Reviews from

in the past


extreme distaste for the british national anthem

๐“๐‡๐„ ๐ƒ๐„๐€๐ƒ ๐’๐๐„๐€๐Š! ๐€๐†๐€๐ˆ๐! ๐“๐ก๐ž ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ฅ๐ ๐ก๐š๐ฌ ๐ก๐ž๐š๐ซ๐ ๐š๐ง๐จ๐ญ๐ก๐ž๐ซ ๐ฆ๐ฒ๐ฌ๐ญ๐ž๐ซ๐ข๐จ๐ฎ๐ฌ ๐›๐ซ๐จ๐š๐๐œ๐š๐ฌ๐ญ, ๐š๐ง๐จ๐ญ๐ก๐ž๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐ซ๐ž๐š๐ญ ๐จ๐Ÿ ๐ซ๐ž๐ฏ๐ž๐ง๐ ๐ž ๐ข๐ง ๐ญ๐ก๐ž ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐ข๐ฌ๐ญ๐ž๐ซ ๐ฏ๐จ๐ข๐œ๐ž ๐จ๐Ÿ ๐ญ๐ก๐ž ๐ฅ๐š๐ญ๐ž, ๐ฅ๐š๐ญ๐ž ๐๐€๐‘๐Ž๐๐„๐’๐’ ๐Œ๐€๐‘๐†๐€๐‘๐„๐“ ๐“๐‡๐€๐“๐‚๐‡๐„๐‘.

๐…๐š๐œ๐ž๐ ๐ฐ๐ข๐ญ๐ก ๐ญ๐ก๐ž ๐ซ๐ž๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง ๐จ๐Ÿ ๐จ๐ง๐ž ๐จ๐Ÿ ๐ก๐ฎ๐ฆ๐š๐ง๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ'๐ฌ ๐ ๐ซ๐ž๐š๐ญ๐ž๐ฌ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ก๐ซ๐ž๐š๐ญ๐ฌ ๐Ÿ๐จ๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐ž ๐ฌ๐ž๐œ๐จ๐ง๐ ๐ฒ๐ž๐š๐ซ ๐ซ๐ฎ๐ง๐ง๐ข๐ง๐ , ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ ๐ก๐š๐ฏ๐ž ๐ง๐จ ๐œ๐ก๐จ๐ข๐œ๐ž ๐›๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ซ๐ž๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ง ๐ญ๐จ ๐“๐‡๐„ ๐“๐„๐๐“๐‡ ๐‚๐ˆ๐‘๐‚๐‹๐„ ๐Ž๐… ๐‡๐„๐‹๐‹:

๐“๐‡๐„ ๐”๐๐ˆ๐“๐„๐ƒ ๐Š๐ˆ๐๐†๐ƒ๐Ž๐Œ ๐Ž๐…
๐†๐‘๐„๐€๐“ ๐๐‘๐ˆ๐“๐€๐ˆ๐ ๐€๐๐ƒ ๐๐Ž๐‘๐“๐‡๐„๐‘๐ ๐ˆ๐‘๐„๐‹๐€๐๐ƒ

๐€๐ง๐ ๐ซ๐ž๐ข๐ง๐ฏ๐ž๐ฌ๐ญ๐ข๐ ๐š๐ญ๐ž ๐ญ๐ก๐ž ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐ž๐ซ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ฅ๐ ๐Ÿ๐จ๐ซ๐ญ๐ซ๐ž๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐ง๐จ๐ฐ ๐ค๐ง๐จ๐ฐ๐ง ๐š๐ฌ...

๐“๐‡๐€๐“๐‚๐‡๐„๐‘'๐’ ๐“๐„๐‚๐‡๐๐€๐’๐„: ๐€๐‘๐‚๐€๐ƒ๐„ ๐„๐ƒ๐ˆ๐“๐ˆ๐Ž๐

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September 24th, 2021: About an hour after THATCHER'S TECHBASE is shared with the world, I'm filled with an overwhelming urge to never think about it again. I go out for a pint of Tennent's Lager at the pub.

September 25th, 2021: Despite my best efforts to pretend I don't care at all, I spend most of the day fixing all the bugs people found in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. There are a lot of them, but I'm buoyed by the fact that there is something really funny about debugging a joke.

September 27th, 2021: A representative from Channel 4 calls me up and suggests that THATCHER'S TECHBASE be included as a challenge in a reboot of the classic British gameshow GamesMaster. The smart part of my brain that thinks it sounds like Channel 4 are looking for someone to do a bunch of free work for them in exchange for exposure is immediately overridden by the mental image of famous British people shooting Margaret Thatcher in the face on television. I agree to make some stuff for the show.

September 28th, 2021: I have a surprisingly terse conversation with someone on Twitter who tells me that the Thatcher's Graveyard section of THATCHER'S TECHBASE is not optimised for four-player co-op play and that I should consider redoing that entire section of the wad for all the people out there who are playing THATCHER'S TECHBASE in 4-player co-op. I swallow the surreality of the situation and give in to plain old spite by making some of the corridors in that section a little narrower, immediately pushing a v1.3 to production.

October 15th, 2021: Conservative MP David Amess is stabbed multiple times at a constituency meeting in Leigh-on-Sea and later dies at the scene from his injuries. Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old man, is arrested at the scene.

October 21st, 2021: Ali Harbi Ali is charged with murder and preparing terrorist acts.

October 22nd, 2021: Another representative from Channel 4 calls me up to say they are now considering whether THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a "right fit" for GamesMaster. They stop responding to emails shortly after.

November 1st, 2021: Putting faith in the great professional relationshop we had previously established, I apply for a ยฃ5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project, explaining my intention to make [REDACTED], a new game about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED].

November 3rd, 2021: My application for a ยฃ5000 creative funding grant from the Tennent's Lager Grassroots Arts & Culture Project is rejected for "cultural" reasons.

November 11th, 2021: During his day job as a community organiser in an assisted living facility, my dad finds out one of his elderly residents has watched the trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE via a Hillsborough Justice advocacy group on Facebook. This is the kinda shit that just makes me smile and feel glad that I went insane making a DOOM wad lol, idk

November 17th, 2021: EDGE publish their Christmas 2021 issue, which contains an article about THATCHER'S TECHBASE entitled "How Doom mod Thatcher's Techbase became the most talked-about videogame satire of 2021". Therein, I sheepishly admit that Tim Rogers baited me into making a DOOM wad by doing an incredibly affecting video about how great DOOM is and Tim responds in kind, closing the loop on a year-long project that was inspired by an off-hand YouTube comment. I am happy that I convinced Chris Schilling to print some of the Irish Republican Army's most famous attack lines in his computer game magazine.

December 5th, 2021: THATCHER'S TECHBASE finally appears on Channel 4's GamesMaster, much to my surprise. Because of the game's content, it is shown from very far away, blurred down to a small assemblage of black and white pixels that kinda look like maybe it was maybe Doomguy punching something for a second? Who knows. The Scottish professional wrestler Grado claims he killed Margaret Thatcher with a chainsaw, but players of THATCHER'S TECHBASE know that you can't use the chainsaw in THATCHER'S TECHBASE. The chainsaw has been replaced with a stream of piss.

December 7th, 2021: The GamesMaster reboot is cancelled after three episodes.

December 8th, 2021: Margaret Thatcher wins the coveted "Best Demon" award at Esquire magazine's 2021 Esquire Gaming Awards.

December 24th, 2021: Following three months of surprisingly involved legal back-and-forth with the law firm representing Tennent's Lager, the company finally acquieses to my nervous demands and donates ยฃ500 each to Stonewall UK, The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Realising they have no further legal obligation to reply to my emails, the company ignores my queries about donations for the other organisations on the THATCHER'S TECHBASE website.

January 1st, 2022: I start a new job; one that doesn't involve banking or banks or people having full-scale meltdowns about share prices.

March 18th, 2022: The Scottish government declares an end to all mandatory coronavirus measures across the country.

May 18th, 2022: After a long break from thinking about Margaret Thatcher, Hell and THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I return to the Tenth Circle of Hell once more when the wad is exhibited at the Southside Games Festival in Glasgow and I am invited to attend and do a Q&A panel. Expecting questions like "do you like doom lol" and "who is margaret thatcher??" I am completely utterly blindsided when actual, real, not-pretend game developers start asking me questions about political theory and its applications in game design. I don't remember the things I said because my brain was too busy suppressing the urge to piss and didn't have enough free CPU cycles to record memories, but I do know that one dude asked "So what's the deal with all the timewasting elevators?" and then nodded in a satisfied way when I told him I really liked that one part of The 25th Ward where you have to solve the toilet maze and knock on 100 apartment doors - the TECHBASE lifts are meant to be sort of like that. Thank you, Backloggd, for allowing me to get away with being a little bit pretentious in front of people who make real art games. To the guy who nodded - I know you totally have a Backloggd dude, drop the @ in the comments below.

July 7th, 2022: REUTERS, BREAKING (via CNN): "U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned Thursday, bringing an acrimonious end to a nearly three-year premiership that has been beset by controversy and scandal."

August 3rd, 2022: As part of his election campaign, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak promises that people who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Governmentโ€™s deradicalization "Prevent" programme.

August 18th, 2022: The build team from The World Transformed, a political festival that takes place at the same time as the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, ask me if they can turn THATCHER'S TECHBASE into an arcade machine that will support Living Rent, a Scottish tenants union who are struggling against record rent increases and ruthless landlord action.

August 19th, 2022: I try to explain to the build team from The World Transformed that a DOOM wad won't translate to a pleasant arcade cabinet experience, but my protests are finally suppressed by the part of my brain that is yelling "THEY ARE MAKING AN ARCADE MACHINE OF THE WAD YOU MADE". I give sincerely cheerful thumbs-ups when the design plans for the cabinet are waved in front of my eyes, irresistibly activating the huge clusters of "VIDEO GAME" neurons in my hippocampus.

August 20th, 2022: I get to work on making a version of THATCHER'S TECHBASE that's more suited for an arcade experience. This mostly involves unlocking all the doors and pumping the player full of ammo and milk.

August 28th, 2022: I realise that even Capcom puts a little bit more effort into their Arcade Editions than this, and decide to put out feelers for an artist who can help me add some new enemies to the game because I am not living through a coronavirus lockdown any more and cannot spend five hours a day dragging little blue suits onto cyberdemons. By pure luck, the guy who originally helped me make the CyberThatcher sprites - Rafael Batista de Lima - responds to my advert without even realising it's the same project, a moment of serendipity that I have no choice but to recognise as divine intervention from Satan himself.

August 30th, 2022: Keeping proud design traditions from the original game alive, I start dragging Thatcher wigs onto the Archvile and other baddies and share the designs with Rafael.

September 2nd, 2021: Upon finding out what the project is, a workshop in Liverpool offers to provide and work on materials for THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION free of charge. This, in essence, means that the game will be making a "net profit" for Living Rent from the moment it comes online.

September 5th, 2022: Liz Truss becomes prime minister of the Tenth Circle of Hell.

September 10th, 2022: Despite making a strong case for her inclusion, I ultimately reject the invitation from TWT to make Liz Truss one of the new enemies in THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION, fearing that someone may be pictured performing violence upon a standing Member of Parliament.

September 20th, 2022: Development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION.

September 22nd, 2022: Development work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is no longer completed, because my artist legend friend Rafael comes in clutch at the last minute with some more incredible sprites. The final art and polish is applied, and development work is completed on THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION. For real this time.

September 23rd, 2022: I arrive in Liverpool. After spending some time looking at things that have been built to look like The Beatles and having a few surprisingly cheap pints, I head to the community centre where The World Transformed is being hosted. A little buzzed, I enter the basement of TWT's venue for the weekend and see a giant vinyl sticker of the CyberThatcher lying on the floor in front of me; it's probably the beers, but I suddenly have to suppress the urge to be sick. I feel like I'm in a weird dream, sort-of-a David Lynch dream, one of those intense dreams where you're interacting with things that had only ever existed in your mind as if they were/are real, tangible actors in meatspace - playing tulpa Tetris with real bricks from on high, going ice-skating with Sonic the Hedgehog, getting freaky with some 32-bit polygonal video game hero you found sexy when you were thirteen... That sort of thing. It shouldn't exist, but there isn't much time to contemplate this concept further because suddenly I am knee-deep in adhesive paste and wood shavings, a Glaswegian dwarf at a forge of MDF and gorilla glue, trying to create a convincing simulacra of a machine that existed in a forgotten age so that I can put my political parody satire game-mod-wad thing inside it and ask people to pay money to piss on graves and fight the ghosts in the shell, those nasty little demon dudes wearing Margaret Thatcher wigs. I also end up painting protest signs and hanging lights somehow - can you believe they gave the drunk video game guy a hammer?! - while a local school teacher uses his arts & crafts kit to give the cabinet its beautiful finishing touches. At 1am or thereabouts, the owner of the venue insists we cease our demonic rituals and go home for the night. He is thoroughly creeped out by this B&Q obelisk.

September 24th, 2022: Having failed to actually install the computer and PCBs the night before, most of the morning is spent rotating source ports and virtual machines to try and get the split-screen experience going - to no convincing avail. While I'm in the middle of looking up the best ways to emulate a local DOOM multiplayer server, a woman asks me what the fuck I'm doing in the basement's basement, a little sweaty goblin tapping away on a giant arcade machine with Margaret Thatcher's face down the side of it. I try to explain my deeds in a number of ways, but she rightly cuts through the bullshit with a hot, shameful knife of "I don't have a clue what you're on about". The woman encourages me to K.I.S.S. and get something, anything out on the floor - especially if it's for a charity. About half an hour later, the experience has been simplified down to just the single player campaign, the second stick and buttons functioning as a cool little Geometry Wars/Steel Battallion/whatever dual-stick aiming system. I try explaining the absence of multiplayer and the new control scheme to people who try playing the game on the conference floor, but I'm quite rightly drowned out by people going "you can punch her? coooool" and "have you seen the shooting game where you can go into wetherspoons". I eventually stick an Xbox controller on the front of the arcade machine because there is no fucking way people are getting past the first area of THATCHER'S TECHBASE without being able to turn and shoot at the same time. It bothers me a lot less than I thought it would.

September 25th, 2022: Nothing of interest happens. I go do some sleep-deprived disassociating at a talk about a student doctor's plan to do post-colonial restructuring of the global pharmaceutical industry through "community action", and some more people play the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION cabinet, including a few old men who were in town for the Labour Party Conference. I go home and play with my cat for a bit.

September 26th, 2022: The Independent, a UK newspaper, publishes an article: "Jeremy Corbyn played a version of Doom that lets you 'kill Thatcher'". About an hour later, my phone is turned off and thrown into the back of my desk.

September 27th, 2022: I find out about Denis Through The Drinking Glass, a 1984 title for the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro where you play as Denis Thatcher and have to try and escape from Maggie's lair in No. 10 while maintaining a certain blood-alcohol level. I think it's kinda funny that despite hours of research on the original THATCHER'S TECHBASE, I never found this game. Life is crazy like that!

September 28th, 2022: I do an interview with a newspaper journalist where I'm just filled with this overwhelming urge to just, I dunno, keep apologising for how ridiculous every story I'm telling sounds. This can't actually have happened, can it?

September 29th, 2022: After doing some "ideological trolling" with a very tired and exasperated BBC intern, I sign over the rights for THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be used as material on Friday night's """political comedy""" panel shows in exchange for some private donations.

September 30th, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE appears on BBC 1 panel show Have I Got News For You, wherein British newspaper editor and satirist Ian Hislop compares CyberThatcher to the current prime minister, Liz Truss. On Twitter, I jokingly claim this is yet another example of the BBC's left-wing bias and a woman from Basingstoke sends me a DM to accuse me of being a traitor to the nation of Great Britain because I "only think about the 1%". Whoops!

October 1st, 2022: I discover that there is a mod for DOOM II called Pinochestein 3D. The final boss of the wad is a giant robotic Pinochet. I've never heard of this one before either. Pretty cool!

October 2nd, 2022: THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION is released to the general public.

October 3rd, 2022: Jeremy Corbyn plays THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION in Duke Nukem 3D mod Duke Smoochem 3D.

October 4th, 2022: Conceding to pressure from the Scottish Greens, Living Rent and other tenants' unions, the Scottish Government institutes an immediate rent freeze for six months and makes it illegal for tenants to be evicted during this time.

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There isn't much to say about THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION that isn't covered by the events above. If you've ever "finished" making something - an essay, a presentation, a drawing, a song, a game - you'll probably know the feeling of wanting as little to do with your work as possible once it's done. We all know the Picasso quote about paintings never being complete. It's not necessarily a feeling of shame or dislike for what you've created, but when you finally hit 'Save' on a _๐…๐ˆ๐๐€๐‹_๐…๐ˆ๐๐€๐‹_๐…๐ˆ๐๐€๐‹.๐ฉ๐ซ๐จ๐ฃ once and for all, there's always this sense of a weight being lifted - a job done, a book closed, an era's ending. A past confronted, hopefully, by your idea, and now captured in some media that lies external to your self.

As I spoke about in the original review for THATCHER'S TECHBASE, there was an overwhelming sense during this project that I'd kicked out a stone of a joke and caused it - sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally - to gather more and more moss of meaning, rolling downhill at such speed that I couldn't really contain it. By the end of 2021 I thought it was all finally, mercifully, over, but somehow the stone managed to roll back up a bigger hill and start the nightmare all over again, with me reluctantly chasing behind it.

The funny thing about THATCHER'S TECHBASE is that I spent a lot of the intervening year haunting myself with the ghost of its imperfections as a mechanical device. I was ultimately nonplussed by its crass political implications, and the gamer within bubbled over to fuss about gameplay. Dumb, I know; but for some reason, people messaging me about bugs, puzzle problems and balance fuckups concerned me far more than the people who wanted to report the WAD to the police for unthink. I spent a lot of time in my own head about such a trivial issue, grappling over whether I should go back and fix layouts and redo encounters and hand over more ammo to players who were SOL an hour into the WAD, my own little welfare state in the battle against Thatcher. Fortunately, a good friend of mine shook me back to reality by pointing out how fucking annoying it was when George Lucas went in and changed Han Solo shooting Greedo in the Star Wars movies. I didn't wanna be like Kanye West patching The Life of Pablo or some shit, did I? I'm glad I put the stupidity behind me and moved on with my life, leaving that Save button untouched for good, accepting that I'd made what I'd made.

... For a while, lol. Just when I thought I was out, they etc. etc. etc. Oh, go on then.

If there was something that was going to draw me back to THATCHER'S TECHBASE, it was always the chance to rectify the failures of the project that lay beyond just correcting linedefs and spawn triggers. While I was delighted that Tennent's Lager made good on their promise to donate money to charity in exchange for me compromising my perfectly legal right to express myself in a satirical work, I was still pissed off that they chose not to associate themselves with some of the more "contentious" organisations on my list. Partnering with Living Rent on ARCADE EDITION was the resurrection of a dying dream come true once more for a useless bohemian layabout like me, a spindly little computer guy who looks at tenant action movements and picket lines up and down the country and feels like he can't do jack shit but spectate and hold a placard up the back.

You read about what's going on in the world in newspapers and on Twitter; you see the results of government policy in your bills, your loans and the rising cost of milk and bread at the supermarket; somehow, it still feels abstract, remote, and far away. But actually going to a "hard left extremist fringe event" (per the Daily Mail article on THATCHER'S TECHBASE, September 26th, 2022) makes a lot of this evil become real to you in a sense it hasn't been before: You see people planning military-like operations to keep soup kitchens and food banks running; you see collections that will keep picket lines fed and watered for weeks at a time; you see people teaching other how to get out of handcuffs; and then you look over at the little MDF box with its game controller hanging over some Margaret Thatcher stickers and feel like you didn't really do jack shit but make jokes and crack wise about the end of the world. I was stewing in this feeling for a lot of that Saturday at The World Transformed, a combination of sleep deprivation and day-drinking becoming an ironic feeling of self-involvement at a festival of collective action. Oh poor me and my selfish little video game toy. What have I actually done here?

That night, however, I attended a rally in support of the striking dock workers in Liverpool, who were standing in the rain only a few miles down the road from the festival. Many hard-working people spoke passionately about their unfair treatment and burning desire to address the injustice of neoliberal wealth distribution, but there was one speech in particular that has stuck to my mind. A union leader from the Port of Baltimore told the crowd about the 2013 longshore workers strike, and how the 2000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association had stepped up across the world to defend the rights of their friends in the United States by threatening strikes and collective action of their own, no matter how small or large the organisation - including the men and women who were now picketing the Liverpool Docks at this very moment. He spoke of a lodge banner that's brought out for special occasions like these. Itโ€™s almost a hundred years old. A simple symbol - two hands, joined together in a union. Thatโ€™s what the labour movement means. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Whatever you can do. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.

If youโ€™re one of the people whoโ€™s supported us by putting money into buckets - the literal one lurking within the innards of THATCHER'S TECHBASE: ARCADE EDITION's flimsy wooden hide, the virtual one at the other end of the QR code on its display panel, or in the real/virtual buckets of any other charity that's come to your attention because of the wad - thank you. Because what youโ€™ve given the people who made THATCHER'S TECHBASE is more than money. Itโ€™s friendship. And when youโ€™re in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy - like the CyberThatcher and her minions - who is so much bigger, so much stronger than you... Well, to find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - itโ€™s the best thing in the world. So thank you. ๐Ÿ™‚