After months of trying to escape it I was finally forced to watch the latest teen girl sensation Twilight. The film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's hit series of books was always going to be a success regardless of how good or bad the film was. The audience was always going to be there to see it and it was, the film was a smash hit raking in $382 million worldwide and the sequel is already in production. Personally though I hated it and this is why.

Story... Or lack thereof. A good film adaptation of a book or comic or anything will allow the viewer to understand the story and generally what the hell is going on even if they haven't read the book. After all these movies are expensive to make so they want to reach the most amount of people. Well I had no freaking idea what the hell was going on in Twilight. It mostly revolves around some ridiculously pale girl Bella who lives in Phoenix, Arizona PHOENIX FREAKING ARIZONA!!! The sun never goes away EVER!! How the hell is she so pale!! Maybe it's so she doesn't look out of place with the weird looking vampires she's going to want to sex? Anyway she moves away from Phoenix to live with her dad in small town Forks, Washington possibly the dreariest looking small town in America. Gloom seems to surround this small town most of the town. Anyway she goes to the local school and gets bombarded by this ridiculous group of people whose sole job is to inform her of the 'Cullens' the local weirdos who also happen to be the hotties, and the Vampires. From here on in it's a Mormon love story, filled with so much teenage angst it's not funny and reminded me of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals Wizard Angst spoof. Bella for some reason is the most amazing smelling piece of meat vampire Edward Cullen has ever smelt. Now normally the vampire would then EAT HER!!! But no he's a vampire vegetarian who only eats animals, how nice of him. So he gets all angsty and conflicted, Bella gets an orgasm face anytime the word boy is mentioned and they decide to date each other. She meets the rest of the ragtag vampire family who also want to eat her and becomes the focus of obsession for a rival vampire, a supposedly ruthless tracker James. That's about as much as I can be bothered telling you about the story, I only understood that much because I had someone who has seen the film a million times and read all the books explaining everything. The story just doesn't make any sense if you haven't read the books you can't grasp that these are a different form of vampire than you are use to because nothing explains that. Half the dialogue is about dieing and eating and can be down right depressing. Probably why it's so popular with the teenage girls of today, everyone loves a moody, conflicted love story about death right?

What it did Well... The town was gloomy but looked really good, your typical small town America setting. The forest they so often run in too was beautiful whilst the Cullens dressed really well and had an amazingly cool house. This is one of the mainstay vampire traits Meyer seems to embrace, Vampires are always wealthy, glamorous and well posh and snobby. Also Bella's dad was probably my favourite character because he was BELIEVABLE!! He acted like a dad who hadn't spent much time with his daughter and in my opinion some of the best scenes involved him, like when he's cleaning his guns and meets Edward for the first time "Bring him in" (cocks shotgun).

What it Didn't... Ok where do I start here. The Cullen family vampires looked ridiculous with their beyond pale skin, one of the guys looked like Edward Scissor Hands but didn't have the advantage of saying he was built by a mad scientist. Meyer just rips vampire lore to pieces, her vamps have no fangs but hiss when angered, no claws but maneuver their hands like they do and instead of dieing in sunlight they have diamond skin that jingles. What the hell!!! Diamond skin!!! I know the jingling wasn't in the book so why the hell add it in the film it was just weird. The special effects in this film were terrible. They reminded me of the 1994 Jim Carrey film The Mask except The Mask was actually good. Edward Cullen and the other vampires blur their way around the screen when ever they run or jump or break into girls houses so they can watch them sleep and 'Spider Monkey' Bella has to hang on for dear life. Spider Monkey, what the hell kind of nickname is that anyway? One lot of vampires seemed to glide and walk at the sametime. The fight scene actually wasn't too terrible but the baseball scene was ridiculous. Just why did they have to play baseball? I don't understand that scene at all. Hardwicke really disappointed me with her direction of this film. I loved Lords of Dogtown one of her prior films but in Twilight she really missed the mark. The camera angles, techniques and shots she chose in certain scenes were ridiculous. In one scene Edward and Bella are standing in a clearing, the camera pans round as they talk and instead of waiting a second longer for the pan to finish and end up infront of Bella there's a cut to infront of her, WHY!! In another scene shortly after the camera goes on a dutch tilt and takes in the scenery half way through a scene with Bella and Edward, it wasn't even angled at what they might be seeing it just seems to trail off and then forgets they are there as they appear tiny in the bottom corner. In another scene they are walking and talking and all of a sudden goes to a flashback of the day before, no reason why you and could only tell because of their clothes and then folds back into the present. I did not understand the reason for that flashback, the information given could have just as easily been relayed in the present scene. It was a flashback just for the sake of it. Probably my most hated scene though was when Edward was standing on some rocks and jumps literally a metre down in a display of his crazy blurred vampire awesomeness. Why did he do that? Why did they show that? It was like a five year old jumping from the curb to the road, random and stupid. He didn't need his vampire powers to do it, he could have done it normally but no he goes blurry vampire for it.

What it all Means... Obviously I'm not the target audience for this film at all. You seem to have to appreciate the books or the romance genre to get this film. The special effects and fight scenes seem thrown in their to make dragged along boyfriends feel ok about being there but the special effects are especially bad, a clear afterthought to the whole production. None of this matters though because the film was always going to be a success and clearly lots of 16 year old girls are going to be dieing to see the sequel. I give Twilight 4 sucks on a dead corpse out of 10.

So I figure I've had the latest offering from Sports Interactive, Football Manager 2009, long enough to write up a decent review. Now first off you should all know I was playing version 9.3 of FM 09 which means it's had some issues in past which from what I've read were pretty freaking ridiculous but have largely been cleared up, now shall we?

After it was promised on Thursday I was finally able to get my hands on the new Aliens comic put out by Dark Horse. Now unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard of Ridley Scott's highly successful Alien films, lucky for you if you have I've provided you with a link so you can get your ass up to speed. The original film, now coming up for its 30th birthday has spawned comics, books, sequels, toys, video games the whole shabang and now Dark Horse is releasing a new comic to celebrate this birthday.

First thing I noticed about this comic is the Aliens look slightly different to what I'm used to in the films. They have crazy little ant face claw things that are red near there mouth. Now I'm not sure if they've always had them and in this case they were soaked in blood so they were more noticable but to me they seemed new and different. The story is obviously a little vague as this is the first issue and it raises some interesting questions. A group of miners find a planet that's uninhabited and rich with resources, score and then they find strange alien artifacts, double score? Well at least they think so but as usual things are not as they seem. A second group is dispatched to the planet, a bunch of scientists to explore the alien artifacts but curiosity certainly gets to the cat and the miners do some exploring of their own and things get interesting from their. I don't want to ruin too much for you because it really is an interesting start to the series. At times the talking between characters was hard to follow and did not seem to have a natural flow yet I was reading this when I was quite tired so that may have affected me a little. Also to me it seemed to raise a lot of questions and not give very much background so there seems to be a lot to answer in the following issues. All in all it was a good first issue with a nice drawing style that certainly didn't let up on the violence and gore of the films and the Aliens certainly looked like they were from Scott's films, red face bits aside and was certainly well worth the price. I'll give Aliens #1 7 and a half slashes out of 10.

Okay okay I know I haven't given you much to get interested about when it comes to my blog and I know what your thinking, just another douche bag who wants his own soapbox but has nothing to say yet. Well luckily, like a dodgy day time TV chef, I do happen to have something I prepared earlier. A nice little review of a computer game called Rome: Total War, you may have heard about it.....oh and before I go just remember I wrote this right after I decided I'd been rejected by my local student newspaper so well I was kind of pissed okay.

Well so far it appears I have been denied my request to VOLUNTEER for the student run VOLUNTEER magazine (not naming names cause I don't want to get sued or something). Now that must mean I'm pretty bad if I can't get a shot with the volunteer student magazine and pretty much leaves me with the options of 1) creating my OWN magazine where I can write all the articles I want or 2) write a blog. Personally I think option 2 is much more practical because well creating a magazine seems really hard and expensive and really hard, all the colour choices and zippy subject headings just seem out of my reach. So here I am writing this blog ( at the time on MySpace) and what, you may ask, will I be writing about? Video games...That's right, laugh if you must but I know I'm cool and really that's all that matters in the end.

So what about video games, well I'll tell you. Being a student, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and getting one shift a week at my dodgy casual job I don't have any money. Therefore my gaming of late has been on the cheap, often the end result of a coin toss between eat or buy a game, but that doesn't mean the quality of the games have been cheap too. Case in point, Rome: Total War Gold Edition. This game was purchased for a poultry $20, awesome, this game also came with the Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion expansion pack, do I hear double awesome? Yes yes I do. How freaking sweet is that! Two games in one, you can't beat that....except for maybe with 3 in 1 or 4 or ok ok so maybe you can get better in terms of the number of games but you'll be hard pressed to find better quality and you can take that to the bank, where they'll probably try to charge you a banking fee and ask for your first born child because they are all about to crumble and die if they don't do something fast. Anyway focus focus.

Rome: Total War is a turn based real time strategy game (TBRTS...yea that's my acronymn....bitch) from the Creative Assembly set during the rise of the Roman Empire. You, the snappy new commander on the block that you are, chooses to take charge of one of three competing Roman factions the Scipii, Julii or Bruti. I personally enjoyed the little cutscene after choosing your faction where your faction disses the other two, its nice to know bitching was still an important part of life during the Roman Empire. Anyway after choosing your faction you....pretty much do what you want, as long as it is pillaging and plundering the poor countries who happen to border you, excellent. Occasionally you may dabble in some trade or undertake a Senate mission (the idea is you eventually control the Senate yadda yadda it involves a lot of killing basically) but ultimately the idea is to capture as much of the known world as possible and eventually control Rome. The planning of your conquests are done from a very cool looking Risk style world map which shows your armies, provinces and enemies. When you decide to attack an opponent the game switches to a fully rendered 3D battle where you control your army.

This part of the game is fantastic. I love watching my legions clash into hordes of inferior barbarians (hey it's not my fault they aren't as awesome as my legions are) and listen to my commander give words of inspiration before battle, sometimes even making me want to pick up a sword and shield and then probably run the hell away because then I catch sight of Egyptian chariots (chariot owns pretty much everything) or Carthaginian elephants (they're freaking elephants, nuff said) rampaging through my army. The battle engine runs on a rock paper scissors system so knowing what unit beats what is important especially when commanding armies numbering over a 1000 because things will get intense really fast and whilst losing most of your army doesn't necessarily mean you'll lose it generally helps if you can keep a few alive for future battles but sometimes I'm even impressed when I lose it just looks so good.

After a battle, or a siege, did I mention there are sieges (you can either attack the city with catapults or if you are patient but a decidedly sadistic commander starve them out) your turn usually ends and you are given a run down of how your settlements have done. You can choose to either manage each settlement you control setting taxes and choosing what to build or let the AI do it, which becomes a wise choice when you control three quarters of the map and just want to focus on that last pocket of resistance. This is one problem in Rome, there are so many factions and provinces that the aptly named Grand campaign can seem to go on forever and whilst you'll eventually become so engrossed in the game that this is a good thing (FAMILY AND PARTNER WARNING: You may not speak to them till you've conquered everything...and that could be a while) the micro-management involved with running each faction got a little dull and boring and I just wanted to fight the Scythians and Egypthians and Pontus and yea it is also very easy to want to fight the whole world if you don't strategize properly.

Also one tiny problem I had was with the goddamn rebels. I mean what just because I don't think my newly conquered Germanian settlement deserves an aquaduct or a barracks or a farm or a road or the essentials to live doesn't give them the right to revolt and smash up the place. I mean clearly it was just tough love and not a sign of my flaws as a leader that they didn't get these things and what happend to sending a nice letter or a box of chocolates with a picture of a farm underneath to let me know that they needed one. Haven't they heard flattery gets you everywhere? Really though this is not a huge flaw of the game but more my personal leadership style.

Outside of the campaign there are tutorials, advisable to first time players as there is a lot to take in, historical battles, a distinctly Frank Miller less Battle of Thermopylae anyone, and you can then also create your own custom slaughters... I mean battles between any of the factions. The array of content here is just jaw droppingly impressive , pat on the back for you Creative Assembly.

There is just so much that Rome: Total War offers that I haven't even mentioned here, like special unit abilities, battle formations, campaigns from different faction perspectives or the Barbarian Invasion expansion that came with this awesome $20 Gold pack so this is definitely a recommended buy for cash strapped anyone or cashed up anyone who is welcome to slip a $20 my way for recommending it .

Rome: Total War gets 9 much needed work hours out of 10

So there you have it, a brief review of a decidedly spectacular game which I hope you've enjoyed.