Anyone who happens to read Mr. Kieron Gillen’s blog will no doubt have come across the page by page release of Busted Wonder. Apparently it was written four years ago and since then has been slowly but surely arted-up by the clearly incredibly talented Charity Larrison. Well, finally, finally it is finished. And you can go here to read it:

Complete Busted Wonder

The reason I’ve described it (twice) as “finally” finished is because I’ve been ignoring it for a good couple of years now despite wanting to read it. At some point in the past I read about the first 15-20 pages and enjoyed it enough to know that I’d greatly prefer to read it from start to finish. It just didn’t suit a page by page release. Since it was put online a couple of days ago I’ve had the chance to read it all the way through. Twice.

And it is lovely.

Despite the fact it is 80 pages long, a significant read, it feels brief and wispish. Reading it is just effortless, each page bringing on a fountain of pinks and blues and purples that make it almost tempting to ignore the words and flick through looking at the pictures. Every now and again a page will just make you smile. But if I was going to pick out one thing it wouldn’t be the gloriously colourful pages as a whole, it’d be the eyes. There are some very, very nice eyes which just suits every aspect of the story and giving the star of the show a real brightness to her personality. It’s a gorgeous comic.

The story, as pointless as it is summarising when you really should be reading it instead of this, is somewhere along the lines of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but with a circus coming to town instead of a rabbit hole to go down. It’s makes no apologies for being aimed at little girls, but that should put no-one off. It avoids sickly sweetness but it never has desperate attempts to be clever to please any grown-ups that happen to be reading it. If there was one little thing I’d complain about Phonogram (Kieron’s genuinely excellent series for Image, available here) is that it very occasionally got itself all a-fluster from being a bit clever. Busted Wonder doesn’t suffer that at all, it just moves smoothly from start to finish with a bounce and a confidence in its step, as if it always knew it was going to work well. Which, of course, it does.

Even though this has all been glowingly positive, it somehow feels a bit wrong giving it a score out of five. It just doesn’t suit it, it isn’t that sort of project. Instead I’ll end with a quote from Kieron’s blog:

Charity and I talk about our dream future for Busted Wonder would it be collected in a small hardback book with a red ribbon. It’s be sold solely to libraries - you couldn’t buy it in a shop - where generations of Kelly’s will find it and hopefully find something inspiring in it.

It deserves it. Go and read it, you’ll probably still enjoy it when you have read it FIVE times or more.

After giving them DM’s album of the year award last year, it’s safe to say that this isn’t going to be a negative review…although it certainly isn’t quite perfect with the night splitting itself into three distinct parts. The night began with a solitary support act, Bats for Lashes. Musically she was fine, fans of her excellent album last year all enjoyed it. But that was it, little more could be said. She was a tiny speck on a distant stage to most and doing little for the crowd herself. And presumably as part of Radiohead’s push to cutback carbon emissions there wasn’t even a screen to show what was going on. It was good to listen to, but far from awe-inspiring.

Things continued in a similar vein as Radiohead came on, opening with Reckoner. It was fine, but it didn’t have a great impact. The lights were allowed on, but the bright clear skies took away most of the impact and the already small screens being divided four ways most of the time didn’t do much either. Planes filled the clear sky, gently mocking the choice of more energy efficient lights and the decision to turn the screens off between songs. End of Part 1.

It’s hard to quite workout where Part 2 began. 15 Step made a better start to the night than Reckoner did, but didn’t wipe away the slight doubts about the gig that were forming. Even an excellent version of There There didn’t stop people taking their eyes off the stage when two planes passed relatively close-by each other. But somewhere, certainly before a marvellous pairing of Myxamatosis and National Anthem, doubts were put to rest. It took longer than it should, but Radiohead had managed to capture the vast majority of their audience.

By the time the first encore came around, things were flowing nicely. The band might not love playing The Bends, but their fans like to hear it. Bangers and Mash might not be as well-known but it still seemed to go down well. And the second best pairing of the night, My Iron Lung and Karma Police were both great, with the former played with much more passion than you might expect after a slightly disinterested version of The Bends.

The band file off the stage again having given Part 2 a lovely send-off. When they come back on for the second encore, they start the final part of the night.

Go Slowly isn’t their best known song and it certainly isn’t their biggest, loudest one either. But despite the wait between the songs felt like it followed Karma Police extremely well and sounded great. But compared to the final two it might as well not have existed. 2+2=5 is a great track at the best of times and played in front of a crowd eager to clap and stamp along with the build-up made it even better with Radiohead responding by thrashing through it. But compared to the final track it might as well not have existed and that is really, really saying something.

In my opinion, Paranoid Android is not only one of the best Radiohead songs it is one of the best songs ever. And it was better than even I expected. Even the crowd managed to excel itself each seeming to choose a different vocal track highlight and sing along with, making it seem a million miles from hearing it before even though Radiohead themselves didn’t dodge too far from the script. And the lights…the lights! They’d been looking good since the sun started to dip, but in front of the dark night sky and allowed to use bright greens, pinks and their full power it looked amazing. And did I mention it sounded great?

I genuinely don’t think I am ever going to enjoy a single song at a gig as much as that ever again.

Fantastic.

5/5

Illustration by MAp

There’s a pretty interesting list of the Worst Videogames Ever list on Ditto.net. I can understand ET, Driv3r or Streetfighter: The Movie (Although I’d defend the ability to control Kylie Minogue).

But at the moment it’s got Perfect Dark Zero at #7! OK, so it wasn’t Goldeneye, but there are a darn sight worse games out there. And what on earth is Call of Duty 4 doing at #13? That’s just silly.

So I think we owe it to the world at large, and those less educated about videogames to get some really, really bad games out there!

And on the brightside, there’s a decent list of the Best Videogame Weapons Ever, which is shaping up nicely. Finally proof of the power of the BFG 9000, although it’s sad to see Lightsabers automatically topping the list.  There’s got to be something less stereotypical!

OK, OK it makes us look a bit bad doing two Rock Band posts in a row. But then it does make up the vast majority of my life so it was always going to happen. Anyway, coming hot on the heels of the news that The Pixies “Doolittle” is going to be the third full album to be released and the release of “Hammerhead” this week, we get another hint of what is to come. Thanks to the official website of The Offspring this list appeared:

“Come Out And Play [Keep 'Em Separated]”
“Self Esteem”
“Gone Away”
“All I Want”
“Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”
“The Kids Aren’t Alright”

Colour us excited. It is probably the best DLC news for Rock Band so far. The Kids Aren’t Alright will be fantastic to play (Woah-Oh) and I suspect it’ll be one of few that makes the people playing look quite cool. And for anyone not familiar with most of the songs in Rock Band then Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) will be great as everyone knows that.

And by virtue of being in Crazy Taxi, All I Want is probably one of the songs I’ve heard most in my life I should think…

Awesome.

No-one knows when they’ll be coming out, but it looks a reasonable guess to say that they’ll be appearing as a pack together. Great stuff.

As you can see, we’ve got a new website. Keen Disposable Media fans will know that we always ran a blog elsewhere, but now the main site and the blog have come together. We’ve even imported all the old content, making the other completely defunct. The whole thing might have appeared sooner if it wasn’t for the fact most of its development has coincided with Rock Band coming out in the UK and the developer (ie. me) spending much too much time on the game rather than the site. But it is up now, so it can’t all have been bad.

Whilst it was probably a bit harder to put a whole website together, it’s more interesting seeing my reasons for failure in drumming on Rock Band:

The sympathy kick pedal press:

Make no mistake, the kick pedal is the source of every single problem with progressing through the drums. I think I could say with relative confidence that without the kick pedal I’d be ploughing through Expert drums right now. I’m actually edging my way into hard.

The sympathy kick pedal is a peculiar problem though - it involves missing a kick and then pressing one on the next note, whether it has a kick or not. As if my brain felt sorry for making me miss the first one, so gave me an extra to make up for it. Make this happen a few times across a song and the chances of getting a decent streak going are slim to none…

The rhythm does in fact get me:

Once I’ve got a nice regular drum beat going, maybe a Green, Green, Red repeated a few times that when I see Green, Red, Red approaching it just isn’t going to happen. My mind and flailing arms are quite content hitting Green, Green, Red and they ain’t gonna change for no-one. Even me. Add in a few kick-pedals into the pattern and I can manage to get myself almost permanently stuck in a rut.

My armchair:

Until my purchase of Rock Band I was constantly delighted with my armchair. Comfortable, attractive - it did everything that an armchair is required to do. I’d even go as far as saying it excelled at it. But now I’ve got Rock Band? It’s a bit rubbish. It is clearly too low leaving my calves and shins aching ridiculously after a not even particularly long session. Add in that the arms of the chair sometimes block my elbows when moving from one end of the drums to the other. The solution?

Whinge about it on the internet. I’m not changing my chair for anyone.

Green Grass and High Tides:

By far the biggest problem in Rock Band, in fact in my life for quite a spell, was Green Grass and High Tides. It’s an alright song, nothing amazing but certainly unoffensive, but since starting the drumming solo career it has become my mortal enemy. It was the first song that almost failed me on Easy, but I scraped through.

The same can’t be said for Medium.

Still without failing a track, I hit Green Grass and High Tides again. And for a few days made no progress at all, always failing at the fast part, around 65%. With a bit of maths, that means that I’ve spent 2 hours and 23 minutes of my life doing nothing but failing GG&HT on Medium. Bearing in mind my armchair problems above, this was a genuinely painful experience…

I hate that song.

In Summary:

Best game ever.

And we haven’t even mentioned all the other cool stuff about it apart from drumming yet…