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Category: Interesting

  • 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.

  • The Video Game Worlds That Would Genuinely Collapse Under the UK’s Planning Permission System

    The Video Game Worlds That Would Genuinely Collapse Under the UK’s Planning Permission System

    Imagine you’re Link. You’ve just defeated Ganon, Hyrule is saved, and all that’s left is to rebuild. Grand towers, sweeping bridges, a Temple of Time that would make English Heritage weep with joy. Except hang on. You need outline planning consent first. Then full planning consent. Then a heritage impact assessment. Then a neighbour objection from the farmer three fields over who says the new temple “will block his views and increase traffic.” The video game worlds UK planning permission funny overlap might sound absurd, but honestly, spend five minutes on any local council’s public notice board and it starts to feel terrifyingly plausible.

    Hyrule Castle buried in UK planning permission notices in a funny comic book art style

    Hyrule: A Conservation Area Nightmare Waiting to Happen

    Hyrule Castle alone would trigger approximately forty-seven separate consultations. The thing is enormous, it sits on what appears to be prime agricultural land, and its structural design (floating battlements, a moat that defies hydraulic logic) would have the Environment Agency absolutely furious within about a fortnight. Any application for a structure that visually dominates the surrounding landscape gets flagged immediately, and Hyrule Castle dominates everything within a 200-mile radius.

    Then there’s the issue of Kokiri Forest. Protected woodland. Ancient trees. You cannot touch so much as a branch without a tree preservation order getting slapped on it, and some of those Deku trees have clearly been there since before the Roman occupation. The Lost Woods would almost certainly be designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, meaning the only person allowed in is a DEFRA-appointed ecologist with a clipboard and a somewhat haunted expression.

    Death Mountain? You’d need a geotechnical survey, a volcanic risk assessment, and probably a strongly worded letter from the Health and Safety Executive before you could even pitch a tent up there. The Gorons would be waiting years.

    Rapture: Andrew Ryan Would Have Been Destroyed at the Planning Inquiry

    Andrew Ryan built an entire city on the ocean floor to escape government interference. Lad. You cannot escape it. You just relocated the paperwork.

    A subaquatic city of that scale would require a Marine Licence from the Marine Management Organisation, sign-off from the Crown Estate (since the seabed around the British Isles is technically Crown property), and a full Environmental Impact Assessment covering effects on marine ecosystems. The bioluminescent sea creatures alone would spark a Natural England intervention. The Art Deco architecture, while genuinely stunning, would probably get listed before it was even finished, meaning Ryan couldn’t modify a single neon sign without retrospective consent.

    His libertarian utopia would collapse not under the weight of ADAM addiction or plasmid-fuelled revolution. It would collapse under a fourteen-week local consultation period, a missed statutory deadline, and a planning officer’s email that just says “further information required” with no further information about what further information is required. We’ve all been there.

    Night City: Every Single Building Is Probably in Breach of Something

    Night City from Cyberpunk 2077 is essentially a vertical sprawl of megabuildings, neon signage, and structures that appear to have been designed by someone who’d never heard of a building regulations inspection. The megabuildings alone, residential towers housing thousands of people, would require fire safety assessments under the Building Safety Act 2022. After Grenfell, the cladding situation in Night City would have every safety inspector in the country on site simultaneously, and rightly so.

    The Badlands outside the city would be classified as brownfield land (toxic waste everywhere, abandoned infrastructure, general post-apocalyptic vibes), which actually means it would be prioritised for development under current government housing policy. Perversely, Night City’s dystopian wastelands might be the one bit of the whole franchise that breezes through planning. There’d be a press release from the council calling it “an exciting regeneration opportunity.”

    The neon advertising hoardings, though. Every single one of those would need advertisement consent. Every. Single. One. There are approximately 900,000 of them. Good luck, Arasaka.

    Midgar: Objections from Every Resident of Sector Seven

    Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar is built on a plate, literally a massive disc suspended above the slums below, blocking all natural light from the lower city. If you tried to get planning permission for that in the UK, the objection letters alone would fill the Albert Hall. “Loss of daylight” is one of the most commonly cited grounds for planning objections in England, and Midgar takes loss of daylight to a genuinely dystopian extreme. The Planning Inspectorate would reject it within twenty minutes. Shinra Corporation would appeal. It would go to a public inquiry lasting three years. Cloud would be middle-aged by the time anyone made a decision.

    The Mako reactors draining the planet’s life energy would also, one suspects, fall foul of the Environment Agency’s abstraction licencing rules. You can’t just drain a river without permission; draining an entire planet’s spiritual essence is presumably in a whole other category of enforcement action. The government’s planning guidance for England runs to hundreds of pages and somehow still wouldn’t cover this specific scenario, which tells you everything.

    Tamriel: Listed Buildings, Everywhere, Forever

    The Elder Scrolls universe is essentially one enormous Grade I listed building with some bandits in it. Dwemer ruins alone would be automatically protected under the equivalent of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act. You wouldn’t be able to excavate a Dwemer dungeon without a full archaeological watching brief, a report submitted to the Historic Environment Record, and six months of waiting for an archaeologist who is, themselves, still cataloguing stuff from the last dungeon.

    Skyrim’s longhouses would probably fail Part L of the Building Regulations on energy efficiency grounds immediately. All those fires burning inside stone buildings with no insulation, single-glazed windows, and roofs that appear to be made of turf. The energy performance certificate would be an F. Possibly a G. The Jarls would be legally required to upgrade before they could rent them out.

    Pac-Man’s Maze: Honestly, the Only One That Might Actually Get Approved

    Think about it. It’s a contained structure. No visual impact on the surrounding landscape. No heritage concerns. It’s underground, so no overlooking issues for neighbours. The ghosts are technically existing residents with a right to remain. A few accessibility concerns under the Equality Act, perhaps, since the corridors appear to be exactly one person wide and there are no lifts, but nothing insurmountable.

    Pac-Man’s maze might genuinely be the only iconic game world that could clear a UK planning committee without a single amendment. And that’s probably the funniest thing about any of this.

    The real tragedy of all these video game worlds UK planning permission funny comparisons is that they reveal something true: the games we love exist precisely because they’re free from the bureaucratic friction that shapes every brick of the real world. No impact assessments, no neighbour objections, no enforcement notices taped to the door of Hyrule Castle. Just adventure, consequence, and the distant sound of someone heroically ignoring a building regulation.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the funniest video game world that would fail UK planning permission?

    Rapture from BioShock is a strong contender, since an entire subaquatic city would need a Marine Licence, Crown Estate approval, and a full Environmental Impact Assessment before a single Art Deco tile went down. Andrew Ryan literally built it to escape regulation, which makes the irony especially delicious.

    Would Hyrule Castle actually be blocked by UK planning rules?

    Almost certainly. A structure of that scale dominating the surrounding landscape would trigger a full heritage impact assessment, and its location on what appears to be protected farmland would cause serious headaches for the planning officer. The moat alone would need Environment Agency sign-off.

    What UK planning rules would apply to Night City from Cyberpunk 2077?

    The megabuildings would face scrutiny under the Building Safety Act 2022, particularly around fire safety and cladding. Every neon advertising sign would individually require advertisement consent, of which there are thousands. The Badlands, ironically, would likely be designated brownfield and fast-tracked for development.

    How long does a UK planning application actually take?

    A standard householder application should be decided within eight weeks, but major applications can take thirteen weeks or longer, and anything going to a public inquiry can take years. For something like Midgar’s plate structure, assume never.

    Is this article actually about real UK planning permission rules?

    The planning rules referenced are real, including the Building Safety Act, Marine Licences, tree preservation orders, and advertisement consent requirements. The game worlds applying for them are, sadly, fictional. Although Pac-Man’s maze genuinely might scrape through.

  • Video Game NPCs Who Behave Exactly Like People You Meet on a British High Street

    Video Game NPCs Who Behave Exactly Like People You Meet on a British High Street

    There is a very specific energy that descends upon a UK town centre on a Saturday afternoon. Someone is standing directly in the middle of the pavement going absolutely nowhere. A bloke outside Greggs is eating a sausage roll with the thousand-yard stare of a man who has seen things. A woman near the post office is on the phone to someone called Sandra and has been for forty minutes. None of them acknowledge you. None of them will move. Sound familiar? If you’ve spent more than twenty minutes in any open-world video game, it absolutely should. The funniest video game NPCs aren’t funny by accident. They are, in fact, a breathtakingly accurate simulation of a British Saturday.

    Comic book style British high street crowded with passive shoppers, illustrating the funniest video game NPCs parallel
    Comic book style British high street crowded with passive shoppers, illustrating the funniest video game NPCs parallel

    The Skyrim Guard Who Has Heard Enough

    Let’s start with the classic. Skyrim’s city guards are perhaps the single greatest NPC achievement in gaming history, not because of their combat prowess, but because of their magnificent indifference. You’ve just slain a dragon in the town square. Buildings are on fire. Citizens are screaming. And the guard sidles over to say: “No lollygagging.” This is textbook British high street behaviour. Try doing something genuinely remarkable near a shopping centre and watch the security guard stare right through you. He’s not paid enough. He’s thinking about his lunch. He has seen everything and is impressed by none of it. That guard and Skyrim’s finest are essentially the same organism.

    GTA Pedestrians and the Mysterious Queue to Nowhere

    The pedestrians in the Grand Theft Auto series have always been magnificently useless, and I mean that as a compliment. In GTA V, civilians will queue on a pavement for no discernible reason, wander into traffic mid-sentence, and stand motionless outside shops staring at their mobiles. Which is… just a Saturday in any town centre in England. The only difference is that in GTA, a car eventually mounts the kerb and everyone scatters. On a real high street, people barely flinch when a Lidl delivery lorry mounts the pavement. Adaptability is the British pedestrian’s greatest superpower.

    The Shopkeeper NPC Who Has One Line and Delivers It With Zero Emotion

    “Welcome. I sell things.” That is the entire personality of roughly 70% of video game shopkeepers, and honestly? Deeply relatable. Wander into certain shops in a British town centre and you’ll receive exactly the same energy. Not hostile. Not warm. Just present. A human body standing near a till, technically available for commercial transactions, spiritually somewhere else entirely. The funniest video game NPCs in the merchant category are so accurate that it raises questions about whether game developers have been quietly surveying retail staff on their lunch breaks.

    It’s worth noting that the high street itself is evolving, even if the energy of its inhabitants hasn’t changed since 1987. Apps like TownCentre.app, a free platform based in England built specifically for high streets and town centres, help independent shops sell for free, reach customers digitally, and take card payments without the faff of a full e-commerce setup. The shopping landscape is shifting, but the bloke blocking the entrance to WHSmith while staring at his mobile is eternal.

    Comic book illustration of a blank-faced shopkeeper NPC behind a till, echoing the funniest video game NPCs
    Comic book illustration of a blank-faced shopkeeper NPC behind a till, echoing the funniest video game NPCs

    Red Dead Redemption’s Townsfolk and the Art of Aggressive Minding Their Own Business

    Red Dead Redemption 2 is frequently praised for its world-building, and rightfully so. The NPCs have routines. They gossip. They go to the saloon. They do their shopping. They are, in short, going about their business with complete disregard for the fact that you, a notorious outlaw, are standing right next to them. This is peak British high street behaviour. You could be dressed as a giant lobster outside Boots and most people would simply navigate around you without making eye contact. RDR2’s townsfolk have absorbed this energy entirely. Arthur Morgan could rob a bank in the middle of town and someone nearby would still just be talking about their horses.

    The Sims’ Wandering Pedestrians Who Block Every Doorway

    The Sims has long been celebrated as a life simulator, but its street-level NPCs are what truly capture human truth. They stop in doorways. They walk into you repeatedly without adjusting course. They stand on the pavement engaged in an urgent conversation that clearly cannot be moved six inches to the left. Anyone who has tried to exit a Costa Coffee on a busy Saturday afternoon while three people are having a full committee meeting on the threshold knows exactly what this feels like. The Sims didn’t simulate life. It simulated a British high street with slightly better weather.

    Fallout’s Confused Wanderers and the Woman Who Has Been Outside Superdrug Since 2019

    Fallout’s wasteland is full of NPCs who walk in small circles, mutter to themselves, and appear to have forgotten where they were going somewhere around the third step. Every town centre in England has at least one. You’ve seen her. She’s been outside Superdrug since approximately 2019. She has a trolley. She may be waiting for someone. She may have transcended waiting entirely and simply exists now, a permanent fixture of the high street like the broken fountain or the charity shop that’s been having a closing-down sale for six years.

    The parallel between fictional wanderers and real high street regulars is so strong that TownCentre.app (towncentre.app) built its entire free app around the idea that high street shops need better tools to reach customers who are already right there, walking past, technically available for shopping. The app lets small businesses in England take card payments and connect with foot traffic digitally, because sometimes reaching customers means meeting them where they already are: standing outside Superdrug, going nowhere, with time to spare.

    Why the Funniest Video Game NPCs Are Actually Tribute Acts

    Here’s the thing. Game developers spend years crafting believable worlds, and the secret ingredient has always been people-watching. The funniest video game NPCs are funny precisely because they mirror behaviour we recognise instantly. The guard who ignores the dragon. The shopkeeper who has one line. The pedestrian blocking the door. These aren’t lazy programming choices; they’re documentary filmmaking in code form.

    According to the BBC, immersive world-building is increasingly cited as a primary reason players return to open-world games, and NPC behaviour is central to that immersion. The irony is that the most immersive NPCs aren’t the ones doing extraordinary things. They’re the ones doing absolutely nothing, in exactly the way a real person does absolutely nothing on a Saturday afternoon, in a town centre, near a Greggs, for reasons no one will ever fully understand.

    And when those real high street wanderers eventually make their way into a shop, it’s nice to know that the shops are getting better at reaching them. TownCentre.app supports England’s independent high street shops and local businesses by letting them sell for free, take card payments easily, and reach customers who are already in the area shopping. The NPCs, of course, will continue to stand in doorways regardless.

    Final Verdict: Games or Reality?

    If you load up any major open-world game this weekend and spend ten minutes just watching the NPCs rather than completing missions, you will see your local town centre rendered in startling detail. The chaos, the queues, the bloke eating a pasty on a bench who has not moved in three hours, it’s all there. The funniest video game NPCs aren’t a parody of life. They are life, just with slightly more consistent frame rates and fewer pigeons.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the funniest video game NPCs of all time?

    Skyrim’s guards are widely considered the gold standard, famous for lines like “I used to be an adventurer like you” delivered entirely without irony. GTA pedestrians, Fallout wanderers, and Oblivion’s chaotic villagers are also perennial fan favourites for their brilliantly absurd behaviour.

    Why do NPCs in games behave so weirdly?

    NPC behaviour is governed by scripted routines and AI pathfinding that can produce hilariously unintended results when the system encounters unexpected player actions or environmental overlaps. Developers often leave these quirks in deliberately because players find them charming rather than broken.

    Which open-world game has the most realistic NPC behaviour?

    Red Dead Redemption 2 is consistently praised for having the most lifelike NPC routines, with characters that eat, sleep, gossip, and react to weather. Its townsfolk feel genuinely lived-in compared to most other open-world titles.

    Are there any games where NPCs actually react intelligently to what you do?

    Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings III both feature NPCs with complex simulated personalities and memories. In some RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3, NPCs remember your actions and adjust their dialogue accordingly, which feels revolutionary compared to the “I used to be an adventurer” crowd.

    What makes NPC behaviour in games feel British?

    It’s mostly the passivity. British NPC energy is characterised by polite disengagement, queuing instinct, and a refusal to acknowledge extraordinary events, which maps perfectly onto how most open-world NPCs are scripted to ignore player chaos while going about their routines.

  • If Marvel Characters Had to File a Self-Assessment Tax Return With HMRC

    The 31 January deadline is a uniquely British kind of dread. A cold, grey morning, a strong tea, and the creeping realisation that you have absolutely no idea where you put your receipts from last April. Now imagine that same panic, but your receipts include “repulsors, Mark 47 suit (business use only)”, “return portal from the Mirror Dimension” and “one jar of Pym Particles (miscellaneous)”. Welcome to the most chaotic corner of the HMRC online portal you have never thought about before. The Marvel characters self-assessment tax return situation is frankly a nightmare, and we are here for every excruciating detail.

    Tony Stark: Sole Trader, Reluctant Taxpayer, Definitely Under Investigation

    Let us start with the big one. Tony Stark is, at his core, a freelance defence contractor who pivoted into saving the world without ever properly updating his Companies House registration. In the UK, he would be operating as a sole trader under “Stark Industries (UK Branch)” and almost certainly filing his return at approximately 11:58pm on 31 January with a glass of Scotch in hand.

    His income sources alone would make an HMRC inspector weep. There is the licensing revenue from his patents. There is the fee he probably charges the government for each Avengers mission (he absolutely does). There is also the small matter of the Iron Man suits, which he would attempt to claim as a capital allowance under plant and machinery. The suits cost billions. HMRC would have a view on that.

    His expenses would be equally spectacular. Business mileage at 45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles, except his commute is sometimes “low Earth orbit”, which is not a recognised postcode district. He would also try to claim his Malibu cliff house as a home office, forgetting that he destroyed it in Iron Man 3 and it is therefore probably not eligible for property relief. Pepper Potts would be furious. JARVIS would have filed it correctly by March.

    Doctor Strange: The Self-Employed Property Nightmare

    Stephen Strange is a man with multiple properties across dimensions, a Grade II listed townhouse in Mayfair (the Sanctum Sanctorum sits in the New York version, but let us say the London branch exists on Belgrave Square for tax purposes), and a complicated income stream that blends “former neurosurgeon” with “Sorcerer Supreme”.

    The property question alone is catastrophic. Strange owns, or at least occupies, buildings across multiple planes of existence. Does the Mirror Dimension count as overseas property? Technically it has no sovereign territory, which means it is either exempt from UK tax rules or constitutes an entirely novel category that the HMRC guidance at gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns has not yet accounted for. Either way, Strange would be leaving it blank and hoping nobody notices.

    His income as Sorcerer Supreme is harder to categorise. Is he employed by the Masters of the Mystic Arts? Self-employed? A charity? He has no employment contract, no P60, and his clients largely pay in “eternal gratitude” and “the universe not being destroyed”. HMRC accepts neither as a valid payment method.

    Black Widow: Freelance Operative With a Very Tricky Employment History

    Natasha Romanoff has the most complex employment history of anyone who has ever attempted a Marvel characters self-assessment tax return. Former KGB asset, SHIELD operative, Avenger, then briefly a fugitive. That is no fewer than four different employment statuses in one career, and at least two of them are organisations that do not technically exist on any official register.

    For UK tax purposes, the question of whether SHIELD counts as a foreign employer is genuinely thorny. It was a UN-adjacent body (probably), which might mean her income was exempt under diplomatic protocols, except SHIELD collapsed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and presumably stopped issuing payslips around the same time. If she never received a P45, she may still technically be considered employed by an organisation that no longer exists. HMRC would refer this to the Counter Avoidance Directorate immediately.

    Her expenses, meanwhile, are a delight. Widow’s Bites (combat gadgets, business use): possibly claimable as tools of the trade. Black leather tactical suit: HMRC guidance says clothing is only deductible if it cannot be worn outside work. The suit is not exactly M&S, but it is technically wearable. She would try. They would decline it. She would accept that outcome with unsettling calm.

    Does Asgard Count as an Overseas Territory for Tax Purposes?

    Thor raises the single most entertaining jurisdictional question in the entire Marvel universe. He is a Norwegian god (the myths are Norse, so technically Scandinavia has a prior claim) who is also a prince of a realm in a different galaxy, currently residing on what remains of a floating city that relocated to Tønsberg and then presumably qualified for some kind of Norwegian coastal development grant.

    For a UK resident, income from overseas property and overseas employment is generally still taxable, depending on domicile status. Thor, as a non-UK domicile who has been resident here for several tax years through Avengers activity, would likely fall under the arising basis by now. That means his income from Asgard, his stipend as heir to the throne, and any revenue from the Bifrost (toll bridge? Private infrastructure? Hard to say) would all need declaring.

    His accountant, if he had one, would be billing 400 hours minimum and weeping into their spreadsheets. If you think sorting out Thor’s dimensional tax affairs sounds expensive, you should know that even building a basic web presence does not have to be. There are Free Websites out there for small businesses, which is more than any Asgardian treasury ever offered.

    The Expenses Marvel Heroes Would Definitely Try to Claim

    Just for the record, here is a partial list of deductions that various Avengers would attempt, ranked by audacity:

    • Captain America: Uniform cleaning (reasonable), shield replacement (capital allowance, maybe), 70-year pension shortfall from being frozen in ice (not a thing HMRC recognises, but full marks for trying).
    • Ant-Man: Travel expenses at microscopic scale. He would argue that shrinking means he technically used less fuel per mile and should receive a proportionally larger claim. HMRC would have no precedent for this.
    • Spider-Man: Web fluid as consumables (plausible), Spider-Man suit made by himself (potentially claimable under homeworker costs), tutoring income from being a sixth-form student on the side (taxable above the £1,000 trading allowance, probably).
    • The Hulk / Bruce Banner: Two separate self-assessments? One per personality? Split income claims? The legal complexity would genuinely break the system.

    What HMRC Would Actually Do About All This

    Realistically, the Counter Avoidance team would open an enquiry within fifteen minutes of Tony Stark’s submission. Strange would receive a compliance letter asking him to clarify the nature of his “dimensional consultancy” work. Thor’s return would be flagged for specialist overseas review and then quietly set aside because nobody knows what legislation applies to a Norse god’s inheritance.

    Black Widow’s return would simply vanish from the system under circumstances that remain unexplained.

    The broader point, absurd as all of this is, is that the UK self-assessment system is brilliantly, chaotically unequipped for anyone whose income does not fit neatly into a payslip. As the ONS notes, over 12 million people filed a self-assessment return in the 2024-25 tax year, and a significant chunk of them found the process baffling without any interdimensional complications involved. If even regular freelancers struggle, spare a thought for a billionaire with repulsor boots and no time to organise his receipts.

    The Marvel characters self-assessment tax return remains one of the great untold stories of the MCU. Not because it lacks drama. Precisely because it has far too much of it.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is a self-assessment tax return in the UK?

    A self-assessment return is how self-employed people, freelancers and anyone with untaxed income report their earnings to HMRC each year. The deadline for online returns is 31 January following the end of the tax year. You can find full guidance at gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns.

    Would Tony Stark actually need to file a UK self-assessment?

    If he were UK-resident and earning self-employed or investment income above the relevant thresholds, yes absolutely. As a billionaire tech entrepreneur with patent royalties and government contracts, he would have several income streams requiring declaration.

    Can you claim superhero costumes as a work expense?

    HMRC only allows clothing deductions if the item is a uniform or protective wear that cannot reasonably be worn outside of work. A skin-tight red and gold suit or a black tactical bodysuit would face scrutiny, though a case could be made for protective functionality.

    Does income from overseas or other dimensions need declaring in the UK?

    UK residents are generally taxed on worldwide income unless they qualify for non-domicile status. Income from overseas property, foreign employment or interdimensional toll bridges would likely need declaring, though HMRC guidance has not yet covered the Bifrost specifically.

    What happens if you miss the HMRC self-assessment deadline?

    Missing the 31 January deadline results in an automatic £100 penalty, with further charges building up after three and six months. Interest also accrues on any unpaid tax. Even a Sorcerer Supreme would not be immune to late filing penalties.

  • Ranked: The Most Unrealistic Hacking Scenes in Games and Movies (A UK Cybersecurity Nerd’s Nightmare)

    Ranked: The Most Unrealistic Hacking Scenes in Games and Movies (A UK Cybersecurity Nerd’s Nightmare)

    Somewhere right now, a UK IT support worker is watching a film where a teenager types furiously for four seconds, shouts “I’m in!”, and gains access to the Pentagon’s mainframe. That IT support worker is quietly weeping into their third cup of tea of the morning. They’ve just spent forty-five minutes resetting a colleague’s password because it needed a capital letter and a symbol and “no, Karen, a full stop does not count as a symbol.” This is the reality of cybersecurity in Britain. Hollywood has absolutely no idea.

    From blockbuster films to AAA video games, unrealistic hacking scenes have been a staple of entertainment for decades. We love them. They’re ridiculous. They’re glorious nonsense. And if the National Cyber Security Centre ever sat down to watch them all, there would be a strongly worded advisory notice issued before the credits rolled.

    Comic book art of a UK IT worker horrified by unrealistic hacking scenes on a cinema screen
    Comic book art of a UK IT worker horrified by unrealistic hacking scenes on a cinema screen

    What Does Real Hacking Actually Look Like?

    Spoiler: it involves a lot of staring at text, drinking cold coffee, and Googling things you already know just to double-check. Real cybersecurity professionals spend hours, sometimes days, probing systems methodically. There are no spinning 3D cubes. Nobody yells. There is no dramatic orchestral swell when a firewall is breached. It’s closer to doing a very stressful crossword puzzle in a dark room than anything you’ve seen at the cinema.

    With that context firmly established, let’s rank the most gloriously unrealistic hacking scenes ever committed to screen or cartridge.

    The Worst Offenders: Unrealistic Hacking Scenes Ranked

    1. Watch Dogs (2014) – The Entire Game, Basically

    Watch Dogs promised us that one bloke with a phone could hack every traffic light, every bridge, every CCTV camera, and every bank account in Chicago simultaneously. Aiden Pearce is essentially functioning as a one-man GCHQ, except he does it while wearing a cap and brooding. The idea that a single mobile device could interface with every piece of urban infrastructure in real time is the kind of thing that would give an actual network architect a nosebleed. Still an absolute banger of a concept though, and the sequels leaned even harder into the absurdity. Full marks for entertainment. Zero marks for plausibility.

    2. Hackers (1995) – The Sacred Text of Nonsense

    The 1995 film Hackers is essentially a religious document at this point. A teenage Jonny Lee Miller rollerblades into a plot involving a garbage file, a supercomputer called “The Gibson”, and a villain called The Plague. The hacking itself is portrayed as navigating a literal 3D city made of skyscrapers, each representing a different file system. It looks extraordinary. It bears absolutely no resemblance to anything that has ever happened on a real computer. NCSC analysts presumably keep a copy in the office purely for morale purposes.

    Comic book art showing two people typing on one keyboard illustrating unrealistic hacking scenes
    Comic book art showing two people typing on one keyboard illustrating unrealistic hacking scenes

    3. Die Hard 4.0 (2007) – A Fire Sale on Common Sense

    Bruce Willis’s fourth outing as John McClane introduced us to the concept of a “fire sale”: a coordinated cyberattack on every critical infrastructure system in America at once. Roads, power grids, financial systems, all crumbling because a small team of people typed very quickly. The actual Cyber Resilience Centre network in the UK has entire frameworks dedicated to preventing exactly this kind of cascading failure, and those frameworks involve rather more than one man and a laptop in a van. Timothy Olyphant’s villain does at least seem to understand what he’s doing, which puts him ahead of 90% of fictional hackers.

    4. NCIS (TV Series) – Two People, One Keyboard

    Any episode of NCIS where McGee and Abby face a cyberattack deserves a mention. The solution, on multiple occasions, has involved two characters sitting at a single keyboard and typing simultaneously. This is not a thing. This has never been a thing. If two people tried to type on one keyboard at the same time in a real IT department, they would produce gibberish and HR would be involved. This scene has been parodied more times than almost any other moment in television history, and rightly so.

    5. Skyfall (2012) – Q Branch’s Slightly Embarrassing Moment

    Skyfall is a masterpiece of a Bond film. However, the moment where Q plugs Silva’s captured laptop directly into MI6’s network to “analyse” it, and is then shocked when it immediately begins hacking MI6 from the inside, made cybersecurity professionals across Britain collectively put their heads on their desks. Air-gapping. Sandboxed environments. These exist. Q apparently skipped that module. Even the most junior IT apprentice at a UK managed services firm would know you do not plug an unknown device from a known threat actor directly into your primary network. Q got fired, presumably.

    6. Swordfish (2001) – Hacking Under Pressure

    Hugh Jackman is forced to hack a government system in sixty seconds while a gun is pointed at his head and a woman is nearby for reasons the film apparently thought were important. He succeeds, naturally. The actual logistics of breaking government-grade encryption in under a minute are slightly beyond what any human being has ever achieved, regardless of how many monitors they have. The multi-screen setup at least became a meme that accurately predicted every tech YouTuber’s desk setup by 2020.

    Why Does Hollywood Keep Getting This Wrong?

    The honest answer is that real hacking is visually boring and emotionally undramatic. It doesn’t make for compelling cinema. Watching someone run a port scanner and wait isn’t tense, it’s Tuesday afternoon in a network operations centre. So filmmakers invent visual metaphors, add countdown timers, and give us glowing interfaces that look more like a rave than a terminal window.

    The knock-on effect, though, is that it shapes public perception of what cybersecurity actually involves. People assume it’s exotic and instantaneous, when in reality it’s methodical, patient, and deeply unglamorous. The UK has a genuine shortage of cybersecurity professionals, partly because the job sounds less exciting than the films suggest and partly because the actual work is hard. Understanding the basics matters more than Hollywood admits, whether that’s using a decent wordpress security plugin on your personal site or understanding why you shouldn’t reuse passwords across fifty accounts.

    The Games That Got It Slightly More Right

    Not everyone fumbles it. Hacknet, an indie gem available on PC, is basically a hacking simulator that feels plausible and genuinely teaches you something. Deus Ex has always treated its hacking mechanics with a bit more respect than most, building systems with logic gates and countermeasures that feel grounded. And Cyberpunk 2077, while absolutely science fiction, at least acknowledges that hacking has costs, risks, and countermeasures rather than just being a magic button.

    The gap between these thoughtful examples and “I’m in!” typed on a MacBook in a thriller from 2009 is vast. One feels like it respects the audience. The other feels like it was written by someone whose only experience of computers was defragging a hard drive in 2003.

    Final Verdict: Brilliant Nonsense We’d Never Give Up

    Here’s the thing: we love these scenes anyway. Hackers is in the cultural canon. Die Hard 4.0 is a great action film. Watch Dogs is enormous fun. The unrealistic hacking scenes are part of what makes these stories entertaining rather than being dry technical documentaries. We just shouldn’t confuse them for anything approaching reality.

    The NCSC, for its part, does genuinely good work communicating what actual cyber threats look like to UK businesses and individuals. If only their advisories came with a Hackers-style 3D city interface, more people might read them. Someone get Timothy Olyphant on the phone.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the most unrealistic hacking scenes in movies?

    Hackers (1995), Swordfish (2001), and Die Hard 4.0 (2007) are widely considered the most egregiously unrealistic. Common offences include hacking completed in seconds, 3D visual interfaces that bear no resemblance to real systems, and single individuals compromising entire national infrastructures. They’re brilliant entertainment, just catastrophically inaccurate.

    Do any video games portray hacking realistically?

    Hacknet is probably the closest to realistic, using actual command-line style interfaces and logical system structures. Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077 do better than most big-budget games by building in risk and countermeasures. Watch Dogs and the majority of open-world games treat hacking as a magic ability with essentially no technical grounding.

    What does the NCSC say about cybersecurity awareness in the UK?

    The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) publishes regular guidance for UK individuals and businesses on topics including password management, phishing threats, and software vulnerabilities. Their website at ncsc.gov.uk is genuinely useful and a lot more reliable than anything you’ve seen in a Bond film.

    Why do films always make hacking look so dramatic?

    Real hacking involves methodical, patient work that is visually dull and often takes hours or days. Filmmakers use visual metaphors, countdown timers, and dramatic interfaces to create tension and make technical processes legible to a general audience. It works for entertainment purposes but creates wildly inaccurate public perceptions of cybersecurity.

    Is the NCIS 'two people on one keyboard' hacking scene real?

    No, absolutely not. Two people cannot meaningfully operate a single keyboard simultaneously to speed up a process. The scene, which appeared in multiple NCIS episodes, has become one of the most parodied moments in television history among tech professionals. It is, by a comfortable margin, physically and technically impossible.

  • The Video Games That Nailed British Architecture So Well It Feels Like Google Street View

    The Video Games That Nailed British Architecture So Well It Feels Like Google Street View

    There is a very specific kind of joy that hits you when you’re wandering through a video game world and you spot something that looks exactly like the Arndale Centre in Manchester, or a row of terraced houses that could absolutely be somewhere off the A58 in Bolton. Your brain does a little backflip. You point at the screen. You say, out loud, to nobody, “That’s proper British, that is.” It doesn’t happen often. But when it does? Glorious.

    Video games with authentic British architecture are genuinely rare creatures. Most developers default to generic fantasy kingdoms or suspiciously sun-drenched American cities. Getting Britain right, with its grey skies, red phone boxes that nobody uses anymore, and the specific sadness of a Wetherspoons at 11am, takes real commitment. Here are the games that actually pulled it off.

    Comic book style illustration of Victorian London in a video game with authentic British architecture
    Comic book style illustration of Victorian London in a video game with authentic British architecture

    Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: Victorian London Done Properly

    Let’s start with the obvious one, because it earns its place. Ubisoft’s 2015 open-world romp through 1868 London is, genuinely, a love letter to Victorian Britain. The Thames, the rookeries of Whitechapel, the wrought iron bridges, the fog that sits on everything like the city is permanently trying to hide itself from visitors. It’s all there.

    What makes Syndicate feel authentic rather than just “vaguely old and British” is the texture of it. The way the buildings crowd each other. The narrow alleys between market stalls. The class divide stitched into the actual geography of the map, with the poorer East End districts looking genuinely grimier and more cramped than the West End’s wide, well-lit boulevards. Ubisoft clearly did their homework, and the result is one of the most detailed recreations of Victorian London ever committed to pixels. You can almost smell the coal smoke.

    The Getaway: A PS2-Era Love Letter to South London

    Here’s one that doesn’t get nearly enough credit. Released in 2002 for the PlayStation 2, The Getaway was built around a painstakingly recreated square mile of central London. Developer Team Soho drove around the actual streets with cameras strapped to vehicles to capture the city’s texture. The result? A gritty, low-res (by today’s standards) but deeply authentic slice of South London gangster life, where you could recognise Shaftesbury Avenue and the Barbican in the same afternoon.

    For its time, this was genuinely mind-blowing. No HUD, no minimap, just characters signalling left and right turns with their hands. Very British problem-solving, that. The game is set firmly in the world of proper old London crime drama and it commits to the bit completely. Soho, Southwark, Shoreditch. The specific washed-out palette of early 2000s Britain. Perfection.

    Comic art depiction of a brutalist British estate in a video game with authentic British architecture
    Comic art depiction of a brutalist British estate in a video game with authentic British architecture

    Strange Brigade and the Curious Case of Portmeirion

    Rebellion’s 2018 co-op shooter Strange Brigade isn’t set in Britain per se, but its aesthetic roots are deeply embedded in British Imperial-era design, and the opening sequences lean heavily on the kind of stately English architecture that screams “National Trust car park” in the best possible way. Worth a mention for anyone who likes their bullets served with a side of Edwardian stonework.

    Concrete Genie and Urban British Grit

    This underrated 2019 gem from PixelOpus (published by Sony) is set in the fictional Scottish fishing town of Denska, which is clearly inspired by real declining British coastal towns. The brutalist harbour walls, the shuttered shops, the general sense that the council has given up but the community hasn’t quite, it’s painfully, beautifully accurate to places like Hartlepool or Grimsby or Margate before the hipsters arrived. That is not an insult. That is texture. That is Britain.

    80 Days: The Great British Map Game Nobody Talks About

    Inkle Studios, a Cambridge-based developer (yes, British, obviously), made 80 Days in 2014 and it remains one of the most elegantly written games ever created. While it spans the globe, the Victorian London sequences are rendered with such literary precision that you can practically feel the fog on your cravat. The tube stations, the docks, the class-conscious dialogue. Inkle are the quiet genius of British game development and more people should be shouting about them.

    If you want to know more about the broader landscape of UK game development studios producing this sort of culturally specific work, the BBC’s technology section has covered the rise of British indie studios in some depth over recent years. There’s a proper scene here, and it’s brilliant.

    Why British Environments Feel So Rare in Games

    Part of it is market size. The US games market is enormous, and developers naturally skew their settings towards what sells in bulk. But there’s also something harder to pin down. British architecture is genuinely complicated to replicate. You’ve got Roman foundations under Medieval streets under Georgian facades under 1960s concrete carbuncles. Nothing matches. Everything is slightly wrong in a way that somehow works. That randomness is hard to procedurally generate. It has to be felt.

    When a developer gets it right, it’s because someone on that team grew up near a Kwik Save that became a Polish supermarket, or spent their teenage years in a brutalist block that smelled of chip fat and cigarettes. You cannot Google Street View your way to that level of detail. You have to have lived it.

    Indie Games Setting the Pace for Digital Britain

    The indie scene is where things get genuinely exciting for video games with authentic British architecture. Games like We Happy Few (technically Canadian-made but deeply rooted in 1960s British dystopia aesthetics) and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture by The Chinese Room (a Brighton-based studio, fittingly) demonstrate that smaller studios are often more willing to commit to a specific regional identity than the big publishers.

    Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture in particular deserves a standing ovation. It’s set in a fictional Shropshire village and it is painfully accurate. The phone boxes. The village hall. The dry stone walls. The precise way the English countryside looks at golden hour before something terrible happens. It’s gorgeous and haunting and could not have been made by anyone who hadn’t spent real time in rural Britain.

    Interestingly, the same principle applies across industries. Authenticity matters online too. Whether you’re a game studio or a small business trying to reach a British audience, the details make the difference between something that feels right and something that’s clearly been assembled from a template. Speaking of which, if your own online presence feels as generic as a reskinned American open-world map, it might be worth grabbing a free SEO audit to see what’s actually going on under the bonnet.

    The Games We’re Still Waiting For

    We need a proper open-world game set in modern Britain. Not historical. Not dystopian. Just Britain. A brutalist Birmingham estate at midnight. The M6 at 6am. A Greggs queue. A canal boat in Hebden Bridge. A Reading Festival campsite. Give me the soul-destroying beauty of a British supermarket on Christmas Eve and I will play it for a thousand hours. The bones are there. Someone just needs to build it.

    Until that day arrives, we’ll keep treasuring the games that bother to get it right. Because when they do, there’s nothing quite like walking through a pixelated terrace and thinking: yes. That’s exactly what the gap between a semi-detached and its fence looks like. Someone on that team has been to Wolverhampton. And bless them for it.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Which video games have the most accurate recreation of London?

    Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and The Getaway are widely regarded as the most detailed recreations of London in gaming history. Syndicate covers Victorian London with impressive architectural fidelity, while The Getaway used real-world photography to recreate a square mile of early 2000s central London.

    Are there any British indie games set in recognisably UK environments?

    Yes, several. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture by Brighton-based studio The Chinese Room is set in a fictional Shropshire village with remarkable authenticity. Inkle Studios, based in Cambridge, also produce games deeply rooted in British literary and architectural traditions.

    Why don't more video games use British settings and architecture?

    The US gaming market is significantly larger, so most AAA publishers skew their settings toward what sells in volume. British architecture is also notoriously layered and inconsistent, making it genuinely difficult to recreate convincingly without real local knowledge or research.

    Is The Getaway still worth playing in 2026?

    If you can find a way to run it, absolutely yes for historical and cultural interest. The gameplay is dated but the recreation of early 2000s London is genuinely fascinating, especially compared to how those areas look today. It’s a time capsule as much as a game.

    What games have accurately recreated brutalist British architecture?

    Concrete Genie captures the feel of declining British coastal towns and brutalist harbour environments with striking authenticity. We Happy Few also draws heavily on 1960s British urban aesthetics, including the particular grimness of post-war brutalist design, even though it’s set in a dystopian fiction.

  • 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.

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