Guest review by Super Bad Advice

​At face value, ARMS should be absolute cobblers. A motion-controlled game with cartoonish characters sporting floppy appendages and daft gimmicks like a robot dog sidekick or fighting inside a giant noodle bowl? Yeesh. It sounds like a hangover from the original Wii or (god forbid) the Xbox’s relentlessly dreadful Kinect peripheral.

And, as the first entirely new Nintendo franchise for the Switch with no familiar faces or mascots, a potentially risky move.
 
However, this negativity turns out to be about as misplaced as a drunk, flatulent clown giving the eulogy at a state funeral. Because despite all those facts about what’s in the game being true, this is also true: ARMS is chuffing brilliant, and will make you do all manner of big daft grins.

Uhhhhhh... gnaaaaaaah! Ugh. UNNNNGH. I'm so exhausted. Mentally, I'm still semi-functioning, but physically... I'm done for. I have nothing to complain about though; the 48 hours we spent filming the deeply weird finale of Mr Biffo's Found Footage were two of the best days of my life. You're probably sick of my sincerity - but thank you again for making it possible.

So... despite working two 14+ hour days, we still didn't get everything filmed. We're probably about 70-75% there, which is going to require some creative editing. We could've done with a week or more, to be honest, but I'll find a way to stitch it together. Maybe. Potentially. No - I will. I already have a plan.

Anyway... you know how film people in interviews talk in really gushing terms about the people they worked with, and how it always seems fake. Well, in this instance... believe it. From the crew to the extras, to the cast - who gave up their time for free and went for take after take - we were blessed with an amazing, talented, hard-working, lovely, lovely bunch of people.

What we captured on camera was better than I could've hoped for... but I thought I'd share - by way of attempting to process the last couple of days - what I think I've learned from it, and what I'd do differently if I ever get this chance again.

We're now just a couple of days away from the filming of Mr Biffo's Found Footage: The Finale. We're deep into finishing the props, making an inventory of the hundreds of items we need to take with us, and breaking the shoot down into manageable chunks. The actors are learning their lines, and the crew are prepping.

As already stated, thanks to your generous support, we're setting our sights a little higher than the rest of the series.

In the way that Biffovision was a heady cocktail of all the TV shows I watched and loved as a kid, so the Finale will be a blend of influences - some profoundly silly, others less so. A lot of them come from the movies I watched as a teenager. Others from my post-pubescent fear of thermonuclear war, video games, and more recent world events.

Given that, for the most part, I'm approaching it instinctively,I thought it'd be an interesting exercise to see if I could identify the constituent parts that make up the Finale.

Reading this you might think we're making a multi-million dollar sci-fi movie - I wish - but it doesn't hurt to have lofty ambitions, even if we fall short. Which we will. But hopefully not catastrophically so.

Digitiser2000 is going to be slightly different for the next couple of weeks, as I embark on the unusual adventure that is the finale to Mr Biffo's Found Footage. Updates might not be quite so regular, and - hold onto that send button - there won't be a Friday Letters this week. Keep sending them, though, and we'll do a bumper one the following week. In the meantime, I'll try and keep you updated on here, Twitter and Facebook, with our progress.

The show's many kindly backers have been getting regular updates that they're all probably sick of, but I thought I'd inflict some of my enormous waffling on all of you for once. 

To bring you up to speed, Found Footage: The Series is almost complete. We've a couple of sequences left to shoot next month, and then all the material will be "in the can" (so to speak). I suspect I'm going to still be editing in the days before each episode goes online.

​I'm not sure how many eps there are going to be once September arrives... but it's likely to be more than six, due to the overabundance of material.

However, next week we're filming Found Footage: The Finale (final title TBC), a 30 minute sci-fi movie, that I hesitate to call a sci-fi comedy, due to the fact we're taking it seriously. Consequently, we've put together a team which includes actual professionals - real actors, real crew - and the production values are a major step up from the homespun approach to the rest of the series.

I mean, within reason. Don't go expecting this to look like Avatar, or something. The budget is literally a few grand, though many of the talented people involved are doing this as a favour - something for which I'm eternally grateful. 

So why conclude a strange, surreal, sketch show with a 30 minute sci-fi movie? I shall attempt to explain.

The signs were there the minute Steven Moffat cast Peter Capaldi - initials PC; those lefty luvvies at the BBC have inflicted their politically correct agenda on the nation's most beloved institution - Doctor Who. How?! They've only gone and cast a woman!!!!!?!! The Doctor used to have two hearts - now he's going to have two boooooobs!!!!!!??!!!!!! What a liability - he'll probably get them trapped in the TARDIS doors!!!!!???!!!!

Why don't they do the decent thing and call the character what she is now: a nurse!!!!?!!!!! Get back in the kitchen, Doc - where you belong!!!!???!!! Galiffrey?!? More like Gal-afraid!!!!?!! Sonic vibrator, Doctor Phwoar, shegeneration... Etcetera etcetera.

The question is: where will the show go next?! Here's a glimpse into the future of the UK's formerly favourite long-running science-fiction series...!!!!??!!!!!!

QUESTION: What did the big clock say to the little clock?
ANSWER: KLOKK!!!!

So... Last year I watched a documentary called Asperger's Are Us. You can find it on Netflix, but I think we stumbled across it first on iTunes.

As the dad of someone with autism, the title stood out to me for reasons that should be obvious. It told the story of the world's first comedy troupe formed by people on the autistic spectrum, as they prepared for what the documentary led us to believe would be their final ever show.

I really enjoyed it, and though the film - as edited and subtly emotionally and narratively manipulative as documentaries often are - focused on the personalities, it was the comedy which really intrigued me. Or, at least, the tiny hints of it which the documentary deigned to show.

It revealed that the Asperger's Are Us guys were fans of deadpan comedian and actor Mark Proksch - check out his K-Strass videos on YouTube - so I figured there was a degree of crossover in terms of our sense of humour. However, it wasn't until I sought out some of their sketches online that I realised the documentary might've done them a disservice by focusing on - in their own words - "The Hallmark stuff".

References to an Elton John routine and something called "The Safety Album" led me to a brilliantly bizarre sketch set at an Elton John concert, in which a gravel-voiced "Elton" comes on stage and starts hammering tunelessly on a piano while shouting out safety tips. 

"Stay close to an adult!"

But still, the documentary stayed with me. It helped in my ongoing attempt to better understand autism. It was also inspiring and heartwarming, but I figured Asperger's Are Us were a done deal. I'd love to have seen them live, but the sense I got was that they were all heading in their own directions.

Therefore, when I was contacted by Asperger's Are Us via Twitter, inviting me to come and see them on their UK tour - while quoting an old Man's Daddy joke back at me to boot - I was left reeling.

In the last couple of years Virtual Reality has exploded into the mainstream consciousness. Sort of. You know: apart from the fact that it remains prohibitively expensive faff for most normal people who don't enjoy nausea.

Still, those who have been fortunate enough to try VR for themselves will know that there's nothing quite like it. If you can't wait for that bold new epoch to arrive... here are the ten best virtual experiences you can have right now!

Do you ever wonder where you might've ended up if your life had taken a few different turns? In every person there exists the capacity for both greatness and catastrophe. Why, just a few bad days and any one of us could become a serial killer!

Here are ten photographs of ten men who either helped build the video games industry as we know it - or were responsible for the deaths of countless innocent people.

Can you tell the video game pioneers from the murderers? Put your powers of deduction to the test, as we play... Video Game Pioneer - or Murderer?!

Do you remember the thrill of playing games when you were a kid? Do you? Or can you not remember that far back, because all the stress and hell you've endured since is getting in the way?

Here's a gallery of gamer children from the 70s and 80s enjoying games before that whole adult thing kicks in.

It might just be the most harrowing thing you ever see.

I left school in the summer of 1987, and applied for three part-time jobs. The first of these would have required me to sweep the floor for three hours on a Saturday in a new British Home Stores that was opening. The second of these jobs was working on the bread counter of Waitrose.

The third I was put forward for by my cousin; she worked in the accounts department of Ladbrokes Racing, and had heard that the head office was looking for a graphics artist to draw horses on their in-store betting screens. Not with a pen, but on a special computer.

Somehow, I got offered all three jobs in the same week. Choosing the Ladbrokes one was a no-brainer.

I soon discovered that having my own money was literally the best thing ever. I'd agreed - initially anyway - to work on a freelance basis. A vague verbal contract meant that I got paid £30 per half day, though what constituted a half day was never really specified. After a few months I managed to define "half a day" as "about forty five minutes", so long as I snuck out without saying goodbye.

I rationalised it by the fact that I was significantly quicker at doing graphics than they'd expected. I was effectively compressing an entire "half day" into that time, I insisted to myself. That speed - call it a slap-dash methodology if you must - was also how I was able to juggle doing Digitiser while also working full-time as a graphics artist for Teletext. 

At first, my boss at Ladbrokes - a genuinely lovely man - told me which days he'd like me to work. ​Eventually, I just started turning up whenever I fancied being given thirty quid. Nobody ever questioned these unscheduled appearances.

Right then. We've had the NES Classic Mini. We're getting the Super NES Classic Mini. All wisdom would suggest that next year we're going to get a Nintendo 64 Classic Mini. Well... maybe.

Truthfully, it's going to be a harder system to recreate, given that the games require that much more storage, and the stupid N64 pad is potentially more expensive to recreate.

Still, we can but dream; and dream we all do. Why, last night I had a dream that ITV broadcast a retrospective on chickens, entitled "Now and Hen".

Hennyway... here are hen less obvious N64 games which I demand that Nintendo consider for any miniaturised Henhendo 64 Hens.