Downhill from here?

I’m sure it was the same for the Great Depression and the last recession in UK history, but I can’t stop thinking this is the beginning of the end of society as we know it. Many people have been predicting this for years. The economy is a charade for the financial elite to make their millions, but it’s all coming to a head because the people in charge cannot extricate themselves from their own greed, and it’s coming back to bite them in the arse.

The joy of mice

Next time you execute a deadly Counterstrike airstrafe attack using a deft combination of finely honed finger movements, spare a thought for the plastic gadget grasped in the palm of your hand. Yes, the input device now taken for granted in today’s world of rapid-reflex gaming has an interesting history of its own. And it wasn’t always about entertainment.

Take the humble mouse, the modern mainstay of any self-respecting PC gamer. Its first incarnation appeared in 1964, a year of unprecedented innovation for Dr Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. During the gestation of their revolutionary hypertextual On-Line System, Engelbart and his team believed that the state of computer technology was restricting their ability to develop new and improved technologies, and a fresh way to manipulate information was surely needed. Favouring an acid-induced philosophy of co-evolution, Engelbart redressed the balance with the ‘X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System’. With the connecting cable originally running tail-like from the rear, the device was nicknamed ‘the mouse’, but in using two separate wheels for vertical and horizontal movement, the bulky contraption proved as cumbersome as its former name suggested, and it was later superseded by Xerox PARC’s aptly titled ‘ball mouse’. Replacing the wheels with rollers that contacted against the sides of a single ball proved a masterstroke, and the device swept into the consumer market as a must-have add-on for the Xerox Alto home computer.

Eight dead-skin sullied years later, the mouse went ‘optical’ and ditched the ball, instead adopting state-of-the-art motion-detection thanks to Steve Kirsch of Mouse Systems Corporation. Early optical models employed an x-y coordinate system embedded in the mouse pad, but as computing power grew cheaper soon image-processing chips were embedded into the mouse itself, to eventually herald the modern-day spate of so-called ‘laser mice’. And so the digital rodent was liberated.

Suffering an ungainly protrusion into the real world, the joystick’s future, by comparison, appeared gloomy. The first electrical joystick was invented around 1945 in Germany and was developed for targeting airborne glide bombs against Allied ships, and by a series of, frankly, paradoxical events, eventually fought itself into the home with the release of the Atari 2600 entertainment system. But if the phallic totem thought it had won the peace and comfort of domesticity it was sorely wrong. While the less-than-joy-stick proved its mettle within the scorching life-or-death intensity of a World War II cockpit, it failed to hold its own against the rigours of Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Summer Games (joystick killers of the world unite!) leaving many a gamer cursing their own masturbatory prowess.

Unexpectedly amidst a mountain of peripheral corpses, the holy grail of callous-inducing frenetics emerged – Nintendo’s comparatively asexual D-pad.

Lapped up by millions of NES gamers, the D-pad ruled the console roost for years to come and inspired a wealth of imitators. But like a phoenix risen from the flames, the fabled joystick enjoyed the last laugh with the dawn of the Nintendo 64 controller and the reintroduction of the additional rotary analogue stick. Gamepads followed suit ever since.

Now, in the face of such a winning combination, who could imagine that a device resembling a 70s TV handset dubiously pronounced ‘weemote’ would become the latest console craze?

Nerve paste

The funny thing was that I had picked the time and place for her death. Not that I’d foreseen her demise. It was a complete shock to me – but then why wouldn’t it have been? Everything was perfect. And I mean love-story perfect. It was eight months into our relationship and she was yet to expose any vice that I could forgive her - and she was only human. That now was all too apparent. Before she succumbed to the constriction, the agonising, retching suffocation I witnessed, she was simply angelic. I don’t apologise for any dewy-eyed nostalgia. It’s true. I won’t skimp on the bare facts as I see them. She was the one you see on the cusp of a heavenly dream, that girl you can’t look at directly, to do so would extinguish her in a wink. She was a total abstraction, too designed for life. She was flawless.


I looked on her ending with a complete sense of confusion. There is a God. And yet, there is no such thing! For how could He ever allow it? For Julia to be taken in such a way was an affront to humanity, even existence itself. To think that a whim could have killed her, a gesture of playfulness, a night-time effervescence on my part, was a constant stabbing pain at my heart. But I was not the sole culprit. I was a mere accessory, and the 'personage' of prime suspicion could not even draw breath – yet it could take it. Oh, it could so easily take it. Do I dare divulge? Can I repeat the monosyllabic slayer of sublime love, dancing heavenly adoration? A pea. It was a pea. A pea killed Julia. And a pea killed me.

She collapsed in her chair, drooping like a flower in intense heat. Her head lolled back, her neck no longer able to withstand the dead weight. The quartet stopped playing almost instantly as a woman shrieked at the table next to us. The saxophonist, he must have been a doctor, rushed from the stage like an animal toward her. Or at least he had first aid training. Where was the doctor?! My eyes darted round the restaurant, frantic for some essential solution to the horror of it all. I was motionless, half-expecting to be swept aside by some nameless authority figure, mouthing those initiatory words in the grip of a tense ritual: ‘Give me some space!’ Or some such saving phrase. Nobody moved. And I watched helpless as her skin turned a sickening colour of green. No-one would ever have thought possible that the spectrum of human complexion spanned to this extreme, yet nobody spoke in a coherence implying what we all knew unequivocally: this woman is dead. Someone help.

Dungeon Keeper

As a boy, Star Wars equally enthused and annoyed me. Regardless of the inevitable Rebel triumph over the mean and wicked Empire, I couldn’t help willing a victory for Darth Vader and his minions. Stormtroopers seemed to symbolise the height of interstellar fashion, and the Emperor’s electrifying powers put the rebels’ mystical Force to shame. Surely I was not the only one to realise just how cool the Dark Side was?

Fortunately, this is Dungeon Keeper, and now you have the chance to seek revenge on all those irritating do-gooder types, albeit in the comfy depths of your medieval underground dwelling. With the help of an assortment of hideous creatures and some foul-smelling demons, it is your job to systematically pillage and plunder the peace-loving communities of the countryside above. Oh, and how enjoyable it is!
Using a top-down view that can be tinkered with to your liking, you start out with just a few scurrying imps - but don’t underestimate their seemingly feeble frames. Imps are the backbone of any self-respecting dungeon. They provide the means of constructing and maintaining your home, from mining precious gold (your primary source of income) to reinforcing dungeon walls against the marauding hordes. However, they are inclined to sleeping on the job if they can get away with it, so it’s up to you to keep them in check by dealing out a few well-targeted slaps to the backside using the mouse cursor.

The first thing to do to expand your caves is to hook up with a local portal - to the damned, of course. This is your source of creatures, but they are unlikely to make a home of your dungeon if it does not boast the latest hellfire amenities. These include sleeping nests for those oh so impish-naps, a hatchery to feed hungry goblins, and a treasure room to hoard your blood money. Progressive devastation of the above-land villages increases your room options to advance the technology of your dungeon, from creature training areas and spell libraries to jails and even torture chambers.As if the slaughter of the innocent wasn’t satisfying enough, you also have to contend with other equally disturbing keepers vying for your precious dungeon space (and green blood, possibly). Things aren’t as bad as they seem. Being a malevolent keeper yourself, you are also a veritable necromancer and have a wealth of magic spells at your disposal. The possession spell is of particular merit, allowing you the option to experience the labyrinthine corridors of your dungeon through the eyes of any creature you choose. Whether to personally wreak suffering on an advancing knight of the realm or simply gain a more direct understanding of the lives of your brethren, the possession spell provides a welcome extra dimension to the game engine.

Initial levels provide a wealth of in-game help as a spree of handy tips introduce you to the managerial aspects of your dungeon, and presentation is mostly excellent, with the option of high-resolution SVGA radically increasing the clarity of those sometimes hard-to-distinguish close-quarter battles.

So what’s lacking in this largely playable strategy? Upon taking the plunge into first-person perspective, the two-dimensionality of the sprites becomes glaringly obvious and pale in comparison with the realism of today’s first-person shooters, but DK can be forgiven for this by never setting out to compete with that genre.

Apart from this minor gripe, everything is in place and waiting for you to lead your cohorts to a sadistic reign of terror. Right, I’m off to confession.

The height of noise

There it was again. Even over the shunt of the train and the mobile phone jingles and the terminal chatter of the voice in my head, I recognised it immediately. The resonating sound was like a solid flat plane of energy pulsating in all directions at once. It even travelled through my hands because I heard it with them over my ears, although it did create a strange sort of echo.



I got off the train at the next station, and let it carry me toward the hill above the village. The trees seemed like cardboard cut-outs in the clear daylight. Everything got larger, and loomed green above me, grew and grew til I could no longer see the point where any part touched the sky. When I got to the end of the lane and turned off into the grass I realised that no, I was wrong - there was no change in the size in the landscape or the wilderness.

I had shrunk to an extensionless point.

I tried to look down at my body, but my vision seemed not to have any originating physical counterpart. Nor did it have any specific direction, yet I could see everything, as if I was focused intentionally on every minute speck of space all at once. It was the strangest thing, but it felt like this was the way it should be, in fact always was, just that I'd never paid enough attention to my own awareness to see it, laid bare, naked and dancing. I floated up the hill, but stayed motionless. There was sky. Birdsong. The breeze on my...

Death by bus-stop

My journey to work, like most people’s, doesn’t much veer from the following standard going-to-work fare. I hurriedly lock the door behind me and crash onto the street. It may be raining, but invariably this is the first I know about it but I’ll miss my bus if I attempt to go back inside, unlock the door to my flat and find a broken umbrella. So I head for the top of the road. The short walk to the bus stop: I have one eye on the shelter and another on the drone of vehicles passing by in case I spot my bus and have to mount a lumbering run to slither between its closing doors. I reach the shelter, hopefully in good stead to catch my ride, but by this time if it is raining I am soaked through and know that I must slouch like a slimy elk for half an hour before I can get off again.

This particular bus stop is always inhabited, but the seasons dictate the formation and the temperament of its dwellers. In the depths of winter it is a clammy affair where people huddle for warmth underneath the slight roof of the bus shelter like newborn mice hankering for a lactating mother-tit, the more unfortunate relegated to the sidelines to cushion the fall of rainwater streaming gutter-like from the shelter’s corners. If you’re late you don’t even have the privilege of this position and must watch from the pavement like an experiential meteorologist.

Eventually (and at this point we must assume it was a ‘good’ morning and you actually made it this far) the bus arrives, accompanied by the obligatory second bus tailgating behind. The endless wait ensues where you have to scratch your head and curse under your breath as you consider the vacuous mind of Other People as they suddenly realise they have to pay to use public transport (as if this were some lightning-rod revelation) and must manage their petty cash at the bus stop, call their accountant, haggle with the driver, and any other malignant fool-action they can devise in the long-haul time it took for them to activate their brain stem for the day ahead. You begin to sympathise with Sartre. Eventually we all board and the driver heaves the hulking great wheels around the roundabout and we hunker down for the roasting/freezing 45-minute journey to seven hours of job in which your life is disappearing one second at a time.

Hill noise

It was when I awoke early Tuesday morning that I first became aware of their calling. It was still dark outside, and the tired grey colour of the sky seeped in through the blinds. I couldn't sleep. My mind was sharp and lucid, as if I'd lain there awake the entire night. It was not that my head was filled with worrisome thoughts or some pressing topic. I was simply awake and very aware. What confounded me more so was my lack of frustration with being conscious at such an hour, even though the reality that I would soon have to rise for work was clearly apparent. After lying there for a few moments, my attention was arrested by an extremely quiet but vital sound. At first I thought it came from within, as though an inner awareness had arisen of some deep biological rhythm echoing through the canals of my body. However by placing my hands over my ears I could cause the sound to cease, and from this I surmised that the walls of my apartment had colluded with the source of the sound to foist upon me a devilish hoax. I swung my legs out of bed and sat up. Still the sound was there, almost imperceptible but nonetheless intrinsic to my bewitchment. It was a low tone, so low that it seemed to be a corrugation of sounds vibrating at a slow but continuous rate. The curious effect seemed to travel from the lounge, along the hallway and through the open door of my bedroom. Intrigued, I got up and walked to the door. The hallway was bathed in the same grey light, and I realised I'd forgotten to draw the curtains in the lounge before retiring to bed. So in a timid but adequate illumination, I moved across the hall and into the front room of the house, half expectant (through my absent-mindedness the previous evening) to find the television set still on and the screen emanating an impermeable landscape of snow and that strange low tone in flickering rhythm. But the TV was off. I looked to the four corners of the room, to the dead hi-fi, to the electrical sockets and the lights. Everything was still, inactive. Only until I caught the view out of the window did my roving eyes rest. I took two steps closer to the glass and looked above the houses and heard it, no – saw it – so clearly, as if my whole being was at once fixated by an almost visual sensation. Beyond the blackened pavement streets and below the flannel sky, the hills called out audibly in the empty night.