Dear Father,
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I have news from Mother: for a game series that pretty much peaked with its first instalment almost 40 years ago, Pac-Man somehow remains one of the most iconic video games characters of all time. Why? You can blame the iconic simplicity of the yellow fellow's design, the purity and brilliance of the original concept, and an early-80s marketing blitz which saw Pac-Man-branded products stacked high than Pac-Man himself after a power-pill binge.

Of course, success lures the jackals and the imitators, and Pac-Man might've had more imitators than any other character in gaming history. Here are but ten o'they things.

Yours in memorium,

Roly Pissman

I admit it; there are days when I despair at the knee-jerk political correctness lobby. I despair because, I'm all for political correctness. I want there to be universal equality. I want us to be better than our prejudices, to evolve and grow, and not go backwards.

In short... I'm on your side, but you don't half make it difficult sometimes. I've had moments where I've stopped and gone... "Wait, are we the baddies?"

Political correctness sometimes needs to be wielded sparingly, subtly, almost invisibly, because you don't want to give the other side anything to rail against until it's too late. If you give equivalent weight to everything, then the big stuff is diminished. You reinforce the arguments of the opposition.

We have to choose our battles more wisely, fight the ones that matter, the ones that need to be fought, and let some of the smaller stuff slide. Annoying I know, but, well... FFS.

If you don't, it just looks as if you're too caught up in your own crusading to see the bigger picture. You cannot force a change to centuries of established patriarchal convention - you have to do it in a way that the gammons almost don't notice. Otherwise, you get the world we're currently living in. Compress a spring all the way, and it bounces back with even more force.

Like, years ago, when I was at school, we had a substitute English teacher for a day. We'd had him before, and he was one of those teachers who we all sort of knew was a pushover. Weirdly, he was an actor on the side, and I later saw him crop up in episodes of Cats Eyes and Doctor Who (he played "Dad" in The Greatest Show In The Galaxy). 

We decided as a class that it would be a gigantic wheeze if we all moved our desks around so that we ended the lesson in a completely different place to where we'd begun. Rather than do this en masse - which would've got us sent immediately to the Head Teacher - we did it gradually. Every time Mr Ashford looked down we'd all move our desks an inch or two, as quietly as we could. He'd look up occasionally and narrow his eyes, but he never said a thing. 

I get the frustration that we live in a world with more than its fair share of bigots. I hate that a hollow, racist, sexist, egomaniac lives in the White House. I get that - as a straight, white, male - I'm able to say all this from a position of privilege, that I'm not under the yoke. I don't know what it's like to live as a minority, and would never presume to know. 

At the same time, my fortunate position, I suppose, gives me a certain clarity; I'm not damaged from a lifetime of oppression. But then, just occasionally, the other side behave in a way which really yanks my goitre...

I read a thing the other day in a games magazine the name of which I shall withhold (alright, it was GamesTM - a publication I otherwise enjoy, because it has big pictures in it). There was a small piece in there about how virtual reality is only just getting off the ground, and that the only things currently holding it back are, y'know, it having too many wires, and the screens not being good enough, and it being too expensive and that.

I literally pooed myself with resignation when I read it (though to be fair, I was on the toilet at the time). I don't understand why people don't get it. Virtual Reality is amazing - yes, in a way it is - but as a technology seeking mass adoption it was always doomed to never happen. 

I went to see Ready Player One a couple of months back, and it underlined for me how we're never going to live in a world where everyone is plugged into a virtual world. It's pure fantasy, and - contrary to what the movie portrays - the grimmer the world gets, I think the less likely most people are to withdraw from it.

If your real environs are dangerous, surely the last thing you're going to do is cut off your connection to it (although, to be fair, plenty of people with drug and alcohol issues do exactly this - but I'm not sure you'd want that to be the focus of your marketing)?

The reasons why VR is doomed are simple;

1) The technology makes some people feel sick, and people don't want to feel sick.
2) Using virtual reality requires you to cut yourself off from the world, and people don't want to be cut off from the world.

Think about it; it's primal instinct. It's hewn into our evolutionary DNA. We're built to survive. That's why we have an adrenal system. Even if we're not aware of it, we're subliminally on the look out for predators, and we strive to feel safe.

On some level, our brains are telling us that using virtual reality is akin to sitting on the middle of the Stone Age savannah with a wicker basket on your head, while waving your arms around, shrieking and drawing attention to yourself.

There's little argument among ZX Spectrum owners that Ultimate Play The Game was the premiere games publisher for the system. If you did want to argue, then that's fine: I accept that you're an idiot.

But get a load of this: it wasn't merely the games which got our loins a-glistenin', but everything from the logo, to the marketing, the none-more-secretive nature of the company's founders - the Stamper Boyz - to the packaging.

When Ultimate started out, the games came trussed into a standard cassette tape box with an inlay card, just like all the rest. With the release of Sabre Wulf in 1984, this all changed. Ultimate doubled the price of its games, and started shipping them in big, black, boxes, with a nice scratchy-textured surface, a glossy booklet, and artwork that was more impressionistic than literal.

It was a canny move, which ensured that the majority of us overlooked the price hike, and bought into the notion that we were purchasing something special and mysterious.

Of course, the benefit of hindsight suggests that we were all suckers who didn't know any better, but when you compare the way Ultimate did its business (so to speak) with most of its contemporaries, they were leagues ahead.

And so... here is a tribute to Ultimate's big box packaging.

All together now.... Iiiiiiii like big box and I cannot lie. 

Many years ago, I got to spend a special day at a zoo. It was - at the time - part-owned by my friends from the Centre For Fortean Zoology, and I'd been invited there to attend a conference on big cat sightings across the UK. That's a whole other story in itself, but to give you some idea of what it was like... upon arrival, I met a man who - within the first two minutes of our conversation - told me he'd been the uncredited drummer on The Bay City Rollers' 1975 hit Bye Bye Baby, and was clearly still bitter about it.

Also, another man came to give a talk about a panther that he'd seen walking along some train tracks behind his flat, but he'd forgotten to bring the photos he'd taken of it. From the way he described it though, it was definitely a panther.

Significantly, I'd brought two of my many daughters along with me, and they were due to be spending the weekend helping the keepers.

On our tour of the zoo, we were introduced to a "teenage" gibbon called Udo, who apparently was in the grip of puberty. Female keepers weren't allowed to enter his enclosure alone, as - were they to do so - the dirty gibbon would attempt to do rudies with them. Amusingly, every time my daughters passed by his cage, Udo would hang from the ceiling, pucker his lips, and press his genitals up against the bars. Whenever I walked by, he would turn his back on me.

We spent some considerable time exploiting the hilarious behaviour of this hairy little pervert - while I pretended not to feel rejected - and then around five minutes feeling a bit bad about having done so.

Importantly, it wouldn't have been as funny if primates didn't look - and behave - so much like people. What I always find interesting about them - and apes in particular - is what they can teach us about ourselves. Unfortunately, most of it isn't pretty, but it saddens me that gorillas are considered critically endangered, and possibly won't be around forever. 

The more we learn about them, the more we discover how similar they are to us. Maybe we should bring them out of the jungles and invite them to live in our towns and cities and put them on benefits. Admittedly, I offer this suggestion not because I want to save the great apes, but because I don't want to waste any opportunity to laugh at them.

​It makes me wonder how many of these so-called "conservationists" are secretly operating with a similar motivation.

GUEST ARTICLE by SUPER BAD ADVICE

I dunno about you, but when I think of retrogames I always think of pigs. Not because I particularly relate pigs with the distant origins of gaming, but because I have a terrible cognitive association disorder! I’m really quite ill!
 
Now that feeble setup is out of the way, let’s get on to the meat (specifically: pork) of this thinly-disguised listicle. That’s right: pointing and laughing at a load of rubbish old things, like a thoughtless maniac let loose in a geriatric care home.

It's happening, everyone: the live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movie starts filming this summer, with a release date set for November 2019! 

Given that Sonic's heyday was more than 20 years ago - his legacy sullied by countless weak sequels and spin-offs and general mishandling of one of gaming's greatest characters - it's fair to say that a movie is a little overdue.

Nevertheless, there can be few Sonicheads who aren't already excited for what is certain to be a cinematic masterpiece - providing the moviemakers remember to cater to the hedgehog that is fast's still-sizeable fanbase!

Here are 10 things we all want to see in a Sonic The Hedgehog film.

Okay, look... I'm not one to judge. You've got your kinks and your fantasies, and that's okay. So long as you're not hurting anyone... you do whatever you need to scratch that itch. It's fine. Honestly, it's fine. I accept you, even if your thing is to put a load of biscuit-discs in a bag and then get in the bag, and then roll around in an abattoir. 

At the same time... some of you might be into vore and - frankly - that shit is messed up. You know what I'm talking about, right? Vore is described as "the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature - usually whole".

Due to the somewhat impractical nature of vore, this fetish is typically expressed in stories or pictures - often crossing over with so-called "furry" fetishism. Consequently, the Sonic The Hedgehog universe, with its anthropomorphic animals, is regularly used as the subject of vore-based art - and here are ten such examples.
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Be warned; this is a deep dive into one of the most unusual sexual fetisihes there is. Each to their own.

For some reason there's a new Atari console on the way, demonstrating that some dogs never learn their lesson, no matter how many times you rub their nose in some dirty business.

We all know the broad strokes of Atari's rollercoaster hardware output - Pong, VCS, Atari ST, Lynx, Jaguar, oblivion - but between those tentpoles there were many other Atari machines. Some of these were released to little fanfare. Others simply never got that far.

Here are ten Atari systems that you may not have heard about. And if you have... good for you. I literally couldn't care less, probably.

GUEST ARTICLE by SUPER BAD ADVICE

Back in the 1980s, life was simpler. Instead of all the rules and regulations cops have to ignore these days before tasering someone in the forehead, they could just cause mayhem and chaos on the roads and streets of the US of America while apprehending people who merely look like a wrong-un.

All regardless of whether they had much in the way of evidence and all that. So, er, actually much the same as now, but let’s pretend it wasn’t for the purposes of this article, yeah?
 
Anyway, many people don’t realise it – mainly because it’s a complete fabrication – but the game Chase H.Q. is actually a digitised documentary of a day in the life of two such typical 80s ‘plod’. But what about the so-called villains they apprehended?

​Let’s take a look and see what REALLY happened when the cameras (arcade machines) were switched off (broke down after being repeatedly kicked by dank teens lurking in run-down seaside arcades).

It's fair to say that I might've been partly responsible for one of the first large-scale examples of toxic fandom. I'm talking, of course, about Amiga owners, and their response to Digitiser's decision not to cover their preferred dying format.

Back then, the term 'toxic fandom' hadn't been invented, of course, but recently we've seen it lobbed around in relation to Rick & Morty fans, Star Wars fans, and - as of the past weekend - I've used it to describe Ricky Gervais fans.

I've met Ricky Gervais. Once, many, many years ago, I briefly crossed paths with him when I visited Channel 4 to discuss a Comedy Lab pilot I was working on. Ricky was pre-The Office, but I knew him from The 11 O'Clock Show, where he portrayed a version of himself who - in his own words - probably should've been called "Billy Bigot". You see, then everyone would've got the joke that he was only pretending to be a bigot. 

I didn't have a great deal of an opinion of him, to be honest. I didn't watch The 11 O'Clock Show, after a producer turned me down for a job on it and then some of the ideas I'd pitched to them turned up word-for-word in the first episode.

But I knew who he was.

When I entered the room where I was having the meeting, Ricky was in there. He sized me up, nodded an "Alright?", finished the conversation he was having, then told me "it's all about the comedy" - and left. I didn't think much more of it, but got the sense that he'd sized me up, and I was left with the impression that there was a bit of professional rivalry.

​Not that he had any clue who I was - why would he? - but it's something I've experienced a few times when meeting with writer-performers over the years; a guardedness, a feeling of them gauging whether I'm a potential threat.

​It's weird and one-sided, but it happens.