Regular Maintenance: Serious Business.

With it being unseasonably warm the last few days, I took the opportunity to get some bike based housekeeping (bike-keeping?) done. Namely replacing the air filter, which I checked about 5000 miles ago and decided that there was about 2000 miles worth of life left in it, and changing the oil. Not the most glamorous of jobs, but they needed doing, and given the weather I needed to do something other than jobseeking (boo), sitting on my arse writing, or sitting on said arse doing/watching/playing something to write about later. Oh irony!

I’m still trying to get into the habit of taking pictures of jobs as I go along, so even with this being an easy job, I got a bit snap-happy. Brandishing a digital camera was a bit at odds with the Fred Dibnah Business Suit™ (a must for any serious work), but I still got a little too into it, taking far too many pictures for such a simple task. Many of these pictures will be interspersed into this just so I wasn’t wasting my time.

While the bike was running to warm and thin the oil, I got busy with the first challenge to be overcome: constructing my oil tray. Some people will buy a purpose made drain tray for upwards of £20, these people are decadent bourgeois fools. Others will use some sort of scummy old bowl, paint tray, or the like. This is also a stupid idea, but for practical reasons: you want a clean drip tray so you can see if there’s anything floating in the oil you’re draining. Things like bits of metal can tell you a lot about the health of the inside of your bike’s engine. Protip: bits of metal in your oil aren’t a good thing.  

Anyway, crafting the tray was a doddle with my amazing craftsman skills. Yeah... yeah. It is a just 6 pint milk carton with a hole in it. Still, even if I can’t claim that it was my idea, it is ingenious. Empty cartons always available and the screw cap lets you drain it out into a suitable container for storage with ease (more on that later).

Oil tray reporting for duty!

One more step it’s a good idea to take before removing the drain plug is to remove the oil filler. So I did (it lets atmospheric pressure act to help drain the oil quicker). This done, I finally got down to business and removed the sump plug. Remembering to put the drain pan in place under the engine first, I didn’t want the garage floor looking like the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez.

Here we go.

As I left the oil to drain, I cleaned up the sump plug and replaced the crush washer ready for reinstallation. As the name hints, the washer crushes down as the plug is tightened up, providing a good oil seal. For this reason, you’re meant to change the crush washer each time you change the oil. Few people do though.

After this, since the oil was still going to be draining for a while, I got on with replacing the air filter: efficiency and all that. Changing the air filter was a simple enough job. Just three bolts retaining bolts and the cover was off. The old filter itself was even easier: it just pulled straight out. The aperture was clean so it was just case of pushing the new filter in and replacing the cover. All too easy for someone of my mechanical skill :P . 

As a side point, since the threads for the cover were metal set into plastic, I decided to apply copper grease to the retaining bolts before replacing them. Copper grease in general is used to help prevent corrosion from fusing the bolt into the nut or thread around it. This helps to stop bolts seizing and then shearing when you attempt to remove them. In this case, I envisioned the bolts fusing into the embedded threads of the air box and these metal threads then ripping free of the plastic next time I had to remove the bolts.

The old air filter, check out the dirt.

Additionally, a little copper grease on bolts was apparently a sign of a well looked after bike in the old days and old bikers now get annoyed by people like me who use it where it may not be strictly necessary. Honestly this just amuses me. So long as it isn’t going to cause contamination, like using it on any bolt that goes into the innards of the engine itself, I don’t see the problem. Even if a bolt was never going to seize anyway, putting a little copper grease on it isn’t going to hurt.

The new, much better.

With that over with, the oil had about fully drained. I waited until the final drops finished and replaced the sump plug. Doing this involved breaking out the 'mighty' torque wrench. Some see the torque wrench as the physical manifestation of OCD. This has a little truth to it, some things can be safely tightened by feel and using the torque wrench just slows things down. However, I personally find the torque wrench to be invaluable for giving peace of mind by ensuring that vital bolts, such as the yoke clamps for the fork legs, are as tight as they were when they left the factory. In the case of the sump plug, using a torque wrench is important as aluminium sumps are vulnerable to cracking if the plug is overtightened. Overtightening is a real possibility too, as the sump plug is often very tight before removal. This is because the endless heating and cooling cycles of the engine make for constant expansion and contraction of the metal threads, which over time leads to them becoming more tightly interlocked than they started out. The torque setting for my plug is 35nm which equates to about 25 ftlb (my torque wrench doesn’t do metric) which barely feels like anything at all; hence the danger of overtightening from the more nervous home mechanic.

Behold, the magnificence that is the torque wrench.

This done, it was finally time to refill my bike with beautiful golden nectar. Just take a look at the colour difference between the new oil and the old (see the bottom). It’s a misconception that engine oil is/should be black. As per the figure listed in Haynes, I measured out, using a measuring jug and filling one litre at a time, 2.9L of (only the best) Halfords motorcycle oil. This hurdle overcome, I replaced the filler cap and ran the engine back to temperature. A quick check of the dipstick told me that the oil level was... just over the minimum mark. This isn’t totally uncommon. Even if you measure out the correct amount, engine oil has a reasonably high viscosity; you never get it all into the engine. Some always remains in the measuring jug or inside the funnel, and that’s not taking into account spillage. Four more cycles of topping up by 100ml, running the engine, then checking the level were needed before the oil level was right.  

With all the fun over, all that remained was getting the oil from the master-crafted drip tray into an appropriate receptacle ready for transport to an approved disposal site. As I stated before, this was a simple job thanks to the screw cap. All I had to do was place the tray on the workbench, put the masterwork funnel into an empty oil container then remove the screw top. This let the oil flow out into the appropriate receptacle. The appropriate receptacle will now be responsibly dealt with by leaving it in the garage for a few months until nobody can remember where said appropriate receptacle full of used oil has gone. The tray just went in the bin. 

Feeling satisfied of a job well done. I indulged in a dinner (lunch for devious foreigns) of champions. There is no better way to finish a job. 

So there it is. A small job written long. As always, it felt good to finish something and be able to  see the fruits of my labours. Someday I hope to get paid to have that feeling. Until then I’ll just keep writing to get it, and pursuing projects... which I can then write about.

Addendum: Since I couldn't get it to read well with all the pictures interspersed with the text. Here are further reference pics:

A used crush washer. Notice the deformation.

 

The new air filter.

The air filter housing. Notice the embedded metal threaded holes.

Copper grease applied to a bolt. Purdy.

Old black oil vs new golden nectar.

Mount and Blade. The Ultimate RPG.

Mount and Blade is, in essence, Oblivion meets Total War. Anybody who finds that sentence in anyway interesting should buy it (Warband is the best version to start with)! Still, this isn't the inevitable review. Rather, as there is barely any set storyline  in the game beyond what the player creates on their own, Mount and Blade has terrific narrative posiblities, in that you could write out a log of your adventure as if it was well, a real story, and it would be totally different from anyone elses. Sadly, at around 100 combined  hours in various iterations and mods I'm coming towards the nadir of my enthusiasm of the game, well at least his wave of it, and can't muster the desire to start again for the sake of doing such a log. Instead I've just written up this quick and dirty piece about a random battle I had whilst roaming enemy territory. It's a little embellished to get around having to write about game mechanics, "I pressed tab to end the battle then went into the spoils menu" could be a little bit much of a tonal shift! I'm not totally sure about it, but it is very much quick and dirty. With that out of the way, I present for your delectation: The Battle of the Field near Dvinsk Castle.

Old Game First Impressions: Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast)

This is in a review style rather than a first impressions because by the time I'd played enough of the game to feel comfortable writing, I'd played pretty much all of what the game has to offer.

Broad first impressions: Crazy Taxi is fun, infuriating, and addictive. So it’s exactly the kind if game deserving of discussion. This is especially true when most of the quirks are products of the design, not just age-related limitations. 

The game’s biggest strength from the outset is its sense of style. Visually, everything is bright and colourful, which is a nice change from the subdued colour palette typical of modern game design. This combines with the bouncing punk soundtrack to create a cohesive high-energy atmosphere within the game. This overall style really compliments the fast and frantic gameplay, showing a depth of design elegance belied by the simple, arcade-y game mechanics.

This simplistic gameplay really shows its arcade roots. You pick up passengers, follow the floating arrow and take them to their destination within a given time. The faster you do it the more money (points) you get. That’s it. You can earn extra money for stunts like jumps, near misses, drifts etc, but these are all things you’ll be doing anyway in covering ground as quickly as possible. This simplicity is to the game's credit though, you can jump straight in and start playing immediately. No annoying tutorial or 40 real-time hours of driving lessons followed by a test before you can start having fun.  It's a pick up and play game in the best possible sense.

The game takes place in an open city, but it’s definitely a time-attack racing game at its core, you’re always on the clock so there’s no time for exploration and, honestly, no real point. The fun of the game comes from hammering through traffic to get to a destination as quickly as possible. Any time that you’re not doing that, like when trying to roll up slowly to pick up a fare, the clunkiness of the driving mechanics is suddenly thrust to the fore. 

It doesn’t feel right talking about driving mechanics in a game like this; this isn’t Forza or Gran Turismo. Still, those games however at least have hyper-realistic driving physics to aim towards. Caricatured arcade-y racers almost have a more difficult job, conceptually if not mechanically, as they have to create their own driving model that may have little basis in reality. Arcade racers like this tend to go with a model that minimises inertia and maximises the feeling of grip: cars will turn on a penny at high speed, will accelerate smoothly off the line and pull up to a stop in 20ft from 100mph. Crazy Taxi doesn’t go with this. The cars manage to feel very light and very heavy at the same time. Light, in that your car has no feeling of impact, hitting traffic cars will see you bouncing around like a pinball, with very little movement out of the other vehicle. Heavy, in that the car bogs down when you accelerate from a standstill as if it was made of solid lead. Steering is also weirdly vague; it’s almost as if speed makes no difference to the ability to corner. You can turn more than you would expect once underway, but when trying to (again) slowly manoeuvre the car to pick up a fare the car feels like it has the turning circle of an ocean liner.  

The odd steering, especially at low speeds, is compounded by the braking, or lack thereof. In the usual high speed traffic splitting of the game, the brakes are barely used so their weakness doesn’t really make any difference. However, once again it’s the fare mechanic that highlights the problem. To deposit a passenger you must stop in a marked area. Given the time attack mechanic, you’re usually approaching the box at a fair old lick; this then often leads to trying to press the button down harder to stop quicker as you fail to slow down. Often you just have to resort to using a nearby wall as an emergency brake.

The thing is, despite these issues, you just keep coming back to it. You can play for a set time, or arcade, where you gain extra seconds for each successful fare. It's a great game to put on for a 10 minute blast. You just have to be careful not to get too into it. The compulsion to try to beat your last score can be hard to resist turning a 10 minute blast into an hour long marathon.

Having said that, the other side to this is that the game can get very frustrating when being punted around by traffic messes a good run. That anguished mix of a need to keep playing and desire just to rage quit for being 'cheated' out of a good score. Still, the frustration is never a product of a broken game, just one that is surprisingly unforgiving of a lack of forward planning. Once you adjust to the game's quirks, being aware that you need to factor in a long braking distance or that you need to watch the traffic more than the direction arrow, the problems become much more bearable.They're still there, but the game is great fun in spite of them.

A special mention has to be made for the soundtrack which seems to be quite divisive. There's no question that it fits the tone of the game, but it's going to grate on people who don't like nineties Californian Punk (Bad Religion and The Offspring provide all the songs). On a personal note, as a fan of the genre I have the opposite problem: the songs get cut off before they're done. Damnit I want to listen to Ten in 2010! Still, even though there's a very limited number of songs, which is fairly annoying, nothing compliments the look and the gameplay of Crazy Taxi better than high energy punk.

Additionally, another potential point of irritation is the in-game advertising. There's no getting away from it, especially when you're route goes from KFC to The Original Levi's Store. How much of an issue it is is completely personal preference. The game has no obnoxious ads, just brand named waypoints which, personally, started out as a little amusing and then were just started being ignored.

Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast is a really conflicting title, especially for one so simple. It can be controller snappingly irritating at times, yet overall it's fun, frantic and compelling. For all of these complications, it's a good game. Equally frustrating and addictive for the self-competing soul, everyone should play it at least once. That way, gaming would be truly universal: everyone would keep coming back. 

Gear Review: Draper Gas Soldering Iron.

The lid doubles as a stand. A nice touch but
fairly useless.

I bought the Draper Gas Soldering Iron because most of the electrical work I do is automotive, splicing into the vehicle's existing wiring loom, a task for which the usual mains powered soldering iron isn't really suited. The rationale behind getting the butane powered one wasn't just that it would free me from being tethered to the wall, by being smaller and lighter (around 14cm long), it would work better for fine detail work than the "standard" ones with the large heated length that mean that you can't really grip towards the tip for fine control.  

Now that I've had it for a few months and have done a variety of jobs with it,  I feel that there are some issues that need to be highlighted. Nothing that would stop me buying it had I known in advance but still quirks worthy of note.

The main issue with the iron is that it takes quite a long time to get up to temperature. In fact, all of its other annoying... quirks, are caused by this fact. The iron taking so long to heat up makes it very thirsty, as quite a lot of gas is used before it attains a temperature that allows it to be used for work. The knock on effect of this is that doing jobs involving many joints can be irritating as frequent stops are needed to refuel the iron: exactly the kind of concentration breaking distraction that isn't needed on precision work. By the same token though, even just using the iron for minor tasks means refilling it after each piece of work, as each job will involve the iron going through a wasteful extended heating cycle.

Another side effect of the temperature problems is that the iron has to be held on the work for a long time before it is hot enough for solder to flow into the joint, not the greatest of requirements when you're not working in situ, which is surely the whole point of a cordless soldering iron.

Still, these issues only really become more than just annoying if you run out of butane. As long as you have a can kicking around, the iron is no harder to refill than a lighter. On top of this, it is still useful as a light and compact soldering iron, especially when it can be found for around £12. 

For reference: what I mean by "standard"

If you do a lot of in-situ or otherwise difficult to access electronics work, and can accept the limitations  (you have a can of butane within reach whilst you work), the Draper Gas Soldering Iron can be an indispensable tool. It's small, light and simple to use: there is really nothing better at this price point. It's battery powered rivals being both more expensive and having the downside of batteries being much more expensive than butane. For bench work I can't really recommend it over a corded iron, but for anything else, the flexibility it affords is well worth the asking price.

MAME Cabinet

All this playing of older games has got me thinking about a dimension of gaming that I never experienced: arcades. This is partly because the arcade heyday was over when I was in nappies and partly because I don't think Arcades were ever big in rural Northern England. As such, beyond the odd lightgun or racing game in a service station, laser quest or anywhere else that was equally... seedy, arcade games pretty much passed me by. 

However,  this may be about to change. Having seen how easy it looks to build a MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) cabinet out of obsolete PC components (which since I throw nothing out, I'm swimming in). Hardware wise, the build is pretty much just modular PC stuff, with a little soldering being needed to rig up the interface buttons and sticks but little else. The only difficult part really looks to be the cabinet itself, the rest I could do in an afternoon. Even then, I have a jigsaw, hands, and rudimentary abilities with tape measure and marker! This will just be going on the heap of stuff to do, but hopefully posting it here will mean it gets done.

Flash Gordon is the Greatest Film Ever

Best

The golden rule of film-making is 'show, don't tell'. By this token, Flash Gordon has to be the best film ever made. The story: meh. The acting: meh. However, these are merely the things it tells you, and are as such null and void. The visual design is amazing though. Everything is fascinating to look at. It almost looks as though the entire film could've been filmed in various rooms of Freddy Mercury's house, and that the payment for the soundtrack was made in costumes. In fact, the production of costumes for the film caused a worldwide shortage in sequins, driving the price up until supply finally equalised with demand again in late 1983^{[citation needed]}. Still, such an impact can only be expected of the greatest expression of visual art created by man.

Film

It is by the virtue of rule that dictates the nature of quality film making that Flash Gordon is the best film ever made. Every costume is magnificent, from the proto-shyguys to the fabulous Cylons, never mind Ming himself, dressed in a garb that would make pharaohs jealous. The sets are opulent, not a sci-fi stereotype in sight. Even the lasers add colour and flair to an already gorgeous film. Flash Gordon shows perfection and as such is the perfect film. It also has Brian Blessed.

EVER!

Video Game Review: Fallout New Vegas DLC: Lonesome Road

Ulysses' mark, the trail continues.

Ulysses, the man that refused to carry the Platinum Chip, whose decision set in motion the events that saw the courier shot in the head. A man who has remained unseen, but whose actions shaped the fate of the courier and, by extension, the entire Mojave. Through each subsequent DLC pack, his presence has been slightly more pronounced: his logs, his marks and the consequences of his actions, all part of a trail that, each time, felt like it was getting slightly warmer. Now, finally, the time has come, for the Courier to travel the Lonesome Road, to cross the divide, and to find out the truth about Ulysses, and their pasts.

This is Lonesome Road’s baggage. These are the expectations that this DLC has to come to terms with in order to provide a fulfilling experience. It has the unenviable task of having to give the player closure to the story of the Ulysses and the Courier, a backstory that has been nothing if not built up by the hints and clues throughout all previous New Vegas content; as well as having to provide a good final send off for New Vegas as a game, and the Fallout universe as a whole for the foreseeable future. Still, in spite of its many flaws, New Vegas was a well crafted game set in an amazing world, being written by the very guys who created this world back in the late nineties, so if anyone could pull this off, they could. Unfortunately, they haven’t.

There is no way of getting around this; Lonesome Road is a big disappointment. Maybe expectations were a little high coming off of Old World Blues, but it’s hard to see LR as anything other than average. But for Fallout content, especially this as the final piece of announced content, average just isn’t good enough.

Easily the most interesting view of The Divide

The greatest strength of Fallout has always been in the universe, the gameplay having always been solid but never stellar. Even in 1997, the original Fallout’s gameplay was a little clunky, but the beautifully realised world more than made up for it and ensured that the game appeared on ‘Best Games Ever’ lists for years afterwards. Sadly, LR really does nothing with the setting, The Divide being more of a generic post-apocalyptic world than Fallout retro-futurist one. The area designs are appropriately bombed-out and destroyed but fail to invoke any real emotional response. The outdoor areas especially feel very phoned-in, never being more than a generic destroyed town. The problem is further compounded by the linearity of The Divide, there is very much a set path to be following with limited chances for exploring around the road you have to be taking. As such the bombed out buildings that would often be explorable in, say, the main game of New Vegas, are merely there to hem the player in to the path that they should be taking. The whole area design of the game feels more like a nineties FPS than a modern (or even retro) Fallout title. It’s too restrictive, and the way in which these restrictions are imposed clashes with the conventions of the rest of the game wherein buildings generally provide a door to, not a barrier against, further exploration.

In spite of the irritation of the linearity, it is only a real problem because of the aforementioned charmlessness of the design of The Divide. An apt comparison can be made between LR and Dead Money, which too was quite linear. The major difference is that Dead Money used the aforementioned Fallout trick of using its world to provide a compelling experience in spite of giving the player little free choice (in Fallout terms). The Sierra Madre was well designed, aesthetically interesting and enigmatic; The Divide is visually uninspiring, clichéd, and dull.

Still, credit where it’s due, The Divide may be lacking as a setting, but the designers did at least do a good job of ensuring that Lonesome Road lived up to its title. Without giving too much away, the only character you can really have any meaningful dialogue is Ulysses, and unsurprisingly you don’t meet him until the climax. Apart from that, there are no other people to talk to in the divide. Even the mysterious ‘Marked Men’ that roam the divide don’t have much to say, not even a battle cry as they shoot you. This does work to give the quest a degree of isolation, The Courier really has no one else to count on. Sadly even this is limited by the aforementioned design issues of LR that work to ensure that there’s never quite enough immersion for the game’s attempts at fostering isolation to really work.

Never meet your heroes... or villains

Moreover, when the isolation is finally broken there’s just more disappointment. Much like many other once enigmatic characters; The Emperor from Star Wars; Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII;... the shark from Jaws; once Ulysses is standing there before the Courier, the veil of mystery removed, exposition spewing from every orifice, he loses his magic. What you get is character with iffy voice acting (though the voice is really cool), spouting philoso-nonesense, that ends up coming across as just another wasteland madman. This in turn ensures that there is a really unsatisfying climax to it all; dealing with Ulysses loses some of its lustre when he himself is no longer what you expected.  The snippets of information given by audiologs, terminals and the comments of NPCs painted a picture that the character could never live up to. It’s interesting that Ulysses’ best performance is in an audiolog you receive at the end. Much like Lonesome Road as a whole, Ulysses as a character ultimately comes off worse for the expectations built up by the implicit promises scattered New Vegas and its DLC.

This seems completely safe...

As far as the actual mechanics of the gameplay go, LR is generally just more New Vegas. However, there are a couple of elements that do deserve a closer look in the context of LR. The most prominent is the introduction of warheads around the map that can, and in some cases must, be detonated by the player using a ‘laser detonator’. Some warheads unblock passages you need to take, others just open the way to items and some merely do damage to surrounding enemies. There is nothing really wrong with the idea; it just comes across as a bit half baked. It doesn’t add anything special to gameplay, beyond an achievement.  Also, in a world devastated by nuclear war, somehow the idea of blowing up a nuclear warhead from less than a hundred yards away with no consequences to you is a little immersion breaking, especially given the damage that they can inflict in scripted events.

Not pictured: 5 subsequent quick loads

The standard combat of the game is classic New Vegas, though it does come across as a little on the difficult side. A level 45 character (the maximum possible level to attain before LR came out) had better be packing a boatload of ammunition and stimpacks or else face frequent deaths, not so much at the hands of firearm wielding Marked Men, more usually at the hands of Deathclaws or a new enemy: Tunnelers; an enemy introduced in a sequence that sees a Deathclaw being torn apart. Hmmmm. The difficulty of the enemies may be a stylistic choice to reflect the harshness of The Divide, or to give previously level maxed characters something to provide a challenge (maybe both). The latter seems a little difficult to believe unless the whole thing scales very effectively by level as the only way to reach level 45 is to have all previous DLCs and it would seem odd for Obsidian to want to limit the potential audience of Lonesome Road to people that have all of the other DLC packs. Still, elements of difficulty such as unavoidable Deathclaws comes across as cheap in a series whose gameplay is generally centred around being able to approach a problem in multiple ways. There is the impression that some of the harder fights can be avoided by strategically detonating the warheads scattered around the map, but these tend to lack the punch (surprisingly) to take down tougher enemies. This is further compounded by the fact that enemies usually see you when you begin to try to detonate a warhead and will, rather rudely, move away from the warhead towards you.

Beyond of the meat of the new content: the storyline and map, Lonesome Road, also has the expected compliment of new weapons, armour and items. Again, these are nothing special. They aren’t atrocious, just not really all that inspiring. The new Shoulder Mounted Machine Gun and Red Glare Rocket Launcher, both look cool but they lack any real feeling of punch when you use them. There’s nothing quite like pumping thirteen bright red rapid fire rockets into an unsuspecting group of enemies only to be gunned down within ten seconds because none of them have gone down, and they now know exactly where you are. Other items of note include lesser quality versions of Legate Lanius’ gear. The inclusion of this makes storyline sense, but it seems a little lazy: just old items with tweaked stats. On the bright side, it does mean that the Courier can finally run around in that cool mask for longer than the time taken between killing Lanius and initiating the ending sequence. There are other new items, but none really worthy of note, which, if anything, only highlights the problem.

To reiterate, at its core, Lonesome Road is very much an average piece of content. It’s by no means atrocious, but when it’s being added to what is a very well designed game, it does come off looking and feeling worse than it would in isolation. It provides a less than satisfying ending what seemed to be a parallel saga of the DLC, a story of Ulysses and the unfinished business of the Courier’s old life to compliment the story of the Mojave and the Courier’s new. At £7.49 for around 5 hours of content, it’s cheaper than a film but it really can’t be recommended over any of the other DLC for New Vegas. For those that want completion, get it, you were going to anyway. Anyone who isn’t all that interested in the whole Ulysses storyline however, had best leave it alone as there is little else to recommend it and it falls below the standard of the main game or the other DLC.

Switchgear Success.

As much as all this writing is fun it does leave a little to be desired in terms of physical results. Thankfully, my trip last week not only gave me something to write about, it also gave me something that needed fixing, namely my bike's r/h switchgear pod which started spinning on the bar everytime I used the throttle. The only reason that the throttle worked at all was because the metal throttle cable sheath elbows coming out of the bottom of the switch housing could be wedged against the bottom of the brake lever clamp.

This setup was safe enough for coming home from Leicester (I had no choice) but not really for anything else. Luckily since the housing had never been totally right, I had bought a CBR600 unit to replace it. Unluckily, the CBR wiring used a totally different harness and different coloured cables to my CB500. So began the process of checking, double checking and logging which coloured wire went to each individual switch contact.

The pre-graft. I also hate phone cameras

With the wire colours safely noted, I took the plunge and cut the harnesses off of the ends of each switchgear's wire bundle and began the tedious process of soldering the appropriate wires together. I may maintain that bike wiring as a whole is a piece of cake, but I still hate soldering, the stupid stuff never flows into the joints like it should for me. Still, it didn't take too long, about 40 minutes including the time needed to refill my portable soldering torch a couple of times. I made sure the joints were all pretty by covering them in heatshrink before taping the lot up. Many people look down on using insulting tape, but I have no problem in using it to make an outer sheath for a bundle of wires that would otherwise be hanging loose. I wouldn't use it to cover the join on every individual wire though, that would just be sloppy! It all turned out fine and works perfectly (of course) but it always amazes me that no matter how confident I am of a repair, I'm always nervous when I try out some repaired or modified electrics for the first time. 

Seeing as I was doing work that took the bike out of action anyway, I also used this opportunity to take the bars off and drill a new locating hole for the pin on the CBR switchgear. My bike has Renthal aftermarket bars as the originals were too low. Honda switchgear uses a locating pin to stop it from spinning on the bar. This is especially important for the right side when the throttle is applied (it was this pin that escaped from my switchgear on the trip). However, when I got the new bars they didn't have the hole drilled for the switchgear. Long story short, I was in a hurry to get the job done and drilled the hole in the wrong place, putting the switchgear at a weird angle. This time around I trial fitted, measured and marked like a proper human being and surprise, surprise, the switchgear now sits how it should have when I first fitted the bars over 14 months ago!

It feels good to do something practical and productive, even if they were very minor jobs.

Animated Film Review: Superman/Batman: Apocalypse

Despite my criticisms of Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, I still enjoyed it and maintain that it is worth watching. So when I saw Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, I picked it up without hesitation, further ensuring that Blade Runner and Akira will remain forever on my ‘to watch’ list.

As it’s a sequel to Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, there are going to be a lot of comparisons made between the two. Not least because Apocalypse manages to better its predecessor in key areas, but then, just as you want to clap it on the back and say “well done”, it manages repeat some mistakes of the first film and even make some new ones of its own. These are never totally deal-breaking, but they are enough to stop if from really breaking out of the rut of “worth watching” that these animated superhero films so often fall into (for an exception, see Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker).

Whatever else can be said about the film, it definitely opens strong. An atmospheric flyover of Gotham (at night, obviously), a newscast voiceover setting the scene, and surveillance blimps surveying the streets below; the latter a definite nod to the opening of On Leather Wings, the Batman Animated Series’ pilot. Then bam! You’ve got a meteor, underwater Bat-investigation, a runaway rocket boat, explosions, and a mysterious woman, all before the opening titles have rolled.

Within seconds, the first thing you notice is that the design cohesion of the film is much improved over Public Enemies, the colours are a little more muted, the shading a little less stark, and overall the characters look to fit with the backgrounds a lot better, looking to be in the scene rather than superimposed over it. It almost seems as if the first film was in a style reflective of Superman, and this one in a more gritty Batman style. Whilst grim and subdued colours may be a little overplayed, at least in this case they provide a cohesive design aesthetic. It’s also important to bear in mind that all of this is in comparison with the style of the first film, which had a very bright colour palette on its characters. It’s not like Superman has swapped his red ‘n’ blue for beige and olive, just that the stark contrast has been ironed out with more gradual, even shading and fewer thick, black, character outlines.

Whatever the improvements in visual design, the film is inescapably brought down by its plot. Again, the film does a lot in its runtime (78 mins), but I just couldn’t connect with the story in spite of some good characterisation. Superman, in particular has a little more of his “big blue boyscout” naiveté, the impetuousness of the previous film still being there, but in a way that has him coming across as much less aggressive and more just an uncomplicated kind of guy. Batman remains as good as before, though in this iteration he is much more controlled whilst under the cowl, coming off even as cold. This may just be a heavy handed way of contrasting him with Superman’s earnestness though.

Dude, Sephiroth wants his schtick back.

However, the meat of the first act, the coming of age; finding one’s way; dealing with one’s ability to level a city without a thought plotline just didn’t speak to me and seemed to get an odd amount of exposure in a such a short film’s story. Yes this is an adaption the second story arc from the comics, with Public Enemies, being the first, but this isn’t the comic. It’s a film that even fans will probably pick up as a standalone or as a sequel to the first, not as a companion to the source material. So in this instance, it just drags on too long for a film of this length, the whole fish out of water thing is cute for a while, but not for as long as the writers thought it was.

The film does pick up after this, but the damage is done, once again the problem of unexplained characters rears its head. Not quite as bad as in the first film, but almost more annoying. There may be fewer characters to keep track of, but now we’re expected to have a connection to them. In all honesty, this film is really for pre-existing fans, but it would be nice to have some more internal context for the characters, especially since the continuity variances between different DC properties means that you may recognise a character but not this particular version of them. Still, you wish that less time had been spent shopping (oh yes) and more used to explain who the hell everyone is. Hell, even a little bit of insight into Darkseid (not a spoiler, he’s on the box) would have been nice.

By the end of this, you'll know all about his Omega Beams.

The lack of context for Darkseid means he just comes across as the dullest, laziest, kind of villain: evil for its own sake. We are shown nothing of his overall aims or motivations, just the specific thing that brings him into conflict with the protagonists. This is especially disappointing because Andre Braugher’s voice acting gives him real presence. He sounds powerful, a creature who really has no reason to fear anything. In spite of this, the use of Darkseid sadly comes across as unimaginative and arbitrary. It’s as if the writers chose him because they’d used Kryptonite last time and needed one of the few other credible threats to Superman (yes, yes, I know, I know: they did it because the comics did it) to give the story tension.

On the plus side, the action scenes in the film have real impact; the fluid animation quality and use of sound effects really give it a visceral rawness. Whilst the ‘camera work’ is fast and frantic, imparting real tension to the action. It is here that the film really shines, and what makes it fun in spite of the plot issues. It would be fair even to go as far to say that if as much care had been taken with the story as had been with the action, this would have been a great genre film. Even as it is, action is the one key area where film has the edge over comic books. So by getting that right, the film at least makes good where it really counts for this type of production.

Just as before, a Superman/Batman film comes off as a mixed bag. The nuts and bolts of the film are spot on, the animation, visual aesthetic, and action set pieces are above reproach. However, the story suffers for reasons that can be broadly summed up as dodgy pacing, and characters which are internally underdeveloped. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you’re a fan who can fill in the backstory gaps, or just want to watch superheroes fighting, go for it. It’s fun. However, if you want a good solid story, set in the universe, to engage with, or are looking to dip your toe into the vast waters of the DC ocean, move on, you’re just going to be disappointed.

Animated Film Review: Superman/Batman: Public Enemies

Cover Image Courtesy of covershut.com

Batman and Superman, the twin pillars from which all things that comprise DC seem to be suspended. Through the decades, despite changing trends; reboots; and death itself; these two have remained at the core of all that is DC. In short, it would be difficult to find a pair of comic-book characters with more combined importance, more gravitas, to throw together in a story, especially in a one shot animated film. So, the question remaining to be asked is: Just how good is Superman/Batman: Public Enemies? Well, it’s alright I suppose.

From the outset, I would point out that all of these straight to DVD DC movies that I’ve seen so far are aimed at existing fans. Unlike Hollywood comic films, they are assuming a level of background knowledge. As such I would not see them as being a good way into the mythos. At least, not on their own. 

Personally, I’m coming from a position of having watched pretty much the entire DC Animated Universe. Added to this, I’ve read a fair amount of DC graphic novels and have spent far, far, too long reading around the fiction online. This at least meant that I recognised most of the characters, even the minor ones just making cameos, and that I was equipped to keep track of a plot which seems to be struggling a bit to stay within its runtime. Both things I’ll get onto in more detail before the end.

Seeing as it’s so important, and I’ve just alluded to it, it makes sense to take a look at the plot of the film first. Straight out of the gate, in the opening sequence, we are treated to a nice concise dose of back-story showing how Lex Luthor gained the presidency of the United States. Before the opening credits have even run, Luthor has declared that “no one is above the law.” In addition to this, he has a group of Superheroes that have joined up in service of the government. It’s not quite the Keene Act or the Superhero Registration Act, but the astute will have already seen where the ‘Public Enemies’ part of the title is going to come from.

This is not to say that the film simply retreads the, by now, old ground of the idea of superhero civil war or public hatred of the power of costumed heroes. In fact, due to the run time, and the other major plot point: the gigantic kryptonite meteor heading towards earth, the ‘public enemies’ idea doesn’t really get as much mileage as one would expect from the title. Yeah, there are some exciting fight scenes, but that’s about it. Superman and Batman beating up villains and a few lower-tier heroes, but that is about the extent to which they are ‘public enemies’. I’m not sure what else could have been done, but a little more public revulsion to them would be nice. Instead, by being nominally outside the law, all that happens is that Supes and Bats fight heroes that are barely characterised within the bounds of the film.  As such the enemies they face may as well be B-list villains or juiced up flunkies made for the film.

It’s in these areas that the film really starts to come apart for the non-DC fan. I get a kick out of seeing Hawkman and Captain Marvel fight the titular heroes, but for somebody that maybe doesn’t know much about the DC universe even beyond feature films, it would be perfectly fair for them to wonder why a dude with wings and a guy in a bad superman costume have turned up out of nowhere to pummel the protagonists. It’s moments like these that make it clear that this is aimed squarely at the pre-existing fan base. On the other side of the coin however, you don’t need to be an uberfan to understand and enjoy what is going on. I’m certainly not, and I had fun with the film.

In the end, as has been hinted to, the real problem with the plot is the time constraint. The film really packs a lot into just over an hour, and does an admirable job of it, but it’s impossible not to notice that there is a definite strain to get everything in. When characters are appearing out of nowhere with little explanation, and major elements of the final act are only just being introduced at the same time that they become vitally important, it reeks of the writers having to cut things down to get the essentials in. In fact, if anything, the film has the feel of a good multipart episode from the Superman or Justice League DCAU series, only without the built in back-story coming from being part of an ongoing saga to lean on.

Speaking of the DC Animated Universe, the returning voice actors, especially in the case of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Clancy Brown as Luthor are real treat. For me, those two are the definitive non-comic incarnations of the characters. Luthor’s voice in particular really carries the arrogant superiority of the character; you can hear the smirk on his face. Even without seeing him, the voice tells you that the man is totally certain of himself, to the point where the mere suggestion that he hasn’t accounted for everything is laughable. The rest of the voice work is variable. Even then, it never drops to a level that jars you out of immersion.

Trust me, the stills don't look like it does in motion.

Other comparisons with the DCAU are unavoidable, and sadly less flattering. I found the character designs to seem a little off. Yes, the Superman/Batman comic line provided an aesthetic basis for the film, but still, the heavy detail; bright colours; and the minimal, but high contrast, shading really don’t fit in with the art direction of other elements of the film. Sometimes there is a real disconnect between the heroes and the backgrounds they’re on, and once you see it, it’s difficult to ignore. Moreover, this may be a minor gripe, but Superman’s design seems a little young. Whilst this fits some of the impetuousness he shows in the story, Superman and Batman are generally shown as looking roughly the same age, this is not the case here.

I would also like to add that these problems are not a product of this film choosing a different style to other DC animation, I loved The Batman’s style and that was a radical departure from both the DCAU and the ‘traditional’ Batman look. It’s the inconsistent aesthetic style and lack of cohesion that that brings that I find fault with.  A case in point is Power Girl; her look is different to anyone else’s with eyes and a facial shape that are much more heavily stylised. In all honesty, she immediately made me think of that freaky photoshopped girl from the Playstation adverts.

Pictured: Power Girl undermining my point by looking normal.

In spite of all this, the film doesn’t look bad overall, it’s just inconsistent. The animation has a few hiccups (watch any scenes of people walking down a hall toward the ‘camera’ then search ‘Weebl’s Stuff Scampi’) but beyond that it’s nothing worth losing sleep over. Moreover, despite my own issues with the design choices, the bright colours and minimal yet heavy stylised shading do make a change from the general grim n’ gritty colour palette that seemed to infiltrate design culture in the mid to late nineties and still has yet to be totally ousted. 

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is a solid animated DC adventure. It is far from being great, but it doesn’t need to be. When it all boils down, it provides an hour-ish of superhero entertainment and that’s clearly what the aim was. It may feel rushed in places and the art direction may be a little wayward, but overall it never becomes a bad film. If you’re looking for something to spice up a boring Sunday afternoon, it’s definitely worth picking up.