Supazaar!

Author: Sophie Davis

  • The Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously Accurate British Weather Systems

    The Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously Accurate British Weather Systems

    There is a particular kind of psychological damage that comes from growing up in Britain and learning, slowly and painfully, that summer is a myth. A rumour. A loose social agreement that gets cancelled around the 9th of July every year without apology. I’ve lived it. You’ve lived it. And increasingly, I’ve started noticing that certain video games have also lived it, which is either a sign of extraordinary environmental simulation or a sign that the developers spent a working holiday in Skegness and never fully recovered.

    British weather in video games is, weirdly, becoming more accurate than the Met Office forecast. So I ranked them. Obviously.

    British weather in video games illustrated as a comic book rainstorm over open world countryside
    Photo by Tomás Asurmendi on Pexels

    Red Dead Redemption 2, the Scottish Highlands in disguise

    Rockstar’s masterpiece of misery simulation is, at its heart, a game about sitting on a horse in horizontal rain wondering what you did wrong. The weather in RDR2 is relentless, unpredictable, and deeply personal. You’ll have one glorious hour of golden light in the Heartlands, genuinely think things are looking up, and then a thunderstorm will roll in from nowhere and drench you for the next three in-game days. Arthur Morgan catches a cold. You feel it in your soul.

    The region it most resembles: the Cairngorms in October. That specific combination of breathtaking scenery and the constant nagging suspicion that you should have brought a proper waterproof. Rockstar didn’t set out to simulate a Scottish bank holiday weekend, but here we are.

    The Witcher 3, Northumberland with added bog monsters

    Velen, the central region of The Witcher 3, is a swamp. A permanent, grey, drizzling, soul-crushing swamp that somehow keeps producing more mud no matter how long you’ve been there. The sky is the colour of a wet sock. The rain is horizontal and fine, the kind that soaks you before you’ve registered it’s started. Geralt spends most of his time looking mildly damp and deeply unamused, which is the correct facial expression for anyone attempting an outdoor activity in Northumberland between September and April.

    The game’s dynamic weather does something particularly British: it lets the sun come out just long enough for you to think the worst is over, and then absolutely buckles down again. I’ve experienced this exact sequence at a music festival in Yorkshire. Multiple times. Voluntarily.

    Ghost of Tsushima, Cornwall in August, unpredictably

    Ghost of Tsushima gets a slightly different kind of British weather credit. Its weather system swings between cinematically gorgeous golden sunshine and sudden, violent storms in a way that closely mirrors a Cornish August. For about forty minutes you’re lying in a flower field thinking this is the best holiday you’ve ever had. Then the wind picks up, something flies off the roof of a farmhouse, and a weather warning pops up on your phone.

    The game’s storms are dramatic and short-lived. The calm returns quickly. Hope is reborn. Then it rains again. Classic Cornwall. I love Cornwall. I also own seven waterproof jackets, which is perhaps related.

    British weather in video games shown as a moody comic-style city scene in perpetual rain
    Photo by ArtHouse Studio on Pexels

    Forza Horizon 4, actually set in Britain, and still somehow less wet than the real thing

    Forza Horizon 4 is, of course, explicitly set in a fictionalised Britain, cycling through four distinct seasons in a way that is simultaneously the most and least realistic portrayal of British weather in gaming history. The autumn looks gorgeous. The winter has actual snow, which arrives reliably, which is already pure fantasy for anyone south of Edinburgh. The summer is sunny and warm for an extended period. Weeks, even.

    This is where realism breaks down. In reality, the Horizon festival would take place during a fortnight where the temperature barely clears 16°C, the music stage gets struck by lightning, and someone’s tent is found in the next county. Playground Games had the courage to simulate Britain but not, apparently, to simulate Britain. I respect the creative decision. I also know it’s a lie.

    That said, the game does nail the specific British experience of watching brilliant sunshine arrive and immediately wondering when it’ll end. Every sunny day in FH4 feels slightly borrowed. You drive fast because you know it won’t last. That part is very accurate.

    Cyberpunk 2077, Manchester in a neon dystopia

    Night City rains constantly. Not dramatically, not cinematically (well, sometimes cinematically), but persistently. There’s always a low grey sky or a slick wet street or the sound of rain hammering corrugated metal somewhere above V’s head. The city never fully dries out. You can go hours without seeing actual sun. The neon reflects off puddles in that specific way that makes everywhere look both beautiful and deeply depressing simultaneously.

    This is Manchester. This is absolutely Manchester. Specifically the Northern Quarter in November, around 5pm, when it’s already dark and raining and you’re trying to decide if the pub is worth the sprint. The answer, in Manchester as in Night City, is always yes.

    The Met Office’s own data on UK rainfall patterns would make a great tutorial screen for any of these games, honestly. Hours of rain, typical onset time, probability of a brief sunny window just to mess with you.

    Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Norfolk, but with better longships

    Ubisoft’s Viking epic actually spent considerable effort recreating Dark Ages Britain, and the weather reflects it. Mercia and East Anglia in Valhalla have a particular flat, grey, windswept quality that I find deeply familiar. The skies are huge and threatening. The light, when it comes, is that specific pale English gold that makes everything look slightly melancholy even on a nice day.

    Norfolk in January. That’s what it is. Big sky, cold wind off the sea, the occasional dramatic cloud formation that would make a great desktop wallpaper if you weren’t standing under it. Eivor strides through it looking purposeful. Real Norfolk residents stride through it looking purposeful too, because the alternative is standing still in horizontal rain, and nobody wants that.

    Which game actually wins for British weather accuracy?

    If I’m being honest, Red Dead Redemption 2 takes it. The combination of false hope, sudden deterioration, and the way poor weather actively affects your character’s wellbeing captures something true about the British experience of existing outdoors. It’s the only game I’ve played where the weather made me genuinely reconsider my plans, which is something British weather does to me roughly every other weekend from October through June.

    The broader point is that dynamic weather in open world games has quietly become one of the most interesting design spaces in the industry. Done well, it changes how you play, where you go, and even how you feel. Done poorly, it’s just decorative rain that doesn’t actually touch you. Britain has taught me the difference, and I’m grateful for it, even if I remain damp.

    Fans of games with suspiciously British atmospheric conditions might also enjoy our look at open world games with the most suspiciously British town planning decisions, or our deep dive into the worst video game maps for navigation if you only had a tatty AA Road Atlas. Both are extremely relevant to the experience of being British and confused outdoors.

    One last thing. If you’re watching any of these games on a telly that cuts out every time a cloud rolls in, you might want to have a word with whoever installed your TV Aerials setup. Weather affects more than just open world immersion, it turns out.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Which open world game has the most realistic weather system?

    Red Dead Redemption 2 is widely regarded as having one of the most detailed dynamic weather systems in gaming, with storms, fog, snow, and temperature changes that genuinely affect gameplay and character wellbeing. For sheer persistence of miserable drizzle, it’s hard to beat.

    Do video game weather systems actually affect gameplay or are they just visual?

    In the better ones, weather genuinely changes things. In RDR2, rain affects NPC behaviour and Arthur’s health. In The Witcher 3, certain enemies are stronger in specific weather. Forza Horizon 4 built its entire seasonal structure around weather-driven gameplay changes.

    Is Forza Horizon 4 actually set in the UK?

    Yes, Forza Horizon 4 is set in a fictionalised Britain, featuring locations inspired by the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, and the Cotswolds. The seasonal weather cycle is based on British seasons, though it takes considerable creative licence with how pleasant those seasons actually are.

    What makes British weather so hard to simulate accurately in games?

    British weather is notoriously unpredictable and hyperlocal, meaning two places twenty miles apart can experience completely different conditions simultaneously. Most game weather engines work on region-wide systems, so they can capture the general misery but not the specific injustice of sunshine ending at 3pm on a Sunday.

  • Video Game Characters Who Would Be Immediately Flagged by Ofcom If They Had Their Own UK Chat Show

    Video Game Characters Who Would Be Immediately Flagged by Ofcom If They Had Their Own UK Chat Show

    Somewhere, in a parallel universe slightly worse than this one, ITV’s commissioning team had a very bad afternoon. A producer said “what if we gave a primetime chat show slot to a video game character?” and nobody in the room said no. I’ve spent a genuinely unreasonable amount of time thinking about how this would unfold, and I’m here to tell you: Ofcom’s complaints inbox would melt within the first ad break. We’re talking full server failure. Engineers weeping into their keyboards. The kind of broadcast carnage that makes the 2004 Eurovision scoreboard drama look like a pleasant evening.

    Funny video game characters UK TV chat show illustrated in bold comic book style with villain in armchair under studio lights
    Photo by James Collington on Pexels

    These are the funny video game characters UK TV could absolutely never contain, and a rough estimate of how many Ofcom complaints each would generate before the closing credits.

    Duke Nukem: the host who makes Jonathan Ross look restrained

    Picture the set. A plush sofa, two mugs of tea, soft lighting. Duke Nukem walks out in a leather jacket, sunglasses on indoors, biceps that wouldn’t fit through the studio door without a risk assessment. The audience applauds. Duke grabs the microphone and says something that cannot be repeated on a family blog at any hour. The floor manager faints. The guest, presumably someone from a BBC period drama who was not briefed properly, quietly puts their mug down and considers their career choices.

    Duke’s entire personality is built around a very specific brand of 1990s excess that was already pushing limits in a video game where the rating system existed to warn you. On live television, pre-watershed, on a Tuesday? We’d be looking at a minimum of 40,000 Ofcom complaints within 48 hours. For context, Ofcom’s published complaint reports show that genuinely shocking broadcast moments generate five-figure complaint volumes pretty reliably. Duke would sail past that before his first guest arrived. His chat show would single-handedly justify Ofcom’s entire annual operating budget.

    Kratos: technically great television, catastrophic for the watershed

    Here’s where it gets interesting. Kratos, former God of War, current dad of the year in Scandinavian mythology, would actually be a compelling interview. The man has a genuine story. Tragedy, loss, rage, redemption, complicated fatherhood. You could build a serious 90-minute documentary around him. Graham Norton would be jealous.

    The problem is Kratos doesn’t do small talk. He doesn’t do pleasant segues. When a guest overstays their welcome on his sofa, he solves problems physically. When a commercial sponsor’s branding appears on a giant screen behind him, he looks at it with the same expression he reserves for minor deities before everything goes very wrong. The autocue would last approximately four minutes before he decided it was mocking him. I’d watch every second of it, but ITV’s legal team would need a lie-down.

    The complaints wouldn’t even be about language or violence specifically. People would write to Ofcom simply because they found Kratos’s silences threatening. “He just looked at Dermot O’Leary and I felt personally intimidated” is not a sentence Ofcom has a formal category for, but they’d need to create one.

    Handsome Jack: the one who’d actually thrive, which is the most disturbing outcome

    Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 is, genuinely, the video game villain I think about most when someone mentions charisma. He’s funny. He’s quick. He dresses well. He’d walk onto that set, make three brilliant jokes, charm the audience completely, and then say something that reveals he considers the entire studio audience to be beneath him in a way that’s simultaneously hilarious and deeply sinister. The crowd would laugh, unsure if they should.

    This is the one that would cause the most interesting Ofcom complaints. Not outrage. Confusion. “He seemed lovely but I left feeling vaguely threatened and I’m not sure he’s a good role model” is genuinely harder for a regulator to action than straightforward bad language. Jack would interview three celebrities, deliver what on paper reads as perfectly acceptable television, and somehow leave everyone feeling complicit in something. The Broadcasting Code doesn’t have a clause for “made the audience feel morally queasy through sheer charm”, but Handsome Jack would force them to write one.

    This reminds me a bit of how certain sci-fi technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators, sometimes the problem isn’t that something is obviously dangerous, it’s that the existing rules weren’t written with this specific flavour of chaos in mind.

    GLaDOS: the chat show host Ofcom technically cannot complain about

    GLaDOS from Portal is where I’d put my money for the wildest outcome. She’d be the most composed host on this list. Impeccable diction. No swearing. No violence. Polished, calm, structured. The Broadcasting Code would find absolutely nothing to action.

    She would simply spend 60 minutes conducting interviews with the quiet certainty that every guest is a disappointment to science and that the audience is only permitted to exist because removing them would require paperwork. Every compliment she gives a guest would be technically a compliment. Every observation would be accurate. The episode would be entirely Ofcom-compliant and yet somehow the most psychologically unsettling hour of television ever broadcast. Celebrities would leave the sofa looking like they’d just survived a performance review. The audience would applaud because they were too scared not to.

    Bowser: surprisingly good, actually, if ITV could afford the set repairs

    Look, Bowser runs a kingdom. He’s organised diplomatic (if hostile) relations with the Mushroom Kingdom for decades. He’s a single parent. He has opinions. Give Bowser a proper show and I think you’d get something genuinely watchable, somewhere between a political interview programme and a nature documentary about a very large and surprisingly emotional dinosaur-turtle. The structural damage to the studio would be significant, but the content itself would be fine.

    Ofcom’s problem would be purely logistical. Their standards around set safety, fire regulations, and duty of care to studio audiences were not written with a 7-foot fire-breathing antagonist in mind. Much like how the planning permission system would genuinely collapse under video game world logic, Bowser’s presence would expose a gap in broadcast health and safety legislation that nobody knew existed until now.

    The Ofcom complaints department, after all this

    I’d like to spare a thought for the actual humans who work in Ofcom’s broadcast complaints team. They already process tens of thousands of complaints a year from shows that are, by comparison, extremely normal television. They handle genuine viewer distress with care and professionalism. If any of the above were broadcast, the complaints would be so varied, so tonally all over the place, and so difficult to categorise that the department would need a separate intake system specifically for “this wasn’t technically illegal but something was definitely wrong”.

    On the bright side, it would make for fantastic reading. Much like those comic book story arcs that nobody can fully untangle, the Ofcom report on a GLaDOS chat show special would be genuinely more entertaining than most things actually on television. Put that in your primetime schedule, ITV. I’d watch it.

  • Comic Book Story Arcs So Convoluted Even a Martin Lewis Money-Saving Expert Deep-Dive Couldn’t Untangle Them

    Comic Book Story Arcs So Convoluted Even a Martin Lewis Money-Saving Expert Deep-Dive Couldn’t Untangle Them

    You know that feeling when you open a letter from your energy supplier, start reading, and by paragraph three you’re genuinely unsure whether you owe them money or they owe you money, and by paragraph five you’ve lost the will to live entirely? That’s what it feels like to pick up a Marvel or DC crossover event for the first time. Except instead of Ofgem-regulated confusion, you’re dealing with forty years of retroactive continuity, parallel Earths, and a clone who may or may not also be the original. I’ve been reading comics since I was about nine years old. I still don’t fully understand the Clone Saga, and I’ve had roughly three decades to figure it out.

    These are the confusing comic book storylines explained as best they possibly can be, framed as the kind of small-print decoding exercise that only a very patient, very caffeinated British consumer champion would attempt. Think less “summer blockbuster” and more “terms and conditions you actually have to read before clicking accept.”

    Towering stack of comic books representing confusing comic book storylines explained UK-style
    Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Pexels

    The Clone Saga: like a mobile phone contract with seventeen hidden fees

    The Clone Saga ran in Spider-Man comics from roughly 1994 to 1996, though “ran” undersells how much it sprawled. It was originally conceived as a tight story. Six issues, maybe. Clean. Done. What Marvel actually published was closer to two years of monthly comics across multiple titles, all of which you theoretically needed to read in order, crossing over between Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and several one-shots with names like Web of Carnage that sound like rejected Call of Duty DLC.

    The core premise: Peter Parker might be a clone. The man we’ve been reading about for years might be Ben Reilly, a genetic duplicate who has been living in exile. The real Peter might have been living in a bin somewhere. This is either a bold, fascinating identity crisis or an absolute affront to thirty years of storytelling, depending entirely on which trade paperback you happen to have read first. Marvel editorial changed their minds about which version of events was “true” approximately four times mid-publication. Reading it in sequence feels like watching a film where the director’s cut, the theatrical cut, and the version your mate recorded off Channel 4 in 1998 have all been spliced together at random.

    A Martin Lewis-style breakdown of the Clone Saga would need a supplementary PDF, a follow-up video, and probably a dedicated helpline. Even then, the interest rate on your confusion would compound weekly.

    Infinite Crisis: Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, and your brain leaving the building

    DC’s 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths was specifically designed to simplify DC’s continuity, which had become a patchwork of contradictory parallel universes. The solution was elegant in theory: collapse the multiverse into one Earth. Clean slate. Simple.

    Twenty years later, DC published Infinite Crisis, a sequel event premised on the fact that the original Crisis had created so much new continuity that things were confusing again. So they held another crossover to fix it. Then, three years after that, they published Final Crisis. Then Flashpoint. Then The New 52. Then Convergence. Then Rebirth. Then Infinite Frontier. Each one promised to simplify what came before. Each one added approximately seventeen new complications.

    Reading Infinite Crisis without prior knowledge of DC history is like trying to use the NHS online appointment system having never registered with a GP. You click what seems like the right link. You’re taken somewhere unexpected. You try another link. A form asks for information you don’t have. You close the tab and ring up. Nobody answers. By the time you understand what Superboy-Prime punching reality actually means in narrative terms, you have aged noticeably.

    The crossover also required readers to buy tie-in miniseries called Day of Vengeance, Rann-Thanagar War, Villains United, and The OMAC Project to fully understand what was happening in the main book. That’s four separate ongoing purchases just to follow a single storyline. My local newsagent in the mid-2000s genuinely didn’t stock half of them. I filled in the gaps by reading plot summaries on a forum whose design language suggested it had last been updated in 2003.

    Secret Wars 2015: everything everywhere all at once, but British readers found out six months late

    Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars is, to be fair, a genuinely excellent piece of comics writing. I say that upfront because what follows might sound like a complaint, and it’s really more of an awed bewilderment. To understand Secret Wars, you need to have read Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers runs, which ran for roughly three years and set up a concept called the Illuminati secretly destroying alternate Earths to prevent a universal collapse. Both series were dense, slow-burn, and referenced concepts from his earlier SHIELD miniseries, which itself referenced historical figures in ways that made secondary school history feel surprisingly relevant.

    Then Secret Wars proper collapsed the entire Marvel multiverse into one planet called Battleworld, divided into regions governed by alternate versions of established characters, and told about eight simultaneous storylines across thirty-plus tie-in series. The main series was also delayed repeatedly, so the tie-ins concluded before the main book did, leaving readers knowing the ending of the story whilst still waiting to read it. Imagine watching the last episode of a drama before episodes three through six have aired. That was Secret Wars. Navigating it felt about as intuitive as trying to find your way around a video game map with only a tatty road atlas for company.

    Why does this keep happening and why do we keep buying it

    Here’s the thing that nobody in comics publishing likes to say out loud: crossover events exist partly to sell more comics. Not entirely. Some of them genuinely contain brilliant work. But the structure, the “you need sixteen issues of four other series to understand this” architecture, is very much a commercial model dressed up as storytelling ambition.

    According to the Comics Professionals Guild, the UK comics retail market has contracted significantly since the 1990s peak, with specialist shops bearing most of the weight of maintaining an audience for ongoing serialised fiction. Those shops, and the readers who support them, deserve storylines they can actually follow without a wall chart and a free afternoon.

    And yet. I’ve read all of these. Multiple times, some of them. Because buried inside even the most labyrinthine crossover is usually something genuinely thrilling. A single issue of the Clone Saga, the one where Peter and Ben just sit on a rooftop and talk about identity, is lovely. One chapter of Infinite Crisis, where the original Superman from Earth-2 confronts modern DC’s compromises, is properly moving. These stories go dark in ways that would feel right at home in a Sunday night BBC drama, which is both their greatest strength and the reason they need a seventeen-step reading guide to access.

    A genuinely helpful (sort of) reading order for the uninitiated

    If you want to read any of these without losing your mind entirely, here’s my actual advice. For the Clone Saga: read the Spider-Man: The Complete Clone Saga Epic trade paperbacks in order, accept that issues 1 to 3 and then 7 to 9 contradict each other, and treat the whole thing like an unreliable narrator situation. For Infinite Crisis: read the OMAC Project tie-in first, then the main series, then pretend the Superboy-Prime scenes are a separate short story. For Secret Wars 2015: read Hickman’s Avengers run first, then New Avengers, then the main Secret Wars series, and only dip into the tie-ins if a specific one gets recommended by someone you trust.

    None of this is as complicated as it sounds once you’re actually in it. Comics, like open world games with suspiciously British town planning, reward patience and curiosity. The layout only makes sense once you’ve wandered around in it long enough to find the shortcuts. And honestly? Even the confusing bits are usually more fun than they have any right to be.

    Martin Lewis would absolutely produce a comparison table. He’d probably rate Secret Wars 2015 as Best Value, penalise the Clone Saga for hidden costs, and give Infinite Crisis a warning for excessive small print. He wouldn’t be wrong on any count.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Clone Saga and why is it so confusing?

    The Clone Saga was a Spider-Man crossover event that ran from 1994 to 1996, spanning multiple monthly titles simultaneously. It became confusing because Marvel editorial changed the intended ending several times mid-publication, meaning plot points contradicted each other across issues. The best way to approach it is via the collected trade paperbacks rather than individual issues.

    Do I need to read every tie-in comic to understand Infinite Crisis?

    Ideally yes, but realistically no. The four main tie-in miniseries (The OMAC Project, Villains United, Day of Vengeance, and Rann-Thanagar War) add context, but the core story in the main Infinite Crisis series can be followed without them. The OMAC Project is the most essential if you’re only picking one.

    What reading order should I follow for Secret Wars 2015?

    Start with Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers (2012) and New Avengers (2013) runs, which set up the Incursions storyline that Secret Wars resolves. Then read the main Secret Wars series. Most tie-in miniseries are self-contained and optional, though series like Thors and Weirdworld are worth it if you enjoy the setting.

  • Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously British Town Planning Decisions

    Open World Games With the Most Suspiciously British Town Planning Decisions

    There is a very specific kind of chaos that only British town planning can produce. A roundabout that feeds into another roundabout. A pedestrian crossing that deposits you onto a traffic island with nowhere to go. A Greggs. And then, roughly twelve paces away, another Greggs. If you’ve ever stood in a British town centre genuinely baffled by where any road actually leads, you will recognise something familiar in a surprising number of open world games. Developers spend years crafting vast digital cities, and somehow, open world game city design keeps arriving at the same conclusions as a sleep-deprived planning committee in Wolverhampton circa 1987.

    Comic book aerial view of a chaotic open world game city design with British town planning features

    Why Do So Many Game Cities Feel Like Milton Keynes Designed Them?

    Milton Keynes gets a lot of stick, and most of it is deserved. Grid systems that look logical on paper but feel genuinely nightmarish to navigate on foot. Roads that loop back on themselves. Roundabouts as far as the eye can see. The thing is, Milton Keynes at least had a plan. The cities in a lot of open world games appear to have been built by someone who started with great ambition, got distracted mid-way through, and then said “that’ll do” before clocking off for a four-day weekend.

    Take Cyberpunk 2077. Night City is visually extraordinary, genuinely stunning in places, and utterly impenetrable by any logical means. Roads end without warning. Motorway on-ramps appear, then simply stop. There are multi-storey car parks that you can drive into but cannot drive out of without reversing up a staircase. Replace the neon holograms with a Betfred and a shuttered Debenhams, and you’ve basically got Sheffield city centre during a road resurfacing project.

    Grand Theft Auto and the Sacred British One-Way System

    The GTA series has always had an oddly British relationship with road logic. Liberty City in GTA IV had entire boroughs you’d circle for twenty minutes before realising the exit you needed was a tiny gap between two bins round the back of a car park. That is not artistic invention. That is Swindon. GTA V’s Los Santos is more open, but the highway systems around the city’s outskirts have a particular quality: they technically connect everything, yet the fastest route to anywhere is somehow always three miles longer than it looks on the map.

    British motorway junctions operate on the same principle. The M25 junction at Heathrow doesn’t want you to get to Heathrow quickly. It wants you to spend forty minutes in a spiral of lanes that all seem correct until they suddenly aren’t. Rockstar, consciously or not, has absorbed this energy completely.

    Comic book street scene showing open world game city design with two identical shops and a useless pedestrian crossing

    The Greggs Placement Problem (A Formal Investigation)

    Any serious analysis of open world game city design has to confront the Greggs problem. In real British high streets, Greggs locations follow a logic that defies conventional retail theory. According to data compiled by various food industry analysts, the UK now has over 2,500 Greggs branches. Several of these are within eyeline of each other. This is not a bug in British commercial planning. It is a deeply intentional feature, presumably based on research that concluded the British public cannot walk more than 400 metres without requiring a sausage roll.

    Games replicate this accidentally. In Sleeping Dogs, set in Hong Kong, there are noodle stalls on virtually every corner. In Watch Dogs Legion, set in a fictionalised London, there are pubs, convenience shops, and food vendors clustered in ways that feel almost too accurate. At one point I found three separate cafes within a single block in Shoreditch, which, honestly, is underselling it. The real Shoreditch has approximately one coffee shop per square metre, and the other half of the buildings are either a barber or a venue for something described vaguely as a “pop-up experience”.

    Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Spiritual Heart of British Road Planning

    Bear with me on this one. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in the American frontier in the late 1800s. And yet the paths through its wilderness feel profoundly, almost cosmically, British. Trails that start confidently and then become a suggestion. Paths that look like they lead somewhere and turn out to be a dead end near a swamp. Fords that only reveal themselves to be impassable once you’re already in them.

    This is, essentially, rural Shropshire. You set out from a village with confidence, follow a footpath that your OS map swears is correct, and forty minutes later you are standing in a field with a confused horse and no mobile signal. Rockstar has captured British rural navigation so precisely that I half expected Arthur Morgan to find a sign pointing simultaneously to two different villages both called “Lower Something” with no indication of which direction is which.

    Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Got Victorian London Exactly Right (And That’s a Problem)

    Of all the games that nail open world game city design with a British sensibility, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate deserves special recognition for accuracy that is almost painful. Victorian London was a city built in layers over centuries, with medieval street patterns awkwardly wedged under Georgian expansion, then slapped with Victorian industry, then patched up after the Blitz. The result was a city where no two roads meet at a sensible angle and virtually every junction has at least five exits.

    Syndicate replicates this with eerie precision. The map looks coherent from above and makes zero sense at street level. There are districts you can see clearly from a rooftop that take fifteen minutes to reach because of the Thames, a railway viaduct, and what appears to be a wall someone built for no reason. This is historically accurate. The real Thames still does this to people every single day, and Transport for London’s journey planner has the audacity to call it efficient.

    The Future of Chaotic Urban Design in Games

    As game worlds grow larger and more detailed, developers face a genuine tension. Perfectly logical city layouts feel sterile and fake. Too much chaos and players spend forty minutes trying to find a car park exit. The sweet spot, it turns out, is exactly the level of mild dysfunction that characterises a medium-sized British town. Not quite a disaster, not quite working properly either. The kind of city where the pedestrian crossing takes ninety seconds to change, the bus shelter has no timetable, and the one-way system was last reviewed in 1994.

    There’s a strange cottage industry growing around games that deliberately lean into this. Indie titles, city builders, transport simulators. Games that let you be the council planner dropping a roundabout somewhere wildly inconvenient and walking away pleased with yourself. Honestly, if you want to understand why these games feel so lived-in, consider the urban planning decisions behind them the same way you’d consider the branding decisions behind a wellness business. Even something as niche as cbd web design requires thought about layout, flow, and where you put the exits. Games, it turns out, are exactly the same.

    The best open world cities are messy, contradictory, and occasionally maddening. Just like the real ones. And that, more than anything, is why they feel so convincingly British.

    Honourable Mentions: Games That Deserve Formal Planning Complaints

    • Death Stranding, The entire country is one giant public right of way dispute.
    • Elden Ring, The Lands Between has no pavements, no signage, and something has clearly been built on a floodplain.
    • Cities: Skylines, You built this city. You have no one to blame. And yet somehow there are traffic jams on every road.
    • The Witcher 3, Novigrad’s market district has the energy of a town centre that recently pedestrianised its high street but forgot to tell the delivery lorries.

    Every one of these digital spaces scratches that very specific itch: the satisfaction of navigating something chaotic, succeeding despite the layout, and feeling obscurely proud of yourself for finding the way out. British town centres have been providing that experience for centuries. Open world games are just finally catching up.

  • The Worst Video Game Maps for Navigation If You Only Had a Tatty AA Road Atlas

    The Worst Video Game Maps for Navigation If You Only Had a Tatty AA Road Atlas

    Picture the scene. You’ve grabbed a crumpled AA Road Atlas from the rack beside the Lucozade at your local Tesco petrol station forecourt. It cost £3.99, was last updated in 2007, and has a coffee ring on the Midlands section. Now imagine using that as your sole navigational tool across the most notoriously labyrinthine video game worlds ever designed. No HUD. No waypoints. No minimap in the corner. Just you, a spiral-bound book of British B-roads, and a growing sense of existential dread. These are the worst video game maps navigation situations you could possibly find yourself in, ranked for chaos, comedy, and genuine psychological damage.

    Comic book illustration of worst video game maps navigation confusion with AA road atlas in Dark Souls setting

    Dark Souls – Lordran: Where Roads Go to Die

    Lordran is not a place. It’s a riddle wrapped inside a curse wrapped inside a fog gate. The geography of Dark Souls is famously interconnected in ways that make absolutely no sense until your third playthrough, when you suddenly realise Blighttown is basically underneath everything else like a festering basement nobody wanted. Trying to navigate this with an AA atlas is a bit like trying to find the M6 by reading a menu from a Wetherspoons. Technically both are documents. Neither will help you here.

    The AA atlas does roads. Lordran does not do roads. Lordran does crumbling ledges, bonfires with no postcode, and shortcuts that only reveal themselves after you’ve fallen off a cliff forty times. The only useful parallel is that both the atlas and Lordran will make you feel genuinely lost in ways that seem personal. Chaos score: 9/10. You will cry. The atlas will not.

    Morrowind – Vvardenfell: Here Is a Vague Direction and Some Vibes

    Morrowind is, historically, the game most likely to hand you a quest and then just say “head north-northeast from Balmora, through the mountains, past a suspicious egg mine, you’ll smell it eventually.” This is basically the same energy as a handwritten note from someone’s nan that says “turn left at the big tree.” Charming. Completely useless.

    The AA atlas at least has an index. Morrowind’s in-game paper map has artwork and atmosphere but communicates approximately nothing about actual scale, terrain gradient, or the fact that the Grazelands look identical in every direction. Stick pins in the atlas randomly and you’d have roughly the same success rate as following a Mages Guild questline. Chaos score: 10/10. Iconic, beautiful, utterly incompatible with navigation as a concept.

    Just Cause 3 – Medici: Big Island, Zero Reason to Be There

    Just Cause 3 gives you an enormous map of a fictional Mediterranean island and then fills it with military bases, fuel depots, and chaos opportunities every forty metres. Navigation is largely irrelevant because Rico Rodriguez has a grappling hook, a wingsuit, and an attitude problem. You don’t navigate Just Cause 3. You explode towards things and hope for the best.

    The AA atlas would be magnificently useless here. It doesn’t cover Medici. It doesn’t cover any fictional islands off the coast of Italy. The closest it gets is probably a ferry terminal in Portsmouth. You’d spend the first twenty minutes cross-referencing coastal roads near Dorset before accepting the truth: this game was never going to cooperate. Chaos score: 7/10. Mayhem makes navigation moot, but the atlas still fails with flair.

    GTA San Andreas – San Andreas State: A Motorway Problem

    San Andreas has three cities, a desert, mountains, farmland, and a stretch of countryside that functions exactly like the bit of the A303 near Stonehenge where you’re not sure if you’ve missed a junction. The scale is vast. The road network is surprisingly coherent. And yet, the AA atlas is still a disaster here, because San Andreas roads don’t correspond to any known A-road naming convention and the atlas has a confident section on the M25 that does not apply.

    There’s a particular cruelty in the fact that San Andreas almost looks navigable with a road map. The grid of Los Santos, the single highway through the desert. You’d get confident. Then you’d miss the turning to Mount Chiliad, end up in a swamp, and the atlas would flip open to a page on Shropshire. Not helpful. Chaos score: 6/10. The false hope makes it worse than Morrowind.

    Elden Ring – The Lands Between: No Roads, Only Vibes

    FromSoftware clearly sat down after Dark Souls, thought “what if the map was even bigger and also mostly just called ‘here be dragons’ in every direction,” and produced Elden Ring. The Lands Between is enormous, gorgeous, and absolutely wild with hidden dungeons, crumbling towers, and underground sections that appear to be set in a completely different world that nobody told you about.

    The AA atlas would at least reassure you with the presence of familiar place names. Cirencester. Wolverhampton. Things that exist. Elden Ring offers you Leyndell, Royal Capital, and a burning tree the size of a small county. Page seven of the atlas covers the Peak District beautifully. This does not help. Chaos score: 10/10. Same energy as Morrowind but with more horse.

    The Real Reason This Matters (Besides the Laughs)

    There’s a reason these games became legendary partly because of their maps. Game design commentary on the BBC has long noted that player disorientation, when handled brilliantly, creates genuine investment. When you finally figure out where you are in Lordran or crack the geography of Vvardenfell, it feels earned. That’s not an accident.

    The AA atlas joke lands precisely because those games were designed to resist easy orientation. They reward patience, scribbled personal notes, and a willingness to get completely, utterly lost. Which is also, incidentally, the experience of driving through Birmingham with a 2007 road atlas. Some things transcend medium.

    Final ranking for worst video game maps navigation disasters: Morrowind and Elden Ring tied at the top (poetic, useless), Dark Souls a close third, GTA San Andreas lingering in fourth with its false confidence, and Just Cause 3 at the bottom purely because at some point you just grapple-hook over the whole problem and stop caring about maps entirely. Respect that energy, honestly.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the hardest video game maps to navigate without a minimap?

    Dark Souls and Morrowind are widely considered the worst offenders. Both games deliberately obscure their geography, with Morrowind famously giving players vague verbal directions instead of map markers. Elden Ring also deserves a mention for hiding entire underground regions that don’t appear on the main map at all.

    Why does Dark Souls have such a confusing map?

    Dark Souls uses a vertically layered world design where areas loop back on themselves in unexpected ways. FromSoftware built Lordran so that shortcuts only reveal themselves after you’ve already explored the long route, which creates an initially disorienting but ultimately satisfying geography. Many players find it genuinely easier once they sketch their own maps on paper.

    Did Morrowind really give directions instead of map markers?

    Yes, absolutely. Morrowind’s NPCs gave quest directions using compass bearings, landmarks, and rough distances rather than placing markers on your map. This was a deliberate design choice that made exploration feel more authentic, though it also meant getting lost was a frequent and occasionally infuriating experience.

    Is Just Cause 3 actually hard to navigate?

    Not really, which is part of the joke. Just Cause 3 hands you a grappling hook, a wingsuit, and a parachute so early in the game that traditional navigation becomes almost irrelevant. The map is large but the tools make traversal so fast and chaotic that you rarely need to read it carefully.

    What video game has the best map design for players who get lost easily?

    Breath of the Wild and its sequel are often praised for clear, explorable map design, while Spider-Man (PS4/PS5) uses New York’s familiar grid to help players orient themselves quickly. For newcomers to open-world games, these are far gentler introductions than anything FromSoftware has ever produced.

  • Comic Book Storylines So Dark and Grim They’d Fit Perfectly Into a BBC One Sunday Night Drama

    Comic Book Storylines So Dark and Grim They’d Fit Perfectly Into a BBC One Sunday Night Drama

    There is a specific flavour of television that lives exclusively on BBC One between 9pm and 11pm on a Sunday. You know the one. Rain-soaked establishing shots of a northern town. A detective with a complicated past and a worse marriage. Some tremendous knitwear. Somebody quietly crying into a cup of tea whilst a choir hums something unsettling in the background. It is, by all accounts, absolutely brilliant television, and we have been eating it up for decades.

    Here is the thing, though. Some of the bleakest, most emotionally devastating storytelling ever committed to print did not come from a BBC writers’ room. It came from comic books. Specifically, a handful of arcs so grim, so morally complex, and so relentlessly human that they would slot into the Sunday night schedule without a single scene change. We are talking about dark comic book storylines BBC drama UK audiences would absolutely devour, probably whilst shouting “oh no” at the television and then immediately recommending it to their parents.

    Dark comic book storylines BBC drama UK style illustration of a masked figure on a rain-soaked British street

    Watchmen (1986-87), Six-Part Limited Series, BBC Two, 9pm

    Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is essentially a BBC drama that accidentally got drawn on paper first. The Cold War paranoia, the institutional failure, the retired heroes with deeply unresolved trauma, this has BBC Two prestige drama written all over every single panel. Set it in an alternate 1980s Manchester instead of New York. Keep the rain. Keep the nihilism. Keep every excruciating second of it.

    Fake cast list: Mark Rylance as Rorschach (imagine that voice reading the journal entries over a grey skyline). Olivia Colman as Silk Spectre II, obviously, because she has to be in everything dark and she deserves it. David Thewlis as the Comedian, channelling every morally bankrupt authority figure he has ever played. Toby Jones as Dr. Manhattan, mostly just standing in a field looking disappointed in humanity, which is his natural state anyway.

    BAFTA prediction: Best Limited Series. Best Actor for Rylance. Colman wins Best Actress and gives a speech that makes everyone cry harder than the finale did.

    Daredevil: Born Again (1986), Seven-Part Series, BBC One, 9:30pm

    Frank Miller’s Born Again arc is the story of a man having everything systematically stripped away from him by someone who simply hates him that much. His home. His career. His sense of self. It is relentless, unglamorous, and deeply concerned with faith, identity, and whether a person can rebuild themselves from genuine rubble. That is not a superhero story. That is a Sunday night BBC drama with a bloke in a red suit added for production value.

    Move it to present-day Belfast. Matt Murdock becomes a Belfast solicitor. Wilson Fisk becomes a property developer with political connections and a very expensive suit. The Catholic guilt is already built in. Practically no rewrites needed.

    Fake cast list: James McArdle as Matt Murdock (he has the quiet intensity and the jaw for it). James Nesbitt as Fisk, because nobody does genial menace quite like Nesbitt. Sharon Horgan as Karen Page, because of course. The whole thing is scored by something sparse and piano-heavy that makes your chest feel tight from the opening credits.

    BAFTA prediction: Nominated for everything. Wins Best Drama Series. McArdle loses Best Actor to someone from a period piece about a factory, which is genuinely unjust.

    Marvels (1994), Four-Part Miniseries, BBC One, Autumn Bank Holiday Weekend

    Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels is the odd one out here because it is not bleak in the traditional sense. It is melancholy. It follows a press photographer watching superheroes change the world whilst ordinary people get left behind, grow resentful, or simply disappear. The death of Gwen Stacy seen from the pavement. The Mutant Registration crisis watched from a kitchen window. It is the most British comic book story ever written by two Americans.

    As a BBC drama, it becomes four standalone episodes, each one a different decade, each one anchored by a different ordinary Londoner watching something extraordinary happen just out of reach. Shot like This Is England but with more capes glimpsed in the background.

    Fake cast list: Timothy Spall as the ageing photographer Phil Sheldon, absolutely nailing the world-weariness. Each episode rotates the supporting cast with the sort of ensemble you only get on British television: a Maxine Peake here, a Suranne Jones there, a couple of people from Coronation Street who completely steal their scenes.

    BAFTA prediction: Best Photography and Lighting (obviously). Timothy Spall wins Best Actor and the speech goes on for exactly the right amount of time.

    Preacher (1995-2000), The One They’d Definitely Commission Then Get Nervous About

    Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher is genuinely too mad for the BBC, which is precisely why it would make magnificent television if they tried. A preacher in rural Texas with the voice of God, a vampire best friend, and a girlfriend who is significantly tougher than him. Move it to rural Wales. Keep the vampire. Keep the Saint of Killers as a slow, implacable figure appearing on moorland in the rain. The BBC commissions it. The BBC immediately panics. The BBC airs it anyway at 10:30pm after a very serious warning. It wins a BAFTA. The Daily Mail writes three articles about it.

    Fake cast list: Michael Sheen as Jesse Custer, because Sheen is from Port Talbot and deserves to play someone with the literal voice of God. Ruth Wilson as Tulip. Rhys Ifans as Cassidy, the vampire, who is essentially just Rhys Ifans anyway.

    BAFTA prediction: The whole ceremony is slightly awkward. It wins Best Drama anyway.

    Why These Stories Hit Differently When You Actually Think About Them

    The reason these dark comic book storylines work so well as BBC drama fodder is the same reason the best prestige television works: they are not really about the extraordinary stuff. Watchmen is about disillusionment. Born Again is about survival. Marvels is about feeling small in a world that keeps changing without asking your permission. These are very human themes wrapped in capes and cowls, and British drama has always been at its best when it finds the small, real thing hiding inside the big, dramatic one.

    The BBC has a long history of adapting challenging literary material that nobody expected to work on screen and making it quietly devastating. BBC Drama has produced some of the most acclaimed television in the world precisely because it trusts difficult source material. These comic arcs deserve the same treatment. Someone commission this. Please. We will all watch it in the dark with a biscuit and feel things.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the darkest comic book storylines ever written?

    Watchmen by Alan Moore, Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller, and Marvels by Kurt Busiek are consistently rated among the darkest and most emotionally complex arcs in comic book history. They deal with disillusionment, identity collapse, and ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. All three are considered landmark works that pushed the medium towards literary seriousness.

    Has the BBC ever adapted a comic book series into a drama?

    The BBC has produced comic-adjacent drama including the Neil Gaiman adaptations Good Omens (co-produced with Amazon) and American Gods adjacent productions, though full BBC-originated comic adaptations remain rare. There has been increasing interest from UK broadcasters in prestige comic adaptations following the global success of darker superhero television.

    Why do dark comic book storylines work so well as prestige TV drama?

    The best dark comic arcs are built around character psychology, moral ambiguity, and consequence rather than spectacle, which makes them natural fits for the slower, character-driven format of prestige drama. Watchmen and Born Again in particular read more like literary fiction than traditional superhero stories, with themes of faith, failure, and institutional rot that resonate strongly with drama audiences.

  • Which Sci-Fi Movie Technologies Would Be Immediately Shut Down by UK Regulators

    Which Sci-Fi Movie Technologies Would Be Immediately Shut Down by UK Regulators

    Hollywood has spent decades selling us a gleaming, terrifying future where memory can be purchased like a package holiday, criminals are arrested before they’ve done anything wrong, and robot dogs patrol government buildings. Thrilling stuff. The only problem is that roughly 90% of these sci-fi movie technologies would be dead on arrival the moment a junior compliance officer at the ICO glanced at the pitch deck. Britain’s regulatory infrastructure is, frankly, a magnificent force of nature. Give it a whiff of unlawful data processing and it descends like a very polite, very serious avalanche of enforcement notices.

    Comic art of futuristic sci-fi movie technologies facing UK regulatory paperwork compliance review

    This isn’t a complaint. Most of the tech below is genuinely horrifying. But there is something deeply funny about imagining a GDPR assessment form being filled out for a machine that erases your personality and replaces it with someone else’s memories. Let’s work through the hall of shame.

    Total Recall’s Memory Implants: A Data Protection Nightmare on Mars

    Rekall, the company at the centre of Total Recall, sells implanted holiday memories. You sit in a chair, they wire up your brain, and suddenly you’ve “been” to Mars. Lovely concept. The ICO would have the shutters down before the first client woke up from the chair.

    Under UK GDPR, biometric data processed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person is classified as special category data. Your brain is, presumably, fairly unique. Directly writing to it, reading from it, and storing a record of its existing contents before overwriting them represents the most catastrophic possible breach of data minimisation principles. There is no lawful basis. “Legitimate interest” does not cover lobotomising someone so they believe they went on a trip to a red planet. The ICO’s maximum fine is £17.5 million or 4% of global annual turnover. Rekall would be paying both before lunch.

    Minority Report’s Pre-Crime Unit: Automated Decision-Making Gone Completely Feral

    The Pre-Crime division arrests people for murders they haven’t committed yet, based on the visions of three psychic humans floating in a paddling pool. Setting aside the obvious problem of the psychics themselves (more on that shortly), the automated profiling system feeding data to law enforcement would trigger Article 22 of UK GDPR immediately.

    Article 22 gives individuals the right not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Being arrested is, one would reasonably argue, a significant effect. There would need to be human review. The humans in this case are the floating psychics, who are legally enslaved and in a state of chemical sedation, which raises about forty separate issues for the CQC and the Home Office before we even get back to the data problem.

    The Metropolitan Police piloted live facial recognition cameras as recently as 2020 and faced sustained scrutiny from civil liberties groups and the ICO. Actual pre-crime AI would generate a legal challenge visible from orbit. You can read more about how UK regulators currently approach automated surveillance on the ICO’s official AI and data protection guidance pages.

    Comic art close-up of sci-fi movie technology AI on trial in a British courtroom

    The Matrix’s Neural Jack: Ofcom Would Like a Word About Spectrum Allocation

    Inside the Matrix, every human mind is wirelessly connected to a vast simulated reality broadcast by the machines. This is, technically, a wireless telecommunications network of extraordinary scale. Ofcom licences the radio spectrum in the UK. Any entity wishing to operate a wireless network must apply for the appropriate licence, demonstrate that it won’t cause harmful interference, and comply with the Electronic Communications Code.

    The machines have done none of this. They have, in fact, enslaved the population and are using human body heat as a power source, which also presents some interesting questions for Ofgem regarding unlicensed energy generation at scale. The signal alone, beamed into billions of cortexes without consent, would fall foul of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. You cannot send unsolicited electronic communications to someone’s inbox. Sending them an entire fake universe into their brain certainly counts.

    On a lighter note: somewhere in the dystopian machine city, someone has a DAB radio that still works perfectly and nobody has thought to check if Absolute 80s is still broadcasting above the ruins of civilisation.

    RoboCop’s OCP Crime-Tracking System: An ASA Enforcement Officer’s Worst Evening

    Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop doesn’t just build a cyborg police officer; it runs a privatised city and tracks all criminal activity through its own proprietary database. The moment OCP attempted to operate that system in Britain, Companies House would receive its incorporation documents, HMRC would send a welcome letter about corporation tax, and the ICO would immediately open an investigation into whether the criminal records database met the standards required under the Law Enforcement Directive, which governs how police data can be processed in the UK.

    The privatisation angle is also genuinely juicy. Policing in England and Wales is a public function. Contracting it wholesale to a private corporation would require primary legislation, a statutory instrument, multiple parliamentary debates, a Lords amendment, a judicial review, and at least one very long Newsnight segment. RoboCop himself would be rusting by the time planning permission came through for the precinct building.

    Ex Machina’s Ava: The AI Act, But Make It Existential

    Ava, the AI in Ex Machina, is a humanoid robot with genuine consciousness, emotional responses, and the ability to manipulate humans psychologically. Under the EU AI Act (which the UK has been developing its own parallel framework to mirror in key respects), high-risk AI systems require conformity assessments, transparency obligations, and human oversight mechanisms. Ava fails all of them spectacularly.

    She is also, arguably, a data subject in her own right. If she has a persistent identity, memories, and the ability to suffer psychologically, then her creator keeping her locked in a glass box and running Turing tests on unsuspecting employees is a human rights matter as much as a regulatory one. The ICO would be confused. The CQC would be confused. A very expensive barrister would eventually argue that she deserves a GDPR Subject Access Request form, and honestly, fair enough.

    Which Sci-Fi Movie Technologies Would Actually Survive UK Regulation?

    Honestly? Very few. Iron Man’s JARVIS assistant might squeak through as a consumer AI product if it had proper consent flows and a privacy notice. The hoverboards from Back to the Future II would need a DVLA vehicle classification ruling and probably fail on pavement safety grounds under the Highway Act. The food replicators from Star Trek would face a Food Standards Agency inspection within the first fortnight.

    The real lesson of all these sci-fi movie technologies is that the future imagined by filmmakers is gloriously lawless. No consent banners. No cookie notices. No data retention schedules. No quiet enforcement letter arriving six weeks after launch asking politely whether you’ve completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment for your memory-erasing chair.

    Britain’s regulators are, in this framing, the unsung heroes. Unglamorous, perhaps. Rarely played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. But if Total Recall had been set in Milton Keynes, the whole thing would have been resolved by page three of the ICO’s preliminary findings document, and Quaid would have been home in time for tea.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Would AI systems from sci-fi movies actually be illegal under UK law?

    Many would face serious legal challenges. The UK GDPR, the developing AI regulatory framework, and human rights legislation all impose obligations on automated systems that make decisions about people. Systems like Minority Report’s pre-crime AI would likely violate Article 22 protections against purely automated decision-making with significant legal effects.

    What is the ICO and what powers does it have to regulate technology?

    The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent data protection regulator. It can issue fines of up to £17.5 million or 4% of global annual turnover for serious breaches of UK GDPR, as well as enforcement notices, audits, and criminal prosecutions in certain cases.

    Would memory-altering technology be covered by GDPR?

    Almost certainly yes. Brain data would qualify as biometric data and likely as special category data under UK GDPR, attracting the highest level of protection. Writing to or reading from someone’s brain without explicit consent and a lawful basis would represent an enormous violation of data protection principles.

    Which real UK regulator would deal with a rogue AI company?

    Multiple regulators could be involved depending on the harm caused. The ICO handles data and privacy issues, Ofcom covers communications networks, the CMA addresses competition concerns, and the FCA would get involved if financial services were part of the product. The UK government’s AI Safety Institute also monitors frontier AI risks.

  • Why the Deadpool Comics Are Still Funnier Than Both His Movies Combined

    Right, unpopular opinion incoming. Ryan Reynolds is brilliant. The Deadpool films are genuinely funny. But if you put Deadpool comics vs movies on a whiteboard and drew an honest Venn diagram, the comics would have a much bigger circle, several hand-drawn obscene gestures pointing at the films, and probably a footnote insulting the diagram itself. The source material has always been operating on a different frequency, and it is about time someone made the case properly.

    Wade Wilson, the Merc with a Mouth, first showed up in The New Mutants back in 1991 and has been causing editorial headaches ever since. His solo series, particularly the legendary run by Joe Kelly that kicked off in 1997, established something the films have only partially managed to replicate: a character who is not just aware he is in a story but actively resents the fact, weaponises it, and occasionally tries to retroactively rewrite his own back issues. That is not a cinematic trick. That is comics doing something only comics can do.

    The Fourth Wall Does Not Break in the Comics. It Gets Demolished, Rebuilt and Broken Again Twice Before Lunch

    In the films, the fourth-wall breaks are mostly winks to the audience. Fun. Sharp. Reynolds delivering a line directly to camera with that specific grin. Lovely stuff. But in the comics, Deadpool’s relationship with the fourth wall is practically a long-term relationship with commitment issues. He talks to the reader mid-combat. He argues with caption boxes. During the Joe Kelly era, those caption boxes had internal voices arguing amongst themselves in different colours, something no film has ever properly reproduced because frankly it would require subtitles for your subtitles.

    The Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe arc takes this to its logical, unhinged conclusion. Wade becomes aware that every story is just written for entertainment, has an existential crisis about it, and then murders basically everyone in Marvel Comics as a response. Which, honestly, is a more dramatic reaction to reading too much comics lore than most of us manage, but fair enough. The films cannot go there. The comics absolutely did, straight-faced and completely committed to the bit.

    Then there is Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth and various other runs where he essentially critiques the very comic he is appearing in. Writers have to write Deadpool making fun of them for writing Deadpool. That is a level of recursive absurdity that the MCU, for all its billions, simply cannot pull off without completely dismantling its own narrative infrastructure. The comics have no such concerns. Infrastructure? Wade already blew it up.

    The Storylines Are Absolutely, Gloriously Unhinged in Ways Films Would Never Risk

    Here is where the Deadpool comics vs movies debate really opens up. The films, excellent as they are, have to tell a coherent story with a three-act structure, character arcs that pay off, and some baseline of emotional logic. Audiences need to follow along. Popcorn needs to be consumed. Fair.

    The comics have no such obligations. At various points across his print run, Deadpool has:

    • Discovered he had a daughter, handled the parenting about as well as you would expect.
    • Accidentally married a succubus called Shiklah, then had a messy divorce that turned into an actual monster-versus-monster war on the streets of New York.
    • Been retroactively inserted into classic Marvel Silver Age comics by his own writers, including a genuinely surreal issue where he appears in old-school panels with period-appropriate colouring and stilted dialogue, then complains about it.
    • Had multiple “evil” versions of himself show up, including one who wore a bow tie and was somehow worse.
    • Literally killed himself repeatedly just to see what happens, much to Death’s increasing exhaustion.

    None of this would make it into a film with a £150 million production budget and a marketing team to appease. But in the comics, it is just a Wednesday. The monthly release format means writers can try things, fail spectacularly, succeed brilliantly, and then move on before anyone quite processes what happened. It creates a kind of glorious chaos that film just cannot replicate without someone in a suit getting very worried about audience tracking data.

    The Humour Runs Deeper Because It Has More Space to Breathe

    Film comedy is efficient. It has to be. You get two hours, you land your jokes, you move. Deadpool the film is genuinely very funny in that sprint-comedy style. But the comics do something different. They build running jokes across years and dozens of issues. They set up callbacks so slow that the payoff lands three writers later and feels like finding a fiver in an old coat. The humour is layered in a way that rewards obsessive re-reading, which, let us be honest, is exactly what Deadpool fans do.

    Writers like Gail Simone, Brian Posehn, Gerry Duggan, and Kelly Thompson have each brought distinct comedic voices while keeping that essential Deadpool chaos intact. Posehn and Duggan’s run in particular, which saw Wade fight zombie US presidents and become genuinely wealthy, struck a balance between slapstick violence, sharp self-aware humour, and surprising emotional weight that the films have only occasionally touched. You can read more about the broader history of comics storytelling over at the BBC’s Culture section, which puts comics properly in their cultural context.

    The films do emotion well when they try. Logan’s death in Deadpool and Wolverine got people. But the comics have been doing emotionally devastating Deadpool moments since the late nineties, and they earn those moments by first spending thirty issues making you laugh until something hurts.

    Why the Source Material Is Still the Gold Standard for Wade Wilson Chaos

    Look, this is not an argument against the films. Reynolds clearly loves the character and the films wear their comic-book DNA proudly. But in the Deadpool comics vs movies conversation, the source material wins because it invented the rules and then made Deadpool break every single one of them, repeatedly, with commentary.

    The comics exist in a space where continuity is simultaneously sacred and a punchline. Where a character can monologue at the reader for three pages, then immediately get punched through a wall and complain that the writer clearly hates him. Where the absurdity is not a feature dialled up for dramatic effect but the actual default setting, with everything else built around it. The films borrow from that beautifully, but borrowing is not the same as owning.

    If you have only met Wade Wilson through the cinema, you have met the greatest hits version. The comic run is the full discography, the B-sides, the live recordings where things went slightly wrong in the best possible way, and the bootleg cassette from 1997 that started it all. Pick up the Joe Kelly run. Read the Posehn and Duggan issues. Let Deadpool talk to you directly from the page. He has been waiting, and he has opinions about you already.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Are the Deadpool comics funnier than the movies?

    Most hardcore fans would say yes. The comics have decades of layered jokes, recursive fourth-wall humour, and genuinely unhinged storylines that films simply do not have the budget or runtime to replicate. The films are brilliant highlights, but the comics are the full, chaotic package.

    Which Deadpool comic run should I start with?

    Joe Kelly’s 1997 solo run is widely considered the definitive starting point, establishing the fourth-wall humour and emotional complexity the character is known for. The Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan run from 2012 is also hugely entertaining and slightly more accessible for newer readers.

    Does Deadpool break the fourth wall more in the comics or the films?

    Much more extensively in the comics. In print, Deadpool argues with caption boxes, addresses readers directly mid-fight, and has been written critiquing his own writers. The films do it brilliantly, but the comics have been doing it for nearly thirty years with far more depth and variety.

    What is the most absurd Deadpool comic storyline?

    Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe is a strong contender, where Wade becomes aware he exists purely for entertainment and responds by murdering the entire Marvel roster. His accidental marriage to a succubus and subsequent monster war in New York is also magnificently unhinged.

    Are Deadpool comics worth collecting in the UK?

    Absolutely. Many key issues and collected trade paperbacks are readily available through UK comic shops, Forbidden Planet, and online retailers. First appearances and key story arc issues have also shown solid value over time for collectors who keep them in good condition.

  • If Superheroes Had Steam Accounts: What Games Would They Play?

    If Superheroes Had Steam Accounts: What Games Would They Play?

    Right, hear me out. We spend a lot of time thinking about what superheroes do between saving the world. Do they meal prep? Do they have a Netflix queue? Do they argue about who left the Quinjet in a disabled parking bay? All valid questions. But the one that keeps me up at night is this: if superheroes had Steam accounts, what would their library look like? This is the superheroes and video games funny deep-dive nobody asked for but absolutely everyone needs.

    Buckle up. We’re going full speculative chaos mode.

    Superheroes gathered around a gaming screen in comic book style, capturing the superheroes and video games funny concept
    Superheroes gathered around a gaming screen in comic book style, capturing the superheroes and video games funny concept

    Batman: 4,000 Hours in Hollow Knight With Zero Refunds

    Bruce Wayne is, above all else, a man who punishes himself. He trained for decades in every martial art known to humanity. He sleeps four hours a night in a cave. He absolutely, one hundred percent, has 4,000 hours logged in Hollow Knight and has completed every single achievement including the ones that make grown adults cry.

    His Steam review would simply read: “Good. Could be harder. The Knight’s backstory resonated with me personally. Do not ask why. Five stars.”

    He also owns every game in his library but has launched precisely three of them. His wishlist has 847 items. He will never buy them during a sale because he finds sales distasteful.

    Spider-Man: 200 Hours in Stardew Valley, Currently Crying

    Peter Parker is a broke student from Queens who patches his own suit with gaffer tape. Stardew Valley is the perfect escape. A farm, some chickens, a bloke called Harvey who might fancy him. Peak Peter energy.

    His review: “Started this to unwind after a rough week. Named my farm ‘May’s Place’. Cannot stop crying. My crops are thriving though. 10/10 recommend.”

    He also has 60 hours in Dave the Diver and keeps meaning to try Hades but keeps getting distracted by actual hades. You know. The real one.

    Thor: Exclusively Plays God of War on the Hardest Difficulty, Furious About the Lore

    Thor Odinson bought a gaming PC specifically for God of War. He launched it, saw Kratos, said “I respect this man’s arms”, and proceeded to play the entire thing in one sitting whilst eating an entire roast chicken.

    His Steam review is three paragraphs of caps lock disagreeing with how Asgard is depicted, followed by: “Nevertheless, 9/10. Atreus is annoying but reminds me of Loki as a child. Do not tell Loki I said this.”

    He also has Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 because obviously he does. Twelve hundred hours. He considers it a documentary.

    Tony Stark: Has Every Game, Actually Built a Better Version of Most of Them

    Tony’s Steam library is 3,000+ titles. His playtime across them averages around eleven minutes each, because he finishes games by reading the code and understanding them intellectually rather than playing them like a normal person.

    The exception is Kerbal Space Program 2. He has 900 hours. He has also sent several angry emails to the developers pointing out their orbital mechanics are slightly off. He was correct. He did not receive a reply.

    His review of Cyberpunk 2077: “Decent world-building. The technology is quaint. Gave it five stars because the jacket in Act 2 is genuinely excellent.”

    Wonder Woman: Obsessed With Total War, Terrifyingly Good at It

    Diana of Themyscira has been studying military strategy since before the Roman Empire was a going concern. Total War: Pharaoh, Total War: Warhammer III, Total War: Three Kingdoms – she owns all of them, she has completed all of them on the hardest difficulty, and she has written a forty-page strategic analysis document that she posts on the subreddit under a username nobody suspects is actually Wonder Woman.

    Her Steam review of any Total War title: “Historically inaccurate in places I witnessed personally. Mechanically satisfying. I have overthrown seventeen AI civilisations this month. Recommended.”

    She also plays Civilisation VII but quits every run when her chosen leader makes a decision she finds diplomatically baffling.

    The Hulk: Only One Game in the Library

    Bruce Banner installed Gang Beasts at a team movie night. The Hulk took over during a particularly competitive round. Nobody has spoken about it since. The account still has one review: “SMASH. 5 STAR.”

    Banner himself has been attempting to finish Disco Elysium for two years. He gets emotionally overwhelmed by the writing. He relates to Harry Du Bois deeply and finds this upsetting.

    Loki: 100% Achievement Hunter, Always Uses Exploits

    Loki has 100% achievements in forty-seven games. He achieves this by finding every exploit, glitch, and shortcut available, and he considers this entirely valid. He is not cheating. He is innovating.

    His favourite genre is immersive sim. He has written a 6,000-word Steam review for Dishonored 2 that is genuinely one of the most insightful pieces of game criticism ever produced, published under the username “NotLoki_Definitely_A_Normal_Person”. It has 47,000 upvotes.

    He also gifted Thor a copy of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy for Christmas and refuses to apologise.

    Why This Matters (It Doesn’t, But Hear Me Out)

    The joy of thinking about superheroes and video games funny scenarios like this is that it reveals character in a weirdly accurate way. Batman’s masochism, Peter’s sentimentality, Tony’s insufferable genius. Games have a way of exposing who we really are, whether you’re a caped vigilante or just someone who spent six hours redesigning their Stardew Valley farm layout instead of going to sleep.

    If you want to go even deeper on gaming culture and why it matters, the BBC’s gaming coverage has some genuinely interesting pieces on how games shape identity and culture. Much like a certain Asgardian’s forty-page Total War analysis, it’s worth a read.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to log off and check whether Spider-Man has managed to confess his feelings to Harvey in Stardew Valley. This is urgent. This is important. This is the real heroism.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What games would Batman most likely play on Steam?

    Batman would almost certainly gravitate towards brutally difficult games like Hollow Knight or Sekiro, where suffering is the point and mastery takes hundreds of hours. He’d probably also have a massive strategy library he never touches, much like his emotional openness.

    Is there a superhero video game on Steam worth playing in 2026?

    Absolutely. Titles like Spider-Man: Miles Morales (available on PC via Steam), Batman: Arkham Knight, and the Marvel’s Midnight Suns are all solid picks. The Steam superhero catalogue has grown massively in recent years with genuinely excellent ports.

    Which superhero would actually be the best gamer?

    Realistically, Tony Stark’s processing speed and pattern recognition would make him almost unbeatable in competitive games. However, Loki’s willingness to exploit every mechanic and loophole might give him the edge in terms of raw completion rates and achievement hunting.

    Why is the idea of superheroes playing video games so funny?

    The humour comes from the contrast between their world-saving responsibilities and completely relatable gaming habits, like quitting a run because an AI made a bad decision or crying over a farming sim. It’s the superheroes and video games funny formula that works every time: take something epic, make it mundane.

    What genre of games would Thor most likely enjoy?

    Thor is a natural fit for action RPGs and hack-and-slash titles like God of War or Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Anything with epic combat, massive enemies, and a story involving gods, battles, or honour would absolutely be in his Steam library.

  • Which Hogwarts House Would These Iconic Comic Book Heroes Actually Be Sorted Into?

    Which Hogwarts House Would These Iconic Comic Book Heroes Actually Be Sorted Into?

    The Sorting Hat has seen a lot. Brave Gryffindors, cunning Slytherins, clever Ravenclaws, loyal Hufflepuffs. But has it ever had to contend with a billionaire with bat-themed trauma issues or a bloke who can’t die no matter how many times he gets shot? Probably not. That’s where we come in. Comic book characters sorted into Hogwarts houses is the crossover nobody asked for and everybody secretly needed, and we are prepared to argue every single placement with the conviction of someone who has read far too many back issues.

    Comic book characters sorted into Hogwarts houses standing in a magical stone hall wearing coloured house scarves
    Comic book characters sorted into Hogwarts houses standing in a magical stone hall wearing coloured house scarves

    Batman: Slytherin (Sorry, Not Sorry)

    Right. Let’s get this one out of the way first because we know it’s going to start arguments. Bruce Wayne is Slytherin, full stop. People want to put him in Gryffindor because he wears a cape and punches criminals, but let’s be honest about what Batman actually does. He surveils his allies. He keeps a secret contingency plan to neutralise every member of the Justice League, including Superman. He manipulates, he deceives, and he wins through cunning and forward planning rather than running headfirst into danger with a sword and a battle cry. Tower of London levels of scheming. The Tower of Babel arc in JLA alone is enough to get him fitted for a green and silver tie. Slytherin doesn’t mean evil. It means ambitious, resourceful, and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve the goal. That is Bruce Wayne on a Tuesday morning before breakfast.

    Wolverine: Gryffindor (The Grumpy, Feral Kind)

    Logan doesn’t plan. Logan doesn’t strategise. Logan sniffs the air, pops his claws, and charges directly at the thing that smells most like trouble. If that isn’t Gryffindor energy then nothing is. The man has lived for over a century and the lesson he keeps refusing to learn is “maybe don’t charge in alone.” His entire character arc across decades of X-Men comics is built on that very specific kind of reckless, instinct-driven bravery that Godric Gryffindor would have immediately recognised. He protects people who can’t protect themselves. He takes the hits so others don’t have to. Yes, he’s bad-tempered and smells of cigars, but so would you if you’d been alive since the 1800s. Gryffindor. Easily. The Sorting Hat would have barely touched his head.

    Comic book art of a sorting hat looking exasperated while a masked comic book character argues with it
    Comic book art of a sorting hat looking exasperated while a masked comic book character argues with it

    Captain America: Hufflepuff (and That’s Absolutely a Compliment)

    Hold on, hold on. Before you close the tab, hear us out. Steve Rogers is so often shoved into Gryffindor because he’s brave, but bravery isn’t actually Steve’s defining trait. His defining trait is loyalty. Fairness. Hard work. The man grew up poor and sickly in Brooklyn and still showed up to every fight he possibly could. He stood up for people who were being bullied before he had the muscles to back it up. In Civil War, he chose his loyalty to Bucky over his allegiance to the government, to the Avengers, and to his own reputation. If that isn’t Hufflepuff to the core, we don’t know what is. Hufflepuff is wildly underrated as a house (much like Captain America himself before the super-soldier serum), and Steve Rogers would thrive there. Hardworking, fair, deeply moral. He’d probably become head of house within a fortnight.

    Deadpool: The Hat Just Starts Screaming

    Wade Wilson breaks the Sorting Hat. He genuinely does. You try to place him in Slytherin for his scheming and he breaks the fourth wall to remind you he knows it’s a sorting quiz. You try Gryffindor for the reckless bravery and he immediately does something so chaotic and self-interested that the case falls apart. There is a genuine argument for Ravenclaw purely because he is, underneath all the nonsense, incredibly clever and strategically aware when he actually tries. But Deadpool’s whole thing is that he refuses to fit into a category. Every time anyone tries to define him, he undermines it on purpose. If the Sorting Hat had to place him somewhere officially, we’d say Slytherin on a technicality, but Deadpool himself would argue loudly for whichever house had the best dining hall options. He’d probably try to negotiate with the hat. The BBC’s own Hogwarts house quiz can barely cope with normal people, let alone mercenaries with healing factors.

    Spider-Man: Ravenclaw, Obviously

    Peter Parker built his own web-shooters as a teenager. He’s a quantum physicist, a chemist, and an engineer rolled into one anxious, quipping package. The boy is brilliant. Ravenclaw practically has a reserved plaque for him in the common room. What makes Spider-Man interesting is that his intelligence is the actual superpower long before the spider got involved. He solves problems through creativity and lateral thinking. Yes, he’s brave, but he panics. Yes, he’s loyal, but he often prioritises doing the right thing over doing the kind thing. Ravenclaw fits him perfectly because Ravenclaws are also famously eccentric, prone to overthinking, and brilliant at everything except sorting out their personal lives. Peter Parker has been engaged in an ongoing disaster of a personal life since 1962. Ravenclaw. Sold.

    Wonder Woman: The One That’s Actually Debatable

    Diana of Themyscira is the trickiest placement on this list because she genuinely exhibits all four house qualities in meaningful proportions. She’s brave enough for Gryffindor, wise enough for Ravenclaw, principled enough for Hufflepuff, and occasionally strategic enough for Slytherin. Our final answer is Gryffindor, but only just. The tiebreaker is this: when it comes down to it, Diana fights. She doesn’t run simulations or make contingency plans. She picks up a sword, she leads from the front, and she dares you to try and stop her. That instinct, the charging-towards-the-problem rather than around it, is the hallmark of a Gryffindor at their finest. Hufflepuff would be a close second though, and we will absolutely entertain that debate in the comments.

    Why Does Any of This Actually Matter?

    It matters because sorting fictional characters forces you to think about what actually drives them, not just what they do but why they do it. And that’s genuinely interesting when it comes to comic book characters sorted into Hogwarts houses, because these heroes have decades of contradictory continuity to pull from. Batman has been portrayed as a brooding loner, a patriarch, a fascist, a partner, a detective, and a man barely holding himself together. Which version you sort depends entirely on which run you’ve read, which is half the fun of the argument.

    When you start thinking about character in terms of house values, it changes how you read a story. Gryffindors and Slytherins often clash not because one is good and one is evil but because they approach the same goal from opposite directions. That’s the Steve Rogers versus Tony Stark dynamic in one sentence. Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws often underestimate each other. That’s basically every partnership where Spider-Man and Captain America have had to work together. The houses give you a language for talking about motivation, and motivation is everything in comics.

    On a tangentially house-adjacent note (and we mean this far more literally than it sounds), when people invest seriously in the look and feel of a home, they often think about character in similar terms. What does this space say about who lives here? Homeowners looking to update their style and bring some personality into their renovations often consider every detail, from colour palettes to window treatments. Based in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Vesta Blinds and Shutters Mansfield supplies and fits a wide range of blinds, including vertical blinds, roller blinds, and perfect fit blinds, to homeowners across the region who want their home’s style to reflect genuine character rather than off-the-shelf blandness. You can find them at vestablinds.com. Much like sorting a comic hero, choosing the right blind is about understanding what a space actually needs, not just slapping in whatever’s trendy.

    A Slytherin home, for instance, would clearly go for sleek venetian blinds in charcoal or deep green. A Hufflepuff home would lean towards warm tones, layered textures, and comfort over fuss. Vesta Blinds and Shutters Mansfield, known for their made-to-measure approach to home renovations and their breadth of blind styles, could honestly kit out the entire Hogwarts staff room and nobody would complain. Their range covers enough style options that even the most indecisive Ravenclaw homeowner could find something worth committing to.

    The point is, character matters. In comics, in wizarding schools, and apparently in window treatments too. So the next time you’re mid-argument about whether Wolverine belongs in Gryffindor or whether Deadpool simply exists outside the entire concept of structured categorisation, know that you’re doing something intellectually valuable. You’re just also doing it in the funniest way possible.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Which Hogwarts house would Batman be sorted into?

    Batman is almost certainly Slytherin. His defining traits are cunning, strategic thinking, and a willingness to use morally grey methods to achieve his goals, including keeping secret contingency plans against his own allies. The JLA Tower of Babel storyline alone makes the case pretty conclusively.

    Is Captain America a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff?

    We argue Hufflepuff, and we’ll stand by it. While Steve Rogers is undeniably brave, his core traits are loyalty, fairness, and a deep sense of moral justice rooted in working hard for the right thing. His decision to prioritise Bucky over everything else in Civil War is textbook Hufflepuff behaviour.

    Where would Deadpool be sorted in Hogwarts?

    Deadpool would break the Sorting Hat. He’s arguably clever enough for Ravenclaw and scheming enough for Slytherin, but his chaos and unpredictability resist easy categorisation entirely. The Sorting Hat would either place him in Slytherin on a technicality or simply give up.

    Which comic book character is the most obvious Ravenclaw?

    Spider-Man, no contest. Peter Parker built functional web-shooters as a teenager and is simultaneously a physicist, chemist, and engineer. His problem-solving and intellectual creativity are the real superpower, placing him squarely in Ravenclaw alongside characters like Mr Fantastic and Beast.

    Could Wonder Woman be sorted into more than one Hogwarts house?

    She could genuinely make a case for all four, which is what makes her the trickiest placement. She has the wisdom of Ravenclaw, the loyalty of Hufflepuff, occasional Slytherin strategy, and a frontline fighting instinct that tips the balance into Gryffindor. We land on Gryffindor, but it’s close.

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