Buried Alive by Porn...

Recently there has been quite a bit of emphasis on the ease in which children are able to get their greasy little mitts on the worst filth the world has to offer. Many broadband companies are having to implement new rules and barriers to prevent minors from being able to access 'adult' material online. The only problem with this is that I thoroughly believe it is impossible to protect children from adult material. To be honest, I think it's unnecessary and I shall explain why.

When I was about 10 I had a friend who lived very close to me and had some very open-minded parents. This was a very good thing and I feel I should say that their openness and love towards each other has kept them together to this day. It was, however, a point of interest to us as ever-curious youngsters because we could see hints of their bedroom antics occasionally around the house in the form of the occasional saucy bit of underwear or erotic chocolate treat. I must stress however, that as 10 year-olds, we really didn't care about such things or want to know what was going on behind closed doors.

It is worth noting that no matter what you do to avoid such things they will, occasionally, jump out and smack you in the face when you least expect it. That is exactly what happened to my friend...

When I was younger I used to go fishing with my friend and we fancied ourselves as avid fishermen and were always eager to learn more about the sport. Upon discovering that there had been a large number of carp released into our local canal, we decided that we would try to catch one of these beastly fish, but in order to do so we would need advice. So, when my friends parents were out, we went searching for fishing magazines that we knew his Dad had, with the intention of learning the art of catching carp.

Bob Nudd, make me proud!

The search in the garage yielded no results and there were none in the downstairs cupboard so we commenced our search of his parents bedroom. Sure enough, in the top shelf of his Dad's wardrobe, we could see a picture of Bob Nudd -- a championship angler -- poking out from a pile of magazines. We had found the motherload and smiled in anticipation at learning how to fish like a pro. My friend, being the taller one, reached up and grabbed the magazine, pulling with all his might. This was when it happened...

With a yank, the whole pile of magazines collapsed out of the cupboard and fell onto my friend, literally knocking him back onto the bed behind as they poured out of the closet. The fishing magazine was buried -- along with my friend -- amongst the most humongous pile of porn magazines I have ever (and will ever) see. One magazine even landed, open, with a centre page spread on my friends chest.

My point here is that we were not looking for smut, nor were we interested in it, but our childish search for fishing magazines instead led to my friend being literally buried alive by porn. When my friend lifted the centre page spread from his chest, his reaction was not, "Whoa, that's nice" but "What the fuck is that?Urggh!"

Yes, my friend. That was a vagina.

We frantically pushed the magazines back into the cupboard, ignoring the pages that appeared to be stuck together and tried to assemble them into the same order as before. There was no curiosity to look into the unknown any further, we just made off with Bob Nudd and tried to wipe the experience from our minds. The funny thing is, my friend was pulled up at a later date by his Dad who had apparently kept an 'order' to the magazines and had guessed that his son had found the stash. His assumption was that he'd searched for it; the truth was it had almost killed him.

Children are not interested in porn until their teens and when we were introduced to it at a young age, rather than being aroused, we were put off it for a good while. There is no way to completely 'protect' children against porn and there is no need to go to extraordinary lengths to do so.

Obviously, times have changed and now the internet is the worlds largest library of pornographic material. The ease in which people can access porn, even accidentally, is quite staggering. I always used to joke that anyone could find a picture of a naked lady within 30 seconds of logging on, even on a blocked PC. I've not yet been proved wrong.

A good example of this was experienced during my time at college. I was 17 and studying Geology. Most of our time was spent in the classroom studying rock types and formations however we did occasionally get a chance for a field trip or, on this particular day, a trip to the computer room. We were learning about igneous intrusions and our tutor urged us to use the internet to find examples of them and in doing so, he managed to accidentally get every computer profile in the class blocked for a week.

An igneous intrusion is where rock strata has had magma injected into it, leaving a 'blob' or 'sheet' of volcanic rock surrounded by softer rock. There are many types of these and when searching for batholiths, sills and diapirs we quickly found what we were looking for. When it came to dykes however, our results were inconsistant at best.

Some of us found this:

Whereas some of us found this:

Obviously I had not wanted to search for porn but that was exactly what I found. It is worse with the modern internet search engines because it seems that typing in something as innocent as 'tea cup for girls' is likely to bring up results '2 girls 1 cup' and all fetishes related to cups. Despite this, I don't think young children are going to be tempted to click on the more filthy links and if they do, boy will they regret it.

Teenagers on the other hand will search for porn. They will search for it and they WILL find it and nothing in Heaven or Earth can stand between a teenager and porn. Even if he doesn't find porn in the strictest sense, anything with any iota of flesh showing will do: FHM, Art websites, African tribes, science websites anything and I mean ANYTHING will do. All this means is it's completely futile to try and stop a teenager from accessing porn and preventing access or making it difficult to get hold of will only add to the fun of trying to find it.

So what do I say to parents trying to discourage their children, or teenagers, from accessing porn? Show them the most sordid, horrible, disgusting, foul material you can get your hands on. Show them the horrors of the internet and suddenly, it might not seem quite as much fun.

Dead Space 2 Review (PC)



OK, it's unusual for this blog but I feel that since there's not much going on in the world at the moment (that I understand enough to make fun of) I'm going to give my opinion on something which people may relate to a little more. A computer game!

So, for those of you who have played the first Dead Space you will be familiar with where the story left off but for those of you who haven't, and don't want to spoil the fun by going onto Wikipedia to find out, I will give a summary:

*WARNING - SPOILERS*

In the first game, engineer Isaac Clarke was sent along with a small team to a 'planet cracking' mining ship -- the USG Ishimura -- that had ceased contact with all authorities and appeared to be floating dead in space (haha, get it?). Heartstrings were pulled when it became obvious that Isaac was on the mission not only because the ship needed to be fixed but because his girlfriend was on board. After 'shocking' in, the ship docks (or rather crashes) on board the Ishimura only to find that the crew have in fact been completely wiped out (save for a couple of psychopaths) and morphed into horrifying alien creatures called 'Necromorphs' following the removal of an artifact called 'the marker' from the planet below.  Isaac almost immediately finds himself alone and has to fight his way through the ship, completing ever-increasingly difficult tasks in an attempt to survive and then to get off the ship. Que a couple of twists and Isaac discovering that the marker was removed by a religious cult called 'Unitologists' with fingers in all the right pies. Soon it becomes obvious that just escaping the terror is not enough. It falls to Isaac to return the marker to the planet below, and kill the hive mind by shooting it in it's gooey yellow bits. The first game ended with Isaac escaping the planet as a huge plug of rock hurtles into it after being released by the Ishimura's gravity tethers.

Dead Space 2 carries on the story three years later than the first game. For those of you who have not watched the Dead Space animated films or played the less successful games released between then the story may be a little confusing at first, not that it affects the gameplay. Issac wakes up in a hospital bed and straight jacket within a massive 'space city' known as The Sprawl. He is awoken to find that a Necromorph infestation has occurred in the city and a mass evacuation is taking place. The first level of this game is perhaps the most tense and best of all the horror games I've played. You are immediately thrown into the action when the person reviving you (a character from the games released between Dead Space and Dead Space 2) is killed and turned into a Necromorph. At this point you get up, still in a straight jacket, dodging Necromorphs as you run for your life.

Yeah, I look like Optimus Prime.

(artwork courtesy of videogamesblogger.com)

It's a tense and effective ordeal . You see other patients being attacked in their cells and the screams of victims as they meet their demise and this only adds to the overall believability of this first portion. Thankfully, you are soon released from your bonds but still have to endure another long period of  fighting with only a torch and kinesis to aid you. When you finally get into your engineers RIG, it stands out as an immediately cool moment and, unlike the first game, you feel that Isaac really is at home and it far more ready than before to fight.

The pace of the game is good, but this doesn't take away from the jumps which are frequent and as effective as the first game. I'd be lying if I didn't say some of them are a tad predictable but it's the sounds, or sometimes complete lack of them, which causes the most tension and sets up some of the best scare moments. I must admit, these moments do ease off a little after you get into the suit as you don't feel as 'alone' as you did aboard the Ishimura. The fact that you can also 'fly' around in the zero-gravity areas mean that your view feels less restricted than that of the first game. Despite this, there is a prolonged sense of catastrophe and you get to see citizens as they are violently attacked by the aliens and on more than one occasion this creates a sense of hopelessness that I thought impossible for a game.

In Dead Space 2 we encounter a number of new aliens (along with most of the old ones), including the 'puker' which is probably my favourite of the newbies. This Necromorph is more humanoid than the ones we've encountered before and vomits a caustic liquid onto you which eats away at your health. If you're too close, you may get to see Isaac have a particularly brutal demise at the hands of one of these whereas at a distance, they will spray the liquid from afar. Once again, the brutal violence of this game is not over the top nor gratuitous, but paced and believable considering the circumstances. The other new Necromorphs include a tripod type creature that is one of the new 'boss' type enemies (although not as difficult to beat as the charging brute from the first game) and a small, crawling infant with a bloated yellow belly. These disturbing creatures explode when they get close, and are introduced during a particularly unsettling scene. There are also hordes of crying mutated children which attack en masse and are creepy as hell and finally a strange, two legged creature that charges and rams you from afar.

This is probably the only new alien I'm not overly fond of. Whilst they are kind of creepy when you see them poking their heads around the corner before they attack, this also makes them a bit predictable and I dare say the beasties are kind of cute; sort of reminding me of a dinosaur off 'The Land Before Time' rather than a hideously transformed corpse. The sounds they make also seem to also be directly taken from that a kids movie.

Aw, a small child... Kill it! Kill it!

In addition to new Necromorphs, there are new weapons that have been included in this game and this, perhaps is also my only other gripe. The problem is, I never found myself using them... at all... throughout the whole game. This is perhaps my playing style but I found that the best combination of weapons was still the Pulse Rifle, the Plasma Cutter, the Line Gun and the Contact Beam (all of which are weapons from the first game). The new additions include a javelin gun, a detonator and a seeker rifle. The Javelin gun is pretty nifty and impales targets but is fairly useless against hoards and the detonator, whilst powerful, is slow and sometimes quite tricky to use without prethought. The seeker is an excellent sniper rifle type weapon but in a game where your enemies are close to you, it seems a little pointless. In my opinion, they should've 'forced' the player to use these weapons by not including familiars from the first game or by replacing them with similar updated equipment models.

Perhaps the scariest level on the game -- and one that had me literally desperate to escape -- was where you return to the decommissioned Ishimura that was bought to The Sprawl after the first game. It's corridors may have been mostly cleared and cleaned but audio logs describing 'strange noises' and effective background sounds combined with the visions of Isaac's dead girlfriend help to maintain tension and make you eager to get off the ship. Despite the terror, there is a little humour, especially when you're on board an Ishimura tram when you're informed that the Necromorphs have breached the medical deck and you should be OK if you avoid it... at which point the tram breaks down and calmly states that you've arrived at the medical deck.

I mentioned that you never feel alone and the reason for this is because you are in constant voice contact (that's right, Isaac is not the weird mute he was from the first game) with other characters. These include the main aggressor, Hans Tiedemann, a sexy female called Ellie Langford and a crazed ex-patient called Nolan Stross. The voice acting is exceptional and really helps to move the story along with a sense of purpose and believability. It is, obviously, Isaac who is the main star of this story. The haunting visions of his dead girlfriend and his reactions to these along with his frustrations and ever-growing strengths help to add an extra depth to him. There are some uber cool moments including a few frantic zero-g combat episodes, a tense scene where you fight whilst hanging upside-down and finally a truly bollock-tingling moment where Isaac dodges space debris whilst flying before finally falling through a series of vents, crashing through a floor and executing a perfect landing.

The ending for the game was a little disappointing, both because of the ease in which it was completed and because it is the end of what is otherwise a truly awesome game. In fact, I would recommend seasoned Dead Space fans to play the whole game on the hard setting, simply because earlier levels are a little easy and there is an abundance of credits and ammo on the normal setting (until the later levels).

There is a multiplayer function for this game -- something which Dead Space didn't include --  however, I've not had the chance to play this portion of the game yet. As a fan of the story and the horror, I'm not expecting the multiplayer to be great, simply because these aspects are going to be taken away from the game and replaced with fast action and lots of shooting which has never been the reason I've played games of this genre.

All in all, Dead Space 2 carries on perfectly where its predecessor left off: continuing an awesome story, developing an awesome character and succeeding in making you jump out of your skin. Play with the sound turned up, the lights turned off, and a jumbo pack of adult nappies at the ready.