Games developers keep vampire hours, working through the summer so that we may have diversions when the long evenings arrive. The season is the only time many publishers can turn a profit, and the push starts long before British wintertime robs all […]

This wacky urban myth that CSI took it on itself to face last night (UK Channel 5): the oh-so-cool black guy who secretly gambles was sceptical, the dark-hair woman who caught a bullet for President Bartlett’s daughter was cheerfully up for we[…]

Intermission:
Starts well by destroying the charm of the Irish, and of Colin Farrell.
Delivers on what Ocean’s Eleven might have promised, but only promised to promise: A caper film where the emotional underpinning is at least as important as t[…]

The false goal of visual realism in games – a springboard for at least three articles about video-game design that I’ve never written. Top of my list of crimes against mimesis in many recent third- and first-person games that I have seen […]

Spirited Away is over-rated. (That got you clicking).What is most interesting about it is its reliance on at least a cursory knowledge of the Shinto spirit world and Japanese culture. Consider this one line description of the plot from the Guardian: […]

Don’t you love that feeling when you check your old email account, and then suddenly REMEMBER when you bid on all those Dr Who videos from eBay in a couch-driven stupor of sossidge sandwiches and the odd glass of BEER?
(Ssh – Pyramids of […]

Cable TV Manna: Survival Via The Remote Control
For the kids, life in a tropical climate is the prime time to play in the park, or at the community pool. Of course, this depends on actually being able to stay outside for more than five minutes. What […]

The new teacher training ad, with its somewhat child-unfriendly image of headless people wandering around, is unlikely to help recruitment. “Oi” – it is saying – “you, in the braindead masses. Why not do the only job in […]

Unlike the 1980’s dancical Shag, this years attempt at redoing the Fame formula Camp revels in the dual meaning of its title. Yes, this may ostensiably be a teen movie set in a summer camp, but this is a theatrical summer camp. It is certainly […]

Space Jerky!
The opening montage of The American Astronaut, after our hero’s bumpy landing on Ceres in his railroad spacecraft, is of him fixing up everything that’s fallen down, intercut with dry-shaving his whiskers off, tidying up his […]