Tuesday 30 January 2018

Film Review #103

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)
Director: Edward Zwick Starring: Tom Cruise, Coby Smulders, Danika Yarosh, Aldis Hodge, Patrick Heusinger, Holt McCallany, Robert Knepper, Jessica Stroup

Certificate: 12A Running Time: 118 Minutes

Tagline: "Never give in. Never give up. Never Go Back."


Despite being based on the first of a whole series of books, the first Jack Reacher film wasn't exactly a roaring success, even with the charismatic Tom Cruise in the lead role, so I wasn't really expecting to see a sequel, even if there is plenty of source material. But lo, arriving four years later to little fanfare, that was exactly what we got. It's set an unspecified period of time after the first and sees Mr. Reacher continuing his drifting and occasional vigilante tomfoolery. After establishing that with an opening bust taking down a human trafficking ring, we get down to the business at hand which will feel immediately familiar to fans of the first film. Reacher, you see, has struck up a friendship with Major Susan Turner (Smulders) who is based at his old military HQ but when he goes to meet her face-to-face for the first time he finds she has been arrested and detained as she awaits trial on charges of espionage.

Wednesday 24 January 2018

Top Five Bob Wakelin Arts

If you grew up in the 80's here in the UK and were the proud owner of an 8 or 16-bit home computer, there's an excellent chance your eyes regularly glanced upon the splendid artwork of Bob Wakelin, even if you didn't know it at the time. His work was most often found in the form of adverts and cover-art for many of Ocean Software's releases and was among the most iconic and recognisable around.

As many of you may well have heard by now, Bob sadly passed away recently after a long illness. I didn't know him personally but many did as he was active in and very popular with the retro gaming community, and was regularly seen at various retro events. He leaves behind many happy memories for some of us but even those who didn't know him can still appreciate his wonderful artwork which must've surely helped shift a fair few copies of the games it adorned all by itself.

His style was varied and could be found in most games magazines from the mid-to-late 80's as well as on store shelves all over the country and beyond. I love most of his work but, while everyone will have their own favorites, these are in my view his finest efforts which lit up my early gaming years. Rest in peace, Bob...

5. Where Time Stood Still (1988)

This game was notable for being one of the very few 128K-only games for the Speccy which was, to my great pleasure at the time, deemed to be the only 8-bit system that could even manage a version of the game at all. Something else the game was famous for, though, and not just the Speccy version this time, was the splendid artwork that adorned its various covers and magazine adverts. The cynical among you might highlight the flimsily-clothed hottie who stands (almost) centre stage as being the reason for that but the rest of it was fantastic too - the heroic pilot stood next to the blonde stunner, his crashed plane, the scary dinosaurs and angry natives, and that large bold title seemingly carved from ancient rock collectively did an amazing job setting the stage for this epic and memorable adventure.

Friday 19 January 2018

Space Stuff - Messier Objects Part 2

Charles Messier (1730 - 1817) was a French astronomer who spent much of his life identifying various star clusters, galaxies, nebulae, and other notable occupants of our glorious heavens. Ironically, it wasn't even his aim to create a comprehensive list or catalogue of interesting sights - he actually did it purely as part of his efforts to hunt down comets which was his primary goal - but make a list he did, and such was the importance of it and the many discoveries on it, the list of 'Messier Objects' has remained in regular use to this day by amateurs and professionals alike.

This could be down to the fact that the list contains many of the biggest, brightest, and best-known (and therefore most popular) objects to be found. Indeed, many of us will have grown up seeing or hearing about a lot of them, myself included, without ever knowing what they are or even what they're called. There are 110 objects in Messier's catalogue too, which means simpletons like me often forget about some or get others mixed up, so I figured it might be worth listing them here. The second such post is therefore thus. The pics should all be 1200x900, hope you like them :)

Part One can be found here

M41 / Open Cluster
M42 / Nebula
"Orion Nebula"

Wednesday 17 January 2018

Steam / GOG Downloads #4

Brilliant Bob (2015)
By: Zonitron Productions Genre: Platform Players: 1 Difficulty: Hard
Featured Version: PC


A great thing about Steam is that it's so easy to discover obscure indie games that you might never otherwise encounter while looking through its many pages, and that's exactly what happened here. Brilliant Bob caught my eye, most likely due to its lush green locales, and it was cheap too, so I thought I'd give it a go! The greenery I had spotted is actually the happy land of Sekotwana where Bob and his kin live. Life there is apparently great, but only until the evil, or perhaps more accurately, the unhappy Dr Magazi drops by to steal all of Sekotwana's happiness. Bob and his family were resilient and refused to give up their happiness but his parents got themselves kidnapped leaving Bob to save them, and indeed the save the day all around from the ghastly Dr Magazi.

Wednesday 10 January 2018

Film Review #102

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Director: Gareth Edwards Starring: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen, Forest Whitaker, Genevieve O'Reilly

Certificate: 12 Running Time: 133 Minutes

Tagline: "Save the Rebellion. Save the dream."


I think I speak for a good few film fans when I say that news of Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm a few years back was something I was cautiously hopeful about rather than immediately excited. The announcement of three sequels to the much-loved original trilogy was welcome. What caused more trepidation amongst fans was the additional news that a series of spin-off films was also on the cards. For some, the more Star Wars we can get the better, but some were worried that Disney might just be trying to immediately cash in on their new baby and that so many new films might end up saturating demand. The other possibility of course, is that the films could just suck donkey balls. Simply putting the Star Wars name on a film is guaranteed to earn you lots of dough, to start with at least, but it isn't an instant seal of quality, as we discovered to our horror with those pesky prequels.

Wednesday 3 January 2018

Merry New Year!

Oh hey, what's going down y'all? Just a quick message to wish everyone a Happy New Year! :) The past year has again been a challenging one in RKS Land and as a result there has been an all-time low in the number of new posts here. This is mainly due to my job - I've been with my current employer for just over a year now, and I'm very grateful to have the job, but it does take up a sizeable percentage of my non-sleeping time, and that's before you consider all the overtime I've been doing - time that may well have otherwise been spent on Red Parsley-related tomfoolery.