I normally write posts like this on Patreon and Kickstarter, but I thought it'd be a good opportunity to take stock, and just fill you all in on where things are at in the wider Digiverse.

I'm away next week for a much needed break, which means no updates on this site until the week after. There may be a new video on Sunday night, but probably not one the following Wednesday or Sunday. I'd hoped to have more stockpiled, but I've been flat-out, clearing the decks enough to get to a point where I can go away without disasters happening.

I've had an incredibly full-on year. Aside from editing and filming gawd-knows-how-many Digi Minis for YouTube, organising, writing, and appearing in a full-on live spectacular, and writing regular posts on here, I've also been lead writer on two CBBC shows.

I've written 13 half hour episodes since January, and on one of those shows I'm very much a lead writer in a sort of showrunner sense, which has meant reading everything, and giving notes to other writers at every stage. Plus, I only got fully paid for a lot of that work this week, which has proved rather, ahem, stressful. 

All in all, it has been... a lot. So, you'll hopefully forgive me for being knackered, and needing to go away to recharge. 

Once I'm back, you'd better brace yourselves.

Practical jokes and pranks get the Biffo and Gannon treatment, as we attempt to pimp up some of the best remembered classic pranks! Also: look out for an epic scare prank! LOLOLOLOLOLOL?

​And sorry about the picture quality again. We ballsed things up with the camera! So funneee! Subscribe for regular videos, and support Digitiser on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digitiser2000

I always feel a spasm of guilt whenever there's one of these articles on Digi. I mean, the artists responsible were, presumably, working to the best of their limited ability.

Still, when that ability was stuck at the remedial - nay, primordial - level, I find it fascinating that they were ever allowed anywhere near the packaging of a commercial product, even if it was self-published. Did these people not know they were bad? How is anyone that utterly, profoundly, unaware?!

So here, because it's important that this warning from history is never forgotten, here are even more of the worst home computer game covers of all time...

All images sourced/stolen from the Centre For Computing History.

Like a swollen toad squatting its distressingly warty buttocks above a mound of rancid tadpoles, Sega sits atop an enormous pile of very valuable IPs; Shinobi, Golden Axe, Crazy Taxi, NiGHTS, Super Monkey Ball, Virtuas Cop, Fighter and On, Afterburner, Alex Kidd, Zaxxon... and many, many more.

And yet, since Sega slithered out of the hardware game, and retreated into its subterranean cranny, it has - for the past 20 years or so - revisited those franchises in only the most tentative ways. Admittedly, Sonic has reappeared continually, to ever more depressing effect... albeit until the release of Sonic Mania a couple of years ago, where it looked as if Sega was finally going to honour its past, and begin scooping some of its ever-gestating "taddies" back into the pond.

Hope was high that the reception which greeted Sonic Mania would encourage Sega to revisit some of its other most popular franchises. 

Here in the space-year 2019AD, we might be seeing the fruits of that; the Sega Ages line has reintroduced some of its greatest franchises, and we've a new Streets of Rage, Super Monkey Ball, Phantasy Star, and a remake of Panzer Dragoon, on the way.

But Sega, for the most part, continues to be a real weirdo in terms of the baskets it chooses.

I still find it jarring to visit Sega's website and see its most prominent listed franchises as Alien Isolation, Football Manager and Total War. That's not to knock the popularity of any of the series, but they just don't feel like Sega games to me.

And, indeed, judging from the reaction to Sega's latest announcement, Sega continues to avoid giving its most hardcore fans that which they desire most...

We stage our very own Digitiser indoor fireworks show, which starts and ends with a spectacularly explosive and hilarious fail that almost ends everything for Biffo and Gannon! Do not try this at home... like we did.

​Subscribe for regular videos, and support Digitiser on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digitiser2000
​

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE

​One of the first games I can still clearly remember playing from when I was young wasn’t one of the all-time early arcade classics like Space Invaders or Donkey Kong.

It wasn’t even a clunky home version of these, like Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, even though I actually had an Atari 2600 and apparently also had the infamously duff 2600 port of Pac-Man as a photo exists of me playing it one Christmas (its shonky awfulness perhaps being the reason why I’ve blotted it out of my memory).
 
No, this was an obscure game on the 48k Speccy called Mutant Monty and the Temple of Doom, one of four games on an allegedly now rare (according to some dude on ebay trying to flog a copy) compilation tape called ‘ASSEMBLAGE’.

​Because, of course, nothing says ‘great new game’ like bundling it on a tape with 3 other unrelated efforts and then giving it an uninspiring collective title that basically means ‘pile of stuff’.

The name Mel Croucher will be familiar to anyone who grew up with home computers in the 1980s. He founded Automata UK - "the first games company in the UK" - off the back of a business which sold travel guides.

Automata went on to publish a series of idiosyncratic games for the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, including Pimania, My Name Is Uncle Groucho You Win A Fat Cigar, and his multimedia opus, Deus Ex Machina. Unfortunately, tastes change, and as gaming became more corporate and risk-averse, so Croucher's particular blend of surreal whimsy fell out of fashion. 

However, it is one particular Croucher production that we turn our attention to today; the rarely remembered anthology Can of Worms, a collection of mini games for the 1K ZX81, which saw the Sunday Times accuse Croucher of "peddling pornorgraphy to kids".

Croucher, to his credit, saw this as "great publicity".

​Here's a rundown of all of the games featured on Can of Worms; a satirical halfway stop between puerile juvenilia and artistic genius, that in many ways is as relevant today as it was back in 1981.

Do you ever ask yourself that age-old question: Which super-power would you most want to have?

Flight would be cool, but I admit that I'd worry about getting cold up there. Also, if I could fly everywhere, why would I bother walking? Does flying burn off calories? Nobody wants to look up in the sky and see a big fat man with a feeble pair of atrophied legs dangling below him.

What about invisibility? The only legitimate use I can think of for it is spying on people, and becoming a pervert. Firstly, I don't want to know what people are saying about me. There's a reason why I don't ego-surf. These days. Also, it would depend on whether my clothes became invisible too. Would I have to walk around in the nuddy? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. Also, what if I got cold?

Being able to breath underwater like Aquaman? It's alright if you live at the seaside, I guess, but the main thing that puts me off going swimming is all the faff of having to get dry and changed afterwards. Plus, it's probably really cold at the bottom of the ocean, and it's not like you can go swimming in a thick woolly jumper.

Actually... now that I think about it, it seems my choice of superpower would be dependent on whether it made me feel cold or not. 

Gannon and Larry Bundy Jr review Tomy's Atomic Pinball game, then Gannon challenges Rhett and Link from Good Mythical Morning to an actual fight! Warning: contains Gannon Brand (tm) filth!

Subscribe for regular videos, and support Digitiser on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digitiser2000

​Buy official Digitiser merch from our store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/digi...

Back when I used to babysit my nieces, I'd get them to behave by telling them that Hitler lived in the living room light. I would threaten to turn on the light, which would make "Hitler" and "The Bird" fly out and "get them".

Now in their 30s, they still remind me of the trauma this day.

Adolf Hitler, to my generation, was the original boogeyman. When I was growing up, he was a figure of fun - the awful power he wielded awfully was something that, to my parents' generation, who had lived through the war, could only be undermined by making fun of it. It was, as much as anything, a coping mechanism. It diminished his power.

​Remember the comedian Freddie Starr? He had a whole routine where he'd dress up as Hitler and goose-step around the stage. This was something that could be seen on primetime TV, pre-watershed. Could you imagine, say, the outrage if Michael McIntyre presented the 2019 Royal Variety Show dressed in an SS uniform? Or if some tatty, low-rent, video game blog wrote an article in which Hitler was portrayed as an idiot? 

That's how we used to see Nazis, you see; idiots, who happened to do something unspeakably evil. Those few who still clung to the ideology were diminished by our license to take the piss out of them. Now we're all much more fearful that Nazis aren't quite as mired in the past as they once were. 

Of course, Germany has had a very different attitude to all things Nazi, and with good reason. Until last year, any image associated with Nazism - such as the swastika - was banned. Since the German ratings board, the USK, relaxed its rules, Nazi and other extremist imagery is now allowed in a video games, which are finally classed as an artistic product.

​Before the change though, games featuring swastikas were either banned outright, or had to be altered for the German market. Here are some of the more notable examples.