RIP Terry Pratchett

I am a nerd.

I spent an entire weekend migrating my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll and I fucking loved it. I have a board game collection that’s out of control. And just this week, I’ve had not one, but two arguments about the ending of Battlestar Galactica (one of these turned into a standing-up, shouting kind of argument)¹.

In fact, I’m going to revise up and describe myself as a huge nerd.

Despite this, I have not enjoyed a single Terry Pratchett book that I’ve read.

It’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve asked my nerd friends where I should start and I’ve gotten different suggestions from each of them. And I’ve tried each one that’s been suggested. Even Metafilter, the closest we’ll get to an internet version of a Borg hive-mind can’t settle on any one starting point. The closest I’ve come has been Good Omens, but I’m dismissing this because of Neil Gaiman. Oh, and I played a lot of The Colour of Magic on the Commodore 64. But again, I’m not counting this because it’s, you know, not a book.

All the same, I’m going to pour one out for Terry Pratchett for two reasons.

First, even though I can only handle him in small doses, even I can recognise he was capable of some beautiful writing. Like this passage from Wings

‘Come to think of it,’ he said. ‘it wasn’t frogs exactly. It was the idea of frogs. She said there’s these hills where it’s hot and rains all the time, and in the rain forests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called … bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there’s a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don’t even know about the ground and once you know the world is full of things like that your life is never the same.’
He took a deep breath.
‘Something like that, anyway,’ he said.

I mean, wow. This is just marvellous. (For the record, I gave up on Wings after 50-odd pages.)

But I’ll mostly be pouring one out because even though he’s not my cup of tea, his writing touched – deeply touched – a lot of my friends. His writing, his irreverence, his entire outlook on life - these had a profound influence on an entire subculture. A subculture I count myself part of.

Godspeed, Sir Terry.

“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING," said Death. “JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”

Don't believe his lies

Have you read that interview Rock Paper Shotgun did with Peter Molyneux? If not, you should go read it now. And not just because it’s relevant to what I’m about to talk about, but because it’s an absolutely fascinating interview. It’s an interview that starts off with John Walker asking Peter Molyneux “Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?”

I mean, holy shit, that’s something, right?

It’s a tough interview. It was sharp around the edges. But that’s a good thing. Most developer interviews are polite affairs. Even developers that really deserve to have the boot laid in get the soft treatment. Microsoft released the Halo: Master Chief Collection, whose multiplayer (arguably the main draw of the collection) was unplayably broken and the hardest question most games press ask is “when will it be fixed?” It’s press-as-PR bullshit.

Remember back when Dan Hsu laid into Peter Moore about all the issues that plagued the Xbox 360 at launch? Remember how that was greeted? Everyone cheered and welcomed this as a new frontier: the moment when the games press seemed like they could actually be (whisper it) games journalists.

Which brings us to the Molyneux interview. Rather than being heralded as another great moment in games journalism – when a developer who has lied to consumers for years was finally held accountable – the reaction from most of the games industry has been pretty disappointing. The latest episodes of DLC, Idle Thumbs, Gamers With Jobs and Isometric all include some variation on the theme of “poor Peter Molyneux, he didn’t deserve that”¹ (Isometric_ even went so far as to say that the whole thing just demonstrated gamers’ ‘sense of entitlement’). A common thread across all four podcasts is that they described the interview as “unprofessional” for starting by asking Molyneux if he’s a pathological liar.

This has driven me absolutely fucking potty over the last couple of days. I feel like I’m living in bizzaro-world, where up is down and down is up. Peter Molyneux is such a notorious liar that he’s spawned a goddamn internet meme:

(that image was stolen from the Idle Thumbs forum, by the way)

… yet actually saying this to his face, actually confronting him about it is “unprofessional”? I just don’t get it.

Personally, I think that, if anything, the interview didn’t go far enough. I want to know if Molyneux feels any guilt about taking people’s money for Curiosity over the promise over a ’life-changing prize’ (for the record, Eurogamer ran an article about how much the winner’s life has changed. Short answer: not at all). I want to know if he feels any remorse over putting out Curiosity in the first place, since it was nothing more than a shameless cash-grab helping in the race to the bottom of free-to-play games. I want to know if he feels bad about potentially having taken money and press from other potential God games that were on Kickstarter. Games that could potentially have been driven with more passion than he’s shown Godus. And while we’re at it, I want to know if he ever gives a second’s thought to the people for whom Godus was the first game they’ve backed on Kickstarter and they’re now so wary of the process that they’ll probably never back another project on there.

These are just some of the questions I wished John Walker had asked Molyneux.

Dessie

I realise I’ve mentioned him a couple of times on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, but I’ve never actually even mentioned it on my own personal blog. So let’s fix that now.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dessie.

He’s my dog and he’s my best friend and I’m going to tell you about him. But first, a story.

My wife and I had wanted to rescue a dog for ages. We’d been out to Dog’s Trust a few times and, although there were a lot of lovely dogs out there that needed homes, a lot of them were ’troubled’ dogs. Actual conversation: “Oh! You’re interested in Solo? He’s such a sweetheart. Just lovely. But tell me, are there ever any small children in your house because he does have a history of biting. Yeah, he’s been returned to us a few times because of that.” Stuff that just broke my heart. I wanted to adopt them all, but I’ve never actually owned a dog before, so there’s no possible way I could ever train one up to, you know, not bite small children. So we hadn’t found the right dog for us. But we kept looking.

A friend of mine was fostering dogs for A Dog’s Life and just before Christmas 2013, she started fostering Dessie. Here are the pictures of him from A Dog’s Life.

The minute we saw him, we said “that’s it, call of the search, this is the exact dog we want”. He was so gentle and so sweet and we called up the charity the day after we met him to start the process. They don’t actually allow people to adopt over Christmas (understandable, no?), so we had to wait a bit.

We actually got him on February 14th last year. Honestly, that timing had absolutely nothing to do with grand romantic gestures and had everything to do with bureaucracy.

Our lives have completely changed since then. In lots of ways, both obvious and non-obvious. Obviously, we have a lovely little creature to take care of now, so we have to arrange our lives differently. For example, we’re meeting some friends for dinner next week and we’re already talking about who’s going to cycle home to walk the dog and cycle back into town before dinner. We have to plan things. We have to be more organised with things. No more leaving food on the table, for example. Also, before getting Dessie, I’d never picked up a still-steaming pile of shit on a frosty winter’s day. That’s a line I can’t un-cross.

But there are also less obvious ways that things have changed. Like, we’re part of the neighbourhood dog walking group that meet in the local park to walk their dogs. It’s such a semi-formal group that they actually had a Christmas party, where everyone wrapped their dogs in tinsel and brought wine and brandy and cakes to the park and everyone had a merry old time. Before we had the dog, I had no idea this group was even a thing. Now I’m one of them.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. For the first couple of weeks, he was absolutely terrified of me. I guess a handsome, burly man must have mistreated him before. We still keep getting these glimpses of what his life was like before he came to us. Snatches of his little neuroses that hint at some past trauma. Like, he’s absolutely terrified of motorbikes. Even a parked motorbike on the street, he’ll give it a wide bearth. And that was just the start.

For the first couple of weeks we had him, it was tough going. He wouldn’t settle. He’d whine all night and then he’d whine all day (we set up a webcam so we could check on him via our phones - that’s how quickly we descended into being just awful dog-people). But that’s something I really appreciated about A Dog’s Trust: along with the dog, they give you access to a sort of a dog counsellor that you can email with your questions and they’ll give you advice. So you can say “my dog is doing $x”, and they’ll say “your dog is doing $x because of $y, you should try to $z”. Well – and I’m not happy about this – when he hadn’t settled after two weeks, I wanted to send him back. But the charity were lovely and answered all my questions and helped me get through it and I learned how to handle him much better because of them. That helped him become more comfortable with me and settle down.

And here he is now.

In this photo, he’d just won “best rescue”, came third in “agility” and won “best in show” at the Greystones dog show.

So, things people should know:

1. Sight hounds (whippets, luchers, greyhounds) are the laziest animals you’ll ever meet. They sleep and they sleep. Here’s a typical picture of Dessie: I know everyone expects them to be really energetic and be a real handful, but if they can get just a couple of decent 20-30 minute walks a day where they can get off the lead and run fast, they’re super-happy.
2. The only issue with this is that they’ve got a really strong prey instinct and that can be a real problem. If they see something small (and preferrably furry), they must have it in their mouth. If that small thing is across a busy road, they don’t care. So they need to be trained out of this, which can be a slow, slow process. It’s only in the last couple of weeks that Dessie has stopped running out of our local park. For a while there, he was strictly kept on the lead, which was frustrating to both him and me.
3. Also, you wouldn’t think it to look at them, but they’re incredibly affectionate. They’re all skinny and pointy and you’d think they’re not into the whole touching-feeling thing, but there’s nothing Dessie loves more than to sit on the sofa with us. And he nearly always has to be touching us at all times. He’ll be sitting beside you and just put a little paw on your leg. Adorbs. Again, another very typical photo of Des:

If you’re ever thinking about adopting a dog (and you should! I can’t think of a single person whose life wouldn’t be improved by getting a dog), I’d seriously encourage you to take a look at the whippets, lurchers and greyhounds. The pounds are full of them and they’re just the best.

Hello Jekyll

One of the nice things about having a blog that no-one actually reads is that you can do silly, borderline reckless things with almost no fallout. For example, you can completely change your backend from Wordpress to Jekyll on a whim.

So this weekend, that’s exactly what I did.

And I have to say, it’s been an interesting experience. I moved from Livejournal to my own Wordpress blog, on my own domain (fuckcuntandbollocks.com - RIP) in 2004. Besides the general embarrassment that comes from reading stuff from your past, (especially when I moved away from the earnest, personal writing on Livejournal and I was trying so hard to be clever and articulate over here), there’s also the sheer volume of cruft that’s built up over time. I’ve spent the weekend blowing the cobwebs off the darker corners of my Wordpress database and trying to extract this content into something that makes sense and will out-live Wordpress. Both of these have clarified exactly why I needed to move to something like Jekyll.

Now my blog is written in text files that live in my Dropbox and I don’t have to worry about the latest Wordpress 0-day exploit.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done. Broken images need to be found. Broken links need to be fixed. The migration is maybe 90% complete. So bear with me while I get it finished.

The Best Games I Played in 2014

Before I crack into the list, I just want to give a bit of context for some of my choices. There are a load of games that are appearing in other peoples’ lists that I bought but just haven’t gotten around to playing yet[^1]. So that’s why it’s really important that I stress that this is just a list of the best games I played this year. Are we all clear? Great! Let’s crack on, so.

PT

I played PT in late at night during the summer. I was wearing shorts and at one point about an hour into playing the game, my dog brushed against my legs as he walked past. And it actually hurt. I was so tense my leg-hairs were standing on end so hard that they actually hurt to touch. That’s never happened to me before. And all it took for PT to scare me more than I’ve ever been scared in my life was just two perfectly-rendered corridors. Even the ridiculous sink-baby couldn’t ruin this for me.

Kentucky Route Zero

The episodes in Kentucky Route Zero are coming trickling out of the developer, Cardboard Computer, like a pitch drop. You couldn’t accuse it of being an episodic game in the way that Telltale games are episodic. And that’s a great thing. Once you’ve played the first episode in a Telltale game, you’ve pretty much seen everything the entire series is going to throw at you. What makes Kentucky Route Zero so special is that each episode has done something completely different, something completely surprising. In the second episode, you actually arrive at the titular Route Zero and it’s a beautiful, twisted nightmare with its own dreamlike logic. The third episode’s musical interlude was a brave, ballsy piece of gaming. Up until that point, the game had mostly been about making dialogue choices, but suddenly you take over a lounge-singer named Junebug and you’re constructing an entire song from your choices. A gorgeous, haunting song straight out of Twin Peaks. It wouldn’t work in any other game but Kentucky Route Zero. Loved it.

This War of Mine

I actually haven’t played that much of This War of Mine because it’s a tough game. Not in the sense that it’s hard, but rather it’s an emotionally gruelling experience unlike anything else I’ve played this year. It’s a game where you control a group of survivors during a war (roughly based on the Siege of Sarajevo) and the entire game is just about keeping your group alive and together – both physically and emotionally – for as long as you can. Everything you do, every awful decision you’re forced to make will affect your group in some way. If you break into an old man’s house and steal his food, your group will survive a bit longer, but the character who did the actual stealing will be racked with guilt for the rest of the game.

The Talos Principle

I already described this on Twitter as “Portal with a philosophy degree”. You could throw some Myst in there too for good measure. There’s no combat. It’s just a solidly-designed puzzle game, but it’s also got a great story that unfolds in front of you as you play it. One layer peels back to reveal another, to reveal another and so on. And all this from the people behind Serious Sam - I know, right? It’s probably not for everyone. I can imagine some people getting ticked off at the being questioned on their moral and ethical beliefs by a slightly dickish, super-patronising terminal. But that shit just worked for me. (Also, this will sound fierce wanky, but you know that first world, the one set in Roman ruins? No game has captured Italian light like that. Really small detail, but jesus, it felt great.)

Mario Kart 8

The best Mario Kart since the original.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

If you’d have said to me last year that Wolfenstein: The New Order would one of the best games I’d play in 2014, I’d have called you a fucking liar. I had no interest in the franchise and this particular iteration was completely off my radar. But here we are. Solid, visceral action and some of the best storytelling of the year. It basks in its B-movie, grindhouse roots (I mean, that scene on the train feels like it’s lifted straight from Tarantino) without ever winking at the audience in a “we’re actually too cool for this shit” kind of way.

Desert Golfing

For a while there, Desert Golfing was all I played. I mean, for weeks on end. Remember I said I bought a load of games but haven’t played them yet? It’s probably because I was too busy playing Desert Golfing instead. I’d say I’ve sunk more time into this than probably any other game on here. It’s also the smallest, quietest game on this list. There’s a ball, a hole, and the landscape. For as far as you can go (there’s no ending, as far as I know), that’s all there is. Occasionally, you might come across something else - a cloud, a cactus, a vase – but for the most part, for the majority of the 2,500 holes I played before I finally deleted it, that’s all there was. And that’s all it needed. You could talk about how the game is like an interactive art installation, a commentary on futility and perception, with the background changing so slowly across hundreds of holes. You could shite on about this and I’d listen and I’d nod at the points you were making. But that’s not why this game kept me playing. It kept me playing because it was near-perfect.

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

Gather round kids, old man Kelly’s got a story to tell. Back before Metal Gear Solid came out on the original Playstation, they released a demo of the game which was just the first area before you get onto the lift – the pre-credits introduction. I lost days to that demo. It was a short thing, and you could complete it in less than ten minutes, but I was absolutely obsessed with it and I played it every way I could. I wanted to milk every drop of entertainment out of that because, back then, it felt perfect. Ground Zeroes is does a great job of recreating that feeling of the original Metal Gear Solid demo. It’s a small sliver of a game – an amuse-bouche to keep us entertained until the actual release of Metal Gear Solid V – that you could easily beat in ten minutes. But it’s also the type of thing you could easily lose days to.

Nidhogg, Starwhal: Just the Tip, Gang Beasts, Sports Friends, Tennes

One of my favourite things to come out of 2014, at least in the indie space, is a resurgence in local multiplayer games, so I’m bundling some of my favourites together here. Or at least the ones that we’ve had the most fun with in our office. Online multiplayer games can have 256 simultaneous players, and that has its own brand of chaotic fun. But there’s something genuinely beautiful and special about being able to yell and laugh with the person (or people) you’re in a room with. With all the gamergate shit this year making me feel more and more disconnected from gaming and gamers, it was really nice to be reminded of the feeling of two (or four, or with Johann Sebastian Joust, seven) people in a room having fun together.

including Dark Souls 2, Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Bayonetta 2, Super Smash Bros 4 Wii U, Alien Isolation, The Evil Within ↩

Raw Meat Radio - Chris Morris Retrospective - MP3 version

The BBC recently put out an amazing three hour retrospective on Chris Morris. I love Chris Morris but I absolutely hate being tethered to the iPlayer, so I created an MP3 version for offline listening.

You can grab it here:
Raw Meat Radio - Chris Morris Retrospective

Best bits of Morning Ireland

In her recent blog post, my wife pointed out that the “it Says in the Papers” section of Morning Ireland is a really useful tool for giving you a super-condensed daily overview of the major stories in Irish media. And it’s true. It’s my favourite part of Morning Ireland (well, technically it’s my second-favourite, right after Harem Lousch reading the weather forecast – honestly, nothing brightens your day quite like hearing a Dutch person saying “schattered schowersch”). So I was pretty happy when my wife said “It Says in the Papers” was downloadable as a podcast.

Turns out that’s not strictly true.

It’s actually only available as part of the general Morning Ireland podcast, which also includes the news bulletins, the sport, the weather, as well as miscellaneous stories broken out into their own individual podcast episodes. In other words, there’s a whole load of shit there that I’m not actually interested in and don’t want to spend five minutes each morning deleting the extraneous crap from my feed just to get at the stuff I actually care about.

So I’ve created “Morning Ireland - The Best Bits”, which takes the Morning Ireland podcast firehose and filters it down to just the bits I care about – the news bulletin, It Says in the Papers (and Harem Lousch reading the weather).

To subscribe to it, just add the following URL to whatever podcasting software you’re using:

http://lowbrowculture.com/podcast/morningireland.xml

Obviously, the normal legal stuff applies – I don’t actually own the license for the media, this is for personal slash educational use only, caveat emptor – etc. etc. If you’re using it and you have any feedback, drop me an email.

Crossfit

A few days ago, I celebrated my one-year Crossfit anniversary. “Celebrated” is a bit of a weird word to use here, isn’t it? Would you say you “celebrated” being a year in a gym? I’ve never marked this in any of the gyms I’ve been a member of, so what makes Crossfit different?

For me, going to the gym has always been a solitary thing. You go, you set yourself up at your little station, you work out and you don’t speak to anyone. You’re in the zone.

Crossfit is different. Crossfit is about the sense of community. I go to Ronin Crossfit and, honestly, I’ve never found anywhere with such a consistently solid group of people. They don’t just make you feel welcome, they make you feel like you’re part of a team.

I’ll give you an example.

In February, they organised a sponsored 100 burpee challenge for Suicide or Survive (if you don’t know what a burpee is, consider yourself lucky). Lots of people said that one of the conditions of sponsoring me is that I had to make a video of me doing the burpees. I’m glad I did because it captured something I really love. Here’s that video:

Now, as you can see from that video, I’m not an athlete. I found the 100 burpees really hard and I was so slow it’s kind of embarassing. But did you see that? At the end of the video, when people had finished and I was still struggling and wanted to give up, people — real athletes who had finished ages ago — came over to cheer me on. One guy had finished his hundred and did my last ten burpees with me. He wasn’t showing off, he was showing solidarity.

Crossfit isn’t about being the strongest athlete in the room or beating other people, it’s about beating yourself. It’s about finding your own limits and pushing them. The other people are there to help you achieve this. And that’s the exactly what you see in that video. Without those people cheering me on, maybe I would have given up, I dunno, but I know I definitely would have taken much, much longer. And they’re celebrating with me because they know I hit a wall and kept going. And that’s not just reserved for special occasions. Even in our daily workouts, the person who lifts 40kg for the first time gets as big a cheer as the person who lifts 120kg for the first time.

That’s what I love about Crossfit. Here’s to another year.

Apple Ireland

Apple are famous for sweating the small stuff. They pay attention to the tiniest details, the things that hardly anyone notices but make a huge difference to a user’s experience of their product.

Apple Ireland, on the other hand, appear to be a bunch of goddamn clowns. This could be a larger blog post about what it’s like to be an Apple consumer in Ireland (other possible topics: no TV shows in iTunes store, no visual voicemail on the iPhone etc. etc.), but let’s just limit it to one thing: the film section of the iTunes store

One of the things I really like about the film section of the iTunes store is the ‘themed’ bundles. For example, during fashion week, they had a sale on 25 films about fashion. Now it’s Halloween and they’re doing a sale on 25 horror films.

Click into this and you’ll get this list of films:

Can you spot the obvious mistake? That’s right, in this list of 25 horror films, there are only 24 films.

If you change iTunes store to United Kingdom, you’re presented with the full list of films. Apparently, we’re not getting Cabin in the Woods as part of this sale although it’s still available in the Irish iTunes store for €16.99

But the fuckery doesn’t stop there! Even in the Irish store, you can see that The Blair Witch Project is in the €6.99 sale. Except when you click into it…

(Again, in the UK store, this film is listed at the ‘sale’ price.)

Apple Ireland have definitely adopted the Irish attitude of “Ah sure it’ll be grand”. I’m just not sure how well this works with Apple’s overall reputation as a company that sweats the small stuff.

EA Sports UFC

(This review first appeared on thumped.com)

I’m having real trouble trying to figure out who EA Sports UFC has been made for.

Was it made for the hardcore fans of UFC as a sport? I mean, it’s got 97 current fighters all realistically modelled, animated and rendered. Their Conor McGregor even has that God-awful gorilla chest-tattoo he got recently. This means that rather than just using a generic fighting model with a different ‘skin’ for each fighter, each fighter in EA Sports UFC moves and behaves like their real-life counterpart. They have the same strengths and weaknesses (or at least, they’re supposed to - lots of fans have been scratching their heads at some fighters’ stats, some of which seem wildly off-kilter). These are things that will mostly appeal to the hardcore UFC fighting fans, because they’re the only ones that will pick up on them. Plus the game copies the basic control scheme from the previous UFC games, so the hardcore fans who are familiar with THQ’s games will be able to hit the ground running with this game.

Unfortunately, if they’re targeting the hardcore fan, I can’t imagine it being anything but a bit of a disappointment. UFC is a visceral, vicious sport that’s all about cracking heads. But the fighting in the game feels weightless and floaty. Despite the amazing graphics engine, blows never actually feel as if they’re connecting, so a lot of the fights are spent just watching health meters because they’re the only real indication of how you’re doing. Only a few years ago, this same development team introduced a HUD-less fighting game, where you could tell how tired/battered your player was just by looking at them. It’s hard not to see EA Sports UFC as anything but a step back.

And it’s not just the floaty, toothless fighting game that will drive the hardcore fans bananas. The game’s transitions between the various stages of fighting (standing up, in the clinch and on the mat) are painfully disjointed and mechanical with no sense of grace or fluidity. The game is full of canned animations that bring everything to a standstill until the animations have completed. Then there’s also the fact that some of the sport’s more ‘simple’ moves actually require a fairly complex combination of inputs on the joystick, but some of the sport’s more difficult moves are just one or two button-presses. So it’s entirely possible to just spam flying knee kicks and win 90% of your matches (I tested this and won around half of my matches on ‘hard’ difficulty by just spamming the one move over again). In a sport that prioritises technique and finesse, this confusing mess of a control set-up is another of the game’s disappointments.

So maybe the game wasn’t made for the hardcore UFC fan. Maybe it’s there for the more casual fighting fan. People like me, who think that the whole arcade fighting game genre peaked with Rocky on the Gamecube, or maybe Fight Night Round 3 on the Xbox 360. In which case, EA have completely misjudged this game’s introduction. It starts by dropping you into an extended tutorial sequence that attempts to familiarise you with some of the basic controls before finally dumping you into an actual exhibition fight. But considering the sheer number of controls, it’s a bit like saying “Okay, press this button. Great. Press this lever. Great. Now these 200 other buttons. Great. Now fly this plane.” If you haven’t played a UFC game before, you’ll be overwhelmed by the controls and immediately left feeling frustrated as the game kicks your ass and asks if you want a rematch. And when you don’t know what you did wrong in the first place, a rematch is a grim, unappealing option.

The short ‘career’ mode is where the game should open up for newcomers. You choose a fighter (or create one yourself) and take them through the various stages of The Ultimate Fighter, an actual reality TV show where contestants compete for a chance to enter into the UFC. Between fights, you practice the moves you briefly saw in the tutorial, running drills until you can actually use them in some sort of sensible way. Then you fight one-on-one against a computer opponent to progress to the next round. Repeat, repeat until you’ve won your ‘contract’. As a relative newcomer to UFC games, this is where the game finally started to make sense for me. It didn’t make it much more enjoyable – the complaints about the weak-ass fighting system still stand and the opponent AI was underwhelming – but at least I could say I finally started to get my head around what some of the buttons did and when I should use them.

Being able to create my own fighter and bring him through career mode definitely helped with the enjoyment of the game. Rather than creating something sensible, I created a 300-lb man-child called “Dick ‘Jumbo’ Wang” from Bosnia and Herzegovina (the commentators actually use your nickname and surname in fights and having them say stuff like “Jumbo Wang is taking a heck of a beating” never stopped being funny for me), with easily the worst stats in the game.

As well as providing you with just enough customization options to make your fighter look like a mongoloid sex-pest like I did, you can give your fighter some tattoos. There are pages and pages of dragons and tribal patterns (no God-awful gorilla chest-tattoos, disappointingly). In amongst all these is, bizarrely, a “In Memory of Cheryl” tattoo. And because the game lets you spam the shit out of these tattoos, Dick Wang has an “In Memory of Cheryl” tattoo everywhere the game would allow it: on his head, on his back, three times on his chest, twice on each arm and twice on each leg. I have no idea who the fuck Cheryl is, but Dick Wang must really miss her. I guess this says a lot about how easily amused I am, but it also says a lot about the game. The thing that amused me most wasn’t the exhibition fights, it wasn’t the multiplayer and it wasn’t the career mode. It was creating Dick Wang.

In the end, EA Sports UFC doesn’t really know what it wants to be. It doesn’t know who it’s trying to please, so it ends up not really pleasing anyone at all. It’s not engaging enough to be the essential next-gen UFC game the hardcore fans have been waiting for. And it’s so inaccessible for casual fans that they’ll be reduced to putting together hideous monsters in the character creation screen just to extract some entertainment from the game. I’ve no doubt that the next iteration of the game will be much better, but until then, this is definitely one to skip.