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Category: Interesting

  • The Video Game Sidequests That Feel Exactly Like Dealing With a UK Council Complaints Process

    The Video Game Sidequests That Feel Exactly Like Dealing With a UK Council Complaints Process

    There is a particular flavour of despair that only two situations in life can produce. The first is opening a video game quest log to find an objective that says “speak to the Elder” only to be told by the Elder to “speak to his assistant”, who tells you to come back after a festival, which doesn’t trigger for six in-game days, by which point the original NPC has wandered into a river. The second is lodging a noise complaint with your local council. I’ve experienced both. I’d genuinely struggle to tell you which left the deeper psychological scar.

    Video game sidequests and UK council bureaucracy are, I’m now convinced, designed by the same person. A person who hates you specifically, has never once met a human being, and gets paid per redirect.

    Frustrated gamer overwhelmed by video game sidequests UK council complaints funny quest log
    Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels

    The fetch quest that refers you to another fetch quest

    Classic scenario. You need the Amulet of Whatever to progress. The blacksmith has it, but he won’t give it to you until you bring him three wolf pelts. You get the pelts. Now he needs a gemstone. The gemstone merchant has one, but she needs a signed letter from the mayor. The mayor is away on council business. You wait. He returns. The letter requires a stamp from the archivist. The archivist is dead.

    I played about forty hours of this in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered earlier this year and felt an uncanny recognition I couldn’t place. Then I remembered: that’s exactly what happened when I tried to report a broken streetlamp to my local council in 2024. You submit the online form. You get an automated reply saying your case has been logged. Three weeks later, a second email arrives telling you to use the correct reporting portal. The correct portal 404s. You call the number. The number plays hold music for eleven minutes before disconnecting. You are the wolf pelts. You have always been the wolf pelts.

    Objectives that reset for absolutely no stated reason

    This one is special. You’ve done everything right. You gathered the items, spoke to every NPC, navigated the dungeon, and handed in the quest. Quest complete. Except the next morning the objective is back in your log, marked as incomplete, with a helpful note saying “see the clerk”. The clerk says the same thing she said at the start. There is no explanation. The game does not acknowledge this has happened.

    Bethesda games are the obvious culprit, but honestly any open-world RPG with a complex quest flag system has done this to me at least once. And yes, it maps perfectly onto the experience of submitting a planning objection, receiving written confirmation that it has been received, and then receiving a second letter two months later asking you to resubmit because the original form used the wrong reference number. The number that they gave you. On the form they sent.

    For a broader look at how video game worlds handle bureaucratic chaos, our breakdown of which video game cities would fail a UK fire safety inspection is a genuinely cathartic read. Some of those cities would make your local planning committee weep.

    The NPC who sends you to a different NPC

    You ask the guard where to find the guild. He says to talk to the innkeeper. The innkeeper says to talk to the travelling merchant who passes through on Tuesdays. It is Wednesday. You return the following Tuesday. The merchant says the guild moved to the next town. In the next town, the first NPC you find says to talk to the guard.

    I’ve lived this. I spent three weeks trying to get an answer about a missed bin collection that went: council website (directs to phone line), phone line (directs to online portal), online portal (says to contact your local ward councillor), ward councillor’s office (auto-reply pointing back to the council website). At no point did anyone collect the bins. My wheelie bin became a monument to circular logic.

    The video game characters who’d be flagged by Ofcom on a UK chat show article touched on this kind of NPC uselessness, and honestly some of those characters would make better council representatives than the actual system. Duke Nukem would at least give you a direct answer, even if that answer was unbroadcastable.

    The timed quest that expires before you can complete it

    You have seven in-game days to deliver a parcel across the map. The parcel-giver does not mention that three of those days will be consumed by a mandatory story cutscene. You get to the destination on day six. The quest has failed. The NPC who issued it says nothing and stands there smiling. You reload. The cutscene is unskippable.

    The council equivalent: you receive a letter saying you have 21 days to respond to a licensing consultation. The letter was postmarked 17 days ago. You go online to respond. The consultation closed yesterday. There is a phone number. It rings out. There is a note on the website that says “for further information, please attend the next public meeting”. The next public meeting was last Thursday.

    According to GOV.UK’s Freedom of Information guidance, public bodies must respond to FOI requests within 20 working days. In practice, submitting an FOI about why your local council’s consultation system is broken feels only marginally less absurd than retrying a failed timed quest by reloading a save from three hours ago.

    The reward that isn’t worth the quest

    You’ve done it. After seventeen steps, four redirects, two dead NPCs, one reset objective, and a unskippable cutscene, the quest resolves. Your reward is 40 gold coins and a piece of leather armour you outlevelled six hours ago. The questgiver says “you have my thanks”. He does not mean it. You can see it in his procedurally generated eyes.

    The council version: after six weeks of emails, two phone calls, one formal written complaint, and a subject access request, you receive a letter confirming that the streetlamp has been logged for repair “within the next financial year”. The lamp is still broken. It is November.

    I’ve spent time reading about how game designers deliberately structure friction into sidequests to extend playtime, and I believe local council complaints departments have studied the same literature. Possibly the same spreadsheet. There is something almost impressive about a system so perfectly calibrated to exhaust the person using it without ever technically failing.

    The quest that asks you to wait

    “Return in three days.” That’s it. That’s the quest update. You return in three days. “I’m not ready yet, come back tomorrow.” You come back tomorrow. “The person you need to speak to has gone home for the evening.” It is 11am. You come back. They have gone on holiday for a fortnight.

    My local council’s complaints team once told me to expect a response within ten working days. On day eleven, I chased up. I was told the original email had not been received and I should resubmit. I resubmitted. On day twelve I received the original auto-reply from day one, confirming receipt. On day twenty-three I received a reply. It asked me to clarify what my complaint was about. The original complaint was six paragraphs long and included photographs.

    For pure structural comedy, the movie heists falling apart at a UK car park barrier piece captures the same energy: elaborate systems, confident protagonists, completely undone by a mundane British obstacle nobody thought to plan for. Swap the barrier for a council ticketing system and you’ve got my life from April to June last year.

    So what does this mean for us?

    Honestly, I think games have been training us for council complaints processes for decades and nobody told us. Every fetch quest was practice. Every reset objective was a drill. Every NPC who says “I’d love to help but you need to speak to Gerald” is preparing you for the moment Gerald’s voicemail says to email Sandra and Sandra’s out-of-office points you back to the main switchboard.

    The difference is that in games, you can reload a save. In real life, the bin just stays full, the lamp stays dark, and the noise from next door continues unabated at 1am on a Tuesday whilst the council’s automated system cheerfully informs you that your reference number has been updated.

    Game developers: I’m not complaining. Well. I am. But keep going. You’re clearly the only ones who understand how this country actually works.

  • Every Type of Player You Encounter in a UK Gaming Café, Ranked by How Deeply Unsettling They Are

    Every Type of Player You Encounter in a UK Gaming Café, Ranked by How Deeply Unsettling They Are

    Gaming cafés are having a proper moment in the UK. According to the BBC’s tech coverage, the esports and gaming lounge scene across British cities has grown significantly since 2022, with venues popping up everywhere from Manchester’s Northern Quarter to random retail units above chip shops in Swindon. And with that boom comes something nobody warned you about: the people. The utterly, magnificently unhinged people. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit in these places, and I can confirm that UK gaming café types of players funny enough to write an entire article about do absolutely exist. Every single one of them. All the time.

    Comic book style illustration of UK gaming café types of players at glowing PC setups
    Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels

    The Red Bull hoarder

    You spot them immediately. Four cans arranged in a precise diagonal line to the left of the keyboard. A fifth already open. They are not drinking the fifth. The fifth is structural. It is load-bearing. Nobody at the venue has ever seen them eat. There is a small theory amongst the staff that they subsist entirely on taurine and the ambient glow of RGB lighting. They are aggressively good at whatever they’re playing, which makes it worse. You want to dislike them but you also want whatever they have.

    The Football Manager monk

    Completely still. Completely silent. Staring at a spreadsheet that, if you squint, might be a tactical formation but could also be a personal tax return. They arrived before the café opened. They will leave after it closes. Nobody has spoken to them. Nobody dares. There is something almost meditative about the Football Manager monk, they have achieved a level of focus that most people only reach during a genuine crisis. I once sat next to one for three hours and the only sound he made was a single, barely audible “yes” when his reserves drew 0-0 away at Carlisle. It sounded like a prayer being answered.

    The person who brought their own keyboard in a tote bag

    Look. I understand. The café keyboards are fine. They work. But the person who brought their own keyboard in a tote bag does not want “fine”. They want their 60% mechanical board with custom switches they had shipped from a vendor in Japan, lubed by hand over a long weekend. They will spend the first eight minutes of their session plugging it in, adjusting the angle, adjusting the angle again, and then typing four letters to test the feel. Respect them. Fear them slightly. They have opinions about actuation force that they will share with you if you make the mistake of asking. Don’t ask.

    The person on a work call

    Headset on. Teams open. Playing nothing. Just… doing their job. In a gaming café. I’ve seen this three times now and each time I feel like I’ve witnessed something that breaks a fundamental rule of the universe. The gaming café is not an office. It has neon lights and someone is speedrunning Dark Souls two metres to your left. And yet here is Dave, updating a stakeholder on Q2 projections. In fairness, the Wi-Fi is usually excellent.

    The tutorial abandoner

    They’ve never played this game before. They skipped the tutorial. They are in the hardest difficulty setting, somehow, and they are furious about it. They will spend forty minutes fighting a concept they would have understood in three minutes had they just done the tutorial. You can see the tutorial option right there on the pause menu. They cannot see it. Do not tell them it’s there. They need to learn. This is their journey.

    The person who’s definitely playing something they shouldn’t be in public

    The screen is angled away from the room at a very specific 37-degree tilt. They are wearing headphones that are clearly doing a lot of work. I’m not saying it’s anything alarming, it’s probably just an embarrassing amount of Stardew Valley or a very personal anime game, but the energy is unmistakably “this is not for your eyes”. And honestly? Fair enough. We all have our thing. My thing, for the record, is losing spectacularly at fighting games I have no business playing, which brings me neatly to my next entry.

    The person who is just catastrophically bad and having an absolute blast

    This is my people. Grinning. Dying constantly. Probably playing something with a really unforgiving skill curve and treating each death like a minor inconvenience rather than the humiliating defeat it objectively is. They are the reason gaming cafés feel alive. Every venue needs at least one person who is just fully in it for the chaos, the fun, and the extremely loud sound their character makes when they fall off a ledge for the sixth consecutive time. If you’ve ever read our piece on the most catastrophically bad video game menus, you’ll know that games are already conspiring against you, some of us just lean into it.

    The person who has claimed a table with snacks, a hoodie, a second bag, and what appears to be a light lunch

    They have colonised 1.8 square metres of shared space with the quiet confidence of someone filing a planning application. Crisps: two bags. A meal deal sandwich from the Tesco Express next door. Their hoodie draped over the second chair as a territorial marker. A third bag whose purpose remains unclear. They are not being rude, they are simply operating at a logistical level the rest of us haven’t evolved to yet. Genuinely, I find it impressive. The kind of preparation that reminds me of those open world games with suspiciously British town planning decisions, someone has clearly thought hard about territory.

    The one playing a horrifying horror game at full volume

    Headphones are available. The venue provides them. They have chosen not to use headphones. The ambient soundtrack of their game is now everyone’s ambient soundtrack. A jump scare just occurred. Three people across the room flinched. This individual did not flinch. They are beyond flinching. They have ascended.

    The absolute regulars who know all the staff by name

    Every gaming café has them. They arrive, they are greeted by name, they have a usual. They know which PC runs the smoothest, which chair has the wobbly wheel, and which corner gets the best air conditioning. They are not unsettling at all, they are, in fact, the glue that holds these places together. The ecosystem depends on them. They are the NPCs of the gaming café world, and I mean that with full affection. Much like the video game characters who’d be flagged by Ofcom on a UK chat show, they have enormous presence and strong energy. Just significantly less liable to be investigated by a broadcasting regulator.

    Gaming cafés are genuinely one of the better things to have spread across British cities in recent years. They are weird, loud, warmly lit, and full of people who care intensely about something. My ranking of unsettling player types is, for the record, entirely affectionate. I am, depending on the day, at least four of the above simultaneously. The Red Bull is structural. The keyboard is in the bag. The tutorial has been skipped. See you in there.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    How much does it cost to use a UK gaming café?

    Prices vary but most UK gaming cafés charge between £3 and £8 per hour depending on the city and the quality of the setup. Many offer off-peak rates and membership deals if you’re a regular. London venues tend to sit at the higher end, while cities like Leeds or Birmingham often have more competitive pricing.

    What do you need to bring to a gaming café in the UK?

    Generally just yourself and payment, most venues provide everything including PCs, peripherals, and headsets. Some regulars bring their own mechanical keyboards or mice for preference, which is entirely allowed and absolutely judged in the warmest possible way.

    Are UK gaming cafés good for beginners or just serious gamers?

    They genuinely suit all levels. Most venues have a wide range of games installed covering casual titles through to competitive shooters and RPGs. Staff are usually happy to help newcomers find something appropriate, and nobody is going to kick you out for being bad at the game.

  • Comic Book Characters Who Would Absolutely Lose Their Minds at a Standard British Summer Festival

    Comic Book Characters Who Would Absolutely Lose Their Minds at a Standard British Summer Festival

    Picture it: a field somewhere in Somerset, approximately 90% mud, 8% crushed plastic cups, and 2% actual grass. The headline act is someone your mate’s cousin vaguely recognises from a 2019 Later… with Jools Holland appearance. There are no phone signals, the portaloos smell of broken dreams, and the cider is somehow both warm and flat simultaneously. Welcome to the Great British Summer Festival. It is, against all logic, one of the best things we do. I’d genuinely not trade it for anything. But I have been spending a frankly irresponsible amount of time imagining how comic book characters would cope here, and the results are catastrophic in the most entertaining way possible.

    Comic book art of a muddy British summer festival crowd, perfect for comic book characters British summer festival funny content
    Photo by Ama Journey on Pexels

    Thor would be banned by the second afternoon

    Let’s start with the obvious problem. Thor, god of thunder and heir to the Asgardian throne, controls lightning. At a festival famous for metal stages, tall scaffolding rigs, and approximately 80,000 people holding wet tent poles, he is a walking health and safety incident. The HSE would have a field day. He’d arrive in full armour, Mjolnir in hand, and immediately be told by a steward named Dave that “no weapons, mate, it’s in the terms and conditions.” Thor would argue. Dave would not care. Dave has seen worse.

    Then the rain would start. And Thor, bless him, would feel personally responsible. He’d spend the entire weekend frantically trying to redirect storms, accidentally making it worse, and eventually getting a formal written complaint lodged against him by the organisers. He’d end up sitting alone in the acoustic tent watching a folk duo from Bristol, quietly nursing a warm Strongbow, wondering if Odin ever had to deal with this.

    Batman would spend the weekend in a silent, seething rage

    Batman does not do mud. I cannot stress this enough. The man irons his cape. He has a bespoke cave with temperature regulation. He once built an entirely new Batmobile because the old one had a scratch. Now imagine him queueing for 45 minutes to reach a cashless bar that has just run out of his preferred brand of sparkling water. He’d stand there in full costume, rain dripping off the pointed ears of his cowl, staring at a laminated sign that reads “CARD ONLY – MINIMUM £5 SPEND” with the kind of controlled fury only a billionaire orphan can muster.

    He’d also be terrible at festivals for entirely different reasons. Batman’s whole thing is surveillance and threat assessment. He’d spend the weekend compiling a dossier on every single person in the camping field. “Suspicious individual, tent 47C, has not slept in 36 hours and is wearing a bin bag as a poncho.” Yes, Bruce. That’s just Gary from Wigan having the time of his life. Leave Gary alone.

    Spider-Man would actually be fine, which is annoying

    I hate to admit this, but Peter Parker would absolutely thrive. He’s used to swinging between Manhattan skyscrapers at speed, so navigating a crowded main stage field is nothing. He’d volunteer for the crew, help someone find their lost group three separate times, take genuinely brilliant photos for the festival’s socials, and somehow end up on stage doing a bit with the headline act. Everyone would love him. He’d go home sunburnt (despite the overcast skies, classic British trap), with four new best friends and a wristband he’d keep on until Christmas. Genuinely insufferable.

    The Incredible Hulk and the portaloo situation

    This one keeps me up at night. Bruce Banner is probably fine in his mild-mannered state. He’s the sort of bloke who brings a proper camping stove, has a waterproof rucksack, and pre-downloads a playlist. Sensible. Prepared. Then someone bumps into him in the queue for the portaloos at 2am on Saturday night. The queue is two hours long. The bloke behind him is playing Oasis at full volume from a Bluetooth speaker. A seagull steals his chips. And then, slowly, Bruce Banner stops being Bruce Banner.

    The transformation radius alone would cause a significant incident. Glastonbury’s traffic management is already widely covered by the BBC every year as a logistical miracle. Add a 2.7-metre green rage monster to the campsite and it stops being a miracle and starts being a documentary.

    Wonder Woman would be having the absolute time of her life

    Diana of Themyscira spent her formative years training on a hidden island of warrior women. She has wrestled gods, defeated armies, and crossed No Man’s Land in the First World War without flinching. A British summer festival, with its warm cider and communal spirit, is genuinely nothing to her. She’d be first in the queue. She’d have the best spot on the hill. She’d make friends with strangers from sixteen different countries, teach someone to arm-wrestle in the real ale tent, and cry at a beautiful set from a solo acoustic guitarist nobody else had heard of. She’d buy their EP on vinyl. It would be wonderful.

    The lasso of truth would cause one minor incident when she accidentally deployed it on a festival-goer claiming the queue for the main stage had “barely moved” when it had clearly moved quite a lot. But she’d handle it graciously.

    Deadpool would get a lifetime ban within four hours

    Look, I don’t need to spell this out. Deadpool at a British festival is an Ofcom complaint, three noise warnings, and at least two visits from local council officers before the first act has even finished their soundcheck. He’d heckle the acoustic acts. He’d start a rumour that the secret headliner was someone completely implausible. He’d find the backstage pass system’s loopholes within twenty minutes. He’d be charming about all of it, which would only make it worse.

    Funnily enough, I’ve previously written about video game characters who’d be flagged by Ofcom if they had their own chat show, and Deadpool would make that list too. He makes every list. He probably wrote his own list and laminated it.

    Iron Man versus the no-fly zone

    Tony Stark would book the best glamping pod money can buy, arrive in the suit, and immediately fall foul of the Civil Aviation Authority’s temporary airspace restrictions that apply over large public gatherings. He’d land, be told he needed prior authorisation, and spend the next two days arguing via a hotline that was clearly not equipped to handle a billionaire genius in a flying metal suit. The suit’s AI would try to help. The hold music would drive them both to the brink.

    The glamping pod, at least, would be exceptional. He’d have it kitted out with a portable reactor, climate control, and an espresso machine. Everyone nearby would hate him for it, and he’d be oblivious, which is, honestly, very on-brand for Tony.

    The bigger picture here

    What all of this points to is that British summer festivals are a genuine social leveller. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, how many suits you own, or what dimension you’ve saved recently. If it rains, you’re wet. If the card machine goes down, you’re not getting a pint. If the person next to you in the sleeping bag section is snoring at volume, there is nothing in any comic book that prepares you for it.

    I’ve had a similar thought reading through some of the most baffling comic book storylines out there, actually. Superheroes can handle multiverse-collapsing threats and reality-bending villains, but put them somewhere ordinary and British and everything unravels gloriously. There’s also something quietly delightful about the fact that characters who routinely survive genuinely grim, emotionally harrowing story arcs would be completely undone by a two-hour wait for a pulled pork bap.

    That’s festivals, though. That’s the whole point. You’re all in it together. Even if “all of it” includes a confused Norse thunder god slowly coming to terms with the acoustic stage schedule and a billionaire on hold with the CAA. See you in the field.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Which comic book character would actually enjoy a British summer festival?

    Wonder Woman and Spider-Man are the clear winners. Both are adaptable, good with crowds, and have the kind of relentless positivity that gets you through a two-day rain delay without losing the will to live. Thor would eventually enjoy himself once he stopped feeling guilty about the weather.

    Would Batman survive Glastonbury?

    Technically yes, physically. Emotionally, no. The lack of mobile signal alone would trigger a minor crisis, and the cashless bar situation would finish him off. He’d file a 47-page debrief upon returning to Gotham.

    What is a British summer festival actually like?

    Muddy, crowded, expensive, and genuinely one of the best experiences you can have in the UK. Glastonbury is the obvious benchmark, drawing around 200,000 people to Worthy Farm each year. The BBC has comprehensive coverage at bbc.co.uk if you want the full picture.

    Why is Deadpool always getting banned from things?

    Because Deadpool operates entirely outside the social contract that makes civilised events possible. He finds loopholes, ignores rules, and somehow makes you laugh while doing it. A British festival’s security team would have a very bad weekend.

  • The Most Catastrophically Bad Video Game Menus, Ranked by Someone Who Has Clearly Never Used the NHS Website

    The Most Catastrophically Bad Video Game Menus, Ranked by Someone Who Has Clearly Never Used the NHS Website

    I’ve spent roughly 40 hours of my life trying to change the brightness setting in a video game. Not because I’m slow. Because game studios, some of them employing hundreds of talented people, routinely design menus so structurally unhinged that the DVLA online portal looks like a spa retreat by comparison. The worst video game menus in history aren’t just annoying. They’re a genre unto themselves. A horror genre.

    Let’s roast them properly.

    Frustrated gamer facing the worst video game menus in comic book art style
    Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

    Why do so many games get menus catastrophically wrong?

    There’s a theory I’ve developed over years of gaming that goes like this: the bigger and more ambitious the game, the worse the menus. It’s as if the design team spent four years perfecting the open-world rendering engine and then, on the final Friday before launch, someone said “oh right, we need a settings screen” and an intern handled it during lunch.

    The result is menus that feel like trying to book a GP appointment at 8am on a Monday. You know what you want. You can almost see it. But every click takes you somewhere slightly more confusing, and you eventually give up and just live with 60% volume forever.

    The NHS website, bless it, does this exact thing. You land on the homepage wanting to check if your local surgery is open over a bank holiday weekend. Twenty minutes later you’ve somehow ended up reading about bunions and booked a repeat prescription you didn’t need. Video game menus pull the same trick. Dragon Age: Origins had a character creator with sub-menus inside sub-menus inside dropdown tabs that required a printed flowchart. I love that game. I will never forgive it.

    The worst offenders, ranked from “frustrating” to “genuinely frightening”

    Deadly Premonition (2010)

    The inventory system in Deadly Premonition is, technically speaking, a war crime. You navigate it using what feels like three different button mappings that were never introduced, across a grid layout that appears to have been designed by someone who once heard the word “interface” at a party. The game itself is wonderful, chaotic and deeply strange. The menu is its spiritual twin. You can actually see the design philosophy: “What if finding your torch felt like renewing a TV licence?”

    Dark Souls (2011)

    Here’s the thing about Dark Souls. The difficulty is the point. Dying is the point. But accidentally unequipping your shield mid-boss fight because the item menu is a minimalist nightmare with no confirmation screen? That’s not difficulty. That’s a filing error. I’ve spoken to people who genuinely believe the menu was designed by Miyazaki as a metaphor for suffering. I’m not ruling it out.

    Close-up of a catastrophically confusing game menu in comic book illustration style
    Photo by Rafael Minguet Delgado on Pexels

    The Elder Scrolls Online (early access version)

    The DVLA’s vehicle registration portal has, at various points, required me to enter my details, lose the session, re-enter my details, get an error code, phone a number that goes to voicemail, and then discover the thing I wanted was on a completely different government website all along. Elder Scrolls Online’s early menus worked almost identically. Bank storage, inventory, crafting bags, guild storage, the costume system: all separate, all slightly different, all pretending they’d met before when they clearly hadn’t. ZeniMax eventually fixed much of it. The DVLA is still working on theirs.

    Final Fantasy XIII

    Final Fantasy XIII is a linear game. Genuinely, almost aggressively linear for the first twenty hours. And yet somehow its menu system managed to feel like a labyrinth. The Crystarium upgrade screen looked gorgeous. Understanding what it was actually doing to your character stats required a separate Google search and an act of faith. I’ve seen convoluted comic book storylines that were easier to parse than the FFXIII status screen.

    Cyberpunk 2077 (launch version)

    At launch, Cyberpunk 2077 had a map that was more misleading than useful, a crafting menu that buried essential items under five separate tabs, and a quest tracker that occasionally pointed you somewhere with all the confidence of a sat-nav directing you into a river. The irony of a hyper-futuristic game set in Night City having a UI that felt like booking a British Rail ticket in 1987 was not lost on anyone. CD Projekt Red spent two years patching it. The game is now very good. The early menus remain a museum piece.

    The NHS website comparison is funnier than it should be

    I want to be clear: I have genuine affection for the NHS. What I do not have affection for is the approximately seventeen different login portals it operates, none of which share credentials, and the way that finding your immunisation history requires you to pass through what feels like a series of escape room puzzles before arriving at a page that says “try the app instead.”

    Game studios making terrible menus aren’t doing anything the public sector hasn’t done for years. The difference is that NHS Digital (now absorbed into NHS England) has at least had the good grace to acknowledge the problem. Some game studios still seem to think their settings menu is fine, actually, and maybe you just need to read the manual. There is no manual. There hasn’t been a manual since 2004.

    Good interface design is its own craft. It’s why a company like WDM exists, why UX as a discipline has entire degree courses attached to it, and why someone, somewhere, is being paid specifically to make sure that clicking on a button does what you expect it to do. Video game studios hiring that person properly would solve a remarkable number of the issues on this list.

    Games that actually got their menus right

    It’s not all grim. Hades has menus so clean and responsive they feel like a personal compliment. God of War (2018) moved everything into a radial wheel that barely interrupted play. Forza Horizon 5 has a map and menu system so intuitive it almost makes up for the fact that, as we’ve noted elsewhere, open world games rarely get British weather quite right. These studios proved it’s possible. The bad ones just chose not to.

    The worst video game menus share a common failure: they were designed by people who already knew how they worked. A developer who built the system will always find it intuitive. They know where the audio slider lives. They put it there. The rest of us, loading the game for the first time at 11pm with the telly too loud, are just guessing. Like renewing a passport. In the dark.

    According to the GOV.UK Service Standard, public-facing digital services must be designed with user needs at the centre. Game studios aren’t bound by that standard. Looking at some of these menus, you’d know.

    Miyazaki, the DVLA, and whoever designed the Final Fantasy XIII Crystarium: all victims of the same curse. All completely convinced their system makes perfect sense. All absolutely wrong.

  • Which Video Game Cities Would Absolutely Fail a UK Fire Safety Inspection

    Which Video Game Cities Would Absolutely Fail a UK Fire Safety Inspection

    I’ve spent a genuinely embarrassing number of hours inside fictional cities. Midgar at 2am. Rapture on a Sunday afternoon. Los Santos on what felt like every bank holiday for three years running. And the longer I spend in these places, the more one very specific thought keeps nagging at me: a UK fire marshal would absolutely lose their mind. Not metaphorically. We’re talking clipboard-snapping, hi-vis-vest-sweating, full-scale professional meltdown. Video game cities fire safety is, frankly, a disaster waiting to happen. Multiple disasters. Simultaneously. On different floors.

    Dystopian video game city skyline illustrating catastrophic video game cities fire safety failures
    Photo by zhou shen on Pexels

    Let’s do this properly. I’m rating five iconic game cities against the actual requirements set out under the UK Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which governs commercial and public premises across England and Wales. The criteria are real. The violations are extremely fictional. The danger feels very, very genuine.

    Midgar (Final Fantasy VII), structural chaos with added mako leakage

    Midgar is a city built on top of another city, suspended on a giant metal plate, powered by reactors that literally suck the life out of the planet. From a fire safety standpoint, I don’t even know where to start. Actually, I do. The plate itself.

    The upper plate has exactly one documented escape route for the population below: falling through it when Shinra blows the thing up. That is not a compliant emergency exit. UK fire regs require clearly marked, unobstructed escape routes with adequate lighting. The slums beneath the plate have zero natural light, a network of alleyways that double back on themselves like a very angry maze, and exposed electrical wiring that would make an NICEIC-registered electrician weep openly. Mako reactors produce heat, radiation-adjacent energy, and presumably some kind of noxious vapour. There are no working sprinklers. There is no assembly point. There is a flower girl, but she cannot legally serve as a fire warden without proper training and a certificate.

    Verdict: Immediate prohibition notice. Evacuate everyone. Shut the reactors. Then probably shut the planet down for a full risk assessment.

    Rapture (BioShock), underwater, flooded, on fire somehow

    Rapture is an art deco city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, built by a libertarian who explicitly rejected the concept of government oversight. You can probably see where the fire safety angle is going.

    By the time you arrive in 1960, Rapture is partially flooded, partially on fire, and entirely populated by people who’ve injected themselves with genetic material to the point of psychological collapse. The fire marshal would step through the bathysphere, take one look at the burst pipes pouring water over exposed electrical panels, and immediately turn around. Blocked fire doors propped open with plasmid canisters. Sparking overhead lights flickering over puddles. Ryan Industries signage hanging from a single bolt. And the smell. I’d imagine the smell alone would violate about four separate sections of the Health and Safety at Work Act.

    To be fair to Rapture, some areas do have functional splicer-proof doors. But those doors lock from the outside and are designed to trap you, not help you escape. That’s essentially the opposite of what a fire exit is for. Rapture scores zero out of ten. It gets a bonus minus point for being technically impossible to evacuate because you’re under the sea.

    Flooded underground corridor representing the worst video game cities fire safety hazards
    Photo by Tom Fisk on Pexels

    Los Santos (GTA V), technically compliant, until absolutely not

    Los Santos is the most interesting case, because on the surface it looks like a functioning city. There are proper roads. Shops. A working airport. You’d think someone, somewhere, had signed off on a fire risk assessment for the Maze Bank Tower.

    And then you spend five minutes there.

    The problem with Los Santos isn’t the architecture. It’s the residents. Car fires happen approximately every ninety seconds. Petrol stations explode if you look at them with mild intent. The police response to any situation involving smoke is to add gunfire, which historically does not improve fire safety outcomes. I once watched a lorry clip a lamp post outside the Vanilla Unicorn and set off a chain reaction that took out half a city block. No fire brigade arrived for eleven minutes. Ofcom would have something to say about the emergency broadcast system too, given that the in-game radio just kept playing.

    For flooring alone, the interiors of Los Santos properties are a case study in what not to do. Slippery surfaces near exits, no anti-slip treatment in commercial kitchens, questionable choices in high-footfall areas. Speaking of which, if you want to see what genuinely compliant safety flooring looks like in real-world commercial environments, Macfloor is worth a look. Los Santos, clearly, has never heard of them.

    Verdict: Conditional pass on the buildings. Catastrophic fail on everything else. Trevor’s properties don’t even get a conditional pass.

    Hyrule Castle Town (Zelda: Ocarina of Time), medieval, and it shows

    Look, I understand that Hyrule is a fantasy medieval kingdom and expecting it to comply with modern fire legislation is perhaps ambitious. But the castle market town is presented as a bustling, populated settlement with tight alleyways, thatched-adjacent structures, and a literal volcano visible from the centre. You can see Death Mountain from the shop where you buy bombs. You are purchasing explosives within eyeline of an active volcano.

    The castle itself has candles everywhere. Torches lining every corridor. No stone compartmentalisation between floors that would slow the spread of fire. The drawbridge is the only way in or out of the entire upper town area, which means that in a genuine fire emergency, exactly one escape route exists, and it requires someone at the top of a tower to manually lower it. That person is the gate guard, who, in my experience of this game, is not always present.

    Hyrule Castle Town fails on means of escape, fire detection, fire-fighting equipment, and structural compartmentalisation. But it does have a very nice fountain in the middle. That’s something.

    Raccoon City (Resident Evil 2 and 3), the absolute worst

    Raccoon City doesn’t just fail a fire safety inspection. Raccoon City fails at existing as a city. By the time you’re navigating the Raccoon City Police Department, the building has been abandoned mid-shift, most of the lights are out, blood is on the floors, and the fire suppression system has been specifically disabled by the villain’s organisation to prevent evidence being destroyed. So someone actively sabotaged the sprinklers. That’s not just a building regulations violation. That’s a criminal offence under the Fire Safety Act 2021.

    The RCPD also has boarded-up windows, barricaded corridors, random explosive barrels placed next to filing cabinets, and a basement laboratory operating illegal biological experiments beneath what is nominally a public safety building. The fire marshal would arrive, review the risk assessment (there isn’t one), attempt to locate the responsible person under the 2005 Order (he’s been eaten), and promptly call the HSE, the police, and probably MI5.

    Raccoon City is so dangerous from a fire safety perspective that the government’s eventual solution was to nuke the entire city from orbit. Which, honestly, I think the fire marshal would have signed off on early if given the paperwork.

    Honourable mentions and how they’d appeal the decision

    A few cities didn’t make the main list but deserve a note. Novigrad from The Witcher 3 would probably scrape a pass on the fire exits, but the persecution-fuelled bonfires happening in the main square are an obvious concern. Columbia from BioShock Infinite is a floating city powered by unknown energy, which the HSE would classify as a novel hazard requiring a specialist assessment before any rating could be issued. And Dunwall from Dishonored has rats. So many rats. Rats are listed as a fire risk in UK property guidance because they chew through wiring. Dunwall would fail on rats alone before you even got to the whale oil.

    If you enjoyed this descent into bureaucratic chaos, you might also appreciate our look at which sci-fi movie technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators, or the equally grim findings from our MOT assessment of famous sci-fi spaceships. The pattern, as you’ll notice, is that fictional worlds are having a very bad time with British compliance standards. And honestly? Good. Someone has to hold them accountable.

    Final rankings, quickfire: Raccoon City (actively illegal), Rapture (physically impossible to make safe), Midgar (prohibited pending structural survey), Hyrule Castle Town (medieval, not exempt), Los Santos (chaotic neutral). None of them pass. Not one. I’d give Hyrule’s fountain a small certificate of merit, but that’s as far as I’m going.

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

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

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

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

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

    Red Dead Redemption 2, the Scottish Highlands in disguise

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

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

    The Witcher 3, Northumberland with added bog monsters

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

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

    Ghost of Tsushima, Cornwall in August, unpredictably

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cyberpunk 2077, Manchester in a neon dystopia

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Which game actually wins for British weather accuracy?

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

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

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

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

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Which open world game has the most realistic weather system?

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

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

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

    Is Forza Horizon 4 actually set in the UK?

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

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

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

  • The Movie Heists That Would Completely Fall Apart the Moment They Hit a UK Car Park Barrier

    The Movie Heists That Would Completely Fall Apart the Moment They Hit a UK Car Park Barrier

    I’ve watched Heat, The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven and about forty other heist films with the same slack-jawed admiration as everyone else. The choreography. The swagger. The getaway drivers who somehow always find an empty road. And then I think about the last time I tried to exit a Tesco car park with a ticket that wouldn’t scan, and the whole fantasy collapses like a wet paper bag. Movie heists are brilliant precisely because they exist in a world without our infrastructure. But what if they didn’t? What if Danny Ocean had to contend with the Dartford Crossing? What if the Italian Job mini coopers had a Pay & Display to deal with first? Let’s find out exactly where movie heists involving UK infrastructure would have gone catastrophically, hilariously wrong.

    Comic art of a movie heist getaway car stopped by a car park barrier, illustrating how movie heists UK infrastructure would derail
    Photo by Chen EdisoN on Pexels

    Ocean’s Eleven: foiled at the NCP multi-storey

    The crew in Ocean’s Eleven spend weeks drilling into the Bellagio vault through a network of underground tunnels. Sophisticated. Audacious. Completely undetectable. Now transplant that plan to, say, the NCP car park on Great Portland Street in London. First problem: the automated barrier at the entrance doesn’t accept the ticket Brad Pitt’s character forgot to validate at the machine. He reverses. He blocks the ramp. A Ford Focus behind him beeps once, politely. Then again, with more feeling. The rest of the heist team are circling the one-way system for the fourth time because there’s no right turn onto the main road and Google Maps keeps recalculating. By the time anyone actually gets underground, the car park charges £4.50 per half hour and they’ve already spent £27 arguing about which level they parked on.

    This is the quiet tragedy of movie heists UK infrastructure would destroy. It’s not the police. It’s the Pay & Display machine that only takes coins up to 50p, and nobody has coins anymore.

    The Italian Job and the Birmingham ring road

    The 1969 original is a masterpiece. Michael Caine. Three Mini Coopers. Sewers and rooftops and the most satisfying ending in British cinema. But here’s my problem with it as a real-world plan: the escape route relies entirely on unobstructed urban roads in Turin. Turin, not Birmingham. Swap the location to the UK’s second city and those Minis immediately hit the Queensway tunnel on a weekday afternoon. One of them gets stuck behind a council lorry. Another clips a bollard that’s been there since 1987 and has no business being that colour. The third Mini makes it as far as the ring road before the driver, rattled, accidentally joins the M6 and ends up in Coventry.

    I’d genuinely argue the Birmingham ring road is more effective at preventing rapid vehicle movement than any police cordon. As I noted in our piece on open world games with suspiciously British town planning decisions, British urban layout has a particular genius for making fast movement feel personally insulting.

    Comic book panel showing toll cameras catching a getaway car, representing movie heists UK infrastructure challenges like the Dartford Crossing
    Photo by Araf Khan on Pexels

    The Dartford Crossing: nemesis of every getaway driver

    The Dartford Crossing is, in my view, the single greatest passive anti-crime device in the country. Since going cashless in 2014, you have to pay online or via the app by midnight the next day. You can’t pay at the crossing itself. There are no booths. There is no human. Just cameras, and the quiet certainty of a £35 fine if you forget.

    Now put any Hollywood getaway driver through that. They’ve just done the job. They’re heading south on the M25 with the goods in the boot. They’re buzzing. They hit the Dartford Crossing and… nothing happens. They get through. Brilliant. Except three weeks later, a PCN arrives at the registered address of the stolen vehicle they were driving. Which leads investigators directly to the car. Which leads to CCTV. Which leads to the whole crew getting nicked over a £2.50 toll they forgot to pay online. The Dart Charge system has almost certainly done more for public safety than it’s ever been credited for.

    Fast and furious vs the London congestion charge zone

    The Fast and Furious franchise long ago abandoned any pretence of being about cars and is now essentially a superhero series with slightly more torque. But imagine Dominic Toretto and his family pulling their elaborate vehicular nonsense inside the London Congestion Charge Zone. The charge is currently £15 per day for most vehicles, and the zone operates Monday to Friday, 7am to 6pm, plus weekends 12pm to 6pm. Professional criminals planning a job during those hours face an immediate additional overhead that no Hollywood script has ever acknowledged.

    Worse, if any of those lovingly customised muscle cars don’t meet the ULEZ emission standards, they’re looking at another £12.50 on top. Per vehicle. Per day. A five-car convoy doing a week of reconnaissance in central London racks up costs that would make the actual haul barely worth it. The TfL cameras would also capture every plate on every approach road, creating a perfect timestamped record of the entire crew’s movements. Vin Diesel has never once mentioned the Ultra Low Emission Zone. I find that suspicious.

    Heat’s famous downtown shootout, but make it a British town centre on a Saturday

    The heat downtown LA shootout is arguably the greatest action sequence ever filmed. Tactical, brutal, eerily realistic. Robert De Niro’s crew fight their way through wide American boulevards with military precision. Now put that scene in a British town centre on a Saturday afternoon. The crew immediately encounter a pedestrianised zone with bollards every five metres. The getaway car can’t enter. There’s a farmers’ market blocking the only vehicle access point. A man selling artisan cheese does not move out of the way quickly enough. The escape motorbike gets its wheel stuck in the tramlines if we’re being generous enough to give the town trams.

    I’ve always thought, watching that film, that the real unsung heroes are the getaway vehicle logistics people. In the UK, that job is basically impossible. The British high street has a unique talent for being completely impassable at exactly the wrong moment.

    The one heist that might actually work in the UK

    Here’s my genuine take: the only heist film that could plausibly translate to Britain is The Lavender Hill Mob. Alec Guinness. 1951. A mild-mannered bank clerk who is completely overlooked precisely because he seems so ordinary. No car chases. No glamour. Just a man on a bus, hiding in plain sight, not drawing attention to himself. That is peak British criminal methodology. Don’t speed. Pay your congestion charge. Validate your parking ticket. The audacity of the scheme is invisible because the person executing it looks exactly like someone queuing patiently at the post office.

    Modern heist movies could learn something from that. All that flash and horsepower, and they never once ask: what if the plan was just to be extremely polite and boringly compliant with all posted signage?

    There’s something almost poetic about the fact that the most unbreachable security systems in Britain aren’t the ones in the vaults. They’re the car park barriers, the toll roads, the emission zone cameras, and the single-lane contraflow that appears without warning on the A406. For anyone planning something elaborate and cinematic, I’d strongly suggest reconsidering. And perhaps redirect that energy somewhere more constructive, like getting behind a climate action plan for schools in the midlands, which honestly requires less planning and causes fewer problems with CCTV.

    For more appreciation of British infrastructure’s quiet chaos, our breakdown of the worst video game maps for navigation using a tatty AA road atlas is required reading. And if the movie heist angle has you thinking about films that went genuinely dark and weird, the most unhinged video game plot twists piece will scratch that itch nicely.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Would a getaway driver actually get caught by the Dartford Crossing?

    Almost certainly, yes. The Dart Charge system is fully automated with ANPR cameras that record every plate passing through. If you’re driving a stolen or unregistered vehicle and fail to pay the £2.50 toll online, a fine notice gets generated and linked to the vehicle’s registered address, which could easily expose the wider operation.

    Which real UK city would be hardest for a film-style car chase?

    Most people would say central London, given the congestion charge zone, ULEZ cameras, pedestrianised areas and general gridlock. But Birmingham’s ring road system deserves serious consideration: it’s bewildering even with GPS assistance and has a way of sending you back to where you started no matter which exit you take.

    Does the London ULEZ really cover central London?

    The Ultra Low Emission Zone covers most of Greater London 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Non-compliant vehicles pay £12.50 per day. On top of the congestion charge zone operating weekdays and weekends, it creates a significant financial disincentive for anything involving older, flashier muscle cars.

    What is the Dart Charge and how does it work?

    Dart Charge is the cashless payment system for the Dartford Crossing on the M25, which handles crossings in both directions. You pay online, via the app, or by phone before midnight the following day. There are no booths at the crossing itself, just ANPR cameras. Miss the deadline and you receive a £35 penalty charge notice.

    Are there any real heist films set in Britain worth watching?

    The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) is genuinely brilliant and actually engages with the mundane realities of British life as cover. More recently, the Guy Ritchie films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels have fun with British criminal culture, even if they stretch credibility in their own ways.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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