David Bradley is the new DOCTOR WHO (sort of)

David Bradley - most recently seen as the worst wedding host ever in Game of Thrones - is playing William Hartnell, the actor who played the very first Doctor Who, in a new docu-drama chronicling the show's creation. The first images of him in the role have been released and are spookily similar to William Hartnell's appearance in the first episode of the series, An Unearthly Child. This is all the more remarkable as Bradley is sixteen years older than Hartnell was when he filmed the episode.

David Bradley as William Hartnell (above) in An Adventure in Space and Time (2013). William Hartnell as the First Doctor (below) in An Unearthly Child (1963).

An Adventure in Space and Time will air in November as part of Doctor Who's 50th anniversary celebrations. It will chronicle how the show was created and got on-air. In addition to Bradley as Hartnell, Reece Shearsmith will play Patrick Troughton, the actor who played the Second Doctor. The two surviving castmembers from the first episode of the series cameo in the new drama in small roles: Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor's first companion and granddaughter Susan, and William Russell, who played companion Ian Chesterton. The episode is written by long-time Doctor Who scriptwriter and novelist Mark Gatiss.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who itself will be celebrating its 50th anniversary with a special, 'movie-length', episode to air on 23 November, the actual 50th anniversary. Details of the episode are light, although we know that David Tennant is returning as the Tenth Doctor, along with Billie Piper as Rose, and they'll team up with the Eleventh and Clara to battle the Zygons. John Hurt's mysterious 'other Doctor' character will also play a role. The production team are also gearing up to film the Christmas special, which will introduce the Twelfth Doctor. According to showrunner Steven Moffat, the new Doctor has not yet been chosen, but with filming due soon on the Christmas special a decision will have to be made and announced shortly.

Company of Heroes 2

It can be tough for developers to make sequels to best-selling games. Vary the formula too much and people will complain about you moving too far from what the game is about. Don't change things and people will moan that you've produced an overpriced expansion rather than a new title.

This is a problem Relic know well. In 2009 they released Dawn of War II, the sequel to their successful 2004 Warhammer 40,000 RTS. They changed a lot about the game, moving it away from being a real-time strategy game to more of an action RPG: Diablo in space with more than one playable character. Whilst it was a very solid game on its own right, it did feel like a different genre to the first game. Fans complained.

For Company of Heroes 2, Relic's sequel to their very popular 2006 strategy game, they've gone conservative. The shift in focus and time means new sides - the Russians and the German armies of the eastern front - but the improvements over the first game are modest. The graphics are better, but not as improved as you might expect given the seven-year wait for this game. This is less of a dig at Company of Heroes 2 (which is still the best-looking strategy game in existence, at least until Total War: Rome II launches in September) and more of a reflection of how astonishingly far ahead of its time Company of Heroes was in 2006. The sound is a lot better, with booming explosions and realistic machine gun noises, a lot of them sampled from the genuine weapons. Sound design isn't usually something that stands out in games, but Company of Heroes 2's is simply the best I've ever encountered in a game.

In terms of gameplay, things proceed much as before. The battlefield consists of a home zone for each team and a patchwork of territorial zones in between. By capturing territory you boost your resources and can summon new troops to the battlefield more quickly, as well as unlocking fresh abilities through combat. Units gain experience in battle, becoming more accurate or tougher, and so does the commander, unlocking abilities such as recon planes, artillery bombardments or air strikes. Company of Heroes 2 changes things a little by having both locked territories (which are pre-set to provide fuel, ammunition or manpower points) and 'open' ones, which you can set to a particular resource by building on them. This is a nice touch which helps factions if they lose a rare resource zone.

Of course, you have to fight you away across these maps. Infantry can be summoned quickly to the battle and are surprisingly versatile, with anti-tank squads perfectly capable of taking down individual enemy tanks (though they're less effective against larger armoured formations). Snipers can provide both recon and a way of eliminating infantry at range, whilst mortars are formidable short-range artillery units and heavy machine guns are excellent for disrupting enemy charges. In the mid-game armoured cars, anti-tank guns and light tanks appear, and in longer battles expect to see heavy tanks like the T-34 and the Panther enter the fray. So far, so much like Company of Heroes. Improvements are modest rather than revolutionary, although a much stricter 'true sight' system allows for some sneaky tactics and makes things like using smokescreens much more effective (as it removes the enemy unit from sight altogether, rather than making hitting him harder). Some may bemoan the less-effective MG units, which find it tougher to pin down enemy infantry and reduce their effectiveness.

It's all loud and fast-paced but the game retains satisfying tactical elements. It's possible for battles to swing quite wildly from side to side, with armies being driven back to their bases only to burst forth again, reinforced for battle against their exhausted pursuers. It's great stuff, as much now as it was back in 2006.

In terms of structure, there's a single-player campaign which takes place against a backdrop of different parts of the war. This is framed with a former Red Army soldier being interrogated for seditious activities during the war, allowing the narrative to jump from Stalingrad back to the opening of Barbarossa, the siege of Moscow and the battles for Kursk and Berlin. Relic try to do something interesting with this narrative, by focusing on the individual heroism and bravery of the soldiers whilst exposing the brutality of the Soviet regime (which was not much better than the Nazis in terms of the death and destruction it caused). It fails due to weak writing and a feeling that there's too much of a Western (and particularly American) sense of morality impugning on what was a true life-and-death struggle for millions of people. The ambition is laudable but the execution is poor. Individual missions are quite well-designed, especially in the latter part of the campaign, but ultimately there are too many arbitrary restrictions on what units you can or can't use in a mission.

More impressive is the Theatre of War mode, which offers up a variety of different missions to the player. Some are single-player, focused scenarios (such as using a squad of snipers to assassinate enemy officers in a village) whilst others are bigger co-op missions or full-scale battles against veteran enemy forces. The Theatre of War covers events for 1941 only; updates are promised for the future to cover the rest of the conflict. Freed from the restrictive narrative, these scenarios can be more inventive and interesting than the campaign missions.

Of course, multiplayer is a big focus and is as fast, furious and smart as the original game's.

The game also introduces a couple of other ideas. One is the notion of winter itself as a threat, with the temperature suddenly dropping and your soldiers no longer able to fight. Getting them into cover or, better still, to a campfire, becomes a priority. It's a nice idea but it adds an extra level of randomness to the game which most players will likely prefer to do without. Fortunately, it can be switched off for multiplayer. Another new feature is that an NKVD officer will be deployed to your HQ whenever new infantry are deployed; if the infantry retreat to your base, the NKVD officer will shoot them. This simulates Stalin's 'not one step back' doctrine which made Russian soldiers fear retreating more than advancing. Again, it's laudable that Relic try to reflect this, but in practice it's just rather annoying. It's also historically inaccurate that your soldiers won't simply kill the NKVD officer themselves (NKVD troops assigned to Red Army squads occasionally 'fell to enemy fire, honest' during the war if they proved too zealous in punishing their soldiers). Since the retreat order is the best way to avoid being pinned by MG or mortar fire, the game punishing you for using it is something that gets old rather quickly.

Ultimately, Company of Heroes 2 (****½) is a modest evolution of the original game rather than anything too spectacular. The Theatre of War mode is its biggest improvement over the original, along with some exceptional sound design and graphics. Some of the new features meant to convey the atmosphere of the conflict backfire a little, but overall this is an accomplished, impressive and enjoyable RTS. The game is available now in the UK and USA on PC.

Trailer for debut novel TERRA features some famous faces

British comedian and musician Mitch Benn has written his first novel, Terra, after being Twitter-stalked by Gollancz into doing so (less sinister than that suggests). Due for publication this month in the UK, it's the latest book to get its own trailer. However, this trailer is a bit different: it features sixteen writers, actors, comedians and musicians taking turns to read the first chapter of the book. Benn also called in several compatriots from The Now Show (a BBC radio show that Benn works on).

Those who took part were:

Hugh Dennis (comedian)
Steve Punt (comedian)
Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman)
Sophe Aldred (actor, best known as Ace, Doctor Who companion 1987-89)
Phill Jupitus (comedian, perennial panel show guest, Jabba the Hutt fan)
David Baddiel (comedian, novelist, scriptwriter)
Emma Kennedy (comedian)
John Culshaw (comedian, impressionist, Tom Baker voice impresario)
Laura Shavin (comedian)
Rufus Hound (comedian, actor, presenter)
Samuel West (actor)
Amanda Palmer (musician)
Robert Llewellyn (writer, TV presenter, actor, best known as Kryten in Red Dwarf)
Reece Shearsmith (writer, actor, best known as one of The League of Gentlemen)
Arthur Darvill (actor, best known as Rory, Doctor Who companion 2010-12)
Mitch Benn (musician, comedian, wrote the book)

ELITE: DANGEROUS starmap is a thing of beauty

Frontier Developments have posted a new screenshot from their Kickstarter-funded space trading/combat game Elite: Dangerous. This screenshot shows their starmap, which the player will use to travel from system to system and within systems as well.

The starmap used in Frontier: Elite 2 was a phenomenal piece of work (considering it was an addendum to the main game) and it looks like the map in the fourth game is shaping up to be far more impressive.

As a bonus, see if you can catch all the SF references on the image.

Robert Jordan bigging up A GAME OF THRONES in 1997

This is a cool find, courtesy of Terez. It's a letter from the late Robert Jordan to George R.R. Martin's editor, Anne Groell, requesting a signed copy of A Game of Thrones. The letter is dated 6 March 1997, after Thrones came out in hardcover (August 1996) but before its paperback publication.

Click to embiggen.

It also features an interesting statement from Jordan regarding series length:

"I see in Locus that George says he no longer thinks he can finish the story in a trilogy. Good. Not that his story will be any longer, but that he isn't going to try shoe-horning his story into the form everybody seems to say such stories must follow. Writing what you want to write, in the way you want to write it, isn't easy when people are telling you that you can't do it that way because it it isn't done that way. He apparently is as lucky as I am in having a publisher and editor who are willing to go against the flow."

GRRM has said many times that he credits the early success of A Game of Thrones in paperback to Jordan's cover quote and, a bit later, people picking up Legends to read Jordan's short story New Spring, also reading The Hedge Knight and then picking up the novels. An interesting insight into Jordan's opinion of Martin (and for the reverse, Martin penned a memorial for Jordan when he died in 2007).

A glimpse of a FIRST LAW world map

The First Law comic adaptation has given us a glimpse of a world map for Joe Abercrombie's fantasy world. On his blog, Abercrombie has confirmed that the map is mostly accurate and canonical. On the following image the map is shown with the existing maps of the Old Empire to the left and Styria to the right, whilst at the bottom is an attempt to combine them into one image.

Obviously, the comic strip image is small, somewhat compressed and not entirely to scale with the published maps, though it is possible to get a good sense of what's going on and what is where. I will try to use this information to construct a clearer map at a later date.

The island in the middle is clearly Midderland, the island-continent on which the heart of the Union and Adua are situated, whilst to the north lie the Northlands, with Angland likely being the peninsular immediately to the north-west of Midderland. Kanta is one of the two landmasses to the south; likely the one to the south-west, with Dagoska located on the narrow peninsular reaching up towards Midderland (it's also possible that both landmasses to the south are Kanta, with the sea between them being a very large bay rather than a separating ocean).

The SF of Gaming

Where would computer games be without science fiction? Alien bad guys, stonking great railguns, cyborg protagonists and post-apocalyptic landscapes are ten-a-penny in games. The number of games out there without any SF or fantasy elements is tiny; even the historical simulation Civilization games allows Gandhi to build an army of death-dealing laser tanks and then fly to Alpha Centauri, whilst the Crusader Kings series postulates fantastical alternate timelines where Wales is a European superpower.

Scientifically inexplicable.

That said, SF in games is usually scenery rather than the focus of the setting. The socio-economic basis of why the alien Lord Mental, with access to vast resources and commanding a star-spanning empire, needs to invade Earth in the Serious Sam series remains resolutely unexplored. And how do those suicide bomber guys scream when they don't have a head anyway? The science in science fiction is often questionable in books (and almost non-existent on TV and in film), and even moreso in games.

Still, exceptions exist. Here's a look at some games which attempt to use real science as more than just wallpaper.

Frontier: Elite 2 - Real Astronomy & Newtonian Physics

Released in 1993, Frontier was David Braben's ambitious follow-up to the classic, medium-defining 1984 space sim Elite. Frontier allows you to take on the role of the captain of a spacecraft. You can indulge in trading goods between star systems, fighting pirates (or turning pirate yourself) or undertaking missions for one of several interstellar powers (the Federation, the Empire or numerous independent worlds, as well as various corporations). You can switch between spacecraft and upgrade them.

Where the game was truly stunning was that it simulated the entire Milky Way Galaxy on just a single floppy disk. 100 billion stars were located in the galaxy, and the several hundred closest to Earth were placed in their (more or less) correct astronomical positions, along with a few hundred other major stars. You could fly to the Pleiades (though it'd take a while), check out Polaris or skim the surface of Arcturus. The game also used real Newtonian physics, complete with effectively infinite inertia once you had fired your engines in a particular direction, and space stations simulating gravity through centrifugal force. You could even fly over planetary surfaces and land at starports.

Of course, the game looks pretty primitive by modern standards, 99% of the stars in the game are randomly placed and named and the Newtonian physics make space combat unintuitive and almost ridiculously difficult to pull off (and the fact that few later space games - I-War and Tachyon's nods to it side - use real physics may be down to Frontier's problems). But the ambition and scope are there. It will be interesting to see if Elite: Dangerous, due in 2014, manages to solve the issues whilst retaining the immense scale, scope and ambition of its forebear.

Damocles: Mercenary II - Comets and Time Dilation

Predating Frontier by a few years, Damocles similarly depicts an impressive 3D universe which allows you to land and take off from planets. The setting is much more limited, with just a single solar system on offer. The spacecraft is also merely a way of getting from planet to planet, with the focus being on your character wandering around (in first-person 3D; a stunning achievement in 1990). The premise is that the comet Damocles is about to crash into and destroy the planet Eris and your character has to find a way of stopping it. The game presents several possibilities, from the direct (finding and blowing up the comet with a mega-powerful antimatter bomb) to the sensible (redirecting the comet away from Eris onto a safer orbit by blowing up another, uninhabited body nearby).

One of the more interesting things about the game is that your spacecraft can accelerate to near-lightspeed to get around the system, but this results in time dilation. You can travel right across the system in minutes, but the doomsday clock will tick down at a ridiculous rate. This forces the player to find alternate ways of travelling around (teleporters being the favourite alternative, but their locations are unknown at the start of the game) to avoid the problem.

Syndicate - Cyberpunk Dystopia

Also released in 1993, Syndicate was an action-strategy game set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, where the world is controlled by corporations who influence and pacify citizens via chips in their brains. These chips can be subverted by the player, allowing them to take control of huge crowds of people during missions to be used as cannon fodder or a distraction. This notion of human/computer interfaces is only lightly touched upon in the game due to control limitations, although it does bring in other SF ideas such as robot policemen and massive corporate advertising boards (influenced by Blade Runner). Most sinister is the way the game postulates a future where governments are rump states at best, with the real power held by corporations and their private armies.

A sequel, Syndicate Wars, moved the game into 3D in 1996. Recently, several of the design team for Syndicate and its sequel announced a Kickstarter campaign for a 'spiritual sequel', Satellite Reign, that will expand upon many of the ideas in the original game and allow for things like hacking and more freeform approaches to missions.

Hostile Waters - Nanotech Singularity and Social Revolution

One of the greatest (though also underplayed) strategy games of all time, Hostile Waters (aka Antaeus Rising in the USA) places you in command of an immense aircraft carrier with orders to liberate a chain of newly-risen islands from the control of a hostile power. What at first appears to be a remake of the classic 1987 strategy title Carrier Command (itself given a lacklustre, official remake in 2012) quickly turns into a different beast. Part of this is down to the compelling fiction, created by writer Warren Ellis.

The game postulates a technological singularity (in 2012) which comes to pass due to the invention of Creation Engines, devices which use nanotechnology to break items apart and reassemble them at a molecular level. Anything can be turned into anything else. Rubbish can be transformed into food, sand into diamonds. This immediately removes scarcity - famine, lack of resources - as an issue for everyone on the planet and would seem to herald a golden age. The owners of the means of production, who are effectively out of a job, resist by trying to regulate the introduction of Creation Engines, resulting in a messy, bloody global civil war. At the end of the war the 'old guard' are defeated and everyone lives in a world of plenty. Needless to say, some of these old guard launch a new assault using weaponised Creation Engine technology...technology which gets out of hand very rapidly.

Dealing with SF hot topics like nanotechnology, the Singularity (not exactly in a robust way, though, as the post-2012 society is still pretty comprehensible to us), life-extension via 'saving' consciousness on AI systems, the conflicts of closed systems versus open ones and ideology versus religion, the game's storyline is surprisingly deep though arguably flawed: the world also being a secularist paradise with billions of people abandoning religion seems a bit far-fetched, though there are hints that the new society has a sinister side as well. All the more remarkable is that this background is there purely to explain the game's use of standard strategy tropes, like being able to build vehicles instantly on the battlefield. The fiction is impressive and well-thought-out, complementing the amazing gameplay very well.

Portal - Science as Fun

Released in 2007, Portal was a small game but a hugely influential one. The game is based around the idea that you can create two linked dimensional portals on certain surfaces, allowing for intelligent ways to solve apparently insurmountable puzzles. Jumping across a vast chasm is possible by creating a portal on the wall behind you and another at the bottom of the chasm: falling into the chasm builds up enough momentum to shoot through the portal, over the top of the chasm and landing safely on the other side.

The portal technology is of course highly speculative, but it's a rare example of a gaming taking its central scientific/technological premise (no matter how ludicrous) and exploring it intelligently. The 'science!' theme, the impressive AI antagonist, the game's remarkable sense of humour and it's bigger, better sequel all help cement the game's reputation as one of the finest first-person action games in existence.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Augmentation and Cyborgs

This prequel to 2000's classic Deus Ex deals with a number of important near-future issues. As well as the standard cyberpunk government/corporation tension, the game explores the theme of augmentation and using technology to enhance human abilities in depth and with intelligence. The notion of how much of our bodies we can replace and remain human is also a key theme: does the corporation 'own' protagonist Adam Jensen because they paid for the augmentations that allow him to live? A rich and involving game (let down a little by silly boss fights).

BioShock Infinite - An Infinity of Possibilities

This recent game is set in an alternate timeline in which a huge flying city called Columbia was built in the early 20th Century thanks to the invention of quantum engines, technology that never existed in our world. As the game progresses, the protagonist and the girl he was sent to save find themselves passing through tears in the fabric of reality into other universes, including some similar to our own and others completely different.

The 'many worlds' theory of quantum reality is a common theme in modern SF, but this is the first time a game successfully explores the same theme with some intelligence and uses it to tie together the disjointed narrative in a manner which makes sense.

Wasteland 2 - Post-Apocalyptic Wildlife

The upcoming Wasteland 2, from some of the same team that gave us the Fallout games, is a post-apocalyptic romp which makes few pretences towards scientific realism in its backstory or how anyone survived the nuclear apocalypse. However, the developers have called upon the services of real scientists to help portray environments and creatures, leading to the creation of the fearful giant hermit crab, which hides within the shells of abandoned and burned-out cars and gives the players a nasty surprise when they wander by.

As we can see, there are a few games around which do make more use of science and real SF ideas than as just a cheesy explanation for insane ultraviolence. Hopefully this is something we will see more of in the future.

See also: Polygon has interviews with the scientists who have consulted and advised on games such as Wasteland 2, BioShock Infinite, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the upcoming Outlast.