Blue Man Sings The Whites

Hello you! Sorry I’ve not posted in a couple of months. I appear to have completely forgotten how to write.

This appears to be a combination of two intermeshing and not terribly interesting causes. The urge to write generally comes from stuff that evokes passion in me one way or the other – things I really love or things I really hate. I’ve now spent some time in a vague background state of general listless mopey fedupness that’s kind’ve turning down the volume on everything. It’s a bit like being a character in Battlestar Galactica.

Compounding the problem is my Godawful writing process. A regrettable combination of nitpicky perfectionism and mediocre talent means that my writing is incredibly stop-start. I have an enormously hard time moving past a sentence or a paragraph I’m not 100% happy with. I’ve just spent five minutes deleting and re-writing that last one, f’rinstance. Yeah, I know.

The result of this is that I’ll often start an entry, hit a problem and instead of moving it and coming back when the rest of the piece is done it ends up being a road-block that stops me dead, particularly – and here we hit where my general ennui enters the equation – if the idea I’m writing isn’t one that’s burning in my brain and won’t rest till it’s escaped. Above this entry in the Word doc I use for drafting blog posts I’ve currently got 10-50% complete musings on Civ 4, mental list weirdness, the Rock Band games, Once, fat stroke fat acceptance, Escape To Victory and parkour. In each case I’ve clonked into a roadblock and been unable to get around it.

So anyway. Sorry so long no content, and sorry that I’m breaking my duck with sorry-for-myself limp lettuce-leafery. Hopefully (ir)regular service will be resumed soon.

Good result for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow there against a scrappy Vegas team.

A semi-tactical real-world soldier sim in which you’re in charge of a three-man elite anti-terrorist team running around the Las Vegas strip meeting interesting people and shooting them in the head. Even though it’s considerably streamlined and simplified since the old Rainbow 6 games on the PC (where you’d be controlling a squad of six and often spent more time planning your team’s movements on the level map beforehand than you did actually first-person-shootering) this is still something of a thinking person’s frag-fest.

I found R6V2 (he was the astromech droid on Wedge’s X-Wing) a bit of an uncomfortable experience. The game doesn’t seem sure if it wants to be a slow-paced tactical shooter or something more akin to Gears Of War, where use of cover is absolutely vital but it’s still completely clear that you’re in an arcade free-for-all. As a result, there are some jarring changes of tone and the odd moment that feels completely out of place in a game that’s largely a semi-hardcore soldier-sim. Goons pouring out of side-doors when I reach a certain point I can just about forgive. Goons that only pour out of side-doors when I reach a certain point, having totally ignored the two squad members that I sent ahead are a complete immersion-breaker. Don’t get me started on the blokes lugging around indestructible metal shields. The airport level, with its multiple unavoidable chokepoints that you have to navigate sans squad, can get to fecking feck. And the hugging game ends with a hugging BOSS BATTLE. Seriously. A combat sim that throws in an old-skool shmup-style memorise-the-pattern trial-and-error boss battle. For crying. Out. Loud.

My discomfort wasn’t entirely due to the schizoid level design, however. Call me a muesli-munching bleeding-heart liberal, but all the way through the game I was faintly bothered by the nagging awareness that I was playing a right-wing wet dream. Dozens and dozens of highly-armed fanatical terrorists are going to BLOW UP THE MOON or something so we now need to open up a dialogue. And by “a dialogue” we mean “their chest cavities”. Yes, of course it’s only a game, yes of course it’s not remotely unique in demonising and dehumanising the pop-up shooting-gallery targets that provide an obstacle to victory. Nonetheless, there’s just a slight distasteful air to proceedings, a bit of a whiff of the palpable excitement that a certain sort of person displays when something ghastly happens because now they’ve got moral justification to let slip the dogs of war, crack open the shiny high-tech explode-o-toys and protect the values of civilization by being absolute barbarians. However, Ubisoft should be given credit for subtly undercutting the game’s fascist undertone by casting your squadmates as a pair of bumbling pacifists who’ll do anything in their power to prevent you harming anyone. They repeatedly refuse to follow your orders because they’re unable to work out how to get around, for example, a knee-high coffee table and on occasion they’ll even attempt to bring a halt to the bloodshed via non-violent direct action, heroically throwing themselves in front of your gun in the midst of a firefight. The voice-acting for your team isn’t just them endlessly singing Blowin’ In The Wind but it flipping well ought to be.

For all its frustrations and dodgy ideology, I had a pretty good time with R6V2 (or “Community Policing Sim: The Met Edition” as it swiftly became known in these parts). When Stan and Ollie aren’t being flummoxed by furniture or the functionality of the common corridor they do give several very cool moments where you can send them in through one door to draw the enemy fire (“Iron Duke, Iron Duke, this is Pawn Sacrifice…”) while you nip around the side and slaughter the oppo with impunity. The combat is intense but still somewhat tactical, and the experience-point system that rewards you with goodies for massacring folk in interesting ways (killing someone from behind f’rinstance, or at long range, or with explosives) encourages you to plan and experiment even if the kit you’re given actually isn’t any more effective than the default stuff. And I liked being able to use the EggBox camera to import my massive baldy heed onto my character.

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2, then. It’s annoying and it’s for people who’re a bit too keen on the word “ordnance”, but it’s not bad. RANK: C

Not being remotely patriotic has its advantages. No, you don’t get to feel unearned and unjustifiable pride in those achievements of your fellow countrypeople with which you had nothing whatsoever to do. However, you also don’t have to feel ashamed when the other folks crammed onto a slightly shabby island in the North Atlantic with you do something deeply stupid and nasty. Thus, valuable emotional energy that would have been taken up with misplaced guilt and shame can instead be used for working up appropriate levels of embarrassment and contempt.

Here’s part of the problem, though: if you’re an average, reasonably rational human being who’s naturally concerned about the current political, social and economic climate but doesn’t believe the solution is to lock up all paediatricians  and to Send Back Where They Came From anyone darker-skinned than David Dickenson, exactly who is there for you to vote for? With the three main political parties melting together into a centrist mass of well-scrubbed near-indistinguishable charisma-free talking heads who’ll say absolutely anything to get elected it’s hard to generate much enthusiasm for any of them. And that’s assuming you don’t share the general understandable yet ever-so-slightly hypocritical outrage at the state of MPs’ expenses.

(After all, you could take the opinion that everyone was doing it, that it was basically an accepted perk of the job. And I don’t know about you, but the sort of person who’s got the chutzpah to claim for having their moat cleaned or a wooden duck house on expenses is precisely who I want representing my interests. Scruples are all very well, but when it comes right down to getting things done give me the devious git with the nerve of a burglar over the choirboy. Not meaning to excuse or play down the general shabbiness of the whole expenses scandal, but some of the weeping and wailing that’s followed it seems just a little hysterical and fundamentalist. After all, Let He Who Is Without A Purloined Pad Of Post-It Notes Cast The First Stone.)

The Green Party have always been the traditional beneficiaries of the middle-class protest vote, but personally I can’t in all good conscience put my cross next to a party who veer dangerously close to being anti-rationalism. Banning animal testing, banning stem-cell research and throwing more NHS money at alternative and complimentary therapies are policies that speak of a mistrust of science, of a worrying degree of influence from headbanging hardcore ley-line botherers. Which they make no bones about of course, and is absolutely fine if that’s your bag but for me it’s a complete deal-breaker (ladies). Making sure the current ecosphere survives is a Good Thing to believe in, absolutely, but the only way that’s going to happen is by applying our wonderful, miraculous evolved monkey brains to the problem.

Being able to turn up at the polling booth and place our cross for None Of The Above would be nice, but doesn’t address the major issue that somewhere, somehow, we do actually need to find some people to run the country. So what we need is a Fourth Way. We need a party without the Flash Harry sliminess of the career politician, but also without the baggage or true-believer scariness that comes with the one-issue candidates.

Friends, Britons, countrymen – what we need is the Nerd Party.

The advantages of electing nerds to office are many. If you accept that power is inevitably going to corrupt, it’s a good idea to vote for folk who’re only going to be corrupted in ways that are a) harmless (No Child Left Behind The Current Generation Of Consoles, changing the national anthem to Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley) or b) entertaining (several hundred million quid of taxpayers’ money blown on a Boeing 747 and a giant conveyer belt to settle things once and for all). Having computer-literate politicians would go a long way toward preventing the habitual costly chaos that results every time a government department tries something IT-related that’s more complicated than reading its email. And it would mean an end to having to doll out a second-house allowance to facilitate MPs attending the House of Commons, because the Nerd Party would be entirely happy to telecommute. In our pants, most likely.

In fact, we could likely ditch the Palace Of Westminster altogether in favour of an entirely web-based solution. The Forum Of Commons has a nice ring about it, n’est-ce pas? It’d be a far more efficient way of debating the issues of the day than the current one-subject-at-a-time, one-person-talking-six-hundred-sitting-there-waving-pieces-of-paper system. And just think how much more difficult it would be for a government to backtrack from its positions or promises if the opposition had instant access to everything that had ever been said plus a “Quote This Post” button.

The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced it’s the way forward. After all, so long as you keep clear of their pet subjects nerds are generally clear-thinking folk who don’t attach any stigma to seeking the counsel of the better-informed, which is exactly the sort of attitude that we want from our leaders. Of course, if any major policy decision hinges on which Terminator film is the best we’re looking at weeks of increasingly long-winded and vicious infighting followed by the collapse of Western civilisation, but that’s a chance we’ll have to take.

Vote Nerd in 2010. Together we can be made of win!

Re: The darkly hilarious interview on Radio 4 this morning in which BNP leader, holocaust denier, new Member of the European Parliament and all-terrain tosspot Nick Griffin declared straight-faced that white folk are now second-class citizens in Britain:

“Alright, apart from the House of Commons, the banks, the police, the European Parliament, the media, the Cabinet, the armed forces, the Civil Service, teaching, the House of Lords, the City, the social services, journalism, the Church and 94% of all management positions – what is there left that white British people still control?”

I’m not a huge fan of Star Trek. The original series was camp fun, and the movies that embraced that (primarily Wrath Of Khan, The One With The Whales and The One With Shakespeare In The Original Klingon*) were thoroughly enjoyable. Next Gen was largely “meh” with only a few flirtations with REALLY ANNOYINGNESS (So-called empath Deanna Troi and her ability to state the stupefying obvious – green guys with weird foreheads are blasting away at the Enterprise with a battery of Kill-O-Death Cannon, at which point Troi helpfully interjects “I sense… anger”. Come to think of it, what IS the ship’s councillor doing sitting on the bridge anyway? Also: Troi’s relationship with Riker. Also: Riker. No wonder Picard kept sending the fatuous git on every possible away team. “Captain, our sensors detect millions of ten-foot tall heavily-armed warrior-lizards whose society appears to be entirely based around the loathing of trombones, stupid beards and self-satisfaction.” “Number One, report to the transporter room.”). Deep Space 9 I actually quite liked, despite it being a poor man’s Babylon 5 and featuring the most wooden commanding officer in Trek history. Voyager was nearly unbearable, it’s only saving grace being the holographic doctor who seemed to hate every other character on the ship nearly as much as I did. And Enterprise was actually unbearable.

This disclosure isn’t coming from the sneery “Trekkie? Me? No, I Have Known The Touch Of A Woman Haw Haw Haw” place that seems in rather pathetic vogue at the moment (I really must get round to writing that post on The Cult Of Nerd that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for the last few weeks). It’s just that a person’s reaction to the new Trek film is inevitably going to be coloured by their feelings about the franchise so I feel I should get my cards on the table right from the off. I wouldn’t want you thinking it’s just nostalgia talking when I tell you that the film’s really, really good.

The film’s really, really good.

Going in, I had some trepidation. Classic Trek given a smirky noughties shakey-cam makeover sounded like something that was potentially smug enough to provoke me to gouge my own eyes out with a spoon. Particularly seeing as it was being directed by the bloke who made the really not terribly good at all Mission Impossible 3.

Any lingering doubts were quickly dismissed. Within the first ten minutes I’d laughed, I’d cried and I’d seen the vehicle that I now want a go on more than any other in movie history. Sorry, Dark Knight-era Batmobile. Sorry, Speeder Bike. Sorry, hoverboard thingamy out of Back To The Future 2. For all the flashy whizz-bangery and unnecessary wobblycam this film looks and sounds and feels like Star Trek. More importantly, it looks and sounds and feels like a massive, epic, sweeping space-opera. There’s derring-do and a remarkable but mis-matched group of misfits battling against impossible odds with The Fate Of The World Itself At Stake. It’s as close as (almost) anyone’s come to recreating the fun and wide-eyed excitement of the first Star Wars film. Certainly closer than George Lucas has managed since 1983.

One of the big reasons Star Trek works as well as it does is the casting. Central to the original series was the Freudian relationship between Bones the irascible, emotional humanist id, Spock the cold, rational ego and Kirk’s (heh) superego resolving the two. In this film you can see that dynamic shaking into place via the three terrific central turns from Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban.  The film usually remembers that the lasers and splodes aren’t the point, they’re just there to dress up what’s fundamentally a story about people. And, importantly, they’re people you really enjoy spending a couple of hours with. For the most part the performances are pitched to evoke the original cast without impersonating them, something that’s done through little mannerisms such as Kirk’s smirk and command-chair slouch, Chekov’s wide-eyed enthusiasm or Spock’s patented “Hmm, you’re right, I hadn’t considered that” expression. It’s a difficult trick but it’s pulled off immaculately give or take a dodgy Scottish accent or so.

It’s not perfect by any means. It’s pretty relentlessly white-male-centric: Uhura is set up as an interesting character then given next to nothing to do for the last half of the film. I’d have preferred a plot resolution that relied a bit more on outwitting the enemy and a bit less on peace through superior firepower. However, my only major issue we’re probably going to have to break the old spoiler warning out for:

CAUTION! SPOILERS AHEAD!

The whole baggy, slightly tedious section with the (slippy-slidey) ice world needed to go. Really? There was no more elegant and cohesive way you could have woven in the time-travel plot and Old Spock than that? A massive Exposition Dump and an even more massive coincidence that Kirk got marooned on the same world that Nero stuck Old Spock on? I’m not even sure which of the two was more of a stretch of logic. Wouldn’t New Spock just have chucked Kirk in the brig? Wouldn’t Nero have just kept Old Spock on the Death Star for fun, torture and maybe more? Couldn’t he have shown Old Spock the destruction of Vulcan from there? Hmmm and ahem and come on now.

I know cohesive water-tight plotting is hardly Star Trek’s raison d’etre, but in this case it was abusing the privilege. Thing is, the whole alternate universe, time-travel thing was such a clever and brave idea it really did deserve an awful lot better.

CAUTION! SPOILERS BEHIND!

That’s being just a fraction nit-picky, though. To reiterate: the film’s really, really good. Comfortably the best Star Trek film ever, comfortably the best sci-fi movie since Serenity. Between this and Iron Man we now have two unexpectedly terrific summer blockbuster franchises that are ready to follow the path well-trod by Pirates Of The Carribbean 2 and Matrix Reloaded right over the quality cliff.

Which’ll be something to look forward to.

* – Actually, just go here, they’re all great.

Tom Clancy Presents Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. By Tom Clancy (Xbox 360)

It’s an arcade flight sim in a contemporary setting. And it wants to be Ace Combat 6 so badly it hurts, right down to the pre-mission target-percentage breakdown, the post-mission cinematic replay and the three camera view options, each practically identical to its equivalent in AC6.

Here are the things H.A.W.(ks – Ed) does better than Ace Combat 6: more planes (although they all feel pretty much exactly the same to fly), external fly-by “assistance off” view that looks hugely cool (but is completely unnecessary and massively difficult to control), your plane carries anti-missile flares (not that you’ll have any left when you need them because some idiot mapped “deploy flares” to a click of the control stick, something that’s incredibly easy to do accidentally when engaged in intense flight manoeuvres) no portentous and jarring cut-scenes about the hideousness of war (instead there’s a staggeringly nonsensical plot about a corporation as lacking in business-sense as they are in morals), moderately groovy R6: Vegas/CoD4 XP-O-Gain level system (which mostly only unlocks new planes which, as previously stated, aren’t much more than re-skins), looks hugely pretty in places (but extremely ropy in others – the Chicago level with the skyscrapers jarringly plonked down on what looks like a perfectly flat Google Earth map will take you back to the worst sins of mid-nineties flight-simmmery) and its whole campaign is playable in co-op (actually, that one’s pretty much an unreserved yay).

Here are the things it does worse than AC6: smaller maps with smaller, almost linear missions. One of my favourite levels in Ace Combat sees you asked to assist a massive amphibious assault on a coastal town. There are three different allied forces landing in three different places facing different compositions of enemy, and who you choose to primarily support in what way is up to you. Fly a mud-moving A-10 Warthog with iron bombs to easily take out enemy tank formations? Or air-to-ground missles for knocking out priority targets from a safe distance? Either way, you’ll be vulnerable to enemy interceptors and too slow to effectively support all three fronts. Go with a multi-role plane like the F-16 or the Mirage 2000 which’ll let you carve through enemy close air support bombers like a multimillion dollar supersonic knife through butter but is somewhat brittle in the face of ground fire? Should you take the risk of attacking the well-defended town in order to secure its airfield, giving you a base near the front-line where you can land to get repaired and re-armed?

All that light tactical layer is absent from H.A.W.(ks. – Ed). In your first playthough, you’ll have a lot of planes to choose from but generally only one weapons load and one approach to any given scenario. There’s no landing at carriers or airbases, no chance to change your payload mid-mission, no trading off effectiveness against X sort of target with effectiveness against Y. It’s pretty much just a shooting-gallery – hostile unit appears in front of you, press A to fire a missile, done, done and I’m onto the next one.

There are tons of smaller niggles. Hard mode is too easy (so I presume you could finish Normal mode without actually looking at the screen) while Elite mode doesn’t, y’know, make the enemy AI any more dangerous it just artificially and unfairly limits the number of weapons you can carry (which wouldn’t be as much of an issue except that, as previously mentioned, there’s no way of re-arming mid-mission). The targeting system is fiddly and thoughtless – if I’ve got AAMs armed, why on Earth does it let me lock onto ground targets that I can’t hit? And why oh why oh why is “change weapon” mapped to the D-pad? Did nobody twig that when you want to switch to, say, dogfighting missles you might possibly be in, f’rinstance, a dogfight and so not really be overly keen to LET GO OF THE HUGGING CONTROLS?

If the flight scenes in Top Gun mildly arouse you, you’ll have some fun with H.A.W.(ks – Ed). Me? They do and I did. It’s not a bad game by any means, it’s just shallow, workmanlike, a bit bland and lacking in charm. It’s like a tribute band – the songs are still good but the magic’s not quite there. H.A.W.(ks – Ed) is the Bootleg Ace. It’s the Counterfeit Combat. It’s the Tesco Value Ace Combat 6.

With an unnecessarily silly name.

John Woo Presents John Woo’s Stranglehold By John Woo (Xbox 360)

The graphics are ropy, the controls are slightly worse, its difficulty is up and down more than a manically depressed junkie kangaroo on a space hopper and it’s a pony that barely manages one trick. And that’s the exact same trick as Max Payne’s, only – and I appreciate this will be hard to believe – with a worse story. If I’d paid full price at release I’d have been a) insane and b) furious. But as a cheap, throwaway b-movie title it hits the spot. Stranglehold is the first game in history where the stuff you can do in-game is cooler than the stuff you’re shown doing in cut-scenes. The first time I slid down a banister, shot a sign that fell on a mook’s head, blew up a second mook by taking out the barrel of propane he was slightly foolishly hiding behind, then dove onto a wheelie-trolley and rolled across a courtyard shooting two more mooks in the face I’d pretty much had enough fun for the fiver the game set me back. And the massively over-the-top spinny-around-with-doves-flying-up-everywhere special move made me laugh every single time I did it. For that, I’m willing to forgive semi-frequent moments of frustration brought on by the lack of a Left 4 Dead-style “Spin 180 Degrees” button and insufficient information as to the location of the THOUSANDS OF ENEMIES currently shooting your wanger off.

Stranglehold is rubbish. But it’s extravagant, operatic, cheerfully stupid, generally good fun rubbish. It’s rubbish with the courage to be rubbish as loudly and forcefully as it can. Much like Face/Off, actually.

Russell T. Davis Presents Russell T. Davis’ Doctor Who Easter Special By Russell T. Davis (Alright, you can stop now – Ed) (Telly)

It was alright, wasn’t it? The Lara Croft wannabe pseudo-assistant was good fun, the visual of a London bus crashed in the middle of a desert wilderness was cool to the point that you strongly suspect that RTD started with that image and worked back to find a story that semi-justified it, I liked that the ugly menacing-looking aliens actually turned out to be innocent bystanders and the story rollocked along at a decent old pace even if it didn’t make a lot of sense and fell apart a bit in the final third. No change there, then. So not a boundary, but a controlled single that keeps the scoreboard ticking over. Still looking forward to seeing what Who will turn into in fresh hands, mind.

Nobody Presents Nobody’s Empire: Total War By Nobody (You’re fired – Ed) (PC)

Medieval: Total War is one of my favourite games ever, I’ve read every Sharpe book ever written (they are, after all, Mills And Boon for boys), and there’s nothing I like more in movies than some buckles being suitably swashed. So why oh why oh why hasn’t this game clicked with me? Am I just a bit Total Warred out? The real-time battles have a very different feel to Rome or either of the Medievals. Those games depended on you winning the scissors-paper-stone-lizard-Spock matchups (archers beat everything at range, everything beats archers up close, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beats swords, swords beat spears) and making practical use of flank and rear attacks on already-engaged units. Outflanking remains important in Empire, but its battles seem to primarily hinge on your ability to concentrate fire. Almost everyone’s got guns, so all things being equal what you’re trying to do is get two of your units shooting at one of the enemy’s. If you can do that, the opposition will rout before you and your freed-up soldiers can then start shooting at the next enemy unit, continuing a virtuous circle that will eventually see you “rolling up” the other fellow’s battle-line. It’s a different tactical challenge, and an interesting one, but for some reason the whole package isn’t quite grabbing me.
 
There are lots of little problems with it, but nothing I can see as being The Sticking Point. The naval battles are fiddly but easily-skipped. The battlefields seem a lot more varied than they used to be, with buildings that you can garrison, but occupied buildings are such easy prey for enemy artillery that they’re not remotely worth the bother 90% of the time. In the strategic layer, I don’t feel like I’m getting enough feedback on the socio-economic situation in my territories making it hard to determine which cities are performing well and which are on the brink of anarchy, although this may simply be down to not yet having spent enough time learning the nuances of the game.

Can’t put my finger on it. All I know is that this weekend I spent nine hours fiddling with a game I’ve had for six months and three quid’s worth of tower defence shenanigans rather than bestriding the nations of the Earth like a colossus. That can’t be right, can it?

Werner Herzog Presents Werner He… (*gunshot*) Grizzly Man (DVD)
 
Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who spent 13 summers living among bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed by a bear.

(Much as with Steve “Man Who Teases Dangerous Animals For A Living Killed By Dangerous Animal He Was Teasing” Irwin it’s such a horribly predictable fate I’m not even sure that it counts as ironic.)

It’s fascinating stuff with some beautiful footage of the Alaskan wilderness in general and bears in particular. The opening scene, with Treadwell talking the camera, describing himself as a “gentle warrior” who’s “earned the trust” of the bears and will never be hurt by them leads you to think that he’s going to be portrayed as an absolutely colossal tool. In fact the film gives a much more nuanced, interesting picture of a divisive, remarkable, quixotic and thoroughly tragic figure.

A few of the interviews seem weirdly forced, even staged – every time the guy who did the autopsy on what was left of Timothy Treadwell’s body is on camera for instance, or the scene where Herzog listens to the audio recording of Treadwell’s last moments. But that aside, it’s a terrific film that I’d thoroughly recommend.

Payday, and a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of gadgets. Specifically, a proper NAS enclosure and a suitably beefy SATA hard drive to replace my ageing and slightly flaky LaCie Ethernet Mini disk. Because nothing says “Bank Holiday Weekend” like hours spent fiddling with media server software and transferring video files.

Here’s my sparkly new Seagate 1.5TB disk, still in its immediate packaging – a rather groovy inflatable lilo-for-ants arrangement, as it goes.

And here’s the box it arrived in.

Half the fun of ordering things off the internet is receiving parcels through the post. It’s like getting a present, a little workaday Christmas. And Roy Wood and I are in total agreement on that subject. So it’s nice to see Dabs going out of their way to give their customers that little extra frisson of thrill. That old ”Single Pair Of Socks In Enormous Elaborately-Wrapped Package” gag is always a killer, innit?

For your consideration – the full and unedited instructions included in the cheap-o-clone XBox 360 headset that arrived yesterday.

HEADPHONE MICROPHONE

FEATURE

• Promote the on-line community experience of the X-Box Live of the unprecedented in history, let you draw up the strategy with member of team, the interference opponent or while play favourite game with the friend chat.
• You can make serve to record for friend or family and stay the speech message through the free X-Box Live letter, can also replace telephone and good friend contact.
• Open loudly to adjust the small voice, make experience personally the most vigorous game career to make possible.

INSTRUCTION

The microphone strengthen the function and can carry on regulate, obtain the best sound quality.

The supplementary volume control and muting switches allow the customer to regulate the headphones volume or cut over the mute appearance.

The microphone of lowers the speech control that the noise function promotes the game to respond to and provide the pure speech exchanges.

Reducing in weight of, the wear type desigh brings the more comfortable usage experience.

The ear Micheal with put X-360 hand handles or the X-box lead-in hand handles of X-box very easily and directly.

Handy, because I’ve been looking for something to replace my good friend contact for ages.

While laid up with a dodgy leg a couple of weeks ago I found myself strangely compelled to catch up with the last couple of series of Hustle that I missed, in the same way that when you’ve got a broken tooth throbbing in your gum you feel strangely compelled to poke your tongue at it.

Somehow in the eighteen months or so since I last watched it I forgot how much more-or-less everything in Hustle gets on my pecs. All of the individual missteps it makes could be forgiven, but they come together to create something fundamentally disagreeable. In the rather spiffing recent Screenwipe special on writing for television, Hustle’s creator Tony Jordan said that when writing the scripts for the series he’d start with a premise but have no idea how it would end. Instead, he’d just follow the story until something suggested itself.

Frankly, this explains a lot.

Too often, Hustle plays – I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry – a con game, talking fast to try and rush you past a plot point or story conclusion that seems to superficially make sense but falls apart if subjected to the slightest scrutiny. It’s also painfully formulaic – every week, about two thirds of the way through it seems that everything’s gone wrong for the team but by the end it’s revealed that the trap they were seemingly caught in was just part of a wider con and, aha, actually they were in control the whole time. House gets away with repeating the same basic episode structure over and over again largely because its antihero central character is unusual, engaging and well-written. Hustle doesn’t because its antihero central characters are either cataclysmically dull or brain-detonatingly irritating. Even the more likable personalities (that’d be Ash, a combination of the Faceman out of the A-Team and a bulldog licking a nettle) are forced to transport levels of weapons-grade smugness far in excess of government-mandated safety guidelines. It desperately, desperately wants to be Ocean’s Eleven but succeeds only in being Ocean’s Twelve. Damningly, the characters look to be having a far better time than the audience ever will.

Top tip! If you’re writing a series about a group of con artists, whatever you do don’t rip off The Sting which is, y’know. Only the most famous movie about con artists ever made. And really, really, don’t do it twice. And when you’re having one character explain the con to another, really really really don’t have them say “you know, like The Sting.” Because that’s not funny, it’s not clever, it makes no sense. If you acknowledge that The Sting exists in your setting, then apparently your con artists are banking their life, wealth and liberty on the fact that their mark and anybody he happens to talk to haven’t ever seen a film that won SEVEN FLIPPIN’ OSCARS. More than that, it’s probably not a great idea to remind your viewers that they’ve seen this story done before with better writing, better acting, better directing, better costumes and better music. In The Sting, for instance. And to anyone who considers watching that episode like I did, thinking to yourself all the way through “actually, this is really clever, they’re following the plot of The Sting almost line-for-line in order to spring a massive unexpected twist at the end that works because I think I’m familiar with the story” – don’t bother. Because they’ve followed the plot of The Sting almost line-for-line in order to spring a massive unexpected twist that’s exactly the same as the end of The Sting.

Grrrrr.

Top tip! If you’re writing an episode that focuses on poker and you don’t know anything about poker, why not try not writing an episode about poker? Otherwise, you just end up in a situation where Evil Max Beesley flat calls a pre-flop raise heads-up with pocket kings (perfectly reasonable in itself, of course), calls again after the board comes down ace-high and he’s facing a pot-sized bet (um…), calls another big bet after a blank on fourth street (eh?), then flukes into one of his – count ‘em – TWO outs, catching trips on the river to beat the raiser’s top two-pair. Which would be bad enough, but then he’s got the nerve to smirk “Call me sometime and I’ll teach you how to play poker!” as he scoops a pot that he’d have lost 23 times out of 24 after the call on the turn.

Top tip! If you’re a team of high-class con artists who repeatedly bang on about how you only ever take money from people who deserve it, why not try not constantly conning the poor Scouse sap who runs the bar you always meet at? Not only does this make you look like a bunch of complete hypocrites and remove any last lingering traces of sympathy I might have had for you, but it’s also spectacularly unwise to systematically antagonise someone who’s seen and heard the planning of about 75% of every criminal act you’ve ever committed, you enormous idiots.

Wow. 800 words on the hatefulness of Hustle and I haven’t even had to mention Marc Warren and his stupid squinty smirky Mockney hamster fizzog.

Next week in Blue Man’s Timely Telly Reviews Of Large, Slow Moving Targets we’ll be covering Day 6 of 24 in a feature entitled I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills or: I Know What Jack Bauer’s Dad Looks Like And You, Sir, Are Not Jack Bauer’s Dad.

As mentioned in a previous life, Blue Man’s First Law Of Comic Adaptations is this: just get the big stuff right. Work out what makes a comic worth reading, find the foundations that it’s built upon and make sure that those essentials come across successfully on screen. The corollary to Blue Man’s First Law Of Comic Adaptations therefore is this: change as much small stuff as you need to.

The first two X-Men films keep the mutants-as-an-oppressed-minority and family vibes from the comics, along with the iconic powers of Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto and Professor X but change the costumes (“What, you think we should be wearing spandex?”), turn the Xavier Institute For Gifted Youngsters into an actual school, and re-interpret both Magneto (as a Holocaust survivor) and Rogue (as a teenage runaway). Batman Begins shows us Bruce Wayne’s double life, keeps Batman’s ambiguous relationship with the law and portrays him as a figure of superstition and terror to the criminal classes. However, it also gives us an on-again off-again romantic dalliance, the Batmobile as a military vehicle and Batman being trained as an actual no-fooling ninja. My very favourite comic movie ever, The Crow, retains almost nothing from the comic - about one-and-a-half scenes (Eric visting Gideon’s pawnshop and his confrontation with Fun Boy), plus the basic look, origin and mission of the central character, a bunch of villain names and that’s your lot.

I reiterate this to make my attitude clear – I’m a huge fan of Watchmen, but I don’t regard the book as a sacred text from whose holy writ deviation is not to be tolerated. I understand that what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work on screen. In fact in the case of Watchmen this is doubly true, it being  a story that is structured specifically to take advantage of the strengths of the medium it was written for. Sin City may have basically treated the original comic like a storyboard with more-or-less successful results (mind-bendingly rampant misogyny aside), but in that case you’re talking about a very simple plot and books that were intended to be a film noir in comic form. Try the same thing with Watchmen and you’d just end up with a sprawling mess, albeit one with some great characters, nice set-pieces and interesting visuals.

Watchmen is a sprawling mess, albeit one with some great characters, nice set-pieces and interesting visuals. It’s not a very good film at all. I enjoyed it very much, look forward to seeing it again and would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who’s read and enjoyed the comic.

(Anyone who hasn’t read the comic I would recommend to, er, read the comic – it’s about the same price as a cinema ticket, can be read in about the time you’d invest in a visit to the flicks and is better than the film in every respect).

Let me attempt to explain.

The Phantom Menace is a terrible film by anybody’s standards. It’s got a rotten script, dodgy performances, it’s bloated, baggy and filled with characters I couldn’t give a flying hug about. But the first time that Qui-Gon O’Jinn The Oirish Jedi and Awful Alec Guinness Impression drew their lightsabres with that ssssccccchvooom! sound and began cutting loose with them I started grinning like I had a flip-top head. There are things that I’m just programmed to enjoy, that are hard-coded in my Nerd DNA to give me pleasure.

The sight of a giant Doctor Manhattan creating a glass palace of cogs and gears is one of these things. So’s the Comedian’s costume. So’s Archie the Owlship. So’s “You don’t get it! I’m not locked in here with you! You’re locked in here with me!”

Director Zack Snyder is obviously a fan of the comic, and he’s pretty good with cool images, with cool lines, with cool props, with cool fight scenes. He’s not so good with anything below the surface sheen. To coin the excellent phrase that m’good friend Lori used while we were comparing after-action reports last night, he’s respectful but not insightful. Almost without exception,every problem with Watchmen as a film can be traced back to one of those two traits – too much respect or not enough insight.

SPOILERS FOR BOTH FILM AND COMIC FROM HERE ON OUT. FAIR WARNING GIVEN.

The scene near the start of the film showing Dan Dreiberg visiting the first Nite Owl, Hollis Mason, is a decent example of showing too much respect for the source material. In the comic, Hollis plays a much bigger part, largely via the excerpts from his autobiography that make up the last few pages of the first three issues. We know him, we empathise with him, we’re upset when he gets killed, a shocking, saddening piece of collateral damage from Rorschach’s crusade. In the movie, Hollis gets that one short scene and is never heard from again. So if you’re not going to develop him as a character why include him at all? We don’t learn anything from the scene that couldn’t have just as easily been included in the (excellent) title montage that sums up the rise, fall and replacement of the Minutemen. The scene doesn’t serve any dramatic purpose so why does it exist? The answer: because it exists in the comic.

A smaller example is Bubastis. In the comic she’s a tiny bit of foreshadowing, an example of the genetic engineering that Ozymandias later uses to create the Space Squid Of Doom. In the film, she’s just a cool (and quite badly animated) pet. Why is she there? Because she was there in the comic.

Ozymandias was a major problem in general, in fact. In the comic he’s portrayed as a cross between John D. Rockerfeller, Bill Gates and Bono. He’s a media star, he’s a philanthropist. Yes, he’s a genius but he’s also approachable and down-to-earth. When the “assassination” attempt occurs, we hear a character saying “Who’d go after a guy like Veidt? He’s a real hero.” When it’s revealed that he’s behind the “mask killings” and then worse – much, much worse – it’s a kick in the gut that’s all the more savage for being totally unexpected.

In the film, he’s a stereotypically superior corporate kingpin. If he’s using his riches to do good works we never see it, beyond one rather nice little speech early on where he’s talking about infinite resources meaning an end to war driven by envy and hate with the twin towers of the World Trade Centre silhouetted behind him. We see him using people as human shields to avoid an attacker’s bullets. When it’s revealed that Veidt is behind the “mask killings” and worse our reaction is “yeah, he seemed the type”.

It feels almost as if the director’s started from the premise of Someone Capable Of Killing Millions To Save The World and worked backwards from there rather than appreciating the nuances of the character as written. In the book Ozymandias is a reflection of Rorschach – the latter is a character who we initially see as a despicable right-wing psychopath but gradually gain a measure of respect for. The former is a character who at first seems noble and sympathetic but who is revealed to be capable of unthinkable atrocity. That symmetry is lost in the film, as are plenty of other subtle parallels and juxtapositions and it’s the poorer experience for it. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining that too much has been taken out in the transition from stage to screen, that’s not the issue at all. Almost the opposite in fact – the problem isn’t that Stuff Has Been Taken Out, it’s that the director’s primary concern appears to have been getting as much Stuff into the film as possible, with the structure that that Stuff hangs on a secondary concern.

This is a film that seems to have been made by someone who loves the book too much and understands it too little.

The director’s big stampy bootprints are uncomfortably visible all over the place, making sure that any layers are properly smashed flat. There’s no room for subtext, nothing’s allowed to be hinted at or implied. I could nit-pick any number of examples but I think one sums up Snyder’s approach perfectly. He’s perfectly fine with allowing Rorschach to speak the iconic line;

“No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”

So long as he then adds:

“That’s the difference between you and me, Daniel.”

For CRYING OUT LOUD. YES. We KNOW that’s the difference between them, you’ve just spent TWO AND A HALF HUGGING HOURS SHOWING US that that’s the difference between them, this line is coming at the end of a scene where they’ve practically specifically DISCUSSED that that’s the difference between them, you’d need to have a MAJOR CONCUSSION not to realise that that’s the difference between them so WHY ON EARTH do you feel the need to SPELL OUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM, you ENORMOUS HACK?

Honestly, it’s “from my point of view the Jedi are evil!” all over again.

For all that, there was plenty of stuff to like. The look of the film is almost perfect, a couple of dodgy costumes and some extremely dodgy makeup aside. Rorschach is utterly fantastic, and his incarceration is one of the few sequences that the film abridges almost completely successfully – a lot of the detail is gone, but the shape is still right, it’s tense but romps along at a good pace and is comfortably the best section of the movie. Dr. Manhattan comes across as properly unearthly, the Comedian as properly brutal, Nite Owl as properly diffident. The Silk Spectre is OK, but didn’t display anything like the hatred for the Comedian that she shows in the book which rather undermined the Luke I Am Your Father revelation on Mars. The change to the ending is perfectly acceptable. The action scenes are pretty good, albeit over-reliant on slow-mo and maybe erring on the side of “whoa, cool!” a bit too often. 155 minutes shot by amazingly quickly.

I just wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie made by someone who didn’t seem as scared of the source material and the fanbase. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie that was more interested in the book’s themes than its look, with its steak rather than its sizzle. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie that complimented the comic rather than just trying to duplicate it. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie made by Paul Greengrass, basically.

Until that happens, we could do an awful lot worse than the Watchmen movie we’ve already got.