'Lemmy at 'em,' declares plane-spotter Darren
Snoop brings you more tales from the annals of Darren and finds anunusual twist in the Muppets manual.
The Darren Newnham saga continues. After dazzling the trade with his impressive impersonation of Motorhead's Lemmy at Ocean's retail party last month (see CRN 19 August) the HMV games buyer has stunned the industry once more by revealing his fathomless knowledge of aircraft. At a recent airborne industry jolly hosted by helicopter sim supremos Nova Logic, Darren amazed the EA sales team and assorted bods from the specialist press by identifying dozens of different planes. "I never realised there was so much to the man," said one observer. "No wonder he spends so much time playing flight sims." A full day of corporate hospitality however, inevitably took its toll. After taking off in a helicopter from Battersea, flying in a jet over Stonehenge, riding in a tank at considerable speeds around a race track and picking off clay pigeons with a shotgun (all washed down with considerable quantities of hooch), our Dazza was beginning to feel it. Snoop's sources say that on the way home in Nova's stretched limo Darren was seen waving hysterically out of the sun roof while throwing computer games at passing pedestrians.
"He did it out of respect," said a pal. "That's what Lemmy would have done."
In the last two weeks Snoop has heard more complaints about broken release dates and heavily discounted prices than ever before. A couple of years ago everyone was getting steamed up about the multiples breaking release dates and trashing prices on AAA carts like Donkey Kong Country. When the publisher complains, the multiples behave like naughty schoolboys caught writing rude things on the blackboard: they all point at each other and shout "Not me, Sir! He did it first." This time, with Quake, Z and Resident Evil, they've decided to gang up on Virgin Our Price and all point their fingers in the same direction. Probably they hope VOP will get a caning from the publishers. Not that any publisher is likely to take action against VOP of its own accord, after all, the publishers need the shelfspace in Megastores more than VOP needs their products to fill it. But what if the other big retailers decided to put pressure on the publishers to make VOP's life difficult? Perhaps Snoop is just inventing conspiracy theories, but more than one voice is muttering darkly that the knives are out for Virgin.
No-one reads manuals these days, least of all for multimedia software - except Snoop that is. So while thumbing through the manual for Activision's Muppets Treasure Island, he was interested to find on page 17 among a list of cursor symbols, a cursor which can be "used on treasure island to bonk pirates". That should cause a titter among the ten-year-olds.
Product placing is all the rage these days. In Golden Eye James Bond wore Churches' shoes and among his arsenal of gadgets from Q was an IBM Thinkpad. Similarly, in Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum does the biz with an Apple Powerbook. According to the film, the Powerbook is an extraordinary machine. In one scene Flybum uses his Powerbook to download a software virus to the host computer in the aliens' mothership. It's a huge gamble, but the future of the planet depends on it. The trusty Powerbook takes but a few seconds to find the right protocol and interface with the aliens' computer, and the virus works immediately. How fortunate the aliens use silicon-based binary machine code computers like the ones on earth. Anyone who has ever tried to connect two computers together, even two computers made by the same manufacturer in the same factory on the same day, will know what an unlikely scenario this is.
Computers are blamed for a lot. When the bank charges you twice for interest on your overdraft, the off-hand clerk who takes your call puts it down to computer error. Nothing can be as frightening as being robbed by a shotgun-toting thug, but it's the pony-tailed geek who hacks into a financial institute from his home computer who grabs the headlines. And porn takes on whole new dimensions of horror when it is electronically distributed on the internet rather than lurking on the top shelf of a newsagent. It's the involvement of the computer that grabs the imagination. Thus a humble notebook computer is playing the star role in a terrorist trial in New York.
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef stands accused of plotting to blow up a dozen US airliners flying between Asia and the US. The plans for the audacious plot are on the said portable PC, as is Yousef's voice, recorded by himself while cooing to his girlfriend down the telephone. But Yousef is no technologically bewitched dupe. He is also accused of being the brains behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and is conducting his own defence in what is being called by the press the case of the smoking laptop.
One person who won't be voting for new Labour at the next election is Dixons' chairman Sir Stanley Kalms, if his recent article in The Sun is anything to go by. In the article Sir Stan wades into a circular he has recently received from the office of Tony Blair aimed at allaying the fears of Britain's captains of industry should Phony Tony become Prime Minister. Funnily enough, Sir Stan is not convinced: "Behind the half-baked ideas of New Labour there lurks a programme which threatens our national prosperity just as seriously as the old-fashioned state socialism of the seventies."
Sir Stan is no fan of the EC's Social Chapter it would appear, which is odd, because Dixons is such a caring employer, a fact anyone who works there will testify to. "Of course all companies should treat staff decently," he says in the article. "But if they are forced to embrace a 'duty of care' they will end up as little more than social welfare agencies. It's not stakeholding, it's handholding."
Looks like the Conservative party can rely on Sir Stan's and Dixons' support for the foreseeable future.