Red light! Green light! Go! Go! GO!

After the heady heights of Thor hurling Loki back to Asgard, Daisy Duke posing and Wildcat punching a Nazi we're back to the usual level of ham-fisted content that you can only find on This Sentence No Verb.

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wished that you could perform archaic forms of surgery with rusty tools as blood and pus flies everywhere? If the answer is 'Yes' then you're in luck! Yes, thanks to the fine people at ArmorGames now you too can lose yourself in a world of grimy pain thanks to Dark Cut, the internet's primary Horrific Surgery Simulator™!

If the answer was no, then I suggest you go somewhere else instead.

I've said before that these little games that you can find on tHeINtErnEt.com can be a fantastic way to spend a little time. Then they become a fantastic way to spend a lot of time. Then they become a time-consuming behemoth that will not rest until they've sucked the life out of you. I'd managed to kick the Curve Ball habit, and deal with my Nuclear Eagle addiction and was feeling pretty confident about not getting sucked in again. The thing is, this game is different to all the others and therein lies its allure.

The premise is simple - you are a doctor in the dark ages and must perform medical procedures without killing your patient. The controls of the game are very simple, at each stage of the level an appropriate tool appears and the mouse is used to control that tool to perform the required action - be that slicing the flights from an arrow, sawing an arrow shaft in half or hammering it all the way through the patient's leg.

Hammering wood through a leg. Yesterday.

Fairly straightforward and easy. The only problem is that if you make any mistakes then you end up hurting the patient. So, say you're sawing the shaft of the arrow, if you're too vigorous with the saw you end up wounding your patient, but if not vigorous enough you'll never cut through. You have to find the right balance. This is made all the more difficult by the near constant blood splatters and twitches and by the very nature of the tasks you have to perform. Here's what your plague patient ends up looking like.

Pus and leeches and slit veins to relieve pressure. Lovely. And yet it still
manages to seem cleaner than an NHS hospital. Ah-ha ha ha.[/satire]

Biting political commentary aside, I love this game. It may not be overly complicated or have that many levels but there's a definite atmosphere to the game that I find particularly absorbing. The crepy music and basic graphics only add to that sense of griminess. The ideal way to play this game is in the dark whilst slightly drunk. Sure, you can play it stone cold sober in the middle of the day but you're not getting the best out of it if you do.

Worryingly for any future plans of other activity I may have had, there's also a Dark Cut 2 that takes place in the American Civil War and requires you to remove shrapnel wounds and perform rudimentary brain surgery as cannonballs explode all around you. The patients react more vigorously with twitches and screams of agony which really throw your aim off. Also there's a level where you have to saw your own leg off.

I love me some of that Will-To-Live-Meter!

Whoever knew that surgeons were so badass?

Where I Mock Leigh, Linkblog and Talk About Something That Isn't Comics

How's it going? It's been a while since I rapped at you so I'm going to hit you with an update.

I was quite impressed with my 3 post schedule last week, so I'm going to give it another whirl and see if I can make it 4 this week. Unfortunately, inspiration has yet to strike so you'll have to make do with this whole stream of consciousness/themeless update. Sorry. No-one's making you read it though. You could always check out T-Dog's musings on the return of the cold war. I can see that Richard has updated his too with some of Shuiab's knowledge from the local paper and Leigh has...oh no, my mistake. Still nothing new.

That's not the only thing that you can check out though. Something I recommend to anyone is one of the blogs linked to on the Rolodex of Awesome over there - The Absorbascon. The Absorbascon was the first blog I ever commented on (that didn't belong to someone I already knew) and as such it holds a special place in my heart. Not just for sentimental reasons but because it's probably the smartest comics blog in the world. Sure, you can always get your comic blog staples of out of context panels as well as an obsession with an obscure comic book character there but you can also find complex mathematics and literary theory. Sure, he may prefer the barbaric "civilisation" of Thanagar to that of the interstellar utopia that is Rann but nobody's perfect. Anyway, I was just going to finish off by letting you people know that over there it's Martian Manhunter week. Go read.



Great H'Ronmeer! More? I don't know if I've got any more info to share with all y'all or not, J'onn.

*snaps fingers*

Wait a minute! Of course I have more to share with you! You probably haven't noticed, but there's a funky new addition to that section on the right there. I've now included a link to the official JYD Blog Of The Week. It's here where I can easily plug something from the Rolodex of Awesomeness in a vain attempt to get you bastards (who aren't Leigh) to enjoy the wonderful fannishness (Is that even a word? - Ed) of the world of comics. There'll always be a link to the blog as well as a quote taken from it too so you can see the literary genius contained within. This week's BOTW is Jon Carey's Facedown In The Gutters. Not only is he one of the dulcet voices that you hear on the Big Monkey Podcast but he's also a master of the written word. Weirdly, he is also one of the few American bloggers that has an authentic trans-Atlantic vibe going on. I've seen him use the word "bloody" and even more impressively "The Gunners" entirely correctly. Not just in the right context but in the right way - it doesn't seem forced or out of place. Maybe he's some kind of half-breed like Gillian Anderson. Anyway, a particularly noteworthy post to get an idea of how funny he is is this one. So I implore you, in the name of supporting people who can actually write well on the interweb, go and read. Even though some of the jokes may be outside of your frame of reference you will laugh. I guarantee it.

- - - - - - - - - -

That's not all I got though. This Sentence No Verb isn't solely supposed to be here for me to talk about comics, there are other interests too. And after my success in discovering the masterful game of CurveBall I have once again decided to turn my attention to the wonderful world of free internet games. Perfect for when you have nothing to do on the InformationSuperCanal but are too hungover to read. This evening I present for your gaming pleasure a game I chose to play based solely on the name. And here (in the style of a certain infamous 1990s computer games magazine) is where you have science dropped on you. Boyees.

It's nuclear! It's an eagle! It's nuclear and it's an eagle! It's Nuclear Eagle!



How can you not see the allure of a game so beautifully named?

The premise of the game is pretty simple. You play a giant nuclear powered eagle of death taking revenge on the cruel human world that has tormented its kind for years. It may sound slightly Friends Of The Earth but with the whole mutilation and destruction angle I see it more as an Enemy Of Mankind kind of thing. There are worlds on this, country and city. Whilst out and about in the country, your goal as an Atomic Avian is to look after your young. A wonderful message about nature. Of course, being a Radioactive Raptor your young are about the size of a Suzuki Swift so mice and voles can't sate their hunger. The best way to keep your Neutron Newborn (Can we stop with this please? - Ed.) fully fed is by providing them with a meal of suitable size. People sized.

Feeding helpless civilians to my hungry young.

As the game progresses the people get nastier, they start taking potshots at you and your babies and pretty soon the place is swarming with police, SWAT teams, tanks and helicopter gunships. It's kind of like Grand Theft Auto. But with giant monsters.

Using your mighty talons you can not only grab bystanders and carry them to their doom but you can also fling vehicles around for mighty explosions, sending dozens of people hurtling through the air. To get more points you rack up combos by throwing humans onto cars (they stick there!) and destroying the vehicle. The more vehicles the people hit before finally landing in nest or hitting the ground grants you a bigger combo and more points. You'll soon get the hang of it. It's all about torturing them for as long as possible. Their terrified screams only add to this pleasure.

Combos aren't so important in the country, but the city level is a kind of time attack mode where you have to rack up as many points in the allotted time as possible by wrecking their shit. Nothing is more satisfying than blowing up a tank by throwing a civilian covered SWAT van at it.

I drop a police car on a SWAT van and some civilians. Oh, how I laughed.

It's simple, you only need a mouse to play and it's good old fashioned high-score getting fun. Truly, Nuclear Eagle is the Carnage game of Champions. You too can know what it feels like to be a Feathered Fiend of Fusion. (Right. That's it. I'm stopping it here. - Ed.)