No Man's Diary #5

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Day Five
I've spent the last two systems searching in vain for chrysonite, but haven't seen so much as an atom of the stuff. Salt in the wounds was Sarah practically tripping over the stuff on a planet she found, but I keep looking.

I find a world with huge mountains of gold, and spend an hour mining the stuff to swell my coffers a bit; despite the new ship I got yesterday, I'm still in the market for a bigger ship, but the ones I like the look of all cost between one and two million units. I've currently got less than half a million.

No Man's Diary #4

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Day Four
As I fly low over the surface of another mostly-dead world, I spot a blob of blue and red standing out from the surrounding brown ground, a plume of smoke billowing out into the thin atmosphere.

I land nearby and sprint/jetpack over the rocks to survey my prize: a crashed starship.

The Thing (1982)

Waaay late to the party on this one; I've owned The Thing on BluRay for about two years, but I only finally got around to watching it last night, after seeing a bunch of people on Twitter talking about it in relation to an allegedly-anachronistic reference in the Netflix show Stranger Things.

It's been a journey.

Anyway, we watched it, and #controversialopinion time: The Thing isn't really that great.

No Man's Diary #3

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Day Three
I warp into a new system, which I find is occupied by a gruff but honourable warrior race. The first planet I land on, I find another Manufacturing Plant - score! While trying to blast the door down, I attract the attention of the Guardian drones nearby. By the time the dust has settled and the door is open, I've killed five of them, but I now have the blueprint for antimatter, which will come in useful for making Warp fuel.

The second planet is a storm-prone radioactive rock with scattered oceans. It has no vegetation, and it's populated entirely by bouncing potato creatures. I haven't named the planet yet; I may just call it "Ireland".

Star Wars: Rogue One - trailer 2

You've seen it already, I know you have, but what the hell:

That... doesn't look too bad. Then again, Lucas managed to make Star Wars boring, so the guy who turned in a snorefest like Godzilla..?

Yeah, I'm pretty definitively on-record as not having a very high opinion of Gareth Edwards' last movie, so I suspect that if this is good, it'll be more down to a script he didn't write and the involvement of Christopher McQuarrie and Tony Gilroy. Still, I want to be optimistic, and I will say that if Edwards is good at anything, it's solid VFX work, and getting the sense of scale across. The guy sure can pick a DP, too, and I love the score going on here.

Felicity Jones seems about as emotionless as I'd expect from the guy, though, so... fingers crossed, but breath definitely not held.

No Man's Diary #2

(previous entry)

Day Two
I spend the first hour or so continuing to explore Coyote Tango. Setting out from the Trading Post I'd parked at, I stumble almost immediately on an upgrade for my Exosuit, increasing my inventory space by one. It's the first of three I eventually find, though I fill them all with mechanical upgrades, leaving my actual carrying capacity entirely unchanged.

As I explore - mostly from the air now, which is faster but requires a lot more Plutonium with repeated takeoff - I come across a Manufacturing Plant, which has a door that needs to be blown open. My mining laser doesn't make a dent, so I wander off. By the time I realise I can switch the multitool into a combat mode, I've lost track of where I am, and can't find the door again.

I spend about another hour trying in vain to relocate the Plant, but just find more outposts and beacons, as well as enough alien sites to increase my known word count to over 30. Eventually I give up on ever finding the door again, and blast off to investigate the system's third and final planet.

No Man's Diary #1

Day One

I wake up on a hot, windy planet, and the first thing that happens, after a slow scan of the horizon and my smoking, damaged ship, is a warning from my suit that the temperature is hazardous. According to my HUD, it's less than 40 degrees Celsius, but I take the suit's word for it that the depleting heat bar is a bad thing, and move off in search of shelter and the materials I need to repair my ship and multitool.

Ninchilla Prime (my new homeworld) is a planet of rolling hills and towering plant life, scattered with timid herbivores; in the whole time I spend there, I don't see a single hostile or carnivorous animal (though there is a particularly aggressive plant species I call Mr. Whippy).


There's an almost overwhelming amount of stuff here, most of which I leave with their auto-generated names, although I later regret not renaming the system to something more memorable in case I ever want to come back.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Ultimate Edition)

When Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (I'm not going to bother typing the full title again) was released to a critical savaging, my interest level in it leapt dramatically upwards. I wasn't a huge fan of Man of Steel, and I don't know that I've seen a Zack Snyder film that I thought was particularly good (though Watchmen probably comes closest), but there's something much more compelling to me about a grand, glorious catastrophe.

But as the venom for Dawn of Justice faded, so, too, did my urge to see it, and I ultimately never got around to watching the thing theatrically. But now the alleged Ultimate Edition is out, and the talk online was that it actually wasn't bad - so, I figured, why not.

Now, I've still not seen the theatrical cut, so comparisons aren't possible - but I figured that it'd be interesting going into the "director's cut" without any baggage (well, aside from the trailers, and the aforementioned critical mauling)... but I can easily see how a hacked-down version of this could have been terrible.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition... is.

Warcraft: The Beginning

There are probably two major barriers to entry on Warcraft, and characters with names like Gul'dan, Khadgar, and Medivh only represent one of them; the other one, and perhaps the bigger of the two hurdles, is that there's just too much here to fit into a two-hour movie.

The opening is breakneck, throwing characters, locations, and names around with enthusiastic abandon, but without really introducing any of them. It's a shame, because there are some valiant attempts at character work scattered throughout, but a huge amount of development feels missing - it often feels like they've left fast-forward on for long sections, as we whizz through (or, more often, past) the "craft" part for the sake of getting to the "war".

Full disclosure: I was a big WoW player for about seven or eight years, from just after launch in 2007 to about midway through Cataclysm. In that time, I was something of a lore fiend, and went so far as to read several of the tie-in novels. The point being, I already had some idea of what the plot of Warcraft was going to be before I even got close to booking a ticket.

I have no idea how confusing this film must be for someone without that reference point.

Hitman: Marrakesh

Another month, another exotic, sun-drenched location to explore; IO Interactive only just managed to get this one out in May, but they are just about managing to keep to their one-a-month “schedule”, and Marrakesh is yet another change of pace from what’s gone before. Where Paris was contained clockwork, and Sapienza was sleepy and flexible, Marrakesh is tense and claustrophobic.

The targets this time around are a banker, currently holed up in the Swedish embassy, and an army general looking to use public unrest surrounding the banker’s paramilitary-assisted avoidance of prosecution to build up support for a military coup.

With violence brewing, 47’s sent in to prevent the fall of a government… or, more specifically, the building contracts that said government has awarded to the ICA’s construction-company client.