Seems one of the best television shows of the past decade I had ignored, manly because I have an adverse reaction to “cop shows.” It’s the like a rash that I can’t stop scratching until the correct oinkment has been applied, in this case, switching to another channel, poking myself in the eyes, or reaching for a frying pan to hit myself over the head with.

24 came very close to being like that when it first started and that was one of the reasons why I fell asleep during it’s first season, along with the fact that everything was so drawn out to the point of wanting the terrorists to win so it would end. Not even the vapid eye candy known as Elisha Cuthbert enough to stop me from switching to the porn channel that resides in my head.

That show I kind of watched on and off but to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what the hell was supposed to be going on, as really it’s one of those shows you do have to watch from the beginning to get some of the references in later episodes, and considering I couldn’t stand the first season, it wasn’t a price I was willing to pay.

Cut to this weekend, and given my success with defrosting the fridge, doing the washing up and having my annual bath, I decided to wander out to the local store to pick up something different to watch.

The first season box set of The Wire was available at a cut price, and as it had been mentioned by friends and also Charlie Brooker during ScreenWipe as being something you just had to see, I picked that up instead of Hot Tub Time Machine, and put on the first disc.

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The world of multiplayer gaming. It’s brought us all together in an digital orgy, only for people to bellow out written and spoken cries of “noob”, accusations of being cheating bastards, and give birth to 10,000 “your mum” jokes.

It’s come on leaps and bounds over the last 15 years, from the simple beginnings of Doom over an IPX connection, to the full realisation of the online console arena, where facing your foes in a virtual world has never been easier to do. However perhaps all this great progress has come at a price?

While conversing with a friend who had just quit from a session of Modern Warfare 2, he stated that a change from the usual multiplayer blood bath would be welcome.

I simply stated that it wouldn’t be a problem and we started to work our way down the list from the Steam games browser to see what tickles our collective fancy. What we initially thought would be a simple task, was not so simple after all. Why is so much of the titles on offer, offer the same thing?

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On Sunday, we postponed our diatribe about the Pope to bring you news that GOG.com had closed their doors. Today, it turns out it was all a big pile of marketing poo.

We now actually have a real life case of lies, treachery and deceit from a company who basically used the ever present tool of “word of mouth” to close their site and spread news to all on the internet who cared. Which as it turns out, included me.

Even though you could argue that taking the site down, denying current customers access to their games without warning was clearly a silly thing to do and “oh my god, how could they? I’ll boycott them forever, start a movement…” and all that rubbish, this actually proved to be a fairly effective marketing ploy, and given the talk it had generated around a number of the gaming sites out there, you can’t say it didn’t work.

For once, the marketing tw*ts who try writing with sticks, banging their heads on wallls, and require their food feeding via a plastic spoon, earned their money.

I suppose it’s been a funny old week, reflecting on various things of import, the most important of which I didn’t actually pay attention to, owing to spending too much time playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, and laughing at the notion that Stephen Hawking is simply referred to by some as “the wheelchair guy.”

The Pope came to visit the UK on a £12 million jolly, meaning lots of people got jolly upset about the whole thing costing lots of money and asking why should we care? The Richard Dawkins signal was shown in the night sky over London, ensuring that all were rallied to distribute condoms, pelt the Pope Mobile with copies of the Atheists’ Guide to Christmas, and install chastity belts on the under 7′s.

The end of that scrolling link from Sky news is: “underpants in the wash, can someone dry them and send them back via air mail?”

The first real tiding of holy doom was cast when Corporal Walter Kasper (not the friendly Ghost), one of the Pope’s senior advisers, pulled out of the trip earlier this week. Apparently he withdrew from the jolly after comparing Britain with a “third world country” and made a reference to the nation’s “aggressive new atheism” during an interview with a German magazine (Uber Allis probably, come on, let’s keep the second world war stereotypes alive!!)

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Forget about the old Pope coming to Britain, our lovely little third world country, and telling us we shouldn’t listen to Richard Dawkins as he’s a very naughty man, there is some more frankly startling news which will granted, only concern 3 people, but as I’m one of them, and this is my corner of cyberspace, I bloody well will type away in some clanky fury.

Yes game fans, the good old days of main characters made up of pixels that look like body parts appear to have been consigned again to history, as Good Old Games has sadly departed from us from the time being.

As you may remember from some ramblings in 2008 oddly, around September it goes, I was telling you not to inject your arms with cocaine no longer, as GOG.com provided simple old people like me the ability to purchase all these old classics, which they have tweaked and massaged into running on modern day equipment, all for a reasonable price while they are at it; $5.99 with the odd couple at $10, so god only knows what has happened in the meantime in order for the service to come crashing down like the Hindenberg blimp.

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Sometimes it’s not hard to wonder how silly things can be in the world. Here’s three of the best things from the week so far; Warning, some scenes are not suitable for anyone.

Purple Headed Monster on loose round children…again…

And the silly thing was, worse than a man dressed like a dildo, was that the whole pointless exercise was promoting fitness with chocolate. Well done Cadbury’s, you’ve saved us all!

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These days, it is the geek which roams the earth, with knowledge of various sounds and catchphrases from things gone by, own countless devices which cook an egg, does the shopping and clean your teeth at the same time, and either incredibly skinny or have developed many fat folds, which are actually used to store snacks which don’t mind being a little bit moist.

Strangely Hollywood have been somewhat reluctant to give the audience a film which, outside of zombie films, fully acknowledges while they are awkward, and at times stupid, they are also very funny.

Enter Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

ROUND 1: FIGHT!

So to the story spoiling bit which we begin every review with, much to the annoyance of many.

Here we’re introduced to the main character, Scott Pilgrim, a skinny fella living in Toronto with a gay bloke, even sharing the same bed, with various T-shirts of suitably sad yet cool origin, who is being constantly mocked for going out with a 17 year old Japanese girl while he is 22.

While if they were in this country they’d already have 23 kids and live in a mansion if you were to believe the press, in Canada, like the US, until people turn 18, potential naughty situations with school kids are still a sort of taboo, so we’ll just move past that and get to the nub of the matter.

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Indeed, it has been 28 years since I came into being, and of course the slow yet steady decline begins as youth is fleeting away from my battered skin cells. Indeed things had been so silly that last year, the whole birthday thing didn’t even get a mention. The one thing for the whole of September was in fact, that someone used a photo from this site. Indeed, something we all know was so earth shattering it had to be remarked on.

Well this year, that will be only slightly different.

You see, as I’ve gotten older and also further away from people I knew once upon a time, birthdays have become nothing more than a day off from work, and really nothing further than that. It becomes a subtle kick in the balls as it were, just like christmas etc, that time is passing by and all the while, things are moving on, and also people are moving on. Yet you’re the one that remains pretty much the same, you’ve still got an arse the size of the moon, the social skills of head lice, and a face that could derail a moving train at 100 metres.

Like the whole thing about New Year’s for example, which we all know is coming rather soon now, you think that yes it should be celebrated and then use it as a stepping stone, a line in the sand, to boost yourself, start fresh, achieve that special list of things you’ve always wanted to do. And then reality kicks in.

No-one should kid themselves. At the end of the day you will have been fashioned by the sum of your experiences and how you will act going forward will only be subject to those experiences, we don’t suddenly change our entire behaviour.

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The owner’s going to be pissed when he finds out a fat man nicked his motor;

Only thing is I’d end up only going back to the time I was able to have naughty with ladies, bugger anything else, hang on, that’s the idea of this…..and then maybe stop at one point in history to slap someone and say no, and then disappear…..oh the possibilities….

And now for the first time since October 2009, we now come back to the warm comforting embrace that is an leisurely film review. It has been many many months since last we destroyed the pompous, battled against incorrigible acting and wonder how much can a hollywood film really cost given you can get a green screen starters kit from Argos for £69.99.

And yet I feel compelled to begin our trip down the silver screen’s river of sludge with a troubling statement. There comes a point in everyone’s life where we’re going to feel a lot older, more useless, unable to understand where it’s gone wrong with the world, why so much has changed and so much remains the same, yet we’re not quite ready for the scrapheap.

This is the point of a mid-life crisis one might say, where we’re sort of in-between the years of youth, and the steady destruction of our minds and bodies all becomes too clear, where we then strive for a few last times to relive past glory, get that Harley Davidson scooter, score with hot 20-something girls (or have fun with “Parm-erla” and her five sisters when that fails), and we sing along to dreary music by Radiohead.

Maybe that’s the reason the Expensables, sorry Expendables exist. Allow me to explain….

Yes, the action man band got together finally after 70,000 years of waiting for Sly Stallone to pick up the phone to say something no one understands to create the ultimate action movie, damn, I feel more of a man just thinking about all those hard bastards blowing everything up, firing every gun known to exist, and saving so many bloody sexy women, they should just float along on a river of blood and tits.

Plot? You want a Plot? Nah, this is all about shooting crap and saving the day! Oh alright if you want to know this is the jist of the story which of course was written down on the back of a well hard beer mat;

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