E14 Giveaway!

A story of death, sex, betrayal, and revenge; sweat, steroids and duplicity - Bret Hart lifts the lid on the wacky, mythic, secretive word of pro wrestling in this epic tell-all.

Bret Hart achieved superstardom in pink tights and won titles across the globe. But there is a dark underside to wrestling's stagey showmanship and Bret paid the price. There were betrayals: most famously by Vince McMahon, a man he had served loyally; and there were tragic deaths: including the loss of his brother Owen, who died when a stunt went terribly wrong. During his roller-coaster 20-year career, Bret kept an audio diary, recording life on the road: the relentless travel, the practical jokes, the sex, the drugs, the rivalries.

Now, his riveting, self-written, no-holds-barred account blows apart the mysterious world of wrestling.

Thanks to our friends at Ebury Press, we've got five copies of Bret Hart's Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling to give away! For your chance of winning one, send us an e-mail to hitmangiveaway@yahoo.co.uk with your name and postal address before midday on Thursday 10th June (UK time). The first five names drawn out of the electronic hat will win a free copy!

Overrated/Underrated

Every now and again, some newspaper or some website or some magazine or some TV channel (most likely Channel 4) will do a “Best of X”, and tell you all the movies you should see, books you should read, games you should play, whatever. The fact is, however, that a lot of these things aren't the best of the best. They’re what a bunch of critics think the best are – and most of the time, they’re wrong. Citizen Kane is an okay film, but it’s not the best one ever made – that’s Revenge of the Sith. Sgt Pepper isn’t the best album ever made, that’s blatantly The Varangian Way.

So, here are five things that are frequently over-rated, and their plucky little underdog that you should be rooting for:

Comic Book Writers

Overrated:

Alan Moore

What you are hearing is the sound of a million casual comic book fans screaming into the Xbox 360 headsets. They can’t believe that someone would dare label Alan Moore as overrated. The guy wrote Watchmen! The Killing Joke! The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! V For Vendetta!
And...

From Hell...and...uh...Albion?

I’m not saying that Moore is a bad writer. Moore is a great writer responsible for some of the greatest comic books ever written. However, if you Mountain Dew spitters can take a step back and be objective for a moment you’ll realise that Moore has a pretty even 50/50 split between pure gold, and brown, sticky stuff that smells like shit. There’s a reason people talk about his five greatest achievements all the time, and that’s because they are all his achievements.

He’s a great writer, but let’s not get carried away here.

Underrated:

Pat Mills

Who?

Pat Mills is, for my money, the best comic writer there is. His work manages to stay “comic booky” (good vs evil, big action sequences, larger than life characters, a great sense of humour), whilst also being intelligent, and actually saying something at the same time. Nemesis the Warlock was about an alien crusader fighting against a Human Supremacist government/religious organisation – but it did it with humour, explosions...dark wit and biting satire.

Mills is also responsible for Charley’s War, which is (along with Maus) the only war comic you will ever need. Charley’s War managed to be a kid’s war story that was totally uncompromising – and when I first read it as a kid, I really appreciated that.

Mills has also worked on Batman, Dan Dare, Judge Dredd, The Punisher and Star Wars; and created Diceman (the 2000AD Choose-Your-Own-Adventure comic), Slaine, Defoe and The ABC Warriors.

Moore can give us layered textures and characters and hidden meaning and blahblahblahblah. Moore never made “BIG JOBS!” a catchphrase.

Gothic Horror Writers

Overrated:
Edgar Allan Poe

Again, I like Poe. He’s a great writer, but I think he’s a pretty lousy horror writer. Can anyone honestly say that they’ve ever been scared by anything he’s ever written? Impressed: yes. Entertained: yes. Scared: no.

We can allow a little for changing sensibilities and tastes over the decades. I can get that The Raven was probably more chilling back then that it is now...but was it ever really scary? To me, Poe is admirable for setting the stage for those that followed. His work in and of itself is...lacking.

Underrated:
Sheridan Le Fanu

Sheridan Le Fanu, may be the second greatest horror writer of all time. His work is eerie, ghostly, uncompromising, and pretty damn original. Fans of M.R. James, in particular, will love him. He wrote several short stories that were full of the kind of frights I loved as a kid, and – of course – his most famous work is Carmilla. Published in 1872, it predates Dracula by a quarter of a century, and is probably the first story ever to combine vampires and lesbians. And for that, we applaud him.

Action Movies Stars

Overrated:
Hollywood Action Heroes

I love action movies. I’m as excited about The Expendables as the next person with a penis. But, when you think about it, all The Expendables is saying is that all of the action heroes is Hollywood are actually so f’n weak, that you need to use all of them at once to generate any sort of interest in a project. Stallone used to be able to carry a movie on his own, as did Li...but the rest of them? Okay, maybe Lundgren had a couple of movies that were actually pretty good, but Statham? Steve Austin?

Who is our biggest star these days? Is it really Vin Diesel? Dwayne Johnson?

Hollywood Action Heroes just aren’t as kick-arse as they used to be. This is because when an action movie star gets older, he just can’t be taken seriously any more. This then leads to make one of three choices: a) do family movies, b) do comedies or c) be Bruce Willis.

Interestingly, Bruce Willis chose all three.

Underrated:
Vincent Cassel

Sure, he looks like a French hotel manager, but this man has kicked more arse than you even knew was on the face of the planet. He’s starred in hyper-violent movies such as La Haine, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Irreversible, Guest House Paradiso, and the almighty, death-by-tarmac-abrasion featuring Brad’s Personal Favourite Action Movie Ever After Commando: Dobermann.

Gaming Reviews

Lone Wolf Multiplayer Gamebook
RPG Core Rulebook
Mongoose Publishing
Available Now - £10.00 (Paperback)
Review by Brad Harmer

Launched in the 1980s, the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks (not be confused with the Lone Wolf and Cub series of hella-awesome) quickly became firm favourites among a growing fan based. Alone among the gamebooks of their day, Lone Wolf was the first to feature an extended campaign in which your character could grow and expand as he travelled through all twenty-eight books of the original series.

Now, you can return to the world of Magnamund, this time with your friends. The Lone Wolf Multiplayer Gamebook is a full role-playing game, based on the simple rules system of the solo books. This first book in the series introduces character classes, basic rules, and three short introductory scenarios (linked as a short campaign).

If the Lone Wolf Multiplayer Gamebook is one thing, it’s “simple”. The combat system is light and abstracted, there are very few statistics to keep track of, and character generation is a doddle. If you’re looking for your first RPG and have fond memories of the gamebooks on which it is based, then you could do a lot worse than pick this up for the price of a night out.

Of course, chances are that if you do fondly remember the gamebooks, then you’ve probably either moved away from unplugged gaming entirely, or have moved on to bigger and more complex systems. After anything more complicated than this (and I would class Advanced Fighting Fantasy as being heavier than Lone Wolf Multiplayer), chances are you’re going to find this rather insipid.

The presentation is fair to middling. The layout is clear and the illustrations are excellent, but so much has obviously been rather lazily cut and pasted from the original gamebooks, and it’s not even been well edited or proofed, and errors abound.

The adventures provided are light and simple, but painfully railroaded. Any attempt to try something innovative will result is squishy gory death for the players. Hardly an ideal introduction into what role-playing games should be like.

With strong support (and Mongoose are one of the best at providing support for all their releases), then there may be hope for this yet. A very light, beginner’s RPG that’s worth picking up for nostalgia value, but won’t win over any newcomers. 5/10

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When a couple travelling along the English countryside stop to get directions from a pair of Ministry of Agriculture workers who are testing an experimental device designed to drive crop-damaging insects into killing each other, you know you're in for a good movie.

While they plan their next stop, a man who has been dead for several days attacks--to be followed shortly thereafter by a full-scale zombie invasion--which could very well be a result of the agriculturist's distribution of ultrasonic radiation. A macabre, atmospheric Spanish-Italian co-production featuring extremely convincing performances and a haunting score by Giuliano Sorgini.

The second half of the film contains enough gut-munching gore scenes to satisfy most horror fans, leading to an unexpected and eerie finale. Jorge Grau's film is a seminal entry in the Italian zombie genre and gained notoriety when it was banned as a 'video nasty' in the early 1980s.

Thanks to our friends at Revolver Entertainment, we've got a copy of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue to give away! For your chance of winning it, send us an e-mail to manchestermorguegiveaway@yahoo.co.uk with your name and postal address before midday on Monday 8th June (UK time). The first three names drawn out of the electronic hat will win a free copy!