Billy the Human Bomb

Weather, gloomy and chilly to start, thankfully brightening briefly later.

Last night's movie was 'Four Lions' - Chris Morris' black comedy of suicide bombers, and an odd kettle of fish it was too. I don't think that any subject should be taboo where comedy is concerned and this is certainly a very funny film as the wannabe jihadis make their ludicrous farewell videos, attend training camps with disastrous results and assemble their bombs with the childish glee of a kid on Bonfire night playing with bangers.

The characters are a mix of the deluded, the stupid and the paranoid, but the one that I found most disturbing and affecting was Omar. He has a wife and young child, a steady job, a nice house and little time for the pompous religiosity of the imams at the mosque. So why does he tell his small son stories of Simba the jihadi and plan to blow himself up? The film does not answer this question, and perhaps it can't, and that truly is the blackest joke of all.

In more cheery games news, I played the space combat section of Reach yesterday and jolly impressive it was too, swooping around vast cruisers and orbital platforms picking off Covenant fighters, before boarding a ship for a zero g fight with the usual sounds of battle muffled by vacuum. It reminded me a little of the classic X-Wing game from 1993 (gulp - has it really been that long?) with a dash of Freelancer thrown in, and set me to wondering why space combat seems to have fallen out of favour as a genre in recent years, compared to the dominance of terrestrial FPS games on PC and console. The only one that I can think of currently is Eve Online, which seems fearsomely complex to the newbie, with its mix of inter-company battles and stock market shenanigans. I would still buy an Elite genre game, with a mix of shooting and trading, in a flash, even more so if it had a persistent MMO environment.