Greetings from the Halls of Infinity

Good afternoon. As some of you may know I am archmage of the past, keeper of the keys of time and author of 1776: America and Britain at War David McCullough. Though, once again, I have little in the way of immediate historical knowledge to pass on I do have snippet of imbecility culled from Google videos capacious archive. It's not very funny, but then history is a deadly serious business.

Zombo-porn

Filing this one under 'sceptical' but it's being reported that character upgrades in the mighty Dead Rising will require some interesting in game activities - including the surreptitious snapping of ladies in mildly compromising poses. First read of the Kotaku post made me think that these ladies may well be members of the living dead. On reflection however, necrophilia seems a step too far - even for Capcom.

Busy, busy, busy

Been a rather busy week so was nice to combine a bit of pointless splurge shopping with a trip to see Superman last night. As well as the latest Smoke and the new album from The Grates I succumbed to the temptation of a second hand copy of Pursuit Force. First impressions are largely positive but the game seems to suffer from the PSP disease - it's a console game, not a pick-up-and-go game. Just booting it up and getting a new game started took the lions share of a Euston to Chalk Farm tube journey, including a two-minute wait on the platform. This is pretty useless in terms of portable gaming and - with the collapse of UMD movies - can't bode too well for Sony's long term portable aspirations.

In fact I've got a nasty seed of an idea in my head - am beginning to convince myself that I *need* a DS lite...

Somewhat optimistic tourist advertising...

Dancing to the Music of Time

A very quick update as I've been skulking in the shadows for a while.

Last week saw the powerful one-two punch of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 20-20 cricket at the Oval. Two great days, though I have to say that Pirates had the definite edge on account of its unmitigated genius. Surrey vs Middlesex, sadly, was not as earth-shaking but still fun mainly thanks to the fools who dashed on the pitch towards the end of the game in a vain attempt to make off with the stumps. Had I been more on the ball (and less drunk) I could have secured pictures. Meh.

The weekend saw viewings of Flightplan (rubbish) and XXX2: State of the Union (rubbisher). However, also began plans to resurrect my NES (which I have, amazingly, in one piece and with all original games). In addition integration of the worlds of Mac and Xbox continues apace with this rather fine xbox 360 controller driver.

Finally have become unreasonably excited at this. It's an MMORPG admittedly, but its got pirates in! Remains to be seen whether it'll be ready for Mac - Xbox is probably a bit much to hope for.

I'm like a chocaholic but with booze

Speaking of remakes I finally got round to watching the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocoalte Factory last night. Now I haven't seen the, apparently terrifying, 1971 Gene Wilder version but I have a self-awarded diploma in Roald Dahl studies and so feel fully qualified to declare this movie somewhat of a mixed bag.

On the one hand it rips a lot of the dialogue and set-pieces straight from the book, especially with regard to Charlie's family and - joy of joys - the brilliant squirrel nut-sorting scene. It even makes improvements. For instance Charlie's father is fired from the toothpaste factory because the hunt for the golden tickets has caused an upsurge in cavities leading to increased sales of toothpaste and therefore providing the company with enough funds to mechanise thus leaving Charlie's dad obselete - an important lesson in capitalism for you there, and something I'm pretty sure isn't in the book.

However, the film also bears the stamp of Hollywood, and despite all the weird grotesqueries of the factory and of Wonka himself, the makers couldn't help but tag on a retch-inducing message about 'family', including a whole new, and utterly superfluous, backstory for Willie Wonka. A lot of the film is good, but as with so many of the recent American mainstream (for instance every Spielberg film since A.I.) it totally fluffs the ending.

Oh, and re John Carpenter and rermakes, I should have pointed out that the original Assault on Precinct 13 is also a re-make - of a sort. Carpenter idolised Howard Hawks, and took Rio Bravo as inspiration for his cops and gangsters siege-fest. However, as anyone who has sat through Rio Bravo will know, it'sstodgy and overlong with only Dean Martin to recommend it. Carpenter took the idea and realised its full potential - as he did with The Thing.

Reasons to be cheerful

The line-up of xbox 360 titles has hardly been stellar, and it's quite frankly difficult to think of anything I'd want to pick up on the second-hand market now that Oblivion, Battlefield 2, GRAW and Rockstar Table Tennis are in my collection. That said there are a few promising titles coming up in the near future.

Top of the list is Just Cause a close an attempt at Flames of Freedom as I'm likely to ever see. Not sure how hot it'll be on the strategy, but in terms of free-roaming madness it looks pretty promising.

Next up, somewhat unsurprisingly, is Gears of War. What can I say? It has lots of guns. Not too sure about Lost Planet after the xbox live demo, but it's definitely worth a look. Finally there's *drool, drool* Dead Rising. A total departure for Capcom dealing as it does with hardcore zombie action. Read an interesting preview on this the other day, and it seems that gameplay will revolve as much around photojournalism as bloody carnage. A bit of a twist there at least.

All these summarised in a handy guide to ten titles to look out for between now and early 2007 in the British Gaming Blog.

The John Carpenter Memorial Show

Despite the raging heat and blazing sun that has engulfed London I found time over the weekend to watch the remake of Assault on Precinct 13. Now I used to be a bit of a John Carpenter obsessive. Not a completist (though I have seen Ghosts of Mars, which must count for something), but a fan of the classics - The Thing, Escape from New York, Halloween and, yes, the original Assault. The 2005 version is perfectly adequate but I still found myself asking the same question that must have occurred to any fan of Japanese horror on entering a multiplex in the last few years - why remake these films?

Now I know there's a bit of pot and kettle going on here. The Thing is, technically, a remake of Howard Hawks' Thing From Another World. However, what Carpenter did was rework a classic story (indeed, return to the original source material - John Campbell's short storyWho Goes There?) in the cinema style of the time, the body horror video nasty. By contrast what has Jean-Francois Richet done for one of the minimalist classics of modern cinema? The faceless horrors of the street gang become a bunch of identikit corrupt cops, the influential electronica soundtrack disappears and the brilliantly tense climax, with the few survivors forced into the last corner of the station becomes a dreary gun-fight in a snowy forest.

It's not that this is a terrible film, more a pointless one. The only points of interest come with those few shred of the original not to be hacked out - for instance when two survivors look to have escaped only for one of the bad guys to pop his head out from the back seat of their car. Otherwise it's easily lost in the pile of comparablew police thrillers - The Negotiator springs instantly to mind as, for some reason, does Narc. If you're going to remake a film, do something new with it.

It's all over

Oh no we're out of the world cup. As a football agnostic I can't say I'm too bothered but have reined in my usual level of anti-kickball vitriol as I'm sure there are some people to whom this really matters. In any case, I've finally found a way of watching this game that suits me: with an improvised jazz accompaniment.

The Vortex Club are screening the matches and hosting two groups of jazz musicians - one for each side - who play along to the action, the music reflecting what's going on on the pitch. Yesterday was perhaps not the best first experience of this, with the game juddering to the usual penalty shoot-out misery but it added a new dimension to the game beyond the usual commentary. It would be easy to go overboard on how this is jazz how it should be, fluid unpredictable and so on but mainly it was just a tremendously fun experience, the final score notwithstanding.