Films

Hedda (2025)
[#88 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]

Comics

2000 AD
Prog 2429
Prog 2430

My "an issue a day" goal may be proving troublesome, but I'm still hoping to get caught up by the end of the year. I'm currently 26 issues behind, so even an average of one every other day should just about do it. We'll see if I can maintain that...

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

The quietness of last month continues to be an anomaly as new acquisitions flooded in this week — nearly all of them ordered this week, in fact. Turns out I hadn't been keeping on top of new big-studio release dates, because I almost missed Superman and Jurassic World Rebirth hitting disc.

Then Indicator launched their 10th anniversary sale. Despite warnings about dispatch times being slower during the event, the two orders I placed were both sent out quickly... though not quickly enough to both arrive in time for this week's update. Four are included below, with four more due on Monday.

Number of titles in collection: 3,624 [up 7]
Of which DVDs: 981 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,643 [up 7]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 474 [up 5]

Number of discs in collection: 8,710 [up 8]
Number of films: 4,629 [up 7]
Number of additional cuts: 473 [up 2]
Number of TV episodes: 10,175 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,271 [no change]

With more preorders expected throughout November, I doubt the next couple of running time updates will be as tiddly as the last one's 18 hours. See you next week for the first of those, faithful reader.

Films

Häxan (1922)
[#87 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]
Blindspot 2025 #10

Tenebrae (1982)
[#86 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]
"What Do You Mean You Haven't Seen...?" 2025 #10

Happy Halloween!

Fiction

By the River, Fontainebleau by Stephen Gallagher

Another Stephen Gallgher chapbook roped in on the last day of the month to tick a box on GoodReads, a la The Governess back in August (only two months ago, and yet it feels like an age).

This one seemed appropriate Halloween reading: its original magazine publication provoked a reader to complain about its "gut-wrenching horror" that left them "physically sick... for three days", while a radio adaptation provoked chastisement from Mary Whitehouse's lot (always a good sign). That said, I'm not sure what the fuss is about — the 'twist' seemed kind of obvious, but also not fully explained. I thought maybe I missed something, but re-reading the ending didn't enlighten me. As an exercise in tone, it's mostly effective, but that brief and unclear ending doesn't pay it off. Oh well.

Films

Slap the Monster on Page One (1972)
[#85 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]

TV

Friends
10x09 The One with the Birth Mother [6th or so watch]

TV

Friends
10x07 The One with the Home Study [6th or so watch]
10x08 The One with the Late Thanksgiving [6th or so watch]

Richard Osman's House of Games
8x54 Week 11: Thursday
8x55 Week 11: Friday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Watson
1x08 A Variant of Unknown Significance

TV

Richard Osman's House of Games
8x51 Week 11: Monday
8x52 Week 11: Tuesday
8x53 Week 11: Wednesday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Watson
1x07 Teeth Marks

Tabletop Games

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Game 7 (of 7)

This doesn't have a New Game+ type mode like the LotR trick-taking game does, so we just replayed the final stage. It wasn't as successful as yesterday, which just goes to show how much the luck of the draw affects how it goes. Well, that's games for you!

TV

Friends
10x05 The One Where Rachel's Sister Babysits [6th or so watch]
10x06 The One with Ross's Grant [6th or so watch]

Richard Osman's House of Games
8x49 Week 10: Thursday
8x50 Week 10: Friday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Watson
1x06 The Camgirl Inquiry

Video Games

Cluedo
I haven't played Cluedo since I was a kid, but I always remember enjoying it, so now that there's a version included with the relaunched Amazon Luna (albeit prominently given its US title, Clue, even on Luna UK, and even though the official website manages to call it Cluedo... but anyway), we decided to give it a go. It was... awkward.

The game doesn't do enough to tell you how to play — fortunately I could remember the basics from when I was a kid, but I had to talk my partner (who'd never played) through it as I remembered, rather than the gaming doing it for us (apparently there is an option to display the rules, but it's hidden rather than being offered freely). Controlling it on a little phone screen was kinda tricky — it makes sense for the idea of a party game, where everyone can just whip out their phone and join in, but the interface is a little fiddly at that size. It also didn't scratch the proper board game itch — you're still sat in front of the TV, not getting away from it to play a game. I can see it would work for some people, but it didn't for us.

Oh well, worth a go.

Tabletop Games

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Game 7 (of 7)
It took a good few hours to get there, just because of how long it takes (or takes us, anyway) to work through the mechanics and processes of this game, but we beat this on the first attempt without really struggling. Which is kinda fine by me.

TV

Watson
1x05 The Man with the Glowing Chest

Films

Juror #2 (2024)

Comics

2000 AD
Prog 2428

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

This week's new additions include The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 4K, which doesn't replace any of my previous editions due to not wanting to part with extras for various reasons — so four of the titles in the count below include the RHPS 25th anniversary edition DVD, 30th anniversary edition collector's edition DVD (that came in a lip-shaped box), 35th anniversary edition Blu-ray, and now the 50th anniversary edition 4K UHD Blu-ray. (There was a 40th anniversary Blu-ray, but it's just a re-release of the previous one.) It's sort of silly, I guess, although every edition has slightly different extras — it would be nice if the new release could've been an across-the-board upgrade. Oh well, it's not like most discs net anything when you sell them nowadays.

Number of titles in collection: 3,617 [up 3]
Of which DVDs: 981 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,636 [up 3]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 469 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 8,702 [up 4]
Number of films: 4,622 [up 3]
Number of additional cuts: 471 [up 3]
Number of TV episodes: 10,175 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,271 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

Critical Role
4x04 Stone-Faced
The final part of the opening overture — it's weird to think that, 18½ hours in, we're only now moving into the 'proper' campaign. I stayed up to watch it 'live', as a kind of bookend to doing that for episode one. It shouldn't make a difference, what with it being prerecorded, but it does somehow make it more exciting. Or maybe that's just because I only do it for special occasions. Or maybe it's just because this was a helluvan episode!
[Watch it (again) now on Beacon, Twitch, or YouTube if you're a member, or free on YouTube from Monday.]

Critical Role Cooldown
Campaign 4, Episode 4
[Watch it (again) on Beacon.]

Richard Osman's House of Games
8x47 Week 10: Tuesday
8x48 Week 10: Wednesday
[Watch various episodes (again) on iPlayer.]

Video Games

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Amazon recently announced some changes to their Prime Gaming and Luna offerings (essentially, combining them under the latter brand, plus a refresh of the Prime-tier of Luna to include more recent, big-name games), and it went live this week. There are a few titles on there that I wanted to play, but this jumped straight to the front of the queue. I've been an Indy fan as long as I can remember, and this game seemed to receive nothing but praise when it came out. I nearly subscribed to Xbox Game Pass just to play this — indeed, I was still planning to at some point, but I've bought so much else for my Steam Deck and 3DS recently, I thought I should focus on them for a bit first. But, heck, if this didn't cost £60+ and reviews had said it ran well on the Deck (apparently it doesn't), I probably would've bought it and dived in. So I was ecstatic when I saw it was coming to Luna Standard (as it's now called), I've quickly dived in now it's available, and...

Well, thank goodness I didn't pay £60 for it. Or whatever the cost of Game Pass was, even. I'm about two hours in and I'm... bored, really.

So, it looks pretty great, overall — there are some issues, but that might be with how Luna runs it and/or streaming in general (if I loved it, I'd be tempted to buy it and play it through GeForce Now, which I'm considering for some other graphics-heavy titles that my Deck won't run well). In the cutscenes and so forth it does a good job of recreating the feel of an Indy movie. But the gameplay...

I suppose dying multiple times during the opening tutorial-ish section was a bad omen. I'm sure that's partly a skill issue on my part, but not entirely ("oh, I need to run now? Okay, so I press... Oh, I'm dead", repeated a couple of times until I did it right). Part of the slow pace is my desire to explore and see and find everything, but I guess there's not really enough to see to justify that. It's funny, because some people say it's really an exploration/puzzle game, but as someone who likes that kind of game, nah, it doesn't scratch that itch right.

Instead, there's a lot of stealth. I find stealth boring in concept, and turns out I do in play, too. I can see the inspiration — Indy isn't a run-and-gun killing machine, so they don't want it to be a shooter — but the Indy films are action adventures, and stealth simply doesn't feel adventurous and it's certainly not action-packed. I turned the action difficulty down to low, so the enemies and stuff weren't too difficult when they did spot me, but I wasted so much time not trying to be spotted. The level design felt like a maze, too — it didn't feel like I was exploring, it felt like I was lost.

I have so many other complaints and niggles, too. One I feel I see all too often in recently-made games I try is that it won't let you save wherever you want; it only saves when it decides to. At least that's not only at the end of a lengthy level, or only at majorly significant checkpoints — sometimes the little save icon will flash up when you enter an inauspicious room (and it's not a portent of "this seemingly unimportant room is about to be a big fight", which is how some games do it). And it does try to help you on the pause menu by stating how long it's been since the last autosave — I've not seen that before, and it's a useful feature... if only for the fact that, when I wanted to quit, it told me it had been quarter-of-an-hour since the last save. The immediately-obvious downside was that, to not lose that quarter-hour of progress, I had to keep going when I didn't really want to, at least until I trigged a new save, which took a fair while. Making you play when you don't actually want to anymore is the kind of thign that turns you off a game!

The first person view does not suit it. That feels like a funny thing for me to say, because back when I was into gaming the first time round, FPS was the genre and third-person games were often looked down upon. I feel opinion has swung in the other direction, and playing this in first person feels wrong. It's a bad fit for the property (I don't want to be Indy, I want to watch him have adventures) and for the style of gameplay (both stealth and melee combat feel so much harder in this than in third-person games I've played that use similar mechanics).

Then there's the point early on where it suggests you read the in-game manual to learn how to do stuff, and it turns out that's a mass of different screens explaining dozens of different gameplay mechanics. Why is it so complicated?! How often am I going to need to do all these different things? Should I be trying to memorise them because the game is truly flexible and I could use any at any time? Or, actually, are some only used in very specific circumstances? In which case, can't you just explain them when I get there? Or maybe you could've just made the game less unnecessarily complicated, I dunno.

I feel like I should go back to this, because I'm a huge Indy fan and this is such a praised Indy experience. Also, I've only given it one go, and I'm still quite early into it — it kinda feels like I've only done some training mission-type opening stuff; and, indeed, the level I'm on is still hand-holding a little... even as it could handhold more (that damn maze-like layout). Perhaps if I can get past these early teething troubles...

But the first barrier is the fact I don't really want to go back to it now — the complete opposite to how desperate I was to play it before. That's some cruel irony. I'm going to have to force myself, and I can't decide if it's worth that effort.

On the bright side, in this new Lina world it doesn't seem to have a time limit on the Standard tier (other games do, so it's not that they're not listing them anymore), so I guess I've got some time still to force myself back into it. That might help. Or maybe I'll lean on that possibility and just never try again. We'll see.

Comics

2000 AD
Prog 2427