Editorial: Benighted Realm of the Week

Tory Administered Britannia
Benighted realm of the week goes to the Isle of Tory administered Britannia, wherein buffoon at large, and sometime Defence Secretary, Liam Fox blundered his way into international gaming headlines with his absurd demands on English game retailers. Fox has demanded that retailers boycott EA’s October reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise due to the muddled and ignorant belief that the game involves players assuming the role of Taliban insurgents, requiring them to gun down British troops (when a rudimentary facility with the written word could have disabused him of this outlandish notion). Mr Fox went on to say “It’s shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban. I am disgusted and angry. It’s hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game”, by this I can only assume he means that it is every British citizen’s sacred duty to play naught but Henry Hatzenfeldt’s Great Crumpet Caper, but of course I jest.

Before Mr. Lusipurr feels honour bound to tear strips from my beer swilling, no-good, convict hide I should probably clarify the situation somewhat. You see Liam Fox is a Scotsman (worthless race/never amount to anything), and rather than rid himself of this rabble when given the chance (defective breed/should be put to the sword), the virtuous Englishman saw only a brother of the anglosphere, and so clasped to his breast this asp in man’s clothing, and has thus been paying for it ever since (woe betide genteel culture/mediocrity ever attempts to drag down excellence). This is merely Mother England’s chickens of convenience come home to roost, the oafish Mr Fox blundering like a drunk mule across the world stage is the price she pays for territorial unification. Sadly, it is a cross which both sides of English politics have to stoically bear, that they must be inclusive of such debased riffraff, which is why you have the Tory Defence Secretary spewing such absolute garbage as: “I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product”.

Understandably, Mr Fox’s more learned Tory peers have been completely mortified at his ignorant knee-jerk rhetoric, as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), a cabinet of Tory MPs (all of them upstanding, sober and clean living Englishmen to a man) gave this clear and unequivocal statement:

Dr Fox was expressing a personal view and we understand why some people might find the subject matter of the game offensive. There is a ratings system in place which exists to categorise games appropriately, in this case the game in question is rated 18 so should only be sold to, and played by, adults. There is a clear choice for consumers which they can exercise when making decisions about purchasing video games.

For readers not fluent in political bullshit, that roughly equates to “Liam Fox? Yeah that arsetard’s not with us. He should eat a dick and die, in his arse”, or some such. EA were even more explicit in providing a remedial explanation fit for a Scotsman: “The format of the new Medal of Honor game merely reflects the fact that every conflict has two sides. We give gamers the opportunity to play both sides. Most of us have been doing this since we were seven: someone plays the cop, someone must be robber.

What often troubles me about such situations is why the burden of explanation should always fall to the game publisher when incompetent Scottish politicians never even attempt to understand what the hell it is they are talking about (that is assuming that they can even read with their glass eyes and such), preferring to bluster and bristle as they do with righteous indignation. Thus, the real benighted realm of the week award is conferred unanimously upon darkest Scotland, the sceptic pustule on the anal rim of Greater Britannia, and the eternal bane of Mother England. Whether she will ever be free of this toxic scourge, well who’s to say? Perhaps they will one day collectively misread the warning label on a bottle of tasty looking rat poison, one can only dream.

Runner Up:
Murfreesboro: Land of Milk and Honey