Remember Midway's Joust? It's one of the few video games to feature ostriches. There's a reason for that, and that reason is this reason: ostriches are horrible, and they hate humans, and why would anyone want to put ostriches in a game?

To prove it, here is the ultimate ostrich stare-out. Will you make it all the way to the end, or will you crumble beneath their abhorrent gaze?

For most of this year, PC owners have had the monopoly on virtual reality. Oh, how they've quietly looked down upon the rest of us, sneering and clucking from their lofty, gated communities, atop Mount Superior. 

It's all changed now. The great, unwashed masses finally have access to VR, thanks to Sony and their almost-affordable PlayStation option. Making matters worse, with EVE: Valkyrie, we're not even content to stay in our slums and shanty towns; this is the first cross-platform multiplayer VR game, where PlayStation owners and Oculus Rift owners can rub their bellies against one another in the same virtual space.

That's right: it's like some immigration nightmare for the PC Master Race. We're no longer staying confined to our communities. Instead, they can now find us wandering around their villages, trying to eat the thatch on their cottage roofs, and using their Post Offices to transfer money back to our poor, PlayStation-owning families, and opening Consoleski Skleps that sell weird sausages.

Of course, it would've been lovely if there was some way in EVE: Valkyrie to organise players into teams of PC or PS players, and pit them against one another. We could finally decide things one way or another, like some sort of historic peasant revolt.

​Alas, there's no way to tell whether you're shooting at one of your own. The important message here? Once we're strapped into billions of dollars worth of death-spewing space technology, there's no way to tell one person from another...

​Profound.

Last night I went to my step-daughter's school for her sixth form information evening. Inevitably, she's worried about getting the grades she needs to do the A Levels she wants, because - y'know - that's what happens. It's important to place enough pressure on children so that they break.

​As we left, I reassured her that I did pretty badly in my O Levels, leaving school with just four measly pass grades, and a U in Geography, because I'd chosen to play video games rather than revise... and yet... and yet, here I am in 2016AD - the owner of an actual virtual reality headset. 

That's literally what I thought, and I wasn't trying to be funny. For all my carping and crowing and moaning and naysaying about VR over the past couple of years, I finally own a proper VR headset, thanks to Sony's almost-affordable new PS4 add-on... And I think I love it. It feels like the future. Like owning a jetpack, or a machine which 3D prints small dogs, or a big, bronze, chair with LEDs in the armrests, or something.
​
However, this isn't a review of the PSVR's games; those are on the way. This is a review of the hardware, of the very idea of PSVR. And despite everything, despite all my resistance to VR, it's a very good idea indeed.

And like many of the best ideas - hen parties, drinking from an un-flushed toilet, licking a football stadium seat for a bet - it also made me feel sick.

Being a parent isn't easy, they say, but in my book it's the easiest job in the world: all you have to do is show your kids that you love them. Piece of cake. It hardly even takes any effort.

Still, showing they cared was clearly too much effort for my parents, who couldn't even be bothered to buy me any of these games systems that I really, really wanted, and never got.

So here I am then; up to my waist in the crowd-funding whale's blowhole. It's only right, after all. I mean,  I was there, right at the beginning. I was one of the few thousand who started this whole new epoch of fan-backed projects. No, really. I was! You have me to thank.

You might know this, or you might not, but crowd-funding was invented by the band Marillion. Who, as you might also know, because I don't shut up about it... are my favourite band.

​Don't believe me that Marillion were responsible? Go and take a look at the Wikipedia page for crowd-funding. Kickstarter, Patreon, Indiegogo, Gofundme, Pledge Music - all of them exist because Marillion did it first, in 1997, when a bunch of American fans raised $60,000 to pay for the band to tour the US.

Off the back of that, Marillion then hit upon the notion of asking fans to buy their 2001 album, Anoraknophobia, before they had recorded or written a single note. In return, the fans would be guaranteed an album that would've otherwise been rushed - plus a nice special edition, with their name in the booklet.

That changed everything for Marillion, for the music industry, and - indeed - everyone who ever had an idea for a thing. Such as, y'know, an idea for an hilarious online series called Mr Biffo's Found Footage, which you can now back on Kickstarter. Woof! Woof! 

Following the overwhelming positive response to the Digifest videos... I proudly announce that the Kickstarter funding page for Mr Biffo's Found Footage - a six-part series of comedy nonsense - is now live.

​Please go here for full details of the project and rewards, and to support the campaignt: I can only make this happen with your generous backing! Please spread the word, wherever you can. Many thanks in advance. Here's a quick reminder of what you can expect from Found Footage...

If there's one thing that the Internet loves doing, it's creating memes - about Ram Man! This stocky loser was easily the most stupid and useless of He Man's Masters of the Universe crew, so it's little wonder that users of the so-called World Wide Web hate him, and will waste no opportunity to express their displeasure through the use of amusing pictures with words on them.

Here's a selection of some of the best, and funniest, Ram Man memes around! Get ready to LOL!

Excitement levels: quite high! There are just a couple more days before Sony launches PlayStation VR - its barely-promoted virtual reality peripheral, which threatens to usher in an age of almost-affordable mass-market VR. 

Just what can PlayStation 4 owners expect from this new technology? They say a picture speaks a thousand words - so just check out this gallery of people using PlayStation VR. They can scarcely contain their excitement!

Well, I didn't expect that. Saturday morning, I was reading up on the fallout from Donald Trump's latest faux pas, when I wanted to find out how the right-wing media was attempting to spin the revelation that he uses his fame to drag women around by their genitals, and rubs damp Tic-Tacs on the tip of his ghastly shrivelled micropenis.

This led me to Heat Street - the "news, opinion, and commentary website" run by the controversial former Conservative MP Louise "Corbyn's a Nazi!" Mensch, for Rupert Murdoch's News Corps.

I'd forced myself to look at Heat Street before, and never took it as a sort of conservative version of The Onion - just a news and opinion site that's anti-"SJW", pro-Gamergate, seeing itself at the right-wing frontline of the "culture wars". Admittedly, some of the content adopts a sneeringly humorous tone - a current story has the headline "Screaming Bearded Feminist Hijacks Open Mic at Comedy Club" - but it seemed to report the news that best fits its agenda.

So, really, you can't blame me for mistaking an article about weaponised hurricanes as a real piece, and not the satire it has since been explained to be. Let's face it, there are plenty of other conservative commentators who believe the US government are using the weather as a weapon - the godawful Alex Jones for one.

As Poe's law states: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

And I wasn't the only one suckered by Andrew Stiles' piece for Heat Street - the couple of thousand (and counting) who retweeted me were too.

Poor Lincoln Clay - the half-black/half-Italian Vietnam veteran, who was adopted as a child by mobsters. Upon his return from the 'Nam, he refuses to take the reigns at the top of the criminal organisation, despite pressure from his peers... yet still feels obliged to repay a family debt, by taking part in a bank robbery. Oh, Lincoln...

Inevitably, this goes spectacularly awry when he's betrayed by his partner - and his friends and family are all killed. Now get this: Lincoln forms a mob of his own, to take down those who betrayed him. Can anybody say... irony!?

No. No they cannot. It's a very difficult word to pronounce correctly. Iranonly. Irrinally. Ireronney.

My journey towards Digitiser really began back in 1987, when I got my first job in the summer after I left school. My cousin had told me that Ladbrokes needed a graphic designer at their local head office - someone to create their in-store graphics and animations. 

I was only 15, but I had a portfolio of drawings and paintings that I'd built up over the years. Nothing remotely computer-y, and certainly no horses or footballers - but pictures of Star Wars scenes, and - of course - the guitarist from Marillion. 

I had applied for two other jobs - sweeping floors at C&A and working on the bakery counter in Waitrose. I'd been offered both, but when when the Ladbrokes job slid into my lap, it didn't take a lot of consideration to turn the others down. Not least because the floor-sweeping job was for two hours on a Saturday, for the mighty sum of £3 an hour. 

I remember the interviewer asking me "Why do you think you can do this job?" - the words sort of disintegrating as she realised the absurdity of the question. I just shrugged and said "Because it's sweeping floors". She nodded, and made a note of this on her clipboard. God alone knows how the unsuccessful interviewees had answered. Maybe they'd just laughed, or shivered and died.

​Initially, I worked at Ladbrokes on a part-time basis, but when I decided to drop out of college - I was enjoying working far more than education - I demanded that unless they gave me a full-time job I'd have to stop working for them altogether. Looking back, I'm still shocked by my bravado. These days, I'd never have the guts to do something quite so ballsy. It worked though: they gave me a job, but couldn't justify giving me a full-time graphics position.

Apologies for this week on Digi2000 still being a little Block Party-heavy, and light on the usual gaming nonsense. It's a consequence of my brain still being a little Block Party-heavy... and remaining profoundly exhausted from Saturday - and the previous few weeks. 

But! Lots of you voted or left comments over whether I should have a crack at crowd-funding something in the Biffovision/Digifest ads vein. Enough of you have come back to generously offer your support that I've decided I'm going to give it a go. 

And it's going to be called this: 'Mr Biffo's Found Footage'.

That's probably all you need to know at this point in time. The name kind of tells you exactly what it is. But I'll tell you a bit more anyway. I'm nice like this: that.

They fooled you into thinking they knew what they were doing. But right up until the moment they left the Centre for Computing History bleary eyed at 1:15AM, not a single organiser had the slightest idea what was going to happen next.

The only certainty was that lovingly prepared crib sheets and schedules would at some point be ripped to a thousand pieces in favour of making things up at a femtosecond’s notice.

But this was (mostly) intentional, because it’s precisely how Digitiser itself was run. They might have been orchestrated chaos, but the pages of Britain’s foremost teletext video games magazine were never uninteresting.
​
Mr Biffo himself admitted he experienced night terrors in which not a single person attended Block Party 2016. But by the time he arrived at the real life venue in Cambridge, a six-strong team of dedicated helper chimps was already transforming the classroom area into a geek cave for daytime activities.