Santa bought us a lovely Nintendo Wii for Christmas, and I spent most of the season throwing myself about in front of the telly playing Wii Sports. As a result, I now ache all over and I think I may have trapped a nerve in my spine. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the Wii fitness test tells me that I have the body of a 68 year old. Thanks a lot Nintendo.

So far I've briefly played: Medal of Honour: Vanguard, Zelda, Wii Play and Big Brain Academy. I'll probably put some reviews up of some of these when I've played them a bit more.

I've also had a bit of a browse around the Virtual Console Shop and there's a nice selection of retro NES, SNES, N64 and Megadrive games on there, but disturbingly I can't find the legendary Axelay on there anywhere.. if anyone at Nintendo is reading this, please, please upload Axelay. Thank you.

In reality, I could probably send a seasonal greeting to every one of you individually, so small is my readership, but still I'm far too lazy for that – in fact, I'm too lazy to even write a proper blog, so I'm going to fill up this entire entry with a computer-rendered sheep jpeg and a few sentences about mince pies, sherry and the Great Escape, like those dreadful talking-head list type programmes you get on television every year.

'Turkey... amazing!' says Fern Bloody Cotton. 'Only Fools and Horses. Brilliant' says Vernon Kay.

Cut to stock footage of a beige family playing Monopoly. 'Board games. How rubbish are they?' says Danny Baker, pointlessly.

And so on...

Right, that's enough of that. I'm off to make some stuffing and wrap all the presents I haven't bought for people.

Happy Christmas.

Prepare yourself, because things are about to get seriously nerdy. If you're roughly my age (late 20s/early 30s) you may remember the rather brilliant Ulysses 31 from your childhood. If you can't, then you may want to skip all this because the magic will be mostly lost on you, but if you're desperate, click here for a brief synopsis.

I loved Ulysses 31, and, like a lot of other nerds of a certain age, I even acquired the complete series box set. However, until last week, even I wasn't aware that an unbelievably rare pilot episode exists - I only found out by accident when trawling through wikipedia. After a bit of internet detective work, I found a streaming video of said episode.

Watching it was fascinating but rather odd – plotwise, the pilot episode's identical to the final tv show. The music and visuals, however, are entirely different. For example, take a look at Ulysses in the pilot:

And look at Telemachus:

Both characters (in fact, all the characters in the pilot) bear a closer resemblance to traditional anime; the production designers obviously decided to go for a westernised look for the actual series.

And if you think that's strange, take a look at his ship, the Odyssey:

It's rubbish! Instead of the fantastic eyelike ship, poor old Ulysses has to wander the galaxies in a bicycle tyre.

The gods are also far less sinister. Here's a comparison:

More Brian Blessed than Zeus really. It's also quite strange watching an episode of Ulysses 31 without the familiar music - instead of the trudging 'march of the gods' we're used to, we have to put up with some generic seventies porn music.

Sadly, I can find very little production history about this oddity – I for one would love to know why the show changed so radically (for the better, it must be said) from the pilot to the final show. If you're a Ulysses 31 fan, it's definitely worth checking out, if only for curiosity's sake (and bits of it are very curious indeed). And if you want to read some more Ulysses 31 fan-worship, why not check out my little article over on the awesome Den of Geek website?

My first post in a month! Oops. To my readers (all three of you) I apologise.

Anyway, Heroes. Because I'm a bit of a luddite at heart (and skint to boot), I don't have Sky – which is why I've only just finished watching series one of Heroes. It's been great – I've enjoyed it for all the reasons everyone else enjoys it: Hiro and Sylar were excellent characters, the cameo performances were fun and the plot was (for the most part) clever and full of surprises.

The final episode, however, left me feeling a little underwhelmed. In a series full of memorable episodes, it seems a shame and rather odd that they should leave the most predictable until last. The weeks of steadily building tension have been abruptly concluded with what looked like a dull brawl in a pub car park; quite why the writers thought it necessary for almost every hero to have a part in defeating Sylar defeats me. It sort of reminded me of the scene in the 1980 film Airplane where the passengers all lined up to hit a nun; Parkman fruitlessly fired off a few bullets from his pistol, Niki followed up with a blow to the head with a fire hydrant (or something), Peter threw in a couple of punches and Hiro finished the proceedings with his sword.

It all seemed a far cry from the previous episode's rather brilliant set piece, where Sylar used his Akira-style powers to flip a prison truck upside down.

Of course, it was almost a foregone conclusion that New York wasn't going to get leveled – that would be far too bleak in our post 9-11 world – so it was very important that the writers throw in some other twists to keep us happy. Sadly, they didn't. It was quite obvious from the outset that Nathan Petrelli would 'come good in the end', and sure enough, just as Peter began to glow like a russian spy in a sushi bar, Nathan whisked him away to blow up in the outer atmosphere, to my complete and utter lack of surprise.

{on a side note, why did Peter even need Nathan's help? If Peter was a kind of 'Hero sponge', couldn't he have just as easily flown off and blown up somewhere by himself?}

Maybe the writers are deliberately trying to lower my expectation levels for (from what I've read) is a pretty poor second series...