John Walker's Electronic House

Do you know who is the saddest person of all the people?

I do.

He’s the guitarist for the female singer on the late night talk show. They’re not a band, they’re just the guys she’s currently hired to play the tune in the background while she’s famous in front of it.

But the guitarist, he’s a proper rock star!

Which he exhibits by bending over backwards with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, then stomping around with his head banging, as he strums the twee rubbish.

He is the saddest person of all the people.

Channel 4’s Inside Nature’s Giants has been almost brilliant, constantly held back by presenter Mark Evans’ determination to present it to confused children.

The programme, in which some of the world’s biggest creatures (elephant, giraffe, whale, etc) are dissected, is absolutely fascinating. But watching it feels like a fight to ignore Evans and his about-to-cry face saying things like, “Once upon a time…” when trying to explain evolutionary theory. But this is as nothing when compared to his constant apologising for the programme’s existence.

This is never worse than in the elephant’s episode, where he implores with the audience to forgive the existence of every moment of it. Phrases like, “Of course it’s a complete tragedy that the elephant has died…” NO IT ISN’T! It is in no way a “tragedy” that this animal has died. It would be very sad if it were your pet elephant, or if it were the last elephant in the world, but it was not. It was a zoo elephant that was too ill to stay alive, and so was put down. And now, brilliantly, it’s here on this programme for the public to witness something that’s usually carried on in private, a dissection of such an incredible animal.

Evans demonstrates how out of place he is in this programme when he’s asked by a couple of kids, around 10, about something hanging off the side of the whale they’re dissecting in N. Ireland. Is it skin or plastic they want to know. And suddenly he comes alive! Enthusiastically he runs over, grabs a piece of it, and explains why the whale’s skin is flaking off, illustrating it for them with examples of how their own skin can flake off. He’s spirited and clear, and involves the children. He’s a children’s presenter, and he’s great at it. Really great. But this is on late at night on Channel 4, for adults.

Sorry, sorry! Sorry it died! Sorry we’re dissecting it! Sorry I’m here! Sorry! Sorry!

I wish this programme, so brazenly called “Inside Nature’s Giants”, was proud of itself. Rather than appalled.

Thank goodness it also features Richard Dawkins explaining the biology, as he seems to have the confidence in his viewer that he or she might not be a moron. He’s used all too briefly, but makes a big difference when he appears. And it’s ultimately a great show. There’s a tinge of that frustrating Channel 4 tendancy to imply this is about grossing people out, rather than educating – something they did horrendously during the human autopsy programmes a few years ago. As intestines spill out, there are the shots of audience members looking horrified. But despite these weird flaws, ignoring the nonsense, it’s still well worth watching.

You can watch all the episodes here.

In the wonderful world of criticism there are lots of horribly lazy phrases people fall back on. For people who care a weeny bit more about what they’re writing, such phrases cause everything from wincing to full body spasms. And these phrases have a king.

When trying to convey to the reader whether they may like the product one is reviewing, the very easiest way to put this across is to explain, “If you like [similar product] or [another similar product], then you’ll love [product being reviewed].” There’s a parody by which this most awful and lazy of devices is known. It is:

“If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this sort of thing.”

Not only is there the inherent redundancy, but it’s also the most massively unhelpful sentence to read if you a) haven’t heard of the compared products, or b) don’t like them for specific reasons that may not apply to the current subject. It should never, ever be written. Ever. By no one. If you see it, write the author’s name down in a list of people you’ll roll your eyes at, or car over.

And if you’re looking for this at its absolute worst – to a point where it creates convulsions in all right-minded people – you want to make your way to the Odeon website.

Let’s have a look at some of the film descriptions for the currently showing films at the Odeon in Bath.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs:

If you liked ‘Bolt’ and ‘Finding Nemo’, you’ll love ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’.

Let’s see. There’s Disney’s Bolt, a film about a dog who believes he has super powers, but spends the movie learning that he does not. And there’s Finding Nemo, Pixar’s remarkable comedy drama about a fish separated from his father after the tragic death of his mother and hundreds of siblings. The idea of putting the two films in the same category is peculiar enough, let alone implying that liking either of them will cause you to escalate your feelings in response to the third, and most poor, Ice Age film. Two CGI children’s films were plucked out of the air, with Bolt thrown in to avoid including two Pixar choices. Perhaps, “If you liked Ice Age and Ice Age 2, you’ll love Ice Age 3” might have been slightly more relevant.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

If you liked ‘Babe and ‘Good Boy’, you’ll love ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’.

Possibly the title alone is enough to tip you off that Beverly Hills Chihuahua isn’t reviewing all that well. The New York Post wrote, “The film is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The audience is the fire hydrant.” So there’s a good chance that if you “love” this film, your taste in the films you “like” is going to be suspect. But what choices! Good Boy, which I’d never heard of before, is the straight-to-video tale of a dog from space visiting Earth. Babe is the vastly successful story based on Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep Pig, that saw a generation of children refuse to eat bacon for about two weeks. One’s about a dog, the other’s got, um, talking animals in it? They’re bound to lead to your enjoying the tale of a rich, spoilt LA Chihuahua lost in grubby poor people’s Mexico.

Brüno

An easy one, right? Sacha Baron-Cohen’s third film. His third film taking an old character and seeing how much trouble he can get himself in with it in America. Ali G, Borat, Brüno. It’s a simple formula.

If you liked ‘Borat’ and ‘Yes Man’, you’ll love ‘Brüno’.

Um, half way there. Yes Man is last year’s poorly received Jim Carey movie vaguely based on the idea from Danny Wallace’s book where he said yes to every offer for a year. Which has precisely what to do with Baron-Cohen pretending to be gay to aggravate rednecks, or pratting about at fashion shows?

It then gets too boring to carry on. Fans of gangster movies will love The Departed. Those who enjoy comedy films will love a comedy film. Those who like special effects will love special effects films. But then there’s one shining example of this horror hidden in the site. Not to be released at the God-forsaken Bath Odeon (lest they not be able to run Harry Potter on all seven hundred screens at once), the extremely excellent-looking Moon is due to be released this Friday. Old-school hard-scifi, with rarely more than one character present, focusing on isolation and minimalism, it brings to mind obvious comparisons such as Solaris and 2001. But not to the Odeon’s mind. Where most critics have referred to the quietness, delicate pacing and reminiscence of classic 60s and 70s science fiction. The Odeon, they say,

If you liked ‘Transformers’ and ‘Star Trek’, you’ll love ‘Moon’.

Because they’re both in space too! Apart from Transformers. Oh, they’re all about robots! Except that Moon and Star Trek feature computers. They’re both… They have… WHAT?

Hello my blog, remember me? No, me neither.

I’ve just completed four weeks working in the offices of PC Gamer, which followed a week off, which followed a week and a half out of the country visiting Valve and E3. I’ve been quite busy. Apart from the week off. During which I worried about not being busy.

Ending four weeks in the office – twice as long as I’ve worked in any office for ten years – I know how Terry Waite must have felt.

Except of course unlike Terry Waite, I have They’re Back due at the beginning of next week, and a big feature for the following Monday. It’s a bit like if Terry Waite were released, and then told he had to spend six hours a day chained to the radiator in his own house for a couple more weeks.

I think the point I’m trying to make is that I have it a lot worse than Terry Waite.

This week has also featured an awesome time on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Even though I’ve felt a bit detached from the site for a short while, with all those weeks outside of our secret chatroom, this week we pulled together what I think might be our most awesome feature so far. Rather splendidly it came out of an idea mentioned last Thursday, and happened by Monday. Alec suggested we each write about the games that defined us as gamers. (I rather love that this notion possibly doesn’t make half a second of sense to anyone who isn’t a gamer – the thought that one’s personality could be affected, even changed, by playing games is probably horrifying to those who love to tell you that they never touch the things. (Then switch on EastEnders and slowly die.)) So we did.

The result has been pretty special. You can find them all here.

It makes me look at Rock, Paper, Shotgun with a lot of pride. Obviously other gaming sites have written about games that were special to their writers in their pasts, but I’ve a strong feeling they’ll have written about the games. We wrote about ourselves. And not because we’re all giant egotists. We are, or we wouldn’t be games journalists who believe our opinion and rating of a game is deserving of authority and respect from other people. But not because of that.

Games criticism/writing tends to be pulled between two extremes of so-called objectivity and subjectivity, with people arguing themselves into knots over which is best. Ignoring all that nonsense, and sharing who we are, and how gaming is part of why we are who we are, has created four articles I’m really proud of.

It was splendid to sink back into my brain and recall times when a moment, a place and a game all joined together to create a significant memory. Recalling times sat next to my dad as he played through games, and feeling blessed by the warm, safe happiness of those early evenings, has been a huge pleasure. I distinctly remember how those times would begin. Dad would be playing something, I’d want to watch, and I’d squeak, “Can I sit and watch you for a bit?” And dad would sigh gently, his respite from a long day at work broken, and say yes. I’d climb up on one of the tall, tall kitchen chairs at the breakfast bar, and then drive him to distraction asking what he was doing, why he was doing it, who that guy was, why he’d dropped that item, why did that spell not work, how come you just died, why are you staring at me like that? At my most pestering I’d ask him if I could have a go, and he’d relent and let me sit at the controls for a bit, flailing in the complexity of the role-playing game he’d invested so much time in, and hopefully recently saved. I distinctly remember sharing games of UFO and Civilisation, where he’d let me do the interesting bits like have battles, then take over once it got to the boring rubbish like buying bullets or negotiating land treaties. My interests in strategy gaming have not changed since I was ten.

(The comments on the articles have also been really fantastic. Occasionally, reading through comments threads can be a demoralising experience, as angry people shout insults at each other, or rude people write pointlessly unpleasant things. RPS has one of the best comment communities of any site I’ve known, but wander into the wrong subject area for a post and it can sometimes get grim. These have been almost entirely free of that. (Although I’ve removed at least one that began, “Meh…” Who in their right mind writes “Meh…” after reading someone’s shared personal experiences? I’d love to visit their house, and just as they’ve finished telling me how sad they are about the terrible situation with their friend’s marriage or whatever, I reply, “Meh.”)

So yes, go read. The feature, rather splendidly, is getting bigger all the time. Today we added a collection of similar anecdotes from other games journalists and games developers, and next week we’ve even more from industry types. It’s all rather great, really.

(And time on Gamer was superb. And I’m sorry to Terry Waite, who I’m certain reads this blog.)

It’s been a while.

I’m currently in LA, in a peculiar hotel on the edge of Korea Town, a little overly filled with Korean BBQ. My life may not be well paid, but I’m certainly one lucky guy with the peculiar things I get to do. Now Valve has finally revealed the existence of Left 4 Dead 2 I can say that I’ve been in Seattle for the weekend. Life is sometimes odd, that I sometimes can’t say where I am on the planet because cunning RPS/Gamer readers will put two and two together and get a number dangerously close to four. Valve weren’t even stating they were going to E3, let alone that they’d be revealing a brand new game. I was like an international spy.

It meant there was a spare weekend in Seattle, which was filled tremendously. I ate splendid food like six-egg omelettes at Beth’s Cafe and pulled pork sandwiches from an awesome sandwich shop, visited all the right touristy places like the Space Needle and a Duck Tour, as well as the Jim Henson exhibit, and saw Up at the cinema and Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali live on stage.

Arriving in LA would have been glum, were it not for meeting up with a chum and going for Korean food, then being given an impromptu “nickel tour” of the city in her car. Another really nice evening.

It’s been a great time, with splendid people.

Tomorrow I have to start doing some proper work as E3 begins. (Well, beyond the 2000 word exclusive preview I already wrote, and so on). I’ve not been before, and it’s a daunting schedule. It’ll be interesting, at least.

And that’s all the weather.

There’s a splendid new comedy on ABC at the moment that a grand total of no one is talking about. It’s called Better Off Ted, which is possibly the worst sitcom name of all time, but it’s the name on the smartest comedy on TV. And until this week, they seem to have gone out of their way to make sure no one finds out.

Networks and studios’ frantic actions to keep clips of their TV shows from appearing on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion are well documented, most famously with Viacom suing Google for the astonishing amounts of free advertising YouTube was offering The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, helping both programmes to become international phenomenons. Understandable Viacom were furious at millions of people worldwide seeing short clips of their programmes and developing an enthusiasm to see more. It was a disaster for them, with other countries around the world recognising the online popularity and purchasing broadcast rights. Surely no amount of money from Google could ever make up for such abhorrent results of piracy. But that’s an aside.

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Over the last three months I’ve been writing a project of Eurogamer, where I’ve replayed Knights of the Old Republic by making only the most evil choices available. Whenever I’ve played role-playing games that have offered ethical choices, I’ve always tried hard to make the decisions I believe I would make were I in that situation. Clearly I’ve always flattered myself, as I always become glowingly virtuous in all of them – a feat I don’t always quite manage in real life. As I play such games, I see those awful options, those terrible choices, and very occasionally out of intrigue I’ll pick them to find out what happens, immediately reloading to undo it all. Of course, playing like that breaks the already tenuous frame, so it’s something I mostly avoid doing. I wanted to find out what would happen if I played a favourite RPG completely against character and instinct, both as an excuse to replay the game after five or so years, and because I thought it would make for an interesting article.

I pitched it to Eurogamer as a single piece for their Retro Sunday slot, and lovely editor Tom Bramwell agreed to it. I realised there was going to be a problem after I’d finished the opening sequences on Taris, realised I’d been playing for many hours, and had already done enough terrible things to fill two articles. Tom rather generously agreed to let me break it into two parts. And then I wrote an article nearly three times as long as the standard for the first part anyway.

So playing and writing part two, I realised there were still problems. Buzzing around two planets, I’d gone through quite a transformation, and had started to thoroughly enjoy my evil ways. But I was still a long way from the end. Once again I went grovelling to Tom, explaining that I needed just one more part, oh please, go on. He agreed again, and I wrote another triple length piece for part two.

I really did finish it for part three. Although I really could have broken it in half (not least because the final piece is about 3,200 words long), instead skipping huge chunks of the game to keep it within some sensible size. This is testament to the scale of Knights of the Old Republic, just how much could be said. In the end I wrote about 9,000 words, and could likely have found another 9,000. (Although getting paid three times for this worked out pretty well.)

It’s been a fun experiment, and something I’ve had some really nice feedback from. So part one is here, then part two, and finally today’s part three. Cheers to Tom for letting me take as much time and space as he did – I cannot think of any other publication (beyond RPS) that would have let me do that.

Here for no other reason than I consumed some rum is a collection of Black Betty covers:

Ram Jam:

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Earlier this month, and somehow without a fraction of the noise of the to-ing and fro-ing in California, Vermont and Iowa completed votes that now allow same sex marriage. This enormous victory for realising the rights of loving couples to be recognised as such has, shockingly enough, upset some people. Because it’s now the case that every single person in Vermont and Iowa is now forced, BY LAW, to be in a single sex marriage. That might be wrong. It’s pretty hard to tell when you watch the remarkable advert from an organisation called NOM (National Organisation For Marriage).

You’d be forgiven for being confused by the name into thinking they were for marriage, but what their catchy acronym fails to encapsulate is their rather fevered specificity over the matter. Marriage is for men and women only they say because, well, common sense says so. What they mean is, their interpretation of their religious values says so. In fact, there’s a more sinister reason for the obfuscation: were they to be clear about their reasoning, it would put an even larger irony-shaped dent in their claimed position of defending “freedom of speech”. Here’s the ad:

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