Not Sensible

So apparently, a new online version of Sensible World of Soccer is being released to the X-Brick's Live service. Online. Sensi. X-Brick only.

Bloody Micro$oft.

The Brighton Festival Can Go F*ck Itself

They've got David Lloyd and Kate Evans (among others) in to do a talk/workshop thing on the 18th of May. David Lloyd drew V for Vendetta. Kate Evans does political activism comics, like Copse. The Festival organisers have decided that this is part of their "four-day mini festival of writing for children". Because comics are for children, of course, and the speakers they've assembled don't disprove that at all. Cretins.

Undefeatable

And yet, still better than the Matrix sequels.

Overboard

I really like the Wii's Virtual Console feature, where you can download old games and play them on your new shiny bit of kit. There are a lot of features I'd like to see added, however, and one of those is board game support. I quite like the idea of firing up an online game of Scrabble, Settlers of Catan, or Risk, or, as has just been announced, Talisman. Stuff like this is available on X-Box and the Playstation Network, and the technology is already in place on the Wii, so let's have it, Nintendo!

I Say Thee Nay!

No no no no no no, and no.

No.

A Remake I'd Like To See

It's one of my favourite films, but One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing has its problems, most notably the dreadful portrayal of the Chinese characters (ie, they're British actors with dodgy make-up and comedy accents), and a finale which is trying to be a kung fu sequence, but is foiled by producers that don't know how to film martial arts. So let's remake it, tone down the ethnic stereotyping, and up the kung fu action. Get Maggie Smith in to play Hettie, the lead nanny, Pierce Brosnan to play Lord Southmere (if you've seen the original, you'll know why it works to cast a Bond in the role), Chow Yun Fat as Hnup Wan (I think he's got vast reserves of untapped comedy potential), and Tom Baker in a cameo as the blustery Colonel (again, if you've seen the original, you'll know why). Off the top of my head, I reckon Robert Rodriguez or Edgar Wright would be good choices to direct.

Right, who do I write to to get this done?

No-Thing is Sacred

They remade The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13, they're remaking Halloween (particularly pointless, since the many sequels are essentially remakes) and Escape from New York. Will they try for The Thing?

Ominous Tidings

A while ago, I contributed to an anthology based on Martin Eden's superhero comic The O Men. Sadly, it never came to pass, but Martin's having another go, and the plan at the moment is for me to contribute a page to issue 2.5 of the main series. I'll be sharing space with a lot of other talented types, and you can find out more here.

I should also be working on something with Rol. I've got the script, and it's full of challenges for me, so I'm looking forward to having a pop at it. More on that later.

All of which means that I'm going to have to put some more personal projects on hold for a bit, but that's no problem.

Back in the Bottle of Men

Comics, then. It's just occurred to me that when Aunt May comes out of her coma, she's going to have forgotten that she knows Peter is Spider-Man, isn't she?

Post-Civil War you might say it's a moot point as Spidey's identity is common knowledge, but they'll either:

1) Keep her in the coma until the identity stuff is retconned, as it inevitably will be.
2) Wiggle out of it some other way (it was an imposter, etc)
3) Ignore it and hope no one notices.

I'm betting (3), because Marvel's editorial department have been a bit, shall we say, lax of late.


In other news, we finally saw Children of Men today and while it's not an excellent film, it is very good indeed. It would have been better if they hadn't been quite so broad and heavy-handed with the satire (although I accept that they may have needed to do that to get the message(s) across to everyone), and if the writers had kept their nerve and not allowed a stinking great cliché to blunder in near the end. And it's the storytelling cliché I hate the most too. Bastards.