Blue Man Sings The Whites

So. That was pretty good, wasn’t it?

A long way from being perfect, obviously – the story was pretty ploddingly predictable, with the only minor suprise being the “going away is good, staying away is better” incident. It lapsed a bit into distinctly RTD-ish technobabble as the story neared an end. The whole interaction between the Doctor and the little girl didn’t quite ring true for me, although it’s entirely possible that’s just because I’ve got no soul. The “Doctor Time” stop-motion thing were we’re shown him sifting through what he’s seeing to find the telling off-key detail was a bit gimmicky, went on too long and has been done before in slightly different form by seemingly every detective drama on US telly. If there’s one thing I don’t want Doctor Who to do, it’s remind me of an episode of flippin’ CSI.

Also: remixing the theme music – good idea, absolutely Godawful execution.

More importantly though it was funny, it had just enough emotional heft (“Why did you say six months?” “Why did you say five minutes?”), Matt Smith and Karen Gillan work brilliantly together and despite being a bit disappointing in “Episodes Written By Stephen Moffat” terms it was by leaps and bounds the best season opener in the NewWho era.

Between the episode itself and the rather spiffy “Coming Soon” montage that followed, my feelings toward the new series have been upgraded from “cautious optimism” to “understated but genuine excitement”. Please adjust your watches accordingly.

Well, that was a productive use of a couple of hours of my Friday night.

Look upon my works ye socially adequate and despair.

Best guess, that’s the better part of 300 DVDs and 500 or so hours sitting there. We’re only including feature films not TV series, standup sets or music DVDs. There is still some debate as to whether we should be watching every DVD in the house (and subjecting ourselves to Blue Man III’s petrol-station bargain-bucket action/light horror collection, or Ms. Blue Man’s diabolical taste in romcoms) or just the stuff that either Mrs. Blue Man or myself voluntarily bought.

Number Of DVDs Still Shrinkwrapped: 6 (Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, Cruel Intentions, KIll Bill vol. 1, Kill Bill vol. 2, Terminator 2, Velvet Goldmine)

Number Of DVDs That I Know We Own That Have Mysteriously Gone Walkabout: 5 (28 Weeks Later, Almost Famous: Untitled Edition, Batman Begins, Bulletproof Monk, Pirates Of The Caribbean)

Number Of DVDs That I Had No Idea We Owned: 2 (Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, Underworld: Rise Of The Lychans)

Number Of Films That We Own At Least Two Copies Of: 11 (A Matter Of Life And Death, Blade Runner, The Longest Yard, Mission Impossible 2, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, True Romance, Goodfellas, Fellowship Of The Ring, The Two Towers, Return Of The King)

DVD That I’m Most Embarassed To Admit Owning: Dead heat between Bring It On and Basic Instinct 2.

Sorry so long without a post but hey, it’s not like you’re not used to frequent inexplicable losses of signal from this direction, is it?

Here’s a measure of how eventful and thrilling my life’s been in the time I’ve been away: I’m seriously considering trying to re-watch my entire DVD collection. In alphabetical order. The drawbacks I can see to this plan are a) it would would mean watching Alien, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection then Aliens, and b) it would mean watching Batman & Robin.

Anyway, some stuff that’s been great that I’ve discovered in the last three months:

The latest Metric album (especially Gold Guns Girls). The latest Raveonettes album (especially Heart Of Stone). Moon. Mount & Blade. The latest Yeah Yeah Yeahs album (especially Dragon Queen). The Incredible Hercules. Drag Me To Hell. The Sounds (especially No-One Sleeps When I’m Awake). Castle. Lloyd Doyley’s first ever senior goal. Forza Motorsport 3 (especially after finally working out how to use the XBox steering wheel I got for Christmas last year and has been lying shamefully unused since because of my general hamfistedness. Turns out I just needed some patient tutoring. Actually, one sentence of impatient tutoring. Actually, just my wife saying “You’re turning that wheel like you’re driving a hugging clown car”). The second series of Being Human. The second series of Newswipe. Pretty much everything Gail Simone’s written for DC Comics, especially her brilliant brilliant work on Birds Of Prey, Wonder Woman and Secret Six. The Answer Me This podcast. Lego Rock Band. Snow. Oh, and the iPhone.

Some stuff that’s not been great in the last three months:

Champions Online. Work. The Doctor Who Christmas special. The end of the best coverage of any sport on UK telly as Channel Five show (probably) their last Yankee Helmetball game. The Digital Economy bill. All car insurance ads in the history of all things, ever. Flash Forward. The iPhone’s battery life when you’re playing games on it.

So yeah. Alive and reasonably well. Further updates to follow. Eventually.

Here’s proof I’d rather do anything than what I’m supposed to. Right now, in order of importance I probably ought to be a) preparing for tonight’s first session of a game I’ve never played before in a genre I’ve not GM’d in, oooh, 15 years?, b) sorting out my Christmas list or c) working. Instead, here’re some one-paragraph brainsplurges on some stuff that’s moved me to having to write over the last few months.

Once
The low-key and super-low budget story of the friendship between a Dublin busker and a young Czech pianist it made me laugh, made me weep like a tiny child for approximately 75% of its running time, then made me rush off and buy the DVD and soundtrack album. It’s not a musical, but rather a film about music so it’s just as well that the songs are absolutely bloody wonderful, by turns beautifully delicate and spine-tinglingly passionate. In an attempt to claw back my Hard-Bitten Internet Cynic image by proving that there’s nothing so exquisitely crafted and personally affecting that I can’t crush it under the lumpen weight of objective overanalysis, I’ll say that Once is better than Garden State and the Commitments, about on a par with Almost Famous but not as good as Magnolia. Rank: A

The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox360)
We bought the game solely to replace the drum controller that got knackered on our heroic expedition up the north face of Mount Rock a couple of bank holidays ago, so it was a pleasant surprise that the game was so good. It’s fair to say that nobody in the family is a big Beatles fan – personally I’m so amazingly ignorant that before playing this I’d never previously heard While My Guitar Gently Weeps or Dear Prudence (other than the Banshees’ version, obv) – but this game totally won us over. The enthusiasm that the developers obviously have for their subject matter comes across over and over again, in the animation of the band members, in the often-beautiful staging of the songs (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/With A Little Help From My Friends being a particular highlight), in the wealth of unlockable photos and video that’s included, even in the names of the Achievements. The Beatles: Rock Band is like reading an article by a really great writer on a subject they really know and really love but that you never previously cared about. Rank: B

Lie To Me
Someone’s seen House and gone “I’m getting me a piece of that action!” Quirky take on an established (some would say tired) TV genre – check. Grizzled veteran British lead actor who’s plainly having a whale of a time – check. Troubled but charismatic and brilliant central character with a distinctive gait (House’s limp, Lightman’s bizarre half-gibbon, half-Quasimodo shambling) – check. Unbelievably formulaic scripting with exactly the same story beats every week – check. The always thoroughly watchable Tim Roth does a nice job with a part that calls for him to say “Ah! Now THAT’S the truth!” fifteen times an episode but that doesn’t cover the fact that this is a slightly degraded photocopy of a show that itself has no pretentions to being anything other than disposable fluff. Rank: C

Dragon Age: Origins (PC)
Love it. Love it love it love it. It’s a properly beardy fantasy RPG for properly beardy people. I could pick nits – I’d like the game mechanics to be a bit more transparent so that I could make more informed decisions when levelling up, and while the main story feels decently epic it doesn’t wander far from painfully familiar fantasy tropes – but that would be stupid because this is the best game I’ve played this year that doesn’t involve a man dressed as a nocturnal mammal jump-kicking people in the face. What makes it come alive for me above anything else are your NPC party members, as consistently likeable a group as I’ve ever encountered in a CRPG. In particular, the droll-but-dorky Alistair (Chandler Bing in plate mail, but nowhere near as annoying as that sounds) and Morrigan the sarky heartless sorceress have spent most of the game in my active party, in large part because I enjoy them sniping at each other so much. Only slightly less fun are desperate romantic Leliana, the golum Shale who’s reminiscent of the (awesome) psychopathic android HK-47 from the (awesome) original Knights Of The Old Republic, and lust-for-life Elfish assassin Zevran who’s spent most of his time with the group trying to get into my pants. Bring on Mass Effect 2! Rank: A

[rec]
An hour of enjoyable-enough mockumentary zombie hokum, 15 minutes of HELL ON TOAST. In a good way. Rank: B

Dexter
When I first heard the premise of Dexter – a serial killer working for the Miami police department who preys on other serial killers – I was utterly repulsed. It sounded tacky and sensationalist and dark-for-the-sake-of-darkness and generally not my cup of tea. But eminently sensible people kept singing its praises, so eventually I gave it a whirl and was duly blown away. After a bit of a wobbly second series it got back on track with an excellent third (starring Jimmy Smits’ enjoyably terrible Cuban accent), and now the new season is easily the best yet. The latest episode – set on Thanksgiving – is like a distillation of everything that makes the show worth watching. It’s got Dexter struggling to cope with regular human interaction, it’s got terrific performances all round (particularly from John Lithgow in magnificently creepy form) and it’s got incredibly tense sequences alongside moments that are laugh-out-loud funny. It really is pretty much as good as telly gets at the moment. Rank: A

Lungs – Florence + The Machine
Since last.fm arrived on the FunSquareSuperPlus, I’ve spent a fair bit of time listening its automatically-generated reccomend-o-tron. It seems that Skynet has decided that I’m almost exclusively into impassioned and slightly eccentric female singer-songwriters. And, you know. It’s hard to argue. So it’s fair to say that there was a better-than-average chance I’d go for this album. And sure enough, it’s awesome and proof positive that modern pop really needs more a) harp-playing and b) songs about werewolf-themed sexuality. Rank: A

Let The Right One In
Unsettling lo-fi Swedish vampire flick that plays with themes of alienation and adolescence. But better than that sounds. I couldn’t shake the feeling there was stuff going on here that I was too stupid to understand - what was with the repeated shots of characters’ feet, f’rinstance? Rank: B

The number of tracks available for the Rock Band series reached went over the 1000 mark this week. That’s a daunting amount of music to wade through, and so to celebrate the release of what people are calling The Three Songs That Everyone’s Been Waiting For Off Nevermind, I thought I’d chuck together a quick list of ten downloadable tracks that you really shouldn’t miss.

So I did. And this is it.

Hard To Handle – Black Crowes
Yeah, it’s just an “As Made Famous By” jobbie, but it’s a total crowdpleaser, not least because of the big a capella chorus that everyone can join in on. As good on bass and drums as it is on guitar, which is this good: very good indeed.

Live Forever – Oasis
Chance to do Liam’s Manc whine plus two of Oasis’ three best guitar solos = winner. Mic stand and singing with your hands clasped behind your back compulsory.

Crushcrushcrush – Paramore
It’s a rubbish song, and I’m obliged to grumble whenever my daughter picks to sing it (which is only, you know, every time we play it). But secretly, playing the chorus is an absolute hoot. Don’t tell her, alright?

More Than A Feeling – Boston
Cheesier than the Waitrose deli counter, but the pre-chorus riff that ends with the two rapid bursts of three notes? Possibly my favourite guitar bit in the whole game. And brilliantly there’s a long sustained note straight after it that gives you plenty of time to bask in the warm glow of your own awesomeness.

Gouge Away – Pixies
Not a difficult song on guitar and bass, but it’s got a significantly different “feel” to almost everything else in the game and that makes it interesting. And Frank Black hits the sweet spot where his vocals are demented enough that you can give them EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT but not quite so demented that they’re impossible to replicate (hello, Debaser!).

Skullcrusher Mountain – Jonathan Coulton
“I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like him
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, and you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much?
Maybe I used too many monkeys?
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony
Making a gift for you?”
Lyrically and musically Coulton’s stuff is, almost without exception, an absolute blast to sing. I’d highly recommend checking out Re: Your Brains, too. Word around the campfire is that The Future Soon is next up which should also be a winner, although I’m still hoping for Shop Vac at some point.

The Way That It Shows – Richard Thompson
It seemed an odd choice from RT’s extensive back-catalogue, but as soon as you play it you can see why they went for it. It’s a song that’s put together like a Swiss watch, every element meshing together with exquisite precision. The guitar part, predictably, is outstanding – gradually becoming more and more intense as the song goes on before reaching its climax in an extended, incendiary solo.

I’m Eighteen – Alice Cooper
Maybe the best song about being a teenager ever, and this live version is agreeably ragged and twiddly.

Stonehenge – Spinal Tap
Heavy Duty is technically trickier, doesn’t have long periods in it where certain band members aren’t doing anything and is arguably all-around more fun to play, but I can’t get enough of that mandolin solo. And doing the “Nobody knows who they were… or… what they were doing” line in the Nigel Tufnel stunned, spacey Mockney voice is yet to get old. Might want to keep an eye on your drummer, though.

Tribute – Tenacious D
The kind of song that Rock Band does best is the overwrought power-ballad. This? Well, it really is the ne plus ultra of overwrought power-ballads. Great fun on guitar and drums, even more fun on vocals – “He asked us… *Snort-grunt-growl-thing* ‘Be you angels?’ And we said ‘NAY! We are but men! ROCK! *Long-drawn-out-overtheatrical-wailing*”

This started as an entry in my soon-to-be-forthcoming One-Paragraph ThingThink Roundup but it spiralled wildly out of control AS YOU SHALL QUICKLY SEE. Also: of the 20 people who read this blog, about 3 of you are likely to be even remotely interested, but apparently I really needed to get this off my chest. So, sincere apologies. And so, without further ado:

I owned every single Madden game between 1994 and 2008 before EA ditching the PC as a platform led to me missing last year’s. If there’s a series of games that I’ve sunk more time into over the years I can’t think of it. This isn’t a boast – blimey, it’s almost the opposite – but I mention it for context, so that you’re aware that these opinions are in no way coming from a sniffy Eurotrash “I Find It Curious That A Nation That Prides Itself On Machismo Feels The Need To Strap On Thirty Pounds Of Armour In Order To Play Rugby” sort’ve place. With that out of the way, here are my top ten problems with Madden 10:

1. The running game doesn’t work. At all. For the opposition or for me. Running’s always been rubbish in one way or another in pretty much every iteration of Madden but this year it’s particularly broken – your typical sequence of runs will go 0 yards, -2 yards, 1 yard, 1 yard, 0 yards, 2 yards, 35 yards, -1 yard, 1 yard, 0 yards. It’s like you’re playing Advanced DeShaun Foster Simulator 2010. Yes, after some fiddling with sliders it’s possible to get your back to the giddy heights of a semi-consistant 2.5, three yards a carry, but why the HUG do I need to be roostering about under the hood in order to get one of the FUNDAMENTAL ASPECTS OF A HELMETBALL GAME to work? In addition to which…
2. …it’s almost totally impossible for a receiver to beat a corner deep. So when you add that to the ground-game’s ineffectiveness, it means  the only type of offence that works with any reliability is a junky semi-West Coast Captain Checkdown sort’ve thing built around short passes. However…
3. When I first started playing Madden, quick out-routes were almost impossible for defenders to cover man-on-man. A few years ago, hook patterns were basically 10 free yards every time you ran them. This year, both of those have been so unrealistically cracked-down upon that trying to complete either, even when your receiver has position, will work maybe one time in ten and get picked off about half the time. So when I say “the only offensive strategy that works reliably is passing short”, I in fact mean “the only offensive strategy that works reliably are very specific short passes, namely slants, dumpoffs to your backs and, if you’re feeling really adventurous, the odd drag route.” Which is frighteningly realistic if you happen to be playing as Andy Reid, but for anyone else it’s pretty profoundly rubbish.
4. If I’m playing Superstar mode as a quarterback, why can’t I look left or right, or “focus” on one receiver? There’s a play in the Packers’ repertoire that has the flanker run a corner-route with the slot receiver close by performing a “quick hit” five-yard hook. Several times, I’ve been in a position where the defence is in a cover-2 or similar zone, with only one defender in the vicinity of the two receivers meaning there’s an easy completion available to one or the other of my guys straight off the snap IF I COULD SEE WHICH OF THE TWO THE DEFENDER WAS TRYING TO COVER WHICH I CAN’T BECAUSE OF THE STUPID FIELD VIEW YOU’RE FORCING ON ME YOU USELESS, CRETINOUS MORONS.
5. I quite like the ability to upload the replays of my Plays Of Awesomeness to the Internet. HOWEVER, this seems to have come at the cost of the instant-replay option only being able to record X number of seconds of action. Unfortunately, X seconds is considerably less time than it takes to, say, take a kickoff return back for a touchdown. This means that for longer-than-average plays (you know, the sort that you MIGHT WANT TO SAVE) you often lose the first few seconds of action (you know, the bits where your receiver gets open / running back breaks through the line of scrimmage / returner busts through the first line of defenders, the bits you MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN RE-WATCHING) leaving your replay only showing the ballcarrier running in the open field for 60+ yards (you know, the boring bit).
6. Why is there no create-a-playbook function? The one in Madden 08 was clumsily implemented and occasionally irritating to use but that’s a lot better than, hmm, let me check, oh, nothing. And to make this even more annoying, why can’t I preview the existing playbooks to find the one that suits me best, instead of having to guess, load up a game and flick through the plays there? Oh, and while I’m on the subject, why can’t I select a set of audibles that work with whatever team I’m playing with? Why do they have to be locked to one “favourite” team? And seeing as we’re talking customisation let’s indulge a tiny niggle – how come if you move a team or start with a new custom team there are no names that the commentators will use? In every version of Madden since 2003 there have been “default” names that go with the custom logos that are recognised by the  game – now, nothing.
7. The Achievements are rubbish, almost entirely based on doing certain things with certain players (tackle Antonio Gates inside the 5-yard line, or intercept Pointing Manning three times in a game) with next to nothing on offer for, well, actually acheiving anything. Win a Super Bowl? Draft a rookie who goes to a Pro Bowl? Run for 200 yards in the game? Get your Be A Superstar player to the Hall Of Fame? Child’s play, now get back to trying to juke Bob Sanders. I generally don’t give much of a cuddle for my Nerd-O-Score, but it still seems a bizarre and mildly annoying decision not to focus Achievements on the way the vast majority of people play the game – Franchise mode.
8. Why can’t I turn off the incredibly bland, totally useless, load-delay-infested “halftime show” that is inflicted on me every game? The cliché with EA Sports games is that they’re a bit soulless but glossy and beautifully presented. Well, this is a bit soulless and it’s presented horribly. The commentary is repetitive and even more prone to mis-reading the game situation than it was when Madden and Michaels were on the mic. The menus are a pain to navigate. On top of everything else…
9. In-game marketing just washes over me as a rule. But Madden 10 abuses the privilege. Delaying me from starting a game for three seconds so that Snickers can tell me to “Be a Chompion!” started as a mild annoyance but has made a swift ascent up the north face of Mount Infuriation to the point that I’m now ready to choke a marketing executive to death on a delicious bar of nougat, caramel and roasted peanuts smothered in thick, thick milk chocolate. Mmm, Marathon really satisfies.
10. And while we’re at it, having a menu item almost constantly on display that’s ever-so-discreetly nudging me to part with actual cash-money for a cheat-code, well – you stay classy, EA Sports.“Given that millions of people are already habitually paying full price for a glorified spreadsheet update every year, do we really need the relatively paltry sums that are brought in by milking the fanbase in this incredibly tacky way and corroding the user experience for everyone?” “We don’t need the money, Piers, we just want it. Because we’re very, very greedy.”

I don’t know. Despite the many, many issues I’m still getting some enjoyment out of the game, but that may be because by now it’s physiologically impossible for me to have less than a tolerably decent time playing Madden. However, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that Madden 10 is a significantly worse game than the 2008 version. The fundamental problem for me is that your offensive playcalling is so utterly hamstrung by the hopelessness of the running game and desperately narrow range of options for getting a receiver open. How is it possible, after 20 years of iteration and refinement, to produce a game that fails so completely at such a basic level? It’s like shipping a FIFA game in which corners and crosses were completely ineffectual, where the only way to score was the dribble-and-shot. Which come to think of it was exactly what EA did every year before Pro Evo came along and ruffled their feathers, wasn’t it? Of course, given the EA’s exclusive licence with the NFL, there’s zero chance of that happening with the Madden titles which might go some way toward explaining the bloated, unlovable, complacent mess that is this year’s game. Rank: D

This stuff makes me angry. Then it makes me sad. Then I read the comments and it makes me angry again.

Looking at the story with an ignorant outsider’s eye, the first second and third paragraphs seem to sit uncomfortably together. One of the jurors states that the convicted man should be put to death because the Bible tells us that’s what should happen to murderers. But the juror also says that he believes in the death penalty over life imprisonment because locking someone up is too expensive. Doesn’t that seem a little bit… I don’t know, like he’s trying to have it both ways? In my experience, doing what’s morally right is very rarely the easiest solution to a problem. Generally that’s what morals are for, aren’t they? To stop us taking the most ruthlessly expedient road? Don’t know. Obviously the writer is quoting the juror selectively, perhaps his position isn’t as suspiciously self-supporting as it seems in the story. Perhaps I’m just looking for a problem, looking to pick a fight, seeing self-deception where it isn’t there because the notion of state-sponsored murder based on a selective reading of a 2500-year old text is so utterly incomprehensible to me. It’s repugnance squared.

I appreciate that it’s monumental arrogance for a staunch atheist to try and interpret the Bible for a believer but hey, monumental arrogance is a close personal friend. So: wasn’t this “eye for an eye” stuff supposed go out when Jesus arrived with Bible 2.0? Wasn’t love, forgiveness and turning the other cheek his MO? How is it that headbanging fundamentalists go out of their way to dig up obscure parts of the Old Testament to take to their hearts but miss the really big, really important, really cool stuff that’s said over and over and over in the Gospels? Why do people fixate on, f’rinstance, what folk choose to do with their reproductive organs rather than the notion that the only way into heaven is to love your neighbour?

To put it bluntly, why is it that people who believe that the Bible is the literal truth, the literal word of God, always seem to choose the wrong literal words to believe? Yes, the Bible is the product of many writers over a long period of time and is somewhat self-contradictory in places but the overall tone and message of the New Testament is pretty consistent. So why do so many people pick out the nastiest, most close-minded, most spiteful and stupid parts of a book that in the main asserts that your first and most important duty to God is to be excellent to each other? What am I missing? Can somebody explain to me how it works, because I honestly don’t understand. Particularly given that I can barely think of a single Christian I’ve ever personally known that I wouldn’t describe as a good person. Faith is a good thing. Yes, it needs to be kept out of science classes and public health policies but it’s brought far more light and beauty into the world than stupidity and ugliness – you only need to look at the Sistine Chapel or read Paradise Lost or hear Bird In God’s Garden to realise that. I’m just having problems squaring the circle here.

The answer, of course, is that the idiots and hatemongers are a tiny albeit loud minority. But then I read a story like this which states that 80% of a sentencing jury on a murder case “introduced biblical notions into the jury discussion”, and I start to wonder if “biblical notions” is a phrase that does not mean what I’ve always thought it meant.

Man, it’s going to be tough to get through this post while maintaining the BMStW IV paradigm of swearinesslessness. If ever a game called for a stream of joyfully employed base vernacular, it’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. Or, as it should properly have been called, Batman: (Funking – Ed) People’s (Suit – Ed) UP.

Batman is the coolest superhero. That’s not an opinion, it’s an empirical fact. Batman’s got the coolest logo. Batman’s got the coolest kit. Batman’s got the coolest alter-ego. Batman’s got the coolest base. Batman’s got the coolest power – namely the power to ROCK YOUR FACE. I love the Adam West camp-as-Christmas Some-Days-You-Just-Can’t-Get-Rid-Of-A-Bomb Batman as much as the next man. But my favourite take on the character is the dour, uncompromising, ferociously intelligent and utterly terrifying bad(bottom – Ed) from Grant Morrison’s run on JLA. The Batman who can kick the alien (donkeys – Ed) of a team of incredibly powerful superbeings who’d already defeated Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman and the Flash. Arkham Asylum’s Batman (scripted by Paul Dini, one of the guiding forces behind the excellent Batman: The Animated Series) isn’t quite in that league (aha. Aha. Aha.) but at least he’s in the right sport.

Generally speaking, I don’t have the guts or the patience for stealth games. My character’s vulnerability and the necessity to spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for the right moment to move leads to a undesirable combination of tension, boredom and frustration. The last sneak-em-up I really enjoyed was Tenchu on the PS1, which for all its faults did a wonderful job of making me feel like a ninja in Feudal Japan, darting across the rooftops over the heads of the dull-witted foreign invaders, making the shadows into a weapon, not a shield. You snuck around to make yourself more powerful, not because you were powerless if you didn’t. You weren’t an intruder, you were a predator. Arkham Asylum’s stealth sections give the exact same sort of thrill, the anticipation of isolating some poor (hugger – Ed) followed by the brutal satisfaction of the takedown. I found myself taking my time over the last opponent or two in each room, letting them run around freaking out with their status readout indicating “Terrified” before finally swooping in to put them out of their misery.

If anything, the brawling sections are even better. Combat is simple, relying almost exclusively on two face buttons, but never gets stale over the course of the game largely thanks to absolutely exemplary animation. The fighting in Arkham Asylum reminds me of the Paul Greengrass-directed Bourne movies – strings of fluid moves which are carried out almost too quickly to be consciously registered and yet you’re somehow never confused as to what’s going on. That smoothness is combined with a convincing sense of weight and impact, and as a result the feeling of controlling a hyper-competent, hyper-trained fighting machine is both convincing and satisfying. When Batman hits you, brother you STAY (FORKING – Ed) HIT. My personal favourite move is the finisher where Bats delivers a WWE-style flying fist-drop on a fallen opponent – generally the animation shows you punching the enemy in the face, but if he’s unfortunate enough to be lying with his feet pointing away from you the blow looks for all the world like it’s landing right in his (Michael Ballacks – Ed) instead. Walking up to groups of (buzzards – Ed) and calmly and ruthlessly cleaning their (firkin – Ed) clocks never, ever got dull. Batman: Handing You Your (Derriere – Ed) Since 1939. Batman: Over One Million Customers Served. Batman: When You Absolutely, Positively Have To Deck Every (Mummykisser – Ed) In The Room, Accept No Substitute.

Deep down, I suspect that it’s not actually that great a game, that it’s too repetitive, that it’s too easy, that it’s too Grey Generic Xbox Action Game Space Marine-O-Vision, that the stealth and fighting mechanics while fun are too shallow, and that anyone who didn’t have such a strong emotional attachment to Batman as a character would find it a bit bland and annoying. That doesn’t matter, because anyone who doesn’t have a strong emotional attachment to Batman as a character can (cuddle – Ed) right off. Arkham Asylum lets you “be” Batman, in the same way that (the good bits of) Jedi Academy let you “be” Luke Skywalker. If that notion doesn’t appeal that’s your fault, not the game’s. Also, you smell. RANK: A

Punch my Peggle and call me a casual gamer, but I think I might have hated Mirror’s Edge.

From the wide-eyed ousider’s perspective Parkour is fascinating, both on a practical and abstract level. It seems to be the natural evolution of martial arts for our increasingly dangerous cities, a physical discipline that equips someone to deal with armed confrontation in the most effective possible way – by running the hell away from it. The Mirror’s Edge demo seemed to capture the utter wicked-coolness of Parkour very nicely with its gorgeous bright clean cityscapes and its focus, pretty much unique in the annals of first-person games, on movement and terrain over enemies and fighting. Adversaries were dangerous and largely to be avoided rather than defeated, so the clunky combat controls didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was in it for the running, jumping, climbing trees, the sense of exploration and agility and pell-mell momentum.

Instead, what I got was a stop-start first-person platformer / puzzle game which was made more artificially difficult by having you repeatedly shot at while you were trying to work out your path through the game’s too-often confusing and bland environments. Chances to free-run through the pristine city with its gleaming white skyscrapers were too few and clichéd grey corridors and service tunnels were too many. And whoever decided to set three-quarters of the last level in the pitch dark needs a slap to the chops and a good hard think about what they’ve done. Because if there’s one thing that always improves the experience of finicky platform nonsense, it’s not being able to see what the hug you’re doing. See also: whoever decided that the best way to showcase the acrobatic but imprecise combat was repeatedly locking you in a room with a bunch of heavily-armed motherhuggers and not letting you out till they were all defeated. Grrr.

Mirror’s Edge isn’t totally without merit. When it gets out of its own way there are some nice set-pieces here and there – most memorably, racing down the central staircase of a towering corporate headquarters to escape a squad of armed police – but those moments are swamped by the amount of time spent standing around trying to suss where you’re supposed to go next and how in God’s name you’re meant to achieve that.  Chuck in a nonsensical story, diabolical voice-acting and, in a videogame first, cutscenes that are significantly uglier than the game itself and you’ve got one of the most disappointing games of recent years. RANK: D

Here’s the problem with Mark Wahlberg – he’s got exactly no ability to elevate the material he’s working with.

That’s not the worst problem in the world to have. It’s not that he’s a bad actor, it’s just that he hasn’t got the charisma to carry a film on his own the way, f’rinstance, George Clooney or Bruce Willis or Will Smith can. But neither is he a Keanu Reeves who’ll drag anything he’s involved with down to his level. He’s a safe pair of hands, a decent complimentary piece. Give Marky Mark a great script, a great director and a great supporting cast and you end up with Boogie Nights or Three Kings. Give him a mediocre script, a mediocre director and a mediocre supporting cast and you end up with The Italian Job. Give him one of the worst scripts in the history of motion pictures, a toweringly awful director and a helpless supporting cast and you end up with The Happening.

The Happening opens with hundreds of people in and around New York’s Central Park abruptly deciding to commit suicide. This leads to a moderately eerie scene of construction workers throwing themselves from the top of the building they’re working from and hitting the ground like sacks of tomatoes. From there on, it’s downhill all the way.

The rest of the film follows Mark Wahlberg (for it is he), a high school science teacher in Philadelphia as he flees from the “terrorist attacks” that are hitting the north-east coast of the US with his wife (Zooey Deschanel and her enormous Manga eyes – they could have cast her in that bonkers new BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU anti-drugs ad and saved themselves a fortune in CGI). It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Spielberg version of War Of The Worlds, with the majority of the movie spent showing its main characters running away from an implacable, unbeatable enemy before an anticlimactic deus ex machina ending. The reasons why War Of The Worlds works while The Happening very much doesn’t are many but the two most important are the presence of Tom Cruise, who despite being a batpoo insane religious cultist has screen presence out the fundament, and the drama that develops between the Cruise character and his two children being at least as interesting as the wider conflict with the aliens. You empathise with those three people. You care about what happens to them. It’s hard to give a toss about anyone in The Happening because they’re all so brain-bludgeoningly boring you find yourself rooting for their bloody and violent death just to temporarily alleviate the monotony.

M. Night Shymalan’s second movie, Unbreakable, was a film about comics written by someone who’s never read a comic in his life. Without wishing to give too much away in case you’re still inclined to see this terrible, terrible movie The Happening is a film about the arrogance of science and humanity’s impact on the Earth’s ecosystem written by someone who’s never spoken to a scientist in his life. Although given that the film hardly contains a single line of dialogue that sounds like something a real person might conceivably say, it seems to have been written by someone who’s never spoken to a human, either.

The first time we’re introduced to Marky Mark he’s telling a roomful of students about how millions of bees have suddenly vanished and inviting them to speculate as to what might have caused it. “A disease?” “But there are no bodies.” “Global warming?” “Could be. The temperature goes up a fraction of a degree, the bees can’t tolerate it any more and die.” EH? For a kickoff, wouldn’t that leave just as many bodies as a virus? And if bees were so sensitive that they couldn’t withstand a minute temperature fluctuation, wouldn’t they all die every time the sun went down? Plus, it’s stated this is happening all over the country, so presumably the bees in Arizona are being killed by an increase from 30 to 30.2 degrees centigrade at the same time that bees in Seattle are being killed by an increase from 18 to 18.2 degrees. Really? That’s your best guess? That’s your theory, is it?

Of course not! He’s got a much better answer than that. “They’ll come up with an explanation to put in a book but the truth is, it’s an act of nature. We’ll never know why it happened.”  Yes. Because that’s what science is, isn’t it? It’s basically just a load of hand-waving to fob people off. Really, science can’t hope to understand Nature in any significant way. And yes, it does deserve a capital N. You could write this attitude off as just being the wrong-headed attitude of one chump of a character, except that at the end of the movie another “scientific expert” repeats the line almost verbatim. They don’t say that there are various different theories. They don’t say that there hasn’t yet been sufficient study into the phenomenon to hazard a guess as to its cause. They don’t even say that we might never fully understand what happened. No, it’s stated as a hard fact – act of nature, we’ll never know why, end of discussion. Mark Wahlberg’s character and the TV talking head are presented as the face of enlightened science, they survive and thrive because they accept man’s place in the scheme of things. If that’s your attitude, fine. If that’s the message you want your film to convey, fine. But you can’t put those words in the mouth of your characters who’re meant to be flippin’ scientists because it makes them and you sound like cavemen cowering in fear at the sight of the giant golden ball of fire floating in the sky.

Beyond the heavy-handed fable it’s hard to work out what sort of film The Happening is trying to be. It’s not an action movie, because there’s sod-all action. Somehow, Shyamalan’s managed to make a film called The Happening and forgotten to include anything, well, happening. It’s not a twist thriller or a whatdunnit because the source of “the terrorist attacks” is made obvious half an hour in, explicitly stated about fifteen minutes later then repeated about three more times after that. It’s not the story of two people resolving their differences against the background of A World Gone Mad because the two protagonists barely have any differences. There’s not a single moment in their relationship or indeed the film as a whole that rings true intellectually or emotionally. There’s no character development. There’s no character depth. There’s no character conflict. To be honest, there are barely any characters. Instead, there’re just a bunch of cardboard cutouts riding the world’s least interesting ghost train trying not to step in the metaphor.

If you feel it’s been too long since you’ve properly hated something, The Happening might be just what you’re looking for.