Beyond obscenity

~ Inquisitor ~ 1 Comment

Fundamentalists! Worried about the 'blasphemy' of The Da Vinci Code? Wondering how best to beat up people who go and see Jerry Springer: The Opera? Now, how about putting your moronic talents towards something that actually deserves it?

Living TV, unfortunately popular home of various crappy psychic series, "woman centred" sexploitation programming (e.g. the appalling Extreme Makeover) and CSI repeats, is putting on another crappy psychic series in which various psychics attempt to "solve" famous murder cases by, get this, summoning the murder victims on air.

Yes. Really. Dear God. 

Now, it might just be me, but isn't that just the most tasteless thing you've ever heard of? It's exploitative, it's useless and it's just bloody wrong. I've seen Visitor Q and thought it was a decent satire, but this is just beyond the pale; what's worse is that there's more than enough viewers for this junk. Ugh.

Adaptations

~ Inquisitor

Some sad news that I've only just discovered: Jay Presson Allen, the screenwriter of many fine adaptations, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cabaret, died on the 1st of May.

Cabaret in particular is a masterpiece of adaptation: it changes quite a lot of the original musical whilst keeping very much to its theme (and the best of the songs), and thus becoming a lot less stagey and quite tremendously watchable. The adaptation by Jay Presson Allen is defintely one of the reasons why this works; it puts forth the correct, disturbing mood for the material. It's the benchmark for how to adapt a musical to film, a genre that's never quite been done correctly; only the best writers, like Allen and the late, great Ernest Lehman, working with the best directors really got it.

I'll leave this with Sally Bowles…

Does it really matter as long as you're having fun?

Blog housekeeping

~ Inquisitor

I've signed up for del.icio.us and so now you'll see some of my favourite more, um, random web favourites on the left hand bar. I've also added the WordPress hit counter and a Recent Comments indicator.

I thought of changing the theme, but this is still the best one; although if wordpress.com update some of the ones they have, the look of this blog could change soon. In the meantime, enjoy the already linked peregrine cam.

PS3 at E3

~ Inquisitor

Microsoft and Nintendo must be laughing their heads off.

The PS3 is making the same mistakes Microsoft did with the Xbox360, only in a much worse way. It's got two unneccessary SKUs with major differences, like the 360, only Sony have made it much worse by actually cutting features from the cheaper one – HDMI and Wi-Fi – that can't be put back in using upgrades. HDMI in particular, considering that Blu-Ray movies can request to be digital only, is a big, big loss for the cheap PS3.

Add to that the ripoff of the Nintendo Wiivolution controller, with tilt sensors, despite the fact that it still looks like a Dual Shock and so you won't get nearly as much benefit with it than with the designed-for-the-purpose Wii controller; then add the fact that it's really, really expensive ($499 for the crippled version, $599 for full functionality) and also add to that that you haven't even seen proper game shots yet and all signs point to it looking about the same as the 360, and then Microsoft and Nintendo have little to worry about. Except Sony's market share, of course.

Hope the Wii launch goes better… it would be nice to see some real competition for the 360.

Fun search terms

~ Inquisitor

Someone has found my blog using the search term "videos of dwarf football" (on AOL Search UK).

Hmm. No dwarf football here, sorry. And not much football or videos, full stop. Oh well, hope he found what he was looking for.

At least it’s for charity

~ Inquisitor

But I suspect whoever it was that came up with this thing will almost certainly get "FIRED!" soon enough.

I mean, who actually needs a talking head of Alan Sugar that'll point its finger at you every once in a while? It's like an even more annoying Billy Bass (link very NSFW.) And the Amstrad page says they're trying to contact Matt Lucas…

But while we're at it, thank you all for beating my hits record – I've made 50 hits today. Hopefully, I'll be able to write more, but in the meantime, enjoy the links.

(Piece considering That'll Teach 'Em S3 coming up – my piece on the 2004 season has now been retrieved and placed in articles.)

And they were doing so well

~ Inquisitor

The Nintendo Wii, I ask you. Pronounced exactly like you think it is.

Revolution was actually a pretty good name, all told, for what that particular console represented. Revolution represented a change: it wasn't going to win because it was as grotesquely overengineered as either the Xbox360 (a tri-core monstrosity) or the PS3 (with a processor with seriously untried architectural design and a Blu-Ray drive that probably costs about as much as a launch PS2), and in fact it wasn't even going to be that much faster than the current generation.

It was going to win with innovation. The controller is one of the most ingenious ideas I've seen – motion sensitive, push sensitive, wireless, with the ability to stick it in a GameCube controller attachment if you needed such a thing or attach an analogue stick if you needed to. It's the kind of innovative idea that's been working magic for them with the DS, a console whose simplicity and success shows that there really is no need for PSP-style overengineering in real life.

And then there was the Internet game download idea – which Nintendo refers to as "Virtual Console", an ability for the Revolution to emulate other, older systems. The iTunes Music Store-style Virtual Console ability is a brilliant idea – if you want to play Super Mario World or Chrono Trigger nowadays, you've got to play through a PC emulator and it just isn't the same. Some of the best modifications for other consoles have been to put emulators on them – especially the PSP, which with its dearth of decent actual games (yeah, Lumines, Wipeout Pure, GTA only so you can do the firmware hack, uhm…) has forced Sony into serious rearguard manoeuvres involving its media capabilities in order to stop people from running homebrew, of which the current 2.7 update is merely the most pathetic example. (It plays Flash now, but stops the GTA hack. That's it. I can imagine a Sony executive, looking at the downloads, going "…wait, are the sheep actually upgrading? Wow!")

This legitimisation of classic gaming could be a fantastic coup by Nintendo. If you could pay, say, 99p for a legit ROM of Super Mario 3 you could save to a SD card and keep forever, that would reduce ROM piracy considerably and bring an entirely new revenue stream into Nintendo's coffers. It's no surprise that Sega (who are bringing Genesis/Mega Drive games) and Hudson (who are bringing TurboGrafx games) are joining in the party. I'd probably still get a 'special' Xbox, but that's definitely not for everyone.

No, the Revolution was all there – innovative new games, accessible old ones, creating entirely new genres the way the DS has. Shame about the name, really – it kinda puts a damper on things. Nintendo aren't really a company to joke around about this kind of thing, so there's no hope of changing it to Nintendo GO, or (my personal favourite) leaving it as Revolution.

So it'll be the butt of juvenile geek urine jokes for a long, long time – let's hope Nintendo proves them wrong.

Sorry about the blog drought

~ Inquisitor

Just haven't thought of anything actually decent to write about recently; I've had a pretty boring week, all told, and I'm too jaded about the Hewitt/Prescott/Clarke trifecta to actually have anything decent to write about them. BTW, thanks Google for all the hits on my articles about the crappy England World Cup song (30+ a day) – hope you guys enjoyed them.

So have a link to this cute peregrine webcam, plus the accompanying diary, and I'll actually have something to write about soon. Maybe quite soon.

(Windows Media Player required; may not work in Firefox, it doesn't for me, but you can extract the URL from the Media tab in View Page Info – it's the only Object on the page – and paste it into WMP fairly easily.)