Games

Games Workshop have, for a while now, claimed that they own the trademark to the term 'Space Marine'. They were largely ignored, because the term has an extremely long history in science fiction and is so generic (meaning 'marines in space') that the claim is borderline laughable. A use of the term 'space marine' that predates Games Workshop's by fifty-one years. However, GW's mailed power gauntlet came crashing down on SF author MCA Hogarth when she published a book called Spots the Space Marine . GW asked Amazon to remove the book from their website and informed the author that she was not allowed to use the term in either the title or text of her book. Hogarth, who is not very wealthy, declined to fight the claim legally but has publicised it, which has led to significant discussion of the subject by sites such as Boing Boing and Scalzi's Whatever (and Scalzi is taking it up with the influential Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gu...

Best cover art of the year? Almost certainly. This is the cover to the limited edition of Bleeding Shadows , a collection of short stories by Joe R. Lansdale, to be published by Subterranean Press in November. I have no idea what the hell is going on here, but now I want to read it.

So, Skyrim is now a Super Mario Brothers title. Any further comment at this time seems redundant.

The crappiest way to end the year. News has broken that novelist and comic book writer Peter David has suffered a stroke . David has many accolades to his name, arguably most notably as the author who ended the "Is Pluto a planet?" debate by having the Borg destroy it in a Star Trek novel. He also picked up the numerous loose ends left dangling by the Babylon 5 TV series and resolved them in a particularly fine trilogy of tie-in novels in the early 2000s. He also wrote what is arguably the greatest TV tie-in novel of all time in Vendetta (a Star Trek: The Next Generation novel) and spent twelve years writing The Incredible Hulk , to considerable critical acclaim. I wish him a full recovery and for many more comics and novels to come from him in the future.

George Lucas has sold Lucasfilm and its properties, including Star Wars , to the Walt Disney Corporation for a whopping $4 billion . Lucas has issued a statement saying he belives it is time to sell the franchise to a new generation of young film-makers. So long and thanks for all the Sith.  "For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” said George Lucas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Lucasfilm. “It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime. I'm confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come. Disney's reach and experience give Lucasfilm the opportunity to blaze new trai...

Jon St. John, the excellently-named voice actor best-known for his portrayal of supermacho action hero Duke Nukem in the games of the same name, reads from Fifty Shades of Grey . Needless to say, not safe for work, or possibly your sanity: On a related note, voice actor Gilbert Gottfried reading the official audio book*. Even more needless to say, not safe for work or probably anywhere public: * Note: not actually official.

A trailer has been released for the third movie based on the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. You may gaze upon it below, but I take absolutely no responsibility for anyone smashing their screens in horror at its quality: The first film, simply entitled Dungeons and Dragons , was an famously rubbish, medium-budget movie released in 2000, starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans. The sequel, Wrath of the Dragon God , was released in 2005 and was a near-zero budget movie starring absolutely no-one you've ever heard of. Whilst the first film was awful, it did have some basic watchability (due to the excellent 'down a pint every time Jeremy Irons either overacts or looks like part of his soul has died due to the dialogue' drinking game). The sequel was fifty times worse. If the trailer is accurate, the third will continue this decline in quality to hitherto unsuspected depths. If you want to watch a decent D&D-based movie, I instead unreservedly recommend The Ga...

Quite funny , especially the peach and lobster references (NSFW lyrics): "You afraid of your own shadow, Renly?"

No, really. SF author Neal Stephenson - of Snow Crash , Cryptonomicon , Baroque Cycle , Anathem and Reamde fame - is apparently unhappy with the depiction of swordfighting in computer games, so is now working on a new system. He's set up a Kickstarter (crowd-funding) project and asked for half a million dollars, roping in a whole bunch of experts and some nifty swords-with-sensors-attached to help pitch the idea. Interesting. Mental, clearly, but interesting if they can actually pull it off. Stephenson's pitch is quite amusing and apparently they raised $30,000 within a few hours of the page going up, so I wouldn't be surprised to see the project succeed in raising the initial investment.

Cyanide have released a docu-trailer for their Game of Thrones computer RPG. This trailer shows some gameplay with two of the game's developers talking about the title. Game of Thrones: The RPG will be released on 15 May in the United States but, completely inexplicably, won't be out in Europe until 1 June (since clearly it takes two weeks for digital information to cross the Atlantic). The publishers, in their wisdom, have also decided the release the game on the same day as Max Payne 3 (one of the biggest games of the year on both console and PC) and Diablo III (probably the biggest game of the year on PC). In fact, they've somehow managed to cross with both dates for Max Payne 3 (which is out on 15 May on console and 1 June on PC). I can only conclude at this stage that the publishers don't actually want anyone to play the game. There's some very strange decision-making going on there.

Via Sam Sykes on Twitter: ( and the original source )    Seems about right :-)

The furore over the ending to Mass Effect 3 is one of the biggest Internet controversies of the year, but BioWare and publishers Electronic Arts have moved to try to defuse the situation. In the summer they will be releasing an 'Extended Cut' DLC (downloadable content), for free, for all three formats of the game. The DLC will add additional cut scenes and an 'epilogue' which will clarify and explain elements of the hitherto bizarre ending that has so bewildered fans. "Well, everything makes sense now!" "Really?" "No, but thanks for trying." However, parsing the PRspeak of the announcement, it sounds that those hoping for a 'new' ending, or for the Indoctrination Theory to be proven correct, will be disappointed. It sounds like there will be no new gameplay elements at all, not even extra dialogue during the finale which will better explain just what the heck is going on. This may change as more news is revealed closer to launch...

For the last few weeks the Internet has been ravaged by a controversy remarkable in its virulence and intensity. On 5 March (9 March in the UK), Electronic Arts and BioWare published the computer game Mass Effect 3 , the concluding part of a role-playing trilogy that had been unfolding since 2007. These games have won plaudits for their strong (if generic) space opera setting, well-realised and three-dimensional characters and the way that you, the player, can shape the narrative through making numerous decisions and choices that radically change the story and setting. For approximately 99% of its length, Mass Effect 3 continued this process. Indeed, with numerous major, game-changing moments in which your previous choices in the first two titles came to fruition, it was shaping up to be the best game in the series, and one of the best titles of this generation. Warning: spoilers for Mass Effect 1, 2 & 3 and Knights of the Old Republic. At the last possible minute, the game took a...

The Galaxy has been plunged into war. The Reapers, a race of intelligent machines who cleanse the Milky Way of advanced, organic life every 50,000 years or so, have returned. In their opening salvo they have occupied Earth and attacked dozens of other worlds, including launching a major assault on the turian homeworld. Commander Shepard, who has been warning the various races about the Reapers for the last three years, manages to escape from Earth on his ship, the Normandy , and sets about unifying the Galaxy against the Reapers. But this is easier said than done. Mass Effect 3 concludes BioWare's epic trilogy which began five years ago. Long-term players will have guided their version of Commander Shepard (whose gender and abilities can be adjusted by the player) through three games totalling 65-80 hours (depending on what side-missions you played) to reach the grand finale of the story. As a result Mass Effect 3 has more weight than most computer games. Though assembled from some...

On October 21st, the town of Chester's Mill in Maine is abruptly sealed off from the outside world by a mysterious barrier. Several cars and aircraft crash into the 'Dome', causing serious injuries and several fatalities. The US government moves swiftly to seal off the area and attempt to pierce the Dome through technological means. However, inside the Dome events rapidly deteriorate as a local town politician takes advantage of the chaos to try to take over the town, sparking a chain of events that will end in tragedy. Originally published in 2009, Under the Dome was notable for several reasons at release. It was King's first really big, one-off horror novel in a considerable number of years. It was also a book that King had been trying to write on and off since 1976, but had bounced off as it was 'too ambitious'. From the writer of the complex Dark Tower sequence and the large, sprawling The Stand , this was an impressive comment. After reading the finished no...

I've been having problems with the 'Author Review' index on the right hand side of the page for a while now. Basically, I maxed it out as it suddenly stopped me adding any more books to the list. As a result I deleted the list and created a new one listing authors by their tag entries, which makes for a more concise list but also still allows people to find the reviews. Unfortunately, Blogger has seen fit to somehow merge the old, deleted list and the new one together, creating an unwieldy monster of a list which I now cannot edit at all. Apologies for this. I'm trying to rectify the problem.

Amusing:

Whilst playing Skyrim , it has often occurred to me that what the game really lacked was that space core from the end of Portal 2 floating around like ten feet behind you occasionally bellowing, "SPAAAACE!" in its unique style. "I'm in space. And by 'space' I mean 'Tamriel'." Of course, Valve and Bethesda have recognised this glaring deficiency in the game, and created a mod that allows the space core from the end of Portal 2 to float around behind you and etc. The same update also adds high-resolution texture packs to make the PC version of the game look totally awesome(r) and activates the Creation Kit, which allows you to adjust and tweak all aspects of the game, but frankly this is just small fry compared to the space core thing. So, does this mean that it is now canon that the Half-Life/Portal and Elder Scrolls franchises take place in the same universe? Will we see headcrabs and Combine invade Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls VI ? Will Drag...