Guest post by Super Bad Advice

Tech reviews can be pretty crazy sometimes. I was looking at one for a phone the other day, and it was complaining that the specs showed you could get it wet but that it wasn’t certified for 50 metres immersion in water or something. Not just saying "it doesn’t do this", but flat-out complaining that it couldn’t do it.
 
Just let that sink in a moment (no pun intended). A guy was genuinely upset that a device as thin as a pencil, no bigger than a passport, that can communicate with anyone on Earth and deliver the sum of all human knowledge to them in an instant, and that costs less than most people blow on a weekend night out, may (not even definitely, just may) stop working if you inexplicably:
​
(A) Decided to take it scuba diving, and
(B) Were the sort of dingus who could remember to safely put on all manner of gear to let you breathe beneath the waves, yet simultaneously lacked the foresight to put your phone in some form of spume-proof bag.
 
Then, rather than pointing out how absurd this manufactured calamity was, the comments below the article almost all agreed with the unreasonable grumping of the author. Yes I know, this sort of hyper-extreme nonsense is the internet all round, but it’s absolutely bonkers how quickly we lose perspective of the fact that the stuff we’re surrounded with is flat-out amazeballs, and instead nitpick it for the most flimsy of issues.
 
Which is why, sometimes, it’s nice to be reminded of this, and to be able to appreciate what we have with a whole new insight.

Tim was understandably angry and upset at being ousted from Teletext. It had been a long time coming, but still felt underhand and unfair. Admittedly, a solution to the long-running problem of what to do about Digitiser had unexpectedly fallen into their lap - a quirk of fortuitous timing - but it still seemed calculated. 

That they'd waited until I was on paternity leave made it appear - to both of us, I'm sure - that I was somehow more valued than him. They wanted me for my graphics skills, and Tim became expendable. I suspect they thought I'd be more malleable with Tim out of the picture. That I'd tow the company line, and fall into place. Be just another company drone. The irony, of course, was that I'd do barely another graphic for Teletext, and would go on to give them more headaches than I had ever done while paired with Tim.

I was keen not to let what had happened get in the way of our friendship, but that was easy for me; I wasn't the one who'd been fired.

Tim had a family to support, and had just had his income ripped away from him. I seemed to be favoured by those who'd fired him. The moment Tim was out of the door, I was asked to put Digitiser on hold for a week - and bill it that we were preparing "Digitiser Phase 2". When he saw this on screen, Tim rang me, upset and angry at my apparent betrayal.

I felt terrible. It was the only time one of us had ever lost it with the other. Well, apart from that time Virgin Interactive sent us to Los Angeles, and Tim's trousers got wet, and he took them off, and I made fun of him for walking around in his boxer shorts and shoes, and he snapped at me.

There was a point towards the end of Tim Moore's time on Digitiser where we both became aware of its influence and popularity. We were making ourselves laugh on an hourly basis, and it appeared that many of our readers liked what we were doing, even if our bosses never did.

Within the office, we were tolerated - just. The humour we put into Digi's pages might've gone over their heads, but even they could see that whatever it was that we were doing had been chiming with our readership. At that point, in early 1996, we had a higher readership than either the flagship teen and kids sections, and brought in lucrative advertising.

There seemed to be resentment around that, and it felt like the knives were out for us. The section was too popular to kill completely, but our bosses were looking around for other ways to control the unruly Digitiser team. Splitting us up physically was to be their first attempt, presumably labouring under the - admittedly, wholly correct - assumption that we were a bad influence on one another. Our deputy features editor, Tamara Bowles, seemed to have it in for us, and for Tim - much less diplomatic than I - in particular. 

I recall having a desperately uncomfortable progress meeting with her, where I expressed my frustration at being viewed as a "graphics bimbo". I stated that writing was what I wanted to be doing full time... and she did her best to assuage me that I could write as much as I want, because "People here like you". The subtext of that was "People here like you when you're not being led astray by Tim". In reality we fed into each other, and the more they tried to rend us asunder, the more I felt compelled to resist.

I just de-friended someone on Facebook.

I'd posted a link to an article on The New Yorker about the tragedy that is Trump's election victory, and she'd replied with this: "That's what democracy is. They voted him in. They didn't have a choice as they have had a weak president for the past 8 years. Obama's legacy."

Alright, maybe not a de-friending offence, but she'd had it coming for a while, and I didn't have the energy to argue with her. Not today. 

Trump's victory is a catastrophe, and you don't need me to explain why. There are millions of words to be written on that subject, by people who are far more clear-minded and clued-up about it than I am. 

Even if you think a Trump presidency isn't a catastrophe, you can't be blind to the reasons the rest of us think so. Why we despise the wave of pent-up misogyny, racism, fear and anger which he surfed cynically all the way to the White House. Why we're scared that the most powerful human being on the planet is someone who displays all the hallmarks of a genuine psychiatric disorder.

And I'm so fucked off that he's seemingly never paid a cent of tax in his life, whereas I struggle to put enough away each year to pay my relatively meagre self-assessment bill. Apparently Trump - by his own estimation - is "smart" for doing this. 

So... the rest of us are dumb then? Dumb for contributing to society, for doing our bit for our country?

And people still voted for him, holding him up as some beacon for "ordinary" working people, seemingly oblivious to the scale of this insult. He couldn't have been more direct if he'd spat in their faces and laughed. And yet it was somehow spun as another example of his heroic, anti-establishment, credentials.

I really like first-person shoot 'em ups. I always have. The first time I recall playing what could be viewed as a FPS was Sega's Killer Shark - a mechanical arcade game, in which the player aimed a harpoon gun at an illuminated Jaws wannabe. 

From there, I moved onto Battlezone - a game quite unlike any other, and I remember how it struck a chord with me. How utterly immersed I was in its world. It didn't matter that the graphics were simplistic wire frames; once I had my face nuzzling its viewport, I was immersed. I was part of the world.

Playing at home on my Spectrum, the first FPS I remember was Seiddab Attack - a little-known title, which placed the player in the role of tank driver, fighting off wave after wave of alien invader. So far so familiar. What set Seiddab Attack apart, aside from its name - spell "Seiddab" backwards - were its visuals. The view from your tank was a 3D representation of a city at night, the tower blocks rendered solely through the clever use of yellow dots.

From there, I would always gravitate to the FPS genre. Castle Master. MIDI Maze. Wolfenstein 3D. Doom. Even lesser-known games that arrived in the wake of Doom - Hexen, Heretic, Descent, Outlaws - I lapped them up like a demented cat. It didn't matter how basic the visuals were; I was somehow always able to see beyond them, to what they were trying to convey. I bought into them. 

But why? What is it about the FPS that really chimes with me? It's something I've been pondering in recent months, in the wake of entitled gamers laying into the gaming media. It was sparked by a link on Twitter to my recent Deus Ex: Mankind Divided review, where I was accused of being deliberately controversial to get hits. I wasn't - and were I looking for guaranteed hits on this site, I'm certainly going about it the wrong way.

But it just got me wondering about why I like the games I like, why my taste goes against the grain, and why some people get so pissed off when others don't share their opinions. 

Well this is embarrassing. You wait forever for one futuristic first-person shoot 'em up featuring wall-running, double-jumps, and a touching relationship between your character and a robotic brother-in-arms, and then two come along at once. And then one of them is notably better than the other, but doesn't sell very well. It's an age-old story.

I am of course referring to Titanfall 2 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Like my "review" of Titanfall 2, I'm only going to talk about the campaign here (the multiplayer - as far as I can ascertain from my brief play of it thus far - is your usual CoD-style multiplayer, plus there's yet another co-op zombie game, this time set in a kitschy sci-fi theme park, where you can try out the rides).

I do have a soft spot for Call of Duty, despite the series reaching its peak around ten years ago - a matter only highlighted here by the special editions of Infinite Warfare coming bundled with a remastered version of that peak; the peerless Modern Warfare.

See, for me, CoD has become the gaming equivalent of the Only Fools And Horses Christmas special: nobody needs it, nobody thinks it's the best thing ever, but it makes me feel all warm and Christmassy regardless.

It's an annual hug, a herald of the Advent season as surely as the John Lewis and "Holidays Are Coming" Coca-Cola adverts, and the arrival on our shores of Christmas Steve - the Christmas Crab. It's safe, reliable, doesn't rock any boats. There's even a special guest this year: F1 legend Lewis Hamilton, for some inexplicable reason.

This piece is going to have nothing to do with video games. Sorry. I just need to write it. It's off the back of the above tweet from The Sun Apologies, quoting this column from Rod "The Sod" Liddle.

It feels for a while like I've been reaching a tipping point, where a growing sense of unease about the direction of our country - and our world - becomes all-out despair... and now, thanks to The Sun, I might just have reached it.

It's Liddle's use of the term "whites", and how he equates immigration almost exclusively with Muslims. Or, it seems, anyone who doesn't have white skin. And I'm kind of confused about this.

I mean, what about white Eastern European immigrants? Are they acceptable because of their skin colour, Liddle? How about Italians, like my step-daughters? Or someone, like my partner, whose father was Croatian, but who grew up in Australia? I mean, her mother's English - and she's white - so that's probably alright, yeah? We can let her into our whites-only compound can't we?

Oh. But what about black British people? Unacceptable? Should they be among their "own kind", who are "a little bit like them"? Does it matter that, culturally, most of the black people I know have more in common with me than I probably do with you, Rod? I mean, we're more alike because of our skin colour, yeah? We're skin brothers. That's what matters. 

This week, the final Wii U rolls off of the Nintendo production lines, marking the end of a dream for the company. The Wii U, by modern standards, wasn't a success. A handful of must-have games weren't enough to stop the awkwardly-designed console trailing behind its competitors.

​Nevertheless, in celebration of Nintendo's second-greatest folly, here's a gallery of satisfied Wii U gamers. Yet the question remains: can we tell what they've just eaten, merely from looking at them?

I'm a bit sad. Not so sad that I've been unable to get out of bed, and I've taken to the drink, and stuff. Just a bit sad. Little bit. Little bit sad, yeah? 

You see, Titanfall 2 hasn't done particularly great sales-wise in its first week - landing at number 4 in the charts behind FIFA 17, Skyrim Special Edition, and Battlefield 1.

It might be that another first-person shooter, arriving scarcely a week or so after Battlefield 1, is one first-person shooter too many. Not to mention that Call of Duty Infinite Warfare - with its Modern Warfare remaster - is about to thrust its bulb into our paddock.

​See, the reason I'm sad is because of this reason: Titanfall 2 deserves so much better. Titanfall 2 is a proper video game. And by that I mean this: it's full of ideas. They've really, really thought about it, and coming on the heels of Gears of War 4 - not a disaster, and boasting some decent character stuff, but otherwise a slightly depressing tour of standard video game shooter tropes - it feels like someone's let off a party "razzer" between my knees.

And because Titanfall 2 is so good, I want there to be a Titanfall 3, and that's not going to happen if people don't buy this one. WHY ARE PEOPLE ALL STUPID!??

Just so you know, this is a review of the single-player mode of Titanfall 2. I've not even played the multiplayer yet, and that's for two reasons. Reason 1 is this: I had to update the game before I could use the "network features". Reason 2 is this: I liked the single-player campaign way more than I expected to.

Given that this is a sequel to a game which had no real single-player mode, Titanfall 2 had no business offering up the best first-person shooter single player campaign in years. Yes, that's right: THE BEST BLAH BLAH YADDA YADDA AND SO ON.

In fact, Titanfall 2's campaign is so good that it made my trousers fall off! At least, that's the story I told the security guard, when I was cornered in the freezer aisle of Morrisons, naked from the waist down.

"What are you doing with those gluten free waffles, sir?"