Liking This Makes You An Idiot No.1: Monopoly

It is, I think, a fundamental rule of the universe that you shouldn’t create board games based around professions. You cannot make a board game that is more interesting than the occupation it’s based upon. Can’t be done. Not without a fairly extensive degree of tarting up, at least. Archaeology got a lot more attractive once Lost Valley Of The Dinosaurs threw erupting volcanoes and easily disturbed swamp monsters into the mix, for example. A game in which players complete to be the first to secure the right to dig in Giza, then roll dice to discover exactly which pieces of Third Dynasty pottery are sifted from the sand is unlikely to be a hot-seller. Similarly, Escape From Atlantis was a hit because sea monsters were forever ruining your shit, not because the logistics of evacuating an island population are particularly gripping.

Still, if you are hell-bent on representing an occupation through the medium of plastic counters without having the common courtesy to chuck in rampaging lizards, you at least have to make that occupation of passing interest in itself. Cluedo just about gets by on the fact that generations of exposure to Agatha Christie has left us intrigued by murder mystery at the genetic level. Risk works fine because it simulates the invasion of France without all the myriad difficulties such an act would require in the real world (how do you scrape together the money to get you, four mates, and your butter knives on the Eurostar to Paris?). I still wouldn’t object to either game including zombie hordes or alien space-fleets (“Overlord Zog in the Torment Zone with the Quartellian Doom Ray”), but all that death and violence and discussions in ballrooms is just about sufficient to hold my attention.

But how did 750 million people get suckered into thinking landlords are a good basis for a board game? As an actual career it must be bad enough, the constant cycle of buy house, spruce up house, lend out house, repair house seems so mind-numbingly tedious that treating your tenants as barely hominid lab experiments is probably the only upside. Certainly all of my landlords have taken this approach, and yet it is baffling excluded from Monopoly. Instead your greatest triumph comes from discovering that the game has arbitrarily decided it’s your birthday. This sudden revelation of your own date of birth is the single high-point of the entire experience, unless you get a strange kick out of a “justice” system that comes straight from Franco’s Spain: arrested at whim, then randomly either allowed to leave or forced to bribe the officials. Kafka would be proud, although he might never got any writing done at all if he’d happen to land on the wrong square and forced to sit out eternity waiting to roll a double.

All of which is fine, in theory. Board games are often played due to a sense of duty rather than an expectation of enjoyment (every Christmas my family resolves to grind through Pictionary in the certain knowledge that my brother will accuse everyone of cheating and that my father will be too drunk to hold a pencil, though not to drunk to call all and sundry a bunch of pricks). Monopoly might not be quite so bad if there was any ever suggestion that the damn thing might end. I have never finished a game of Monopoly once. Not ever (well, once, but only because I was banker and deliberately funnelling spare funds to one player in order to expedite his crushing victory; I didn‘t get invited back again). We always just essentially gave up when enough people had quit the board in order to return to their lives. Victory was inevitably claimed by whomever happened to be the last one at the table, which makes the game at least tangentially related to Russian Roulette, though if De Niro and Walken had been forced into rounds of Monopoly in that POW camp they would all have been desperate to get into the underwater cage just so that they could escape the wretched game (though in fairness if the VC had replaced the “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards with “Rot Here Forever, Filthy Americans”, it would finally squash the idea that the Commies didn’t have a sense of humour). Even when someone finally began to skirt the edge of bankruptcy, some generous colleague would swoop in with extra dough, purely to “keep the game going”. It was like watching Estragon and Vladimir decide that it would take Godot even longer to find them if they were to hide in a goddamn tree. I would have thought it fairly axiomatic that any activity, no matter how pleasant, has to end at some point. If that’s true of awesome films or energetic sex, then surely it must be the case for pretending to own a hotel on Old Kent Road. In other words, not only is the game unrelentingly dull and of potential use as an alternative to water-boarding, but the people it attracts are idiots unable to grasp even the most basic elements of human psychology. When I’m finally sent screaming to Hell, it will be to find Satan himself waiting for me with a Monopoly board and an infinite pile of childish fake money, grinning like a loon as we play and shouting out "Also known as your mother" each time I have to take a Community Chest card.

I bet he won’t even let me be the car.

Make Morris Mayor!

Arkham is a city under siege. Mayor Peabody would have you believe that street theft, burglaries, and mysterious disappearances have been reduced. Yet the Arkham Advertiser tells a different story. How can we enjoy our peaceful lives when at any time we may be jostled by uncouth adolescents, or disembowelled by a Dimensional Shambler? Every late-night bus trip could become a journey into terror when your driver attacks you with a enchanted blade, or turns out to be a Deep One, or something.

Citizens of Arkham : the time to fight back is now! A vote for me is an endorsement of my four point plan for reclaiming the streets! I shall:

• Work with members of the local community to achieve a 40% reduction in SAN loss, along with a corresponding 20% drop in random monster attacks and ritual organ-removal.
• Introduce tougher immigration policies for the following groups:
  i) mind-controlling insects;
  ii) time-travelling killer dogs;
  iii) troublesome colours. By which I mean those “out of space”, rather than the blacks;
  iv) the blacks.
• Overhaul city education, ending our over-reliance on the soft subjects such as English and Maths, and instead concentrating on vital life skills, including Spot Hidden, Library Use, and Not Splitting Up To Search Old Man Bishop’s Eighteenth-Century Lair.
• Lower taxes to stimulate the economy, therefore protecting the livelihood of valuable local businesses, such as sanitariums, funeral homes, and the purveyors of Elder Signs.
  

Ignore your lying incumbent (even though he is not a Serpent Person from ancient Valusia... as far as I know)! Deny his lick-spittle officials! Angrily wave away any statistics you might find that disagree with your own prejudices! Only I, Morris Smithson, can save you now!

A young Smithson, with fellow members of the Arkham Historical Society. Of those photographed, four were tortured into madness by Moon beasts, two ended up trapped on the hideous Plateau of Leng, “Stiffy” Williams was murdered by a hyper-intelligent obtuse angle from the Andromeda Spiral, and the man at the top left was lynched after we discovered his grandpa was a Mexican.

Here come the rants

Ok for the first in a series of rantings and ravings on what bugs us in the world of Our Front Room prepare for some geekery, Yes that's right the first installment is Trek based but I'm sure something else will be along soon for all the cool kids.


Those who of you who haven't seen the Enterprise episode featuring the Borg and care enough to have it spoilered look away ....now!

Yes the Borg turn in Enterprise, not just any Borg, but Borg from the future, Borg more advanced than any others we've seen. Said Borg get onto the ship and set about doing what they do best, assimilating the crap out of everything.

Now what annoys about the episode is the 'low-tech' Enterprise crew manage not only to quickly develop phasers that counter act the Borg ability to adapt (remember you used to be only to get any with shooting these guys once before you weapon was less use than a stick, however I remember drones falling down all over the shop)

But also Phlox (is that how you spell it) actually comes up with a cure for assimilation! (I shall be silent on how dumb that is)

Then after the Borg decide they are apparently no match for the Enterprise gang (after signally the collective by the way) they flee back home but back to this era home not the era they actually come from, so surely they advance the progress of the Borg collective by hundreds of years.

Anyway we get to the end and I think this has been absolute guff but one line about classifying the story might go some to saving it, but no. Nothing. Absolutely no explanation as to why Picard and his cronies have no idea what's hit them when the have a tete-a-tete with the Borg down the line. It seems no-one bothered to keep a record of this incredibly dangerous enemy at all.

Also how come the collective does not appear to know who the Feds are? They after downloaded the history of mankind like two hundreds years ago. The federation forgetful maybe I can buy just a tiny, little bit. The Borg as absent minded air-heads, hhmm don't think so.

The spoilerphobic can look again and just rest assured that I think the Enterprise Borg episodes is one of Trek's most shamefully inept and downright pathetic moments as they once again make a mockery of one the fan favourite species. I am done. For now.

An Assassain, His Victim, His Master And Their Excuses

I've recently been playing through the interactive-media entertainment Assassin's Creed and I have a few observations.

Each time you off a target you are thrown into a thrilling roof-top chase across the city to avoid the guards whose boss you've just introduced to the after-life. Now, I say thrown into a chase what I mean is your are gently pushed.

That is because you first undertake a moral debate with the unfortunate recipient of the pointy end of your sword/dagger/knife. They will claim they were only trying to do good, they are no different from you, they are simply misunderstood - a bit like when Tony Blair left office. These discussions often drag on and leave you wishing there was a 'Smother' button but just when you are really getting a little bored of these, about halfway through the game you are thrown a curve ball. Yes, that's right, one of the targets admits he had it coming. All the others try to reason the fact they are Mother Teresa with Goebbels's PR but this guy, this guy simply states he was an utter twonk and frankly needed his limbs forcibly rearranged.
So taken aback by this I forgotten to run when he finally sprung his mortal coil. Three sharp prods from the city guard later however and I was back to my deadly ways.

Another thing I find a little bit odd is I repeatedly told that I shouldn't be killing people who have nothing to do with my mission but the Assassin brotherhood is more than happy for me to butcher my way through twenty dozen soldiers and guards (who are just doing their job) if I manager to save one lousy common thief. You begin to wonder if you are on the right side of homicidal lunatic as you stare down at the remains of the district sheriff's department as the lowlife you've just saved from a trip to prison thanks you by providing a bunch of lawless thugs to berate people in the street.

And don't get me started on my Master, he's clearly up to something I don't like the smell of. For a start his guards register a threat level when I stand next to them - I supposed to be on their side, I'm was forced to kill one of my home town's soldiers because he apparently objected to me riding a horse faster than a crippled old man can walk. I'm betting now if I was allowed just to quietly off my Master and go home it is going to save an awful lot of trouble further down the line.

But whilst I may moan the game itself is quite good run as you leap from roof to roof and give people interesting new holes in their bodies. It is one where you wished the designers had show a little more imagination in the missions involved in 'investigating' the targets but then it's probably that they were distracted by Jade Raymond. After all she is a girl and everthing.

See http://www.jade-raymond.com/bio.php for those of you who need to check what a 'girl' is

As for the future set sections, well, I just pretend those don't exist.

OFR vs TV No. 2

Following the inexplicable resurrection of lycra-heavy cotton bud-fest Gladiators (will the traditional Murmillo face-offs once again be replaced with bitch-fights within hamster balls, I wonder), we present suggestions for alternative combinations of light-hearted family entertainment and humanity’s blood-stained past.

Rape ‘N’ Pillage

Each week a different scenic village on the East Coast is chosen for the scene of a brutal raid by two teams of cider-addled bikers in animal skins and swaying dangerously atop hastily-constructed longboats. Points will be awarded for bloodshed, volume, and collateral damage to patios and rock fountains. In tonight’s episode one team gets off to an early lead by choosing to pillage on a street-by-street basis, but rape in alphabetical order.

Presented by: An inappropriately exuberant Brian Blessed and a heavily sweating John Leslie.

The Tenth Crusade

In which the current Knights of the British Empire are forced to sing for their supper when the BBC ships them to the Holy Land and films them attempting to sack Arsuf armed only with slippers and flasks of tea, plus OBE’s to use as throwing stars. In the first week Sir Ian McKellen meets a sticky end in a deluge of boiling tar, Sir Ben Kingsley throws a strop over a sub-standard consignment of Greek Fire, and Sir Sean Connery is drawn and quartered by whooping townsfolk.

Presented by: Sir Alan Sugar, spared from front-line duty in favour of decrying the oncoming Saracen horse-archers as “a load of old toot”.

Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Tenko

Take a trip through time to the cheeky days of Japanese forced labour camps. In each episode female members of the Great British public compete in a variety of luridly-coloured games loosely based upon railway construction and the burial of friend’s corpses. Prizes include a thimble of rice, an hour without beatings, and the desperate hope of liberation by the Allies by series’ end.

Presented by: A pair of offensively yellowed-up Geordies, who continually pull their eyes into slits as they bellow “Finish buirding bunker warrs of led foam, or I punish!”

Human Wars

OK, so the inevitable computer take-over of the planet isn’t a historical time period just yet, but if it’s good enough for Primeval, it’s good enough for us. How about we prepare for our ultimate destiny as bar-coded underlings by staging Human Wars, in which Z-list celebrities and unpopular politicians are transformed through cortical stimulation to lobotomised flesh-puppets and forced to fight to the death by a selection of computers, past and present. In the pilot episode, David Cameron and Gordon Ramsay are compelled to assault each other’s genitals with their teeth by WOPR and a Commodore 64.

Presented by: A ZX Spectrum soldered onto the bleeding stump of Craig Charles’ neck, its rubber keys twitching with sinister glee.

I'm not a crazed killer!

I've been playing GTA IV for a least a week or so now and I've not yet turned into the crazed killer of the defenceless everyday guys in the street that the main-stream media promised me I would.

The kind lady from Media March said the game was dangerously unsuitable even for grown up minds let alone the poor little kiddies who have it bought for then by grandma for their seventh birthday. But I've not yet felt a compulsion to kill a real person, well apart form those which I normally get during the course of day-to day life every day of my life.

I was promised physchosis.

I want my money back.

That or a subscription to P.A.G.A.N (I will also need some goat trousers before I attend the first meeting)

Cylons are good at football

Again the spoilerphobes should look away.But

really if you're this far behind what are you doing?

But has anyone noticed how suspiciously like Chief Tyrol, Chelsea's German midfield general Micheal Ballack looks?

The Cylons have a plan. That plan is to come to Earth and win the Champions Leaque and World Cup and to crush the spirit of humanity by never ever missing a penalty.