Michael*

Without wishing to rub it in, it really was some finish. Breathtaking the way Bernal just sailed past the breakaway pair on the gravel, I've not seen that kind of explosiveness from him before. Things should settle down a bit tomorrow and then a well-earned rest day before the fun continues.

What a moment, what a header, what a guy for it to happen to. Simply incredible.

Lovely attack out of the break from Lafay today, he looked as fresh as a daisy. Overall, it seems to be teetering on the edge of becoming a fascinating race. I'm expecting an explosion tomorrow and looking forward to Stage 14 and the Zoncolan.

It was supposed to go down to the wire of course with a Fulham-Newcastle shootout on the last day, instead Fulham let Leeds cruise to a win at Craven Cottage, contrived to turn a seemingly competitive game at Villa Park into a crushingly daft defeat, and then were awful against a really-not-very-good Wolves side. Cue much relief from Ashley and Bruce, who can now concentrate on securing 17th place in May 2022. Parker is like the Wile E. Coyote of the Premier League, the necessary qualities for a successful jump often look to be there but every time he's up in the air, gravity kicks in and he tumbles into an abyss.

Fair play to Steve Bruce for winning April's Manager of the Month after taking Newcastle all the way from 17th place in the Premier League to 17th place in the Premier League.

How do you think it'll go with Terzic now, Fred? Despite the initial expectation that he would continue to work under Rose next season, one wonders if he'd be fine with going back to his old role, having led Dortmund back into Champions League contention. Or would a full-time gig elsewhere be too much too soon?

Yeah, as much as one doesn't tend to associate a 60-year-old dude with the character, I think I'd have been okay with the conflict between Scorpion and Sub Zero as the central theme. As it stands, I don't expect it to get that much treatment, but the clip was handled with a nice dash of emotion and I hope it's a sign of how the rest of the film plays out too.

Go on then.

I think really, it's just the latest in what now looks to be a long line of heavily marketed hype trains that turned out to be colossal disappointments, but at the end of the day seemed to barely impact the developer's bottom line. Every year there's a new Aliens: Colonial Marines, Assassin's Creed: Unity, No Man's Sky, Civilization 6. Sometimes these things get patched given time, sometimes they don't. Cyberpunk almost certainly won't be the last of its kind, but hopefully it'll be the last of its kind produced by CDPR. EA, Activision and the like are probably big enough not to care.

That does seem like a common problem, particularly with the survival horror genre, where in order for the game to feel scary they make the central character relatively weak, give them low health, low ammunition, limited supplies and suchlike. I don't mind that in theory, but it is still a video game that needs to feel playable and somewhat balanced, and I myself usually find a lack of ammo more frustrating than scary. Like you say though, I think RE is a series that will always look to strike a balance between horror elements and action. Silent Hill (obviously depending on whether or not Konami ever lets it see the light of day again) would perhaps be the more viable option for fans of out-and-out horror.

Resident Evil is for me, one of those series that's always entertaining, even when the material isn't the greatest. Admittedly, the combat focus isn't really my preference (I'm in the camp that prefers RE 1-3 to 4-6), but I plan on giving it a try.

I think I'm right in thinking that he was without a contract just five months ago, absolutely insane what Van Der Hoorn has done to reach this point. Attention will turn now to tomorrow, where we can reasonably expect to see major changes in the overall standings for the first time since the opening stage.

I have to say, I do like when they kick things off with a time trial. Gaps from the start and sometimes support riders end up as team leaders. Ganna is just absolutely beastly though, the power and precision of his performance made the opening stage.

The teaser for Spectre was another good one, but the movie turned out to be decidedly average. The plot device of the bad guy who, while still achieving something close to world domination, really just lives to torture the good guy, and the awkward attempts at knitting seemingly unconnected strands together, was mostly what tanked it.

New teaser for S4 just appeared.

At the very least I think we'll get a serviceable action game, albeit my hope would be that it captures at least some of Kojima's innovation and crazed melodrama. MGS1 was probably the most restrained entry into the series, but it'll have to be handled with care all the same. Overall though, it sounds like this could be a pretty massive project. Presumably any potential remake would demand a full, Resident Evil-style rebuild with a third person camera instead of a top-down one, which would require an overhaul of the levels, the boss fights and the enemy AI to match modern standards. On the plus side, they do have a fantastic platform to build on with the Fox Engine, it's crazy to think such a technical marvel has basically just been left gathering dust for five years by Konami.

Thanks everyone.

Here comes the sun Glass Onion or Glass Spider?

It was pretty astounding to read that he worked his way up from junior tester to game director. That being said, it seems to be a fairly common problem with companies, where they promote people from junior positions to managerial roles but don't give them any training in how to properly manage people.

No can do, sorry. As much as we hate having to lose good content, our hands are pretty much tied when we receive delete requests from models.

Yeah, I think as much as there'll always be a market for pure entertainment and spectacle, even things like Batman and Spider-Man have at times shown themselves to be fallible in terms of box office performance, and the other properties could suffer just as much if audiences are made to sit through multiple lesser adaptations. At that point, I would fully expect mainstream studios to start looking down the road towards the next big thing, whether it be video game movies or something else.

Yeah. I must confess that not much of Covenant worked for me while it was rolling, although certain things grew on me the more I thought about them afterwards. Overall though, what struck me most about it was how much Scott has seemingly lost interest in the xenomorphs and the horror they bring, in favour of artificial intelligence and the impact it has on humans. So much so that he seems to have started trying to weave the synthetic android themes of Blade Runner into the Alien mythology.

I never thought Prometheus was entirely deserving of the flack it got, however like a lot of prequels it probably tried too hard to answer questions that nobody asked and to establish a "mythology" by mashing together bits of Alien and Aliens, with a touch of Frankenstein mixed in. Taken out of the Alien universe, it could have quite easily stood on its own as a perfectly decent piece of sci-fi.