I was looking at some old pictures on my hard drive today and found this Forza 2 picture. I painted this car a couple of years ago, and it is the only decent thing I ever managed to design. It must have taken me a good five hours so I may as well share it. Let me know what you think.

This morning I took delivery of a 32" Toshiba Regza. It replaced a miniscule SD LCD screen that I have been squinting at since my old cathode ray tube leviathan exploded. So this is my first real HD experience.

The detail one gets from 1080p is stunning! The first game I played was Dirt 2, I am shocked the number of details that I missed before. I almost feel obliged to write a letter of apology from the developers of my games begging forgiveness for desecrating their work with standard definition. It is like hanging an original Titian in a nightclub toilet.

If anybody is looking for a new TV the Toshiba comes highly recommended. It was about £390 from Amazon, which for 1080p is quite reasonable (Toshiba Regza 32RV635DB 32-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p LCD TV with Freeview).

I'm bout to waste your time with facile details of my week, enjoy!

I went back to college this week, after the summer holidays. To be honest it is a relief to be back, my brain was in danger of dribbling out of my left ear in a viscus grey form. To my delight the library is holding a book sale, 25p for anything on the trolly. I picked up The Oxford Complete Works or William Shakespeare, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, The Penguin Complete Novels of George Orwell, Lonely Planet Britain and The Iron King by Maurice Druon. All for a grand total of £1.25! My friends mocked me as Istaggered to the bus,overladen with books like an 80s sitcom nerd. Hopefully the Gamespot community will be more willing to see the glory of discounted literature.

As a final point, I have pre-ordered Dirt 2 from Amazon. I really hope they get it to me on Friday. It almost feels like today is the 23rd of December! I watched the video review before and saw Tom McSheas shameless griefing of Justin! Shame on you Tom.

Well first things first, it was my birthday yesterday. It was a pretty quiet affair, went out for a meal and a couple of G&Ts, and I got some very nice Logitech Z4 computer speakers for my iMac. If anybody is looking for a set of high quality affordable speakers then I would strongly recommend them. The subwoofer is pretty powerful and the tweeters are sharp. I was listening to Vivaldi's four seasons earlier and it has never sounded better.

I have just finished Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My interest in Thompson and Gonzo journalism began only a few months ago after watching a BBC 4 documentary about the man and the movement. I watched the film of Fear and Loathing last year, without really understanding it's context. Having spent the past few weeks doing some light research on the history and key players of the movement, along with reading one of Thompson's books, I am eager to chew my way through some more literature in this vein. If anybody can suggest the next book I should read I would be beholden to you.

I don't want to go all Hotspot on you and neglect the subject of gaming altogether (no disrespect to the podcast team, as I actually think the tangents and movie reviews are the most entertaining part of the show). I just watched the new Dante's Inferno developer diary, and it peeked my interest. I am an avid fan of European history and art, especially the late medieval andrenascence period. The developer diary gave me the impression that Visceral Games is treating the source material with the respect it deserves. Instead of taking the approach that was taken by SCEA in the development of the God of War franchise, Visceral Games appear to be far more faithful to Dante's poem. The GoW story is only loosely based on greek mythology, taking characters and scenarios mainly from the work of Homer and tossing them together in am entirely new story. In a way it was a lot like the TV program 'Deadliest Warrior'. This admittedly makes for a great series of games, but the clasicist (I know that isn't how the word is spelled that way, but for some reason the first half of the word is blocked) in me couldn't help but notice the discrepancies between the game and the source material. Visceral Games appear to be translating the structure of the Dante's poem pretty faithfully, a move that will surely keep my pedantic side quiet. The team also claim to be taking their art from renascence depictions of hell, and it defiantly shows in the gameplay videos that they have shown. Brojgel is one of my favorite artists from the period, so the mention of his work by the developer made me very excited. I just hope Visceral can build solid gameplay comparable to GoW.

Finally I would like to once again thank Kevin VanOrd for his generosity. I was lucky enough to win his 'Inspire a Spore Adventure Contest'. The prize was a copy of Spore and the Galactic Adventures expansion pack. In my brain history occupies only a minor recess; biology is my real passion (as a biology student I suppose it should be). Certain people, including reviewer Tom McShea complain that Spore is misleading in it's claim to depict 'evolution'. It is true that the game is not an example of vertical evolution, the proses explained by Darwin. Instead the development of ones Spore species has more in common with horizontal evolution, a proses by which bacteria exchange DNA to adapt to environmental changes. I won't bore you with the details, but if you are interested I would be more than happy to explain it further. God I'm a geek, but the way I see it it is best to unload the majority of my geekiness in the safety of Gamespot; that way I can operate in mainstream society without anybody knowing the terrible truth!

I have been using Gamespot for some time now, and I consider it to be the most reliable source for gaming news on the internet. Despite this I have neglected the community side of things. Well I feel I am ready to thrust myself into the warm bosom of the Gamespot blogosphere.

Arecurring topic of discussion among me and my friends has been the largely agnostic approach taken by game developers. I am an atheist, but a number of my friends are Christian and one is Moslem, giving us a balanced prospectives to view this issue from. We have struggled to think of a single game that explores religion in any meaningful way. One example we did think of was 'The Church of Atom' in Fallout 3, we decided however that this I more of an attempt to poke fun atfanaticism than a serious critique of organized religion. In fact Medieval II: Total War, a game in which religion is a key gameplay mechanic seems to have attempted tosecularize it's self by not featuringMosques in the crusades campaign. Christian churches are featured, and can bedestroyed, but the Moslem places of worship resemble Mosques but do not bare the name. Iinterpret this as a clear attempt to negate any controversy that may be stirred up by allowing players to destroy Mosques (For some reason this would be more controversial that killing hundreds of retreating moslems after winning a battle).Beyond a few similar nods towards religion the video game industry is a godless entity.

Why is this? Myimmediate cynicalthought was to accuse the industry of money-grabbing. If a developer were to make a game that religious people would find offensive then that is going to alienate a large number of potential consumers. However this issue is not that clear cut. Plenty of M or 18 rated games are published. If the games industry really was this conservative every game released would be a T rated moviefranchise spinoff or would end in the letter 'Z' (Catz). Clearly the games industry isn't too afraid to shock, as it canultimatelycapitalize on controversy.

I feel it is unlikely that a game will evoke a reaction of the scale and ferocity that Salman Rushdie faced after his 'The Satanic Versus' was published; or at least not within the next ten years. I find this ultimately depressing, as it confirms my suspicions, and the suspicions of many others, that the video game industry is a puerile source of entertainment, rather than a credible art form. It took the film industry almost fifty years to come up with some really meaningful cinema, so maybe in ten or twenty years we will see a game that can break the hymen of high art. For now however I will have to get my kicks from games and get my culture from galleries.