Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind

Quantum of Solace (Video Game)

The title's a misnomer; this interact adapt is far more concerned with leading players through unseen action brackets in the Casino Royale storyline than allow play-act insight into Quantum of Solace's murky revenge narrative. Upfront, you get a few bare Quantum paths, before the game delves deep into flashback territory. On release, expectation for Quantum of Solace: The Video Game was unusually high. Bond has a fair video game pedigree, mainly thanks to the N64's peerless GoldenEye, and developers Treyarch had Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine to mess about with. The imagination brimmed with ideas of a polished spy-kit shooter, perhaps informed by the black-ops patter that made Modern Warfare sing.

The result, no doubt thanks to inflexible licence paymaster and a satirically short production window, is more like a product push redraft of Namco's on-rails shooter Time Crisis, with Daniel Craig's 007 as the aspiration item. Perspective shifts constantly. First person is used for iron-sighting, and third person for defence snaps. Jab buttons near the ubiquitous cover, and context drifts outside the eyeline, allowing the player to gaze upon Craig, and his relationship to surroundings. The mechanic ticks two boxes: Gears of War's land seizure gameplay is referenced for the magpies, and Craig becomes visible without excessively compromising the point and blast genre stylings. Shame it's such an uninspired affair.

A simulacra of Craig's Bond drifts aimlessly along preordained paths mucking in on sequences that bare no relation to on-screen action. Break stealth and the boring backroom levels swarm with faceless, arcade bold suicide shooters. Time to bog yourself down in cover and fire blind. A neat summation of this game's flaws would be the trailing of the Alex Dimitrios character. In the film Bond weaves in and out of Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, the raw exhibit figures providing a garishly fragile contrast to 007's blue-lit machine movement. Were Treyarch inclined to just import a poise shredding shoot-out into this situation, you'd have a startling centrepiece. Instead, action shifts to a nondescript science centre, full of barely breakable techno-nothings.

Bad Dog

Tease shill for IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch sequel. First game implied a playable Michael Mann flick, delivering instead a stodgy re-start shooter that asked for flamboyance, whilst stranding the user with stealth-health and a contrary cover system. We shan't even mention IO's utter failure to tap into Mann's particular brand of rootless masculinity. Poor show! For this follow-up, IO are promising little more than fleeing naked men being savaged by attack dogs. Now that's an achievable remit!

Pulp - Tomorrow Never Dies

Pulp's rejected 007 theme. This gem later shored up under the pre-misfaxed film title Tomorrow Never Lies as a B-Side to Help The Aged, then in a rough mix on the Deluxe mint of This Is Hardcore, where it finally got to die. That guitar noodling gets right in my head.

Behold! The Future!

Project Natal ain't got shit on this.

SPACE DEADBEEF

Nothing nets you a Gradius style sidescrolling shooter; in the fringes of the upper atmosphere your finger piloted spacecraft bobs about whilst you trace targets around polite formation enemies. Prod a destination and your craft will shoot a missile at it. The joy of iPhone freebie SPACE DEADBEEF is firing off a glut of deadly ordnance at these player marked destinations. Mindlessly carpeting an area in laser, as you do in most horizontal shooters, is fun, but getting to actually select a terminus point feels rather novel. It's a simplistic, but effective design flourish, virtually impossible on any other platform. Deadbeef's heat-seeking excess also recalls Treasure's pixel overload puzzle shooter Bakuretsu Muteki Bangaioh (distributed as Bangai-O in Europe), a game brimming with the same targeting pauses and screen filling feedback. Delight holds just as long as the enemies remain reluctant to fire back, once combat intensifies the game asks your one finger input to juggle movement as well as aiming. It's an inelegant set-up frustrated by your craft's tendency to drift in the direction of your frenzied target stabbing. As a teaser though, Space Deadbeef has you rooting for more from creator Yuji Yasuhara and publisher IDP.

Paranormal Activity

Supposedly found footage tweaked and streamlined into a feature isn't a new idea, Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project both presented documentary style assemblies of last transmissions. Those films though were about people journeying into a lawless wilderness to find terror, interlopers out of their depth messing with forces they misunderstand. Paranormal Activity instead anchors its scares in a nominally safe domestic environment. This haunted house is completely atypical. Architecturally it is spaciously modern, bordering on prefab, filled with big screen televisions and boasting an outdoor paddling pool. Rather than hobble any potential disquiet, this decision accentuates it. If you're not safe here, in a place entirely too modern to boast a spooked past, where can you be safe?

Director / Screenwriter Oren Pali even goes one further, staging the majority of the disturbed action whilst the haunted couple sleep. How more helpless can a person possibly be? For the most part Paranormal Activity elegantly teases at this idea, the couple's CCTV set-up daring the apparition to be more outrageous and daring. There's even a sub-thread that implies one half of the duo has a vested financial interest in the horror escalating, thus smoothing some of the mounting illogic. Paranormal Activity only really disappoints when it explicitly dips into referencing like-minded cinema, thankfully it's a short burst of disconnect quickly resolved. Several different endings exist for Paranormal Activity, the version currently playing with the theatrical release has origins in a series of notes suggested by Steven Spielberg when his company DreamWorks picked the film up for distribution. This conclusion plays conventional, bordering on cynical, especially with sequel rumours flying about. It implies a new super-identity ripe for further adventure exploitation. Much more fitting is the hopeless sting that crowns Pali's 2007 DVD screener edit. That ending speaks to an incalculable mindset that makes games of misery.

Alien

Between bonus griping, a crew of grumpy space truckers stumble across what appears to be a distress signal. After a traumatic landing, a small team wander out to find the source, inadvertantly bringing back an aggressive, mutating infection. The title character of Alien is a curious creation, worlds away from the huffing invincible clod footers that typically clog science fiction distress yarns. Designed by surrealist painter HR Giger, and played by seven foot plus Bolaji Badejo, the alien is a biomechanical agitator possessed of beanpole limbs and an industrialist sex-organ camouflage structure. The science officer of the besieged ship Nostromo categorises the beast as the son of the astronaut it births from. This throwaway snatch of dialogue frames the monster in the most interesting way: the creature is not wholly alien, it is instead a hybrid calibrated to human dimensions.

The creature even seems to be operating with base human procreation instincts. It instantly brutalises all male crew members it encounters, whilst being fascinated by the females. It pores over the women, savouring a proximity to them. Lambert's death in particular seems to be about a grim enchantment. The androgynous alien looms over the shrinking female, excitedly hooking its stinger tail between her legs. Desperate, but apparently unable to rape her, the alien instead skewers its intended. This savage survive mind attracts a sense of fraternity in snitch programmed Ash, another biomech, this time human designed and acting in secret on behalf of evil paymasters. When interim leader Ripley gets wind of the crew's company mandated expandability, Ash attacks her with a rolled porno magazine, attempting to force it down her throat. Ash is another neutered half-man scrambling for a penis substitute. This is the horror of Alien, death and consumption seem like secondary concerns when you're being considered by a violent extraterrestrial sexuality.

Elephant

Happy Hallowe'en! After last year's double bill of sweaty illogic, I think a skew in the direction of bleak realist is in order. Embedded for your existential horror is Alan Clarke's 1989 the Troubles short Elephant. Partly based on actual police reporting, and the brainchild of then producer Danny Boyle, Elephant dispassionately tracks eighteen sectarian murders. The removal of any political or ideological agenda stumps justification, it's just killing. Likewise, no reasoning is ever offered, instead you get ethereal Steadicams zoning like an accomplice. This being a BBC production, and given their increased presence on YouTube, you'd figure they'd want to shout it from the rafters that they used to produce thought provoking mind splinters like this? Not a bit of it! This was uploaded by a fan under a misspelled name.

More is Moor

Gameplay hype for BioShock 2. For this follow-up, 2K Marin have gone for hysterical sequel inflation. Case in point? The original's vaguely believable cobble-guns remodeled as bitchin' steampunker artillery, including an obligatory chaingun. Enemy designs look culled from the early design document rejections detailed in prequel tie-in artbook BioShock: Breaking the Mold. Can't really blame Marin for picking over leftovers, a lot of those barmy character drafts had mileage. It's a regression though. In Breaking the Mold, Robb Waters had this to say on BioShock's foe cast:

"(We) decided that we didn't want this to be another Doom sorta thing. We wanted our characters to not be zombies and not be monsters, but be these unique humans that were kinda screwed up. They weren't zombies, and you could sorta empathize with them. They retain their humanity, because that's a much scarier notion than just a big monster."

2K Marin's lore contribution? Rot-faced lunatics! Hulking tank men! Death-match gameplay! Still, you're not going to sell on the boring bits are you? Before this all gets too snide, I want to point out that the flooded areas look splendid, like a baroque snowglobe, and the taunting overseer voice hits on a nice little meta-truism for seek and destroy mold video games. Looks like the lithe Big Sister enemy is a constant nuisance too, shades of Claire's story from Resident Evil 2 then. Quite right! If you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Billy Joel - New York State of Mind

Far Cry 2

Hostility pervades Far Cry 2. Even when working for the interchangeable factions that rule this African playground, adventurers can expect no quarter. Out in the field, your approach will always be deemed dangerous, and you will be constantly attacked. After all, you are an invader. Far Cry 2 teaches you to avoid human contact, and covet loneliness. It's a disquieting ambiance than informs a central thesis of unbridled amorality. Even though the bare narrative thread is contextualised by the idea of a police action, the majority of your missions are pathological. Tasked with tracking a phantom weapons trafficker called The Jackal, players find themselves at the beck and call of indigenous militia and circling mercenaries. Notions of heroism or justice, endemic to this genre, are entirely absent. Players must commit great evils to reach a goal. This isn't war as an exercises in chest inflating glory, it's a colossally messy affair balanced on the whims of madmen.

Far Cry 2 is also unusually uncooperative. Sacked guard posts refill endlessly with aggressors who enjoy clairvoyant lines of sight. Equipment rots and degrades, requiring constant upkeep or outright rejection. Missions are rarely expedient, briefs are prone to wild digression thanks to an interfering ally cast. Even the experience of playing is fraught with inconvenience; unpatched the game has a tendency to corrupt saves, patched, missions and characters go astray barring side-quest completion. Deep in the wonderfully bloody-minded final act, my game got into the habit of freezing and crashing. The whole frightful experience was shaking itself apart. Irritating though this was, I couldn't help feeling this added something to the overall experience. Far Cry 2 is about illness, both physical and mental. It seeks to simulate a particular state of mind in which social contracts and morality cease to matter. You have dreadful objectives and no-one cares how you accomplish them. It's also a sandbox of ineffective colonial folly; wilful men of alleged civility drawn to new frontiers, with a mind to bending the country and its people to their designs. Naturally it resists. Far Cry 2 is a ruinous path of hubris, you cannot change this world, the greatest good you can do is to affect an escape. Far Cry 2 is a staggeringly immersive game that repays patience in spades.

Smash TV

It's difficult to imagine an enemy type more lowly and worthless than Smash TV's basic grunt mobbers. Armed with what looks like a 2x4, these witless drones excitedly froth about interminable studio sets, just asking to be annihilated. Utterly useless in the singular, these bullet soakers only really pose something like a threat when you're knee-deep in a clipping, overlapped mess of them. The crypto-fascist media outlet that shills Smash TV's central, lethal, gameshow must have got a job lot on knuckle dragger clones. Bald headed, stocky, and wearing ill-fitting lime t-shirts, these chaps are only fit for clogging up your personal space. As Smash TV trundles on, you'll begin to miss these fragile nobody men. Later Boss enemies demand a satirical amount of shooting before they vacate the premises. Endlessly blasting away at an undamagable two-headed mecha-cobra deep in stage 3, vague memories of Takeshi Kitano's NES prank title Takeshi no Chosenjo began to bubble up. Was I really going to have to hit this monstrosity 20,000 times?

Smash TV is sheer repetition. In order to pass a screen you'll have to blow apart thousands upon thousands of enemies. The game isn't a reward miser either, prizes pop up with staggering regularity, as do swaying wads of screen-filling currency. Post stage totaliser screens take forever to log your spoils, the ascending whistle note accompanying your increasing bank balance strays into the kind of pitch that gets dogs excitable. Smash TV is excess. The player is constantly bombarded with feedback. More enemies. More prizes. More everything. This Xbox Live iteration even allows the player infinite continues to finish the show. You'll need them. The game is mercilessly hard; space-clog tank-men aren't encumbered by their grotesque size, they can rapidly glide to all corners of the screen, better to smother you with their caterpillar tracks. For this player, Boss battles became psychotically resourced wars of attrition. My sweaty little gladiator man, endlessly reinforced by lookalikes, facing blubbering mockeries of flesh and metal. An unseen audience cheers the carnage. That experience was easily worth the 400 point asking price.

Рабочий И Паразит

Tina Faux

How do you sell an untested, potential franchise kicker starring a lethally hirsute, porno-secretary chic, gymtastic Witch? After scratching their heads long and hard, Sega's PR department decided to focus on a brassy glassy brand shove for Hideki Kamiya's Bayonetta. Nothing sells video games like doll head lick gurns! Sex shill aside, Bayonetta's got chops - was it ever in doubt? - the 360 incarnation managed a startling 40/40 score in a recent issue of vapid Japanese gaming periodical Famitsu (PS3 SKU trailed with 38/40, technical issues cited). Quite the coup for both Microsoft's system, and frame count action games in general. All signs point to pick-up minded, less fussified remix of Kamiya's earlier awesome simulator Devil May Cry. Time for a pre-order root!

Prison Pit

Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit is a squarebound thump of chrysalis body atrocity. A wound-faced aggressor is ejected from a sky-society, landing chump first in a boiled desert realm staffed by changeling undesirables. Ryan's tome has gene code in common with muscle-bomb wasteland manga, but rather than base the cataclysmic body-shifting in psychic chakra energies, or interminable training regimes, Ryan has skewed scatological new flesh. He repurposes the form of the pugilists, bodies hide loathsome shade forms, evolved to be effective in a utilitarian clobber-chain. Every injury inflicted is another opportunity to realise building block body grue as biologically alarming predator aspect. Nothing is waste, everything is function. Prison Pit is a space-plane combat scroll, detailing the long-lost art of excretion as weapon. All the best to Mr Ryan. I hope this sells a million, leaving him no choice but to release a hundred more just like it.

"I will count it down for you."

Highlander: The Search for Vengeance

Kawajiri's preoccupation with combative forever men meets an undying 80s clash franchise. Retail opportunity! The future is rubble, policed by Fourth Reich spider-bots, and ruled by an ageless, Saturn worshipping, strat-shredding, Ziggurat dweller. Into this predicament wanders a Ronin mindset bounty hunter, who quickly hooks up with a pragmatic female soul, and establishes strained ties to the local freedom fighters. Deposition is on his mind too. Forever war flashbacks detail a millennia long feud between these two immortals, of which this is but the latest stage. Both have stuck to their roots: the Scottish stray seeks to keep himself ostracised, whilst the Roman imperialist throws in with whatever ideology is currently pushing an expansionist agenda. Highlander: The Search for Vengeance's hysterical highlight comes in the form of a near-miss memory reel: the token MacLeod pursues his quarry over endless continents and centuries, relentlessly coming up short. It's a believable insight into the psychotically ill-framed urges of rootless, eternal, grudge holders. They're all each other's got. As this is a Kawajiri flick, action is brisk and accomplished, both by design and execution. It's a shame his Western paymasters took it upon themselves to hack out chunks of nuance though. There's tell that it was all restored for a vaporous Director's Cut edition. If I ever track it down, I'll let you know.

Julie London - Cry Me a River

Doomsday

Neil Marshall's love letter to stunted outpost civility, and despairing post-apocalyptia. A mega virus has left Scotland quarantined, the North anonymous, and London quaking. When riot cases start breaking in the capital, thuggy fascists dispatch slinky killer Rhona Mitra to scout out survivors and cures up in Alba. There, she finds various subsistence tribes calibrated to widely disparate genre disciplines. Doomsday is a magpie grab-bag of late 70s, early 80s wasteland vintage. Marshall has fashioned a modestly budgeted retrospective best-of. Spot the references! Mad Max! Aliens! Escape from New York! Cannibal Holocaust! Excalibur? The list trudges ever on. Thankfully, Marshall has a fan's eye for the material, adding gonzo flourishes as he pillages - Road Warrior car clod collisions account for fragile human cargo, spraying gallons of grue on impact. It's double reward feedback! Marshall's only major beat misstep is ditching the invaders' tech-might in the medieval section. Who doesn't want to see plate armour knights folding under a relentless hail of bullets? Maybe Marshall wanted to sidestep a Bedknobs and Broomsticks cue? Destined for infamy.

"You're already dead!"

Tease shill for Koei Tecmo's upcoming Hokuto no Ken Musou brawler. Hopefully Europe can expect a fully localised Dynasty Warriors: Fist of the North Star? Pretty please? Signs are at least vaguely promising; both of the Gundam iterations of Musou made it over here, and Discotek Media have licenced the complete Fist of the North Star TV series, to be issued as four DVD boxsets in the US sometime in 2010. Tie-in? Fingers crossed!

Sketch Sunday: CF

Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit hero CF. Drawn from memory, hence the acres of superfluous bear-hair. Gushing review of book to follow.

Isaac Hayes - Walk on By

Don't sleep!

Anyone with fond memories of the BBC's horror-mockumentary Ghostwatch is well advised to check out this trail for Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity. Despite being completed sometime in 2007, the film is still stuck in a distribution merry-go-round; Miramax did their usual edit-flirt, before the property ended up at Dreamworks. One terrified Steven Spielberg later, Peli was being lined up to direct a superfluous remake. In-house screenings were set up for prospective retool screenwriters, who left said shows a'shaking an' a'quivering. Remake ditched, the original flick's domestic release was then lost to distribution wranglings between Dreamworks and Paramount. Confound it all! So far, Paranormal Activity has been snuck out to American college crowds, who are lapping it up. Director Peli has requested that those interested in seeing the film head to eventful.com to register interest. If demand hits a million, there are vague promises about a proper theatrical roll-out.

Zombieland

More cross-pollination. What do you do if you have notionally undesirable product? You lie about it. Or, at least allow it to be misunderstood. Zombieland has romantic comedy plotting, with hodgepodge horror flourishes. It's product, two separate gender calibrated joybuzzes, clumsily aligned for mass-market appeal. It's a date movie! How was it sold? The dream was stricken survivors trapped in a terror world with a centralised game show rule-base. Kill of the Week! bleated the trailers, shilling real sequences of unknowable dexterity. Turns out these aren't kill propaganda beamed into pliant minds, they're Family Guy style digressions to add flavour to down-time. Oh well. I been duped. That'll learn me. Settle in for a modestly budgeted, base dissection of the wonderful Shaun of the Dead's more obvious pleasures. Plus: an ever-present voice over that over-fills blanks for dunces, an insistent shrill that has more in common with Scrubs' laboured life-lessons than dispatches from the apocalypse. Zombieland is a safety net danger-world, full of characters that regularly elect to endanger themselves to advance well trodden women-as-treasure machinations. Also, who uses a toilet cubicle in the wasteland?

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem

Researching this atrocity, I was struck by one nebulous factoid. It isn't the physical actualisers of each creature that gets continued franchise credit, it's the writers who engineered the overall fiction. Whilst I have no problem with writers getting their due - either series wouldn't exist if those creators hadn't got their think on - it seems an ethical dereliction to not name HR Giger as the creator of the Alien, nor Stan Winston as the Predator's. Both species are cypher make-work on the page, given fantastical life and standing by their respective designs. Giger crafted an exoskeleton penis, that wandered and loomed in its space-nest; Winston was given a brief that asked for a spasmodic dog-man, instead turning in a lanky, mandibled Masai. Blueprints so strong that sequels only sought to embellish them. In Aliens James Cameron and Stan Winston crossed the Giger form with a Black Widow spider, and gave us the Alien Queen. Giger refined his own workings to turn in a hyper-aggressive fuck-puma for Alien 3. For Predator 2, Winston simply appended his original piece with gee-whizz gadgets and a steeper forehead.

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator 2 - Requiem doesn't turn in any radical reworkings of the core creatures: the Alien looks to be a mish-mash of Cameron's Warrior suit, and Alien Resurrection's limb elongation, whilst the Predator looks inherited from LA 1997. The directors, who choose to be credited as The Brothers Strause, don't appear to have any real interest in either monster, or their visual aesthetic. Apart from a few mime sequences framed from a Predator viewpoint, the majority of this short wheeze of a film is concerned with establishing boring slasher prey. Cut-out nobodies who hate their jobs, and are bullied by stock jocks. These phantoms burn screen-time. When it does remember to return to the hostility beasts, the film is slick with an almost impenetrable darkness. Both monsters rarely glimpsed out of fleeting, geography denying, close-up. There's a presumption they're clashing, but you can't be sure.

Experimentation is reserved for this installments big idea: a cross-pollination. The clunkily monikered Predalien skulks about the piece raping barely established women, and nominally leading its pack of lobotomised insects. The brush with Predator DNA has created a life-cycle defying super stud who can vomit up embryonic offspring. All the better to cram in as many targets as possible. It's worth noting that said offspring do not retain any Predalien features, mediocre human alignment wins out there. AVPR is a depressingly minor addition to either saga. The alien comes off worse, an Old God bio-weapon reduced to a sewer prowling bottom feeder. The Predator is at least allowed a bafflingly bureaucratic mindset: dispatched to Earth on a clean-up mission, the hunter liberally applies a blue gunk to any shred of xenomorph evidence, dissolving it. Stumbled upon by a hapless community cop, does the Predator attempt to further conceal his presence? No. He skins and maims the bystander, hanging what's left for others to find. You've got to find joy in your work.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies

A global economic meltdown sees a rise in third-party politics in the United States. Spearheading the movement is Lex Luthor, whose empty promises and stern gazing see him installed as Commander-in-chief. Rather than address the modern Hoovervilles that have sprung up all over the country, he quickly assembles a task force of reformed nutters and super-stooges, before framing Superman as a Krypto-addled danger. Batman to the rescue! Based on the opening strand of a World's Finest rebrand that ditched adversarial Millerisms, and recasts the duo as best pals, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is a slight brawler that delights in camaraderie.

Carrying over from their respective individual animation efforts, we have Kevin Conroy as Batman, and Tim Daly as Superman. The pair haven't shared airspace since Toshihiko Masuda's Superman: The Animated Series three parter World's Finest - Daly bowed out after his solo series, and was replaced for George Newbern for the Justice League run. The actors have an easy chemistry that carries the few non-action sequences. They play their super-identities as disarmed, and comfortable in each other's company. As well as Jeph Loeb's plotting, this feature also inherits arc artist Ed McGuinness' visual inflections, albeit simplified for animation. His hero drafts are a curious mix of Masters of the Universe hyper-musculature, and cod-manga big eye. This aesthetic gives Public Enemies the overall effect of a child's play acting. Merchandised action figures, of which McGuinness' designs have spawned plenty, tossed together in vague scenarios dictated by whatever toy comes to hand. Heroes fight heroes, bare figures get gimmick upgrades, and a spoiled brat saves the day.

Doom

A motion-sickness baiting gallop, surfaces crawling with prickle-shock detailing, and enemies that crumble into evacuated heaps. This is Doom. Played in such close proximity to Wolfenstein 3D, Doom feels like a show-off remake of id's previous effort. Unlike Wolfenstein's passive architecture, Doom's landscapes are teeming with scaling, clashing textures. To eyes since trained to expect an unobnoxious glide, Doom can be a disorientating, untrackable experience. Rather than hamper Doom, this mismatch heightens the game's core narrative text: invasion. Hell has literally vomited itself over this Martian technopolis, warping it in ways we can't quite understand. Enemy types augment this experience - corrupted reflection Marines that devolve into brutish, animalistic shapes, and abstract utilitarian gore-cobbles. Little wonder it became the blueprint for an emerging genre.

Wolfenstein 3D

Seventeen years away from cutting edge, Wolfenstein 3D's sprawling mazes of wandering Nazis retain a simplistic feedback charm entirely lacking from the brand it spawned. Booting it up today, the shock of the primitive is mitigated by a concise uniformity. Wolfenstein 3D's levels are easily tracked pastels and primaries, points of interest clearly signposted. The block colours give the game a crisp, readable clarity. A lack of browsable dungeon map is off-set by paper trail corpse retention, an atmospheric feature that has never quite caught on. Wolfenstein 3D's swaggering machismo - difficulty levels include 'Can I play Daddy?' for Easy, and 'I am Death incarnate' for Hard, as well as stages opening with the legend: 'Get psyched!' - frames the chubby foe renders as toys, and Wolfenstein as a grubbily interactive boy's own fiction.

Smallville 9.1: Saviour

Nine seasons in, and Smallville has barely developed. The show is still far more concerned with weaving dead-end romance elements round a licence frame, than examining pubescent superheroics. Clark Kent still hasn't developed a super-identity. Instead he's a hound dog sketch of Christopher Reeves' bumbling under-ego, a self-designed whelp fumbling with the strays around him. This viewer's priors with Smallville include an unusually patient patronage of Season 1, and occasional views sandwiched between better shows on afternoon E4. Back in its opening run, the show focused on throwing up increasingly convoluted Krypto-mutants to tax Kent's emerging powers. Heavily indebted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that infant serial flirted with the promise of a full-on abilities reveal, that even to this day, goes unrealised. Transcendence be damned! Smallville instead conspired to sink itself into sludge arcs of souring interpersonal relations, and baffling stupidity.

In Season Nine opener Saviour, Clark still cannot fly. Likely a sop to budgetary concerns, and fears that the teenage target audience will revolt at any practically realised effect not bristling with computer generated after effects. Wires just don't cut it anymore! In-fiction, Terence Stamp, having graduated from Superman 2's Zod to this series' Jor-El phantom voice, persuades his son that the flight lack revolves around sublimated sexual urges. Cosmic misogyny dictates that a desire for female attention drags you down. It's a detail that's given a cack-handed superiority twist by Jor-El's constant needling: there's always an insinuation from Daddy that Clark's dealings with our 'lower' species has narrowed his horizons. Naturally, this all exists as excuse, and isn't explored in any more time than it takes to say.

The rest of the premiere ep sees Clark making brief headway in developing his Kryptonian vitality. He's cut himself off from society, and spends his evenings zipping around in a black trench coat, halting disaster. It's uniquely dispiriting to see an originator character of superhero fiction kitted out in clone ensemble. Kent actor Tom Welling is an ill-fit for neo-goth stylings. He's too squared and browned, the polar opposite to the Wachowski's palid insect agitators. It makes this embryonic Superman a gimmick chasing phony. Perhaps that's too harsh? Maybe the tailoring has less to do with decade late populist urges, and more to do with on-going ownership disputes? There's no excusing the execution though: repeated interludes see Kent grimly manning nose-bleed architecture, framed like Christopher Nolan's Batman. The kids have got their 'dark' Superman.