House of 1000 Corpses

89 minutes

The late 1990s was a weird time for movie fans in the UK. For a long time, movies like Driller Killer, The Exorcist and, most famously of all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, had been denied a release by the British Board of Film Certification. While that doesn't technically count as a ban, no cinema would normally take a film without and no shop would stock it, all but killing it until it falls in line with their standards. As a result, most of these films received a mystique to them. These were sights so horrifying, so disturbing, that to see them was to invite madness. A modern day Necronomicon. Those who saw them would inevitably watch them on 35th generation VHS copies, the picture quality so degraded, you were never entirely sure of what you'd seen, thus preserving the legend for another telling.

Then they finally released it for all to see on pristine DVD. And all decided it was actually a bit shit.

The legend, like all legends, failed to meet the reality. It was a decent enough movie, sure, but the stories, man, the stories! They had us expecting brutality on a level we'd never experienced before! Violence to sicken even the most hardened of hearts! The shitty quality of VHS had actually managed to enhance the atmosphere of the film, making you see more than was actually there.

House of 1000 Corpses faced a similar fate. The film was denied a release by the studio this time, on the grounds that there was no way they could release it without hefty cuts. Rob Zombie, writer, director and pretty much everything else in between, was an avid fan of the horror genre, as anyone who's ever listened to his music or watched his videos could testify to. The man knew his shit, and if he said that this was a violent, brutal movie, well, it was pretty safe to say that this was indeed so.

The film starts off relatively 'safe': four college students, travelling around researching a book on weird roadside attractions hear of a local legend: the story of Doctor Satan. They commit a breach of one of the cardinal rules of horror movie safety when they stop to pick up a hitchhiker at the side of the road, an oddly unhinged girl by the name of Baby. The car suffers a blowout, and the group is forced to take refuge for the night, blah blah blah. We all know how this goes, we've all seen it before, right?

Well, not really, no. Sure, you've seen the basic premise a million times or more by now, it's one of the classic horror movie setups. But somehow, Rob's managed to make it even bleaker than usual. The Firefly clan, primary villains of the piece, are closer to the Manson Family than Leatherface's brood, the spliced-in footage of them ranting and raving to the camera only further emphasising the idea. The tortures inflicted on the clueless corpses-to-be are impressively inventive - the 'Behold: Fishboy' scene straddling the line between funny and freaky perfectly. The movie's the posterchild for the trope It Got Worse.

The cinematography and soundtrack are especially worthy of praise. The opening titles and many intercut scenes were shot in his basement with grainy handheld cameras, setting the tone nicely, and the obligatory chase scene towards the end has some simply stunning shots. The background music, as you'd expect, is of a high calibre, Zombie himself having composed the majority of it for the film. Some of it saw release on the album The Sinister Urge, released during the three year period when it looked like the film would never see release, and divorced from the visuals, didn't carry that much impact. Once you get to see the two combined, it fares that much better. The man also loves his soundtrack dissonance, with songs like I Wanna Be Loved By You underscoring some of the outright weirder moments. When the two combine, it adds an odd beauty to the sights - the scene where Otis holds a gun to a sherrif's head for about a minute while the camera pans out is hypnotising in its simplicity.

While Zombie couldn't go quite as far as he wanted, he does it better than most. Not long after the release of House of 1000 Corpses, a new genre of movie, the Torture Porn genre, sprang up, focussing more on the violence and blood than the execution. All of the gore, with none of the style, brutality without brilliance. It's something Rob managed to avoid with this film, making it worth any number of Saw sequels. Off the back of this and the sequel, The Devil's Rejects, he was given the opportunity to work on the renewed Halloween series of movies. Frankly, I couldn't think of anyone finer.

Al Ewing - Pax Britannia: El Sombra

291 pages

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I can sell you this book on the strength of two words and two words alone. Two words that will make anything and everything you're currently reading seem like mind-numbingly boring trash. Two words that, in my utterly humble opinion, should be in every book known to man.

Steampunk Zorro

What's that you say? Not enough for you? Really? Okay then, time to break out the big guns - three more words that, quite frankly, can't fail to make anything awesome, and when added to something that's already that goddamn awesome, threaten to collapse the book into a singularity of condensed magnificence:

Fights Nazi Robots

If none of that moves you, then I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure there's no hope left for you. I'm afraid the diagnosis is terminal wasting of the awesome gland, you have no chance to escape, make your time.

El Sombra is set in an alternate reality where Britain came out of the Second World War stronger than ever. This is a world where Britain is a land of dirigibles, steam-powered robots in every house. This is a world where They Saved Hitler's Brain, and put it in the body of a three-story-high brass and copper monstrosity, a steam-powered behemoth with a voice made of broken glass and nightmares. Of course, most of this is only vaguely alluded to (with the exception of the Hitlerbot 9000), as the book takes place in the Mexican town of Pasito. The Reich, weakened, but still very much alive, invades the sleepy town on the eve of a wedding. Most of the wedding party is massacred, the Nazis setting up shop in the town for some unknown, yet nefarious purpose. Only one man manages to escape, running off into the desert, driven insane by the carnage. Nine years later, and the subjugation of the town is almost complete, the townspeople firmly under the thumb of Generaloberst Eisenberg and his son Alexis. A critical mission is nearing completion. Just the perfect time for a masked man with the remarkable ability to ruin everyone's plans to walk out of the desert...

Let's be honest. When it comes to bad guys, it's hard to top the Nazis. They're probably the last major force in the world that you can point to and say 'yeah, those guys are dicks' without any unfortunate implications. And they're so easy to write when it comes to horror and steampunk. When you consider the desperately batshit plans they considered and very nearly initiated on more than one occasion, it doesn't require too much of a suspension of disbelief to consider them rolling out gigantic transforming coal-powered tanks, or signing infernal pacts with the underworld for just a little extra power - science and mysticism were two of the main pillars of their organisation, after all. So we have literal airmen of the Luftwaffe, taking to the skies on wingpacks made of the wonder metal cavorite, gigantic sandcrawlers winding their way across the desert bringing supplies and troops, and the pre-requisite steam-powered automaton, a huge combat robot with a blazing furnace at its heart, which it always has to keep stoked (wood, paper, people, it's not entirely fussy).

The Nazis themselves are an interesting bunch. Cannon fodder are, as to be expected, dropped with the regularity you'd expect. Except the writer has taken it upon himself to give almost each and every one their own little story. And these aren't a couple of lines talking about how their last thoughts were of their mother, or how they never saw it coming, oh no, it's a couple of paragraphs, easy, sometimes a page or two, detailing their life story, their career in the Ultimate Reich. Two soldiers early on, we're told, share a dreadful secret, something so very despicable. Yet the story makes it a point never to tell us what the secret was, despite making a point of mentioning that, in their dying moments, they so desperately wanted to tell someone, anyone, their dark tale, thus utterly negating the whole point. It's interesting, but it doesn't exactly do much to humanise El Sombra's enemies, since the majority of them are painted as being a sadistic bunch of cutthroats and bastards to a man. It does add a nice aspect to the story (even if we're shown almost nothing about the civilians by comparison), but considering how little we're actually told about this world - for the bigger picture, you have to read the other books in the series: bad form considering this was one of the first books released in this line - I couldn't help but think it's prose that would've been better spent world-building. Hell, I didn't even know it was set in more modern times til a throwaway line about 3/4 of the way through about Andy Warhol!

Then we come to the man himself, El Sombra, a hero right out of a pulp novel from the 1950s. Barefoot and bare-chested, dressed in only a pair of ragged trousers and a bloodstained sash for a mask, armed with only a sword, his wits, an uncanny aim and a lunatic laugh as he runs headlong into danger. The man pulls off stunts that in any other book would have me frowning in disbelief. Yet in this one, it's only fitting that he should be so insanely over the top. As mentioned earlier, he's plainly modelled after Zorro, and as such, it's only right that he should be able to kill a dozen men armed with only a handful of stones. Some things just need to be so. The author seems to have something of a fetish for blisters, however, as we're constantly told about him accruing them on his hands and feet. Unsurprising when you consider he walks around virtually (and literally at one point) naked, but it seems to happen every time he goes anywhere anything the wrong side of 'warm'. Yes, Mr. Ewing, we know, hot things burn, can you stop reminding us of this now please?

El Sombra, despite the lack of broad detail, is still a fantastic book, a modern-day slice of pulp with a devil-may-care hero. There's some great moments and references - Nick Fuhrer, Agent of S.T.U.R.M. being a particular favourite - many delivered with a knowing wink in the audience's direction. The book ends with the promise of a follow-up: El Sombra Punches Mecha-Hitler In The Face. I pray it never arrives, because if this book is any indication, the world may not survive the fallout of a punch so almighty, it'd make Captain Falcon look like the tired meme he really is.

Ever wondered what would happen if you combined Deadpool and Dante?

Sheer, fucking, magnificance, that's what.

(and on a side note, if Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 ever gets released, my team's consisting of Deadpool, Dante and Viewtiful Joe. They shall be called Team Seaslug Maximum Ludicrous Awesome Spectacular - pronounced with the pre-requisite Mexican accent. And none shall stand before their might)

Liking the Juggernaut design as well. Looks more like a tank turret had sex with a set of American Football armour, and surprisingly, it works. Juggernaut's design always bothered me for some reason, but this one I actually like. Kudos, guys.

Metroid Fusion

GBA

4 hours 29 minutes

I remember playing Super Metroid on the SNES one summer when I was about 13. I'd play it til stupid hours of the morning, determined to explore every last corner of the map. A sort of penance/revenge for getting utterly stuck about two hours in on the Gameboy version, Metroid II. I have vivid memories of exploring the Crashed Spaceship level, shooting everything with the Ice Beam. I was so out of my tree on lack of sleep, I was convinced the weird noises the enemies were making were telling me how the ship crashed in the first place. Of course, that only made things worse, since it only compelled me to stay awake that much longer. For some reason, I don't quite recall how that night ended. Probably for the best.

A lack of games for my machine resulted in me playing the few games I owned endlessly. People still don't believe me when I tell them I was able to run through Super Ghouls and Ghosts (a legendarily hard game on a par with the infamous Battletoads) perfectly, playing through the game twice in a row to get the best ending, losing only a handful of lives from one end to the other. At the time, the record for running through Super Metroid (without sequence-breaking, glitching or performing any other acts of skulduggery) was somewhere in the region of about 2:29. My best time was about 2:34. The fact that I was about five minutes off the world record was enough for me. While time has dulled my skills with these games (witness me derping into each and every enemy whenever I try and play SG&G), when you consider my experience with Super Metroid (and all the recent 2D Castlevania games which 'borrow' almost every play mechanic from the series wholesale) it's pretty fair to assume when it comes to these style of games, I know my shit.

So tell me then: why did I find Metroid Fusion so unbelievably goddamn hard?

Fusion follows on almost directly from the climax of Super Metroid. Samus Aran, poster girl for both armour and latex fetishists everywhere, has finally eradicated the Metroid menace once and for all... only to discover that they were keeping something even worse in check the whole time. A new type of parasite, dubbed the X is discovered, which can absorb and mimic whatever it comes into contact with. The parasite immediately makes a beeline for our bounty hunting heroine and gets to work on her. Barely making it back to home base, in a moment of oh-so hilarious irony, she's given a vaccine made of Metroid DNA, along with a new suit of armour. This comes with several advantages and disadvantages: first off, she can now absorb the X, much like Metroids could. Unfortunately, it also means that, like the Metroid, she's especially vulnerable to cold. Not much of a problem as long as no remnants of the X parasite remain in her old armour, ready to reanimate it and have it chase after he with that nifty Ice Beam of hers.

...oh dear.

Give the designers credit where it's due, it's a good way to explain why Samus starts off the game armed with nothing but a popgun and a stylish suit of armour. It's always somewhat funny to play a sequel to a game where you ended a borderline demigod, only to start the next game as vulnerable and weak as you were at the start of the last one. At least they justified it here. Anyway, you're dropped off on a research space station which has been infected with X. There's lots of rare and exotic (read: dangerous) lifeforms up here, which The Federation, Samus' employers, would like to see kept safe. Doesn't take a genius to work out how this goes south rapidly.

The major complaint you'll hear about Fusion is its linearity. Super Metroid had a sprawling map that rewarded exploration with power-ups and new weapons. With Fusion, you're directed to your next goal via Navgation Rooms, computers that explicitly tell you where to go next. They're not optional either, helpful little terminals you can visit whenever you're stuck that give you a vague pointer on what to do now, oh no. They all mandatory and tell you exactly where to go next. Of course, there's always something in the way that prevents it being a straight A-B trip, but for a series based on exploration, this constant hand-holding seems completely contrary to the spirit of the series.

Musically, the game doesn't do anything really spectacular. With the other games in the series, there was always at least one or two pieces of music you'd have stuck in your head. Thinking about it, there's only one song that really stands out, and it's a pretty puny rendition of the classic Ridley boss theme (because it's not a Metroid game til Ridley shows up). The few pieces I do try and recall inevitably segue into tracks from Super Metroid. Graphically, things are better. Samus moves with a practised fluidity, the areas are nice and vivid and the enemies are nicely designed, if often awkwardly placed. Several classic enemies show up, with Space Pirates inexplicably making an appearance before the end. Much like with Ridley, I guess it's not a real Metroid game til these dicks show up, getting in the way of your carefully-timed acrobatics. Of all the bosses, the one that stands out most is Nightmare, not just because it's one of only two bosses actually named in the entire game. Nightmare is described as a bio-mechanical monstrosity capable of warping gravity. In practice, it looks like a TV with bad posture. In order to beat it, you have to shoot the glowing ball on it's underside. Yeah. He stands out for two reasons: first off, he's fucking hard. Not in a 'Hell yeah, I could do with a challenge' kinda way, but in a 'why the hell are you flying around like a lunatic with no real pattern DID YOU JUST DO THAT MUCH DAMAGE WITH A SINGLE HIT?! WHAT THE FUCK?!!' kinda way. Second, when you do enough damage to him, his face melts. No, really. It's surprisingly grotesque for a game that, well, isn't.

This is the main problem with the game though: enemies hit way harder than they should. In In past games, each new full suit would give you extra abilities, like being able to move freely in water, as well as well as significant damage reduction. In Fusion, it doesn't seem to matter how much damage reduction you have, the enemies will still cheerfully cut huge chunks off your life bar. Even with the damage reduction, it's like the difference between taking 60 damage per hit and 56 per hit. One boss will happily rape you for two whole tanks of life with a certain attack, which it uses every opportunity it gets. The balance of the earlier games seems lost, the areas between boss fights becoming a war of attrition. Not what I'd qualify as fun.

Then we get to the single hardest section in the entire game. You encounter Samus' old suit several times during the game. Since its infection by the X, it's known as the SA-X, and if you ever see it, you start running. No ifs, buts or maybes, you make a run for the exits ASAP. It only shows up on a handful of occasions, and most of the time, you just need to wait somewhere for it to do its thing and leave. One of the final times you face it, it starts chasing you. You can stop it in its tracks with Freeze Missiles, which do exactly what you'd expect, but that holds it in place for about two or three seconds tops. Whenever the SA-X hits you - and it will hit you - it does a ton of damage. And its rate of fire is surprisingly high. AND IT'S CHASING YOU. Hope you like repeating sections, because this one's going to take a while. Oh, and the save point was a ways back yonder. Have fun!

By the time you get to the final two bosses, you're expecting a monumental encounter, a battle of hair-tearingly sadistic difficulty. Only they aren't. The final obligatory fight against the SA-X is pretty simple, and in the actual last battle, your biggest foe will be time, the mandatory self-destruct timer ticking down in the background. The final boss' most deadly attack? A claw swipe that stuns you for a couple of seconds. That's it. They've tried to replicate the Mother Boss fight of the last game, but it just doesn't work. There's no build-up, no sense of grandeur or finality, just 'I shoot u now ur ded'.

I wanted to like Fusion - I must have on some level, I played it from start to finish. But this is a series you expect more from: merely 'good' isn't good enough. It's frustratingly hard in places and the hidden paths are often a little too well hidden. More than once you'll curse the God of Fake Walls. It's good for what it is, but a complete let-down when you think of what it could have been. At least it's not Metroid Prime: Hunters, my official point of Ruined Forever.

Zeno Clash

PC

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Heavy Metal - the comic, not the music. That would come later. I was raised on comics like the Beano and the Dandy - good, solid British fare, filled with jokes and funny stories. I don't know how or where I first encountered Heavy Metal - there were no cool uncles or older siblings taking me to one side and saying 'yeah, those comics are fun, but this stuff will put hairs on your chest' - but somehow I did. Heavy Metal was a world away from the adventures of Dennis the Menace, Sid's Snake and Minnie the Minx. The stories, almost entirely artsy European comics, featured within were violent, twisted. There was a weird sense of the taboo within the pages, a feeling that I've never really gotten with anything else since, and as a child, I liked it.

Probably explains a lot, huh?

The reason for this anecdote, as I'm sure you're all wondering, is that Zeno Clash, current Indie Game darling of the week, is, in every essence, a tale out of Heavy Metal made manifest. The atmosphere, the visuals, the overwhelming sense of the bizarre, all of it could be taken, cut up into panels, put in the magazine and nobody would blink.

I'm going to impose a challenge on myself for the rest of this review: I'm going to try and write as much as I can without resorting to the words 'strange', 'bizarre', 'weird' or 'odd' because frankly, that would make things way too easy and boring to read, when you consider the fact that those words apply to 100% of everything ever in this game. So, to business: you are Ghat. Ghat is a member of Father-Mother's family. Father-Mother is a hermaphroditic bird-like creature, parent of what seems like almost everyone in the town of Halstedom. As the game opens, Ghat has apparently tried to assassinate Father-Mother for some unknown reason, something the rest of his/her children don't take too kindly to. On his escape from the town, he is joined by his sister, Daedra, who becomes his companion for the length of the game. The pair of them try to find a new home, while being beset on all sides by bounty hunters, Corwids, statues and the persistent forces of Father-Mother's brood. You follow all that? Yes? Good, because that's as simple as it gets. The rest is sheer madness.

The game itself is a self-admitted throwback to the fighting games of yore - names like Double Dragon have been invoked in interviews by ACE Team, the Chilean developers. Combat is simple: hold down the left mouse button for a three-hit combo, press the right for a stronger right cross, hold the spacebar to block. There's more depth if you want it, with counters and deflections available, but those few moves will serve you the vast majority of the game. Gunplay is similarly stripped down, with four different types of projectile weapon at hand. There's dual-wielded pistols, a rifle, a two-shot crossbow and a grenade launcher available, all with infinite ammo. Keeping hold of them is the tricky part, as anything stronger than a stiff breeze will inevitably knock them out your grasp. Thankfully, the same is true of your enemies, who won't hesitate to use them against you at a moment's notice.

The real treat is with the game's design. Zeno Clash has been praised from every direction on its artistic sense, and it's easy to see why: the game is, to be perfectly honest, beautiful. Halstedom is carved out of coral walls inlaid with coloured glass and skulls; the End of the World is a dark and foreboding place filled with statues of living metal; the sewers are... well, the sewers are pitch black and filled with water, but it's the first sewer level I've ever encountered that doesn't make me want to slaughter the dev team, so it deserves mention. The characters are even better. Daedra's face has a quality about it I found myself staring at without realising whenever she walked over to me. Same with the non-human characters as well, but in a different way. The pig-like creatures are made to look like they've been made out of plasticine, the Corwids, mask-wearing lunatics that do whatever they do because that's what they do, have a tribal feel to them, dirt and muck covering every inch of them from headgear to toe. The statue people look like they're made of melted steel, scraping and clanking with every movement and give a satisfying clunk with every hit. These are some of the most tactile designs I've ever seen, and I found myself repeatedly wanting to reach in and pick them up just to run my fingers across them to see how they'd feel. The deliberately stylized art direction is a welcome shift away from the 'more real than real' aesthetic in games today - it's all very well and good giving us a photo-realistic field, but I've got a real one I could go cavort in ten minutes down the road. This is what games should be giving us more of: wild and outlandish realms straight out of a fever-induced delirium. Take us places we could never go, rather than accurate representations of our own back yard.

If there's a snake in this outlandish paradise, it's this: the game's way too short. The 18 stages can easily be finished in a matter of hours. I wasn't given a final time upon completion, but I don't think it'd be out of the question to say it was 3-4 hours tops. And that was with constant game overs (some of the stages can be outright bastards, even early on). Granted, it's nice to play a game that packs four hours of constant fun into four hours, rather than stretching it out for 20 like a few other recent games I could mention - being able to play a game without feeling I had to commit time to it is a surprisingly refreshing feeling in an age where 30 hours of gameplay is considered 'short'. The problem is, the game ends as its starting to get interesting, and nothing is ever explained. We know there's some kind of connection between Ghat, Daedra, Father-Mother and the seemingly omnipotent Golem, but whatever it is, we never find out. The game doesn't really end, it just... stops. There was a writer in the 1930s and 40s called Harry Stephen Keeler, a Corwid of the Free if ever there was. Legend had it, he would set up his typewriter with a big roll of paper, not unlike a toilet roll, and just start writing. At some point, he'd stop, tear off the paper, call it a book, send it off and start on the next, no matter how little sense it all made. That's how it feels - they were writing up the plot, stopped and decided that would be the game, even though what we're presented with makes an arguable amount of sense. They're probably working on the next roll as we speak.

A lesser problem, but still a nagging one, is the lack of different enemies. Rimat, arguably the primary antagonist, is fought five or six times throughout the game. The only significant difference in her fighting style is that she gains one or two extra attacks in her last few fights. And that's still more than some of the other characters get. It's ironic: as different in looks as each character is, there's really no difference in fighting style from one opponent to the next. You'd expect Rimat to be a fiercer fighter than, say, the rat creatures, who you'd be sure would cheerfully suckerpunch you when the opportunity arises, or you'd figure the tower guards would make a beeline for weapons the first chance they get, but there's a sad lack of personality quirks along those lines. It's a shameful missed opportunity, and I only hope that ACE take the opportunity to expand on this in future games.

I sincerely hope that this is a sign of things to come from ACE: if Russia is the land of dark, hopelessly depressing games, I really want Chille to be home to unceasingly inventive digital acid trips. There's a horrible lack of the fantastic in today's gaming climate, and while Zeno Clash as a game is somewhat forgettable, as a concept and a world, I need to see more. The world of Zenozoik is filled with a colour and lunatic clarity rarely seen in games today, or ever for that matter. Here's hoping the next trip is even brighter and more vivid than the last.

Wandering around trying to find info on the new Clive Barker book, The Scarlet Gospels (current word has it it may not be ready for another couple of years. Blast!) when I came across this fantastic quote about The Undying, a PC game he was closely involved with a few years back:

"We had this fellow called Magnus. Count Magnus Wolfram. Who was bald, tattoed, looked like a comic book hero. And I got them all in a room, and I said, 'Look, does anyone in this room know a count? No. Does anybody in this room know anybody called Magnus? No. Does anybody really want to be in this guy's skin? Since this is a first person play, why would you want to be in this man's skin? Why would you want to play [as him]?' And so we threw him out, and I said, 'Look. You've got a gay man in charge here. Bring me somebody I want to sleep with. Bring me somebody fabulously sexy.'...

"Brian Horton about ten days later sent me the character that now appears on the screen. Who was wonderful, he's everything I wanted. He was just the right kind of character. He seemed like somebody you would want to be, somebody you would want to play, whose skin you would want to occupy for a period of time. Even if you are going against the hordes of hell, at least he was going to do it with a smile on his face."

Makes a nice change from the 'Immortal Bald Man In Box Armour, Also Tits McGee' design aesthetic present in virtually every game today. Unless they're following the same design principal. In which case, eww...

That 70s Show Season 1-6

153 24-minute episodes

When I was in high school, there were two shows I used to follow religiously. One was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the other was That 70s Show. The timing of both was uncanny, since they were both lined up with my own high school experiences. Okay, so I wasn't fighting vampires and demons on a nightly basis, and I didn't exactly live next door to a hot redheaded neighbour girl, but everything else? Spot on.

The show centres around Eric Foreman, resident of the town of Point Place, Wisconsin, and the, generally dumb things he and his friends get up to in (wait for it) the 1970s. As set-ups go, that's all you need, and placing it in the 1970s ensures you don't get any unfortunate dated pop culture references, the bane of any show that trys to be 'modern'. Sure, you're looking smart by talking about the latest big band now, but give it six months, and you'reprobably going to look just a little bit silly.

The first two seasons are as sharp as you could hope for. The dialogue is often hilarious and the cast deliver it with spot-on timing. It's hard not to like the cast, from Kelso's idiocy, to Hyde's repeated manifestos about his distrust of The Man, a trait that sadly gets phased out as the series progresses. If the show doesn't remind you of someone you knew as a kid, or something you did, you probably should've done more.

THe one failing of the show is the same one that all sitcoms go through - complacency. Eric and Donna remain much the same from the first to the last, but all the other characters wind up being identified by their character traits more than anything: Red threatens to put his foot in someone's ass roughly three times a second, to the point where they start to throw it in if they can't think of a punchline. Kelso, prone to moments of insight and actual intelligence at times, is made the living avatar of Derp pretty swiftly, amd Jackie... well, she was always meant to be annoying, abrasive and irritating, so it'd be hard to have her devolve into a one-note character.

On the whole, though, the series is still damn funny - it must be, or I wouldn't have watched six seasons of it back to back over the course of about 5 days. Watching it reminded me of all the stupid crap we used to get up to in school, sitting around, talking absolute bollocks while listening to music, deciding we were going to conquer the world before the age of 21. The show manages to capture that feeling perfectly, even though half the cast are over the age of 25 by the third season. Yeah, the show's trading on nostalgia in a way, but sometimes, that's a good thing. Watch the first season at the very least, try to pretend the last season didn't happen. Blonde Donna... what the hell were they thinking?!

Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

319 pages

Charles Stross likes science. You can tell this because the amount of jargon present in this book is staggering. Charles Stross also likes the Cthulhu Mythos. You can tell this because he once wrote a story where the US weaponized the Big C himself. Rule of Cool full in effect, y'all. The Atrocity Archives is the first in a series dealing with Bob Howard, employee of The Laundry. The Laundry are your typical Spookshow beyond-top-secret shadowy government department specialising in Weird Shit in all its forms. Of course, this being set in Britain, things are a lot less glamourous than you'd hope, with nary an Agent J, Jakita Wagner or as much as a Scully in sight. Bob is about as low on the foodchain as you can get, having been forcibly recruited by the group when he nearly turned half his hometown into a hellish abyss, dicking around with mathematical formulae as a student. Bored with being the departmental bitch, thanks to a boss who relishes every opportunity to make his life misery, he jumps at an opportunity to spread his wings with some fieldwork. Needless to say, shit gets very real, very quickly, and a decades-old Nazi plot to win the Second World War is swiftly rearing its ugly head.

Stross comes from the same school of writing as Grant Morrison: throw enough ideas at the reader and some of them are bound to lodge in their head. As a result, the number of concepts you're introduced to are almost too dense to take in, and less time is spent on any of them than you'd like. Maybe I've been spoiled by writers like Frank Herbert and China Mieville lately, but when I'm being introduced to a new world with new rules, I like to have some clue of what I'm doing before the game starts. Stross' frantic pace doesn't help in this respect either, and with the overall shortness of the book (the first 5 pages are an unrelated introduction, the last 103 are a short story, afterword and glossery of acronyms and abbreviations), you find yourself wanting more. Another 150 pages or so to fully explain the theories and ideas - or at least the terminology - within would've helped immesurably. Still, it's interesting finding out exactly how the core of an atomic bomb goes boom.

What we've got though, is damn good stuff. Bob's flatmates, nicknamed Pinky and Brains also work for The Laundry and are known to take their work home with them, resulting in some great moments - Pinky's attempts to disprove the old omelette/shell-breaking axiom will stick in your mind if only for the outright weirdness of it all. The idea that Alan Turing, honorary Grandfather of Steampunk, developed a mathematical formula to basically summon demons and punch holes in the spaces between dimensions is wonderful (and begs to be used in an RPG campaign somewhere). And then there's the moon with Hitler's face carved onto it. Can't forget that one. The thing that strikes you is the mundanity of it all though. You're cheerfully dicking around with arcane weaponry, disarming nukes that may just give demonic forces the oomph they need to play merry hell (literally) with our edge of reality, but there's always the chance you'll get shitcanned for showing up late once too often, and the training courses are still as boring as ever, if a little more deadly than the norm.

The Atrocity Archives is a solid book that needs to learn to catch its breath. I haven't read any of Stross' other books yet, but if this is any indication of the rest of his lineup, it's well worth checking out.