You Should Play ‘Plants Vs Zombies’

Full disclosure: the inspiration to scribble this down came from reading about it on My Kind Of Phone, the Windows Phone UK blog, and discovering that by simply tapping out my witterings on a keyboard I could get one of those shiny new X-Box thingies, plus another Windows phone, which I fully intend to force on one of my smart phone-lacking associates. It ought to be stressed that had I not been doing this, I would have been playing Plants Vs Zombies, so morally I think I’m still in the clear.

Now might possibly not be the best time to go skinny-dipping

Tower defense games are something that I’ve never really got into, beyond a stretch at Christmas playing Crackdown: Project Sunburst (which used Bing Maps to simulate the delightful scenario of tooling up your own neighbourhood with rocket launchers and machine guns to defend it from what are effectively zombies and terrorists), though I suppose I have spent quite a lot of time observing the PC version of PvZ, such that I was already familiar with the notion of root vegetables lobbing produce at the undead, but it didn’t seem compelling enough to get on my desktop. And then it rocked up on the Windows Phone Marketplace, tempting me with its absurdly reasonable price, and I realised that the lure of killing the walking dead by throwing peas at them (and being able to do it on the train, no less) was too strong to resist.

So what does it have going for it? PvS starts with the simplicity of the tower defense concept, chucks in some ever-popular zombies and then, in a fit of glorious whimsy, decides that your defenses will be a plucky combination of flowers, mushrooms and whole foods. You use sun to build your plants, and bobbing sunflowers and golden mushrooms obligingly provide it. They are protected by walnut and pumpkin shields, while stout pea pods shoot down the approaching shufflers. Your arsenal of deadly flora grows as you progress through the game, allowing you to detonate cherries and ‘Doom-Shrooms’ with merry abandon or freeze zombies in their tracks with a glowering blue fungus. All of these are lovingly animated, simple and affecting, giving your plants personality with nothing but a cartoon face. Your sunflowers wear huge smiles, while the red chilli looks like it’s about to blow a blood vessel- and I can’t help but feel Catholic levels of guilt when the walnuts start to cry as the zombies chow down on them. Your groaning adversaries are equally delightful, staggering towards your house in at least a dozen varieties. Dropping your garden variety zombie is easy enough, but soon they start putting traffic cones and buckets on their heads and, ingeniously, finding ways around your defenses with balloons and pogo sticks. Every now and again there’s even a disco zombie who cuts some moves on your lawn- it was with great sorrow that I learned that this guy had previously been Michael Jackson, only being changed for the Game of the Year edition.

Grisly ghouls from every tomb!

This tone of the cheerfully bizarre is resplendent throughout, and sums up what makes Plants vs Zombies great: charm. This is an adorable little game, forged by minds which appear to have been gently twisted enough to seed their brand of funny throughout the entire thing. Your in-game guide is a burbling bulk who self-identifies as Crazy Dave and whose random pronouncements are alarming and amusing in equal measure. The Almanac which details the ins-and-outs of the zombies and plants you’ve encountered is a goldmine of wonderful little descriptions, like that of Bucket Zombie’s: “Buckethead Zombie always wore a bucket. Part of it was the assert his uniqueness in an uncaring world. Mostly he just forgot it was there in the  first place.” The bright blocks of primary colours and the cute animations combine with the addictiveness of the game itself to lodge it into your brain like a joyous javelin, to the point that it becomes difficult to stop playing even when crossing the road (nb. playing games in traffic: hazardous). This has displaced L.A. Noire, Halo: Reach and Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood on my WP7′s big brother, the X-Box 360. That speaks volumes.

Give it a go- you won’t regret it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to the rooftop levels and that damned bungee zombie is doing my head in.

Kingston Start Clapping

I’m off to see Tellison perform at the Kingston Hippodrome tonight, and given that this coincides with the release of their new album, I figured this would be another good opportunity to try a concise (as in not rambling for hundreds of words) review, so let’s put our headphones in and get going.

Tellison are technically competent in every way, but that can be a problem. Contact! Contact! was bookended beautifully by some cracking songs, but on the whole proved quite… well, if not forgettable, then certainly not memorable. That’s still a bit of an issue on The Wages Of Fear, but less so. Instead of a couple of stand-outs, the quality is more even across the whole record, and obviously the better for it. It’s also noticeably sadder- the whole album carries tones of regret and grief which amplify as it goes on, culminating in a fantastic trio of Vermont, Edith and the almost cripplingly tear-jerking My Wife’s Grave Is In Paris. The emotion is personal, blame turned inwards, but quietly and unassumingly, managing to steer clear of angst and cutting through the waves of poignancy.

Freud Links The Teeth And The Heart is the weakest effort, further strengthening my theory that songs involving dentists just don’t work; Stephen H. Davidson occasionally slips up and clumsily handles his words; and there’s no individual track which can stand up to Hannover Start Clapping, but overall this is a confident and accomplished album with a strong central theme of loss running throughout and a unique sound. Well worth a listen.

“Alright boys, let’s give ‘em a spanking.”

You should read The Boys.

They might just kick your teeth in

There we go, I’ve said it- anything further can be considered superfluous excess, unless of course you actually want to know what The Boys is and anything about it.

Or are incapable of using Google. I’m not one to assume. Not often anyway.

I fear that Garth Ennis, the author of this delightful illustrated tract (yup, a comic book), has at least one screw slightly wobbly, if not coming entirely loose. He’s responsible for the critically-acclaimed Preacher, not unknown for its ability to induce nausea, but more recently for something called Crossed as well, which is so vile I’m not going to link to it. He’s free with his swearing, his violence and his sex… and has turned out one of the finest comics I’ve ever read (though that should be taken with a shopping trolley-full of salt, given that my current comic intake consists almost entirely of books involving transforming robots).

Ennis hates superheroes. He feels they’ve harmed the comic book industry, isolating it in a perceived childish niche where it has found itself branded socially inept, and treated accordingly. Comics can be a mature art form, goes the argument, and to this end Ennis sets about literally demolishing the superheroes. In The Boys he shows what super powers would do to the people who have them, and that turns out to be what all power does- it corrupts. Almost to a man (and woman), the superheroes here are the villains, venal, vile and ridden with vice. When a man is raised from birth knowing that he is physically superior to everything else in existence, he’s probably going to come out of it with some psychological maladjustments, and that’s what we find in the Homelander, a cross between the omnipotence of Superman and the out-and-out patriotism of Captain America (one of the primary joys of the series is checking out Ennis’ thinly-veiled analogies of famous superheroes and their resulting perversions). From this ubermensch downwards, we’re presented with a panapoly of licentious bigoted idiots, convinced they can do no wrong and rolling in money, women and drugs.

Now you're seeing Superman in a whole new light, aren't you?

Into this, we add The Boys- a CIA-backed gang of international badasses who believe that superpower is the most dangerous weapon on the planet and has to be watched accordingly. Butcher flies the Union Jack, Mother’s Milk represents the US, Frenchie (supposedly) hails from the Gallic chunk of Europe and the Female is a Japanese lass with a penchant for face-removal. Wee Hughie, a Scot whose girlfriend is explosively seperated from her arms thanks to the superfast hero A-Train, is the audience surrogate painfully exposed to this secret war between The Boys and superheroes.

The art… eh. It comes and goes. Sometimes (notably in earlier issues) it’s super-detailed, beautifully coloured and gloriously grim. Later (I’m thinking in particular of Volume 6, The Self-Preservation Society, but only because it’s the most recent one I’ve read), colouring becomes quite flat and the lines seems to lose a bit of their intricacy, characters lose a bit of their fluidity and can end up looking stiff and awkwardly posed. Whether or not this is is a good thing depends on how essential one concludes that the hyper-violence is to the story: one could argue, very plausibly, that frankly a lot of it is unnecessary and that the plot could run along quite happily without it. Equally, you could note that the narrative of The Boys is driven by intense feelings and bitter resentment, and that the violence merely serves to underscore that; also that if you buy an Ennis comic you should probably know what you’re signing up for…

"So let's just put our heads together and sort this out."

Another potential pitfall is the slight barminess of the nature of the conspiracy theory plot (big business is out to get you!), and on occasion the sheer nihilism on display by virtually every member of the cast save Wee Hughie and his girlfriend Annie (also secretly Starlight, seemingly one of only two halfway decent superheroes in the whole thing) can be quite exhausting. But this is to ignore the fact that The Boys is a fast-paced, intriguing and fundamentally funny take on the superhero genre which can do gross-out humour- witness one moment when Wee Hughie turns out to have been going down on Starlight when she was unknowingly on her period and everyone has a good laugh at his expense- and genuine sentimentality. Butcher is a dark and driven man with an astounding capacity for horrific violence, but at the same time he’s capable of compassion, seeing in Hughie a kindred spirit wounded by superpowers and confessing that he always wanted a little brother. Mother’s Milk goes to great lengths to care for his tearaway daughter, and Frenchie looks after the Female with tenderness and resilience in spite of her inability to communicate and truculent nature. Ennis’ universe is one where people bad people do good things and good people do bad things, but that ultimately they are defined as such by the extent to which they do those things- the Homelander occasionally helps Starlight, but he does this to suit his own ends and the odd moment of convenience hardly cancels out his bloodthirsty proclivities which he indulges for his own satisfaction, while Butcher can lie, manipulate and kill to get what he wants, but is, when it comes down to it, working towards a positive end, embodying, “the ends justify the means”. The means repulse Hughie more and more as the series goes on, the ongoing moral dilemma as much the reader’s as it is his.

If you’ve ever wondered about why Batman kept around a ‘boy wonder’ in tiny shorts, what superheroes really do when an Infinite Crisis event rolls around, why a Communist superhero might be called ‘Love Sausage’ or what might drive a guy to keep a hamster up his backside, then this comic is for you. If you don’t fancy pacey, funny and well-written pieces, or if you just don’t like the word ‘cunt’, then maybe don’t pick it up. But you’re missing out.

A Bad Man Writes A Blog

Doctor Who is a wonderful thing, a glorious televisual creation which gleefully straddles the cavernous divide between adults’ and childrens’ programming and which has somehow survived and prospered in spite of and because of a peculiarly British mix of adventure, peril and techno-babble. And by 7.45pm on Saturday 4th June, I will be absolutely furious with it.

As a self-confessed geek, mid-season breaks in serialised television shows are maddening, because they tend to end on a massive cliffhanger which leaves the viewer in dramatic limbo for as many months as the production team decide is necessary for them to finish work on the second half of the season, or maybe for as long as it takes them to finish coming up with another dark and twisted way to toy with the audience like macabre marrionettes. For one reason or another, Doctor Who, with its already-limited (compared to American dramas, at any rate) series length, has opted to snip itself in twain and render us champing at the bit, probably laughing and pointing the entire time.

As creatures, something in us is inherently attracted to narrative. We love telling stories. We get aggravated when the stories are cut off, but our anger is tempered by knowing that more of the story is coming. Doctor Who has offered a compelling and (relatively) complex tale, a step beyond the monster-of-the-week offerings the show ran with for some time prior to its resurrection, and a cut above the relatively low key overarching plot points Russel T. Davies utilised during his time as Whovian overseer (the Bad Wolf hints for Eccleston, the Harold Saxon clues for Tennant), and it’s because of this that we tolerate the maddening desire to know things and hungrily look forward to the next Saturday in the rota.

Some specifics: the Doctor’s companion, Amy Pond, has been revealed as a ‘ganger’- a creature of a synthetic substance called The Flesh- and dissolved by a clearly distressed Doctor. The real Amy is pregnant and somewhere in a stark white prison, tended to and guarded by a mysterious madam in an eyepatch. Here’s the trailer for the mid-season finale (A Good Man Goes To War- aha! See where the blog title came from), in which Rory tools up Roman-style to go find his wife, and the Sith rock up out of nowhere to infect the Doctor Who franchise with midichlorians and other assorted bullshit:

And here’s a delicious preview of the episode:

To summarise: a blue guy (he’s called Dorium) sells brain, warns creepy Sith guys (human hands, note) that making the Doctor angry is an idea that ranks alongside telling Bruce Banner that you’re shagging his mum. “God help us if you’ve made him angry!“

The really interesting point there is the almost flat-out statement that the child is the Doctor’s. This could be a misunderstanding on the part of Blue Meanie, or it could be that Amy has somehow been artifically impregnated with the Doctor’s DNA… or a number of other points. I don’t know how many people would be too pleased with the notion of the Doctor having had a sexual relationship with one of his companions (though based on her attempt at seduction way back in S05E01, Amy wouldn’t be too appalled), but there’d certainly be some backlash.

Let’s recap (again).

• Amy was a ganger (since when? There’s a whole debate going on about that, but it’s best to leave it alone here I think). The real Amy is pregnant with a baby which has something to with the Doctor, and which has plausibly been conceived on the TARDIS.
• Amy is being held hostage by Ring Wraiths with lightsabers who don’t seem to care much for the Doctor’s anger.
• Cybermen, Sontarans and Silurians are involved. So too are the Clerics (remember them in the episodes with the Weeping Angels last series? Spot them in the trailer above).
• The Silence have to be in on the action somehow. There’s the unexplained link between their device the Doctor found in The Impossible Astronaut and the one at the top of the stairs in The Lodger. Plus we still don’t know how the TARDIS exploded in The Pandorica Opens, and Amy’s pregnancy (“what he must know”) and the Doctor’s death (“what he must never know”) are both directly tied into them.
• That Time Child who rocked up in a 1960s space suit and then regenerated at the end of Day of the Moon has yet to be mentioned, but is clearly something to do with Amy’s baby.
• We’ll find out what River Song got banged up in Stormcage for.
• My namesake (yes, that’s Rory) will actually get to be bad-ass for a change.

Come A Good Man Goes To War, I’m going to be outside the M25, and as such quite plausibly far away from a working television or electrical socket. I will be studiously avoiding the internet until I’ve had a chance to soak up this story. Hopefully, it’ll be good enough to warrant the interruption.

 

 

You Should Watch ‘The Shadow Line’

In a world where it feels like you’re more likely to have no money and get shanked by a disenfranchised yoof after about 7pm if you venture outside (or, indeed, inside) Zone 1 of London- and that’s presuming you haven’t already been blown up by a mad Saudi Arabian- is it any wonder that media entertainment is such big business? Can we really blame people for wanting some escapism? I’m biased, of course- I love the escapism, me. Confronted with life and all its dickish behaviour, escape seems like the only sane option sometimes. Which, in a possibly roundabout way, explains why the BBC have increasingly got it in the neck over their relative inability to produce any decent drama. Given the chunk of money we hand over to them in the form of the license fee, the argument goes (or ought to), shouldn’t they be doing more to provide us with intriguing plots, believable characters and a temporary respite from the soul-crushing drudgery of our existence?

They seem to be doing just that.

There’s been a notable advert lately pushing a new series of drama shows on BBC channels. You might have seen it. One of them was the delightful Exile, which featured John Simm (who I still find it quite hard to think of as anyone other than The Master) as a tabloid journalist-turned-crusading reporter returning home to his Alzheimers-ridden father (Jim Broadbent). A winning combination of fantastic cinematography, some superb performances and terrific lighting and sound, it’s the sort of thing we need to see more of. It’s the sort of thing The Shadow Line is.

Ejiofor, Eccleston and, in the background, a deliciously mysterious Rea

I’ve gotta admit, it was the cast that won me over before I had grasped what the concept was. There’s a fair bit of geek cred in this serious cops and robbers drama: Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Operative in Serenity), Stephen Rea (Inspector Finch in V For Vendetta) and Christopher “Stupid Apes” Eccleston (of Doctor Who fame). It’s a single vision, the product of Hugo Blick, who is writer, director and producer- and who was also, it turns out in a delightful twist of fate, the hilarious Baron von Gerhardt in the Private Plane episode of Blackadder Goes Forth. He’s definitely more known for comedy apparently- there’s something called Marion and Geoff which I had never heard of until looking him up, but by all accounts it’s good. The creative process to crafting something dark and bleak like The Shadow Line is, he says in The Guardian, not so different to making comedy: “I thought all along that I was writing drama with funny lines. Drama, to me, is something that tells the truth. Comedy tells the truth as well, but can feel too heightened to be realistic. My interest is in finding the dramatic truth of something.”

In The Shadow Line, the dramatic truth is insinuated in the title- there’s a thin and hard-to-distinguish line between our world and the criminal world, but, perhaps more importantly, there’s a thin line in all of us between moral and immoral. The primary demonstrations of this assertion are Ejiofor and Eccleston, a cop and a crook oddly inverted. Ejiofor’s amnesiac officer, crippled by memory loss after a bullet lodged itself in his skull, is believed to have been double-dipping- he’s definitely doing something dodgy, as in episode 3 we found out he neglected to log his near-fatal operation and that he has a second family besides his wife. Eccleston, meanwhile, runs a clean fruit and flowering operation designed to be a front for cocaine smuggling. At the same time, he wants out so he can care for his wife, who has Alzheimers (which is clearly the trendy mental illness of the moment). In between them there’s a murdered drug baron, a sole witness, a sinister man in black (Rea, working Blick’s dialogue beautifully) and some absolutely delightful scenes, the highlight being Ejiofor pursuing Rafe Spall (who’s playing Jay Wratten, an unsettlingly nonchalant sociopath) pursuing the witness on foot. Having had to barrel out of his car, Ejiofor spits, “I am on foot! Fucking typical British car chase!”

There’s silly moments- at his drug baron father’s funeral, Spall is confronted by a mysterious ex-associate, the back-and-forth tumbling into Garth Merenghi-esque levels of allusion and metaphor- but this is so far ahead of, for example, the lamentable Outcasts that they don’t even register on the same scale. The whole show is tense, teetering on the edge of a knife. The lighting and sound match: colour is dark, brooding and menacing, or stark and washed out, while there’s a very Dark Knight-esque Joker theme refrain which ominously underscores moments of particular tension. Even the lovely theme tune, ‘Pause’ by Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo, is whistful- beautiful, but melancholy.

Watch it on BBC2, Thursdays, 9pm. Watch it now, before the BBC decide they’ve done enough decent drama for the moment.

trying to get the fever back

Panic! At The Disco – Vices And Virtues

The first time I heard of Panic! At The Disco was at the Give It A Name festival, which used to occur joyously and expensively in May at Earl’s Court over the course of a weekend and which catered both to lovers of the punk/emo/screamo end of the rock spectrum and to fans of overpriced junk food. I can’t really put my finger on why, but I found them intensely annoying, and the line, “Haven’t you people ever heard of/closing a god-damn door,” stood out as particularly eye-twitchingly irritating. A few months later and that line had burrowed its way through my ear drum and grafted itself onto the side of my cerebral cortex, and I was jiving away to I Write Sins Not Tragedies in cheerfully dank and dark London rock clubs with everyone else.

That is, admittedly, a rather long-winded way of saying that yes, I do actually quite like Panic! At The Disco. Not so much the second album (‘the one with the creative differences’), but the alarmingly folky tone of Pretty. Odd. has been jettisoned, along with half the band, in favour of a return to the delightfully baroque and decadent sound that made them famous in the first place. It’s a sound that’s easy to dislike, however irrationally, but if you know that already then you won’t be listening to Vices and Virtues, the new opus, in the first place.

The image P!ATD conjure, drawing on a debauched 1920s notion, is sexy and immoral- you can see why it gets people interested. It’s best implemented in Hurricane, which has a very funky bassline to start it off and sees Urie very successfully capture lyrically what Ross implemented on AFYCSO. Hurricane kicks off a brilliant trio of grand midsection songs- Memories is a melancholy-sounding ode to trying and failing while Ready To Go has a good old crowd chant-bait and rocks along at a great pace.

The rest is relatively solid but not especially memorable- nothing wrong with it, but nothing to make me even remember the titles beyond The Ballad Of Mona Lisa, which is the single. Overall, V&V feels a lot like a band reassuring us that they’ve still got it, in spite of being cut in two- Panic! (with the exclamation mark restored) are saying, look, it’s been rough but we can do what we used to. They’ve stabilised a ship (which, admittedly, was only sinking depending on your taste). Now they need to rise to new and greater things.

New Albums In ‘Not As Good As Last One’ Shocker

This is the first in an experiment of trying to write shorter, more readable posts. Also maybe even regular posts. Madness!

Rise Against – Endgame

I have never seen Rise Against perform live. I feel like I’m really missing out. These guys have so consistently pumped out excellent albums (since Siren Song of the Counter Culture, their first on a major label, back in 2004) that bothering to wonder what to think about this one seemed like something of a waste of time. “These guys wrote Saviour, Like The Angel, Survive… they can’t go wrong!”

Well… they haven’t so much gone wrong as they have… I’m not sure. Maybe they shot themselves in the foot by writing so many good albums prior to this one that there was always a statistically significant chance that the quality wouldn’t quite be maintained. Not that it’s a bad album, oh, far from it! Architects and Help Is On The Way are classic Rise Against of the very highest quality, and the album will certainly grow on you, but it’s not track-after-track of audio excellence, as previous offerings have been. Political commentary is hit and miss: on Make It Stop (September’s Children) the guys sing a poignant ode to bullied gay youngsters, but Survivor Guilt, with its spoken-word dialogue (no idea where it’s lifted from), is particularly unsubtle. There’s also a few instances where Tim Mcllrath’s lyrics aren’t as inspired as they usually are.

Still, overall, these are churlish things to pick at. When the worst thing you can say about an album is, “It’s not quite as amazing as their last one,” well, you’re still laughing. For all that it suffers by comparison with its predecessors, Endgame is still a well-crafted collection of songs. I just hope its name isn’t as ominous as it sounds.

Funeral For A Friend – Welcome Home Armageddon

I have a feeling this one is going to sound remarkably similar to my thoughts above… ok, here we have Funeral For A Friend’s fifth studio album, loudly trumpeted as “the one where we go back to our roots”. A friend of mine theorises that FFAF have seen the writing on the wall- that the line-up alterations, label changes and scene shifts of the past few years have ensured the band remains firmly in the second tier of showbusiness, back to playing pubs in Wimbledon after almost a decade of selling out places like Brixton Academy. The cover stories for Kerrang! have become double-page spreads; there will be no more DVDs. That’s the theory anyway. Whether or not FFAF think that would be a good thing is another matter. Musically they seem to want to return to their roots- maybe they think a rewind of their circumstances back to when they were recording Four Ways To Scream Your Name would be good for them too. This is the context in which I found myself listening to Welcome Home Armageddon.

One thing’s for certain: it’s not Casually Dressed and Deep In Conversation Part 2. This is, at best, a grower. Several songs come across with demo-like production quality (when you said you were going back to your roots, guys, I didn’t expect you to mean, “Parents’ cellar with an 8-track”), Matt’s lyrics hit new levels of uninspiredness (which, ironically, he notes during single Front Row Seats To The End Of The World) and the sound has, unfortunately and surprisingly, not benefited from the influx of ex-Hondo Maclean members- if anything, it’s got blander and more generic. Not to be too harsh: there are some real standout tracks. Front Row Seats was pre-confirmed as a great song several months ago, and it’s joined by Old Hymns and Owls (Are Watching), both of which deserve to be on any sort of ‘Best Of’ album FFAF ever put out.

Alas, it’s just not enough. Most of the songs suffer from feeling like they’re about to kick off into something incredible for their entire running length, and that’s the main problem right there: the album rocks along nicely but never achieves the heights it both could and ought to. This is no Hours. This is no Memory and Humanity. This isn’t even a Tales Don’t Tell Themselves. Hopefully this is just the first stage of the whole “getting back to our roots” thing- The Getaway Plan prior to the next This Year’s Most Open Heartbreak, if you will- because there is very little on Welcome Home Armageddon that makes me want to bend my arms to look like wings.

Warming up the Cold War

Long time, no write. My bad.

Let’s move on.

A few posts prior (it was over a year ago or something), I lambasted Treyarch and praised Infinity Ward for the production of World at War and Modern Warfare respectively. With MW, I gushed, Infinity Ward had raised the game, while Treyarch’s WaW had merely tried to feed of its predecessor’s success.

Oh, but how the game has changed!

Given that Activision (as previously mentioned) has an exceptionally huge hard-on for busting out a Call of Duty game once a year, there have been two releases since last I ventured here- Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 and Treyarch’s Black Ops this winter- and the tables, they have been turned. Where the first MW was an exercise in greatness, its successor got too big for its US Army-issued boots. Where WaW was an ugly non-stop barrage, Black Ops succeeds in crafting an entertaining story with- gasp!- a sympathetic protagonist.

Let’s look at MW2 first. We get started badly- someone called Shepherd (which is rapidly becoming the most over-used name in fiction) spouting empty quasi-philosophical proverbs over the traditional MW scene-setter from satellite perspective. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  Cheers, Shep, hadn’t figured that one out. It’s a little thing, but the voice-over is indicative of the whole game: it’s got a little bit self-important. Shepherd’s habit of speaking in meaningless-but-dramatic-sounding nonsense is an attempt to Be Important, the game attempting to Say Something. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it did have something to say… but it doesn’t. And it doesn’t even have a clue about what’s left over. The plot is a baffling mess, the sort of thing which sounds like it made sense in somebody’s head but turned out to be a convoluted mess when put down onto the page. So we have a character from the first game mysteriously co-opted into Task Force 141, an elite unit apparently entirely under US command when it contains SAS soldiers. A player-character who you command for two missions gets shot at the end of the most pointless bit of gameplay I’ve ever experienced, which features massacring innocent civilians in a Russian airport, and his death convinces the Russians that the Americans were behind the whole thing, in spite of somebody underlining in the following cut-scene that nobody but Shepherd and TF141 knew he was American. Then we’re told that Makarov, the terrorist leader, has a grudge against somebody in a Russian prison (referred to as a ‘gulag’, which gets my goat), who turns out to be Captain Price from the first game. Given that Makarov is reportedly on very friendly terms with the Russian authorities, how exactly has Price not been capped by now…? Never mind, Price and his moustache are back. Meanwhile, Russia has invaded the USA. Wait, what? Oh, and the best way to sort it out is to fire a nuke at the East Coast. Ok, we’ve beaten Russia (“Yoo-Ess-Ay! Yoo-Ess-Ay!”) and now we’re going after Makarov. We’re in his house, we’re nicking his hard-drive, we’re being extracted by Shepherd, our boss- holy shit he shot me and lit me on fire. Why…? Ok, turns out he was in command when the nuke went off in the first game, and he’s angry, and he thinks that the best way to get more soldiers is to… start a war which might see America get conquered…? I guess? In spite of being an older guy who survives a helicopter crash, he stabs you in the chest with your own knife (oh, you’re playing as a fourth guy now) and beats the shit out of Price before you pull the knife out of your own chest and chuck it in his eye.

It says something about my gullible over-emotional nature that I was still a little upset when Shepherd capped me and my buddy Ghost, while Price screamed not to trust Shepherd over the radio and Shepherd’s Shadow Company soldiers went about incinerating us. It shouldn’t have, because other than surprise (Shepherd’s about-turn was baffling and, it turned out, very poorly justified) I felt pretty much zero attachment to the protagonist for most of the game, a grunt codenamed Roach. The same was true of Ramirez, the US Ranger you spend some time defending Virginia and Washington from the dastardly Russians with. You play a faceless, personality-free zombie, doing exactly what he’s told when he’s told and in the way he’s told to do it. Granted, this is the case for all the Call of Duty games, but some have gone out of there way to at least disguise it.  MW gave you Price and Gaz, two endearing officers, and a single uncomplicated plot about taking out a man with sinister nuclear designs. MW2 offers you Price again (who, unfortunately, suffers from whatever attempted gravitas-inducing disease Shepherd has) and Ghost, a guy who, in his skull balaclava, at least looks distinctive and who shows a hint of affection for your character, so we’re already in negative equity. As for your motives, it’s hard to care much for whatever it is you’re up to. Makarov is someone you fight side-by-side with at one point, and then, after you spend most of the game hunting him, you don’t even get to do him in at the end. Shepherd’s dislikeable enough to enjoy killing, particularly after he betrays you, but his heel turn comes so abruptly that it’s hard to feel much closure after you’ve turned his head into a dartboard. On top of all this, the dialogue is bloated with such levels of military tech-speak that it’s difficult to imagine that you’re an actual human being involved in all the madness- it would be easier to think that you were caught up in some sort of cyber-war between robots, so frequently do numbers, acronyms and war-lingo crowd out actual words. It might be accurate to refer to planes as ‘fast-movers’, but seriously, as much as I want a bit of escapism pretending to be a soldier, it’s no fun if I don’t understand what half the dialogue means.

Wow, ranting about MW2 seems to have taken up a thousand words- oops. I should try brevity more often. It’s not all bad, anyway- the multiplayer (specifically offline) kept my housemates and I entertained for months, though we refused to be fleeced for the map packs.

Black Ops, meanwhile, is simpler. It doesn’t have any lofty ambitions to say anything about where power finds a place to rest its head. Instead, it gives you a character (Mason), puts you in a rough situation from the start (strapped to a chair, being interrogated) and offers a mystery for you to solve (what the hell is up with the numbers?). Then it picks you up and hurls you along a rollercoaster ride featuring the Bay of Pigs, a boat ride in ‘Nam with a rockin’ soundtrack, a chopper flight down a river valley, a race across rooftops, an infiltration of a rocket base… It’s the authentic CoD experience, shorn of any pretentiousness and with the benefit of a good old Cold War conspiracy story, plus a tie-in to World at War. Woods and Bowman are admittedly as much non-entities as most other squad members in the franchise, but Hudson and Reznov, on the other hand, are pretty cool (Hudson wins via his over-the-top sunglasses alone, while Reznov… well, you’ll find out). Gameplay is what it’s always been- if you’re not expecting an on-the-rails shooter with almost zero alternative options or interactivity by this point, you’ve been living under a rock. It’s hardly innovative or stylish, but it seems churlish to pick that as a complaint about the CoD series by this point. Multiplayer has had a bit of a change-up, albeit for the worse: you now not only have to earn your way up the gun ladder, but you’ve got to buy them as well, using an in-game currency called CoD Points. Seems like a bit of a bizarre addition, along with taking progression out of offline splitscreen, which is what helped boost its longevity for my housemates and I. One massive improvement, though, is the ability to have two players online on the same console. It’s hardly Halo (which lets you have four) but it’s a step up from previous CoD efforts, and very welcome.

So there we have it. Infinity Ward forgot they were making a game with very limited story-telling scope; Treyarch seem to have become accutely aware of it, and made the best of it. Black Ops is hands-down the better game, with more of an atmosphere and a more engaging story. Still, Modern Warfare 3 is out in November- can Infinity Ward make another classic, even after being so thoroughly gutted by Activision? We’ll see. Another year, another call to duty.

Self-Indulgent Compare and Contrast

I love House, as I believe I have already pointed out. It remains untouched as one of the most dazzling things on television- dramatic, insightful, darkly funny, unafraid to push boundaries (if the constant praise The Wire gets from the Guardian is anything to go by, then House might not be the only claimant to the throne, but it’s one of those things I’ve never got around to watching…). Why is it, then, that other programmes find it so fething difficult to produce material that is anywhere near the same calibre? Recently, I’ve found myself investigating season 3 of The Tudors and fledgling drama Flash Forward (alongside the consistently-wonderful season 6 of House and the surprisingly-high-quality season 5 of Heroes), and they seem to pursue completely different narrative agendas; nay, they have completely different mentalities though they inhabit the very same genre. Let us first consider The Tudors, which you might (not unreasonably) believe to be a historical drama. Don’t be deceived: it is nothing of the sort. ”Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history… and we wanted people to watch it,’ said Michael Hirst, the show’s writer and creator, in an interview with the New York Times last year. The Tudors being set in early-modern England is mere happenstance, a device allowing the show to cram in as many novelty costumes and as much sex as possible.

The Tudors, then, is essentially a televised version of crack- really quite bad, but compelling for its run-time, albeit in a way which induces considerable guilt for subjecting you to a period-drama version of Hollyoaks. Give it anything more than a second thought and one realises how dissatisfying an experience it is- it has no real storyline as such, and merely seems to follow events in a documentary fashion, taking great pains to chronicle every adulterous liaison and lust-drenched meeting. Along the way, we are starved of sympathetic characters, instead provided with men seeking only to advance their own cause and women who either scheme for some greater purpose or who are the pawns of their male overlords. Indeed, it seems that our protagonists only really resonate when they’re on their way to the scaffold to be executed on some tenuous treason charge. Take Thomas Cromwell (James Frain), a low-born man made good who rose to prominence towards the end of season 1, cheerfully clambering over the corpse of his benefactor Cardinal Wolsey (Sam Neil) and a man who took great pleasure in dissolving the Catholic monasteries of England during seasons 2 and 3. Throughout it all, he comes across as selfish, power-hungry and venal, a main character whose only saving grace (if indeed it can be called that) is that he is dedicated to his religion, the newly-birthed Protestantism. If we’re supposed to have empathised with this guy, I really don’t see how: he manipulates, connives and back-stabs, inflicting huge suffering in the name of both power and religion. Only when the tables are turning and he falls victim to the intrigues of the Duke of Suffolk do we start to see anything close to what might be called a sympathetic character- in the space of a couple of episodes it is suddenly revealed that he is over-working himself, actually quite generous, a family man with a son he loves and something of a democratiser of faith, advocating the notion that priests are not required to speak to God, and that anyone can do it. This is really too little, too late, and by the time we see him reduced to a prisoner stripped of his fine robes in the Tower of London begging King Henry VIII (Jonathon Rhys Meyers) for clemency, we are only too aware that he has bullied and cajoled not a few others in that very building, and sent many of them to their deaths, and as such we just don’t care when he is finally and cruelly dispatched.

That, right there, sums up the flaw of The Tudors as a drama: we just don’t care. All of the characters follow the same troughs-and-peaks system- we are supposed to suddenly start giving a damn when their fortunes fail and adversity begins to squeeze, but we remember that while their star was in the ascendancy they were quick to condemn others to equally grim ends, unlikeable in prosperity and hence unforgivable in defeat. Lacking a protagonist as such, The Tudors becomes something else, mere spectacle, all glossy glory and nubile flesh; drama without attachment to the characters, documentary without the interest of the real facts. One could argue that it’s a sexed-up look at what courtly life in Tudor England may have resembled, but this barely counts for a defence, and doesn’t do much to dismiss that the programme really has nothing to it. What’s frustrating is that it could have something to it quite easily. The producers and writers have already demonstrated a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts, so why let mere history get in the way of telling a genuinely decent story, rather than having the show simply being a window onto what are, essentially, the spoiled demands of a king who never becomes anything beyond adolescent? The closest the show has come to dramatic credibility is the fifth episode of season 3, ‘Problems In The Reformation’, which features Henry, grieving for his beloved Jane Seymour, becoming solitary and reclusive, getting drunk and only spending time with his Fool (David Bradley), during which time Meyers gets a chance to act something other than petulant and the two plumb some slightly deeper levels of psychology regarding the reality of life at court, what Henry is really like and the nature of illusion and reality itself. Combined with the much darker editing and direction, these scenes stand out in a series which is otherwise about as deep as a puddle. Why not have some genuine theological discussions? Whilst the theological details in the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism are perhaps not exactly attention-grabbers in themselves, the themes which divide the two make worthy topics: ritual, subservience and the iconography, tradition and rich imagery of Catholicism versus the individualism, revolutionary nature and stark minimalism of Protestantism. What about relationships? As it stands, couplings in The Tudors simply occur, with little discussion as to their meaning and occurrences. They are required to happen, and so they do, end of story, missing a fantastic opportunity to talk about the position of love, friendship (and their absence, perhaps) and convenience in Tudor relationships. Again, however, because of the way we interact with the characters- observing them, rather than understanding them- we are limited to merely watching Henry’s sister Margaret shack up with Suffolk, bereft of why they love each other, what it is they find attractive and necessary about each other, or any sort of other genuinely interesting or insightful details about their relationship.

So that’s The Tudors: a glossy appeal to your sense of decadence masquerading as drama, addictive but far from substantial. How, then, does Flash Forward compare? I first caught wind of this in a Spotify advert, which touted it as being “from the network that brought you Lost”, a tag that one feels is perhaps stretching the boundaries of  credentials a little (“Yay! The people who broadcast Lost are broadcasting a different show featuring different actors and written and directed by different people!” Though saying that, Flash Forward features Sonya Walger, who was/is actually in Lost…), but it nevertheless flitted around in my mind long enough to warrant watching it.

I am as of yet undecided as to its exact quality, but let’s just say straight off the bat that comparing it, albeit indirectly, to Lost was a mistake. One could argue that they’re both shows that begin by positing a main mystery and working from there, though even that gets short shrift- while the mystery in Lost is huge and sprawling, that of Flash Forward is tighter and more focused, a single enigma of an event and the puzzle of solving it. The event in question consists of a two minute seventeen second global blackout during which every person on the planet receives a vision of what will happen to them six months in the future; the series then follows a small group of characters in Los Angeles as they investigate what caused the event and their visions begin to impact their lives. This contains within it the potential for compelling drama, though two episodes in, Flash Forward is still on some shaky ground. It has seemingly looked at Lost, which it considers itself to have a shared pedigree with, and assumed that the show’s popularity comes from the simple fact that there is a mystery at all, ignoring Lost’s propensity for deep character analysis and an intelligent, detailed (some might say convoluted) mythology built up with considerable care and attention to detail. Flash Forward’s setting itself handicaps it- by dealing with a small interconnected group of characters, it loses plausibility from the off in its protagonists’ convenient central role in proceedings which have global repercussions (in the second episode, someone remarks, surprised, that they’re not the only people investigating the blackout- really? The whole world conks out for over two minutes and you’re shocked that an FBI office in LA isn’t the only unit looking into things?). This sense of the contrived is something that Flash Forward struggles to shake throughout, both in its general settings and in its central mystery. The protagonists are your stereotypical American drama characters: good looking, over-sincere at nearly every opportunity, all living in ridiculously big houses, nauseatingly adorable child, etc etc etc; and their conflicts are as superficial as you’d expect: a suicide attempt is averted in the first episode by the blackout, and then ‘explained’ in a two minute next episode (never mind that merely wanting to commit suicide is by itself a traumatic experience which would leave its mark), and the lead couple’s interaction with their daughter is beyond patronising. The central premise, meanwhile, revolving around seeing the future (and the concept of ‘the future’ as a fixed conclusion which cannot be altered) is rather flimsily examined, a rather feeble line being drawn between those who consider the future to be immutable and those who half-heartedly hope it isn’t, the entire show underlining the predilection towards determinism embraced by American television as a whole (take Heroes, for example: no matter what anybody does, the paintings by the people who can see the future always come true somehow).  Investigating the flash forwards, Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes) gradually comes across a series of clues which, bit by bit, make their way onto his board, beginning to form the collection of evidence he sees in his own blackout- a friendship bracelet made by his daughter, words on post-it notes, a photo of a burned doll- all these things are assumed by the show to have huge significance, though it neglects to actually impart this, leaving the audience to goggle in wonder as they recognise bits and pieces which are, naturally, frenziedly highlighted as Mark’s flashbacks are tirelessly relived for the viewer’s benefit, just in case their significance might possibly have lost. It is not, though the details of said significance (why, exactly, are we supposed to be interested in a photo of a charred toy?) are left largely untouched.

This is not to say that Flash Forward is without merits; certainly it has qualities beyond merely being unabashed escapism/voyeurism (looking at you here, Tudors). It’s early days, after all. I’m told Dollhouse took a while to kick off, for example. And even this rocky beginning has its good points. Benford is actually quite a compelling lead, though one has to overlook his tendency to look like he’s about to burst into tears. Playing a conflicted ex-alcoholic with sympathy and realism, he throws himself into the investigation with vigour, increasingly determined to prevent the future he saw from occurring, nicely symbolised by grimly burning the bracelet his daughter made for him which he saw in his flash forward, a good contrast with the saccharine father figure he’d played up to that point. Terrified of losing his wife (Walger, who, after Lost, sounds strange with an American accent), he begins to keep details from her that he reasons she doesn’t need to know, whilst simultaneously demanding the absolute truth from her, which she obligingly gives, turning Benford into a believable and, crucially, still likeable hypocrite. His boss, Stanford Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance), provides some hard-nosed and entertaining comic relief of the ‘blacked out on the toilet’ and ‘gave mouth-to-mouth to a guy who was face down in urine’ kind, and his partner Demetri Noh (John Cho, of Harold and Kumar fame) is looking to have the makings of a good loose cannon convinced that he’ll be dead because he didn’t have a flash-forward.

The mystery itself is quite compelling (so far they’ve found evidence that at least two people were awake during the blackout, implying that the event was man-made), but is this, plus some fledgeling characterisation, enough to make up for what is otherwise a relatively average show, acting-wise and concept-wise? I suppose it isn’t fair to judge just yet- after all, The Tudors is on its third season and shows no sign of being anything other than period soft porn, whereas this could genuinely go places. One has to ask, though: with such good role models like House and Lost, should a new show like this really be so slow off the mark? Can it afford to be?

So Will The Floodgates Open?

Almost two months away, huh? I suck at this. In my defense, I have the excuse of being monumentally depressed, which does rather hinder the creative process (such as it is). But here I find myself again, and I’ve got a few more ideas for posts, so maybe in the next week there’ll be some more articles going up.

Enter Shikari are back, though to be fair they never really went away. Having completed a pretty comprehensive tour of a lot of smaller venues last autumn, they showed up at Give It A Name and will be making appearances at a festival or two over the summer. But as far as releases go, we haven’t heard much out of them since November 2007′s ‘The Zone’. To remedy that, June sees the release of their new album, ‘Common Dreads’, inevitably much-hyped and already promoted with free download ‘Antwerpen’ and upcoming single ‘Juggernauts’. Upon being informed of its recent pre-release leak, I took it upon myself to get hold of it as soon as possible- I’m going to buy it for sure, so there’s no guilt here. First impression? Weird. For some reason, it didn’t pull me in instantly in the way that ‘Take To The Skies’ did- it certainly lacks a song of the immediately-fantastic quality of ‘Mothership’, which is quite possibly their best song. Still, if there’s anything I’ve learned from listening to music, it’s to give anything more than one go unless it’s so diabolical as to warrant immediate destruction. And lo, ‘Common Dreads’ soon yields its rewards if you persist with more than a cursory examination.

The most noticeable difference between the Shikari of TTTS and the Shikari of CD is immediately obvious- they’re angry now, and they’re going to tell us all about it. Gone (for the most part) is the faux-mysticism of ‘Enter Shikari’, gone is the uncertain club-scene sexuality of ‘Anything Can Happen In The Next Half-Hour’. In their place, the environmentalism of ‘Johnny Sniper’ and the anti-establishment sentiment of ‘Acid Nation’ have been taken and blended into a new socially-conscious Shikari, who open their new record with a titular spoken-word track which bemoans the state of society: and as I walk the chartered streets of this familiar oblivion, I recognise nothing but unyielding unconsciousness, in which we have almost comfortably drowned, followed by a collection of voices from around the world who stress, We must unite! in a variety of languages. Only then does Rou’s voice boom out as if to a hushed stadium awaiting the onslaught: Here tonight, I clock a  thousand heads, here to unite through common dreads! And we’re diving into more familiar synth and guitar territory as ‘Solidarity’ kicks off. 

Delightfully, ‘Common Dreads’ has enough continuity to it to lasso older fans in- Shikari have already demonstrated an understanding of themes in their material, and here a link to the past is maintained from the off, sounding exactly like the closing song of TTTS could blur seamlessly into the start of the opening track, the conclusion of which also bears the, And still we will be here, standing like statues refrain which ran through the previous album. Musically, Enter Shikari are on more mature ground- their usual blend of metal and trance is joined here by jazz and grind, the tracks ‘Zzzzonked’ and ‘The Jester’ proving that the lads are more than capable of experimentation with less conventional sounds as they bounce maniacally from concept to concept, their rabid energy shoe-horning what could have been a cluttered mess into a bold statement of intent, and, more importantly, it works. Rou and Chris (and sometimes Rory) put out some brilliant vocals, Chris’ clean harmonies contrasting wonderfully with Rou’s vitriolic or passionate rhyming. And there’s something- another band doing this sort of thing could stumble on a ‘political’ album, but Shikari have too much determination and sincerity for that. The same spirit that saw them convince thousands of people to party with them the first time round will convince thousands more that they’re doing this for the right reasons. You can hear the anger that’s gone into writing the songs, and they are definitely an outlet for the current popular mood- on ‘Fanfare For The Conscious Man’, Rou spits, Our gracious Queen should grasp her crown/and take a good fucking swing at Blair and Brown/for leading the country into illegal warfare/and trying to pass it off that we’re doing it because we care! It’s followed with a mocking, Now preemptive war is a redemptive cause, Rou affecting a stereotypical English accent to highlight the absurdity of the position he attacks in a song dedicated to decrying the privatisation and awful nature of warfare, as well as the US and UK’s Janus-like two-faced attitudes to ‘wars of liberation’.

There are issues to be had with this politicisation of the band. Staking a position so starkly brings with it the potential to alienate fans, most likely those of a more conservative or apolitical nature who either disagree or want nothing to do with the sort of issues Shikari are tackling in place of their previous ‘party hard’ attitude (one only has to look at Green Day’s ‘coming out’ as a starkly anti-Bush band with ‘American Idiot’ to see that taking a side has its risks- the band were roundly decried for allegedly ‘jumping on the Bush-bashing bandwagon’). On top of that, one has to examine what exactly it is that Shikari hope to achieve. Sure, their call-and-response-heavy, chant-friendly anthems are good for getting the crowd going at a gig, but do they fall prey to the usual malady of musical idealists? Obviously there’s a limit to the amount a band can actually do, but for all their talk of tearing down the establishment, rarely do they veer towards proposing an alternative (at one point, Rou asserts that we were meant to build, not break, but there’s not a lot else to go on); for all their songs of unity and coming together, there is not one musical implication that they have a suggestion for how to achieve this. This is not to say that they don’t have any ideas- at the very least, the band has publicly and routinely decried the ever-popular Top Shop for their rarely-publicised use of cheap labour, and who’s to say that the album won’t come with material detailing Shikari’s further thoughts or links to who they support? But at the moment, they’re all style and not a lot of substance when it comes to politics and ideals. Come out in support of a party or a politician or a movement, state some aims and some ways to achieve them. It’s easier to criticise than it is to create, as Shikari themselves recognise, and while they get points for sheer convincing conviction at this point, to be more than just a singalong group playing the demagogue angle for cheap thrills, they’ve got to put their own alternative forward. Not to do so risks their considerable reputation, something I’d really rather not occur.