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.

Two weeks before the return flight: four or five bad seats. I don’t book any of them.

One week before departure: three or four bad seats. Not booking.

Eighteen hours before departure: one bad seat. Oh come on! Fine, as an act of protest, I’m not even going to book the only seat available to me. I’m going to leave you guys in the dark as to which of these one seats I’m going to take.

Four hours before departure: one bad seat. The same bad seat. My system has failed. You know what, assholes? Fine. I’m…. I’m not even going to check in online. Deal with that.

Three hours before departure, check-in desk: “Hmm, let’s see if we can get you a better seat.”
“Oh, that’d be great.”
“Okay, you’re going from gate S10, everything’s running on time, here’s your boarding pass.”

I look at the boarding pass: it’s the same seat. It’s from that special stripe down the middle of the plane where seats just aren’t anything. They’re not aisle (easy to get up), they’re not window (no ass in face when other people get up), they’re not front of block (infinite leg room) and they’re not back of block (guilt-free reclining). They’re just seats, reasonably comfortable seats, on a plane, that is going to fly through the goddamn air until you’re in another country, serving you free drinks as it goes.

Fine.

This is a cinnamon apple pie with maple ice cream I had shortly before my flight home. After I’d finished, the waitress noticed I was not dead and commented that “You’ve done well.” No I have not, kindly waitress. No I have not.

Waiting at the gate, the staff keep putting out announcements for British Airways passengers who’ve checked in online, and haven’t seen a BA rep at the airport yet. I sit back and smile at their misfortune. Wrong choice, suckers! You should have randomly not checked in online this time, like I randomly didn’t.

They form a queue, then everyone sees the queue and thinks we’re boarding, forming a bigger queue, which makes everyone sure we’re boarding, then they have to put out another announcement telling everyone to sit back down. The TV’s showing some weird sitcom where Wyclef Jean is trying to become the president of Haiti.

When we finally board, the lady in front of me gets an angry red beep when her boarding pass is scanned.
“Oh dear. You didn’t see a British Airways representative, did you?”
“Yes, I saw you, at this desk.”
We share a very British everyone-is-incompetent look while the rep goes off to check something. She comes back. It’s fine.

I have my passport open to the photo page with the boarding pass tucked inside – I have decided this will be one of my life skills. She scans it, it beeps red.
“Did you-”
“Yes.”
I’ll be damned if I’m going to be penalised for checking in online the one time I didn’t.
She goes off to check something, and comes back. I’m just about to explain – in what I plan to be a slightly snippy tone – exactly who I saw and where, when she leans forwards and whispers guiltily:
“You’ve been upgraded to Club.”

Jesus, now people are just going to hate me.

My first thought on the plane was “Oh man, Club Class on this flight looks just like the lowly World Traveller Plus.” Then, “Oh, that was World Traveller Plus. This is Club Class.”

Not really seats, even, but pods. Each faces the opposite way to its neighbour, so you’re left staring a stranger in the face. That’s okay, though, because a frosted glass barrier can be electricly erected between you, shooting up in nested layers like spacecraft armour. I worried a while about how to do this politely, until the person opposite did it impolitely.

FINE. Didn’t want to look at YOUR stupid face EITHER. This is how Club Class people behave: I’d only been a Club Class person for a few hours, and I’d already been planning to do the same.

The barrier seemed less like a useful feature and more like a diabolical social experiment. Take two strangers who have no reason to look at each other, sit them so they’re looking at each other, then wait to see who presses the button first. Neither of you mind, really, but unless you live to see the great cyber shunning of 2073, it’s about the only time in your life a perfect stranger will tell a robot that they don’t want to look at your face anymore.

This photo is annotated, but I can’t find a good way of embedding annotations. Click it instead.

The legroom is so preposterous that once you’ve done up your seatbelt, trying to retrieve your Highlife magazine from the seatback pocket in front of you looks like a baby straining at his pram buckle for some unreachable sweet. And it isn’t a seatback pocket so much as a fold-down footrest that completes your full length bed when you fully recline. For this reason your tray folds down from the side on an adjustable rail, running from directly in front of you to the position Club Class people refer to as “the fuck out of my way”.

The only apparent drawback was that I couldn’t put anything under my seat, because the reclining mechanism took up all the space, and I couldn’t put anything under the seat in front of me, because there wasn’t one in walking distance. I’d have to board a much smaller plane and fly there to deposit it.

The drawback was solved by an actual drawer. I had a drawer. I wasn’t just sitting there, I was moving in.

It was one of those ten hour flights that just flew by. You know – the ones that never happen. Apart from a very Club Class incident in which I managed to restrain myself from shouting “WELL IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING POUILLY-FUME, WHY THE FUCK IS IT ON THIS FUCKING WINE LIST? HALF THIS SHIT IS SAUVIGNON, AND YOU’RE TELLING ME ALL YOU’VE GOT IS FUCKING GRIGIO? I WANT THE DELICATE FUCKING HONEYSUCKLE AROMAS GODDAMMIT.” I barely noticed the time.

And oddly, the things that really help don’t seem like they need to be expensive. All you need for an awesome flight is to be drunk, lying down, and watching a bad romantic comedy that is for some reason affecting you more than it should.

Booze and entertainment are free even in Economy, and I just don’t think people take up any more space when they’re lying down. You could have a double-bunk economy class that would be perfectly pleasant to sleep in, and if you staggered the bunks they could even sit up.

Which I guess is why they don’t do it. It’d be perfectly fine. There’d be no reason to pay two or three times a sane air fare to fly in comfort. The airline’s only economically viable option is to cause intentional discomfort to their poorest customers, and I’m not even sure it’s wrong. If they didn’t, base costs would rise and fewer people could afford to fly at all.

It’s a weird and slightly annoying piece of knowledge that’s going to make it even harder to enjoy the actually extremely nice World Traveller Plus class I’m booked on on the way back.

Next: the way back.

Club World isn’t first class, but it makes it hard to imagine what is. Do their seats go beyond horizontal, into back-breaking reflex angles? Do they face out into the open air, to guarantee three miles of leg room? After the champagne, three course meal and brandy you get in Club World, is there a heroin course?

At the airport, a thought occured: I wonder if this gets me into the lounge? I’ve travelled with people who have lounge access before, and it’s a mystical experience. It’s like being given a gigantic apartment, stocked with well prepared food, good espresso machines, a great wine rack, and a full selection of classy whiskeys, cognac, gin and cocktail ingredients. There are no staff, no prices, no explicit rules – you just help yourself.

Directions pointed to the ‘BA Conchord Lounge’, which led me to a fat man by the only door no-one in the airport was heading to. I wasn’t really sure how to say “Does my undeserved, unpaid for, random upgrade ticket get me in here?” with any degree of class, so I just showed him my boarding pass.

I noticed they’d written ‘BLUE’ on it, to make sure no British Airways staff mistook me for a Silver, Gold, Platinum, Sapphire, Diamond, Uranium or worthwhile member. I’m only a BLUE member because BA’s Executive Club is the worst RPG in the world. Every year, they steal all your experience. It’s not if you haven’t used it in a while, and it’s not because you’re not close to levelling up. I was a few points off Silver Membership, I’d used it a month or so back, and was about to use it again when BAM. Zero XP.

Blue does not get you into the BA Lounge, but Club World, I reckoned, would. The fat man, in one of the most expertly polite and helpful rejections I’ve received, explained that the Club Lounge was downstairs, then ‘back on yourself’. I pointed beneath us to confirm. He nodded.

When I actually got there, I realised it wasn’t just below where we’d been standing, it was actually in the same building. He’d made me walk two hundred metres just to avoid using the entrance reserved for Conchord members.

It was a sort of multi-story complex of lounges, and every path you takes leads you quickly and easily to the Conchord Lounge you’re not allowed into, unless you’re constructed from over 70% gold.

Luckily, a well-dressed man ahead of me helpfully blundered into every false turn towards the Conchord Lounge before realising, and redirecting himself towards the lowly Club one he and I were only good enough for. I tailed him at a safe distance to avoid each mistake.

Pretty soon, it became clear that the Club Lounge was actually above the Conchord one, making the fat man’s misdirection all the more cruel and bizarre. This general lobby area is open to everyone, only the 2D plane dividing it from the main concourse is exclusive to Conchorders.

The Club World one, marked by a life-size statue of a horse with a lampshade on its head, was just as I remembered it. And just like the Conchord Lounge, which we’d passed on the way up. Leather chairs, low coffee tables, free internet, huge sofas, wine, whiskey, brandy, gin, vodka, cognac, armagnac, chilled beer, and two hundred meters of buffet: crusty rolls, brie, pastrami, pasta salad. Other, more pungent pastas and other, more confusing rolls.

I was doing calculations in my head as to the order and quantities in which I could eat and drink these things without being ill. I’d need to avoid caffeine, since I planned to pass out on the plane, but I formulated a way to cram in pastrami and brie rolls, hot chocolate, fusilli and feta salad, gin and tonic, and the most expensive whiskey I could find that I hadn’t tried. Something old and tasting deliciously of oppression.

By the time I saw the signs, it was too late. The signs said “Ice-cream”. They signpost their ice-cream. But I was already out of both time and capacity, and slightly drunk.

At the gate, there was a ‘fast track’ queue for boarding, and my heart sunk when I saw that yes, it was for Club World passengers. I’d have to use it, it’d be ridiculous not to, but I’d also have to endure the “Asshole.” stares of everyone waiting.

In fact, though, with only one boarding pass scanner, the fast-track queue ended up moving slower than the public one. I was relieved, then, after a while, actually a little indignant.

The guy in front of me started bitching about it loudly to the person ahead.

“Asshole,” I thought.

Next: I actually fly.

I get to travel for work sometimes, and it’s made me a little demented about checking in.

The first few times you get babied, or bathroomed, or fatmanned, you accept it. But after that, you start to scheme. Getting a good seat isn’t a hope for me, any more, it’s the objective of a five-part campaign. I’ve given miniature lectures to friends on the virtues of aisle versus window, and the risk/reward mathematics of the front row – where there’s legroom aplenty, but the cots may hide a grim payload.

So I pick a seat in advance, which they let you do weeks before departure now. And I check in as close to 24 hours ahead as humanly possible. I even rush the process, when I do it, as if other people are clicking through the wizard faster than me, swiftly dragging their round-headed icons to the precious blue seats I’m trying to secure myself.

If you’re anything like this, you’ll have discovered what I have: it doesn’t work.

You get to seat selection and there are precisely three left, sprinkled amid daunting blocks of what can only be families with children, drunk rugby players, or worst of all: people with something interesting to say. To each other.

And when you walk to this seat, twenty four hours later, you’ll have noticed the ninety year old, noticed the ball of knotted grey hair that might once have been a hippy, and the man whose vestments seem to mark him out as the pope of some unrecognisable religion – all in seats that were gone when you booked. And you’ll have thought this:

Really?

All of you? All of you checked in before me? You checked in twenty-three hours, fifty nine minutes and fifty nine seconds before departure? You there, dipping your dentures in the complimentary tonic water, what browser do you use? Which e-mail address did you have them send the booking code to? Tell me how you got that seat before me, you cheating slimy fuck! Stop crying and talk!

Perhaps you’re not like this.

The whole process makes no sense to me anymore. I thought the reason you had to check in for a flight, when you don’t for a bus, is that it’s important you show up. They’ll wait for you. So they’d appreciate it if you let them know an hour or two beforehand that you’re at the airport and ready to go.

Then they started letting you do it online.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the convenience. But what does checking in online actually tell you, beyond the fact that I still physically exist the day before I fly? That doesn’t seem to offer any greater assurance that I’ll actually show up for the flight in time than when I paid you crazy money for it in the first place. It just reduces the whole thing to a frantic and brutal seat race, one that has frankly cost me a chunk of my already fractured humanity.

Now I’ve learnt something even worse. The seats change. Book one 24 hours early, then try again five hours before departure. A paradise unfolds; a land of empty aisle seats, vacant blocks, even the front rows with infinite legroom. They exist, no-one’s reserved them, and they open up.

I don’t know when or by what dark magic, but it happens. Those people who couldn’t possibly have booked them before you? They didn’t. They just checked in after all the fake, placeholder people checked out.

So this time, I checked in three times.

Once way ahead of time: two seats available, both shit. Same for my return flight, almost a week later.

Then again, twenty four hours before. Nope: different seats are free, but nothing better. I can’t print my boarding pass at home anyway, though, so I just left it.

Then, the morning of departure, I check in online again. Three or four seats. In fucking Club World.

They’re even aisle seats, and why not? Club World is 50% aisle. You can’t move without bumping into an aisle, which is to say you can move without bumping into anything at all, because of all the aisles. There are seats in Club World that are both window and aisle at the same time – something modern science previously thought impossible. I took one by the lake, overlooking the valley, and confirmed.

Next: The Lounge.

In return, I will try to be slightly less inadequate over the next week about posting stuff, both here and on PCG. Starting with some fun news from Valve about Team Fortress 2 I’ve only just had time to write up, and a short series of stupid posts here that have nothing to do with anything. Yes. This plan makes sense.

If you are a judge, you don’t have to vote for me, but you should definitely vote for:

• PC Gamer for Games Magazine. We’re actually pretty good. The thing I really enjoy about our mag these days is being able to read a preview knowing it’s not just going to be, “This looks like a game that has some classes and some weapons and the graphics seem good”. There’s going to be something mechanically or conceptually interesting and we’re actually going to spend the words telling you about that. Also we do reviews. Oh no! That’s mine! How did that get there?
   
• Rich McCormick for Rising Star. Rich has already established himself in our office as the person capable of the most tortured pun when we’re sitting around coming up with headlines, and this company is the Abu Ghraib of pun torture. Here’s his piece on Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. It’s a crime that Jaz McDougall isn’t also up for this slot, partly because it would lead to hilarious in-office brawling, and partly because his work on PCGamer.com is making me laugh every day.
   
• Christian Donlan for Specialist Writer Online. I’m also a fan of Simon, Ellie and Dave, but I think I’m right in saying this is the first time Christian’s been up for this, and it’s way overdue. His stuff on Eurogamer and in Edge always shines, and he is quite literally The Nicest Man In Games Journalism, a title which I must some day kill him to steal.

• Randall XKCD Munroe
• Ben Zero Punctuation Croshaw (who I just interviewed)
• Ryan Dinosaur Comics North
• Tom Who’s Writing This Francis

Illustrated by people including:

• John Scary Go Round Allison
• Kate Hark! A Vagrant Beaton
• Aaron Dresden Codak Diaz
• Dorothy Cat And Girl Gambell
• Christopher Dr McNinja Hastings

I have no idea who’s illustrating mine yet, but you can’t really lose with this list. The final lineup very charitably calls my story ‘brutal, desperate and real’, so it’d be kind of hilarious to see Kate Beaton do it.

I have a flight to catch and a lot to do before and on it, so hasn’t totally sunk in yet. Here’s my story, and here’s the comic that inspired the collection. Oh yeah, and here’s the awesome cover:

Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.

Yeah, I’m sure Fisher-Price are making a mint out of all that juicy promotion for the fucking 1962 Chatter Telephone. How crass, for a film about the experience of childhood play, to feature anything anyone actually played with.

The toys wage battle with the daycare center’s cynical veteran cast-offs: Hamm the Piggy Bank pig, Lotsa Hugs and Big Baby.

The fact that you’re listing Hamm the piggy bank as one of the daycare’s toys seems to suggest that you either didn’t watch or failed to comprehend the child’s film you’re reviewing. It also means you haven’t seen the previous two, which would be surprising but not criminal if you didn’t dismiss them both in your intro.

But none of these digital-cartoon characters reflect human experience; it’s essentially a bored game that only the brainwashed will buy into.

Uses of the term “human experience”: 1,960,001.
Meaningful uses of the term “human experience”: 0.

Besides, Transformers 2 already explored the same plot to greater thrill and opulence.

Wow, I hadn’t noticed the connection. Here, then, is the entire plot of Toy Story 3 – click to reveal, since it’s obviously a major spoiler.

While Toy Story 3’s various hazards and cliffhangers evidence more creativity than typical Pixar product (an inferno scene was promising, Lotsa Hugs’ cannily evokes mundane insensitivity), I admit to simply not digging the toys-come-to-life fantasy (I don’t babysit children, so I don’t have to) nor their inevitable repetition of narrative formula: the gang of animated, talking objects journey from one place to another and back—again and again.

Hi. You dropped these: ………..

(You also dropped a ’ , but it landed on Lotsa Hugs).

It recalls how Tim Burton’s atrocious Alice in Wonderland repeated narrative stasis without exercising the famous line: “It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.”

This is exactly right, for anyone and everyone under the impression that ‘recalls’ means ‘has nothing to do with what I’m about to waste this review giving you my opinion on:’

Burton’s omission of that legendary, therapeutic slogan parallels how Toy Story 3 suckers fans to think they can accept this drivel without paying for it politically, aesthetically or spiritually.

Deranged as this review already was, it did lack the special kind of crazy it takes to imply that people are going to ‘pay’. Thanks for completing the set.

My own review isn’t going to be much cop either, so I’ll just add it here. Spoilers.

It was lovely. The new toys introduced are so colourful, exciting and instantly funny that the returning characters started to look a bit uninspired. Big Baby goes from being truly horrific to powerfully sympathetic without really changing. Until Mr Chuckles, I’d never seen an animated character who could crack up an entire audience on sight. And the fiery, twitching pupils of the vigilant security monkey instilled more stress, anxiety and genuine fear than the Eye of Sauron ever has.

The story itself succeeds by creating a more interesting conflict than the whims of an asshole child, intelligently borrowing the most entertaining bits of prison breakout movies, and milking the basic conceit for more fun than it has any right to. There’s that, and there’s Timothy Dalton as Mr Pricklepants.

Many of them, happily, are just terrible. This isn’t a round up of negative reviews. Some of them, like Salon’s, do a good job of explaining their opinion without whining, lying or embarrassing themselves. This is a round up of the other ones.

Inception gave me a strange sense of déjà vu, I felt like I saw this movie earlier in the year and didn’t like it when it was called Shutter Island.

D

Your words gave me a strange sense of deja vu, Eclipse Magazine. I felt like I’d read words about movies before, and I didn’t like them when they were your A-grade review of Shutter Island.

While many critics are raving about Inception, I’ve never heard so many expressions like “What in the BLEEP was that about?” upon leaving the theater after seeing the film. And, although I don’t believe moviegoers are unintelligent, I can’t help comparing this movie’s transitions to someone reading the Cliff Notes of a Shakespeare play to a pre-school class. Inception becomes its own nightmare by trying to be “too smart.”

2/4

Who are you even quoting there?

You’ll sit in your seat, possibly with overly salted popcorn, and immediately become bewildered. But then you’ll tell yourself the creative force behind Following (1998) and Memento (2000) is always in control. Of course you’ll soon know what’s happening. But a half hour later exasperation will start settling in over you like a cup of cherry Jell-o firming up in your fridge. Then another 20 minutes will pass, and you’ll start feeling like Timothy Leary’s severed, cryogenically preserved head. Will there be any relief arriving at all?

Your similes, like Timothy Leary’s severed head in a salty popcorn box of ill-set exasperation jell-o, are flimsy and smell bad.

And what about Dom Cobb himself? Is his unlikely moniker meant to suggest Dummkopf, the German word for a dope? That would seem entirely counterintuitive. But, as I say, whatever.

Inception is basically a complicated heist flick — there is no mystery to ponder and penetrate.

Thanks for taking the time to highlight that this is now the second time you have summarised your own point, in a review, as “Whatever”.

For all of Nolan’s attention to detail, major logic holes jump off the screen without 3-D glasses. At one point someone is firing at the bad guys with a standard-issue weapon when another character suggests he ‘dream’ up a better gun.

Voila, a massive gun is suddenly on screen. Why don’t all the heroes try that trick?

For all your attention to detail, you didn’t pay any attention to detail. That isn’t what happens, and it’s explained several times why changing the dream too much is dangerous.

Reviews are ideally an assessment of a film’s value as entertainment or enlightenment, and should never be a necessary guide when attempting to figure out what in the world is going on in a movie. Such is the case with Christopher Nolan’s mind over matter blockbuster with a back to basics indie soul Inception, a confounding riddle of a story where the characters are lost inside one another’s dreams without a clue.

2/4

Such is what? What is the case? What? Inception is a review that isn’t a guide? Your review is a review that doesn’t need to be a guide? Isn’t that a good thing? Or are you saying your review is a necessary guide? Any of the nine ways to salvage the verbsputum you’ve dribbled there into a working paragraph result in a false one.

It may still be impervious to criticism, simply because no one short of a NASA systems analyst will be able to articulate the plot.

The sometimes hallucinatory images erupting out of the narrative murk of Inception suggest that the entire enterprise was contrived as an alibi for special-effects wizardry.

I did it in two sentences, and I play computer games for a living. For my next trick, I will know what the word alibi means.

In(c)ept(ion)
At one point, well into the film’s (anti-)conflict, a newbie accomplice to Cobb, Ariadne (Ellen Page, an odd casting choice), lays groundwork with him over rapid gunfire – they can barely get out the explanations in between blasts. The shape of the scene is as odd as the choice to put them on what looks too much like Planet Hoth.

It may look like Planet Hoth because Planet Hoth was shot on planet Earth. In Norway. Star Wars didn’t actually make a planet.

It’s emotionally icy, without a recognizable human being in it, and the story feels like nothing more than a con – an ambitious con to be sure, but one that’s made up as it goes along.

The accomplishments of ‘Inception’ are mainly technical, which is faint praise only if you insist on expecting something more from commercial entertainment. That audiences do – and should – expect more is partly, I suspect, what has inspired some of the feverish early notices hailing Inception as a masterpiece, just as the desire for a certifiably great superhero movie led to the wild overrating of The Dark Knight.

Yes, that’s what happens when you go into something with high expectations and they’re not met. You hail it as a masterpiece.

If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we’ve entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn’t nearly the same thing.

Wouldn’t it have been easier just to make a movie?

He’s got you, Chris. You should have made a movie! Why didn’t you think of it? You Dom Cobb, which MTV tell me is the same as a German insult. Truly, we live in a dark age of cinema where everything is depressingly awesome.

It boils down to an ordinary spy flick anyway, with laughable dialogue.

One way to salvage some fun with this blunderbuss would be to fall asleep while watching and dream up a better movie yourself. Try it. You’ll avoid a headache.

Given that this is his third film in a row in which he deals with a wife who’s unbalanced to some degree (see also Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road), this loop looks to be spilling out from the frames of this feature. Back away from the unhinged women, Leo, before it’s too late. Maybe try a role addressing an alternate lifestyle for a change? Something like, um, J. Edgar Hoover? (*Note: the Hoover project, with Clint Eastwood directing, is supposedly DiCaprio’s next project.)

The best closing jokes are the ones you have to explain in parentheses afterwards.

In a telling moment at this reviewer’s screening, after a character asked, “Whose dream is it this time?” the audience chuckled in unison. Our thoughts exactly.

2.5/5

The audience laughing at that line is indeed telling: it’s telling you that was a joke. Misquoting and misunderstanding it doesn’t make it work as a gag in your review.

But this is a movie, an elaborate construct of illusions designed to extract money from paying audiences – or, in more ambitious cases, to implant something in their imaginations, such as a moral or a fantasy. Or a product placement. How like the line of work of our hero, Cobb (DiCaprio), since he and his colleagues extricate secret information from a target by entangling themselves in a deceiving dream.

Wow. A lot of the reviews I’ve quoted here make ponderous, cringe-worthy attempts to force some of the movies themes into their conclusion, but this – wow. It’s like you started, then changed your mind, then forged ahead anyway, then added a laborious explanation, but one that really only explains why the two things are completely different. I’m sort of in awe.

And now, the motherlode. The New York Observer’s sprawling, frothing, delusional and atrociously written rant. It is both too monstrous to quote whole, and too egregious to single out just one part, so here are just some of the worst offenders.

At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it’s clear that a movie really stinks. Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags its sorry butt to a merciful finale, you’ll be desperately in need of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

It’s sort of weirdly poetic that you open your review with a point about how immediately bad Inception is, and do so with a Monopoly metaphor so miserably shoehorned that no-one could think they were about to read a good review.

Like other Christopher Nolan head scratchers – the brainless Memento, the perilously inert Insomnia, the contrived illusionist thriller The Prestige, the idiotic Batman Begins and the mechanical, maniacally baffling and laughably overrated The Dark Knight – this latest deadly exercise in smart-aleck filmmaking without purpose from Mr. Nolan’s scrambled eggs for brains makes no sense whatsoever. Is it clear that I have consistently hated his movies without exception, and I have yet to see one of them that makes one lick of sense.

I don’t know, is it? Your sentence about the movie not making a lick of sense doesn’t, you know, that.

It’s the easiest kind of movie to make, because all you have to do is strike poses and change expressions. It all culminates on skis in the middle of a blizzard, as Leo is pursued by machine-gun-equipped snowmobiles, but you don’t even know who’s driving them. I have no idea what the market is for this jabbering twaddle-probably people who fritter away their time playing video games, which I’m willing to bet pretty much describes Christopher Nolan. He labors over turning out arty horror films and sci-fi action thrillers with pretensions to alternate reality, but he’s clueless about how to deal with reality, honest emotions or relevant issues.

It’s kind of hard to grapple with all of the crimes this paragraph commits, so let’s stick to the simplest: what arty horror films?

Here’s a summary of his encounters with all of the replicants he’s apparently the only one good enough to kill. Stills by Pikturz.

1. Snake Lady. He fails to convince her to let him check her dressing room, gets in a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. The replicant stops short when she hears voices approaching, and runs away. Deckard shoots her.

2. Leon. He fails to recognise Leon until it’s too late, gets into a fight with him, loses and is nearly killed. Another replicant shoots Leon for him.

3. Rachel. He tells her she’s a replicant, forces her to kiss him, then helps her evade capture.

4. Pris. He fails to recognise Pris because she is sitting still, gets into a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. Pris takes a break to do some acrobatics and he shoots her.

5. Roy. He fails to shoot Roy, loses his gun, gets into a fight with him, loses, runs away and nearly kills himself. Roy saves his life and then dies of his own accord.

Nice job, twat.

Jesus Christ. That was a bit exciting.

Tony called it “the Matrix for grown-ups,” which I like. Because it’s important that this isn’t just smart, it’s cool. It’s exactly the film you’d want from a guy with the brains to make something as convoluted as Memento, and the flair to make an action film as spectacular and compelling as The Dark Knight.

I’ve never really seen anything that keeps my higher brain functions chewing on new ideas the whole way through, while still being a ferocious and stylish action film. This guy should be a director or something.

There’s a lot to spoil, so everything from here on out is hidden until you’ve seen the film and clicked here.

I had a chance to work on my game in my week off, the one I was going to call Private Dick. That name is increasingly pissing me off, so I’m calling it Gunpoint for now. How relevant that title becomes will depend a bit on how much fun it really is to be at gunpoint, or have other people there, and what kind of options I can reasonably code for those situations. Currently everyone with a gun shoots you in the face the instant they see you, and there’s a certain comforting reliability in that.

I’m almost at Milestone 2 – they’re really yard stones, these things, because I can’t have spent much more than ten hours on this thing since Milestone 1. Here’s the plan:

Milestone 1: movement fully working, however horrible it looks and shitty it feels.
Milestone 2: one hostile who shoots on sight, and can be pounced on and beaten unconscious.
Milestone 3: two devices that are interactible. I’ll talk about devices once I’ve got them working.
Milestone 4: one fully working level that’s fun.
Milestone 5: a dialogue system why not?
Milestone 6: narrative reduces grown men to hopeless fits of sobbing.
Milestone 7: the Citizen Kane of games.

So I’m not really thinking clearly more than two or three milestones ahead – my plans change too much with each one for that to be worthwhile, and anyway it’s kind of daunting.

About ten of the people who signed up to test my game played Milestone 1 and told me what they thought of it. This was awesome. Not least because most thought it was a lot less horrible-looking and shitty-feeling than I was expecting.

It’s also a really exciting and eye-opening thing to have people interact with something you created, and have reactions you didn’t expect. People overwhelmingly wanted a certain move added that I’d intentionally left out. And they were right: I’ve added it now and it profoundly improves the feel of the game.

That milestone was all about the jump: the tiny freelance agent you play can leap preposterous distances in any direction, and cling to anything he hits. This milestone, number 2, is about using that jump to pounce on angry gunmen while they’re not looking, then punching them in the face while you have them pinned to the ground.

That part took minutes, really, and is immediately and profoundly enjoyable. I hadn’t really thought about it before I coded it, but there’s no reason to force the player to let the gunman go after he’s hit him in the face once. I just made the mouse click smack him in the face, then return to the about-to-smack-him-in-the-face pose. You can jump off if you like, but in a survey of playtesters called me, 100% felt the need to beat him again and again and again, sometimes tapping out semi-musical rhythms with their facebeatings.

What was trickier was making the jump good enough that you could bet your life on it. One of the biggest complaints from the first test, even without any threats, was that people had trouble judging where their jump would go. I hadn’t even put a charge-meter in, and the strength of your jump increased quadratically as you held the button. A player’s instinctive grasp of basic movement mechanics doesn’t necessarily model quadratics effectively.

This was not a surprise. I knew what I wanted, ideally: a visual projection of the exact arc your jump will take. But like most of my plans, I had a few much easier back ups that wouldn’t work as well. Any kind of charge meter, I thought, would probably do.

The reason I’ve only spent ten hours working on this since the last milestone 5 weeks ago is not actually free time. It’s guts. Doing everything yourself is sometimes daunting.

The fun stuff: design, requires some less fun and harder stuff: coding. And the still quite fun stuff: coding, requires some much less fun, much harder and miserably unsatisfying stuff: art. When I’m not working on my game, it’s because I’m exhausted or distracted or just not in the mood to take on something that may, at any time, kick my ass.

What I’ve learnt from the whole process is this: guts. I’m not accustomed to putting time and effort into something and having it turn out shit, but I’ve found that when I actually get down and do it, it doesn’t take that much time and effort and not everyone thinks it’s shit. Just do it. Accept that not everything you do is going to be met with a steady stream of praise, venture outside your comfort zone and grow up.

That’s true enough for art, but it’s particularly true for coding. Predicting the arc of a player’s jump meant simulating the engine’s own internal vector analysis precisely, so that I could do all the calculations involved with it in a single frame. In other words, the game would have to play the jump out in its head thirty times a second, exactly the same way it would happen at normal speed. It seemed like it would involve an awful lot of trigonometry, which is tricky to code and tricky to compute. Having the game do it thirty times a second seemed like it would destroy performance.

Long story short, it was easy. If you’re smart about it, no sines, cosines or tangents are needed, just basic multiplications. It’s high school mathematics to model a rigid body under acceleration and derive a generalised formula for its position. And once you’ve got that, you just plug increasing values of time into it and create a dot at that position until you hit something. There are ways to make it more precise and reliable, but it already works so well that it’s completely changed the way I play.

I still don’t have a charge meter – I changed the system so that if you want to go further, you just click further away. It means you can make small, precise jumps without time pressure, and great long arcing ones without delay. And it feels great to leap six stories, through a window, and into the back of someone’s head. Then punch them to the beat of Seven Nation Army.

I whined a while ago about wanting to get to the point where the question is “Is this fun?” rather than “Why doesn’t this fucking, fucking work?” I’m there now, and from here until I’m done with the game or give up on it, there’ll always be “Is this fun?” questions to answer. There’ll still be many more things that don’t fucking, fucking work, but I’m tantalisingly close to having most of the building blocks to make real levels out of. Once I’m there, it gets really interesting.

Edit: just as I finish this, Sophie Houlden posts the text of her talk at World of Love, and it’s basically telling me to realise what I just realised.

Edit 2: Once I’ve tweaked it a bit, I could use some more testers to help me figure out if this iteration is fun yet. Any more volunteers? Mail me if so.

Edit 3: Now with animated gif.

Engineer night was horrific. I haven’t seen this many stalemates since Hydro. Everyone’s desperate for the new unlocks, but the achievements that unlock them either require the unlocks, or are based around Engineering in the context of a normal game. Stuff like supporting a Heavy while he mows people down. When your friends and opponents are all just static installations of angry metal gun, there’s not a lot of scope for that.

For the lucky few who got them, the new unlocks looked amazing. You can Wrangle a Gunslung Combat Sentry, so your damage boost negates its reduced damage output, your shield negates its level 1 hitpoints, and your beam gives it seemingly infinite range. It’s as ridiculous as that collection of words.

In the end, none of the individual unlocks matched the specs of any of my suggestions closely enough to justify my mock accusations of plagiarism. But the set of abilities these give you – deploy small sentries quickly, move them, shield instead of repair, and direct their fire manually – is just what I wanted from mine. If I ever actually earn the damn things, I’ll be extremely happy.

Not really, of course: the newly announced Wrangler is a more intricate beast than my Laser Pointer or Shield Spanner suggestions. It sounds ridiculous: not only do you get to direct your Sentry’s fire, but it’s also nigh-impervious to harm and twice as powerful. But of course, if you’re using the Wrangler, you’re not using your Wrench. So your Sentry isn’t getting healed, and it has to shut down for three seconds if you whip out your spanner.

I won’t pretend to know how this will play out, but I actually think this is how Sentries should always have been. There should be no auto mode. Having the AI spot and shoot human players robs the Engy of the satisfaction of doing it himself, and the victim the knowledge that they were caught out by a real opponent. Instead, a computer has all the fun, and the players it kills don’t learn much: the computer simply out-damaged them. Most of the time I die to a Sentry, my only other option was to hang back and do nothing.

So I’m glad the Wrangler sounds crazy powerful, because I’d like everyone to use it, all the time. I’d rather have a tougher but fallible opponent, and one that doesn’t rapidly self-heal, than the alternative.

I’m taking some time off at the moment (which will hopefully translate to some progress with Private Dick), but Jaz and the guys have been running an amazingly good days-long liveblog of every snippet of information that’s come out about the Engineer update.

This information was then fed into a much larger and darker decision-making process that I had really nothing to do with, the first stage of which acts a little like a paper shredder, but it eventually resulted in us getting a site anyway.

We have wanted this very badly for a very long time and worked very hard to get it. So, thank you to all who responded to my thinly veiled call for you to express deep dissatisfaction with our previous web presence, and welcome to our new one.

Since Tim was away at E3, I was in charge of the site launch, and Graham helmed the magazine. It’s been a frantic… Christ, one week? Feels like a month. It’s been a frantic week in which we’ve put up over a hundred and fifty articles, so I thought I’d highlight some of the stuff I’m most pleased with so far.

• Project Dust
  This was the first time I read news I did not know on our own site, and it happened to be the most surprising and interesting reveal of E3. It’s also great to see something exciting like that and not have the “But is it coming to PC?” anxiety. It’s on our site, so yes.
   
• Gaming’s best cereal-based shooter
  Evan’s wonderfully uncynical look at a piece of Americana I’d heard of but really knew nothing about, and the bizarre surrounding culture.
   
• 20 beautiful new Brink shots
  This just makes me happy because it’s just not something we could do effectively before, and it looks superb on the page. It was a personal quest of mine to ensure that whenever we showed off screenshots, you’d just have to click them to get straight to the full, high-res, clean, unwatermarked original file.
   
• Transformice
  Jaz’s post is a great statement of the kind of free game coverage I’ve always wanted. To me, “Here’s a free game that’s mildly entertaining for thirty seconds” is not news – I can see ten of those a day on sites dedicated to that stuff. If we’re talking about one in particular, I want to know why, ideally in the form of a funny story about what happened while playing it.
   
• Engineering victory in Supreme Commander 2
  After helping us out for two crucial weeks, Tom Senior surprised us all by writing his best piece (that I’ve read) on his last day. A great guide to a hilarious tactic with truly magnificent screenshots. I can always tell when someone’s writing about something they know and love, because it’s the only kind of article I can read through without wanting to change anything – the writing just clicks.
   
• Microsoft’s shameful E3 PC showing
  This is why I like having Tim as an editor. At PC Gamer we’re lucky enough to carry some authority without being an official mag beholden to anyone, so when someone screws over our platform, we can say so in no uncertain terms. No-one more so than Tim. I’ve always been proud of PC Gamer’s history of eloquent indignation: I think we do a good job of standing up for gamers without sounding whiny or getting hysterical. Rants are commonplace online, good rhetoric is not.
   

In both the UK and the US, the mag carries a six-page feature that has all the juicy information and probably the best summary of why Human Revolution is worth getting excited about. It has more screenshots and art than have been released online, and it came out well before anyone was allowed to say word one about the game on the web.

On the site, you get the full interviews it was based on, a blow-by-blow account of exactly what I saw and what I thought of it, some informal chatting about the art, and a reminder or two of what we loved about the original. It’s almost the opposite of conventional wisdom about the web versus print: the web’s supposed to be quick and brief, but I think it can be a place where people get to choose the level of depth they want. Print’s sometimes characterised as long-form and slow, but here it’s faster and punchier at presenting the juicy details.

The blow-by-blow in particular was really fun to write. It’s an attempt to address two of my most common frustrations with previews: “Stop wanking and tell me what you saw,” and “Don’t just tell me what you saw, tell me what you thought of it.” Writing it like a liveblog presented a really convenient format for getting facts and impressions side by side without a lot of structural wrangling to fit it into flowing prose.

Of the interviews, I think the one with art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete stands up best on its own. Knowing I’d also be talking to the game design and story people separately freed me up to ask some more wide-ranging stuff, and see where the discussion went. And I really liked how honest he was when I asked about the risk of going obviously futuristic when that was so badly received in Invisible War.

Big thanks to Lewis Denby and Jaz for their help getting the interviews into electrowords.

I am now profoundly exhausted, so please be nice. The feedback so far has been amazing, but what remains to be seen is whether people who like these articles will take the time to link them on their weblogs, forumhaunts and Facetwitters. We finally have the chance to live or die by the quality of our stuff, so now we work overtime to make it as good as we can – and see who notices.

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.