When that’s done you need to watch this absolutely sublime parody, created by the Consolevania team:

Superb, and oh so true.

It’s the end of civilisation! Dawn of the dead!

…

Now tell me you weren’t severly disappointed after reading that headline…

So that was where I was last night, and I ended up learning some interesting stuff from the great raconteur.

1. If Kevin Smith had to pick a man to have sex with, it’d be his friend Bryan Johnson.
2. Kevin Smith’s next comedy, which he has just about finished writing but won’t be made until after his planned horror movie (inspired by Race with the Devil), will apparently have the most self-explanatory title ever, on the same level as Snakes on a Plane. Unsurprisingly, he wouldn’t tell us the title.
3. Kevin Smith is currently a fan of (NSFW!) SexyLabia.com. I dread to think how much comment spam posting that link will bring in.
4. Kevin recently bought a miniature dachshund because he and his daughter thought they were funny. Despite the age difference (eight years next to less than a year, or 56 and 6 using that seven-dog-years-to-one-human-year thing), his labrador Mulder may have gotten the weiner dog pregnant.
5. Jeremy London is the only actor that Kevin regrets casting. Despite the fact that Jason Lee was far better, Jeremy gave him notes on how to improve his performance.
6. Kevin finds the idea of black pudding abhorrent. As do I, to be fair. He also finds British cuisine’s obsession with pigs weird.
7. Harvey Weinstein wanted them to show Clerks 2′s pussy troll on screen. Kevin and Scott Mosier didn’t want to, so set out to make it unusable by either making the depiction far too offensive (getting John Kricfalusi to animate something obscene that wouldn’t make it past the MPAA) or too lame (Jason Mewes dressed up as a troll doll inside a giant wooden pussy). Despite Mewes’ enthusiasm – he’d get to keep the wooden pussy, you see – the idea thankfully passed.
8. Kevin ended up rewriting his whole scene in Die Hard 4.0, giving himself a huge speech. The studio was unsure about it because it turned a humourous scene into one with a ton of exposition, but Bruce Willis had Kevin’s back (“let me ask you this: who’s your second choice to play John McClane?”).
9. Kevin Smith can use the word ‘tchotchke’ in a sentence. I still struggle to pronounce it.
10. Lucas and Steven Spielberg are huge nerds: they like to compare websites and look at pictures of women in lingerie together. And Lucas liked the Death Star contractors idea in Clerks.

My photos are up on Flickr here.

And, one thing I learnt in London itself: some people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. This is aimed at the cunt that almost took us all out on the zebra crossing in Richmond.

I’ve missed out on the chance to see him speak a handful of times now but have an unhealthy enthusiasm for his ‘Evening With…’ DVDs, and although this one won’t be recorded it’s all worth it to hear some more material. Especially if said material ends up being a tirade against Jonathan Ross, ? la his bash of the 3AM Girls on the last DVD. I’d like to have a bit of a rant about Ross in front of an audience myself, but that’s another story.

Suffice to say I’ll post a report (hopefully some photos as well) on the day after. I can’t wait!

The bad guys in films are always the most fun, and it’s unfortunate that the same can’t be said for bad games. When bad games do get fun, however, is when you get to write about how bad they are.

In a fit of whimsy, partially inspired by the Eurogamer review, I downloaded this game. It’s not often that I’ll do this, but this game deserves it. It shouldn’t be purchased – EVER – and yet it’s a complete trainwreck of a game that should be seen by anyone involved in games. For them, it’s the paradigm of how a game shouldn’t be, and for anyone involved in this game it’s incriminating evidence that someone needs to hold as evidence for their future trials for crimes against gaming. And I only played it to prove these facts, obviously. If pressed I’ll claim that I was drunk.

Now I’m not a fan of Little Britain. I get called all the usual names when I tell people this, but I guarantee that when you go back to it in a few years, you’ll come to the realisation that it’s the same joke every single time. Lou turns his back, Andy runs around a bit, says “I want that one” and/or “I don’t like it” (a good summation of this game), cue canned laughter. How utterly hilarious!

Catchphrase comedy is shit, basically. And this game plays those catchphrases over…and over…and over…and over…again. Hardly the most endearing experience.

Even without my prejudices, though, this is a travesty. It’s actually pushing the limits of what I can justify as “amusingly bad”; one of those games that you stick on just to have a laugh at how bad it is. Everyone who’s ever fired up an Atari 2600 emulator (or owned the game, God forbid) has made a beeline for E.T., only to find out that it’s not the so-bad-it’s-good riot you expected: it’s just rubbish. This is the same kind of thing.

Daffyd and Vicky’s games play pretty much identically, in that you’re herded along a path and tasked with collecting some items and avoiding others as appropriate, lest the game play another voice sample at you. Oh, and Daffyd’s requires you to run down any homosexual stereotypes that you might see. They’re also identical in how the game takes its time to decide whether or not it’s planning on responding to button presses.

If Daffyd is in an abomination of Paperboy (replace newspapers with Gay Times, you see?), that Fat Fighters woman runs around like Pac-Man, only collecting cakes (dots) and avoiding the judgemental gazes of other Fat Fighters (ghosts). With interminal voice clips, of course.

The last one that I can be bothered to write about before I slash my wrists is Lou and Andy, in which you replicate that diving board sketch – still utterly depressing that that was voted the best comedy sketch ever – by bashing buttons to perform as many stunts as possible before Lou notices that Andy is a lying bastard. Almost as overrated as the real thing, which is going some considering that its average score on Game Rankings is 15%.

My conclusion? If you’re tempted to try this game because you think it might be a bit of a laugh, don’t. It’s not even worth the bandwidth to pirate it.

Last night I got to see Hot Fuzz, the latest from Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, et al. I haven’t seen this one hyped up nearly as much as Shaun of the Dead was, but as a Spaced devotee I was always going to see it.

First of all I’ll get the bad out of the way. I didn’t like Hot Fuzz as much as Shaun and certainly not as much as [sound of angels singing] Spaced. Secondly, a couple of good laughs aside, I didn’t think the first half hour was particularly brilliant. That’s it. The rest of it’s really good.

Once the main plot gets going and we have the wonderful rapport between Pegg and Frost, things are dandy. Like Shaun, it’s packed full of references to look out for, and of course Edgar Wright’s direction is as fundamental to the humour as the two stars and what’s almost a who’s who of British comedians and their previous collaborators. There’s an unhealthy obsession with Bad Boys 2 and Point Break which is milked for all the humour it’s worth (a surprisingly large amount), not to mention the ubiquitous Cornetto’s. It’s got all the hallmarks of the people who made it, but considering how stylish their oeuvre has been thus far, I’m more than happy with that.

What ultimately won be over, though, was two things. Both are possible spoilers so you might want to save them until you’ve seen the film for yourself. Number one: flying kick to a granny’s face; number two: that the whole thing is basically about militant Daily Mail readers. That gets a thumbs up from me.

Gran Turismo HD (or even GT4?) really looks familiar, doesn’t it? I doubt anything will come of it because they’ll be content to let the bashing commence, but Microsoft’s lawyers could have a field day on that little incident.

Basically nothing seems worth thinking about. I haven?t been up to much these days. I just don?t have much to say right now. I can?t be bothered with anything, but whatever.

The spammer has apparently got the same case of ennui as me, brought on by the lack of any real gaming news, even with CES and Macworld going on. Still, I’ve got my order in for a Halo 3 beta key with the free copy of Crackdown, so there’s always that to look forward to.

The general reaction when people hear this is that they’re not surprised, mainly since the DOA games don’t do a lot to advance the feminist cause, to say the least. I’d probably agree. The men in it aren’t exactly bright and well-attired, but then again they don’t have a game about dressing them up in swimwear and making them jump around.

It’s not the fact that the lawsuit happened that surprised me at all. What surprises me is that there are actually women working at Team Ninja. Surely that has to be a joke?