HeadWillCollapse

Poet William Blakes-Sephen was born in 1978 in Doncaster. His collected works including poetry, prose and illustrations will form the basis of this module. He is best known for his poem “Tyger” about the dichotomy between the natural and the divine in EA’s “PGA tour 2005″. However, the poem we’ll be discussing today is in a different vein. Written as an ode to the puzzle game, “Meteos” on the Nintendo DS it is simply entitled “Five minutes and two seconds”. (more…)

In 1996, the films, the merchandising, the nationwide hunt for a look-alike must have seemed a long way off for Lara. At that time she was still scrabbling around the large brown vaults of some long forgotten crypt sporting a melon on her tiny neck that resembled a dented bucket with a face crudely painted on it. It’s amazing what ten years can do, not that anyone would be suggesting surgery despite the ever expanding breasts and ever more curvaceous skull. Lara simply blossomed, grew into herself and other such cliches, to the point where she became pretty in an obvious way, as opposed to the way that could only really be appreciated with the use of a protractor and set square. She became an icon, and in her latest escapade she’s looking better than ever, but at what price?

Clearly the party girl lifestyle she’s been enjoying over the past decade has started to take its toll, as this recent shot reveals:

The dark circles under her eyes tell another side of the great adventurer’s story. The lifeless stare; the ever shrinking waist; the increasingly heavy use of make-up, possibly obscuring that now orange-peel skin; the desperate need to grab the public’s attention on every outing; all the warning signs are there.

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If you could level one complaint at classic medical simulation “Life and Death 2″ other than the general headaches caused when aging games meet modern hardware, it would be at the lack of multi-player support. It’s a grand oversight considering the number of people you’d normally find lending a helping hand in the theatre of operations that is the operating theatre. LD2 lays all the tasks of the O.R. soundly at a single player’s feet and beyond that forces the single player to run the tests, examine the patient and trudge through the histories.

Clearly this is more responsibility than should be placed on the head of a single sixty-hour-week-working individual. It’s time to put an end to it. In a recent revisit to the game and with the sort of knowledge that can only be gained from episodes of St. Elsewhere, Casualty and their ilk; I have devised a multi-player version of LD2 that’ll have the entire family botching operations, exceeding budgets and spreading methicillin resistant infection for hours on end.
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