If you’ve got access to the BBC it’s been difficult to miss the return of Doctor Who after his extended hiatus from our screens. The leak of the first episode did nothing but raise the profile and create a positive buzz and so far, having seen the two televised episodes, I really enjoy it. It’s not particularly clever, the effects aren’t anything special, and it doesn’t have the production values of the Star Wars’ or Star Treks of the world, but it’s big, brash, and unashamedly entertaining. There’s something timeless (no pun intended) about things like the TARDIS and the Daleks, and Christopher Eccleston makes a great Doctor – he’s both funny and charismatic, and he can carry off the serious moments too. It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t want to stay on for a second series.

They really need to try the same trick of putting it on the backburner for a while with Star Trek. Poor writing and growing antipathy from the audience is killing that show, but I guarantee that if they shelve it for fifteen years and then make a great fanfare about its return it will be big again. Maybe not as huge as it was at its peak, but an improvement on the viewing figures that look to have killed it. Doctor Who’s reception shows that it worked for them and it definitely worked for Star Wars.

It’s good to see the BBC coming out with something as entertaining as the new Who. With all the pressure to become more of a pure public service broadcaster while also having the opposite pressure to stay modern and relevant, I’m glad that they can still show that they have a sense of fun.

Don’t ask questions, just do it.

This game is fucking brilliant. I finally got it yesterday and almost six hours later put the controller down. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was halfway through the story mode and didn’t want to finish it in one day I probably would have kept playing. I can’t remember the last time I was having so much fun with a game. I loved the previous games in the series but this is even a big improvement on them.

I haven’t even started on the multiplayer and co-op modes…

I’ve realised that I’ve completely gone off PC gaming. The whole thing is too much about how big your ePenis is and there’s far too much emphasis on the technology of gaming rather than the artistic side. The community is, in general, full of supercilious arseholes that have nothing better to do than complain about people who don’t know as much about the hardware as they do.

You can drop £800 on a great gaming PC, and it might be able to run a game at 1600×1200 at a solid 60fps+, but can you come home with a new game, drop it in, press a button, and be playing? Can you kick back on a comfortable chair and play without having to jump through hoops (modding controllers, finding homebrew drivers, running cables to a TV, finding TV adaptors, etc)? Is there anything truly original coming out? What was the last new 2D PC game you saw? How many of the anticipated PC games that you’re looking forward to this year are FPS? How many of them are hyped up based purely on their graphics? Is a mouse and keyboard really as intuitive as a decent console controller?

The whole PC gaming market is just stagnant; it’s completely saturated with first person shooters and MMORPGs which get old when you realise that you haven’t played anything else in months. Since I got my iBook in October the PC hasn’t even been on because I find OS X so much better for general applications, and that’s why I’m thinking of getting out of PC games completely and coming back in a year or so when things might have moved on.

Continuing my procrastination around writing a review of The Incredibles, I just read Moriarty’s story on AICN about his tour of Pixar. I don’t really like AICN, partially because it always looked like an anachronistic Geocities site straight out of 1997 and was almost actually offensive to my eyes (less so with their new design), but also because of their annoying tendancy to get worked up on every little fallacy that they post while bashing anything that doesn’t meet their strict criteria on what to like – part of the reason why I found Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back’s idea of tracking down and kicking the shit out of the Talkback kids so funny. Plus there’s the fact that Harry Knowles is like a fat lion-man doing a Michael Jackson impersonation. Seriously, he scares me.

Anyway, Pixar. Reading that just reinforced my idea that it would be the ultimate place to work. There was a story in our local paper the other day about how a former Bournemouth University student is flitting between them and ILM (I forget which way) and all I can feel is raw jealousy. I’m loathe to go back to making obvious allusions to EA’s practices, but the sheer quality and popularity of Pixar’s output just shows that a free and relaxed working environment such as theirs will produce something far better than a production line/battery farm mentality.

It’s too bad that I have absolutely none of the skills that could net me a job at Pixar. I want my own cottage in the dwarf town…

The definition of irony? EA blaming sequels for poor Christmas sales, and they’re audacious enough to blame other people’s sequels. Still, at least they know how it feels to have their market share sucked up by a competitor’s franchise. I just wish it could have been mediocre franchise sequels to blame instead of actual good ones like Half-Life 2, Halo 2 (it was a great game!), and World of Warcraft. Those games actually took a lot of work and originality to develop, unlike Need For Speed Underground 2 and NFL Street 2. Maybe that NFL licence isn’t the licence to print money that they thought it was going to be, and it’s good that the NBA avoided the same fate.

It’s amazing that they can pour out their shit and treat it as the default outcome that it will be bought up by everyone, giving them millions more to spend on slave labour. How can someone be surprised when the same games they brought out last year don’t sell? Do I smell fresh acquisitions in EA’s future?

In other news, I really want a PSP. I don’t know if I’ll manage the wait until September for a superior Japanese model.