http://news.bbc...ire/6105106.stm

Fucking hardcore! What other country does this, eh?

http://news.bbc...ent/6101704.stm

I mean, honestly...

What's wrong with people today? What's debilitating the great British constitution? We hold up okay when it comes to the real torture of actual people, but when it comes to fictional torture, it's goodnight sweetheart?

Weak.

http://www.bruc...jects/bruce.htm

THERE IS A GOD!

http://www.esca...com/issue/65/17

I found myself rather shocked while reading the latest issue of The Escapist. In it, an article written by Warren Spector (Deus Ex fame) asks, Should Games Be Fun?

Now, this dropped my jaw. Spector is a bit of an industry guru, really, and should know the answer to this question is a wholehearted "Yes." If a game isn't fun, you don't play it. Or at least, I don't play games that aren't fun, I don't know anyone else who plays games they don't find to be fun, and I have never heard of anyone else playing a game they did not find fun.

Can you imagine that?

"I hate this game."
*Cue eight-hour playing session*
"Christ, I fucking hate this game!"

Spector mourns the fact that the word 'fun' itself locks us into a childish mentality, that it has other connotations than 'enjoyment'. I think perhaps the link is occurring solely in his head. Because whenever I can, I have fun. Don't you? Don't you do things you enjoy? Or do you play on games that bore you? I know I have fun whenever I can, which is probably more often than when I was a child, because now I am an adult, I can have fun whenever the fuck I want. If I want to get up at three in the morning and set fire to stuff, I can. If I want to play on Advance Wars for twenty hours straight, I can. What's wrong with having fun?

Spector seems to think that games are not, by and large, mature. And he's right. Most games are quite immature, if anything. Most of them are designed to appeal to teenage boys, despite the fact that a growing percentage of the audience are old fucks, like me. With the grave beckoning at age twenty-four, I can't be fucking about with games that are not fun.

Spector also seems to think the games being fun and mature are mutually exclusive. Not mature in the sense of tits and guns, but mature in the sense of themes, of thought-provoking subject matter, of challenging our preconceived notions about anything apart from what a .357 Magnum round does to a human skull. But...don't all those fall under the category of fun? Or are they quite separate, or are they in fact, contradictory?

I know the 'educational' games I played in school were not fun. They were shit. They might have still qualified as games, but they were not, in any way, fun, and so I only played them when I was made to. They failed to instruct or educate me...because they weren't fun. There was absolutely no enjoyment to be had , in any way, shape or form, besides finding out how fast I could press the 'off' button, and that wasn't even part of the games.

Does a game have to be fun to be commercially successful? In my experience, no. It helps, certainly, but numerous crap games have sold a ton thanks to sizable ad campaigns, good reviews, tie-in licenses and hype in general. But there are plenty of fun games that have failed commercially, too. So fun is no guarantee of financial success.

Comparing games to other mediums (films, books, music) is not really valid as far as I am concerned, as games are at their basic level, interactive. Most other mediums are not, and the way we enjoy them (passively, versus actively) is too different to the way we enjoy games. Works in other mediums that are interactive are very unusual, the exception rather than the rule.

So why constantly compare games to other mediums in areas where games cannot possibly compete? Why criticise an industry which is maximum-profit-oriented for not making games for a (admittedly large) minority of its audience? Doing so automatically limits the profits to be made (if we stick to the notion that no one else apart from us old bastards will buy a 'highbrow' game). Even if we generously admit that, okay, even some younger, less mature gamers will buy it, the risk is still there, and the industry is renowned for taking less and less risks. Perhaps we should be applying pressure to that stupidity, and encouraging those conservative fuckers to make some fun games, to take some risks, rather than trying to reduce the amount of fun games being made?

As gamers, we should know that 'challenging', 'thought-provoking', 'frightening', 'compelling' and all those other superlatives are synonomous with 'fun', not mutually exclusive. Perhaps we do, and it's the industry that doesn't?

Just in case you're not reading it already, may I recommend the finest American news source ever to exist.

http://www.theonion.com/content/

A rather more amusing read than The times (excepting the Letters section, of course).

Top pick:

http://www.theo...tent/node/43012

Filming has finished, and Simon Pegg has had a video diary going on for as wee while now.

http://www.work...m.php?filmID=99

Apparently, 45 people have been glued to a Dublin train after an Irish Muslim set off a no more nails bomb.

What do men and clouds have in common?
Eventually, they fuck off and it's a really nice day.

Two Irish couples are a bit bored with their sex lives, and agree to swap partners. After three hours of furious, lustful sex, Paddy stops and says "I wonder how the women are getting on?"

I have been barred from all B&Q stores for life. I went in, and this twat in orange overalls asked if I wanted decking, so I got the first punch in.

Gordon Brown is, apparently, not even slightly autistic.

http://news.bbc...ics/5399072.stm

Shame, I always thought he was rather good at drawing...

Thomas Cholmondeley (middle), keeping up the great traditions of the British aristocracy by shooting a black man.

With a surname like Cholmondeley, how the fuck could he not be posh? This is nothing less than the second time Cholmondeley has been charged with shooting and killing someone (and yes, predictably, the first time the victim was also black). The first case was dropped due to Cholmondeley being rich and white. Great stuff.

http://news.bbc...ica/5377076.stm

Does anybody think that site is a bad idea? It's like everyone you never wanted to see ever again,all under one internet roof. Meeting one's old school chums again has never had any less allure. Not even bumping into them at three in the morning, pissed out of your mind as you try to get money from a cash machine with a debit card that is constantly being rejected because you need to seek the solace of booze every weekend without fail in a desperate attempt to forget why you are stuck in that town.

That girl who you fell deeply, ruler-chewingly in love with when you were all of thirteen, constantly touching the stratosphere in a heady cocktail of hormones and chemistry-class ethanol.

That lad who thought he could relentlessly wind you up every day until he found out that yes, actually, you would stab him in the fucking leg with a fork at dinner time.

Your former best mate who is now A) Sickeningly successful or B) Pitifully poor; and as such makes you feel disappointed either way.

I am amazed that pretty much everyone turned out as I expected them to. So much for free will, eh? Environment will sabotage you every time. Perhaps it's just the town? Everyone one who has moved away has been pretty successful (I count success as having a good education, a good job and not having fathered/being pregnant with your third child at the tender age of twenty-four).

I am one of the exceptions, having moved away but having no education beyond my A-level and no job a'tall. Still, my family did always say I would be a shiftless layabout. Destiny, it seems, has no regard for geography.

How did your friends turn out?

I made a couple of distinctions between my dislike and the true faults in the article, but Jesus Christ, I can't stand that SA system. It's like they tried to please both TB and real-time gamers, and did neither.

I prefer TB over real-time, but I'd rather play real-time than SA. I like Aftermath, but for me, it's not even close to S2 or JA2 et al. If it had been turn-based, I would have liked it a lot more.

Even without such great effects, JC's film tops TTFAW quite considerably. It's a Hell of a lot more faithful to the Campbell short story, for one, the monster isn't relegated to a Frankenstein's-monster-alike and the subtext is a lot more complex than simple right-wing Yank hero versus intellectual pinkos. The actiung and atmosphere are leagues ahead, too. TTFAW was good when I was wee, but not any more.

For more alien terror, what about Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The 70's version over the 50's, with Donald Sutherland in the lead role. Seems a bit better with a bit more distance from the height of Commie paranoia, though that was what it's all about (paranoia, not Commies in particular).

The Maltese Falcon ('41, I think) was a good 'un (though the prior version isn't shabby either), Humphrey Bogart as Sham Shpade, and Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor and Peter Lorre into the bargain. Cracking noir.

The Bourne Identity? I haven't seen the original, so I wouldn't know, but that was an okay film.

Can anyone think of any remakes that are better than the original film, and why they are better?

I was watching The Fly remake recently, and although I enjoyed the original (with Vincent Price, no less) it isn't a patch on the '86 version. Probably Jeff Goldblum's best performance ever, and Cronenberg is a horror director I have always thought brilliant.

Though I'm not really sure if it's a remake, strictly speaking. It takes the original short story and goes in a different direction, much like John Carpenter's The Thing and the preceding Thing From Another World (based on the same short story, but [i]very[i/] different films.

Heat is an excellent remake of Mann's earlier LA Takedown. DeNiro and Pacino are both stellar in that.

P.S. War of the Worlds was not a good remake.

The film suffers for a couple of reasons. It had to stand alone and make sense to people who hadn't seen the TV series, and it was basically an episode of the show stretched to fit film formula, so it had to include more action etc etc.

Still a good flick, though. And the series is even better.

I think it's one of those things that sound shit in synopsis. So no matter how good it actually is, people who read reviews or who see the box while browsing are going to be put off and not even give it a chance.

Which is a bit tragic, as it's an excellent show, easily one of the best sci-fi series ever.