Rob’s Terrible Tomb Of Tat

…and you will know me by the typing of the dead.

  • Line Go Up (Unwinnable)

    At some point in the distant human past, someone traded something they did not want for something they did. The person they traded with likely didn’t want the thing they traded away as much as they wanted the thing they didn’t have. This may have been the most colossal error humanity has made.

    The ever excellent Unwinnable here with a potted history of rot culture and how it relates to videogames and unfortunately, just about everything else in the year of our Molyneux 2026.

    It’s prime “know your enemy” stuff that lets nobody off the hook for the shitshow we all find ourselves in now but makes its systemic nature abundantly clear to all.

    I suspect there’ll be nothing new in it for quite a few people but it’s going to be one of those pieces it’ll be super handy to link to when I need to save myself some time.

  • The Official Sequence Of Videogames

    From the archives

    Just for the record, the official sequence of videogames is:

    1. [game name]
    2. [game name]:[name] Harder
    3. [game name] III: Back In Training
    4. [g]4[me]
    5. [game name] Kart
    6. [game name] (it’s a reboot, go back to the top)

    (originally published on Take This Machine: 28th March 2015)

  • Warning From Space

    I know people like to take the piss out of the star-shaped aliens from Warning From Space but really, I adore them.

    You see, partly the art of a good creature costume in cheap sci-fi for me is that I can look at a still, think “that is so cool” *and* immediately know what film the creature belongs to. You cannot mistake the Pairan for anything in any other film.

    I would have first seen these in my much coveted at the time book of sci-fi films as a young ‘un and yes, from the photo in the book alone I knew this was a film I really needed to see because star-shaped aliens are just brilliant. (Even more so if you believe they might command their own legions of demons in hell too. Which I assume they do.)

    It took a fair few years before I’d get to watch Warning From Space for real but I can’t say I was even vaguely disappointed by it. The baggy costumes, the actors clearly struggling to get about in the damn things (always a bonus for any creature costume), and the really surreal air they lend to every scene they’re in makes them pretty much perfect in my book.

    Sitting there watching it again last night and yep, I still love these baggy aliens a lot. It’s almost saddening when they morph into human form a bit later on.