I have to admit that when the teaser posters showing a 20/11/12 release date leaked earlier tonight, I instantly doubted them. Capcom, going from first announcement of a core Resi title to release in less than a year? Surely not – remember that first Resi 5 trailer that came out in September 2006, two and a half sodding years before the game’s release?

But no, at 10pm GMT this went live confirming the date and showing a lot more than early gameplay footage or proof-of-concept FMV:

Now, in terms of scheduling Capcom have only shaved six months off the four year wait between Resis 4 and 5, but in terms of announcing and marketing 6 they’re taking a far tighter, more aggressive approach, sitting tight through the first two years of development then hitting us with a barrage of visuals and a date.

That November date is a statement in itself. Resis 4 and 5 launched between January and Spring, relatively lean times for game releases when a major franchise title can make a big splash. Resident Evil 6 will be thrown straight into the competitive pre-Xmas market, when major franchises battle it out in the most lucrative period of the year, albeit one where smaller name games can easily get lost.

It doesn’t look like Resident Evil 6 is in any danger of getting lost amongst the big names, or being two low-octane to make a splash compared to this year’s Call of Duties and so forth. The launch trailer lays out a globe-spanning blockbuster that abandons the tight geographic progression of the last two installments in favour of something much bigger, more varied and dynamic.

There’s a lot going on in there as well: old favourites Leon and Chris, both playable; an American town overrun by zombies (replicating the series most popular setting, the Raccoon City outbreak without having to timewarp back to 1998 again); head-splitting mutants from the last two games in a neon-lit Chinese city; a big Nemesis type baddy with very sharp hands pursuing a couple of other characters in a bleak urban landscape; oh, and the whole thing opens with a fantastic, dramatic set-piece where Leon has to shoot the zombified President of the United States through the face.

In short, it looks epic, mixing and matching elements from across the entire series in a way that looks both atmospheric and action-packed, and which looks likely to enthrall both loyal series fans of myself – of whom there are many – and a general audience.

It looks entirely capable of going toe-to-toe with the big beast franchises of the current videogame landscape, and to be honest it should be: Resident Evil is one of the biggest, most recognisable names in games, one with wider pop culture impact (as much as we may bitch about the quality of those movies), and it’s only right that the next major game in the series should be a blockbuster to match the Modern Warfares and Assassin’s Creeds that dominate the pre-Xmas charts.

It looks fantastic, and frankly I can’t wait.

Mark

For more of my ramblings on the Resident Evil series, have a look at the Storygamer archive.

Now, to my ears this TurboGrafix version doesn’t sound as good as the Atari ST one did back in the day, but its melancholic tones still take me back.

Twenty years? Fuck.

Mark

We’d like to go after anyone threatening to continue production of Torchwood. Do you know who we mean?

Yep, those are the ones.

Thanks, Nemesis!

As a rolling news show, Today is basically Okay, but then there’s the interviews.

Oh fuck, the interviews. Some newsworthy figure is wheeled on to have some half-baked challenges and queries barked into their face. Interviewee bats these away. Questions are repeated, and avoided every time. If there’s more than one interviewee, some fatuous opposition is set up between the two, and questions are ping-ponged between them to create some arbitrary drama.

It’s rubbish, and much congratulations must go to Graham Linehan for steadfastly refusing to play ball when Justin Webb (not pictured) tried to get him to engage in a meaningless argument with a theatre critic last week. That Webb insisted on playing arch-twat in the face of Linehan’s insistence that the whole scenario was meaningless and pathetic, and continued to do so on twitter afterwards, just shows how far down the rabbit hole of their own reputation the Today team have disappeared.

Because the mythology of Today is this – that it is the centre of the national conversation, where the great and good are brought to account on important issues, pinned down by the fiercest voices in broadcast journalism. That it is vital listening, where vital matters are revealed, and a compulsory start to the day for anyone who wants to know what’s what in the UK.

Or, to be realistic, it’s a news show with some deeply uninformative interview segments where Ministers, Executives and other members of the interchangeable managerial smear who run things in this country get to be lambasted by James Naughtie (actually pictured) or John Humphrys, get on the radio and then send an email to all their underlings including a full transcript later that day, insisting that it’s vitally important that they all know how vewy bwave their boss was on the wadio. No policy is changed by these interviews, the most lasting consequence being the occasional unflattering soundbite that will be repeated on other BBC News broadcasts for the rest of the day.

The myth of Today as a gladiatorial arena of accountability is fantastically flattering not just for the BBC team who make the show but for the sense of self importance of the highly appointed dimwits who get ‘grilled’ on it. For, make no mistake, ministers and civil servants and senior business types love Today for the sense of importance it ascribes to their half-baked policies. It fuels the myth that their decisions shape our world, and that organisations really can be changed at the top (but that’s another rant for another time). It makes them feel special.

Whereas I’ve finally come up with the exact phrase for what Today really is: an Accountability Pantomime. A raucous, knockabout bit of nonsense where the powerful come on, shout it out with the presenter, and we can all go away feeling cathartically pleased that some high-placed clown was given a bit of a hard time while in fact they’ve been held to account for precisely fuck all. 

A good example of this went out this morning, with an executive from beleaguered care home company Southern Cross. Humphrys gave the bloke a bit of a grilling, battered the same simplistic points again and again, and I found myself smugly pleased that Southern Cross bloke had been given a hard time, as if that somehow constituted a significant restitution for Southern Cross’ alleged crappy behaviour.

I shouldn’t have felt that, of course, because all that had happened to him was that he’d had a conversation with a rude man. He’ll have gone back to his job, and the key meeting with Southern Cross’ landlords (the subject of the interview) will have gone ahead exactly as well as if no interview had ever occurred.

Accountability Pantomime.

Of course, the one useful thing Today could do would be for the BBC to leverage the exaggerated sense of importance the political classes put on it, to which I make the following suggestion:

The next time BBC funding is threatened, the first thing the BBC should offer to cut is the radio cars that allow Ministers to do Today interviews in their jim-jams. If that doesn’t cause an immediate policy reversal, suggest slashing the length of Today by an hour.

MPs will, of course, insist that to reduce the scope of Today in this way would be stifling democracy by failing to give a platform to our duly elected officials to big-up their initiatives, but as Today is basically about politicians listening to the sounds of their own voices rather than speaking to the electorate that’s bullshit.

Press the bastards, threaten to smash their stupid little soapbox to pieces. That should protect the licence fee for another generation, at least.

Mark

While in Paris for our honeymoon a couple of years ago, we browsed a vast second hand book shop in a covered market. It was the kind of place that, for whatever reason, you don’t see in the UK. Amongst all the filthy Italian horror comics and other oddities I spotted a familiar face:

… William Russell, Ian Chesterton himself. Now, most fans of any vintage will know that Russell was the star of ‘The Adventures of Sir Lancelot’ before starring in ‘Who’. Indeed, as with Matt Smith et al on the back of current ‘Who’ books, Russell is credited by name at the front of this French tie-in book:

As ‘Who’ has never been big in France, it’s interesting to see that one of it’s initial stars was well-known enough to have his face plastered over a kids tie-in storybook in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

There was a DVD release of ‘Lancelot’ a few years back, some of you may even have seen it. I’m seriously doubting that it had the kind of action this book’s illustrations suggest:

Pretty dynamic, huh? My suspicion is that most of the show was more like a bunch of actors standing around in a small TV studio.

Finally, it’s good to know that even when playing Lancelot, Russell still had Ian’s frankly awesome haircut:

I don’t know much French, but I’m glad we found this book, physical confirmation that William Russell was a global star five decades before the current ‘Who’ team started doing premiere events in New York, as well as a charmingly straightforward TV tie-in from long ago.

Mark

I don’t generally work on paper unless I’m scribbling notes away from my computer, and even then I’m as likely to use the notes function on my phone for note taking as much as paper and pen. I used to do pen-and-paper first drafts of everything, long overwritten rambles that I would hack down while typing up, but I seem to have internalised that initial edit over the years, and can go straight to screen with something that reads as at least professional. (YMMV.)

However, some things require old methods to work out. For my first 40K book (still not announced, but it does exist, promise!) there were a lot of characters and ranks to deal with, so I drew a chart of how all the squads etc fitted together.

Then there was the Warlock review, which was simple but fiddly. I wrote the topic of each section on a piece of note paper, with arrows pointing to which sections the reader would naturally go to next. I then shuffled all of them, with the exception of the first two and the last one, then numbered them all one to ten and filled in those numbers in the go-to lines. That then gave me a framework to fill in the actual words.

I’m kind of hoping this one gets a bit more attention than most reviews I write. I’ve wanted to write a concept review for ages, and this seemed the perfect excuse. I’m pretty happy with the results, and hope that if nothing else readers of the FF books get a nostalgic kick out of it.

Mark

I picked Bane as (sorry, Rich) he’s one of my favourite Bat-characters, a ‘roided up genius gangster in a luchadore mask. I also thought that Andy would do a great job with all that muscle and menace – Andy has a real weight to his characters, both a physicality and presence from those heavy, curved inks.

Well, I received the sketch today, and I think you’ll agree that, even via the imperfect reproduction of a  phone photo, Andy did a fantastic job:

Thanks Andy! Now, I’ve just got to work out where to hang this…

Mark

Update: there’s a proper scan over on Andy’s blog.

I know I said I’d try for one post a week, but as I’m now on full weekday parenting duty (see artist’s impression) and Georgina won’t be doing any nursery time until May, at the moment it’s a push for me to even do Story Gamer and Shiny Shelf, never mind this blog.

Also, I can’t think of much to say, as this could very rapidly turn into a baby blog if I actually start recounting what I do all day. And no-one needs that.

However, I am still all over Twitter, so you can follow me there if you like, via the ‘Tweets’ link to the right —>

Will hopefully be back soon, in May if not before.

Mark

(You can read a bit about how that happened here.)

The one-line pitch was simple enough: Die Hard on an Imperial spaceship, with a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus fighting off Dark Eldar who are attempting to hijack the ship and spirit it off into the webway.

Oh, and the Adept has a morbid fear of all things alien, and has to overcome this crippling xenophobia to save the day. A nice simple character arc that fit the title of the book snugly.

(That’s a minor writing tip for anyone pitching to a collection or series, by the way – treat every aspect of the overarching project, even the title, as a ticklist to work through with your pitch, and try to get as many (if not all) of those boxes ticked in as thematically a cohesive way as possible.)

As I’d had limited contact with the universe of Warhammer 40,000 since dabbling in 40K as a teenager, I needed to do some catching up. Thankfully there are a lot of 40k resources online, and the official Black Library site contains lots of pdf extracts of books that can be downloaded for free, so I could get an overview from those.

However, there’s no substitute for actual in-depth reading of the source material. Here’s my stack of ‘Sanctified’ related stuff, as piled up in a flat I moved out of 18 months ago:

Up top, ‘Mechanicum’, actually set 10,000 years earlier than 40k during the  Horus Heresy, is to my knowledge the only book BL have put out to date (or at least, still have in print) to focus on the Adeptus Mechanicus almost exclusively. So, although the 30K setting means that this is the Brotherhood at their peak rather than in their cranky, degraded 40K state, it was still a useful crash-course in what the organisation is all about.

The other three are all books that feature the Dark Eldar (including only one book in the Soul Drinkers Omnibus, the last one). Considering the tight deadline, I didn’t read all of them all the way through before submitting the story, but they were all useful in their own way.  In terms of the way I needed to treat them in my story, as a barely comprehensible, fast-moving threat, action sequences early in both ‘Brothers of the Snake’ and ‘Dark Disciple’ proved very handy.

Later sections of ‘Dark Disciple’ and the Soul Drinkers book (the name of which currently escapes me) feature the DE in more detail, expanding on how they act around each other and towards humans, which wasn’t really necessary for ‘Sanctified’ (where they never speak to the hero) but which was interesting background nonetheless.

Not pictured was the middle book in Dan Abnett’s ‘Ravenor’ trilogy, which I picked up for something like 50p of store credit at a second hand book place I used to frequent (last of the big spenders, me) in the exploratory, ‘do I actually want to do this?’ phase before starting serious thinking about my story.

That book convinced me there was a lot of fun to be had with 40K and that I should push full steam ahead, and I’ve since upgraded to a nice shiny new Omnibus of all three ‘Ravenor’ books, which is sitting in my ever-expanding stack of 40K research by my bed. It’s a very fun kind of research, even if the growing stacks of books do constitute a minor health and safety hazard that I occasionally kick over in the dark.

Mark

You know how sometimes, something is too big to process, and it takes 24 hours or so to work through your subconscious, and only then can you squeeze your feelings down into a form that can translate into vaguely comprehensible words or manageable actions?

Well, late on Friday night I read this article on the feminist blog Sian and Crooked Rib, about a Daily Mail article on the case of five footballers on trial for the gang rape of two 12 year old girls. It was an excellent piece by Sian, in many ways not surprising as I’ve been reading a bit about Rape Culture lately due to the Dickwolves affair, and not surprising in terms of the despicable lows the Mail sinks to and the horrific underlying attitudes they embody.

Sian’s post had sufficient impact that I felt physically sick with the world. My vision got blurry, I felt a deep nausea, and I went to bed feeling quite unwell.

On Saturday I woke up, felt better, and got on with the day trying not to think too closely about what had made me feel so ill the previous night.

Then, this morning, I read a tweet linking to a Daily Mail story about a guy who claimed he created Davros as a competition entry when he was thirteen, or thereabouts.

(I’m not going to go to the article and check that, for reasons that will become obvious.)

So, a couple of thoughts pass through my head:

1. I’m going to see this Daily Mail link passed around a lot amongst Who fan friends in the next few days.

2. Well, by Daily Mail standards this guy was old enough to be complicit in his own rape, so really if he did get ripped off by the BBC then by Daily Mail logic he got off lightly.

… which made me realise the sheer extent to which I don’t want to give the Daily Mail my clicks, or my time, or anything that might reasonably pass for support or tolerance.

Because, make no mistake, what articles like that Daily Mail piece about the ‘lolitas’ do is foster and support myths that make it easier for rapists to justify their actions, get away with it, and defend themselves publicly for their actions.

In this particular instance what they’re doing is even worse due to the age of the victims. In this case, by spreading those myths, the Daily Mail is, albeit indirectly, supporting a system of prejudices that defend and excuse the sexual abuse of children.

Let’s reiterate that thought and unpack it a little further: by promoting such weaselly justifications for forcing children into sex, the Daily Mail validates those excuses for further use elsewhere. These views encourage men like these rapists to believe that coercing women and girls into sex is ‘normal’ and allowable, and reinforce the idea that blaming the victim is a valid defence.

(Sian puts this more coherently than me, so go to her piece if you want a better unpicking of the issue.)

It follows then, that by encouraging the Daily Mail, by tolerating it and its readers, its journalists, its editors by buying the paper, reading the paper or circulating links to its online version, we support them in everything they do.

By clicking, and encouraging clicks, we help support a culture that excuses the rape of children.

GO US.

Now, I do not have the energy and mentality to be a campaigner. I don’t have the fervor or temperament to be confrontational about these things. To link to Sian again, my main response to the huge problems of violence against women and girls is to despair, and in my case despair is debilitating and dysfunctional.

I’m a father of a tiny daughter, and of course the scale of the problems terrifies me. But letting myself be flattened by the enormity of it all would just make me a permanent emotional wreck, unable to work of parent, which wouldn’t help anyone.

So, selfishly, no big campaign from me. That’s for braver, more determined voices like Sian.

However, I can draw a line. In the little online spheres I inhabit, I can discourage links to the Daily Mail, although I’m not going to banish Facebook and Twitter people I barely know in real life on the basis of a link here and there. I’m going to point people back to this post to tell them why I don’t want to read that shit.

I’m certainly not going to tolerate any more arguments from media pals o’mine that Mail journos are just doing their jobs, serving the demands of editorial/their publishers/their readership.

Would the Mail’s reporters be so forgiving when reporting on, say, a warehouse worker who turned a blind eye to massive amounts of child abuse images being trafficked under his nose because he wanted to keep his job?

No, they wouldn’t, and in this case the Mail would be right – some crimes are so grievous that any level of support or tolerance is unacceptable. As rank as I find the Mail’s baiting editorials and columns on immigrants or homosexuality or whatever, those are political positions, obnoxious as they are.

But child abuse is an issue that EVERYONE who isn’t an actual abuser is supposed to agree is terrible. And just like my imagined scenario of the neglectful  warehouse worker, tolerating articles like that Mail report, support an ecosystem that allows the abuse of women and children to thrive.

So in my own ineffectual and minor way, I’ll be taking a zero tolerance policy with the Daily Mail from now on.

If you’d like to do the same, and use Firefox, you’ll find a good start is Tom Royal’s excellent Kitten Block plug-in.

More jovial matters next time, promise.

Mark