Two things have been keeping me occupied lately: the first season of the UK Life on Mars, and The Witcher Enhanced Edition. Both are flawed but enjoyable. I was also playing Empire: Total War for a while but it's too danged easy on the difficulty level I was playing so I'm a bit disillusioned.

Life on Mars is about John Simm being a police who gets hit by a car so hard he wakes up in an episode of The Sweeny. John Simm's always entertaining to watch, although his character reminds me more than a little of the Simon Pegg's supercop in Hot Fuzz. The main reason to watch the show comes from Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, a swaggering, hard bastard who insists on being called 'Guv'. The character frequently crosses the line into characiture, but it doesn't stop the show from being entertaining and worth watching. I'm gunna pick up the second series once I'm done with this one.

And the Witcher has really caught my attention. It starts off pretty trashy, with the main character turning up with amnesia after being missing-presumed-dead for five years. You're Geralt, the Witcher, a monster killer for hire with heightened abilites resulting from a mutagenic process that somehow turned all the hair on his head white but left him with a permanent, dark, five o'clock shadow.

He's faster and stronger than a normal person, immune to diseases and resistant to poison. He's also sterile which is good considering the number of women he can sleep with. He also can create potions out of bits of monsters and alcohol, the potency of the potion relating to the booze used. Like I said, it's trashy. I can imagine the creator of the novels getting along really well with R.A. Salvatore.

One part of the game that gets remarked on often is the sexual content, which isn't as unusual as people seem to be assuming. Most of the Black Isle rpgs allowed the characters to have sexual encounters, as did the Troika games. There's a brothel in Arcanum where you can have sex with a sheep. What's unsual is the sex is displayed on the screen, if too blurry to make out, and the player is rewarded with a 'sex card' showing the conquest in a state of undress.

Sex shouldn't be kept out of computer games just because they're games. It's ridiculous. Hip hop music videos have worse content and they get played during supposed g-rated slots. The 'reward cards' allow the creators to put sexual content into the game without the characters sledding upon each other down the uncanny valley in the way that made the Hot Coffee mod in San Andreas so bloody horrifying.

One problem is though there's no consequence for the multiple sexual encounters. Geralt sleeps with anyone who crosses his path because he's sterile and immune to disease. Meanwhile the rest of the game is all about action and consequences. I'm in the second chapter of the game, investigating a murder. But my main lead is dead at the hands of terrorists I chose to supply with weapons in an earlier chapter. Meanwhile I can follow another lead at he hospital because the main guard is someone I saved the life at another point through a different choice I made. It's really interesting the way it's all working out and makes the game compelling.