2008 Top 10 albums with mini-reviews

A little late I know, but here nonetheless.

Tragedy, trite and injustice

In a remarkable day for video games in mainstream news on Wednesday, reports of the previous evening's Bafta video game ceremony sat alongside stories that inevitably blamed shooters for the latest school shooting. Carried out by a 17-year-old in Germany, fifteen people were killed. Some journalists were extremely quick to point out that the killer was obsessed with shooters. The infuriating trite awkwardly shared the headlines with pictures of triple Bafta-winning shooter Call of Duty 4.

The teenage gunman, Tim Kretschmer, was described as "a quiet and reserved boy who enjoyed playing Counter-Strike." That sounds like me, but I'm not planning on doing something similar anytime soon because I've managed to retain sanity, much like 99.9% of the legions of PC gamers and console kids who love nothing more than shooting digital faces purely to let off steam and have fun.

On a lighter (albeit still cynical) note, I was disappointed with the results of the Bafta video game awards. The fact that the very best games of last year didn't actually win anything (bar Left 4 Dead) compares to the corrupt, non-bourgeois nature of music and film award ceremonies.

Super Mario Galaxy shocked everyone by taking the game of the year award, proving that mainstream appeal counts for more than the incredible technical and creative achievements of games like Fallout 3. Even more sickeningly, Spore managed to fight off competition from Bethesda's chef-d'oeuvre and Grand Theft Auto IV for the Technical Achievement award despite the seemingly universal agreement it was the most disappointing game of 2008. Perhaps strangest of all, Call of Duty 4's contrived story and forgettable characters helped it win the, err, Story and Character Bafta despite it being in competition with absorbing epics such as Mass Effect and, again, Fallout 3. People are silly.