Five of the Most Hilariously Tragic Celebrity Pages on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for literally anything you could ever want to know, provided you’re not too fussed about things like facts or the truth. More than that, it’s a great place for the mentally unbalanced to unload a borderline-autistic hoard of knowledge about one specific subject they’ve spent a lifetime harvesting and compiling.

One of my favourite hobbies is thinking about celebrities of days gone by, wondering what ever happened to them, Googling the person in question and then feeling depressed for a while. Today, I invite you to join me on that journey.

Paul Chuckle (of The Brothers, Chuckle)

If you grew up in the late 80’s or the early 90’s then you know who the Chuckle Brothers are, don’t even pretend otherwise. In fact, statistically, there’s a good chance you even shouted out ‘to me, to you’ as soon as they were mentioned. This will be important for later.

Pictured here, in happier times.

If you really need a reminder, Paul and Barry Chuckle made a name for themselves with their Chucklevision show, wherein they raised generations of kids to be absolutely terrified of ladders, chandeliers, and any combination of the two.

Since I’m not a father or a sex offender, I don’t watch a lot of children’s TV anymore, or attend pantomimes, but a quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for the comedy duo shows they’ve stayed in gainful employment on an almost constant basis right up to the present day. You might be starting to wonder what, then, is the tragic hilarity in this story.

For that we have to head to the ‘Personal Life’ section of their Wiki entry:

‘In April 2007, while on holiday on the Greek island of Kefalonia, Paul broke his nose and received cuts and bruises when he lost control of his motorbike […] Tourists who stopped at the accident, instead of helping him out, shouted out the Chuckle Brothers’ catchphrase: “To me, to you.”’

If it wasn’t for the fact the BBC was cited as the source for this story, I would be absolutely convinced that this was a hoax. What kind of nutter, after seeing a horrendous crash, starts shouting catchphrases instead of helping the injured party? That’s like if you saw the dickhead host of Man V. Food choking on a three-stone hamburger and, instead of performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, you started shouting his catchphrase, which I believe is something along the lines of, ‘In the fight of man against food, this time, HNNNGGG OH MY GOD MY HEART SOMEONE CALL AN AMBULANCE.’

You are the reason people hate America.

Back to poor Paul Chuckle though, for some reason I find this story all the more amusing for the fact that the only other information in the section about their personal life is a single sentence stating that the brothers are fans of Rotheram football club.

Rik Waller

Giant of pop, Rik Waller –and I mean that in the literal sense, not in regard to his success or talent– stunned Pop Idol audiences in 2001 when he proved to the world, finally, that fat people can sing.

Thanks, Rik! You condescending fuckwit!

After being forced to drop out of the show due to throat related injuries that were almost certainly caused by singing and not pie, the behemoth of beats went on to butcher the Dolly Parton classic, ‘I Will Always Love You’ because he felt that the definitive Whitney Houston version was lacking something. Possibly the implication that it was a tender ballad about a cake shop.

After being forced to drop out of his contract with EMI –due to the shock discovery that people had very little interest in hearing a semi-talented singer do paint-by-numbers rehashes of classic songs– Waller entered Celebrity Fit Club in a bid to shift some of his excess weight, with a view to using it as insulation in under-privileged households around the country.

After being forced to drop out of Celebrity Fit Club due to cake-related injuries [citation needed] Waller signed up with Red Admiral Records –who have signed numerous industry staples such as absolutely no one I have ever fucking heard of– and took his own band on the road.

After being forced to drop out of the tour due to the fact his first concert in Devon only sold two tickets Rik Waller disappeared from the public eye to refine his craft and launch himself back to the top.

Today, he can regularly be found doing signings…at his local job centre in Kent. Only kidding, he’s an exam invigilator now. So, that’s good, I guess?

The Bay City Rollers

The Rollers were, for a time, industry leaders in the kind of inoffensive rock and roll that made teenage girls swoon, but put parents at ease because they knew that, worst case scenario, if one of these boys were to be staying at the house regularly, the only worry would be having to buy an extra box of tampons every now and then.

I guess it’s a lot easier to understand women when, for all wants and purposes, you are one yourself.

Like most entries for old bands on Wikipedia, the touring history is a sad tale of a meteoric rise and brutal fall; from filling stadiums to a semi-regular gig at Butlin’s. Also like many bands and performers, the Rollers have spent years embroiled in financial battles with their record labels, claiming they were regularly exploited and not paid the royalties that were rightfully theirs. This is where it gets interesting.

In 2007, several former members of the band planned to sue Arista Records over unpaid royalties, which made other former member, Nobby Clark, stand up and take notice. He announced plans to counter-sue the band members if they were successful, citing the fact he had been instrumental in their success.

Funny Fact: Singer Nobby Clark left the band in 1973, to be replaced by Les McKeown forming what would become known as the ‘classic line-up’, i.e. the line-up that made the band successful and start producing hits.

Funnier fact: the reason Clark left the band was due to his dissatisfaction with their lack of success, the same success he was now suing to prove he was responsible for.

The whole depressing mess was the grown-up equivalent of a child who is quite happy playing with his Spider-Man toy but then he sees someone has picked up his Batman toy and –fuck everything– that Batman is the only thing he has ever wanted in the entire universe. Only with millions of dollars, so I guess I can kind of understand.

Speaking of disgruntled artists…

Tony McCarroll

When it comes to people grossly over-estimating their involvement in a band’s success, no one can hold a candle to the original drummer of Oasis, Tony McCarrol. Despite possessing only a modicum of talent, with skills on par with pretty much anyone who has just been handed a pair of drumsticks, McCarroll felt he deserved a bigger slice of the Oasis riches after being sacked from the band in 1995.

Pictured here, pretending to play the drums.

To achieve this, he decided to sue the band for the royalties for three future albums. That he wouldn’t be playing on. This isn’t like suing for loss of earnings after being sacked from your job; this is suing for a job you were never going to do because you were so shit you were fired from that job before you got anywhere near doing it.

The best part is that the £600,000 sum McCarroll allegedly settled on out of court (£350,000 after legal fees) meant severing all ties with the band, meaning he would no longer receive royalties for the songs he did play on.

It’s kind of like the old ‘give a man a fish…’ adage but the other way around. ‘Give an idiot a few thousand pounds every year for the rest of his life and he’ll sue you; give him six-hundred thousand right away, and he will take it like a fucking moron.’

“Thank you! For my next trick, I’m going to cut off my toes so I can buy smaller shoes! Yeah!”

Pliers (of Chaka Demus &)

In my opinion, the saddest entries on Wikipedia are the ones for celebrities who, despite huge success as part of an act, just kind of petered out and disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Unless you were one of the few people not heavily invested in the 1993 UK reggae scene, you’ll undoubtedly remember Chaka Demus and Pliers seminal hits, such as ‘Tease Me (Tease Me, Tease Me, Tease Me, Baby)’ and…’Gal Wine’. Anyway, with ‘Tease Me’ being described as ‘our generation’s Beethoven’s 5th‘ by absolutely no one, these guys were going nowhere but up.

They also held the proud distinction of being the only Jamaican act with three consecutive top five hits in the UK charts, until their record was toppled by Shaggy. I guess it takes some of the sting out of it, knowing you’ve been bested by a master of the craft. (In case you’ve forgotten, Shaggy was the man who single-handedly set the gender wars back a hundred years by suggesting men should consistently deny accusations of infidelity, in spite of their obvious guilt.)

“I sit before you, today, not as a man, but as a man who fucking detests women.”

Sadly, this was only one of the nails in C&P’s coffin. After the duo went their separate ways, Pliers was unable to match the success of Chaka Demus, who went on to start a very successful hardware business: Chaka Demus’ Pliers (& Other Hardware Goods) ltd.

Today, Pliers is best known for a song in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (assuming you’re one of the two people that listen to the reggae stations in those games) and also having a brother who, I swear to God, chooses to be known as Spanner Banner.

I’ll be honest, I wrote this entire article just so I could tell you that there is a man on this planet who thinks Spanner Banner is a cool name.

Spanner Banner!

Prime Minister’s Question Time: The Anniversary Edition

I recently celebrated my two-year anniversary on WordPress, which was weird because I didn’t think two years was a milestone but WP seems to think it is, so who am I to judge. In looking back at my time here, I’m stunned by how shitty some of my older stuff is, so I’ve decided that this week I will re-write a few old articles and try and make them actually funny instead of ‘what’s the most offensive thing I can say’ funny.

I know that’s a bit of a cop-out when I could be writing new material instead, but when my work largely amounts to hyperbole about paedophiles and GBH, do you really care what context you receive it in?

In the meantime, I’ve been tagged again in another one of those questionnaire things by the inimitable Beefy and I figured that was as good a way to kick off the festivities as any. There don’t seem to be any awards going, this time, but God knows I won’t let that get in the way of an opportunity for me to run my mouth for a thousand more words.

Before we get started, though, there are some rules to consider:

1. Post these rules.
2. Post a photo of yourself and eleven random facts about you.
3. Answer the questions given to you in the tagger’s post.
4. Create eleven new questions and tag new people to answer them.
5. Go to their blog/twitter and let them know they have been tagged.

Alright, while I desperately try to scramble together another eleven facts about my miserable life, why don’t you all bask in the splendour of my beautiful face (ladies, you might want to pop a towel down before proceeding):

Pictured, here, drinking what appears to be cloudy piss.

Okay, fact time:

1. I once crashed my bike so hard that I flew far enough to complete a full flip and land flat on my back.
2. I throw up in my mouth, a little bit, on an almost daily basis. I should probably go to the doctor.
3. If I was given a week to live, I’d throw myself in front of a learner driver, so they can never, ever pass their test due to PTSD.
4. I once got so into Animaniacs for the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) that I forgot to go to the toilet and pissed myself.
5. Every weekend for about two months, when I was young, I used to watch all three Aladdin films, back to back, over and over again from when I woke up until I went to bed. In retrospect, I should maybe have been tested or something.
6. I’ve been punched in the face at least three times, that I can remember, yet my massive nose remains unbroken.
7. I can make myself sneeze at will. I can teach you how, as well.
8. I once saw Ant & Dec in a chip shop near where I lived.
9. I can walk for about twenty miles without stopping, but if I try to run for more than two minutes my heart starts playing ‘Wipeout’ against my ribcage.
10. I want to emigrate to Canada because I think it’s the best place ever. I am deadly serious.
11. If I had to choose my favourite Bond, out of all them, it would have to be low-yield.

Okay, next I have to answer the taggers questions, which means I need to go dig out the post from a few weeks ago. While you’re waiting, why not enjoy this chimp on a pushbike.

1. Creamy mac n cheese or powder mac n cheese? My home-made macaroni cheese is one of the very few dishes I would let other people eat. It’s not that the rest are bad, I just put a lot of chillis in everything else and, when the flat only has one toilet, it’s poor form to ask that your guests shit in the bath tub.
2. Snow or rain? Being that those are the only two types of weather we get in Glasgow, I’m going to have to say snow, since it’s at least pretty to look at.
3. Thick crust or thin crust pizza? Thick, I don’t get out of bed for a thin-crust; it’s like eating a greasy envelope covered in processed cheese.
4. Hamburger or cheeseburger? Given the choice, I will put cheese on everything. I don’t trust people that don’t like cheese. Or beans, for that matter.
5. Unleaded or premium? For a car, or putting in a bottle and throwing at the side of a church?
6. Beer or liquor? If I’m at the pub then beer, because it’s cheaper in terms of how long it takes to drink, but when I’m drinking alone in the house and throwing darts at photos of women who have wronged me? Gin and tonic.
7. Green grass or high tides? Is this a drug thing? I’ve fallen for this, before, bloody sniffer dog nearly had my balls off.
8. Paper books or e-books? I prefer a hard copy of everything, and I can’t look erudite by sitting a load of Kindles on my shelf.
9. Dog or cat? Dog, owning a cat put me off the experience for life, after he spent six months systematically shitting and pissing on everything I love.
10. Car or truck? What’s the context? Running people over? Hiding dead hookers? Transporting Romanian immigrants to their exciting new life in the sex trade? Actually, come to think of it, it would be truck for all three of those. So, a truck.
11. Fly or drive? I can legally do neither (I swear, you make one joke about shoebombs, and suddenly you’re banned from every national airport and put on the government’s ‘persons of interest’ list.)

Well that was relatively painless, I guess it’s time for me to come up with questions of my own:

1. Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States. What is your favourite Beatles album?
2. Would you rather fall from a great height head-first or arse-first?
3. A sex-maniac has broken into your home and demanded that you insert the nearest household item into your bottom if your life is to be spared. What’s going up the old dirt trail?
4. Barry Manilow has got drunk at a book-signing and wet himself. It just so happens that you are wearing matching trousers. Do you help him out, trading the shame of piss-stained of trousers for a great anecdote, or leave him to sit in his moist shame?
5. Alec Baldwin is drunk again, stripped to the waist and fixing for a fight. You know he has the upper-hand through brute strength and general insanity, how do you subdue him?
6. You’ve been caught shaving local cats, again, and the judge gives you the choice between a twenty hour marathon of ‘Real Housewives of the Orange County’ or a night in prison where you will almost certainly be buggered.
7. While at a recording for The X Factor, Simon Cowell spots you in the audience and invites you to his dressing room. When you enter he is dressed in blackface and ladies bloomers. You realise his intentions after discovering the door has been locked from the outside, but you know no one will believe you. What do?
8. You notice some policemen beating up a black man down an alleyway. Upon closer inspection you realise it is Lenny fucking Henry. Do you do the right thing, and walk away, or step in and start interfering, as usual?
9. You’ve just woken up next to a dead politician with the murder weapon in your hand. The police are breaking down the door as we speak. Think fast.
10. You’re waiting at a bus stop when the woman next to you starts having a heart attack. For some reason you have the necessary medical knowledge to save her, but as you wade into the fray you realise she is wearing Crocs. Seriously, why the fuck would anyone actively choose to wear Crocs?
11. I mean, even if tomorrow every other shoemaker in the world announced they no longer made shoes in my size, I would sooner cut my fucking toes off to squeeze into a ten than wear those rubber atrocities. Ugh…who was your favourite Friend in Friends?

That was an emotional rollercoaster, I feel drained after that. Now we arrive at the problem, however: as I pointed out in my last questionnaire, I don’t really follow very many people –and two of them have already completed this– so instead I’ve come up with a new idea.

For everyone who replies to these questions in the comments section, I will follow you…Down an alley and beat the shit out of you. No not really, I mean I’ll subscribe to your blog. Because if you’re warped enough to actually take the time to answer the stupid shit I’ve just written, then I definitely need you in my life.

Peace out, crackers!

Five PSA’s That Scared People into Believing (The Wrong Thing)

Public Service Announcements were invented by middle-class white people to scare the country into thinking anything and everything would kill them without provocation or a moment’s notice. The logic behind the concept is solid: some people are too stupid to keep themselves safe and need to be reminded at regular intervals not to dry their babies in the microwave, after a bath.

The problem is that the people in charge of making these adverts often have no idea what they are talking about; something that will be clear to you if you have ever smoked a marijuana cigarette and were surprised to discover you didn’t wake up in a dockyard the next morning with a needle in your arm and sailor’s penis in your mouth.

These people were in such a damn hurry to wage war on threats never existed, they often completely forget what point they were supposed to be making, or to do basic things like fact-checking or script-editing. That, in and of itself, is fine -it’s always fun watching stupid people fail- but on rare occasions the result of this ill-informed propaganda was a terrifying thirty second advert composed entirely of 100% unadulterated nightmare fuel.

Note: Since this article is focusing on adverts that scared people for no good reason, PSA’s like Donald Pleasance’s turn as an aquatic Grim Reaper aren’t eligible because, while they are undeniably maddening, all the freaky shit can be interpreted metaphorically and not as Donald Pleasance actually drowning kids.

The SRSC Kill a Child by Summoning a Golem

In 1994, the Scottish Road Safety Campaign released an advert subtly titled ‘Cars Kill,’ in which a young boy wearing the bluest jeans early 90’s denim could supply is crossing the road while playing his Game Gear when he is struck and killed by a car. Before the audience has time to even process what they’ve seen, the slogan, ‘look out; cars kill’ flashes up and we’re left with a dead child lying in the middle of a road on an otherwise unspoiled summer day.

Seems pretty straightforward so far, right? The message is blunt, both literally and visually, and there can be no confusion about the SRSC’s stance on crossing the road without checking it’s safe, first. There is one thing I forgot to mention, though, take a look at the advert:

Oh, I get it, so they’ve taken the figurative ‘cars can come out of nowhere’ and changed it to ‘cars will literally come out of fucking nowhere and kill you, before sinking back into the earth to await the next unwitting sacrifice’.

Do you have any idea how fucking terrified I was of roads as a child, because of this? Instead of reminding me to always look both ways and make sure my line of sight was clear, this advert says, ‘listen kid: it doesn’t matter how prepared you are, if that car wants you dead you’re dead’ and, even at five years old, I questioned how I’m supposed to defend myself against an enemy that I can’t see.

This advert is the main reason I mentioned the Donald Pleasance one, earlier. In that advert the shadowy figure that stalks marshlands exists as a metaphorical embodiment of how dangerous it is to play in what is essentially muddy quicksand. In this advert, however, there was no threat on the road, until that stone car rose up out of the ground and mowed down a child that in no way could have seen it coming. That’s like the army preparing soldiers for combat by randomly shooting one of them, every day.

I do have an alternate theory for this advert, by the way, which is that it was paid for by Nintendo to kill the Game Gear; although judging by the unit’s performance it really didn’t need the help.

Breaking News: Heroin is Pretty Fucking Dangerous

I’m not particularly into drugs, if I wanted to feel sleepy and a bit sick I’d listen to a Kesha album. It’s not a political or a moral stance, either, I just prefer alcohol when I want to black out and forget all the awful things I’ve done. That being said, heroin absolutely scares the shit out of me because, despite having heard positive drug stories from first hand sources, I have never, ever heard a positive story about heroin; unless your aim in life was to die under the stairwell of a dis-used factory.

On the plus side, rent is cheap. Well, if you can count being buggered by a tramp as rent.

Even to the people who spent the 90’s with their head inside a speaker at Glastonbury, heroin is generally regarded as bad news, so you can imagine my confusion when the Health Education Board for Scotland released their ‘Splitscreen’ ad, showing a group of teenagers in a respectable house, sitting around having a laugh, when one says ‘hey guys, let’s smoke some heroin!’ Have a look for yourself:

The thing that surprised me the most about this advert was that it was released in 2000. Bear in mind that, by then, Trainspotting had pretty much dispelled any pleasant myths that may have been floating around about the life of a smackhead, so it probably wasn’t too likely that many young people were looking forward to a bright future of fishing through their own shit for a condom full of Sweet Lady H.

You probably can’t tell from my literary poker face, but I have several problems with this advert, none more so than the fact the company behind it were so obviously working backwards from the twist ending that they couldn’t come up with any compelling reason why a heroin addict would keep living with his nice middle-class family instead of doing the aforementioned stairwell thing.

Here’s the thing: except maybe in the case of colossal gullibility, no one tries heroin for a laugh. Unlike ‘recreational’ drugs where people get shit-faced and dance for six hours straight to Faithless, you generally don’t get into heroin unless something fucking awful has happened in your life and you’ve decided things can’t get much worse.

“On the plus side, it’s really going to help me slim down for swimsuit season.”

The idea a group of completely normal kids would be sitting around the house one day and just decide to start smacking up is insane. It’s a ridiculous exploitation of the fears most decent parents have:  that as soon as they take their eyes off their kids they’re fucking everything that moves with fifty needles hanging out every vein in their body. Speaking of parenting strategy, since they make it pretty clear his dad is completely normal in the advert, it seems odd that the boy’s parents are quite happy to let their smack-addled son roll about the bed in his room rather than, you know, try to help him by shipping him off to rehab or something.

Finally, the thing that always pissed me off the most about this advert was the idea that you could only sell a Playstation for twenty quid in the year 2000, when they still retailed for £120. Hell, even today they’re still going for about fifteen quid on eBay.

Turns out heroin addicts aren’t great with finances, who knew?

Deers Don’t Give a Shit About Your Road Safety

This was part of a Safer Scotland country road campaign to encourage people to stop driving like dickheads just because they’re out of the city and there’re no traffic cameras. The spirit of the campaign was commendable, in theory, but in application wires kind of got crossed. I couldn’t get an embed for this one so you’ll have to do some legwork and watch ‘Stag Advert’ here.

If you understandably can’t be arsed I’ll give you a quick rundown: a car is driving along a country road while various hazards like ‘broken fence’ and ‘wet road’ are highlighted, then the car turns a corner to discover a deer standing in the middle of the road for no god damn reason, causing the car to swerve and crash into a tree.

“My bad,bro.”

One of my biggest problems with this advert is the ‘you don’t have to be speeding to be going too fast’ tagline, because it’s essentially like saying, ‘you don’t have to be a bad person to get stabbed to death in a nice part of town. Be afraid, always.’

The other issue is the fact that a deer in the road is the kind of anomaly that you can never be prepared for because you can’t expect or anticipate it. It’s like saying, ‘always carry a bucket of sand because you never know when you’re going to be on fire’.

“We didn’t listen!”

I won’t lie: I know next to nothing about traffic laws, (in fact I used to think that the handbrake in a car was the clutch,) but I would submit that, if the driver in the advert was going too fast, then he was speeding. If you shouldn’t go above a certain speed on a road for any reason, then that should be that roads limit. Otherwise we’d be just as well taking down all the speed limit signs in cities and replacing them with ones that say, ‘if you think you can make it through before the red light then go for it’.

 Hit as Many Kids as You Like, Just Don’t Kill Any

This one is pretty famous, so there’s not much need for a preamble, just to refresh your memories:

Brutally vivid adverts like this have become a favourite of awareness campaigns, (and Think! have been at the forefront of the field for several years,) because they think if they can burn a horrible image into your mind you will never forget it, which is true. It just helps that little extra bit when the message you’re putting across is the right one.

I appreciate that the ‘Hit me at forty […] 80% chance I’ll die; hit me at thirty […] 80% chance I’ll live’ is supposed to convey that, in the event of an accident, if you’re at least obeying the speed limit you probably won’t kill anyone. The problem is, the way the statistics have been twisted into that stupid catchphrase changes the message from ‘always obey the speed limit’ to ‘it is absolutely okay to cripple kids’.

At no point does the advert mention that, if you hit a child at thirty miles an hour with several tonnes of steel, they’ll still be all kinds of fucked up. Because it would have ruined their damn slogan, they completely skim over the fact that, in an ideal world, you’ll never be running anyone over in your car, and even the slogan at the end only says, ‘it’s thirty for a reason.’

If this advert was being true to its script then, instead of the girl’s bones resetting and her coming back to life before the advert ends, the car would have hit her again but, instead of killing her, it would have sent her flying through the air and broken both her legs. Or, since I know they like to be artsy and clever with these things, it could have landed her in a wheelchair and showed her wheeling her fucked up legs out of shot.

“Because we think disabled kids are fucking hilarious.”

Canada Hires Eli Roth to Terrify its Workforce into Obedience

I love Canada, and I really hope to move there one day on a permanent basis, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover that one of Scotland’s major exports out there is insanity.

To be honest, I find it difficult to be seriously critical of these adverts, because I think they are absolutely hilarious. I get that they were going for the same shock and awe campaign as the dead kid and the fucking ghost car, but the slapstick level of violence on display moves them from the arena of visceral accident to an episode of Bottom. I was just waiting for Rik Mayal to be up a ladder in his pants, seconds before falling onto a railing and bursting his sack.

Also, I’m not sold on the, ‘there really are no accidents’ slogan because it smacks of the modern way of thinking that there should always be someone to blame. It’s got so bad that I’m starting to weigh up the merits of getting a proper job against taking a stroll down to Tesco’s and throwing myself through one of the freezer doors. After all, why would you bother slaving away as a cog in the corporate machine, when you could get rich off of being a butter-fingered buffoon?

“CHA-CHING! Payday, motherfucker.”

Actually, the more I watch this video, (and I have watched it a lot) I’m starting to get the impression that companies are using this to try and scare people into towing the line so they can stop paying out every time someone gets drunk and breaks a customer’s ankles with a palette. The problem there is that people who are constantly scared of fucking up are actually a lot more likely to do it than the guys who joust forklifts in the car park for a laugh.

Think of it like this: you’ve just bought this beautiful commemorative plate of The People’s Princess. Obviously you don’t want to eat off of a dead woman’s face, that would be weird. Truly, the only way to keep this fitting keepsake safe is to put it up on the mantelpiece, pride of place in the centre of the living room, never letting a single soul touch it, right? Well, from my experience –and this might get a little deep here–the more you try to keep something safe, the more likely you are to end up damaging it.

Maybe I can simplify this even more: I’ve never put my shoulder inside another person and it’s in all sorts of bad shape. My cock, on the other hand, is just fine. Coincidence? I doubt it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is just be safe out there.

And if you can’t be safe, be litigious instead.

Highlights and Massive Shites: 2012 in Gaming (The Bad)

Because when I said, ‘tomorrow’ I obviously meant Monday. Anyway, here’s the second half of my ‘games what I’ve played this year’ list. I should point out before we get started that I could honestly only come up with three games that I had enough of a problem with to put on this list. Oh, I’d also like to apologise in advance for some heavily TL;DR content up in here.

Anyway, as I was saying, the games here aren’t necessarily bad, they just let me down for particular reasons, but you might still enjoy them. Hell, I hope you do.

Except for Kingdoms of Amalur, because fuck that game.

Darksiders II

A lot of people complained about the original Darksiders being a terrifying patchwork doll of other games, a pill that became particularly difficult for apologists to swallow after War collects the literal, how-did-they-not-get-sued-for-this Portal gun towards the end of the game. My counter-argument to this was that, while it was a bold-faced rip-off of any number of franchises, judged by the sum of its parts it was a very, very fun adventure game with an appealing, albeit testosteraged, protagonist.

For the most part, Darksiders II goes a long way to distance itself from its predecessor. To start with, that game copies Prince of Persia 2008’s parkour engine, wholecloth, including some of the character animations, so far as I can tell. This may upset some people –PoP 2008, for many, ranking somewhere between Prince of Persia 3D and being an actual Persian prince, moments before the Spartan army rolled into town*– but I thought it was a great game, and the mechanics slot into Darksiders II perfectly, given that Death is a lot swifter than War (there’s a metaphor in there, somewhere.)

As well as that, Darksiders II introduces several RPG elements, including skill trees, levelling up and a loot system, the latter being extremely broken because possessed weapons can be levelled up with incredibly powerful perks; meaning you’ll often find yourself using a laughably weak weapon because it gives you a hundred defense points and regenerates health. It doesn’t hamper the game, but it doesn’t add anything to the experience either: playing on normal difficulty I made it through most of the game relying on the first two skills I unlocked and downing the hundreds of health potions the game chucks at you.

The real problems start to arise as the game slides into it’s second act, following an exhilarating if somewhat obtuse fight with a colossus, (because apparently we can’t get enough of those fuckers, in adventure games). After arriving in the Kingdom of the Dead, we’re told we have to go see the King of the Dead, but he won’t speak to us until we find three stones to defeat a boss. Then he won’t help us until we recover his three generals. Then one of his three generals won’t help us until we bring him three souls to judge. Do you see a pattern emerging, here?

For all its faults, the original Darksiders was tight and focused: you knew exactly what you were doing and why. In stark contrast, there were several times in Darksiders II where I was fighting my way through a dungeon and I had absolutely no idea why I was there. This isn’t helped by the fact that many of the quests you are sent on abruptly end with absolutely no payoff. No new abilities, no special items, just a quick cutscene before your booted back to the hubworld, having achieved nothing but a list of new locations to visit for no reason whatsoever.

If I can return to the number three thing: it’s absolutely ridiculous. I know fetch quests are standard fare in games like Darksiders II, but normally the story will try and come up with a compelling reason to do things or at least vary your objectives: in Darksiders II you are always gathering three of something. Always. The most frustrating thing about it is that, nine times out of ten, the items you spend all your time gathering will inevitably turn out to not exist, to not work as they are intended or to be used against you.

It’s almost like Darksiders II is attempting to satirise the genre, but that’s the tricky thing about satire, especially in video games: it’s difficult to get the tropes just so ridiculous that they’re funny, (see: Matt Hazard,) and not so much that you feel like your wasting your time in a hobby almost exclusively devoted to that.

Plotwise, the game is all over the place, specifically when you fight Samael, who it is repeatedly made clear is the most powerful being in existence, yet you smash his pan in in a few minutes. It feels like the writers had came up with a good story but the developers had no clue how to integrate it into the game and make it cohesive; this is painfully apparent when the end of the game is reduced to a two-minute boss fight against the allegedly omnipotent being that has brought four separate worlds to their knees, followed by a brief cutscene that does nothing to explain Death’s plan, and then the epilogue from the first Darksiders again.

In short, Darksiders II is a really fun game to play, but the lack of direction and the fact that the plot shifts into a freefall for the latter half of the game kills the atmosphere and makes slogging through another dungeon feel much less appealing. It’s essentially a sandbox filled with nothing but sand.

*I accept no responsibility for any historical inaccuracies present in that joke.

Sleeping Dogs

I’ll keep this one short, as a bit of a palette cleanser sandwiched between these two gigantic meltdowns. Sleeping Dogs is absolutely fantastic, but the reason it makes the worst rather than the best list is because almost everything I enjoyed about the game can be followed up with, ‘but…’

The story is engrossing and keeps you gripped, but it’s incredibly short by the standards of similar sandbox games. I suspect this was the result of editing rather than lack of ideas –probably to maintain the SquareEnix graphics standard– because characters pop in and out of the story without introduction or explanation, and it was the last mission before I even realised who the bad guys were supposed to be, because I’d already had two or three nemesis’s who had conveniently dropped out of the plot several missions ago.

The mini-games are fun and varied, but there’s only a handful of each and you will finish them fairly early on. I will give the game credit for coming up with a hacking mini-game that wasn’t an utter fucking chore to do, which is handy because you will be doing a lot of hacking, and they integrate really well into the story missions, but others highlight some of the games glaring technical flaws. In particular, the racing missions rapidly become an exercise in frustration when your will occasionally hit a kerb –as part of the race to go through paved areas– and this will cause your car to either stop dead or flip thirty times in the air.

The hand-to-hand combat is fluid and satisfying, but doesn’t handle as well as Arkham City; the gunplay is exciting but the fact you can quite easily stay in bullet-time for a whole fight drops the difficulty to zero; the vehicle sections are fast-paced and the nudge mechanic makes running enemies off the road a lot more effective, but I don’t know if the AI is really erratic or if civilians in China have a really strong social conscience, because they will drive over three lanes of traffic just to crash into you in the middle of a chase.

Overall, Sleeping Dogs is a good game, but falls short of being a great game in almost every respect. Also, by sandbox standards, it is really short. Even going for a hundred percent run, I finished the game in about twenty hours which, when you consider how shit I am at video games and that it took me the same amount of time just to get through Saint’s Row the Third’s campaign, isn’t great value for money.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

I genuinely bought into the idea that this games failure, and subsequent bankruptcy of its developer, was down to it being dwarfed by the success of Skyrim. After playing the game to completion, I suspect that particular little rumour was perpetrated by the developer, themselves, to disguise the fact their game was an astounding festival of mediocrity.

I first got interested in KoA after playing the demo and experiencing a more robust version of Fable. After completing the game the only nice thing I have to say about it is that it made me look back on my time spent in Fable III –which I still have on record as the worst game I’ve ever played– and think, ‘at least it had Stephen Fry.’

The problem I have with Amalur is that it seems to want to fill a gap between the Fable franchise and the Elder Scrolls series that I’m not sure actually exists: catering to a market of people who want customisation, but don’t want it to be useful; who want a huge arsenal of weapons, but also an extremely broken and sticky combat system; who want an epic story, but don’t want to be a part of it, (in the majority of pivotal scenes, the day is saved by an ally’s sacrifice, rather than yours.)

As I said about Borderlands 2, how much you enjoy being bombarded by quests depends on how much you enjoy the world you are in. I loved how in Borderlands 2, I could explore huge areas, checking off quests as I go, and taking in the unique and different scenery and enemies. In Kingdoms of Amalur, every dungeon is exactly the same. I mean exactly. If you ever played the PS2 game Dark Chronicle, you may remember their touted dungeon creation system, which randomly generated each area every time you returned. Kingdoms of Amalur does something similar, except that they’ve just copy-pasted the same dungeons fifty-odd times and hoped you won’t notice.

I appreciate that when you’re making a game as big as Amalur you can’t realistically expect the hundreds of areas you explore to all be completely unique, but you have to reach a compromise. I wasn’t a huge fan of Skyrim, I felt that the longer I played the more repetitive it got, but I appreciated the way that, even when the textures were re-used, every dungeon had its own story. In particular, I remember finding a lighthouse at the northern-most point of the map where I discovered several corpses, carrying the pages of a diary revealing bits and pieces of what had went on. I never found the quest attached to that incident, (assuming there even was one,) but it really stuck with me because, in the absence of the games story, I was forced to create my own series of events. It was a true piece of immersion and, for all the problems I have with Skyrim, it is one thing that will stay with me for a long time.

In Amalur, every dungeon is full of the exact same enemies who will attack you in the exact same fashion until you get to the end of the dungeon and pick up what, or whoever, you were sent there to fetch or kill and then you will leave and never ever come back. There is no story behind the dungeon, (it’s either a series of leafy tunnels or an abandoned castle,) and there is absolutely no other reason to go to these places. They exist only for single quests that do nothing to tell you about the world you inhabit; to give you experience points and waste another half hour of your time. And that is the whole game.

The only nice thing I have to say about KoA is that the forest you start in looks absolutely fantastic and does a great job of immersing you in the world. The problem is you’ll never see any of the scenery because the worlds are huge but largely unpopulated so there’s no reason –when on one of the innumerable needlessly complicated fetch quests– to travel by foot rather than with the quick travel function, which drops warp points on your map like rain irrigating a fucking field.

At its heart, Kingdoms of Amalur is a bog-standard RPG, the kind that get shat out regularly be shovelware companies with names like ‘Dungeon Fighter’ and ‘Dragon Swords’, to be bought by well-meaning grandparents who confuse them for something anyone would ever want to play. The only reason this game got any kind of attention is because of the developer’s very public demise and, maybe, because the project was attached to Todd MacFarlane, which in retrospect should have told me everything I needed to know about this bag of balls.

Highlights and Massive Shites: 2012 in Gaming (The Good)

I realise that I’m a bit late to the party with this, but it took me a while to get through my back catalog last year so I’ve just finished some of these games in the last month. I realise that smacks a little of a porn star complaining his dick is sore from fucking all these beautiful women, but playing some of these games felt like a god damn chore, so I make no apologies.

I do, however, apologise for the fact that I sometimes get over-excited when talking about video games and forget I’m supposed to write jokes. So, if you want my opinion on games I’ve played, you’re in the right place; if you’re here to read jokes about Tony Jaa punching Malaysia to death, then I apologise.

Tony Jaa’s apology is a clenched fist punching the alphabet out of your memories.

Note: There may, or may not, be massive spoilers contained within. Seriously, I can’t remember.

Asura’s Wrath

AW is reminiscent of the (largely awful) FMV games that made up a good deal of the Sega CD and Philips CDi stables: a series of cutscenes where the player is expected to hit button-prompts at specific times to advance the story. I realise that that opening gambit didn’t set this up as a positive review so let me also say that Asura’s Wrath plays like every anime ever, condensed into an eight hour gameplay experience.

The whole game is essentially one big quick-time event, broken up by the occasional button-mashing brawls and preposterously over-acted exposition. It’s definitely not going to appeal to everyone: some people will see it as little more than an episode of Dragonball Z that you occasionally point your remote control at to progress, but it’s something different and, if you can get in the right mindset, the over the top action becomes extremely entertaining.

There are a couple of faults to the game, whether you like it or not: the lock-on system can be fiddly when you’re used to the right analog stick moving the camera instead of who you’re targeting, and the developer’s dedication to creating the atmosphere of being inside an anime becomes grating when you’re forced to watch a preview for upcoming levels –which are broken into episodes– when you’d rather just play the damn thing.

All in all, though, Asura’s Wrath is fairly unique experience and it’s a genre I’d like to see more developer’s tackle in the future.

Ratchet & Clank HD Trilogy

Originally I was going to use this to harp on like a cynical dickhead about how my second favourite game from last year was a collection of games from almost a decade ago, and isn’t that all so reflective of sad state of the industry.

In actual fact, I’m uncharacteristically optimistic about the modern video game industry and I think it’s rapidly becoming broader than ever, so instead I’ll say Ratchet & Clank –despite floundering in its more recent instalments– is my favourite series of all time and the original trilogy has aged very well.

R&C followed that now rare standard of sequel progression where every new game expanded and improved upon it’s predecessor, at the same time adding new elements that fit perfectly into the universe, (spaceship sections in the second game; army missions in the third,) while still maintaining the things that made the first game so unique. For instructions on how not to do this with your series, I would direct your attention to Jak II: Renegade which took a perfectly enjoyable Super Mario 64 clone and turned it into a hilariously bad GTA clone with broken combat and a gritty edge (i.e. Jak swears now).

Back to R&C: I was disappointed they didn’t add the more refined control system to the original game (the lack of strafing can be a right pain in the balls when you’re used to it) but overall it’s the best HD collection to date and well worth the money, especially given the huge amount of replay value in the latter two titles, which I’ve now sank more time into than my actual degree that’s meant to get me a real, grown-up job.

Borderlands 2

The original Borderlands is one of the few current generation games I’ve bothered to go back to after completing, and it’s still the only game I’ve ever enjoyed enough to spend even more money on the DLC. The game was not without it’s flaws, many people complained that the environments were boring and the missions were repetitive, but I can only assume they’ve never played an action-RPG before because that sums up every single one, to me.

I love the Borderlands universe, I can remember more characters from it than anything else I’ve played in the last few years, and I think one of the reasons is because the majority of them are all sociopathic dickheads. Almost every named character introduces themselves by shooting, stabbing or otherwise incapacitating someone else, which provides the kind of grindhouse ultraviolence atmosphere that is uncommon in other games in this genre.

To put it another way: would you rather accept a mission to go and pick flowers for a Tolkien-dwarf, or gather body parts for a surgeon to make a creature you then have to kill because, ‘it’s kind of your fault’? If you answered the first one, congratulations: you’re wrong.

For those unimpressed with the original, the sequel is unlikely to do anything to change their minds. The writing may be amusing enough to inject some variety into otherwise repetitive missions, but like every other mission-based game how bored you get will depend on how much you’re are enjoying the overall experience.

Looting is still at the heart of everything, and I claim that I relish having to do calculations in my head every time I find a new weapon to work out if it’s better than what I’m carrying, but the variety in the weapons is massively improved upon, beyond the standard elemental differences. Combine that with some genuinely unique character classes that now have actual benefits and advantages –as opposed to the first game where you could play as Roland or pick a character, play for half an hour then start a new game as Roland– and you are guaranteed to find a build that suits your playstyle.

The environments are amongst the most varied I’ve seen in a game like this, and they merit exploration, partly to uncover some neat easter eggs, but mainly because they feel immersive and worth looking around. Oh, also to see what new things there are to kill: Borderlands 2′s enemy roster is exceptional, with re-skins kept to a minimum, although there are some enemies which the game actually states are specifically designed to annoy you, (fuck you, repair drones,) which is funny for the first five minutes and then annoying for the rest of the game, as well as a couple of ridiculously over-powered enemies capable of taking you down in one hit, which really rubs salt in your lonely wounds when playing solo.

In the end, it’s essentially more of the same on a much, much bigger scale, which is exactly what I wanted, so I couldn’t be more pleased.

The Darkness II

I love this game. Given how much people complain about modern shooters being a parade of exploding set-pieces and carbon-copy military superheroes wanking patriotism all over our screens, I find it strange that this game didn’t get more appreciation.

I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that Jackie Estacado, arguably the hero of the piece, is the head of a crime family and a bit of a vicious arsehole, but I found myself caring far more about his plight than any of the several soldiers I’ve trudged into war over the last six or seven years. The game further mixes things up by occasionally implying that the entire world is a construct inside Jackie’s mind, and that the Darkness represents his mental illness; making him violent and confused.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s a particularly original plot device, but it’s used to great effect and there were times when I genuinely wasn’t sure which way the story was going to go. It also helps that the plot is backed up at all times with a fantastically atmospheric soundtrack; again a woefully misrepresented element of modern shooters.

I was particularly surprised to find that The Darkness II is one of the very few games with an upgrade tree where each and every power you unlock can actually be useful in combat, as opposed to games like Darksiders, where the majority of upgrades just add a new set of bells and whistles to a character who’s basic attacks are more than enough to steamroll through the game.

The only downside I can think of is that the campaign is a bit short, but it’s all perfectly rounded, and I’d rather take a tight but short story over games like Resistance 2 where I’ve completely forgotten what the hell I’m supposed to be doing by the time I reach the final boss. Also, there’s a multiplayer element that, while amusing to play, ultimately adds nothing to the game and feels unnecessary and tacked on to appeal to people with no interest in a campaign-central FPS.

—————————————————————–

That about does it for my favourite games of last year, join me tomorrow when I’ll look back at the games I enjoyed least. I know, I totally can’t wait, either.

It’s my party and I’ll be sad and alone if I want to.

Today I turn twenty five and, since most of no one else gives a shit, I made my own website to commemorate my quarter-century of max-relaxin’ and wrecking shit up.

You might need to refresh it to make the song play –or maybe it’s just my computer– and I couldn’t get the bears to actually dance like they’re supposed to, but fuck it: it’s my birthday, you guys do the work. I’m just joshing with you, here he is, as he should be:

You make my dreams come true.

Catch y’all on the flipside.

I’d Like to Thank The Academy….

Well, it’s finally happened. True genius is being recognised and I’ve been nominated for an Oscar. Not the ones decided by a catacomb staffed with the propped up, dessicated corpses of actors from eighty years ago, but an internet-based award. I think we can all agree that’s much more important, although I do feel silly for putting on this frock and writing an acceptance speech.

(Amazingly, I have no photos of me wearing a dress so, instead, here’s one from when I thought I was nominated for a MOBO:)

#thuglife

Anyway, the award I think I’m getting for services to poor taste is the Liebster award, which apparently means ‘dearest’ in German. Did you know that the German for ‘hospital’ is ‘krankenhaus’? Apparently the Germans don’t have a word for ‘subtlety’.

Now, there are some rules here that I should lay down before proceeding, they are as follows:

1. Each person must post 11 things about themselves.
2. Answer the questions that the tagger set for you plus create 11 questions for the people you’ve tagged to answer.
3. Choose 11 people and link them in your post.
4. Go to their page and tell them.
5. No tag backs!

Alright people, drop your trousers and grab your ankles, I’m going in…

11 Facts About Rob

1. I once saw a two-headed fox. No one is going to tell me otherwise.
2. I am regularly confused for Calvin Harris.
3. I used to be in a band called Little Black Wings. We regularly performed to upwards of ten disinterested people a night.
4. If I was a pornstar my screen-name would be Buxton Lovefist.
5. I can list almost every song Suede ever recorded; including B-sides and demo’s.
6. I can drink a pint of Guinness in one go.
7. I once ate an entire block of corned beef like it was hand-fruit.
8. I’ve seen Withnail & I at least thirty times.
9. One day I hope to open a dog sanctuary, and adopt the title of ‘Beastmaster’.
10. I own many suits and, unlike most people my age, I don’t look like I’m on my way to court when I wear them.
11. Oh, I also have an honours degree. This is bottom of the list because it turned out to be worth fuck all.

Right, that’s round one smashed out the park. Round two: let’s do this. YASSSSSSSSSSSS.

Knowing Me, Knowing You

1. What is your favorite brand of frozen pizza? Chicago Town. I ate thirty of the little ones in the space of two weeks to win an iPod dock I never, ever use.
2. What is your favorite item at McDonald’s? Double cheeseburgers. Two of them and a milkshake, then I lie on the couch and think about everything that’s went wrong in my life.
3. Have you ever been to Disney Land or World? I’ve been to whatever one is in Florida. It was thoroughly disappointing and I am terrified of mascots/paedophiles.
4. Favorite display in your local zoo. Bears. I fucking love bears. If I’m ever given a week to live I’m throwing myself in the bear pit and hugging a bear until it tears my bastarding head off.
5. Tastiest beer. Stella Artois with a dash of lime. The best thing about Stella is the police won’t even answer a domestic if they know you’ve been drinking it, because that’s what it’s made for.
6. What is your favorite thing to blog about? Insanely shit films and batshit insane films.
7. Favorite Beatles song? Nowhere Man, given the choice my answer will always be whatever song sounds the most optimistically miserable.
8. What’s better, original 3 Star Wars movies, or newest 3? I’ve only seen the newest 3. If you listen carefully, you can hear keyboards smashing all over the internet, right now.
9. What was your favorite pet? Catface. Even though he was a little dick that shat all over the house, he was fun to look at.
10. Tic Tacs, breath mint or candy? Reason for projectile vomiting on a car window at the age of six.
11. Tic Tacs, favorite flavor? Whichever ones aren’t covered in vomit.

Now I need to think of 11 questions, in retaliation? I’ll try my best:

1. Would you rather have really long fingers all the time, or thumbs that changed length at random?

2. Quick, you’ve shat yourself in a crowded public place: what’s your plan of action?

3. If you were to become a dictator, what country would you rule with an iron fist?

4.Well, the apocalypse is here. You have to choose one celebrity to re-populate the world with and another to start your New World Order with. Go.

5. You’re at the zoo and a monkey just punched you. What a dick. Do you pretend nothing happened and walk away with wounded pride or punch it in it’s stupid monkey face and risk being branded a monster?

6. If you were to become a professional wrestler, what would your wrestling name and catchphrase be?

7. Would you rather be World’s Strongest Man or Mr Universe (i.e. function over form)?

8. Pierce Brosnan has been throwing litter in your garden for months. You know no one will believe you because he is Pierce Brosnan, so how do you take your revenge?

9. If you could choose how you die, except for in your sleep, how would you go?

10. N*Sync or The Backstreet Boys?

11. I fucking hate swans. If you could get into a fight with one animal, with a reasonable chance of victory, what would you fight?

Well, I think I kept to my high standards throughout that exercise, now is the tricky part though, as I’m s’posed to list 11 people to answer these questions, but I only follow two or three people on here because they don’t incessantly blog about their cats and how lonely life is when you’ve knitted yourself a fake family.

I suppose I should use this as an opportunity to get out there and find some great new people to follow, but fuck it: lazy. So apologies for renegading on the rules and doing a tag back.

1. Beefy

2.Twindaddy

Well, that about wraps things up, I’d like to close by saying thanks for the nomination and just reminding people that a dream is a wish your heart makes; reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars; and if you’re going to murder a hooker, make sure the souvenirs you take from the kill can’t later be used to identify her.

Peace, I’m out like shout.