This article amuses me! I try list all the postives I can think about Sony’s record with the PS3 – remember this was in November 2007 – and, roughly, can come up with one – their commitment to excellent independent games like Everyday Shooter on the PSN.

Well, in February 2009 I’m really not sure I can come with any more, and the negatives I go on to list – removing backwards compatibility, introducing a Dualshock 3, and so on – still sting.

Despite all that, I should really get myself a PS3 considering this month they’re releasing Flower and Noby Noby Boy, but the price still puts me off. If only Sony would finally be kind enough to give me one (hint.)

PDF link

Looking back at this column – which celebrates the release of Sin and Punishment on the Virtual Console – reminds me how long the Wii has been about already. And also the fact that they still haven’t released Mario’s Super Picross in North America, which is an abusively cruel thing for Nintendo to do.

Not that anyone really seems to care about the Virtual Console these days – to be honest I don’t even really remember what comes out from week to week now, as it’s usually some awful Sega game they’re putting out for no reason other than habit.

Intriguingly, at the end of this column I promise I’ll play through the Halo trilogy, because other than playing about six missions of the first Halo one afternoon in London, I’ve never really played them. Here I am nearly two years later and I still haven’t bothered.

Maybe one day.

(You can download the PDF of this issue at the Game Reactor website.)

Publishing that last entry about GamesMaster has put me in a mind to update my site with some other other items that I’ve overlooked or simply forgotten to include here. For example, remember Game Reactor? It’s the Danish magazine that I write an opinion column from. I took a break for most of 2008, but I’ve been doing it again for a while so it’s worth noting.

Despite the fact I didn’t take a break from my column until 2008 I actually haven’t updated this site with my columns since mid 2007. Here’s the first one I didn’t update about – a column on Space Giraffe – in which I managed to shoehorn in some discussion of IGF Mobile.

You can still read the full article, in Danish, as part of the PDF found on the Game Reactor website.

“February has begun, and it’s as if all of the movie distributors have woken up after hibernation, because there’s a sudden deluge of films, and astonishingly not all of them have been shoved out just to get it over and done with.”

Films!

“To everyone who has seen The Wrestler, we always have the same advice: ‘see Beyond The Mat.’ The clear influence behind the story of Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, it displays the very highs and lows of ‘sports entertainment’ that The Wrestler fictionalizes. Vampiro: Angel, Devil, Hero isn’t quite as successful.”

This column is actually largely a capsule review of the Vampiro biopic. I also mention North Korean Kaiju film Pulgasari which I’ve now seen and (to be honest) didn’t consider especially good.

“While watching the trailers for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans that have been wallpapering TV recently, you may have wondered two things. First of all, “Rise of the Lichens?” and then probably, “Who is that beardy bloke who keeps yelling?”

We’ll tell you who it is. It’s only bloody Tony Blair!”

This is probably funnier as an non-sequitur.

(I also made a post about a new game development group in Toronto this week.)

“So where were you last night when the power cut hit? We can tell you where we were—sitting in the Bloor Cinema watching some old-school trailers and waiting for the Rue Morgue screening of the original My Bloody Valentine to start. While initially confusing—the lights going off in a cinema is, after all, expected, and the power had the grace to cut off directly as a trailer ended—it was unfortunate that after that point there was nothing left to do but go home without being able to ingest a classic Canadian slasher flick.”

I mention the fact I was off to see Chandni Chowk to China in an almost offhand fashion in this column. Well, I’ve seen it now, and I can quite easily say it may turn out to be one of my favourite films of this year. I sincerely recommend you check it out if you have any interest in either Bollywood or Kung Fu films, because it’s a brilliant mash-ups of the two.

“And so we return to our weekly film round-up. A slightly delayed return, we guess, but with studios now mostly interested in revving up towards the Oscars with the films they’ve already released, there’s very little happening in January.”

A week of forgettable films leads to a sadly forgettable column…

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This is absolutely our pick of the season as the film we could not care less to see. The original story by F. Scott Fitzgerald was, if anything, a literary exercise more than a narrative, and while you can normally expand a science fiction short story into something (just add explosions!), forcing a tragic story of lost love onto this just strikes us as insincere, especially when it includes one of the most insincere actors we can think of (the awful Cate Blanchett, who may as well play every role wearing a sandwich board that says ‘LOOK AT HOW WELL I AM ACTING’).”

I despise Cate Blanchett; people are usually quick to jump to her defence, and I know why, but I still think they’re suckers.

“Eye Weekly made up for it by linking to the fight scene from They Live in the middle of their article, so you win some and you lose some. It is the best fight scene ever, isn’t it?”

Said fight scene. It’s best in context, of course.