In 1979 Life of Brian released to a powerful backlash from religious groups who thought the Pythons were mocking their beliefs. Often those doing the attacking would not have seen the film and would presume, wrongly, that Brian was just a stand-in for Jesus, rather than a separate character.

Holy Flying Circus, a drama made for BBC4, captures the time between the film being finished and prepped for distribution through to the aftermath of the infamous ‘debate’ in which John Cleese and Micheal Palin came head to head with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood.

The immediate thing that you notice is that the entire team – the writer, the director, the actors – clearly know the source material and how to make the sort of thing that is now labelled ‘pythonesque.’ The actors are terrific at delivering the characters and in the press shots you certainly have to look twice before you realize that it isn’t Python. None of the cast are perfect, but in both looks and sound they’re close enough that it’s never unimpressive.

The writing is, for the most part, very good. The story is delivered very well, dancing upon key points while at the same time completely exaggerating the smaller things, the annoying quirks of human existence. It works very well so long as you remember that it’s a very fictionalized account of events and very little of what we see in the film likely happened.

But that’s where things go a little off the tracks. The film is incredibly one sided, presenting the Pythons as intelligent, rational atheists and anybody religious as either physically or mentally deficient or a complete bastard. This sometimes comes at the expense of what actually happened and, in the penultimate scene, entire parts of the chat show – Friday Night, Saturday Morning – are edited to show reactions, either by the audience or by Palin/Cleese, that didn’t actually happen.

Not a problem, most of the film is entirely fictional, except that it is completely at odds with the “let people decide for themselves” moral that runs through much of Holy Flying Circus.

References to Python sketches or solo projects tend to hit the mark, the same can’t be said for the original surreal moments that are rather hit and miss. Overall there’s enough humour to keep you interested, my favourite being a brief cutaway to the ‘head of rude words’.

If you like straight drama it’s probably worth giving Holy Flying Circus a miss, rarely does it present itself too seriously. If you want to see excellent performances marred only occasionally by a slight drop in quality of the writing (and scenes that are a tad biased) you’ll love what’s presented.

7/10

Part one in a series of articles examining the history of the MMO genre, starting in 1974.

After reading Bill Bryson’s Down Under (In a Sunburnt Country if you’re from America/Canada) I felt like I had no choice but to learn more about the only country in the world that is also a continent. Relatively young, Australia’s political and economic history has been boxed into only a couple of hundred years, yet Aborigines were there 50,000 years ago: far too early for a decent explanation of how they actually managed it.

It’s a country that’s hardly been explored, a vast land of ‘possibly’ extinct animals and prehistoric throwbacks; sometimes animals which are seen once and never seen again, lost in the sun and sand.

Geoffrey Blainey’s A Short History of Australia is the go-to text for people wanting to learn a little more about Australia in a casual and entertaining manner. In the 350 or so pages that make up the text I’ve learnt everything I need to know to have a basic understanding of Australian history and a list of things that I’d like to learn more about. It’s an excellent gateway (if you don’t count Bryson), well written from start to finish.

From the Aborigines to the early 1990s, Blainey covers key moments in his country’s history authoritatively and interestingly, rarely straying so in-depth that you feel overwhelmed by the information given to you.

Unfortunately, the book’s biggest asset is its greatest weakness. Skimming over the chapter on sport is easy if you lack real interest, but things you want to learn more about are over far too quickly and you feel the need to go searching for other sources. My only other real issue would be the fact that the book isn’t structured chronologically, but by themes. There’s still a general forward direction to the book, but it still jumps back and forth quite freely and it’s far too easy to lose your place.

A Shorter History of Australia may not be the perfect history book and experts really need not purchase, there’s little here that’ll surprise you unless you are a big fan of Blainey. For me though, the best thing about it is its simple delivery, its assumption that the person reading the book may not have even ever visited Australia. That alone makes this worth picking up, you’ll be guided kindly through one of the most fascinating histories of the world without being made to feel stupid for your previous lack of knowledge.

Without a doubt, an excellent read.

9/10

In 1994 I was amongst some of the kids who would see The Lion King for the first time. I remember nothing about seeing it for the first time, that experience has been dulled by repeated viewing on video and, later, DVD. Those repeated viewings have firmly glued the film into my mind, almost to the point that I could probably perform the film in its entirety with only a few prompts.

The chance to see it on the big screen is almost the biggest pull of this re-release, trumped only by the chance to see an animated film that I know so well be transferred to 3D – and it’s done very, very well.

Within the opening 20 seconds of the film, with Rowan Atkinson’s Zazu flying over an assortment of rather well behaved animals (the beauty of animation), your eyes are rewarded with a visual treat. The depth offered by the 3D is constantly there throughout the film, at some times more subtle than others but, nonetheless, constantly there.

Does it add or detract from the experience? That depends entirely on your opinion of 3D in general. I found it impressive and well worth the extra money to see, others are likely to not be as impressed. I will say this, I didn’t expect for a second that a 17 year old film could be nearly as well transformed using 3D as it was.

The base film itself, of course, is still absolutely faultless. The story, an anthropomorphic retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has Simba suffering with the guilt of his father’s murder while the real murderer, his uncle, Jeremy Iron’s deliciously evil Scar, takes over the kingdom.

Add in a collection of comic characters, catchy songs, brilliant acting throughout and first-class animation and it’s easy to see why the Lion King became the global phenomenon that it did.

This 3D release was to tie-in with the release of the Blu-ray at the beginning of November, a 3d version is also available. It’s well worth the extra couple of quid if you’ve got the equipment to play the 3D version (or plan to get the equipment). It’s also worth noting that the success The Lion King 3D has seen has prompted Disney/Pixar to announce theatrical 3D releases of Beauty and the Beast, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and Little Mermaid.

9/10

It wasn’t all that long ago that I hadn’t ever actually played an MMO. They always sounded amazing, if slightly geeky, and they offered an excellent opportunity to not only socialize but also play a quality video game. The MMO didn’t have the stigma attached to it that things like Dungeons and Dragons had but with similar objectives and a more immersive setting.

For the full article, read DevilsMMO

The Remasters Collection is delayed into next year some time. Unfortunately I just haven’t had the time or funding to start such a huge project, but it’s something that’s definitely on the cards.

The first release, when it eventually gets done, will be a complete re-issue of the Revealed series, including a downloadable “box set” with additional stuff. The majority of what is below will be available for individual download.

Revealed: The Truth Digital Box Set

• The Truth About Baby Killing
• 2011 remix containing additional dialogue, rerecorded material, super special effects, 5.1 mix (If I can find enough babies).
• Original 2005 mix.
• Script (2011/2005 comparison edition)
• The Truth About Wookies
• The Truth About Chauvinism
• The Truth About What A Scotsman Wears Under His Kilt
• The Truth About Boarding Schools
• A Student Of Sociology - A brand new feature chronicling Revealed and its importance in the world of hard-hitting journalism.
• Re-recording Baby Killers – A video of Mat screwing up his lines and generally acting the fool.

It occurs to me that the MMO, as it currently stands in the industry, is something of a hit and miss affair. The average gamer, equipped with a console and every shooter ever made, generally only ever hears about the very biggest MMOs or, failing that, the MMOs that manage to crash and burn the hardest.

Code Veronica is now well over 10 years old and is perhaps the black sheep of the Resident Evil family. You’d be hard pressed to avoid mentions of Resident Evil 2 or Nemesis when in a discussion about the series, but Code Veronica would probably be the odd omission.

I’m not sure why that would be so. It had releases on the Dreamcast, the PS2 and the Gamecube and received excellent reviews almost entirely across the board, but it’s the one game that I never really see mentioned. Perhaps that is why, along with Resident Evil 4, Capcom decided this would be the game worth porting onto modern consoles.

For the full review, hit LegitGamer.net

Red Riding Hood, written by Sarah Blakley-Cartright, is a story about changes, about a young woman who holds her ground as her world falls apart around her. Daggerhorn is a fairly normal village filled with normal people. Actually, this isn’t really the case as with every introduction of a new major character Blakley-Cartright feels the need to write some variation of the sentence “they never felt they were exactly like everybody else.”

And it is this sort of character introduction that you are slapped with even from the very first page. Each personality is described in intricate detail with little to no actions to back it up. We know that the main character, Valerie, is a bit of a black sheep, adventurous and not willing to settle – we know that because we are told repeatedly. Similarly, we know that Valerie’s sister, Lucie, is beautiful and pure because hardly a paragraph she is in goes by in which her saint-like qualities are not mentioned.

Despite the sometimes clustered writing, Red Riding Hood actually offers quite an interesting story. The village of Daggerhorn has long suffered at the hands of the Wolf and, once a month, the people must offer sacrifices to keep their friends and family safe. When the Wolf attacks and kills the beautiful and pure (it’s catching) Lucie days after the last sacrifice, the village is thrown into disarray. The Wolf is not a wolf, they soon learn, but a Werewolf and it could be any one of them.

But Valerie has more than a supernatural half-man-half-wolf to contend with, oh yes. She also has man trouble, having been betrothed to the rich and handsome Henry, she suddenly discovers that the man of her dreams, her childhood friend Peter has returned to the scene. Who will she pick and what sexual tension will be revealed as the plot progresses? It’s edge of your seat stuff.

Thankfully, the scenes featuring the Wolf turns what could have been, and for the most part is, a novel for teenage girls into a murder mystery,  a whodunit that leaves you guessing until beyond the last page. And I mean that quite literally, the last chapter of the book – in which the identity of the Wolf is revealed – is classed as a ‘bonus chapter’ and is only available online, a chapter which remained unreleased until the launch of the film.

The mystery elements of the plot are generally handled with the same sort of subtlety as the character development, with each character a suspect. As Valerie goes through the evidence against each character, Blakley-Cartright seems to plant far too many seeds of doubt in her characters, characters which you are certain cannot be the murderer. As a result, the few characters that aren’t constantly accused by Valerie and her allies are soon pretty obvious candidates for the guilt. And as each one of them is slowly picked off, it becomes more and more obvious who the killer is.

At its core, Red Riding Hood is a book for the Twilight crowd, for young girls who spend their evenings imagining themselves engrossed in some sort of romantic supernatural world where cannibalism and murder are nothing more than minor character flaws. Unfortunately, it’s also quite a good re-imagining of the original Riding Hood tale, forcing any semi-interested reader to work their way through pages of girlish doubt and over-emotion in order to get to any of the interesting parts.

6/10

Last week we explored Star Wars: The Old Republic, the latest MMO set in a galaxy far, far away, examining whether it could ever live up to the hype that BioWare have created around it, some people saying it is little more than Knights of the Old Republic online. This week I’ve been playing a few games that have got me thinking about what other well-loved and well-respected titles could handle an MMO spin-off.

Now, there are a few specific points about the MMO that have brought the following games to the forefront of my mind while writing this article. Firstly, most MMOs are open world and allow for a great degree of exploration and discovery, a trait shared by every game I’ve listed below. But more than that, these are games that have captured the imagination of millions, creating not only a living breathing universe, but a living breathing universe which you wouldn’t hesitate to be a part of.

For the full article, click here.