I really like Justified. Timothy Olyphant is a US marshall in backward Harlan County, Kentucky, but the show focuses at least as much on the local gang leaders. A white supremacist who finds god in prison, a plump store owner who acts as matriarch for a huge crime family, a sleazy security consultant who operates out of a caravan.

It conjours its own vivid version of this sunny, rural, booze-soaked culture bristling with guns and grudges. It’s a place where even the criminals – even the idiot criminals – address everyone with a folksy politeness, and speak in colourful euphemisms. And watching it feels a little like going there, to a part of the present day that feels like an older, slower time.

The store owner, Mags Bennett, was the main character of the excellent second season. The third’s just starting in the US now, and it’s already introduced some great new candidates for the role of lead antagonist.

I love it. Usually not liking anyone is a problem for me, but here they’re all such Machiavellian jerks that it’s great fun to watch them try to outscrew each other.

Kelsey Grammer plays the mayor, the main character, which is the main reason I checked it out. A quick calculation reveals I have watched at least 80 hours of Frasier. Impressively, given that, I saw him as that character for about 3 seconds – after that, he is unmistakably the seething, deranged, furious Tom Kane.

As it goes on, Boss is getting brutal to the point of brilliant absurdity. Kane seems hopelessly screwed at every turn, but there’s always a new depth to sink to, one more sacred thing to sacrifice.

The director thinks he’s being a bit more artful than he really is, and we see rather more of the sex than we strictly need to, but neither gets to be a huge problem. It’s clever, surprising and horrible.

It seemed far too awesome to ever get picked up, and sure enough, no-one ever mentioned it again. Until about a month ago, when someone said something about an Adventure Time T-shirt on Twitter.

I was all, “Man, did that pilot go down so well people still buy stuff relating to it years later? That makes it even dumber that it definitely never got picked up, a fact I will continue to assume without ever checking.” Then I checked that assumption, and found they made FIFTY THREE EPISODES of this incredible thing and never told me.

I would have bought the hell out of a DVD box set or something, but the Cartoon Network cleverly saw me coming and decided not to release one so that I would have no way of giving them money. You win this round, Cartoon Network – I’ll watch these unauthorised rips of your content on YouTube. But mark my words: one day you’ll slip up, and there’ll be a way for me to pay for Adventure Time. And on that day, you will know the wrath of my twelve to eighteen pounds.

Here’s another great episode before I explain why all the episodes are great.

All the episodes are great because:

• Jake the dog and Finn the human are friends, and both are good guys. This almost never happens. The fact that they’re never jerks to each other in any serious way just makes the series a fun place to be, and the characters completely likeable.
• The dialogue is genius. It’s a mix of the straightforward earnestness of a kids’ cartoon, the fun plays on language you’d normally find in something more mature, and the conspicuously modern idioms that make the heroes feel likeably ordinary in their fantasy setting.
• It’s free and easy with its visual imagination. Technically it’s all set in one place, the Kingdom of Ooo, but whichever direction they head they seem to run into a race of creatures we’ve never seen before, an awesome place unlike any of the others, or a weird new magical artefact. It has the throwaway spontaneity of a child making up a story on the spot, but it follows each one through to an inventive or funny conclusion. It just feels like every time you start a new episode, you’re going to see something completely new.

I say every episode is great, but they’re not always funny: some of them are so weird or so dark – or so both – that there aren’t many jokes. But that visual imagination and the likeable heroes mean it always works as a straight story – even if it has a completely bizarre ending.

It’s weird to be watching this at a time when Futurama is back, and doing gender humour that wouldn’t even get a pity laugh on an open mic night. Every time that series has bombed in recent years, it’s when it betrays its characters to attempt some weak social commentary or manufacture drama. Adventure Time shows why characters and imagination are always more important than plot or gags, even in a comedy.

But a lot of characters felt the need to laboriously explain how the plot related to the broader themes the writer intended to touch on, some could not leave a room without valedicting six to ten separate times, and more than ever before, they would not stop trying to get the words ‘shadow’ and ‘line’ into the same sentence.

OK: “I might have a shadow on a line” is part of the plot, and if you tell me that’s the real cop lingo for an inside man on a drug deal, I can’t dispute it. But it’s so close to the title that no-one can hear it without a reflexive immersion break of, “Hey, that’s like the title of the show!” And it isn’t actually the title of the show.

I mean, it doesn’t explain it or give it any extra meaning. If a shadow is an inside man and a line is a drug deal or recurring drug deal, what’s a shadow line? A sentient drug deal that agrees to tell the police about itself?

So it gets painful when they mix four or five of these mentions with awkward references to “crossing the line”, “finding the line”, and subsequently attempting to “walk the line”, all while having to “live in the shadows”, “run to the shadows”, or “write significant-sounding dialogue for a show named The Shadow Line. From the shadows. Line.”

Most of PC Gamer have devoured George R R Martin’s fantasy novels whole or in part – not me. My reading habits are based on identifying the shortest possible thing worth reading, reading half of it, then forgetting it exists. So I was extra glad to have the apparently awesome series turned into shiny pictures and shouty sounds for me.

It’s awesome. I was loving it even from the very slow first episode, before any characters establish themselves as particularly likeable. Now that it’s kicked off, the characters are actually more exciting than the action. It’s a series in which I can’t remember anyone’s name, but can describe who I’m talking about at work the next day in just a few words. Although in one case those words are “The guy who always sounds like he’s narrating a videogame intro” (the ex-slave trader).

Everyone had told me the books were brutal, which put me off, but I see the appeal now. It has just enough heart to make you genuinely care, and just enough guts to exploit it.

Intricate new BBC drama about the assassination of a drug lord and the two parties investigating it: the police and his former henchmen. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this to be good, but I wasn’t and it is. The deceased’s nephew plays unhinged with sociopathic ease, and Chiwetel Ejiofor (bad guy from Serenity) manages to make even an amnesia plotline darkly intriguing.

Tracking two parties pursuing the same leads, it doesn’t shy away from the repetition that naturally entails. Instead it uses it as a character profiling technique: three very different men all interrogate the same two associates of a missing man, and which one they each choose to call when they hear from him tells us everything we need to know about what they fear or care about most.

A crime series that revolves entirely around one murder, based on a Danish series of the same name. I’m watching it partly out of curiosity about how well one investigation stretches over 13 hours of television, partly because it has the amazing Michelle Forbes in it, and partly because it rains a lot. Apparently that never stops feeling atmospheric.

I’ll tell you what doesn’t stretch well over 13 hours of television: a character subplot whereby the main detective is juuuust about to leave for California at all times, she’s just hanging around to chase this one last lead, then she’s going, definitely this time. That starts in episode one, which is not coincidentally the same moment it starts to feel false and ridiculous.

Comedy by the creator of Arrested Development, starring Will Arnett (Gob) and occasionally Peter Serafinowicz. I’d heard little about it, and nothing positive except that The Onion didn’t think it was as unfunny as people were saying it was. Turns out it’s great. It has a lot of the same subtle wordplay and neat farces as Arrested Development – including a ridiculous number of sly references to that series – but actually makes me laugh more. It sticks more closely to its two main characters, which is good because one of them is Will Arnett.

Graham: I’m reading the pilot script for Sorkin’s new show. I will send it to you, but as a preview, simply close your eyes and imagine that Aaron Sorkin was writing a TV show. Bingo! You now have all the contents of this script in your head.

Me: Wow, awesome. What’s it about? Before I read your response, I’m going to write a synopsis of what I think it’ll be like.

1. The show has no main character but primarily revolves around two male professionals who are each exceptionally talented at their slightly different jobs, but slightly under-appreciated.
2. One of them is in a problematic relationship with a strongly opinionated female character whose job brings them into contact and potentially conflict.
3. Another conflict revolves around someone in a position of power imposing a different mindset or agenda on one or all of the main characters, hindering their ability to do their job the ‘right’ way.
4. The pilot features one of the main characters in some kind of exceptional personal or professional crisis, one he cannot hide from the world, and the other characters give him stronger support than he expects or feels he deserves.
5. At least once two people conduct a conversation by each elaborating on their own concerns without ever listening to the other person.
6. One of them argues strongly for the ‘right’ way against his superiors, accepts his fate, then must argue the opposite side when relaying the news to the other characters.
7. At the end of the episode, the fortunes of the character in crisis have changed and the formula for the rest of the series is established.

Graham: Paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 are spot on. 5 doesn’t quite happen, but not far from it, 6 doesn’t happen but will in future episodes, 7 probably does happen but I haven’t finished reading it yet.

It’s called “More As The Story Develops”. It’s set behind the scenes at a cable news program. It’s partially inspired by Keith Olbermann. It stars Jeff Daniels as the brilliant but kind of assholish news pundit. The show-within-the-show is on a fictional network called UBS, which is the network from Network (and the network Studio 60 was on, until NBC picked up the pilot and changed the name to NBS).

Events happen, Jeff Daniels ends up in crisis – has been in crisis – and the person who comes to help him turns out to be a brilliant woman with whom he had a romantic relationship.

It also stars a mixture of Dana from Sports Night and Jordan from Studio 60, Isaac from Sports Night, Natalie from Sports Night. Not the actors, just those characters. Also there’s a young guy who is kind of a cross between Jeremy from Sports Night and Sam from The West Wing.

But it’s on HBO, so sometimes people say “fuck”. That’s new.

Me, writing a blog post after reading the script: Yeah. It’s so unmistakably Sorkin, you almost wonder if it’s not Sorkin but a Sorkin stalker who’s devoted his life to perfectly mimicking every trope and character Sorkin has ever written.

Early on, I was thinking, “I know why this is funny, I know why it’s engaging me, I recognise all the Sorkin tricks and understand why they work.” It’s a rhythmic and always slightly absurd interplay between smart characters who are smart in different ways, and angry, exasperated or cynical about those differences. He can repeat that formula as much as he likes, I’m never going to stop enjoying it. These are my buttons, he has found them.

Towards the end, though, it becomes more than the offspring of Sports Night and Studio 60. As step 7. kicks in and starts to resolve step 4., Sorkin adds some basic stage directions about what the score should be doing. I’m not hearing the score, he doesn’t tell me what it would sound like, he just says what kind of mood it should reflect. And each time, it’s a perfect description of the mood I’m already starting to feel from the script.

Without even being played, the score is somehow reinforcing and boosting that escalating sense of excitement, and by the absolute climax of the action – which is an ordinary goddamn news report – I am tingling. It’s the emotional high of seeing characters you care about overcome obstacles to do important and difficult work incredibly well.

Unlike the smaller Sorkinisms, I know what’s happening but I don’t know how he’s doing it. As long as he can keep doing it, More Story is going to be great.

Depressing as that is, it’s nice to see the president of the whole network take significant time to explain the exact logic by which they axed Terriers. And while it is a bad name, and showing anything dog-related inevitably hurt it, he’s a pretty clear thinker about statistics and their significance. There’s even something refreshingly scientific about the way he breaks down his job, and his capacity to influence the outcome. It’d be nicer to think there’s a massive audience for smart stuff with no obvious hook and some evil middleman was stopping it reaching them, but Landgraf’s elaboration is more likely to be tough truth than an easy lie.

“If the answer is as simple as change Terriers to Beach Dicks and take the dog off the poster, and it’ll quadruple its audience, then I’m being dumb in not picking it up, especially since it’s such a good show. I did my best to answer that question, and unfortunately the answer was resoundingly no, that’s not likely to create a different outcome. Because for whatever reason—that’s disappointing and not entirely fathomable—people just don’t want to watch this show.”

Cheers to Chris for the link.

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on.

I’m not going to harp on any more about how good Terriers is – it actually had a bit of a dip around episode 9, getting too bogged down with its heroes’ personal problems to investigate any clever plots – but I am going to give you the full song the ridiculously catchy theme tune is taken from. It was written by the series’ composer Robert Duncan specially for it, but I like that he wrote the full song too.

My Call of Duty: Black Ops review also went up on the site this week. I reviewed both the Modern Warfares, and it sometimes felt like I might be the only one not having his mind blown by the unending B-movie combat.

Both those games had a saving grace: the first had a few really smart sections, and a level of dazzle that was new at the time; and the second’s co-op mode is still the best thing the series has ever done. Black Ops has neither, and its multiplayer is too glitchy to get much out of yet, so it’s the first time the score really reflects how much fun it is to aim-and-squeeze your way through a badly written action movie.

Amusingly, the only other review on Metacritic with a score close to mine calls it “Truly a magnificent single-player experience,” “the best single-player campaign that the series has ever had,” and “stunning”.

Povenmire and Marsh still found themselves fighting for some of their more surreal material. In several episodes, for instance, a character named Major Monogram interjects—apropos of nothing—the phrase “Ever since… the Academy.” A Disney executive quickly flagged the line, arguing (correctly) that it was utter nonsense. Povenmire assured him that it was exactly the kind of nonsense kids would parrot to one another at school. In fact, he felt so confident, he told the executive he expected to one day hear children repeat the line. The skeptical exec pledged to give Povenmire $100 for every time Povenmire heard it (unsolicited, of course).

“He now owes me $2,000,” Povenmire says. “And he said, ‘Can I give it to you in Hannah Montana merchandise?’”

The making of Phineas and Ferb, on Wired. This was the first kids’ TV I’d seen in years when I caught on telly at Kim’s, and I felt like the future of humanity was in better hands than I realised.

It all stems from the Death Note: a book found by a sociopathic hyperintelligent schoolkid that will kill someone if you write their name in it. You have to be picturing their face, and you can specify the time and circumstances of their death. He starts using it to rid the world of violent criminals, but gets into such hot water so quickly that his immediate objective is mostly self preservation.

The detective is never entirely sure if it’s really him doing it, since the flexibility of the book lets him schedule killings of people he’s never met, by natural causes, at times he has a perfect alibi for. But nor can the villain find a good way to kill his rival and get away with it: the two keep manoeuvring so that the villain could always feasibly be innocent, and the detective cannot be safely killed.

It’s a terrifying mind game of questions.
“He’s asking me what the killer would do – do I answer accurately and risk looking like the killer, or throw him off and risk playing dumber than he knows me to be?”
“If he’s telling me that openly, does that mean he knows that I know, or is he trying to find out if I know he knows that I know?”

Luckily, the complexity is kept readable by a completely frank expositional dialogue style, where people actually say things like, “If this had happened sooner, it would have been bad for me!” and “Please could you explain a little better.” You’re forever wondering how the hell the series is going to last more than a couple of episodes further, because massive developments tighten the circle around these two players in almost every one. But it keeps finding clever ways to scupper the dominant player, and luck never sides with either of them too long.

I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I can say the first 24 episodes are essential brain fodder. Thanks to Graham and Lisa for recommending it in the pub the necessary five times for me to get around to checking it out. If you’re in the US, PleasingFungus points out that the whole series is available on Hulu for free.

The pilot establishes a rich guy as the villain, getting away with murder, as if that’s going to be the overarching plot for the whole season. Instead it’s picked apart and inverted in a few episodes, and the jobs-of-the-week get much more inventive and entertaining as they unravel it.

Everything else I’m watching at the moment treats its series-scale plot with kid gloves, never daring to move it more than an inch in a single episode to preserve precious plot juice for the finale. Terriers goes at its own with a wrecking ball.

Basically my only complaint has been totally overturned, and unless I’m forgetting something big, this is the best new drama since Dexter Breaking Bad.

Prohibition-era Sopranos. Steve Buscemi is a corrupt county treasurer in Atlantic City in the 20s, and it’s lovely to see him play a position of power. I’ve got so used to him as a snivelling loser that it’s surprising how well his perpetual sneer works as one of superior disdain. The tone is just right, for me: Buscemi’s character is a villain, but not repulsive so far. It’s possible to enjoy the early twentieth century opulence of his life without being put off by the guy himself.

You’ll spend a few episodes trying to figure out which one of the central partnership is the dopey archetype, which one’s the womaniser, which one’s the genius, which one’s the loser. Eventually I realised none of those templates fit any of these characters any better than they do real people. Basically, the hook is that it’s written by someone who doesn’t think you’re a moron or have an insultingly reductive attitude to human nature.

They kind of had to do an episode like this – skipping over it or doing anything fun would have been a betrayal of the emotional punch of the finale. But that didn’t make it any easier to watch. The theme of discovering your humanity through a relationship just hit a little hard. That makes this an effective episode, but I can’t claim to have enjoyed it over the lump in my throat.

If you didn’t see it, Farnsworth invented a mind-swapper. He and Amy swapped bodies to enjoy youth and food respectively, but found they couldn’t switch back because their body’s immune response blocked the same switch being made again. They could still swap to other bodies, though, so Bender and the Professor (really Amy) swap minds.

Bender (really the Professor): Now then Amy, we’ll simply switch bodies, and then we’ll… no… I’d be back in my body, but then you and Bender would be switched, and the Amy and Bender bodies can’t trade minds again since they just did!

Professor (really Amy): Oh no! Is it possible to get everyone back to normal using four or more bodies?

Bender (really the Professor): I’m not sure! I’m afraid we need to use… MATH.

You can already tell the whole episode is going to be amazing at this point, but I had to pause and work it out before watching any more. You could call this an intentionally self-inflicted spoiler, but you kind of already know the main characters aren’t going to end up permanently switched, right? I just wanted to know if this was a way they could be restored, and if so how many more people they’d need.

It’s trickier than it seems as first, but not as impossible as it starts to look shortly after that. To be as clear as possible, I’ll refer to people as Person They Appear To Be (Person They Really Are). This is important because it’s the bodies that can’t switch back directly – there’s no rule about minds.

By this point in the show, here’s the story so far:

Amy and the Professor switch

Producing:
Professor (Amy)
Amy (Professor)

Amy and Bender switch

Producing:
Amy (Bender)
Bender (Professor)

Leaving:
Professor (Amy)

Bender (Professor) proposes switching with Professor (Amy) but doesn’t go through with it. It’s easier to think about if he does do that, though, because we’re back to just two wrong ‘uns to fix.

Bender and Professor switch

Producing:
Bender (Amy)
Professor (Professor) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Amy (Bender)

Now Bender and Amy need to switch, but they can’t directly. So we use Fry as temporary storage:

Bender and Fry switch

Producing:
Fry (Amy)
Bender (Fry)

Leaving:
Amy (Bender)

But that’s not enough. We need a somewhere else to put Bender’s brain so we don’t end up using the same storage person twice for the same trade. So:

Amy and Leela switch

Producing:
Amy (Leela)
Leela (Bender)

Leaving:
Fry (Amy)
Bender (Fry)

Now we can get Amy’s brain back in her without putting Bender into Fry – we can’t re-swap that pair.

Amy and Fry switch

Producing:
Fry (Leela)
Amy (Amy) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Bender (Fry)
Leela (Bender)

Similarly, we can put Bender back to rights without stranding Fry.

Leela and Bender switch

Producing:
Leela (Fry)
Bender (Bender) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Fry (Leela)

So finally we can switch two people who both want to be switched, which is the only way you can ever finish this thing:

Fry and Leela switch

Producing:
Fry (Fry) – Fixed!
Leela (Leela) – Fixed!

That was my first attempt. Looking it over, I think there’s probably some flab there – I think I can see a way to save a move or two early on. But figuring out this much made the rest of the episode all the more fun to watch, because the switches get nuts very, very quickly.

It seems to be biting off way more storylines than it can chew, and more maths than it can resolve, but it does both beautifully. The Wash Bucket is one of those sublime minor characters we don’t see enough of lately, like the homeopathy-hating announcer bot in Crimes of the Hot. And although they seem to be glossing over the mess they’ve made by having the Globetrotters announce that any such tangle can be resolved with two extra people, that is provably correct, and they show they’re nerdy enough to do the legwork by doing a montage of all the required switches at the end.

If Futurama sometimes seems weirdly inconsistent, it’s probably because of the crazy number of writers. No two episodes this season have been written by the same person. This one was by Ken Keeler, also behind Time Keeps on Slipping, and I therefore conclude that he is awesome.

But a lot of the complaints you could level at the way Lost ended up sound superficially like things you could as easily have said about season one: it raises interesting questions but never answers them, it’s too mystical, and you’re given far too much backstory for characters that just aren’t that interesting.

But I think a definable line was crossed somewhere in the middle, between unanswered questions that seem like they could have an interesting explanation, and just making arbitrary shit up in the same lame attempt to blow your mind usually reserved for the stoned, at parties, to the completely sober.

Smoke monster, rips up trees, makes a mechanical clanking noise – I’m fascinated.
Dharma Initiative, has bases here, investigating scientific properties of the island – I’m intrigued.
The Others, mysterious, seemingly superhuman, with horrible motives – I’m kind of intrigued.
“I don’t know what’s more curious, where the rest of the statue is or why it only has four toes.” – I’m, uh, nearing a borderline here.
Ben isn’t in charge of the Others. An invisible man in a shack is. He can cure cancer but he hates flashlights. Also the shack teleports.
At this point it’s clear that there isn’t going to be any kind of interesting explanation for this, and I stop caring.

Everything after that point sounded increasingly like a 12 year-old trying to bail himself out of a ridiculous lie by layering carefully constructed but painfully over-specific falsehoods on top of it. I never really cared about whether they’d answer the questions the series raised, only that the questions should hint at interesting answers. Once it strays into random land, there’s nothing for my imagination to chew on and I get bored.

At some point during Season Five – where one timeline is itself jumping back and forth through time – I stopped watching entirely – hence the 0. I never really came back, except for finales and premieres, and I only watched the two episodes preceding the grand finale this week.

I think that let me enjoy it. It was complete hokum of the laziest, stupidest kind, but emotionally well judged and oddly satisfying. Getting a shitty answer to some of the central questions, even the really interesting ones, turned out to feel better than getting none at all. What they gained by deciding not to do anything particularly special in the whole two hours was the freedom to pace it to give each meandering, pointless story thread its own little send-off. I’m not sorry I skipped what I did – in fact I wish I’d skipped most of seasons 3 and 4 too – but I’m glad I tuned back in for the end.

The crappy, crappy end.

Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Dollhouse

Man-doll Victor’s been the other treat of this season – previously stuck in some pretty dull roles, he’s since been given three or four chances to mimic other characters when ‘imprinted’ with their personality. Each time, the performance has been creepily good. When trying to tot up how many times it had happened just now, it took me a while to remember that he’d ever impersonated Topher – I just filed that whole sequence as ‘the bit with two Tophers’.

Update: just saw the latest. Whaaaaaat.

Castle

It couldn’t pick a more worn-smooth formula if it consciously tried: a police procedural starring a non-cop ‘consultant’ who helps the department solve crimes by a) having some special insight into the criminal mind and b) projecting an aura that prevents ordinary cops from grasping rudimentary logic until it’s phrased to them in allegorical form. The flavour this time is that he’s a best-selling crime writer. And that it’s brilliant.

The twists are small but effective: Lady Cop’s disapproving relationship with him is complicated by the fact that she’s always been a fan of his trashy work, and there’s something almost cute about her determination to give him a harder time to compensate. Castle himself is a rockstar in the literary world, but a powerless underling in law enforcement – Fillion manages to be charming, funny and pathetic as both. And his profession gives him a boyish excitement for working with the police rather than the sneering smugness the genius character usually has.

His daughter, whose inclusion initially triggers a Pavlovian sense that this is where it’s about to jump the shark, isn’t used as a source of whiny teenage tension. Instead she’s just a bedrock for the character, convincing, likable and sweet. It’s so rare to see a father/daughter relationship on screen where they just seem to be friends, and neither of them is being an asshole – the highest compliment I can pay is that it reminds me of Veronica and Keith Mars. It’s only because all this stuff works that she serves the purpose most irritating daughter characters are trying to: she humanises a man who seems otherwise ghoulish in his enthusiasm for murder.

Dexter

Funnily enough, despite an exciting escalation from the worst Thanksgiving ever to an extraordinarily grim finale, the episode that stuck with me was an early one-off. A sleep-deprived Dexter completely loses track of where he’s stashed a body, and consistently one-ups himself by avoiding all the places even he would think to look. I think the core appeal of Dexter is that, whether or not we’ve killed anyone, we all remember how it feels to have done something bad. Even if it was as a kid, the consuming fear of getting caught is scarier than any monster or murderer, because no-one’s going to be on your side.

Jen said she’d never ever see me again
When I saw her again, she said it again
Jan met another man
Leeza got amnesia just forgot who I am

Felicity, said there was no electricity
Emily, no chemistry
Fran ran, Bruce turned out to be a man
Flo had to go; I couldn’t go with the flow

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

(He doesn’t cook or clean; he’s not good boyfriend material)
Ooh we can eat cereal!
(You’ll lose interest fast, his relationships never last)
Shut up girlfriends from the past
(He says he’ll do one thing and then he goes and does another thing)
Ooh, who organised all my ex girlfriends into a choir and got them to sing?
Who? Who? Mmm, shut up
Shut up girlfriends from the past

Mimi will no longer see me
Britney, Britney hit me
Paula, Persephone, Stella and Stephanie
There must be 50 ways that lovers have left me

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town

Love is a delicate thing it could just float away on the breeze
(He said the same thing to me)
How can we ever know we’ve found the right person in this world
(He means he looks at other girls)
Love is a mystery, it does not follow a rule
(This guy is a fool)
(He will always be a boy; he’s a man who never grew up)
I thought I told you to shut u-u-up?

Mona, you told me you were in a coma
Tiffany, you said that you had an epiphany
Mmm, would you like a little cereal?
Who organised this choir of my ex girlfriends?
Was it you, Carol Brown? Was it you, Carol Brown?

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

Special Mention: State of Play

It’s the story of two murders, a mysterious death, an MP and the journalists investigating their connection. S. It gets complicated at a rate of knots, but never arbitrarily, and making sense of those complications becomes a compulsion. It’s a single six episode series, and if you can make them last more than a week you’re a stronger person than I.

I tried to watch the more recent film adaptation on a plane, but in trying to cram six hours of fast-paced developments into two, they’ve somehow managed to make it slower, less exciting and insufferably preachy. If you can watch the whole thing after seeing the series, you’re a more patient person than I.

Note: Glee

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. It’s an attempt to share the strange experience of rummaging through my old download folders, listening to forgotten MP3s with uninformative filenames. All I know about them is that I must have liked them at some point.

Volume Four was the shortest I’ve ever posted, this one is the longest – don’t click play if you’re in a hurry.

It turns out that if you start talking about Mirror’s Edge in the Future offices, pretty soon a small crowd gathers to weigh in. In a group of editors and writers – one who gave it nine out of ten and another who thinks five was too high – it turns out we mostly agree. We all love to run, and we all get angry when we’re stopped by something difficult.

Most of my suggestions for the combat with cops would make it less difficult, and hopefully less awkward. But it can’t get so easy that you don’t feel threatened, and the grander issue is that it needs to be more avoidable. So this is about that.

The police choppers already work well as a propulsive force for the chase sequences that doesn’t often lead to death or frustration. But I’d like to change each of the three types of ground enemies, and how they’re used.

Cops: Not allowed to fire until they’ve issued two verbal warnings (“Freeze!” – “Stop or I will shoot!”) giving you a window to take one out or escape. Obviously once you’ve attacked one, others in the area can open fire. When they do hit, damage is much more serious – two hits kill – but they’re still wildly inaccurate. It becomes more of a tactical puzzle about how not to get shot, and the way forward never depends on turning a slow valve, climbing a slow pipe or working out where to head.

SWAT: Armoured and with two-handed weapons, these guys can’t be disarmed. But they’re only ever sent after you, so you never have to get past them to progress. They can be killed with stolen cop weapons, knocked out if you drop on them, or pushed into danger by a melee attack.

Chasers: Right now these guys have tazers, which are just kind of annoying. I think they should have mace. They should be knocked back by any melee move – to their death if they’re on a ledge – but if they get right up to you, they grab you and spray a blinding teargas in your eyes, sending your vision haywire and making you scream. You can try to flee while blinded, but if you don’t get away your third macing incapacitates you, and it’s game over.

Being chased was the perfect way to escalate Mirror’s Edge, but the Pursuit Cops are just so lame in combat; dancing about, tickling you with electricity and mild punching. I want to be freaking terrified of these guys. It would help if they didn’t look like dorks.

So one set is easy to deal with, another is hard to deal with but easy to avoid, and the last is hard to deal with or avoid – so do whichever you’re best at. I found lots of fun ways to lure Chasers into positions where I could knock them off a building, but bizarre rules meant that more often than not, I was the one knocked back by the crucial blow.

I was saying the other day that no matter how often the game explicitly tells you to stop and fight, the player still tries to run right past. Replaying the early sections at lunch today, I realised there’s actually a forced pop-up message in the prologue chapter that says “Always try to get away from enemies.” It couldn’t feel more like two different games that were code-merged at the last minute.