John Walker's Electronic House

Last September I thought this was going to be the one to watch. Shocked that it wasn’t picked up based on the excellent pilot, tales of Jeff Goldblum’s loony homicide detective and his imaginary victim buddies seemed like it should be ideal murder mystery TV. The deceased appears to Raines until he can solve their crime, but rather than being ghosts, they’re simply the result of his own delusions, and thus a helpful muse for his deliberations. The pilot had fun with this, having Raines’ own prejudices toward prostitutes play on how the victim appeared, along with some very smart writing as Raines leapt to intuitive conclusions (identifying the father as abusive immediately, then conflicting his assumptions). Then there’s the nice reveal at the end that his Latino buddy and former partner is also dead, and seems to be sticking around in Raines’ brains.

The reappearance a month ago of the first episode, finally broadcast on NBC, had a strange surprise. Luis Guzman, who had played Jeff’s dead friend, was entirely gone, replaced by Malik Yoba as Charlie, his black dead former partner friend. Why the racial change? Who knows. Did it matter? Not really. People who love Guzman will be disappointed, obviously, but Yoba did a fine job, and the banter was just as fun, if not even more natural.

But then came episode 2, which pretended it was going to delve into The Shield territory with a gang-related crime, but instead flapped about aimlessly, forgot Charlie altogether, and became a remarkably generic murder mystery where the apparantly bad guy corpse was lamely given good guy status by the end. And already having the cerebral haunting felt like a gimmick they’d run out of ideas for. By episode 3’s moralising on the homeless – and despite the presence of the constantly great Laurie Metcalf as the bag lady with an oh-so surprisingly normal past (a lesson for us all there) – it was hopeless, Goldblum doing his best to apply his trademark meta-stammering to woefully barren dialogue. It feels like the scripts were found in a time capsule buried in the 1970s, hurriedly subbed to mention contemporary technology to disguise their age. I decided not to bother with episode 4, but I expect it was about the murder of a young tearaway who was being given a second chance by the local boxing club, one of whose staff turns out to be involved in some shady dealings with match fixing.

Most daft is the show’s constant desperation for you to remember that the apparitions aren’t ghosts. Goldblum’s increasingly awkward voiceover repeatedly states this for the viewer, just in case they’ve forgotten over the last ten minutes. But there’s only so many ways a narration can mention this before it begins to sound as if the show is cross with its viewers for not getting it yet. It’s like the fantastic Mr Show sketch about the pre-recorded phone-in show.

If anything, this drives home that the conceit probably isn’t good enough. In fact, wouldn’t it just be far more interesting if they were ghosts who haunted him until the crime was solved?

Sorry Raines – I wanted so very much to like you, but you were rubbish. As Jeff would say, “That’s one big pile of shit.”

Yes indeed, it’s time for another TV round-up.

Thanks to the unique way US television has gone completely cuckoo, lots of new shows have recently started, with others waking up from their extended hiatus. So it’s probably important to find out what to think about them.

I’ve got more to say than previously, which will make some scream I realise, so I’m posting them as individual posts, and I’ve added a label for “Television”, so they’re more identifiably ignorable.

Every now and then my job affords me the opportunity to promote a great game that no one’s heard of. Thanks to Stu forcing me to play it, one recently was Slither Link. It’s the first game I’ve ever given 10/10 in nine years of the job (I’ve only ever given two games 90% or higher, and one of those was, well, let’s not talk about it – it was eight years ago). And now, having a look at Play Asia’s DS front page, I see that the formerly obscure, unknown game is now on their “bestsellers” list.

I feel proud.

Possibly the best example of what is so wrong with Corner Shop 2 would be the bowling alley. Available in the second clutch of buildings to buy, your task is not to enjoy a sweet bowling mini-game, but rather to stand the pins back up and roll the balls back toward the customer after their goes. It’s from this menial angle that potential fun is approached throughout. It’s a bit like an FPS where you have to clean up the dead bodies and mop the floors after the NPC hero has blasted his way through the corridor. You watch the mad-faced cartoon blobs excitedly throwing the ball at the pins, probably with a speech bubble saying something utterly bonkers like, “If I hit this, I’ll ask out Mai!” and then tidy up afterward. I sure hope he was having fun.

‘My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”‘

Here’s the latest:

Went to Austria. Saw castles and mountains and birdies.

Played in the garden with the cat.

Watched baseball!

In other news, this is correct.

It seems important to note that Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales are the two most repulsive, fetid vomit-chunks spewed from the rancid, rotting arse of Beelzebub, and I hope their homes are filled with the faeces of ten thousand choleraic horses.

recently, because I hate you.

Back Wednesday.

Griefers are much maligned. Condemned as the playground bullies of the online world, they are in fact masters of innovation.

Sure, there’s the sort of git who mindlessly crashes an online funeral, but what about the guy who figures out a way to ninja-style-kill a Battlefield pilot in midair? For every knob who spawn-camps, there’s another who is healing the enemy when no one’s looking. These are the anarchists of gaming, taking the ingredients they’re given and making a cake no one was expecting. Jealous? You should be. So why not begin your career of adding imagination to multiplayer gaming today?

PC Gamer has a website now, which reprints various content from the magazine into this place they call “the internet”. And on it, it seems, is a feature I wrote for the current issue, as a sort of how-to guide for being naughty in games.

I strongly recommend installing both an ad blocker and a flash blocker before you visit the site, as it will otherwise destroy your browser with its, er, design. But then I strongly recommend installing those for reading the internet anyway.