Blue Man Sings the Whites

Further evidence of my increasingly obvious arrested deveolpment - I didn’t bother going to the flicks for There Will Be Blood, but I did hand over £7.50 (plus a frankly outrageous 10% online booking fee) to see Iron Man.

In my defence, I’ve always had a nagging fondness for old Soup Can Head, dating back to his brief appearance as a backup strip in the old Marvel UK Transformers comic. The attraction was almost entirely shallow and physical - face facts, the classic red-and-gold Mark V armour was the fucking bomb. In fact, it may only ever have been topped in the comic-book-battlesuit way-coolness stakes by his Silver Centurion threads.

Beyond the “Kick Your Ass And Look Great Doing It” thing, though, there was also the practical matter that Iron Man hadn’t been bitten by a radioactive anything, he wasn’t a member in good standing of an honest-to-goodness pantheon or the last survivor of an advanced but selectively idiotic alien race.

He was just a bloke in a tin suit.

A tin suit that fitted in a briefcase, no less, and so therefore would have obviously also fitted into, picking an example at random, a school bag. Man, I wanted to own a flying robot suit more than I wanted to talk to the girl behind the counter at the North Watford Library. And I wanted to talk to the girl behind the counter at the North Watford Library a LOT.

I’m not sure how much crime there would have been to fight in suburban Hertfordshire, but I was up for making the effort to find some. And anyway, I could always use the suit for my journey to school - I’d picked out the little wooded area behind the tennis courts near the underground station as a possible landing area. See, I was even boringly practical in my escapist fantasies.

Ahem. Anyway. Iron Man.

The plot goes something like this. Tony Stark is a multi-multi-squillionaire. He makes weapons for the US military. Whilst visiting Afghanistan to demonstrate his latest and greatest boomstick, he’s kidnapped by a gaggle of swarthy men with teatowels on their heads who lock him in a cell with a load of high-tech equipment and order him to make them one of said boomsticks.

If any of these guerillas had ever seen an episode of The A-Team, this film would have been about 20 minutes long.

So, Stark promptly escapes from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground, where he survives as… oh no, wait. He promptly escapes by making himself a big armoured metal suit - an iron man, if you will - and shooting the bejesus out of a bunch of people who have the utter gall to look suprised by this turn of events.

The whole incident has made him ponder that the weapons he might be being misused - ie, that they might be being used to kill people. He responds to this realisation the way any of us would if we could, by building a robot battlesuit and flying around blowing shit the fuck up.

There’s an awful lot to like about Iron Man. The dialogue is by and large witty and sharp, the plot hammers along at a million billion miles an hour and while there’s a tiny spoonful of clever somewhere in the mix it never loses sight of the fact that it’s meant to be a big, dumb, massively entertaining blockbuster.

Blocks are duly busted.

Robert Downey Jr. is really, really good in a part that must have been quite a stretch for him - a rich, glamerous substance abuser in the middle of a media circus. This version of Tony Stark appears quite heavily influenced by the Ultimate iteration of the character (an influence made more explicit in a fanservice cameo after the credits), making him considerably more sleazy and reprehensible than he was in the original comics. It’s to the credit of both script and actor that despite being a fairly massive prick Stark remains sympathetic and somewhat likable.

The supporting cast is a bit more of a mixed bag. Terrence Howard is given very, very little to do and does it pretty badly. He primarily appears to be in the film because the scriptwriter is aware you can’t possibly consider doing an Iron Man movie without having Rhodey in it even though he has no fucking idea whatsoever what to do with the character. Howard’s demeanour doesn’t so much project “Highly-Trained Air Force Colonel” as “I May Or May Not Be Awake”.

Jim Rhodes’ usual role in the comics - Tony Stark’s confidant and conscience - is largely filled here by Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s executive assistant. Saddled with playing the one of Marvel’s standard-issue Superhero’s Wet Blanket Love Interest, she manages the deceptively tricky balancing act of dancing along the tightrope of concern and underlying sexual tension without tumbling off into the, errrr, big net of being so simpering and annoying that you spend the last hour of the film praying that the villain drops a cement mixer on her (a condition known formally as “Going Full Dunst”). Incidentally, Paltrow also does a nice job of toughing out Stan Lee’s apparent belief that “Pepper Potts” is a perfectly acceptable name for a supporting character.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Jeff Bridges is clearly having the time of his life giving an agreeably scenery-chomping performance as Obidiah Stane. He comes off as a slightly creepy but avuncular old uncle, with his magnificently bald head, his enormous beard and his lapel badge reading “I Will Die Or Turn Evil”.

There are issues. While the script generally crackles with energy and humour there’s just the odd exchange, the odd scene that falls flat on its face. And the final battle just doesn’t really work. I can’t tell you if its a failure of scripting or direction or CGI, but there’s little or no tension and it’s just a bit… well, boring.

That’s somewhat compensated for by a bloody brilliant ending, mind you.

So, any good? Yes, it really is. It’s not quite in the top tier of comic adaptations - it’s no Batman Begins, no The Crow, no Incredibles - but it’s a brillant romp and is quite comfortable jostling for position with the best of the rest - the first two X-Men, Spiderman, the Tim Burton Batman, Mystery Men. After last summer’s thoroughly limp crop (The Bourne Ultimatum very firmly excepted), this year’s popcorn season is off to a cracking start.

OK. I’m suitably warmed up. Now bring on Indy and The Dark Knight.

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You’ll no doubt be delighted to hear that, following a fiddling evening with TV and camera, my torrent of righteous bile aimed at adolescent objectification-fest Guitar Hero III now includes instructive illustrations for the serious student.

Go. See. Be illuminated. Or, y’know, don’t. Either’s good.

Extended play of GH3 had made it clearer why they’ve made such a shameless dive toward the lowest common denominator, though. Put simply, it’s nowhere near as good as the first two games in the series.

Going back to play a bit of Guitar Hero 2 in order to get some screenshots, it’s immediately noticable how much better it “feels” compared to the newer game. The note placement seems more natural - on occaision in GHIII’s medium difficulty it feels like notes have just been “missed out” at random, most notably in the incredibly familiar opening riffs to Paint It Black and Sunshine Of Your Love. Compare these to the thoroughly satisfying version of Smoke On The Water from the original game, and there’s no, er, comparison. More specifically, pretty much every time you think you can hammer-on or pull-off in Guitar Hero 2 (ie, play a note by just working the fret buttons without having to strum as well), you can. Several times in GHIII I’ve been caught in spots where the music suggests I ought to be able to hammer-on but the game doesn’t allow it. This is hugely annoying.

The third game’s tracklist isn’t as infested with horrible tedious see-how-fast-you-can-play-a-string-of-the-same-note thrash-metal bollocks as GH2’s, which is an obvious plus. It sabotages this by having a difficulty level that’s all over the fucking shop, having horrible tedious “boss battles” scattered through the game and then by dropping an joyless wall of fucking-stupidly-hardness across the last tier of songs. Also, the most-fun songs to play in GHIII (Kool Thing, Even Flow and Welcome To The Jungle, for the record) aren’t as fun to play as the most-fun songs to play in the previous two games. Of which we shall hear more later.

On the plus side, the new wireless guitar is lovely. Bigger and heavier than the original, and with a much longer strap so I don’t look like a member of the Byrds any more when I’m playing. So there’s that.

In summary, a large part of why I wanted Guitar Hero III was so that we’d have the second guitar ready for (us to take out a second mortgage and buy) Rock Band, which I’m quite unfeasably excited about. In that sense, I’m delighted with it. In every other respect it’s a disappointment, even taking aside previously mentioned issues. Guitar Hero had the best track list. Guitar Hero 2 is the best game. Guitar Hero III is bundled with the best peripheral. There you have it.

Come on, then, let’s have a quick Top 5 Most Fun Songs To Play From The Guitar Hero Series:

5) Who Was In My Room Last Night? - Butthole Surfers
An adrenaline rush like no other.

4) More Than A Feeling - Boston
I’m not proud. It’s a terrible, terrible song but it’s genuinely fantastic to play.

3) Freebird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
Gives Portal a run for its money in the “Best Game Ending Ever” stakes. The kids don’t like me playing this one, because I end up yowling along to it at an embarassingly loud volume.

2) Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple
Very, very little makes you feel more like an actual guitar hero than that riff. And the game does a terrific job of fooling you into thinking you’re actually playing it.

1) Sweet Child O’ Mine - Guns & Roses
A really testing yet good fun riff and a fantastic solo that ends in the game’s quintessential “My Fingers Just Did That With Absolutely No Input From My Brain” moment and then, brilliantly, a long pause with no notes that allows you time to bask in your own amazingness for having pulled the phrase off. Magic.

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5 – House
Yes, it’s incredibly formulaic even by the low standards of medical drama – a patient comes in displaying symptoms and the peons make several diagnoses which are all wrong. About 25 minutes in House realises what the problem really is, the patient responds to treatment then – oh no! They start getting dramatically worse again! House was wrong! House broods, then has a sudden epiphany based on the B-plot or a casual remark made by Wilson, does something outrageous based on it and saves the patient. But on top of being really predictable, it’s also the most tightly-scripted hour of TV since The West Wing stopped being any good, Hugh “Evil Prince Ludwig The Indestructible” Laurie is unfeasibly entertaining as the titular pill-popping misanthrope and I really like the central idea of a doctor who has an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. Wow, I’ve just devoted ten times as many words to House than I did to Pan’s Labyrinth. There really is no justice in the world, is there?

4 - The IT Crowd
Remember when British comedy ruled the world? This is pretty much the last remnant of former glory. Not quite in the same league as Black Books or Father Ted, it’s at least in the same sport.

3 - 30 Rock
The first episode left me a bit cold. The rest were largely sensational. Alec “You Don’t Understand! He’s The Best Actor In The WORLD!” Baldwin is a revelation.

2 – Heroes
I can’t even start to cover how many things are wrong with Heroes. Dodgy accents (“Dere’s more to Oirland dan dis!”). Plot holes that Mr. Sulu could have comfortably piloted the Starship Enterprise through (Really, nobody kept an eye on the wounded indestructible supervillain?). Annoying characters (Peter “Fucking” Petrelli). Wooden acting (Doctor Whatsisface). Shameless stuntcasting (Together at last! Doctor Who, The Master, the bloke who drove the Enterprise and the guy who killed Captain Kirk). Horrible pacing problems (winning the First Series Of 24 Award for being the TV show in which the least happens during the middle third of the season). Alright, maybe I can start. And yet, and yet, AND YET… for all its faults, somehow it works. It understands what makes comics great in the exact same way that Unbreakable didn’t. Of course, it helps considerably to have everyone’s favourite character Hiro bumbling through the show like a… well, like a stereotypical Japanese tourist. But at heart Heroes is shameless four-colour entertainment with no aspirations above its station. And yay for that. For all its faults, I enjoyed Heroes more than almost anything else I saw on TV all year.

1 - The Wire
My new year’s resolution is to stop banging on about it.

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Dishonourable mention – 300
After an hour of trying to work out if this film was supposed to be a pro-Iraqi Freedom metaphor or an anti-Iraqi Freedom metaphor, I suddenly realised that I was giving the filmmakers entirely too much credit. What it is is visually spectacular but totally fucking stupid. 300 shares a lot with Sin City, Frank Miller’s last big-screen adaptation. Regrettably, one of the things it shares is a degree of casual misogyny. It’s not as all-pervading as it is in Sin City, largely because 300’s only got one female character and doesn’t spend any time with her that it could be spending watching half-naked oiled men shouting and chopping bits off each other, but that character gets treated very badly and combined with the inclusion of gratuitous concubines and a gyrating, net-curtain-wearing seeress getting molested it all left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Still, it’s a subject that really deserves a post of its own, so I’ll curtail the gathering rant and move on.

My other big problem with 300 is that I couldn’t get fully onboard with the whole gung-ho, no-compromise, last-one-dead-buys-the-first-round-in-the-Elysium-Fields, dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-patria-mori attitude. I had a fair amount of sympathy for the view that on the whole it probably wasn’t a great idea to piss off the most militarily powerful empire on the planet for no obviously good reason, and found it really annoying that the film made out that anybody who didn’t want to bleed out their last in a doomed last stand on some Godforsaken battlefield was obviously completely morally bankrupt. I realise that I’ve missed the point of the movie fairly spectacularly, but there you go. It’s pretty, it’s relentlessly idiotic, and it’s moderately offensive. And you can stick that on the poster.

5 - Casino Royale
The opening chase sequence is jaw-droppingly awesome, but it never quite hits those heights again, and it could definitely stand to lose about 15 minutes from the end.

Signs You Might Have Played Too Much Poker, Number 23 In An Occasional Series: When you get far, FAR more pissed-off at the criminal mastermind showing his cards one at a time in a Hold ‘Em showdown, thus giving his opponent a split-second of thinking he’s won the pot before the killer second card is revealed, than you do for said Big Bad committing terrorism, torture and murder. Genital beatings? Mass killing? Perfectly understandable behaviour for a generic supervillain. But slow-rolling? Now THAT’S the act of a REAL wanker.

4 - Hot Fuzz
Not as good as Shaun Of The Dead, which wasn’t as good as Spaced. Which still makes it comfortably the best comedy of the year.

3 - 28 Weeks Later
There were no visuals that quite grabbed me like the spine-tingling opening 10 minutes of 28 Days Later, but it makes up for that in spades with relentless edge-of-the-seat tension. Coming off the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks 300, it was great to see a mainstream gore-fest with the ambition to be about something. If you don’t get a chill in the sequence in which the American soldiers occupying London are forced to open fire on a crowd of panicked civilians and Infected, you’re not paying attention. Great ending too, which being an idiot I didn’t see coming at all.

2 - The Bourne Ultimatum
I can’t remember the last time I left the cinema thinking about the symbolism of water in a Hollywood blockbuster.

1 - Pan’s Labyrinth
Fantastic. Brutal, affecting, magical and visually stunning. “No! Don’t go into the metaphor!”

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Seriously, some actual posts on actual things are coming. Promise.

10 - Pac-Man Championship Edition (X360)
The original never gripped me like this. God, but I hate that little pink bastard.

9 - God Of War 2 (PS2)

Big, but not clever. So ridiculously macho that I felt slightly embarrassed playing it.

8 - Crackdown (X360)

A flawed gem, and a brilliant 3D platformer disguised as a Grand Theft Also sandbox tediumfest.

7 - Galactic Civilizations 2 - Dark Avatar (PC)
Best expansion pack ever. And I’ve a horrible feeling I’ll end up shelling out for the new one in the new year, too.

6 - Team Fortress 2 (PC)

The online shooter for people who can’t stand online shooters. In related news, I can’t stand online shooters.

5 - Guitar Hero II (PS2)

Nearly ruined by an aggressively awful thash-metal forum-kiddie track list full of songs that are a) rubbish and b) no fun to play. Fortunately, the good bits are even better than the first Guitar Hero. Freebird is the (second) best end-of-game boss ever, and the bit at the end of the solo in Sweet Child Of Mine where your fingers flash through a blindingly fast series of notes with absolutely zero input from your conscious mind is utterly euphoric.

4 - Puzzle Quest (DS)
It’s a strategic fantasy RPG! It’s a puzzle game! It’s the nerdiest thing ever!

3 - Ace Combat 6 (X360)

All my twelve-year-old, Top-Gun, Biggles-Flies-Undone dreams come true at once. Especially when you’ve got Ride Of The Valkyries / the Airwolf theme / Harold Faultermeyer blasting away in the background. Ace Combat 6! You’re still dangerous. You can be my wingman any time. Even if your cutscenes suck like an industrial sucking machine.

2 - Wii Sports (Wii. Err, obv)

The closest I came to exercise in 2007. The first time I managed to connect with a home run that left the stadium might have been my biggest gaming thrill of the year.

1 - Portal (PC)

This was a triumph. I’m making a note here – “huge success”. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

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Most out of date. Post. Ever.

Still, I recently picked up GalCiv2 again, which made me want to go back to this - one of the many things I started writing during my long hiatus and never got round to finishing.

So, without even a subtle intimation of the possibility of further ado:

Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion (PC)
Oblivion’s experience system is fucking stupid, with every other creature in the gameworld becoming more powerful every time you do and so seriously damaging your sense of achievement or advancement when you gain a level.

The artificial intelligence isn’t. Enemies you’ve shot with a bloody great arrow will happily return to their guard post after a limited amount of headless-chicken running about, seemingly regarding a sucking chest-wound as something that’s not even worth bothering to fill in the workplace accident book for.

The dialogue is trite and almost totally devoid of character or charm, generally ripped straight out of The Bumper Book Of Fantasy Game Clichés. This is a problem that’s particularly evident in the quests relating to the game’s main storyline. You know, the one you’re supposed to actually care about.

You can run backwards as fast as you can run forwards, making it a viable (and at some points in the game, necessary) tactic to fight your opponents by legging it full-tilt in reverse around the countryside, firing arrow after arrow until the other fella keels over doing a fairly good impression of a hedgehog suffering from male pattern baldness. These Benny Hillian antics help immersion not one tiny bit.

I could go on. I can think of a dozen different ways that the game’s fucked, big and small. The map system holds your hand far too much. The menu screens are chunky and horrible. It doesn’t let your character carry enough, meaning that getting enough loot from a dungeon to make the effort of getting there and slaughtering all the beasties inside worthwhile is an unnecessarily tedious, laborious process.

But here’s the thing – I racked up over a hundred hours playing this game.

A fucking HUNDRED.

In my defence, I was unemployed at the time.

So. What exactly does a man do for a hundred hours in Oblivion? Well, in my case I seemed to have been hit by a phaser set to “Sudden Interest In Botany”. I’m mildly ashamed to recall large chunks of time spent wandering the gloriously-rendered landscape picking flowers. I remember emerging hunched and blinking for a rare foray into our really-real world garden, spotting a small pink bloom and thinking “Oh! A peony! Great, now if I can get my hands on a strawberry I’ll be able to knock together a quick Cure Poison…”

This, plainly, is why I don’t get out more.

For all Oblivion’s problems, for all its bad decisions, lack of polish and missed opportunities, it succeeds utterly in providing you with a big, gorgeous, stupid world and the chance to lose yourself in it.

And the chance to plummet off of big, gorgeous, stupid cliffs while running backwards away from big, gorgeous, stupid wildlife that you disturbed while in the course of looking for some Aloe Vera, natch.

God Hand (PS2)
God Hand is a one-trick pony. That’s OK when it’s a really good trick. God Hand is rock-hard. That’s OK when it’s totally fair.

In the twenty hours it took to plough through the game in Normal mode, I cannot remember ever complaining that one of the enemies had defeated me because of a cheap or unfair attack.

Considering how many times I got defeated, that’s good game design right there. Believe me, God Hand is HARD.

In God Hand, you play a fella named Gene. Gene has a big coat, a standard-issue game-character brash-seventeen-year-old-American voice and, as you might expect, a Hand. That once belonged to a God. Gene uses this Hand in exactly the way you’d expect any brash seventeen-year-old American to. Alright, the other way you’d expect a brash seventeen-year-old American to, ie he slaps people around.

To be honest, the game’s not much to look at. A lot of the character models are a little stiff and most of the environments are decidedly ropy. The sound is terrific, though, with quirky, catchy music (Elvis’ theme is a personal fave, as is the Hawai’i Five-O-ish menu tune) and chunky effects that really help to give the combat its physical, visceral feel.

Ah, the combat. That’ll be the one trick, then.

Starting with a basic suite of fighting moves, you collect more by either (rarely) finding them in-game, or (much more common) buying them from the shop that you can access between levels. You then map these moves as you like to your d-pad’s face buttons, plus specify a set of attacks that will combo together as you hammer at the X button. This gives loads of scope to experiment and find your own fighting style, or to modify your moveset to counter a specific situation or boss. It also adds an extra little “I Made This!” thrill each time your carefully-crafted combo hammers some brightly-coloured headcase to within an inch of his miserable life.

God Hand is, in essence, a 3D version of Final Fight. You walk into an area. You encounter waves of badly-dressed opponents. You hand out the kicking they so richly deserve. Repeat until fade. Clobber enough blaggards and you can enter God Hand Mode, which makes you nigh-invulnerable for a short time whilst simultaneously increasing the amount of damage your blows inflict.

You might accuse God Hand of being repetitive, and you might be right. But it’s repetitive in the same way that Tetris is repetitive - repeated little moments of satisfaction derived from beating the ever-increasing odds through nothing but your own wits and skill.

Alright, nothing but your own wits and skill and a Hand with one previous not-quite-careful-enough God owner.

It’s very hard. It’s very funny. It’s very good.

Galactic Civilizations II – Dread Lords / Dark Avatar (PC)
When I was a boy, I used to love designing spaceships. Warships to be exact. My notebooks were covered with crudely-drawn spiky little fighters and huge, knobbly battleships, conducting grand fleet maneuvers around my lesson notes.

When I was about fourteen, I discovered board games like Star Strike and Interceptor and this minor obsession went from lumpy drawings and descriptions to elaborately calculated in-game stats and even histories. I never actually, y’know. Played the games or anything. Don’t be mad. I just spent hours totting up rows and rows of numbers, crafting intricately-detailed fleets for the sheer joy of creation.

The only drawback (if you don’t count being a nerdy spotty adolescent hermit freak as a drawback) was that my artistic talent never came close to matching my invention, that I could never see my ships anywhere except in my mind’s eye.

Twenty years later, and GalCiv2 shows up.

Yes, yes, yes, there’s a perfectly lovely and relentlessly addictive turn-based strategy game in there, but I’d be lying if I tried to tell you that the appeal lay anywhere than in the huge, massively flexible ship designer. In a stroke of genius, alongside all the functional components (weapons, defences, sensors, “utility” modules like mining or colony constructors) that you can bolt onto your hull, you’re also supplied with an enormous quantity of stuff that takes up no space and is simply there for visual impact, so even someone like me who has Stevie Wonder’s eye for art can create some pretty funky-looking deep-space-death-dealing tin cans..

And in an even more genius-y stroke, when your ships clash with the enemy’s you get to see the battle played out in full spinny-rotatey 3D so that you get to admire your designs doing what they’re meant to do.

I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…

(When naming ships, I have a tendency to get carried away. I went from the Hammer-class corvette to the Thunder God-class destroyer and on to the Ragnarok-class cruiser. This left me with not a lot of headroom, macho-wise, when I got to start using Huge hulls, and thus led to ships with names like the USS Earth-Shattering Kaboom and the USS Fuck You All. But I digress.)

It’s impossible to explain the degree to which this game appeals to my inner (OK, outer) geek. Swarms of fighters and corvettes provide local defence for my worlds while individually-named capital ships form up into battlegroups and cruise into enemy territory bringing peace through superior firepower.

It just needs the Stormtrooper March playing in the background as your fleet glides into position, and it’d be perfect.

Chuck in the best after-sales support I’ve ever seen for a PC game (the developers are still creating significant gameplay patches for GalCiv2 well over a year after its release – not because it’s buggy, but because they’re committed to polishing the game until it glitters like, well, like C-beams off Tannhauser Gate) and you’ve got the best turn-based strategy game I’ve played since Civilisation 2. Hurrah!

Dragon Quest VIII – Journey Of The Cursed King (PS2)
Mrs. Horn, Blue Man Jr. and I each sunk over seventy hours into this game. In the month or so after Christmas, it was nigh-impossible to get near the TV in the front room because one or other of us was permanently stationed there.

If I had to sum Dragon Quest VIII up in one word, it’d be “charming”. If I had to do it in two words, it’d be “charming, big”. Three words? “charming, big, undemanding”. But that’s undemanding in a good way, it’s undemanding the way that an episode of Only Fools And Horses is undemanding, the way that a Teenage Fanclub album is undemanding, the way a Terry Pratchett book is undemanding. I’m not saying Dragon Quest is easy (although it is, a bit), I’m not saying it’s dumbed-down, I’m saying that it’s a wonderfully relaxing, beautiful and well-crafted way to pass several dozen hours of your life.

It’s not without its flaws. Largely unavoidable random wilderness encounters can be annoyingly frequent. The save system is a bit awkwardly implemented. However, these fairly petty complaints are blown away by the things Dragon Quest VIII does well - the gorgeous anime-style art, character and monster design. The voice acting. The simple, elegant combat system.

I’m not sure I’ve ever described a game as “lovely” before, but if I were ever going to, now’s the time. Dragon Quest VIII is a lovely game, playing it is like taking a holiday to a brighter, cleaner, funnier, better world and if you’ve any time at all for Japanese RPGs or, indeed, any joy in your soul I would firmly recommend you check it out.

Castlevania – Dawn Of Sorrow (DS)
There is a long list of maladies and misfortunes that videogaming has visited upon me in twenty-plus years of pursuing the hobby. Kid Chameleon Neck (caused by playing the Mega Drive platformer on the demo system in Game, which positioned its monitor a good two feet or so above the average person’s natural eyeline). Streetfighter Thumb (tenderness brought on by repeatedly sliding the aforementioned digit around the SNES controller’s D-pad to do Ryu’s Dragon Punch). Civ 2 Eyeball (the dry, itchy feeling around the ocular cavities upon realising that your “quick half-hour before bed” playing Sid Meier’s opus has, in fact, lasted until dawn). Guitar Hero Finger, of which we shall speak more later.

To this list we must add a new complaint – Castlevania Bottom. This condition is characterised by a distinctly uncomfortable numbness in the hindquarters, brought on by excessive time spent perched on the toilet whilst in pursuit of, for example, a rare and annoyingly elusive Valkyrie Soul.

It’s hard to put nail down exactly what it is about C:DoS that’s so utterly compelling. There’s no single aspect or feature of the game that leaps out, grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go.

Yes, it’s big.

Yes, it’s nice-looking in a prettiest-SNES-game-ever sort’ve way.

Yes, the enemies are more lovingly and imaginatively designed than you’ll see in any game that doesn’t rhyme with Bragon Breast Bait – Bourney Bof Bee Burst Bing.

Yes, you’re given just tons of ways of dispatching these enemies, from the gloriously pyrotechnic (Mandragora soul vs. everything) to the satisfyingly visceral (battleaxe vs. ghouls. As Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay torso critical 16 would have it – “your enemy falls to the ground in two different pieces”).

Yes, the exploration-platforming aspect of the game is perfectly-judged, needing enough skill to make progress feel like an achievement, but not so much that it ever frustrates for long.

Yes, the myriad of abilities and items scattered around for you to collect appeal to your inner obsessive-compulsive.

But no, there’s nothing obvious that makes Castlevania unputdownable. The game just gives you a big slice of unpretentious, excellently-crafted lo-fi fun, and with the minor exception of the borderline-incomprehensible storyline it gets right pretty much everything it’s possible to get right.

In other words, it’s the Bizarro Oblivion.

We Love Katamari (PS2)
Right at the moment, it feels like the shelves of your friendly neighbourhood games retailer are chock-full of nothing except grey first-person shooters and row after row of joyless, mean-spirited Grand Theft Also games with all the violence, nastiness and nihilism of their progenitor series but not a trace of its wit or intelligence.

The Saint’s Bulletproof Emergency Gangsta Police Warriors is the disease. Meet the cure.

We Love Katamari put a big stupid grin on my face from the very first second of its intro movie, a smile that barely wavered the entire time the disk was in my PS2. It’s a game that oozes charm like a maple oozes sap.

Does a maple ooze sap? If it’s not a plant you can use to brew a Chameleon potion, then I know sod-all about it.

Anyway.

Each level sees you rolling a big sticky ball – the titular katamari – around to pick up stuff. As you pick up more stuff, your katamari gets bigger. As it gets bigger, you’re able to pick up bigger stuff. Generally, you’re either trying to make the katamari as big as possible in a certain amount of time, or you’re trying to get it to a certain size as quickly as possible. The core gameplay is as simple, and as brilliant, as that.

It’s the little things that elevate We Love Katamari from being a fun little romp to being one of the most memorable games I’ve played in years – the first time your katamari gets big enough to start rolling up people, instantly turning you from a rat in a maze who’s having to carefully pick his way around looming obstacles that threaten to knock things off of your collection, into a cackling force of unstoppable terror. The way that when you roll up something alive, its little legs start going twenty to the dozen as its rolled over and over on your katamari. The utterly deranged, completely baffling and yet on occasion strangely touching plot. The music. My God, the music. Not since Freedom Force (”Nu-cle-ar Vin-ter, ahhhhh-ahhhh-ah! Turns your vorld to snooooow!”) has a game boasted such an ear-worm of a theme.

All together now!

”Naaaa, na-na-na na-na-naa-naa, Katamari Damacy!
Naaaa, na-na-na na-na-naa-naa, Katamari on the swing!”

We Love Katamari? Yes, as it happens, we do.

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• There’s Something Going On – Baby Bird
  My only previous exposure to Baby Bird was the massively grating and at-the-time totally inescapable chorus to their one big hit, “You’re Gorgeous”, so this album took me completely by surprise.
  
  It’s largely painted in shades of sad, running from chirpy-but-hollow (If You’ll Be Mine) through melancholy-but-epic (standout track Back Together) to chilling-but-really-really-chilling (Take Me Back) but if that doesn’t bother you – or, indeed if it’s a bonus – then I urge you to check this album out. It’s desolate, it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s… well. It’s gorgeous.

• What Do Pretty Girls Do? – Kirsty MacColl
  A collection of her Radio 1 sessions. Between this and the outstanding three-disk retrospective From Croydon To Cuba, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of Kirsty MacColl lately, and my life’s the better for it. This is pop music how it’s meant to be, full of wit and heartbreak and joy and soul. In a world in which pop has been conquered by wave after relentless wave of Identikit jiggling machines, that’s a rare and rather lovely thing.

• Silent Alarm – Bloc Party
  I sort’ve skimmed over this album on first hearing it last year. On a semi-random re-listen a few days ago, I’ve been drawn in a lot more. Really good choppy pop / art-rock fun, especially the undulating, hypnotic opening track, Like Eating Glass. I’m greatly looking forward to having a crack at Helicopter come Guitar Hero III.
  

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Yes, I know that the posts about things I don’t like are always more entertaining than posts about the things I do like. So let me try and get the nice out of my system all at once, eh? Then we can get back to the stuff you’re reading this for, the incoherent bellowing about things that nobody in their right mind cares about but that infuriate me to the point of physical nausea.

You know. Like that fucking advert for Eon.

The one about them opening a wind farm?

That illustrates its tremendous power by showing a bunch of people getting blown around a seaside town?

Thus strongly implying that there’s an energy company out there who’re under the impression that wind turbines create wind?

Presumably, Eon think that’s why Holland’s so flat. All those windmills have blown the hills over.

Tossers.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh yes. Spreading the love.

• The Wire
  I don’t want to eulogise this too much, since better minds than mine have already covered the ground more than adequately. So I’ll just say that Christ, it’s good. I’m reaching the end of the third series now, and if there’s a better-scripted, better-acted, more authentic-feeling, funnier, bleaker TV programme out there, then I’ve never come across it.

• Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
  All the way through I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this spoof eighties horror series isn’t quite as funny as it should be. There are a few gems, though - “it’s not my fault! Bastard monkey hands!” might just replace “Excuse me, but are you the one they call the Cincinnati Kid?” as the go-to pisstake every time somebody fucks up a deal at our semi-regular poker game.
  
  (How far do you think we are from a remake of The Odd Couple starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn or Don Cheadle and Adam “Fucking” Sandler, by the way? A year? Two? I think that might mark the point when I give up on human society altogether, to be honest.)

• The Peter Serafinowicz Show
  God knows I like Peter “Hi! It’s Duane Benzie / Well fuck-a-doodle-doo!” Serafinowicz. And I tried to like this series, I really really did. But for every great sketch (read: every sketch with Brian Butterfield in it. Especially the detective agency) there were four or five more that left me completely cold. Boo.

• Have I Got News For You?
  A shadow what it was ten years ago. Still the best British comedy on TV at the moment by a street.

• Mission Impossible
  Grabbed a cheap box set of the three films a few weeks ago, because I really liked the first one, have a certain affection for the utterly preposterous sequel that I don’t like to talk about in polite company, and haven’t seen the third but it’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman in it so how bad can it be?
  
  There’s an ad doing the rounds at the moment for a film whose name temporarily eludes me.
  
  ”Three of the greatest actors of their generation…” it starts.
  
  Oh? I think. My, I wonder? Whoever they could mean?
  
  “Robert Redford…”
  
  Well, yeah, I suppose he’s there or thereabouts. The Sting is one of the top ten best films ever made, after all.
  
  “Meryl Streep…”
  
  Fair enough.
  
  “And Tom Cruise!”
  
  You WHAT?
  
  One of the greatest actors of his generation. Tom “Angry Garden Gnome” Cruise. Fuck OFF! The richest actor of his generation, fine. The most famous actor of his generation, certainly. But greatest? In Cruise’s seventy squillion film-long CV, exactly how many quote-unquote great performances has he given? Like, ever?
  
  Magnolia, obviously. So there’s one.
  If you can find another film in which he’s better than “OK, Considering It’s Tom Fucking Cruise” though, then you’re a better person than me. Born On The Fourth Of July, Rain Main, that one where he’s the hitman riding around in Jamie Foxx’s cab – all decent performances but not one whit more. I really liked his character in Interview With The Vampire, but I’d be the first to admit that it wasn’t so much a terrific acting job as an exercise in eye-rolling, scenery-chewing, Cassanova Frankenstein-esque pantomime villainy.
  
  One of the greatest actors of his generation my substantial pasty ARSE.
  
  Anyway, I bring that ad up here for this reason – re-watching the first Mission Impossible last night, I realised with a sudden jolt that Tom Cruise is conspicuously, no-fooling fucking TERRIBLE in it.
  
  Honestly. Nobody was more surprised than me.
  
  Ethan Hunt, AKA the Most Over-Trained Man In The Universe is meant to be a hyper-competent super-secret agent, but Cruise turns him into a twitching, gurning basket-case. There’s no depth, no subtlety, no… anything. Look at the scene where he finds a big clue that suggests the Emmanuelle Béart character might have betrayed him. As soon as she speaks, he might as well have a big flashing neon sign bolted to his weird, almost-entirely-rectangular, Lego-block head saying “I Have Found A Big Clue That Suggests You Might Have Betrayed Me.” It’s feeble.
  
  Compare and contrast Matt Damon in the Bourne films. Nobody’s likely to mistake Matt Damon for one of the greatest actors of his generation any time soon, and yet – especially in the later two films - Jason Bourne is orders of magnitude more convincing as a super-spy than Ethan Hunt.
  
  Anyway. Mission Impossible. For all the things wrong with it, it’s not another dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks Hollywood actioner, and is still decent fun despite the Cruisebot’s best efforts.
  
  

More of the fleeting distractions from my inevitable shuffle toward the grave to follow. Betcha can’t hardly wait.

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