Dragon Age: Inquisition

Full disclosure: I've not played much of Dragon Age Inqisition yet. I think my current play time is still under 20 hours, I've got at least two other party members to recruit, and the Inquisition's fortress of Skyhold hasn't even been mentioned once in my time with it.

Still, I think it's enough time to know two things: one, I'm going to get a hell of a lot more hours under my belt; and two, it has some problems.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I enjoyed the spectacle of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, though I don't think The Two Towers or Return of the King impressed me quite to the degree that The Fellowship of the Ring managed.  My main memory of leaving the cinema after Fellowship was thinking how great the Balrog had been, but Towers and King really just felt like More Of The Same; having read the books, the story was no surprise, and so all there really was left was the grand visuals (and Andy Serkis' phenomenal Gollum).

Enter the Hobbit.

The Dark Knight Rises

Forests' worth of writing has already been done on this subject, no doubt, and I'm not sure how much there really is to say.  I've been a huge fan of Nolan's take on Batman from the beginning, and despite a few minor flaws, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are way, way up on my list of movies I could watch repeatedly forever.

The Dark Knight Rises (or TDKR from here on out) is the last of Nolan's trilogy, and picks up 8 years after the death of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.  Thanks to laws passed in Dent's name, Gotham is cleaner than it's ever been, but Jim Gordon is still torn up a bit by the lie he and Batman fabricated to keep Dent's name clean.

Queen of the World

Queen of the World is the debut novel by Ben Hennessey, a fantasy story that follows the adventures of Sarene, a young girl who's grown up in the farmlands of Tamir, but is forced to embark on a long and difficult journey after her home is attacked.  The book begins with an introduction to Sarene and her family as they go about their daily lives, and cutaways to other characters bring in the hunter Kanderil, Hawk (a bandit-type fellow), and others.

Each of the characters that we meet are significant in some way, despite being so disparate and distant in the beginning, but their individual threads are more than interesting enough to keep me hooked - I wanted to know who they were, and how they'd end up influencing Sarene's journey.

Halo 3

I keep telling myself, "Next, I'm going to do a No. Boot Sheep hasn't said No yet, and he really should, since that was the first thing I ever drew him saying".

I really thought Halo 3 would be it. Despite its pedigree being a pair of games that, while enjoying massive critical and financial success, always annoyed me, this is actually... not...bad.

There, I said it.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Thanks to page four of G2 in today's Guardian, got to see the third installment of Matt Damon's powerhouse Bourne franchise a couple of days early, and for free.

And I really don't know what to say.

A Scanner Darkly

This is one of those movies I wanted to see at the cinema, but never got round to. I think, in retrospect, it was better to have seen it on a TV, because this is a seriously weird film. 

Even now, I'm not quite sure what happens in it, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look amazing. The colours, the lines, the slight distortion of moving objects all combine with the general confusion of both the plot and that the characters are experiencing in a great way. I'm definitely going to have to watch it again, when I'm a bit more awake, and see if I can make more sense of it.

Transformers: The Movie

I was never really that big into Transformers when I was growing up; I was certainly aware of them (what child in the 80s wasn't enthralled by the idea of robots disguised as cars smacking each other up?), and I seem to remember owning one of the smaller ones, but I never saw more than the briefest glimpses of the adver- beg pardon, the cartoon. As such, my Nostalgia-meter is barely fluctuating.

However, the aforementioned car-robot-smacking still appeals today, and so it was that I came to see Michael Bay's big-screen adaptation late last week.