Tau Heavy Support – Part 1: Breaking Out the Big Guns!

The old Heavy Support slot used to be only slightly less of a no-brainer than the old Elites slot; two squads of XV88s and a Hammerhead, with the number of the former depending on the size of the game. Enough has changed, though, that it's not always so easy to decide. And, as Martha Stewart used to say, that's a good thing.

Like 300, But With Way More Gunfire

I just have to say this; the opening to Dredd is awful. It's just really, really bad. It consists of a freeway chase and a mall shootout, and while the action is decently staged, it in no way, shape or form looks like the kind of world Judge Dredd should be operating in. It looks like it's taking place in a particularly rundown section of contemporary Los Angeles. It's about as underwhelming as an opening can be, really.

Which is annoying, because the rest of this movie is pretty great.

The Best $7 I've Spent in Ages!

Pacific Rim is one of the greatest, dumbest action movies I've seen in a long, long time. And I mean that in the best possible way. This movie isn't dumb like, say, Star Trek Into Darkness, whose villain's behaviour can only be reconciled by assuming he is both working for and against another villain simultaneously, or The Dark Knight Rises, which completely wastes the entire emotional arc of the trilogy by having the people of Gotham not do a damn thing to save themselves. No, Pacific Rim is dumb in the biggest, coolest, most fantastic way possible, in the kind of way that doesn't let silly little things like reality and physics get in the way of grandiose displays of pure spectacle.

For example, there's a scene in the trailers where the hero's robot, Gipsy Danger, wields a cargo ship like a sword. This scene is dumb as a box of hammers. Just picking up a ship like that from one end would probably snap it in half amidships, nevermind dragging one end along a pretty long causeway. And then it gets swung through the air and collides with a giant monster. Multiple times! You can punch a hole in the hull of a ship like this by hitting it with a particularly sharp rock; the chances that it would've remained intact long enough to serve as a make-shift weapon for not just one, but several strokes, is essentially nil.

But it looks cool as hell!

Tau Fast Attack – Part 2: The Vehicles - Furious, But Fragile

With six options available, the Fast Attack section is second only to HQ for being crowded out. Last time, we looked at the infantry models available. This time, we're going to see what the vehicles have to offer.

Tau Fast Attack – Part 1: Fighting On Foot (or Hoof, or Wing, or Anti-Grav Generator...)

Aside from the HQ section, the Tau's Fast Attack is the most heavily populated section of the new codex. And amazingly, of the six units available, the worst of them is still solid enough that you won't get laughed at for plunking it down on the table.

As Criticism of Criticism, This Post is Insanely Meta

A formal warning, right here at the very start; I am going to be talking, in some detail, about Man of Steel, its critics, their criticism, and several key plot points and scenes. This post absolutely will contain spoilers. Anyone who hasn't yet seen this film, but wants to, and wants to do so un-spoiled, should not read this post.

Man of Steel has now supplanted Superman III as the most contested of the Superman films. Pretty much everyone agrees that I and II are good, if a little slow and uneven and very 70s; likewise, pretty much everyone agrees that IV and Returns are awful. Before this, III was the go-to movie if you wanted to find people actually arguing about whether a Superman movie was good or not. But now we have Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and all of a sudden the presence of Richard Pryor's comedy stylings in a Superman movie seems a downright quaint point of contention. Ah, progress.

It's Not Perfect, But What Is?

Man of Steel accomplishes in its 143 minutes what Smallville spent 10 seasons alternating trying and failing, and just plain not trying, to do; show how Clark Kent, a young man of strange parentage alternately blessed and cursed with fantastic abilities, grows into the role of Superman, as much a symbol of heroism as a hero himself. It's not unlike Batman Begins, a similarity helped along by the presence of Christopher Nolan as producer, in the way it tracks its titular hero from their definitive origin point (the alley shooting for Batman, the destruction of Krypton for Superman) through a somewhat dissolute period of travel, into a return to their point of origin, and ultimately the establishment of their superheroic identity amongst the broader public. It's a bit formulaic, but hey, not all formulas are bad.

Tau Elites – All Suits, Great and Small

The battlesuit. Is there any more iconic unit for the Tau Empire? And of course, the reason it's so iconic is that, in the first and second codexes, it's had to do almost all the heavy lifting for the army, in terms of fielding special weapons. Oh sure, you could put a single fusion blaster on a Piranha, or a twin-linked plasma rifle on a Broadside, but if you needed anti-light vehicle or -heavy infantry firepower, the battlesuit was your choice.

Plus ca change, as the French say.

Tau Troops – The Few, the Proud, the Squishy

Unlike the HQ section, which was basically reworked from the ground up, the Troops portion of the new Tau codex is more a matter of subtle changes. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Tau Troops might not be Grey Hunters or Guard blob-squads, but they were solid choices stuck with slightly out of date points costs. And thankfully, those costs are now more in-line with the game-wide standard.

Better Late Than Never, Folks

Steven Spielberg and Microsoft Creating Live-Action Halo TV Series (via E!)I'm not going to lie, I literally do not understand what took so long.  Halo was an absolute monster at its peak, an entertainment phenomenon.  How did it get nothing more than an anthology of animated shorts?  How did anyone look at the wide-spectrum brand recognition of Master Chief and not think 'we should get three movies and a spinoff tv series in the works right away!'.  This would have been so insanely easy to make ludicrous amounts of money off of; the only real challenge would be finding a decent actor willing to never take off the helmet on camera.  No Robert Downey Jr.s or Tobey Maguires need apply!

Now?  I don't know, actually.  I mean, Halo is still Halo, and the Xbox One (because that makes sense as a follow-on platform to the Xbox and the Xbox 360) is likely to bring Halo 4 out when it launches.  That'll give it a nice little bump back into the public consciousness.  It's not like this is likely to do all that poorly.  But the property isn't what it was, in terms of reaching beyond the particular video game playing market, and I don't think starting with a tv series would ever have been the right move.  Master Chief is a hero in the traditional sense, a larger-than-life character with little to no weaknesses and no great interest in self-examination.  I'm not really sure he could sustain a weekly television series.  And I actually am fairly sure that launching a Halo tv series without Master Chief is not going to bring in the audience a science fiction television series is going to need to stay on the air.

Well, we shall see.   And hey, it's not like I'm rooting for it to fail or anything; the more science fiction on television, the better!  When this thing premieres, you can bet I'll tune in.  I just hope enough other people will, too.

Edit -  "The Halo series will be commissioned exclusively for Xbox Live."  Reading comprehension, FTW!  This is an insanely terrible idea, and really does not bode well at all.  It's one thing for Netflix to commission a new season of Arrested Development; they're a multi-platform content provider, with a reach that transcends any single system.  But if this Halo series is only going to be for Xbox owners, that means its either going to be a small vanity project, in which case it'll barely be better than those aforementioned animated shorts, or it'll be a low-budget long-running series, in which case it'll probably look worse than just going back and watching the original Halo's cut scenes.


And just like that, my enthusiasm for this project dwindles to a dot.