Rob’s Terrible Tomb Of Tat

…and you will know me by the typing of the dead.

  • The Only Cybermat I Do Like

    Cybermats! Tiny little chums of the Cybermen! And, frankly, mainly a bit rubbish after their first two appearances. And and and, with the second appearance being a step down from the first anyway.

    The metal eel of Revenge Of The Cybermen held the title for worst Cybermats ever for a fairly long time! I’m sorry, as much as I do enjoy the whole Nerva Beacon sequence, the sight of actors holding a tin eel to their necks, pretending to be bitten, has always thrown me right off. Which probably says more about me than it does the model, right? Me? I am absolutely fine with a Taran Woodbeast. Tin eels? Not so much.

    (Yeah, that is definitely a me problem. Do they have therapy for this sort of thing? I’ll ask.)

    So in the absence of the actually quite funky ones that were to be in Silver Nemesis not making it to broadcast (which I do actually like — unlike Silver Nemesis itself), that leaves the Tomb Of The Cybermen incarnation as officially, the only Cybermat design I really like.

    Now, you might be thinking “Rob! Rob. But what about the ones from the newer stories?” and I’m sorry but no. Cybermen (and Cybermats) have seen the worst redesigns of Who monsters outside of the Silurians pretty much until the Chibnall reworks and we especially do not speak of the toothy Cybermats because oh for Molyneux’s sake. Just no.

    Whoever takes over the show next has a pretty easy win on their hands for me then. If we’re gonna do Cybermen, Chibnall finally got the designs on track and the Cybermasters are fully comic book funny too so, erm, yeah, just try and work from there and I won’t have to hate everything that shows up on the screen as being of Cyberman origin.

    Because obviously, catering to my super weird taste is going to be top of anyone’s and everyone’s list. There would be no higher priority in television. Trufax.

  • Death Ray Manta and … OST?

    Death Ray Manta: A Fish Like No Other

    Perhaps surprisingly, I have few regrets from my time in videogames over the years. Sure there’s the odd bit of me behaving like a nob here and there that were I to do over, I would try not to be such a nob and there’s a few choices every now and then but nothing spectacular or noteworthy.

    With the exception of precisely one thing! The soundtrack to DRM 2 having to lie abandoned for the most part.

    It’s a long story of how and why but in a nutshell, it’s “this was the part my life started going into free fall” and so Death Ray Manta 2 has never happened. I’m not so sad about not getting the game done and out there, I think after a while in games you kind of get used to not being able to finish some things. No, instead, it’s that had I managed to get the game out, even if the game turned out tremendously awful, it would have had one of the best soundtracks in videogames by a long chalk.

    It really is an absolutely tremendous piece of work! There’s a small sample on the trailer for the Switch release of DRM:SE.

    Now, maybe one day my life will be comfortable enough again to consider revisiting the game (that time seems a fair way off at the moment, admittedly) or maybe one day Andy at Thalamus can convince someone who isn’t me to make their own DRM2 (I would love to see what someone else could come up with!) but in the meantime I’m so glad that Thalamus Digital have rescued the OST from the darkest depths of internet obscurity and rereleased it on Itch.

    I may have failed to write the arena shooter you can sing along to in the end, but you can still play any arena shooter you fancy and sing along to Oh Stevie’s incredible tunes and give Mike and Jenny some money for their songs.

    Death Ray Manta: The Original Version

    With huge thanks to Thalamus Digital, the original – not SE – version of Death Ray Manta is available again on Itch.

    It’s kind of a halfway point between SYNSO 2 and DRM:SE, it’s a little bit different looking and plays a little differently to the SE version also. To be honest, it’s been so long now I couldn’t possibly give you an authoritative list of differences (I’ve slept since then), I’m just glad to see it’s back out there somehow.

    With the caveat that it is a game from 2013 so you may run into compatibility problems. It definitely works on Window 10 tho. I think most of the real trouble would come from trying to get anything pre-Windows 8 of mine running these days.

    This was also the version that my good chum Jeff used to make an iPod (kids, ask your grandad) version from! You know, back when you could sell videogames without people showing you graphs every ten minutes on social media. And it were all fields too.

  • Flippy The Laserdisc Turtle

    …or when I take passing toots far too seriously.

    I am not really a LaserDisc person! Largely the extent of my LaserDisc experience was during the mid to late nineties when a then *ahem* close friend *ahem* had a relatively small collection of films stashed away on the things. Well. One of their family did anyway. Mainly, we watched cartoons like the grown ups we were but I still remember them showing me both Broken Arrow and Desperado across a couple of afternoons and well, that’s about as far as my LaserDisc experience really went — yet they were very much the right films at the right time and so, I still remember watching them with a fondness (and a genuine surprise at the size of the discs). And y’know, I still fucking love them.

    However, I am also incredibly easily led and love cute mascots! And with apologies because I forgot to keep the specific toot archived anywhere so I forget who was directly responsible here, when someone mentioned people should draw more art of Flippy The Laserdisc Turtle, I couldn’t help but agree. Plus, I was incredibly bored that afternoon.

    Aaaaand that’s how we end up here with two drawings of Flippy. The second one for the age old Rob reason that it made me laugh thinking about it and after that, there was no going back really.