailers have been released for the third Iron Man film (Or alternately the seventh Avengers film.) and here are my opinions on them.

Firstly, it seems to me that this interpretation of Iron Man villain The Mandarin is taking heavy inspiration from The Dark Knight Rises version of Bane, being a terrorist of deliberately unspecified ethnicity, an unusually captivating voice, and who is vowing to destroy the very ground beneath the feet of the film's incredibly rich hero in the third installment and at some point destroys a passenger plane. If that's the case it seems unusual that Marvel would draw from such a source, because The Dark Knight Rises was a bit of a flop in my opinion and the Iron Man series was always taking its own route from the Dark Knight Saga, being more obviously humorous due to the overpowering charisma of Robert Downey Jr and not nearly as grimly confrontational about moral lessons.

I do like the obvious continuity between this film and the Avengers though, I imagine there'll only be vague references so as not to make the film difficult to watch for the three people that haven't watched The Avengers yet. But I like how they're continuing Tony Stark's slow character arc of overcoming his
war profiteering days and becoming more selfless, in the case of this film, making him lean too far in the other direction as he is seemingly now paranoid that everything is trying to kill him and as a result has started hoarding all of his technology, which is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to come when you've been attacked by terrorists, aliens and Russians with electric whips in the space of two years.

My favorite part of the trailer has to be the very end when it seems as if Stark has managed to animate the spare armoured suits into doing battle alongside him, including what appears to be the Hulkbuster mech bustling through a wall, which will almost certainly seem like an interesting idea until you get confused about which armours are meant to be occupied by the characters and which ones get shot down, and potentially not get utilised by the writers in any meaningful way like the animated suits at the end of Iron Man 2. Though in that case those suits were being built up throughout the film as being made within a week by a guy who reversed engineered the arc reactor in his garage so why would they have been that good?


That's just my hypothesis though, cynicism is a powerful tool when judging a third installment of a film series who's second film has a bit of a downgrade. There's no doubt that I'm still looking forward to this film, but critical caution is always wise when a franchise gets to this size, and the second film, whilst still witty with an interesting story, was a significant downgrade from the previous film, I'm hoping that doesn't remain too constant in this case.

Mogworld and Jam

I don't read a lot myself, I used to love reading but my attention seems to have vastly depleted itself ever since I started focusing more on films and TV as my main hobby, so now I've got a load of unread books* on my shelf that I haven't finished. Another thing that I'm still a fan of however is Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation, a video game review show that's greatly influenced my writing style and from whom I've stolen entire lines of monologue from to try and sound more articulate.

*The last three Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, the first three Dune books, and Harlan Ellison's three short story collections 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream', 'The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World' and 'Paingod and Other Delusions' if you're interested.

In the past few years, Yahtzee has taken to writing novels in addition to his other endeavors, the two of which out so far are Mogworld and Jam, the latter of which I've just finished reading. I should stress again that I'm a huge fan of Yahtzee and Zero Punctuation and any negativity expressed in this post should be taken as it is.

Mogworld

First of all let's talk about Mogworld, the plot is about a young lad called Jim, who is a wizarding student, who is killed but resurrected 60 years later by an 'evil' Necromancer. It happens that Jim, along with everybody in his world, is actually a none-player character in an MMORPG of the future in which the AI has gained sapience, his world is then stricken by immortality and player characters, messing up their society. It's a very original story that I'm surprised nobody thought of that goes to a lot of places based on this concept, and when I say that I mean literally for most of the book they hardly stay in the same place for long before moving off to other locations for various reasons.

It got me quite confused for a while and reminded me a lot of Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic in that and a few other ways I don't like, namely that the main character Jim, like Rincewind, is a self confessed dirty, self serving scoundrel and coward who considers themselves to be the furthest from heroism that a man can be. And reading Mogworld, Jim's personality seems like an amalgamation of Rincewind and Yahtzee's on-screen persona in Zero Punctuation, and while I find Zero Punctuation funny because his misanthropy is played purely for laughs, it seems a whole lot less funny when there's a story around it because if you can't excuse an amoral character on a count of being funny then they're just plain old unlikable, and it often made me hard to sympathise with Jim and his goals when he's only occasionally spouting Zero Punctuation style overdrawn similes (Though on one occaision, a line of dialogue is identical to one in Zero Punctuation.) and the rest of the time was spent exclaiming how much he hates the ground beneath his own feet.

The other characters are a bit mixed, while some characters such as Slippery John, the cheery amoral thief who speaks in third person, and Meryl, the cheery undead girl who adventures with Jim much to his chagrin are a bit more amusing, even if their dialogue isn't as funny as some of Jim's, they at least don't act miserable all the time, which contrasted nicely. Though back on the bad hand, the character of the Priest who joins Jim occasionally is similarly unlikable on the grounds that, like Jim, he only has one recurring character trait and accompanying joke he drags around that's repeated with every line of dialogue, namely the fact that he's religious, Yahtzee appears to dislike organised religion because he seems to take every opportunity to use the Priest to take shots at them, whether it's relevant to the topic at hand or the pacing or not.

Those are the only real problems I have with Mogworld though, the plot is very tight and interesting and takes several unexpected and exciting turns, even if it is occasionally a bit hard to follow, the characters I didn't mention by name range from harmless to hilarious, and the third act of the book and the ending in particular is one of my favorite book endings I can remember, because the ending is the point Yahtzee remembers he's perfectly capable of writing poignant, thoughful and more importantly, happy moments.

Jam

Now onto Jam. The plot of Jam is thus, in the real world roughly glimpsed at in the ending of Mogworld, a couple of Australian jobless 20-somethings get caught in an unusual apocalypse scenario in which the whole of Brisbane wakes up one morning to find that the city has been covered in a thick layer of carnivorous jam that absorbs all organic material that comes into contact with it. So the aforementioned characters, Travis and Tim, must team up with Angela, a journalism student who suspects government conspiracies, and Don, a game developer who appeared briefly in Mogworld, and must to traverse their new society, try not to touch the jam, and maybe even get to the bottom of the cause of the jam.

Now, I like the characters in Jam a lot more, because the main characters are all more rounded and have much more likable characters and don't exclusively exist to give a Zero Punctuation style snarky comment about the situation at hand. Unless you count Don, who is another character who's literally Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation persona transplanted into the story, but Don is a lot more likable than Jim from the previous book because we're not expected to sympathise with his struggles, just listen to him snarkily comment on the main characters troubles.

Apocalypse stories, like MMORPG's, are obviously a concept to which Yahtzee is very readily accustomed to and makes a load of genuinely funny and insightful snarks into the common tropes of apocalypse stories. Yahtzee claims in a couple of Zero Punctuation episodes that in a zombie apocalypse, the zombies could be entirely interchangeable with something else without altering any aspect of the story, which is exactly what Yahtzee achieved here, change zombies to carnivorous jam and the gun and weapon looting to plastic bag theft and this would merely be a humorous parody/satire of the standard apocalypse scenario.

There are some things I don't like about this story though, firstly that it has the opposite problem to Mogworld in terms of pacing, because rather than spending every chapter in a different location, there are about 4 locations in the whole story, with about three fifths of it spent in the one where Yahtzee gets to use an aspect of modern society as a punching bag for the same joke, except instead of organised religion and religious fanatics it's the hipster subculture, and like the Priest in Mogworld, they're pretty much a repeating one joke for the entire book. I don't need Yahtzee telling me that hipsters look and sound a bit stupid when I'd rather have him elaborate on his more interesting cultural observations.

Like Mogworld, the last third of the book is very tense and a little bit emotional with an unexpected twist regarding the origin of the jam that I absolutely loved and would hate to spoil, not quite as powerful as Mogworld's ending though.

Conclusion

Mogworld was mostly hit and miss but fun for one or two reads, Jam was an improvement but still had massive blank spots where not a lot was going on, Yahtzee clearly knows his stuff about the genres he writes about, which is of course why Zero Punctuation is such a massive hit, but I personally don't think that his rapid fire humour works in novel form because generally when he runs out of jokes he startes repeating himself until the story shifts, and those time are very far and in between.

I look forward to any future book Yahtzee writes though, he's unmistakably a very funny and insightful guy and definitely worth listening to, every artist has their good, their bad and their average after all.

My Top 10/11 Favorite Films of 2012

2012 was a good year for films I think, even though there are about three new IP's on this list and the rest being remakes, sequels or adaptations.

10. Taken 2

Good sequel escalation, roughly equal in quality to Taken 1, but with a very 'The Hangover' type recursion in the plot. Lots of very thrilling action sequences from start to finish, as well as good character development for whatever Liam Neeson's daughter was called.

The only thing I don't like though is that there is a theme that questions the similarities between Liam Neeson and the main villain, since they're both amoral monsters willing to sink to incredible depths to protect their families. And then you remember the villain's original motivation was selling sex slaves and you stop empathising with them, making the film's theme kind of a nonissue. Nonetheless, a thrilling action flick, just like its predecessor.

9. Skyfall

As I hadn't seen a bond film before, the action wasn't remotely as over the top as I expected thankfully, the story was interesting and relevant too. I like the characters of Mr Silva, M and Q, even if they do seem a bit familiar somehow. Of note has to be the incredibly captivating semi-animated opening credits that I really really liked for some reason.

8. Looper

Good world building and concepts, the story keeps you guessing at the start when it's interesting but becomes predictable toward the end until the last second. The ending is a bit of a letdown and felt meaningless to me, but it built up well.

It's an interesting and highly unique story concept that takes lots of unexpected twists and turns for the first half, the latter half deflates and ends with a whimper but that shouldn't mar your enjoyment of the film unless you're thinking about it too hard like I was.

7. Dredd

Excellent, tightly packed film, there were so many ways they could have ruin the main two characters of Dredd and Anderson, by making them too dark and unlikable, or over sexualising Anderson, but they chose not to. If anything, my main problem is that it's too short. I feel like I could've watched another half when it was over, I wanted to see more of the Megacities, more villains for Dredd to oppose. I look forward to the hopeful sequel, which will go into production if the DVD sells well according to rumours.

6. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

A very good adventure story, Martin Freeman as Bilbo is more likeable than the entire Fellowship in Lord of the Rings combined due to the fact that he's pretty much the go-to  guy for "Everyman getting caught up in somebody else's adventure", the other members of The Company are also very likable, even if the fact that there's 12 of them causes you to forget the names of most of them. Standout scenes are anything with Bilbo being Billbo, but most especially when he meets Gollum and obtains the ring. 

The main, glaring flaw though is that it's padded as all hell, It takes about 10-20 minutes for Martin Freeman to appear onscreen as Bilbo Baggins, and keeps cutting away from the action to have characters explain somebody's backstory at the drop of a hat which breaks the flow over its knee several times in my opinion, the problems that it has make it not quite as good as Lord of the Rings, which is such a shame because I actually liked all the characters more than anybody in Lord of the Rings, even Gandalf is much more interesting and amusing in here than he was in LOTR, and loved the simplicity of the core story more than Lord of the Rings' story miasma if plots.

5. Amazing Spider-Man

Andrew Garfield was amazing as Spider-Man and Peter Parker, buildup to becoming a hero handled better than in Sam Raimi's films when he seems to gain motivation rather quickly. Fight scenes ok, though the fight between Spidey and the Lizard in the school is the best.

Emma Stone as Gwen Stacey also far better than Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane., even if she does bear a strong resemblance to Lana Lang from Smallville, except more likeable and not a Mary-Sue. Problems include Spider-Man not quite as funny as trailers implied, as well as entire plotlines outright being removed from the film.

Personal bias puts this film further than it would've been, as some of the film's flaws may be difficult for many viewers to look past, and indeed on a second viewing I found the pace to be far slower than I remember.

4. The Woman in Black

Really good ghost story, some overuse of jump scares and creepy children's toys, but, Daniel Radcliffe played a really good character I felt, because the fact he's so young makes you empathise with his hardships much more.

3. Ted

The funniest film of the year from start to finish, while it clearly takes a lot of its traits from Family Guy like the cutaway gags and the referencial humour and nonsequitors, the characters are more rounded and interesting to watch, rather than just vehicles for the jokes like the rest of Seth Macfarlane's works.

A standout scene I must mention is the cocaine fueled scene in the middle of the film that would be a crime for me to spoil.

2. Chronicle

Best POV camera film I've seen, I liked the disturbing character growth of Andrew who is portrayed like a school shooter waiting to happen, but with telekinetic powers instead of guns, I also like the creative use of the telekinesis in that the characters use their powers on the In-Universe Camera, that allows for clearer visuals and greater clarity in the more hectic scenes. The escalation is also quite good, the film builds up to a climax where I genuinely didn't know what was going to happen next.

1. Avengers Assemble.

Best Marvel film ever made, including all the Marvel Studios films leading up to it. Everything I looked forward to happening happened, and then some. I especially liked how lots of the things that happen in the film seem like a reward to the viewers who've been following the story for ages, for example I like how the plot was largely based off the first issue of the Avengers comic that was about 10 pages long, and like with Chronicle, it felt like the threats escalated throughout the course of the film resulting in the climax having more weight to it.

Summation

So those were my favorite films of 2012. Films that didn't quite meet my ridiculously high standards include Prometheus, the Hunger Games and the two claymation films Paranorman, and Pirates on an Adventure with Scientists. Perhaps next year's Animated products will fare better. I look forward to Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, Wreck-It Ralph and Django Unchained, the latter two of which would probably have made it on this list if it weren't for the fact that the European releases were months too late.

Doctor Who - Everything Dies (A strictly opinion based essay)

Everything has it's time, everything dies.

After watching the first part of Christopher Eccleston's series of Doctor Who, I have to say. My mind's changed on which series is my favourite.

I think Eccleston's one series is the best story, it has a clear theme that flew over my head. There is a repeated meme that "Everything has it's time, and everything dies." as The Doctor states in the second episode. And it's true, most episodes are about something dying, or something approaching death.

1. The End of the World: The Earth is destroyed and the last pure blooded Human dies. The Doctor states he is the last Time Lord.

2. Dalek: The last Dalek dies.

3. Boom Town: The last of the Slitheen Family dies.

4. Empty Child: The theme of this episode is that there is occasionally a rare subversion, everything dies, but sometimes you get an extra chance. But, as The Doctor says "Just this once.".

5. Father's Day: Rose's father dies, despite the events of the story.

6. Parting of the Ways: The Earth is wiped out. The 9th Doctor dies. But gets an extra chance.

The central theme, as I've made clear, is that everything, without exception, eventually dies. And that you should make the most of it, whether you get lucky or not.

THAT is a problem David Tennant and Matt Smith have, because after evading death for so long as the 9th Doctor, he starts thinking that he and his friends are invulnerable, that they don't have to take responsibility, and that they don't have to let things die. Both David Tennant and Matt Smith have saved the Universe from non-existence twice, and there appears to be no negative consequences for this. In fact, they actually get rewarded. For example, Steven Moffat admitted that in Torchwood, the Cardiff Rift was now never created since Matt Smith saved the Universe that first time. The 11th Doctor even admits that he knows that he's leading people to their deaths, but keeps doing it anyway.

After clearly accepting that everything dies and getting a second chance at his own life, as David Tennant, he goes on more dangerous adventures, kills the Devil himself, because again, screw responsibility, and gets a lot of people killed in the process and ruins the lives of many many people without the villains help. And after Rose herself learns that everything has to end, she gets to have her Dad back by fetching him from a parallel Universe. And after he loses all his companions for reasons that are totally his fault, he moans for a year's worth of episodes, puts himself in more dangerous situations, tries to sacrifice himself several times and then at the last second decides he's not ready because the 10th Doctor's clearly bipolar. And as Matt Smith, the central theme is "Time can be rewritten.", meaning that using his time machine, he can in fact take no responsibility for causing people's deaths, which is an even bigger step backwards in terms of character. Another theme is the consequence of stories and legends, but there's no responsibility involved because he saves the Universe from being erased by wishing really hard. He almost learns his lesson when he is ready to accept his death at the climax of series 6, but changes his mind again for no discernable reason.

I wouldn't have a problem with this if each Doctor was their own story, that they didn't follow on form one another, because each Doctor has a consistent characterisation, but the fact that it's meant to be the same guy gives me the distinct impression that he's just plain refusing to grow up even after being taught the hard way.

I have a lot of friends in real life who refuse to accept responsibility and grow up, and I don't want my fictional characters acting the same way because that's just stupid to watch. Things like Doctor Who are meant to be escapism.

And just so I'm clear, I love Doctor Who, it's one of my favourite, if not my favourite live action TV series, and I like the characters of the 10th and 11th Doctors, they're, on the surface, more fun to watch than the 9th Doctor. I think some of the standalone stories of the 10th and 11th Doctor are better than the 9th Doctor's standalone stories, it's just that when you stand them next to one another, it becomes clear that the reason they're more fun is that they're thinking in the short term, not thinking of responsibility, not knowing things have to end. This is something the writers need to learn too.

I'm no expert writer, I'm not saying I'm more intelligent than Steven Moffat and Russel T David, I think the fact that they built such spectacle proves they're more creative the I could hope to be. But if I were in Steven Moffat's position, I would end the Silence storyline, specifically end it with the 11th Doctor's death, which is the originator of the Silence's name, his Silence, his death.

Everything dies, after all, and it's about time Doctor Who did.

Arrow (Also I complain about Smallville)

Has somebody placed some kind of curse on some of DC's superheroes names that causes them to not be spoken aloud? I've watched a few live action DC adaptations recently, such as the Dark Knight Trilogy, Smallville, Green Lantern and now Arrow and they all seem very shy about reminding you what the superheroes names are with a few exceptions like Batman and the Green Lantern probably out of fear of sounding ridiculous.

Nevermind. Arrow is a TV series made by the same company that brought us Smallville, and it's crap. It's adapted from DC's Green Arrow stories, it's about a rich businessman named Oliver Queen, who becomes a costumed vigilante who wields a bow and arrow after being forced to learn archery when stranded on a desert island.

I had a love/hate relationship with Smallville, because for every excellent thing about Smallville (1) that made me love it, there was an equally bad thing that made it a chore to watch (2). Arrow has far less of the former. 

(1) Excellent parts in question being the characters of Lex Luthor, Lionel Luthor, Lois Lane and Oliver Queen. The wonderfully tragic storyline of the episode 'Commencement', the excellent dynamics between the Justice Society in series 9. And some of the interpretations of the DC mythos, like the short lived appearance of Booster Gold. Amongst other examples.

(2) Awful parts in question being the decision to make the least likeable character the most powerful character on the planet, outstripping Superman himself and then never using the powers for anything ever again making her look an even worse person for being so lazy after claiming she would do good. Also everything about the finale.

So, it's a reboot of sorts of Smallville's Universe centred around the character of Oliver Queen, AKA, the Green Arrow. Except it strips away the superpowers and general comic book-y aspects, like the titles character's bloody name, and sticks to the purely none-powered characters and depowers the ones that DID have powers. And if you're thinking that sounds influenced by Christopher Nolan's interpretation of Batman you'd be right, from the 'trying-to-be-similar sounding' narration (One of the lines is "In order to protect my city I must because someone else, I must become....SOMETHING ELSE.") to the fact that Oliver Queen builds a secret base that looks suspiciously like the Batcave (Fun fact, in the original Green Arrow comics, he had 'The Arrowcave', which is what I hope the writers of Arrow were referring to.) it makes this series look like it has no originality to speak of, but that's not actually strictly true.

Credit where credit is due I suppose, one thing they get right about adapting it Nolan style is that they understand that if they're making it real then they have to strip away the characters who were unreal, and add new characters they serve new purposes to the plot that the original material lacked. So, gone are whatever supporting characters the Green Arrow had, and bring on the new characters, like Oliver Queen's bodyguard, who is the only likeable character, Oliver Queen's suspiciously alive mother (Who was dead in the comics from the first issue.) and a new sister, though the sister doesn't count because they seem to be implying that she's the adapted counterpart of Green Arrow's sidekick 'Speedy' in the comics by calling her that as a sarcastic nickname.

Speaking of sarcastic nicknames, that's a problem I had with Smallville too. It's ok writers, if you want to make some new material for existing sets of characters, that's perfectly fine, but don't treat the source material as a sarcastic suggestion by referencing it in the form of funny nicknames because it gives the impression that you're laughing at the very thought of such silly comic book nonsense, whilst adapting said silly comic book nonsense and acting as if your version is more dignified.

Back to Arrow though. Besides all that backstory nonsense, I still don't like it all that much. Like I said earlier, I like some ideas for new material, one example being Oliver Queen's different motivation and characterisation, and the duel story mechanic they use, in which each episode will alternate between two stories, one story in the present day when he's back home and becoming a vigilante, and a story in the past back when he was on a dessert island. We slowly learn the circumstances behind his disappearance, his return and his transformation from rich nobhead to rich nobhead with a bow.

It's all for naught though, because I think the writing is shockingly generic, they say their generic badass phrases, their generic sarcastic comebacks, they have their generic plots within interesting ideas, and none of it engages me because I feel like I've seen it all before. Oliver Queen himself is a generic anti-hero, he says gruff things in his gruff voice and then kills people, which doesn't make him likable it makes me agree with one of the antagonists, who's a police officer that believes Arrow is a serial killer, which he clearly is because he goes after specific individuals rather than fights crime, and murders a lot of people he knows to be innocent but lets lots of his victims live for some reason.

I'd recommend this series to people who don't mind the generic, which covers a relatively wide audience. I suppose it's not awful, it just could've been so much better, and I think my problem is that I was never expecting it to be better at any point.

My thoughts on unappeasable fans.

Two topics in the gaming and film circles that've caught my interest recently, Mass Effect 3 and Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Both are intellectual properties who fans recently have shouted about for not being how they want and why I think this is absolutely ridiculous. I should stress, I haven't played any Mass Effect games, nor am I a fan of any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles media, so this point of view is strictly based on my opinion.

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 was given a lot of criticism recently due to having a controversial ending, I.E, an apparently open ended game where your choices altered the course of the story, ended up having only one conclusion, one that didn't correspond to choices the player made. This does sound like a problem, but I might add these points:

It's a story, you can never be in control of a story unless you're the writer. No matter how it appears, you're only going on a predetermined path set by the writer, the writer clearly wanted all possible stories to converge on one simple truth, whatever it is.

B) You can't write several parallel different stories and expect them to all flow together as one, a bit of one story where you make one choice, and a bit of another story where you make a different choice does not make sense because the character may have no in-story justification for this because the player will often change their mind on a whim.

I haven't played many games with interactive stories, so it could be that I don't know what I'm talking about, but there you go.

Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Onto Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The controversial change from the source material is that the backstory is to be changed so that rather than being mutated Turtles shaped to become humanoids, they're simply aliens who happen to resemble anthropomorphic Turtles. This has caused a great deal of backlash from the fans.

The original story, so Wikipedia told me a while ago, was that in the original comic books, the Turtles were ordinary turtles, mutated by a strange radioactive substance leaking from a crashed vehicle, being a parody of Daredevil. The Turtles were then trained in the art of Ninjitsu by a similarly mutated humanoid Rat, and they became assassins for hire.

So the original story was a vague Daredevil Parody comic in which the main characters were assassins, in none of the following adaptations were either of those elements present, which certainly ought to have changed the dynamic of the story.

The cartoon was changed by marketing to become kid friendly and altered the personalities of the main characters, in which the main characters were a lighthearted bunch who never killed. And being made in the 80's or young kids, presumably dropped the Daredevil references.

Then there were the films, in which the personalities were exaggerated more and involved a story where the Turtles travel through time to feudal Japan, in a storyline that may or may not have been fabricated by the filmmakers.

Then came the cartoon reboot of the franchise, in which there was the major change of a previously human villain turning out to be an alien.

This, fans, is what happens when a franchise outlasts the original creators, things get changed, things move on. Spider-Man's origin story was a radioactive spider-bite, then a genetically altered spider-bite, then a magical spider-bite sent by a higher being, then it turns out he was a mutant with radiation immunity. In Doctor Who, does The Doctor flee because he's an outlaw, because he's bored, or because he's hiding a weapon? Writers have said each.

Changing them from mutants to aliens seems to me personally like changing the missing item in a detective story, it doesn't matter if they're looking for a diamond, or a wristwatch or a small puppy, its appearance it not defined by its purpose. Just like I very much doubt that it will matter if the turtles are aliens, if they were brought up the same, had the same experiences and had the same abilities, they've not changed a lot.

If the writer DOES make the change big however, and making them Aliens rather than Mutants changes the story drastically, it'll be because this is a reboot, and the purpose of a reboot is to change a story we're comfortable with according to modern ideas, not to show us an existing story, because the existing story has already been told and a new writer wants to do something new.

Sometimes however, major changes are not good, such as the Spider-Man comic in which he relinquishes responsibility for his actions and makes a deal with Mephisto, which is bad because the writer wanted erase everything the last 10 years of writers had done and ignored 10 years of character progression.

But as I said, a good change is a change that, after using up all the good stories for one version of a character, changing the character slightly and writing all the stories for that version of the character. Which is what changing the origin story is to me. A bad change, as mentioned, would be using all the good ideas, changing it to write new stories, then changing it back and reversing the progression. Or alternately, using all the good ideas, changing it in a way that doesn't work and using all the bad stories.

Overall

What I'm saying is basically, that writers should be trusted to progress the story in the way that they envision it, Mass Effect's writers should be trusted to have their one ending, because that must have been what they intended. And Michael Bay should be trusted that his weird idea is a step forward. And if you don't like the way it's progressing, then don't bother carrying on and go and write a fanfiction.

Batman: Arkham Asylum + Arkham City

I played these two games recently upon getting my Xbox, mostly because the general hype would have me believe that Arkham Asylum and City were the best liscenced games in the history of liscenced games. While that's probably far from a lie, it doesn't mean they're perfect, but I'll elaborate quickly.

First of all though, the hype is definitely accurate about the well praised combat system, which is the best I can personally remember handling, the general idea of the combat in the Arkham games is "Engage an entire prison block's worth of poor muscular criminals in a fistfight.", and it works very well, you punch somebody a few times, they get hurt and fall down, but not out, then another knucklehead approaches you and you repeat the process until they all stop moving. I understand I just said 'repeat' in a sentence about the combat, but really there's more to it than that, there are a ton of combos within memory so it never feels like you're endlessly smashing them with webs like in Spidey: Shatty Dims, and plus there's the fact that you can target enemies and the combos will take you right to them, and if you can't be arsed hitting them with your limbs there's the option to use gadgets (Batarangs and Grappling Hook in 'Asylum', Batarang, Grappling Hook, QuickBomb, Quick Electrode shot and a bloody ice Grenade.) which can knock out a load of knuckleheads before they get near you.

Also good in the games in the stealth sections, the best way to describe them would be by asking you to remember the scene in Batman Begins where Batman gradually picks off the gun wielding thugs from the darkness by scaring them a whole bunch. In Arkham Asylum and City, this is done through hiding on the top of curiously plentiful wall mounted Gargoyle statues and slowly taking them out silently without the other knowing you're there, because if they do they'll use their bullets to make Batman kick his addiction to breathing..

..Or I assume that was the intention, because in Arkham City, all I ever seemed to do in the stealth sections was to challenge them to a fistfight while they shot me from afar and my armour upgrades and smoke bombs protected me from being shot, yes the sheer amount of upgrades and gadgets, while quite fun in the combat sections, kind of break the stealth over its knee due to the fact that there was little need to be stealthy when I could take a large amount of bullets and disable at least three gun wielding thugs at a time anyway using various methods of stunning, I generally take this option because the stealth, while fun, is time consuming and not necessary unless the enemies can shoot you from very far away.

Back to the good though, what I like about both games is that the ArkhamVerse's interpretation of the various Batman characters are spot on, though in the first game it was more in the style of Batman: The Animated Series characters, which made since because the plot of both games was written by the showrunners of Batman: TAS. Though having just said I liked of aspect of the writing, I was somewhat less than fond of the actual story of both (Stop reading now if you don't want spoilers.), first and foremost being that the games are written by two guys who write for a TV show very well, which doesn't necessarily mean that they can write for a wholly other medium such as video games just as well.

For example, the main focus of the gameplay is exploration, stealth and combat, and while that might be fun for fighting several knuckleheads at once, it's hard to make conflict with the singular villains fall into this category, like the fact that Batman far far outclasses The Joker, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, the Penguin and other powerless villains in terms of fighting ability, and the superpowered characters like Killer Croc, Bane, Clayface, Solomon Grundy, Ra's Al Ghul and Titan Joker who could put up a fight don't feel that powerful. The only boss fights in the games who actually feeels as threatening as fighting their comic counterparts are Mister Freeze who feels as clever and as powerful as he is in the comics, and Scarecrow and the Mad Hatter, who pit you against your own delusions rather than fight you directly. Wheras Bane, who figures out Batman's identity and cripples him though a combination of intelligence and power, does not come across as such in his fights where you trick him into running into a wall a few times.

Also, I have a love/hate relationship with the environments too, in Asylum, I hated navigating the overworld because it felt like a less distinctive version of Hyrule Field and I hated navigating the buildings because every room looks the exact same and made me lose about two weeks of playtime trying to find a room that I had access to but I forgot the route to, and made me feel like like Batman and more like Link if Link was stuck in the Water Temple the entire game. This is why I like the overworld in Arkham City because not only do you feel like Batman traversing the rooftops and drop kicking criminals that're beating up innocents, but the way you travel is both quick and very Batman, specific buildings are often hard to find but they're usually on the map anyway and my problem with the level design is far lesser.

The game has a ton of side things to do for all the psychopath level OCD sufferers like collecting Riddler Trophies and solving riddles, as well as (In City.) side missions where you fight other villains or help people alternately, some of the side missions are very fussy about when and where you're allowed to continue them (Gameplay tip: When the game tells you "Look for more leads.", what it actually means is "Play the main story and we might think about unlocking the rest of this mission.".), but that's nothing that'll put me off the game.

From all my criticism it might be easy to assume I don't like these games, but that's not the case, I like the combat, the stealth, City's travel system and overworld, and the characters, which is more than enough to subsist me. The games are definitely not perfect, but I wouldn't claim to challenge the notion that they're deserving of praise.