Doctor Who - the 13th Doctor announced

Today geeks up and down the UK, and around the world, sat watching the male tennis final at Wimbledon, waiting eagerly to discover who the next Doctor Who would be.  Personally It's the first time I've willingly watched tennis for some time.

And it's going to be the first time the Doctor has been played by an actress, Jodie Whittaker.

By Photoblogger79 (Own work)
[CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I can't say that I know a great deal about Jodie, although I understand that she's been in some fairly high profile stuff such as Broadchurch and a few films - I'm pretty limited in what TV and films I watch! But I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes.  I'm going to say something which will bring me a great deal of hate.

I'm not a huge Peter Capaldi fan.

I don't dislike him, I hasten to add.  There's some bits of him being the Doctor that I really like. However, I've not been hooked to his shows the same way I was with David Tennant and Matt Smith. Maybe I haven't given him enough of a chance - the only reason I got into Dr Who at all was one Christmas when I didn't have anything else to do so I watched a day of Dr Who shows and became addicted, so maybe I need to give him a proper go.

How about you?  Let me know in the comments if you're looking forward to the new Doctor, or if you're disappointed it wasn't somebody else (Kris Marshall was hotly tipped, and I think he would have been ace, a bit like Matt Smith maybe).  And if you've watched Peter Capaldi, should I devote some hours to him?

What does Doctor Who and the Milky Bar Kid have in common

There are two heros from my childhood that stand out in my memory.  A sparse two that, through string theory and dimension travelling, have not one, or two, but three things in common.

I am of course referring to Doctor Who... and the Milky Bar Kid.

If you are not familiar with the Milky Bar Kid, basically he's a young kid who goes into some kind of ruckus in the wild west, and handles the situation thanks to a few bars of milk chocolate.

If you're not familiar with Doctor Who, well there's just no hope I'm afraid.

Here we go!

3 - They save people

The save people, of course.  Doctor Who has saved the planet more times than can be remembered, generally on Christmas Eve, and particularly focusing on London.  He is suspiciously inactive in other parts of the world.  I'm not sure if he's ever been to Swaziland.

But he doesn't just save people, oh no - he saves them through bizarre and fantastical actions.

And sometimes he has to headbutt his deepest secrets into James Corden.

And the Milky Bar Kid equally saves people, and again in odd ways.  Here he stops an evil sheriff in his tracks with a lasso, some treacle, and the assistance of a few chickens.

2 - They both regenerate

This one is pretty obvious.  There has been eleven twelve a lot of doctors in the fifty years that Doctor Who has been on the television, which is a good job really because otherwise the doctor would really be getting on by now, and the same for the Milky Bar Kid - an aged man in a white suit offering children chocolate bar gives the wrong impression I would feel.

And this comes to...

1 - They've both been around for ages

Both Doctor Who and the Milky Bar Kid first appeared in the early 1960s, and have shown up in various forms ever since, taking the odd break now and again.  The Doctor has been away from our screens for thirteen months, and we haven't seen the Milky Bar Kid for a few years... but he'll be back.


In other news, I've got my latest YouTube video up for my series of trying to get fit.  It's a late night update where I managed to fight off the temptation to eat junk food, and I yawn quite a bit.

How did you change over Christmas?

Myself - I became a fan of Doctor Who.

For someone who considers himself a geek, one thing I've never really been into was Doctor Who.  I've watched the odd episode, certainly, but it's never been a show that I would plan to sit down and watch, just something that, if there was nothing else on, could kill an hour for me.

And over Christmas, when I had some spare time to kill, there was a full afternoon of Doctor Who episodes on.

I have come to the conclusion that Matt Smith is awesome.

Apart from Doctor Who, I've been playing two games on my phone a lot - Clash of Clans from Supercell, and Hill Climb Racing from Fingersoft.

Clash of Clans is a strategy game where you build a town up, building gold mines, walls, resource stores, cannons and the like to defend yourself, whilst also recruiting fighters to go and loot other towns.  As you get better at looting towns, and at defending your own town, you gain trophies, which make it more likely that you'll be attacked by better players - and that you'll get the chance to fight them back!  It's a very engaging free to play game and well worth a try.

One of the nice features of Clash of Clans is the "Revenge" button - after someone attacks your town, you can hit this button, and rather than the game automatically matching you with a town to attack, it gives you the chance to get your revenge upon them.

I was attracted to Clash of Clans firstly by the advert which is very funny - watch it below!

Hill Climb Racing, meanwhile, is a game where you drive a variety of vehicles over a number of landscapes, trying to cover as much distance as possible, whilst picking up coins on the way that you can use to upgrade your vehicles, as well as unlocking new landscapes and new vehicles.  Vehicles go from the mundane (jeep) to the cool (monster truck / racing car) to the bizarre (tank / tourist bus), as do the landscapes (fancy driving on the Moon?)

For a very simplistic game - you have two controls, an accelerator and a brake - it is very engaging and challenging.  The landscapes are quite tough and you'll soon realise that putting your foot down is an unwise approach if you don't want to attempt balancing a car on your head (not recommended if you want to keep your neck in one piece).  However, the temptation of additional coins by carrying out tricks, like jumping into the air and flipping your car over is often too enticing to resist.  Again, I'd strongly recommend giving this one a try.  Be warned though - you never get used to the noise of your neck breaking as a car crushes it - and this happens a lot!

Simon is a coward

I've been playing a open source version of an somewhat ancient game, XCOM: UFO Defense.  For those that haven't played it, the original XCOM is a classic PC game.  You are given command of an elite force with the mission to protect the earth from aliens.  You set up a base of operations, and shoot down UFOs as you spot them, sending in a crack force to finish off any of those grey-skinned freaks that survived the crash.  All too soon though you discover that the aliens are tougher than you think, and it's a race against time to stop them before they put an end to you.

My base.  Don't mess with me.

The problem is, a game of this age doesn't run very well on today's PCs, so I'm playing OpenXcom, an open-source clone of the original (and you have to have bought a copy of the original for it to work).

Now, the thing you have to understand about XCOM is that it's hard.  You don't have much money, so you're often scraping around to try to keep your fighters armed and your troops equipped.  The aliens can see further than you, and in the dark.  They shrug off your bullets with ease, whilst loading plasma death onto your folks.

So I've always cheated on it.

The thing is, to me the important thing is the story.  There's a lot of really good fan fiction based on XCOM, I particularly liked the story written by Russ Brown back in 1994.  I don't want to go into too much detail in case I spoil the game for you - oh sod it I'm going to.

Basically, we're outmatched.  In the long run, humanity doesn't have a chance.  So we research by dissecting aliens, and studying their equipment, what their reasons are for attacking Earth, how to use their weapons and technology, and eventually finding a solution to stop them once and for all (which isn't once and for all because there are many sequels in the XCOM series!)

So playing fair isn't important to me - I like following the story.  So to cheat in the original, you'd use a hex editor on a saved game to give yourself more money and make your troops tougher.  In the open source version, you can use Notepad.

The only problem is, when you're editing your troops, it takes a while, and I'm really lazy, so I only hacked maybe ten of them, and left all of the rest of them as normal troopers.

So, because my hacked guys are faster than the rest, even though they are tougher, they tend to run further, leaving the rest behind, come up against the aliens first, and get shot.

They started dying, one by one.

There's two main troopers I'll mention.  The first is the overall commander of XCOM, and he's called Dustyweaver after my mates gaming handle.  There were also other troopers called Thog and Denkai (mine and my other half's gaming names) but they took too many plasma bolts to the face and died.

I play Dustyweaver the way my friend would play him - that is to say, he leads from the front.  As a result, he spends most of his time wounded and laid up in hospital while the rest of XCOM fight on without him. To be honest, I'm amazed he isn't dead yet.

As you can see from this screenshot, Dustyweaver is wounded.  Again.

One particular mission springs to mind.  We were investigating a crashed flying saucer, and Dusty, along with a few other troopers, were equipped with stun spikes (or whatever the hell they're called) - basically a sort of taser.  The problem with shooting aliens is, although its quite effective at stopping them from shooting back, you don't generally get to interrogate them afterwards.  So, if possible, you sneak up behind one of them, zap it in the back, and get to take it home for tea and biscuits.

Anyhow, Dusty spots this alien toting a plasma rifle. I'm having him, Dusty thinks,and charges the alien.

Face on.

The alien is blasting away at this sprinting blue beast of a man, hitting Dusty in the chest, in the face, and the shots are getting easier and easier as Dusty gets closer.  It's amazing that Dusty doesn't die, but he actually gets right up to the alien, the alien is frantically reloading his gun, and...

After all that running and being shot, Dusty is too tired to stun the alien.

So we have this grassy field, one side filled with XCOM troopers, the other side with a variety of aliens lurking, and right in the middle Dusty and this Sectoid Soldier are stood looking at each other, in my mind saying "Well I can't do anything. And neither can you.  Bugger!"

After all that, Dusty staggered away and his teammates shot the alien.

The second trooper I have to mention is Simon (his first name is Mathis but I call him by his surname, Simon. When I'm feeling kind.).  Simon is another one of my hacked troopers.

As the battles went on, and one by one the hacked troopers started dying, I became aware of something odd with Simon.

Despite the fact that he was faster than the others, he never seemed to be in front.  And he spent a lot of time in cover, behind walls, fences, in tall grass, basically anywhere that reduced the chance of him getting shot.

Now this isn't a bad thing, but Simon took it to the extreme.

I've had to come to the opinion that Simon is a coward.

Note that Simon's lowest statistic is Bravery.  Unsurprising.

Quite often he advances with a trooper on either side, and a medic behind him, just in case.  It's a bit of a joke now when I play that Simon never ventures by himself.

The guy in the powered suit of armour, crouching inside a ring of cannon fodder?  Yes, that would be Simon.

The great thing about XCOM though is the stories it conjures up.  One time I was playing, I was attacking a mini-flying saucer thing, basically it's a white disc that hovers in the air and spits plasma at you (these aliens like plasma).  My squad were running around, trying to get a shot.

Finally one guy dropped to one knee, and opened up with his laser rifle, set to automatic fire.  The great thing about auto fire is that you get to fire off three shots instead of the normal one.  True, your accuracy might be a bit lower, but the odds are that one of the shots at least will be on target.

The first shot flew off into the sky, to panic a bird somewhere.

The second shot hit the disc dead on, and blew it up.  Result!

But the gun was on automatic.

And fired a third shot.

The third shot took one of the troopers colleagues in the head, and promptly killed them.

I bet that was an uncomfortable ride home for him, packed into the back of a transport with twelve other troopers, and a fresh corpse of his own making.

Another in-game joke is the armour.  The first level of armour you research is "Personal Armour".  This is a blue work suit that is pretty useless - it is better than not having any armour, but it isn't that great.  I suspect that the Research department, under pressure to provide something useful to use against the alien threat, went out and bought a load of boilersuits.

You can put as many plastic abdominal muscles on the front of your boilersuit as you like, it doesn't mean that it'll deflect a plasma bolt.

Except for the time when the aliens used their psychic powers to mind control one of my guys, and then I couldn't kill them.  All of my shots bounced off that damn armour.  In the end it took about four of my best troopers blasting away at point blank range to punch through that suit.

In other news, I now have a Google+ page with my own customised web link, https://plus.google.com/+MikeRaven - feel free to check it out.  Also, have you tried the puzzle game on Google currently up, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who?  Hit the second "O" (the one that looks like an arrow) to give it a go.