All screenshots from 'Madden NFL '16'

My team is young and struggling. At 6–8, we lack an offensive identity and half my defense is injured. I'm already thinking about the offseason. As soon as it hits, I'm offering a contract to the best wide receiver possible and then I'm drafting the best quarterback on the board before adding some depth to my secondary. But as the coach of this team, I can't think about the future. I need a confidence boost for my ragtag squad right now. Like a side-quest in Skyrim, I need to drive for 30 yards so my offense can get a much-needed injection of XP and that game-changing confidence.

Sure, this RPG doesn't feature orcs or wizards, but there's more min/maxing in the Madden NFL games than in most traditional swords and sorcery titles. If you want to stare at spread sheets and stats, you're covered. If you want to role-play, you can do it. For years, EA's annually issued franchise has covertly been one of gaming's most complex RPGs—and now, it's presenting the XP (experience points) of each player to the forefront of gamers' minds with Madden NFL '16.

I spoke to Madden's senior producer Seann Graddy, creative director of gameplay Rex Dickson, and creative director of modes Kolbe Launchbaugh to discuss the creation of the world's favorite simulation/role-playing crossover game based on the guts and glory of gridiron.

VICE: You're bringing XP front and center in Madden 16. How do you feel the narratives of gamers have been enhanced by giving players more control over their XP gains?
Kolbe Lanchbaugh: I think of Connected Franchise Mode as our narrative mode, as our roleplaying game. Many, many jocks and all those sports guys out there, they'd never admit that they're playing a fantasy roleplaying game when they're playing any type of franchise mode, whether it's Madden, or a baseball game, or a football game, or whatever sports game is your poison of choice. When you partake in a fantasy, when you take control of a team, when you're living out the fantasy of being that coach, that owner, or even that player, and being inside of that role, the whole goal is always to let you live that fantasy, let you be that person, let you try and be in that world. Which is exactly what an RPG is trying to do—they're trying to let you live the fantasy of being a sword-wielding, magic-dealing thing that goes and fights monsters. Well, you wield football, you sling football, and you have these giant guys that stand up in front of you and take on the opposition. That's the fantasy that we're delivering.

Connected Franchise Mode seems to have a heavy focus for this release, but some of the narrative elements appear to be buried, such as the News section. What made the team decide to take this path?
Seann Graddy: You look at how players interact with our game, and in really any sports genre, Career Mode seems to be either number one or number two in most sports titles. Ours is no different, that's where people spend most of their time, because you want that fantasy of either taking yourself to the Super Bowl or taking your favorite team or franchise to the Super Bowl. We actually spend a fair amount of our time improving CFM every year. Kolbe, who was driving Ultimate Team last year, had a lot of success in how we organize that mode, in terms of navigating it and getting to that things that you cared about. We wanted to translate some of that into CFM, based on the feedback that we've gotten from the previous year. We looked at some of the same ideas and some of the same blueprints and took them over to CFM.

Lanchbaugh: To add a little bit to that, prior to this year, the investment in CFM was really in what we call really hardcore-depth features: the little tiny nuance things, and getting those details into the game. We shifted the focus a little this year to try and put the focus more on what's actually happening. Kind of trying to bring that fantasy to life. And I know that you may take that moving the news as the opposite view of what I just said, but the news is just an execution of what that looks like, and I think we can do that even better if we expend some effort and focus on it. We've made it easier to get in and adjust your team, and find your players, and see what's going on with your team—again, we're giving you that fantasy of being in power. We weren't able to expend any effort of refreshing the news and adding new content and storylines there, so we didn't want to put that front and center if it was going to be a rehash of what's been around.

There's a camp that believes the XP gains popping up over players' heads, and seeing their confidence build with every play, affects the overall immersion.
Lanchbaugh: Well, we knew it had the potential to be a polarizing feature, but we really wanted to show you all the things that are happening on every single play. We wanted to make you feel like you could earn things for your player. Even if you're a coach leading your team, you see all the advances your team is making throughout the game and you see the bottom line ticker updating: this guy is close to a milestone goal, or season goal, or weekly goal. And then you start focusing on trying to help them get better, and you see those results. We wanted to make sure we were showing you all of the things that were going on. At the same time, we gave you the option to turn it off, to turn the visuals off. We do know that there are going to be people out there who hate it. That's OK—turn it off and you'll never see it again.

That's interesting, but the drive goals and the game goals, you're not able to turn those off, correct?
Lanchbaugh: You can actually turn the visuals off, but they still fire. You can completely ignore them. The only thing they are is icing. They're just icing.

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I'm very impressed with the nuance in the procedural animations. In going for the ball aggressively or running after the catch, it's a gameplay element that's being made drastically better. To continue the analogy, it's like adding more frames to combat in an RPG.
Rex Dickson: Wide receiver touchdown interaction was actually on our priority list from the first moment I took the job back on Madden NFL '13. We had to build two years' worth of advanced technology to achieve the multiplayer catch interaction system. So that's something we've always wanted to get to, but we had to do a lot of hard work to have the architecture to actually do it. I'm really happy with the way it came out, and obviously one of our goals outside of showing just the contact and the physicality in the wide receiver/defensive back, is to try to revolutionize the way the game is played.

We try to do that with every year in gameplay, but this year I think we were extraordinarily successful in that we attacked an area that before didn't have much user agency at all. In fact, often times, the game did things that you didn't want it to do, and by adding those three passing mechanics and all the catching mechanics, there seems to be an almost limitless number of weapons that you can have on offense now. So we're really happy about that.

Do you prefer to play the ball or the receiver more?
Dickson: That's a great question. I've been playing the game for months now and I still don't feel like I have a mature game plan. I'm still trying new things every day, so it really depends on the situation. I think if I'm in one-on-one coverage, running down the field on a vertical route, I'm playing the ball. But if I'm coming down over the top of the zone coverage, I hit receiver single every time.

Graddy: I had a game last time I was playing draft champions where I had Dez Bryant, a big receiver, and I was trying to throw downfield with the OP default and I was aggressive catching it every time. The guy kept doing plays as the receiver and he knocked the ball out every time. It was a great little chess match going on, but I lost the game. It was 0-0 at half time, and I lost 21-0.

Watch something promotional: here's the faintly ridiculous 'Madden: The Movie'

One thing that stood out to me, and this hit last year and even more so this year, is the offensive and defensive line play.
Dickson: The scary thing is that we still have two to three years of work to go before we're where we need to be with blocking and defensive line interaction. This is a tricky thing for us, and it was probably like number one or two on my list when I got the job. The first thing you need to do is hire an expert.

We hired Clint Oldenburg, who played for several years in the NFL. The only way to get it looking correct and feeling correct, like an NFL game, was to bring in someone who could bring in real-world rules. Clint had no experience in game design, so when he wrote his design, he wrote it as an offensive lineman. He used real-world rules that he learned as an offensive lineman that coaches taught him, and that became the rules that the game is using. Yeah, it's ridiculously complicated. The amount of logic and AI thinking that's going on behind the scenes there is absolutely ridiculous. Think about all the concessions that they have to make for users doing stupid things that aren't necessarily likely in the NFL, for example—if someone is bouncing up and down in the A gap, we have to account for that. People move all their guys to the left side of the line and we have to account for that, and yield an authentic result. It's incredibly challenging, but luckily we have a lot of really good, really smart people on the job.

Are there any hidden variables like someone slipping, or the left guard picking up the wrong person to block? Is that programmed in or is it just a matter of dice rolls happening?
Dickson: We don't program in human error very often. If we did, people would usually perceive that as a bug or the logic breaking. But they will miss blocks, they will not get two hands off sometimes, and those are all based upon ratings and dice roll formulas. That's the way we achieve the separation between the elite players and the lesser players.

How do you balance the simulation Madden with the RPG Madden?
Lanchbaugh: The gameplay team is always striving to make an authentic simulation football game. My job as the creative director of modes is to wrap that authentic game into fun and interesting game modes that allow you to experience it how you expect, or how you want. We have the Franchise Mode to live out the fantasy of being in the league. We have the Madden Ultimate Team for the fantasy you had growing up, collecting cards and making your own ultimate team. It's another riff on fantasy football. But in the new mode Draft Champions, which is kind of the faster version of both of them, we're combining these modes into a really fun fantasy draft. It allows you to quickly build your team and live out the fantasy of being its owner for a short time. I'll let Rex expand on the authentic simulation of football.

Dickson: This is a very tricky part of our job because if you think about the Madden community, we have some real "Mutheads"; people who all they do, all they think and talk about, is Madden Ultimate Team. We have competitive online guys who are really highly skilled players and they compete constantly just to beat others online, or in head-to-head couch play. Then we have people who play CFM, who are sim-heads, who want a complete simulation experience.

Serving all of those audiences equally is one of the most difficult parts of this job. I'll give you an example. This year we're obviously pushing the game in more of a simulation direction. So we tuned down deep throw accuracy to be more accurate with what the NFL is. Quarterbacks who previously had high 80s and low 90s deep throw accuracy are down low 80s, high 70s. We're trying to achieve an NFL-accurate real-world percentage, which is around 60 percent for the best quarterbacks in the league, for deep throw accuracy. So immediately we might hear from our hardcore competitive players that they don't like it, that they're missing passes on a random dive throw. We start managing that response and we tune the game so we can keep it sim, but also make sure that the people who are playing competitively are having their needs met as well. We're going through this right now with the aggressive catch mechanics.

The first day we were out on Xbox Early Access, people starting posting videos about how aggressive catch is overpowered and there was this narrative developing. Two days later, a bunch of other people started dropping videos about how to stop the aggressive catch mechanic and here's how you take it away, your counter strategies, and all of a sudden the narrative started changing. Now it was about using strategy to stop this tactic. We love seeing that stuff play out—it happens all the time, and it's a big part of the job.

Madden NFL 16 is out now. Get more information at the game's official website.

Follow Jason Nawara on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Mark Nozell

Last night at 9 PM, the State Department made public over 7,000 of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's previously unreleased emails.

In May of this year, it was ruled that the State Department was to release all of Clinton's nearly 30,000 emails on a rolling basis as a result of a FOIA request filed by VICE News. Less than three months earlier, the New York Times revealed that Clinton had used a personal email address operated on a private server in Clinton's home to conduct all official business. It is suspected that Clinton's use of the private server was to keep her correspondences from being subject to FOIA requests: had Clinton used a State Department email address, her correspondences would have been considered government records and kept on State Department servers. Clinton, however, has claimed she merely used a personal email address because of "convenience."

The latest batch of emails cover 2009 and 2010, and are accessible at the State Department's FOIA Reading Room (The Wall Street Journal has created a more sophisticated search engine for the emails). Of the 7,000 emails, approximately 125 were modified because they were deemed to contain classified information.

If you're familiar with the Clinton email scandal, the presence of classified info is a big deal—last month, VICE News reported that Clinton "reportedly denied that she sent or received classified information over her email account."

Topics that warranted redaction included EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton's conversations with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and the proposed relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Japan. Other emails, such as one from April 24, 2010, was all but stripped of context, noting only that Clinton's Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills needed to hop on an urgent call within the next three hours.

Another is an email from Larry Schwartz, Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the United States Embassy in Pakistan, with the subject line, "Facebook Freed in Pakistan." The contents of the email have been completely redacted. An email with the subject line "Lavrov" is redacted, save for Clinton's request, "Can you run the traps."

Meanwhile, some of the emails illustrate Clinton and her team's relationship with technology both publicly and privately. In a 2009 email, Clinton commented on a draft of a speech, "This looks fine and makes me sound like a techie (which is good, albeit a stretch)."

It turns out calling Clinton's tech-savviness "a stretch" might have itself been a stretch. One email from 2010 finds her asking an aide to teach her how to use her new iPad—dubbed the "hPad." Another one finds her asking an aide, "Do I need to charge it? If so, how? I have no cords." Many email chains conclude in her forwarding the correspondence to an aide saying, "Pls print."

Multiple email chains are concerned with the possibility of using social media to manipulate public perception in foreign countries. Below is an excerpt of an email from Alec Ross, Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation to fellow Clinton advisor Cheryl Mills:

In that same email, Ross wrote, "We will work through Stanford to indirectly launch an innovation competition for the best apps and programs that provide tools for circumvention of politically motivated censorship." Additionally, he noted that Clinton staffers Maria Otero and Bob Hormats were planning on speaking with "major, relevant technology companies" with the intent of urging them to "make more carefully considered decisions about the deals they cut with foreign governments."

In a Ross email from September 2010, he noted that he and Clinton Advisor Jacob Sullivan had recently taken a trip to Syria, noting that the country's young, tech-savvy population would inevitably lead to "disruptions... that we could potential (sic) harness for our purposes."

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On Sunday, a man named Charlie Murphy—no, not that Charlie Murphy—uploaded a video to Vine. It's been looped over 63 million times, so there's a good chance you've seen it, probably more than once; it's one of those clips that somehow doesn't lose its potency after five or ten or 20 plays.

Dubbed "Duck Army," it shows a hand pressing an inflatable toy duck in a bin, which emits a garbled quack-like noise. The hand then pushes down hard on a bunch of the ducks, and the resulting collective scream sounds like a million souls crying out in agony all at once, only filtered through a kazoo.

But Murphy is a mere aggregator—he just excerpted six seconds from a video made by Kevin Synnes, a 22-year-old mechanic from Ålesund, Norway. Naturally, we had a lot of questions for Synnes, so we asked him about the making of the video, the internet's response to it, and how he feels about someone else making it go viral.

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VICE: Where did you film this? Why were you there?
Kevin Synnes: My girlfriend and I were on a car trip to get a new engine for my car. I love old cars and fixing them. Sometimes, we have bad weather in Norway, so I had to stop at this store called Biltema to buy something to cover the engine on the trailer.

Kevin Synnes with his girlfriend, Elise Kårstad, moments after shooting 'Duck Army.' Image via Kevin Synnes

Then what happened?
We didn't find what we where looking for. But after a few minutes, we saw the ducks. They're dog toys, I think.

Do you think these are actually ducks or geese? This is a source of controversy...
I think they're really geese.

Why did you decide to push them—and film it?
I tried to embarrass my girlfriend by pressing one of the ducks. But I didn't get a reaction from her, really. So, I pressed all of them.

What were your reactions to the noise?
We were really shocked by the sound these ducks made! And my girlfriend got embarrassed.

Where did you upload the video first?
I sent this as a snap to my friends and I got a really good response. Luckily, I saved the video file, so I uploaded it to Facebook. I was expecting to get 30 to 40 likes out of it. Instead, it went viral in a few hours. Then, I uploaded it to YouTube and Instagram.

The video really went viral after a guy named Charlie Murphy uploaded to Vine. Have you contacted him? What's the deal there?
I've never done anything like this before, but I expected it to be stolen. Charlie has made people so interested in the video, so I can't be angry about that. But I hope he remembers who the original owner is. It was posted without permission from me and Viral Hog.

So, are you trying to get him to take his copy of the video down?
I understand Viral Hog has reached out to him. They asked me if they should get the video removed or if I wanted Charlie's version on the internet. We came to the conclusion that keeping it online was the best thing for the video.

Anything else you'd like to add?
I just hope the staff at stores around the world who sell toys like these will forgive me. I bet there are a lot of people trying to do the same thing as I did.

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In 1857 a British court ruled in R v Closs that a painting could not be "forged" and subsequently chose to let defendant Thomas Closs go, even after he had painted an artist's name on some crude rendering and tried to pass it off as a genuine original. Only documents can be forged, the court said, and a painting was not a document.

Australia shares a catalogue of legal precedents with the UK, meaning this decision sparked a long and proud tradition of allowing art fraudsters to escape punishment here. This could change with the pending prosecution of Melbourne art dealer Peter Stanley Gant, who allegedly made millions passing off candy-colored fakes as genuine Brett Whiteleys. But we'll get to Peter in a moment.

Today, copying a painting is perfectly legal. So too is the act of creating new works in the style of old artists. In fact, art students are encouraged to do this as a way of honing their craft, which is often how fraudsters get started. And given there's only been a handful of successful art fraud prosecutions in Australia, many will see a high return for relatively low risk.

Dr. Pamela James of the University of Western Sydney is an art lecturer whose research centers on art crime in Australia. She also advises the NSW Police in issues surrounding art fraud, theft, and forgery. According to her, all it takes to make a tidy living out of fake art is some semblance of talent and a lack of scruples. "It's not difficult," she says. "If you're clever, you don't forge the great artworks. You work up to it. If you're selling something for $100,000 people are more careful."

But if you are aiming to pass off big ticket fakes, Pamela explains the key is in distribution. Some painters are happy to sell their fakes from the trunk of their car at vintage markets, but the real money involves hooking up with an art dealer, who then connects you to hundreds of commercial galleries around the continent.

At their shadiest, art dealers are the pawnshops of the art world, just with fewer regulations. Those in the primary art market generally deal with living artists, while those in the secondary market buy and sell the works of deceased greats. These are who you go to with your convincing story about a great aunt who was an art student but a total recluse and died in possession of a masterpiece.

Some, like disgraced Sydney dealer Robert Close, may be brazen enough to take a story like this at face value. Most, however, will ask for proof. English forger John Drewe realized this in the mid 80s when he first commissioned a freshly-divorced artist named John Myatt to paint fakes. Drewe then forged the documents proving they were real and placed them into archives for researchers to find. Myatt's works were sold at some of the greatest auction houses in the world and many consider him to be the most successful art forger of the 20th century.

Ask yourself, would you deliberately devalue your investment, or just sell it on at the first sign of trouble?

A simpler method, favored locally, is to place a fake in a small auction house. If it's bought, that's a win. If anyone questions its authenticity, it can be pulled from sale. The beauty is, either way the work has appeared in a print catalogue. After this it takes a short cooling off period before it's sent to a different auction house, with the catalogue as proof of its legitimacy.

Needless to say people do get fooled, and when that happens, those making the fakes find themselves protected by an industry that operates with a code of silence to rival the Russian mob. Then there's the fact that victims are often reluctant to admit publicly they've been had, lest the value of their $100,000 knock-off drops to the price of Ikea kitsch. Ask yourself, would you deliberately devalue your investment, or just sell it on at the first sign of trouble?

This is part of why it's been so difficult to prove art fraud, according to art fraud expert Ken Polk. Successful prosecutions are rare and not every unverifiable work out there is a fake. Many are just "problematic," and estimates suggest 10 percent of the Australian art market is made up of problematic works whose origin cannot be proven.

Another difficulty is that "fraud" is a specific legal term that needs a prosecutor to prove the work was created to deliberately deceive. "Those conditions are extremely restrictive," Polk says. "Most often a person who sells a work says, 'Well, I didn't know!' and from then on its not fraud."

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In the late 90s Australian amateur painter and furniture dealer William Blundell admitted in open court he had painted at least 162 "innuendos" in the style of famous artists and many others, although he strongly denied ever knowing they were to be used to commit fraud.

This claim worked because Germaine Curver, the eccentric art dealer who had commissioned Blundell and sold his works as those of top gun artists for a 2000 percent profit, had passed away in 1995, making it Blundell's word against a dead woman's. Blundell walked.

The Libertos, a couple from a Melbourne suburb, weren't so lucky in 2007 when they were sentenced to three years for ripping off the artwork of Aboriginal artist Rover Thomas and selling it through a major auction house in a landmark prosecution.

The original Brett Whiteley that was ripped off on behalf of Peter Gant. Image via Flickr user Newtown grafitti

Their case stands out as one of the few to get a successful conviction, though it's possible they may soon be joined by Peter Gant. Gant has been ordered to stand trial for allegedly enlisting Ballarat-based conservator, Mohammad Aman Siddique, to recreate three Brett Whitely paintings which he then sold for a combined $3.6 million.

Gant has a reputation for making a long and storied career out of ripping off national treasures and in 2010 he was caught selling a low-quality fake preparatory drawing in the style of Robert Dickerson for $10,800. After a $300,000 civil suit led by Dickerson's stepson Stephen Nall, the drawing and two other fake works in the style of Albert Tucker were burned. To this day, Nall loathes the man.

"The guy is a thief, a liar, and a fraud of the worst kind in terms of commercial life," Nall says. "It's a numbers game—if he sells ten fakes, one will pay out."

And why not? Until something changes, it is a glamorous career where the returns are high and the law has been letting forgers and dishonest art dealers go since 1857. All it takes is an amoral attitude and a gap in the market. Buyer beware.

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If you ever played 'GTA: San Andreas,' you know this kind of thing was a safer pastime than taking flying lessons. Screenshot via Google Play

It was all anyone could talk about. I think for a time Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was all we were allowed to talk about. We swapped stories and cheat codes in the playground. Entire math lessons devolved into little more than screaming matches between 12- and 13-year-old boys about who had gotten the furthest with Denise ,  C.J.'s Ganton girlfriend,  and who had the best completion percentage so far. Spotty, idiot children cussing each other out over who had found the dildo in the police station first.

I remember when I first got it and unwrapped that cellophane. I got a pen and burst through the vulnerable side-section of the tightly wrapped plastic, removing it easily from there. I had made my mom wait in line at Woolworths all morning for it, although I had paid the $1.50 pre-order fee from my own pocket. I ran home from school as soon as the bell rang and all the other boys in my class did the same.

The game was fun and weird and bursting with wit and cartoon menace. The visuals were like nothing any of us had seen before—unimaginably huge and vibrant—and the soundtrack became instantly iconic. Plus it had bicycles! Motherfucking bicycles! Those were the coolest and made a wicked thummmm noise when you pedaled on Grove Street's cracked, sun-beaten asphalt.

The game's player-controlled protagonist, Carl Johnson, a.k.a. C.J. Screenshot via the GTA Wiki

As the sticky claustrophobia of Los Santos turned into San Fierro, all yoga clubs and upmarket clothes stores, the feeling of the game changed completely. The air was suddenly clean and bright and burnt your eyes, the roads were long and hilly, and the buildings stretched into the sky and loomed over you like flashing obelisks. But it wasn't until you pushed past that city and into the barren expanse of the desert that things really got serious.

In Bone County, dust hung in the air like fog, shade came only from shadows cast by giant dick-and-balls-shaped rock formations, and the sun watched ominously over everything like the evil eye in the sky. At night the desert turned blue and even more dangerous. And then there was "Learning to Fly" and that fucking flight school, and James Woods' slick-as-shit government agent Mike Toreno, making things worse.

You'd see the kids in school who had reached that mission, with their telltale sunken eyes and sloped shoulders. They'd been stopped dead in their tracks by this absolute ballache of a vehicle school set way out at the rundown Verdant Meadows airstrip. You could spot them from how quickly they would change the subject—"Has anyone got up to the mission with..." "Oh my god, are you still talking about San Andreas? It's crap, man. Bullshit. Get over it."—and how much slower they'd walk home.

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Missions before this had been difficult (shout out to "Wrong Side of the Tracks," you piece of shit) but this was different. A totally separate kind of pain that'd leave you demoralized and wanting to spend time doing something that wouldn't make you feel this terrible. The flight school just outright defeated people.

I remember when I first reached it. I went straight for it and bombed out pretty early in the run—I failed the opening tests a dozen times at least, probably way more. I'd gun for that corona (the tiny red hoops through which we had to fly) and the plane's nose would start to dip and I'd be hurtling toward the ground and then I'd be a plume of red, yellow, and orange fire before fading to black with six letters spread across the screen telling me my character—and my time—had been wasted.

Eventually I passed the (admittedly quite simple) first few tasks, but the learning curve for the rest was unreal. It was like teaching a child how to ride a bike then snatching away the two-wheeler and throwing them the keys to your car. Even if you were a quick learner with two four-leafed clovers taped to your controller, you're looking at hours and hours and hours learning to do pretty much impossible tricks and stunts that have no actual purpose in the game. I was 13 and stared into the tiny screen of the TV-VCR combo I was playing on and swore like Danny Dyer with his dick shut in a door.

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One of the game's planes, try not to fuck it up. Screenshot via YouTube

But I was determined to not give up. Until this point, when I was sitting in school ignoring my work, head in the crook of my elbow, I would dream about blazing it down a road in the Ballas's territory in a busted Stratum station wagon, blasting "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" by The Gap Band as I sprayed round after round into inch-high pixelated gang-members clad in purple. Now I was haunted by carefully maneuvering an ungainly PS2 rendering of a World War II airplane through the sky at a speed slower than Big Smoke's metabolism. I closed my eyes and saw pulsing red rings on the backs of my eyelids. I was obsessed.

The weight of importance sat heavily on my shoulders. For the first time in my short life, I had to focus and dedicate my life to something. I had to complete this series of meaningless tests of agility and dexterity so I could get on with this fucking game and the rest of my life. I decided to sit there until it was done, hands contorting like Lego claws, day passing into night and then into day again, and I did it. I did the hell out of it.

My school work and behavior in the years leading up to this had been incredibly erratic—usually ranging from "Really good" to "Not bad" to "You're probably going to be expelled"—but after that things clicked into place and leveled out, just like the wings of C.J.'s plane. I'm not saying that completing the flight school on San Andreas changed my life, but I'm not ruling it out.

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Idris Elba looking suave. Photo via Flickr user Lwp Kommunikáció, thumbnail via

Read: The Animated Series 'James Bond Jr.' Is the Redheaded Stepchild of the 007 Franchise

Daniel Craig's filling James Bond's wingtips right now, but that will change soon. The actor has talked about bowing out after this year's Spectre, leaving the world in need of a new Bond. Many fans already have a guy in mind: Idris Elba, the star of Luther and a guy who has already cemented his legacy thanks to his role as Stringer Bell in The Wire. Elba is made to play Bond—he's British, dapper as shit, would love to do it, and the man can wear a suit like God invented the single Windsor just for him. (He's also black; all of the previous Bonds have been white.)

Unfortunately, not everyone is sold on Elba. Last weekend, the guy currently writing sequels to Ian Fleming's original Bond novels, Anthony Horowitz, threw some serious shade on the idea.

In an interview with the Daily Mail the author shrugged off the idea of Idris Elba picking up Bond's PPK, saying that the Elba is a bit "too street" to play James. He insisted that it wasn't a "color issue" and added Elba wasn't "suave" enough.

Just listen to Idris Elba rap and then tell us he isn't suave enough to play Bond. Roger Moore dressed up like a clown in Octopussy, for Christ's sake. The bar is set pretty low. To prove Horowitz wrong, here's a list of the Bonds, from suavest to least suave. You'd be hard pressed to argue that fucking Stringer Bell wouldn't land in at least the top half of this list.

1. Sean Connery

It would be a mistake to have anyone but Connery top a Bond list, but that's not because of any nostalgia or blind worship. The Scotsman deserves all the accolades he gets. The man's hair was impeccably coiffed, he barely spoke above a sensual murmur, and he never broke a sweat, not even when Goldfinger was glazing his testicles with an agonizingly slow-moving laser. He is the paragon of suaveness; the ruler by which we measure all things suave.

2. Pierce Brosnan

Brosnan may not have been blessed with the greatest Bond movies, but there's a reason the producers spent years trying to get him to don the tux. Brosnan does exude a certain smirking charisma, whether he's being tortured in North Korea or showering with beautiful spies in Ho Chi Minh City. Not everybody can be turned into a demented large-headed video game avatar and come out the other side still leeching cool from every pore.

3. Timothy Dalton

Dalton's Bond was all tightly-wound rage—he was vengeful in a way we hadn't seen Bond before, and even cried a little bit at one point. A tearful, rage-filled Bond doesn't exactly scream "suave," but Dalton's Bond was less of Roger Moore's superhero and more of an actual spy. He snuck around; he carried tiny binoculars; he brought merciless, calculated revenge down upon those who wronged him; and kept his head the entire time.

4. Daniel Craig

Although Craig will probably go down as one of the best canonical Bonds, his more realistic, gritty portrayal of the spy is not particularly suave. He even threw up in Casino Royale. Vomit is definitively un-suave.

5. George Lazenby

The runt of the Bond litter is easily forgotten, but On Her Majesty's Secret Service has stood up surprisingly well over the years. Plus, Lazenby famously found out about the opportunity to play Bond while having a threesome, so that has to count for something.

6. Roger Moore

Take a second and watch the clown scene from Octopussy again. Now, watch Moore driving a stupid motorized gondola around Venice. Finally, here's the least-arousing sex scene ever to sully the Bond name. Anthony Horowitz should have his authorial Bond duties revoked for insinuating that Idris Elba is less suave than this. Roger Moore was an abomination.

Photo courtesy History of Game of Thrones/HBO

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker thinks building a wall to separate Canada and the US might be a good idea.

Speaking at a press event Sunday, the Republican presidential hopeful claimed Americans are concerned about terrorists entering the US through Canada—which happens less often than we produce basketball stars—and that physically dividing the two countries was therefore a "legitimate issue for us to look at."

VICE consulted border security experts and construction folks about the logistics of resurrecting an 8,891-km fence. (Spoiler alert: everyone thinks it's a dumb idea.)

Reece Jones, associate professor of geography at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, has spent the past 10 years researching the border-wall phenomenon. There are currently 65 such walls worldwide, he said, the majority of which were built in the last 20 years due to "perceived external threats."

His conclusion?

"From my perspective, walls are not successful at all in terms of securing borders."

In most cases, the barriers serve as little more than a deterrent, Jones explained; they can slow people down but not stop them.

"If you build a 20-foot-high... wall, someone can build a 21-foot-high ladder," he said, pointing out tunnels are another popular way of bypassing border walls.

From a financial standpoint, Jones said a Canada-US border makes absolutely no sense. The partial US-Mexico border, made of steel and wire fencing, worked out to $6.5 million per mile. Assuming parts and labour would cost about the same, that means the bill for a Canada-US border would come in at around $36 billion.

"It would not be very cost effective," said Jones.

In the spirit of innovation, VICE investigated a few different options for a Canada-US border wall.

Chain link fence
At a cost of $15-$20 per foot, a chain link fence will provide the most bang for your buck, though Cathy Hofstetter, president of Scarborough's McGowan Fence & Supply Limited, said thousands of kilometres of it would still be "really, really expensive."

As for security, "all you have to do is cut a hole in the chain link and you can actually walk through it."

On the plus side, chain link fences are weather resistant and have proven remarkably effective at keeping toddlers and small dogs in place.

Total estimated cost of chain link fence (minus labour, security, upkeep, ya know, the expensive stuff): $569 million

Expanded metal mesh
If you wanted to upgrade your chain-link border fence so that it could potentially serve its purpose, Hofstetter advised layering it with expanded metal mesh. The holes in the mesh are too tiny to fit even a finger, so intruders wouldn't be able to scale the fence. "You'd have to actually have to use a saw to cut through it," she said.

(Editor's note: Canadian Tire exists for a reason)

Wood
Assuming Walker doesn't want his border-wall to be made of crappy two-by fours, good quality wood costs about $40-$45 a foot.

Before it inevitably rots, something like cedar would provide an opportunity to showcase the finest North American carpentry. Would we go traditional with a white picket or cross-lattice design? Or contemporary—I'm feeling this built-in planter vibe.

Ultimately though, a wood fence is not going to stop anyone who really wants to get past it.

"I mean all you need is a saw or a hammer to take the boards off," Hofstetter said. "You could probably just give it a quick, swift kick."

Approximate cost of wood fence (minus labour, white paint, paint brushes): $1.28 billion

Electric fencing
These invisible force fields are meant to keep dogs within their yards; using a transmitter, they deliver electric shocks to the collars of pets who step out of bounds. But this dude who inexplicably tried it out himself, swears they work on humans too.

Now all you need is to make sure everyone living north of the border is wearing a transmitter at all times. (Which, tbh, has probably already happened. Bill C-51, y'all.)

Ice Wall
While we're pandering to American stereotypes about Canada, why not take a page out of Game of Thrones, and build a badass wall of ice.

Of course, it would never compare to The Wall. That beast of a barrier, made of solid ice and allegedly designed by Bran the Builder, spans about 482 km and rises more than 213 metres tall. Believed to have been built 7,000 years ago, The Wall is the only thing separating the Seven Kingdoms from the bloodthirsty wildlings (editor's note: that's racist) that live beyond it. It is guarded by members of the Night's Watch, a once-noble brotherhood that now appears to be occupied by farmers and rapists.

However, with 17 castles over those 482 kilometres (or a castle every 28 kilometres) the cost of upkeep along the Canadian-US border would likely be prohibitive.

This "world-class" ice sculpture company charges $1,100 for three block frozen creations, so, something that would run the length of the Canada-US border would probably clock in at the $10-billion mark, plus the cost in lives fending off Wildlings and giants.

The only problem* is the ice wouldn't hold out for long, according to Mary Albert, an engineer at Dartmouth College who fact-checked GoT's wall for Wired.

"Even at very cold temperatures, large ice masses deform under their own weight," she told Wired. "And over long time scales, ice flows, so it would not hold its original shape for thousands of years." We might want to start with a test run along Alaska's 2,475 kilometre border with Canada.

Shrub
I know what you're thinking: a shrub isn't going to stop someone from crossing the border.

Well, as we've already established, neither is anything else. At least the shit would look nice, and, knowing Canadians, we'd probably even voluntarily keep our side trimmed.

*definitely not the only problem

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

Artwork for Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit. All images courtesy of Wes Louis

Exhuming forgotten niche 90s comics, films, and TV series is a big thing in the anime world. Online forums are overflowing with discussions about origins and lost episodes of series like Zenki and Yu Yu Hakusho. It was on the wave of this trend that Wes Louis pranked the online anime fan community earlier this year.

When Louis was 13, he made a comic called Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit (STANR). After Louis recently discovered the comic at his parents house, he and his animation collective, The Line, had an idea.

Soon posts started appearing on Reddit, 4chan, and other forums asking,"Does anyone remember Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit?" along with vague descriptions of a nonexistent show and pleas for help in finding out more info. Then this video, made by Louis, appeared online:

Some people said they "remembered" it, some tried to debunk it, and many were confused as to how something like this could simply disappear. The hoax became a project for Louis that grew into merchandise and short films.

Last night, I found myself sitting on some STANR bed sheets, with STANR figures and a lunchbox next to me, wearing a virtual reality headset and exploring the world of STANR, 24 years after its initial creation. I had met up with Louis and asked him to tell me everything.

VICE: Hi Wes. When you're not pranking anime forums, what do you do?
Wes Louis: I got into animation through my love of anime. I'm part of The Line; we're a group of directors, animators, and designers, primarily in animation.

How did the idea for this come about?
Me and a guy from the collective called Tim McCourt were just looking for something new to do. I brought a folder to the office full of comics I'd made when I was 12 and 13 and Tim really liked the STANR one, but I just thought it was silly!

We thought we'd mess around with making an intro but I needed to write the backstory to work from. It was really difficult and I was over-thinking it and getting really deep. I just sat there thinking, How the hell did I do this when I was 13?! But that was the thing. I needed to change my mentality to that of my 13-year-old self. You know when you're young and you don't think about things—you just do it on the fly and see what you come up with? That's what I did, and I wrote in a giraffe villain and a cow villain, just because I'd never seen them before and thought they'd look cool. I just made it up as I went along.

Then what?
Then we got a friend that I'd worked with before to sing and write the intro song for it. In November 2013 I took time off work and started storyboarding it and doing all the character work, then we got some animators to jump on it and animate it. It's a homage piece to 80s and 90s cartoons; Thundercats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles... and that's all it was meant to be.

A fake cell supposedly bought at an anime convention.

Then Tim and Max Taylor that I work with suggested we take it one step further and make people think it actually existed. Right up until the end I didn't think it would work. We used some of our friends to post about it on their blogs, and started opening up discussions on forums about it. We put a photo of a fake cell up on a blog post, saying "I just bought this at an anime convention."

What was the response like?
Well there wasn't much in the beginning. We couldn't just upload the intro asking if anyone remembers it because the first thing people do is search for it online—if they found nothing at all they'd know it was a fake. So we started drip-feeding little things online, just to back up the story, leaving a paper trail.

We made a lunchbox and thermos flask and used a Japanese friend's eBay account to put it up for sale. There were so many holes in our story, which was a good thing because it started an online debate. Some people even remembered seeing it on TV when they were younger!

The lunchbox and flask that Wes put up on eBay.

Wow.
Yeah, man. People were debating on 4Chan and fan art started appearing. One guy started drawing them naked! There was a furry thing going on.

What about the naysayers?
Well, even the people that worked out it was fake still thought it was really well done, which was great. The way Max from our team comped it was really effective. Back in the day when you did an animation series, you'd draw it on paper, you put it on a cell, and paint behind the cell. Then, when you put the cell on, it'd have a bit of a shadow, and you'd put it onto film print. Max was adamant that even though we were doing it on a computer, we should copy all those imperfections, so that you could really feel it.

READ: I Went to a Massive Anime Cosplay Festival to Learn How to Fight the Canadian Surveillance Bill

When I was animating, I didn't want to use any CGI techniques in it, I wanted it to be all drawn. I wanted to animate the tank shot straight, whereas the rest of the team suggested we use a 3D model. But I thought, People do this stuff all the time in Japan, how hard could it be? I got somebody to make a 3D model of it so I could reference it and get the drawing right. I asked a friend of mine from a collective called NoGhost if he could make a 3D tank for me and it was amazing.

He then got back in touch with me and asked if he could make a virtual reality game of inside the tank with the characters. I said, 'Yes, of course!' When I played it I was blown away. I was sitting next to characters I'd created when I was a kid.

High-definition intro to Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit.

That's amazing. Can you tell me a bit about the world of STANR?
Well the main character is called Misachi, but the other characters call him STAN. He's a kind of a cross between Usagi Yojimbo and a Samurai Pizza Cat. I remember titles for things were really long back when I was a kid, like I remember playing a game called Magical Flying Turbo Hat Adventure, so I just got words that weren't related and put them together to make a character. He's clearly a samurai but I remember using the word ninja in the title so that people didn't think that he was a Samurai Pizza Cat. At some point he got thrown forward in time, but only because I wanted him to wear a cool power suit thing.

Are you going to make an actual series?
Well you don't just make a series. It's a big thing. But if there's enough demand for it and people want to see more then who knows what it'll become... It's so weird to see it all come together. I did so many comics back then that I'd forgotten about this one, really. But this is so of-the-time that we had to do it, it's an honest portrayal. It's mind boggling for me—I'm 37 now but the 13-year-old still inside me just can't believe it.

Follow Jak on Twitter.

Photo by Robert Foster

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

What a summer it's been, eh? All those days spent in the park, eating curiously cheap barbecue meats, drinking corner shop daiquiris, possibly hoovering up powders you can't actually afford—it must have been a real hoot. Unfortunately, the season's all but over and it's time to re-enter the cruel realm of daily life.

After having spent the best part of three months pummeling yourself with seasonal decadence, you might find it hard to restore your body's temple-of-health status. I called nutrition specialist Cristina Muñoz Sedeño for advice on how to piece our booze-addled insides back together.

VICE: As a specialist, what do you make of all this summer excess?
Cristina Muñoz Sedeño: Firstly, people should really be asking themselves why they see their holidays as an excuse for excess. Most people seem to use their holidays as a way to escape from their normal lives. What I propose is that people take a moment to reflect on whether or not they're living the sort of lives they want. And if not, they should figure out what sort of life they would like to be leading. As soon as you figure that out, everyday can be a holiday.

It may sound utopian, but it really isn't. It's great to use the summer to do things that we aren't able to do the rest of the year—but we shouldn't be wanting to escape our lives. When we take drugs, drink, smoke, or eat too much, we are searching for sensations that help us forget real life. These things don't resolve any of our problems; they only make them worse. For every hard night out, there's a hangover—and with that comes the need to stuff ourselves with sugars, carbohydrates, saturated fat, painkillers, and prescription drugs. These things serve not only to aggravate our state of intoxication but also increase our blood sugar levels.

Okay. But let's just say that I happened to do a few too many drugs over the last few weeks. What should I do now?
You should ask yourself why you are doing drugs. Is it for fun or are you running away from something deeper? Once you've answered that question, you should stop taking them. The process of detoxification starts as soon as you stop putting toxins into your body. Our livers and our kidneys aren't able to purify the body if they are busy trying to manage toxic substances.

Changes in our diet and lifestyle can help us overcome various addictions. We can actually increase the production of serotonin and endorphins (the neurotransmitters that produce happiness), not only with chemical substances but also naturally. A diet based on fruits and vegetables will help your body function well chemically. Their vitamins and minerals will accelerate the purification process. If you couple this with plenty of oils, you'll do wonders for your intestinal health. That, in turn, will help you regain your natural energy, vitality, motivation, and, most importantly, it help you feel good about yourself.

Photo by Peter Dench

Should I join a gym or something?
We should avoid falling into quick fix diets or signing up to the gym only to quit a month later. What actually works is changing long-term habits. We need to eliminate the sources of toxins without becoming obsessed. We need to remove stimulants, chemicals, and alcohol, soft drinks, canned food, gluten, and increase our intake of fruits and vegetables. A good place to start is drinking juices or green smoothies for breakfast, and then gradually work up to eating raw salads for lunch or dinner. Raw foods act as tonics but are also high in nutrients and provide your body with large doses of vitamins and minerals.

OK. Is there anything else I should be eating?
When you get up in the morning, press half a lemon into a pint of water and drop a teaspoon of squeezed wheat grass or chlorella in there. Wait at least half an hour after drinking this before eating your breakfast. Like I said, a good breakfast could be a green smoothie or juice. Green leaves, are full of chlorophyll, which purifies and regenerates both blood and tissue. They also have a lot of fiber, which is very cleansing and high in nutrients.

For lunch, a nice salad of mixed green leaves and vegetables, and then a plate of gluten free cereals (millet, buckwheat, quinoa, amaranth, brown rice) with vegetables. Maybe a few tomatoes stuffed with quinoa. For dinner, a salad of apple, celery, walnuts, grated carrot and a garnish of lemon juice, cumin, ginger and a little agave syrup. Cream of pumpkin soup with coconut milk is good too.

How long does it take to recover from having too much fun?
It really depends on your state of intoxication. Nowadays, we all have lots of accumulated toxins. Not only after the summer, but after years and years of eating poorly, using chemical-laden personal hygiene products, and environmental pollution. So this isn't about having a single detox-week, but about making progressive changes in our lifestyle so as to improve our health and long-term welfare.

Should all of this happen suddenly or gradually?
Sudden changes are never good. That's why diets never work; they just make us hungry and provoke anxiety. You should go slowly when eliminating toxins and gradually introduce more vegetables and raw foods. There are healthy substitutes to almost any type of food. Physically, as soon as we start living clean and purifying our body, we begin to eliminate toxins. This can produce effects like fatigue, headaches and even nausea, because the toxins are in our blood. So, yeah, a gradual detox is advisable.

For more on summer binging, watch our documentary 'Big Night Out: Ibiza':

How does one go about fixing their sleep pattern?
Human beings have a biological clock that regulates our body's physiological functions and coincides with states of sleep and wakefulness. At night these functions are minimized—in the absence of light—so if we don't use this period to rest, it affects our health negatively.

To recover our circadian or biological rhythm—ideally guided by the sun—I recommend eating dinner before sunset. That way, your metabolism is still active to digest the food. You should wait two to three hours before going to bed to avoid lying down with a full stomach. Also, you should eat food that doesn't require a lot of energy to digest, such as salads or vegetables (creamed vegetables, steamed, baked, soups, stews).

It's also a good idea to spend ten minutes doing some stretching. Then you could spend another five to ten minutes breathing deeply or meditating. Avoid caffeine and reduce your intake of liquids just before bed.

What sort of effects does excess have on our body?
The accumulation of toxins, the lack of nutrients and the alteration of our biological rhythms will have negative effects—both physically and emotionally. Some of the things you could expect are fatigue, fluid retention, increased body fat, strong body odor and breath, decreased immunity, headaches, stomach problems, anxiety, and depression.

I've heard that fasting is good for you. Is that true?
As I've said repeatedly, detoxing needs to be done gradually, especially if our body is very intoxicated. Fasting is the most powerful removal tool for toxin removal and has historically been used to fight disease. When our body isn't busy with digestive functions, it can use its energy on cleaning up accumulated toxins. If you start feeling very badly, you should stop fasting.

Don't drink soap, not even from a pump/can't touch this! Photo via Jasleen Kaur

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Gangs of street drinkers are apparently breaking into hospitals to steal the antibacterial hand gel that they have in pumps on the wall, which they are then drinking and getting drunk on. This isn't new: the desperate and the homeless have been soap-drinking for years. What is new is a BBC investigation linking the practice to deaths, which is, on the whole, quite bad.

The soap they have in hospitals has alcohol in it to sterilize hands and help keep a lid on the spread of MRSA, and if you get half a cup of that mixed with water then baby, you've got some booze going. Exceptionally bad, lethal booze, that quite often leads to hemorrhaging and even death.

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The BBC spoke to one of these street gang soap drinkers, known only as Bartlomiej, who actually on the whole gave off a "drinking soap is a bad idea" vibe, recounting that time his body ruptured and he lost 1.5 liters of blood and nearly died.

"We lived in various places, always nearby hospitals," he said. "We were squatting, or we just illegally lived in houses or different accommodation. Those were the places we were binge drinking. It's a really simple life."

Hospitals the gangs stole from included Charing Cross, King's College, North Middlesex, St. George's, Lambeth, and Hammersmith. "You don't have to steal it because it's widely available," Bartlomiej says. "We've just been walking in with a plastic cup. If it was a manual dispenser we just filled a half of a cup of this spirit gel and we mixed it with water, half-and-half. You don't need to drink a lot of it to get drunk." But before you start legitimately thinking about it, consider death. "I've lost a few of my friends," Bartlomiej said. "The ones who drank Ace cider and hand wash gel."

Watch the latest VICE documentary, Searching For Spitman:

This is the thing, though: while soap dispenser booze death figures aren't greatly fun reading (as the BBC reports, "The deaths of at least three people in London have been linked by coroners to the consumption of alcohol hand wash since 2008"), they're nothing compared to legitimate alcohol deaths in the UK. As ONS figures from February confirm, there were 8,416 alcohol-related deaths in the UK in 2013, a largely steady rate (14 deaths per 100,000) to the year before. That's bad, right? Like: drinking soap, also bad. But a constant 8,000-odd deaths per year from lager and cider and those little Corky's shots and White Lightning and Frosty Jack's is also quite uncool. Do we only care about so-called street drinking gangs because street drinking is anti-social, or that petty theft is a crime? Do we only pearl clutch about dying from consuming hand sanitizer because they didn't pay for it?

Anyway, leading GP Dr. Sarah Jarvis told the BBC that drinking soap = bad IMO. "These alcohol gels are not made to be drunk," she said. "Therefore they will have all sorts of things added to them which will be very toxic.

"They can cause severe inflammation on the inside of your gut. You can also get alcohol poisoning, which can be fatal. There's absolutely no question that these things can kill and there have been several situations where patients have been killed."

Mildly related, on MUNCHIES: Scientists Say The Only Real Way To Prevent a Hangover Is To Drink Less

I've always thought the central tenet of a successful gang is leadership and organization, which makes me wonder what sort of logistical shitshow a roving soap-drunk street gang might be when they are out on the job. Do they have their own pissed Fagin, aloe vera-scented handwash dribbling from the corners of his mouth, ordering gangs of men to bumrush various hospitals and pump at the handwash dispensers until they have a cup of sterile punch for him to suck on? Or are they rudderless, a box full of drunken kittens emptied onto the floor, scattering to the wind in different directions, knowing only that they want—no: need—soap, guzzled directly from the nozzle like a thirsty child quaffing down squash? We may never know.

Anyway: don't drink soap, kids, you will eventually die.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Imagery from 2013's 'Rayman Legends,' via Xbox

It may not feel like it but today, September 1, 2015, Rayman turns 20. Twenty years ago to the dot, Rayman launched on the Atari Jaguar and set standards for being weird. Rayman—a floating collection of limbs and bandana (or scarf, or the flesh of his enemies?)—is old enough to be at your nearest Freshers Fair, trying to get people to join the glee club. I know. I know. This is actually news to you. Development studio and publishers of the series, Ubisoft, has done very little to commemorate what is essentially their mascot: He's got a new smartphone game coming out. It has nothing to do whatsoever with being five years away from a silver jubilee. From my calculations, I am the only person on the planet who knew today was his birthday.

Maybe the beefy, ingenuity-filled presence of Nintendo's own 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. on September 11 has pushed Ubisoft into a bit of a corner; the celebratory make-your-own-stages Super Mario Maker looks so brilliant, any Ubisoft release would seem like a pissing contest, really, with Nintendo spraying a clear, thick stream so far up the urinal it's basically hitting the ceiling. Even Rayman's creator, Frenchman Michel Ancel, has made a level for Super Mario Maker—but he's not involved in the new Rayman game. At the time of writing, the homepage of Ubisoft's website is entirely dedicated to Assassin's Creed Syndicate, which is not out for over a month. In the mustachioed face of Mario and the economic might of Creed, Rayman never really stood a chance.

A playthrough of the first 'Rayman' (1995)

The first time I played Rayman, it was August 1997; I was nine years old and had acquired—pretty much by chance (thanks, mum!)—a demo of the original game through a copy of Official PlayStation Magazine. The disk's presentation was purely no-thrills, just links to the six demos floating above a moving background, but beneath that shitty exterior lay endless new experiences. And as demo collections went, that one was pretty amazing. Jonah Lomu Rugby, Time Crisis, and Soul Blade vied for my attention, but the small, rotund purple blob with the goofy yellow hair captured my heart.

It's hard to know exactly why this was. I was a reserved kid, thanks in part to head-to-toe eczema that required nightly rituals of creaming and wet-bandages to soothe, and I really bonded with the way Rayman seemed like a total dork. He wasn't cool in the way Sonic was cool, or fun-for-everyone like Mario. He seemed nerdish and weird-looking—in the way that I felt nerdish and weird-looking. His world seemed like the crazy place someone who spent a lot of time on their own could conjure up: all psychedelic colors and cartoonish takes on reality. It made Mario and Sonic look like childish doodles; it was a Picasso burst within a genre so regularly rendered with average results.

Back then, a lot of people felt this way. The original Rayman is—somehow amazingly—the best-selling PlayStation 1/PSX game ever in the United Kingdom. Granted, there's some tripe in that list, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but mostly it shows that gamers knew what was good and what was really fucking good. Nowadays, that's essentially not the case. Five million people bought Rayman in the UK alone, while only 1 million or so copies of 2013's tremendous Rayman Legends were bought across the entire planet. People en masse have stopped caring. Rayman, who started out as the outsider's platformer of choice but ended up a box-office smash, appears back on the commercial periphery.

Article continues after the video below

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Let me go on record here and say Rayman Legends and its predecessor, 2011's Rayman Origins, the two latest home-console entries in the series, are spectacular. They are probably better than the original, and maybe even 1999's Rayman 2: The Great Escape. And yet nobody is really buying them, not in the numbers they deserve. One argument is that side-scrolling platformers are done, which is entirely untrue, or that the series never had mass appeal. But between Rayman 2 and Origins, I think the truth is that Ubisoft lost the plot a bit, derailing its popularity and leaving both Origins and Legends with a mountain of unfortunate precedent to conquer.

Rayman started falling away the moment Ancel stopped working on the series, a period that stretched between Rayman 2 and Origins, comprising a 12-year absence. Ancel's direction guaranteed an experimental flair to the Rayman games he worked on; it made sure they felt like a haven for the oddball player. Even Rayman's design, a collection of floating limbs held together by nothing but our imagination, promotes the gamer to fill in the empty spaces with their own personalities. Ancel echoed these exact sentiments when addressing the Game Developers Conference in 2013: "He's a very simple and direct character. He's not talking, it's really about action. All the animation and design is done so you understand the character just by looking at it. It's not about storytelling; it's about a direct connection between you and the character."

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Direct connection was what I always felt toward Rayman, in ways that Mario and Sonic never evoked. Sonic struck me as the kind of kid at school who'd de-pants you in the hallway, while Mario was Mario: ubiquitous, everywhere, boring.

Without Ancel, it was a tough few years for Rayman fans. The games started churning out mediocrity in weird, self-parodying ways. It felt as if the designers didn't know who Rayman was for. Was Rayman for children? Francophiles? Was it for people who like good games or utter shit? Without the steering hand of Ancel, Ubisoft came very close to throwing Rayman out on a Sonic-like meander towards irrelevance, shuffled from development team to development team (passing through studios in China, Italy, Morocco, Bulgaria, and Romania), and hitting all the genres that franchises call upon on their journey to death: party games, kart games, fighting games, remakes, remakes of remakes, remakes of remakes of remakes.

'Rayman Raving Rabbids,' trailer

The moment when I thought it was all over—when I imagined Ubisoft had given up and taken Rayman out back and injected him with something "to help him sleep"– was 2006's Rayman Raving Rabbids, which is, for my money, the most miserable spin-off ever conceived. Rayman went, practically overnight, from being a traditional platformer into a party game aimed at a fan base that did not exist. Let me stress this: By 2005 most of Rayman's fans were either in their 20s or had simply moved on to other things. Rabbids was a sad and clear attempt to infantilize the franchise, to turn its focus toward younger kids, and it made me throw up a tiny bit in my mouth.

Rabbids represented everything I had begun to hate about Rayman; it was derivate and unfocused. A party game featuring characters from New Labour would have been more appealing. I wasn't alone. Everybody Loves Rayman, made by MAD/Cartoon Network, is a brilliant parody of the Ray Romano show Everybody Loves Raymond, where a bunch of Rabbids disrupt the gentle balance of Rayman's home. "First you stole my franchise," he says, "and now you wreck my house." It's a funny, nostalgic crossover that ends on a slightly sad note, when a Rabbid appears over Ray's shoulder to say, "Nobody understands you." Recurring supporting character Globox then repeats it.

If Ubisoft didn't understand Rayman, there was no way we could. That's why it wasn't selling. That's why it was getting lampooned on television. That's why Ubisoft made smartphone games instead of home console sequels. (The mobile Rayman games are pretty amazing, though.)

'Rayman Legends,' trailer

After years of fucking around, the personal, direct design of Rayman began to resemble a creative dissonance reflected in its position in the wider pop culture conversation. He was no longer a freak with helicopter hair, but a mooing, middle-aged man not even welcome in his own franchise. He was on his farewell tour—tired of the new, tired of the old, tired of himself. And yet, Rabbids sold well—14 million copies well—and while it's a turgid slice of deep-fried turd assessed on its individual merits, it may very well be the reason why Rayman, the series, was allowed to live on. Gaming is business, fundamentally, and any series that does big numbers is always going to be sustained.

The Rabbids spin-offs kept Rayman alive, then, but it was only when Ancel returned that the series got back to what it did best: being strange, being crazy, being the sort of game that took you over the shoulder and said, "Hey, you don't fit in? We don't either."

The first Rayman emerged at a time when side-scrolling platformers were in their pomp, some of them successfully going 3D and expanding their play experiences. Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, and Castlevania were all franchises basking in the glory of fresh breakthroughs. All of them bar Mario are washed up, now. Whereas Rayman, through Origins and Legends, is as vibrant as he was back in 1995, having come through 20 years of amazing highs and barrel scraping lows to feel as relevant on current-generation consoles as any contemporary action-adventure, even if his games aren't topping the charts anytime soon. Sometimes, when I look back on what he went through, I'm surprised that he's made it this far. But I'm absolutely delighted that he has.

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Birmingham Women's Hospital, where the National Sperm Bank is based. Not an especially sexy building, is it? Photo by Oosoom

Britain has a sperm shortage. In fact, "shortage" doesn't do the situation justice—it's been announced this week that, a year after opening, the National Sperm Bank has had a grand total of only nine donors. That's enough to help 90 families, but it's still a pretty miserable effort from our menfolk. So what can we do about it?

Well, firstly Britain doesn't have a sperm shortage. Britain has lots of sperm. We produce billions upon billions of the little underachievers every day. If anything, we have too much sperm. We have so much sperm that, if we grew it all to maturity, we'd have a trillion-strong army of Brits conquering not just this world but a large portion of the galaxy.

What we have is a delivery problem. Instead of marching across northern France or waiting patiently in a sperm bank test tube for the cold pipette of destiny, Britain's sperm are stuck in balled-up tissues, dissolving in laundry detergent, or being slaughtered by the millions in the surprisingly hostile environment that is a woman's vagina.

Read: My Struggles with IVF: It's Not About Failure—It's About Hope

So why is something so easy to make and so readily thrown away so hard to get hold of? Simple: Donating sperm is ridiculously hard to do.

You probably have an idea about sperm donation from your favorite sitcom. Giving sperm is a scene we've seen on TV about a billion times, always played for laughs. Guy walks into a clinic. Guy shuffles awkwardly in front of the attractive woman at reception and is directed to a small room filled with dirty magazines. Nature takes its course, he comes out with a little pot of goo, and a doctor tells him how many swimmers he's got.

It turns out it's nothing like that. Not even close. While it's certainly not as hard as donating eggs, donating sperm is so awkward and disruptive for such a limited chance of success that it's amazing the National Sperm Bank managed to get nine whole men to take part.

Let's assume you're a healthy male between 18 and 41. You then have to attend a clinic to pass an initial assessment and test. Since there are very few clinics around, and they tend to be in say, the centers of cities, you probably have an irritating and expensive commute to deal with. You fill in a questionnaire and provide a sample... Oh, and did you remember to abstain from alcohol, sex or masturbation for the last three days?

The lab assesses your semen for sperm count, sperm motility and sperm shape, and carries out a test freeze to see if your wannabe babies are hardy enough to survive a stint on ice. Forty-eight hours later, you get the results back. Bang, 90 percent of you just failed.

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The failures are the lucky ones. Assuming you pass, the clinic will take more of your precious bodily fluids—blood and urine this time—to test for any infectious or genetic diseases. Get through that and after two commutes to a clinic, several hours of your time and a couple of train fares, you're rewarded with the princely sum of £35 [$54], and the opportunity to begin the donation process itself.

Donating isn't just a case of turning up and making a deposit—getting an actual woman pregnant would be easier. You now have to turn up to the clinic twice a week, every week for three to six months. I live in Maidenhead, so for me that would work out at somewhere between £400 [$613] and £750 [$1150] in train fares—to be paid for out of my £35—and several hours per week of my time.

And before each of those visits, you need to abstain from any kind of sex or masturbation for three days. That leaves a narrow window of about 24 hours per week in which to conduct your entire sex life... for up to half a year.

So, that's what being a sperm donor means. Applying for a process you're 90 percent likely to be rejected from, so you can spend a large amount of your own time, energy, and money, and cripple your own sex life for half a year, in the vague hope that at the end of it you might get someone you'll never meet pregnant.

All of these restrictions and demands can be easily justified. Clinics do need a lot of samples to be sure of getting a good batch. Abstaining from sex does help produce better quality sperm. Screening out diseases also makes sense if you can.

The problem is, while nine donors at the National Sperm Bank have met this gold standard, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of people they can't help are turning to the internet and social media to donate sperm privately. Sites with subtle names like "Donor Daddy" and "Tadpole Town" have sprung up, circumventing the professionals and satisfying demand directly. Only last month, the Mail reported on a lesbian couple who approached a man advertising his services on Facebook. The man in question, Kenzie Kilpatrick, has apparently helped nine women to conceive. That's the equivalent of one birth for every donor in the National Sperm Bank.

But these "services" are totally unregulated. There's no guarantee as to what you're getting or who you're dealing with, or what the quality of the sperm is likely to be. Of course it could be argued that the same is true for most non-donor pregnancies, but the potential for abuse is huge. The Mirror reported in 2013 on the case of a sperm donor professor who'd fathered 49 children, but was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault after complaints by a number of mothers.

Which raises a question—if the result of restrictions on sperm donation is just that people ignore them and go elsewhere, are they really doing anything for public health or safety? Would it be better to make the process easier and bring more people into contact with professionals, rather than continuing to run a system that most people simply bypass? I don't know, but people seem to be making up their own minds.

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Last week Australia's Daily Telegraph ran a story about a documentary called Gayby Baby that was being shown at Burwood girls high. Those familiar with the Daily Telegraph won't be surprised that the article was somewhat critical of the screening. The film follows the children of four same-sex Australian families, focusing on the obstacles they face at home and in the community.

Despite the article's claims of "a backlash from parents," a Presbyterian minister was the Telegraph's only source for parental complaints. According to the Guardian, the concerns he heard were never expressed to the school's staff.

Ostensibly the Telegraph felt the matter was newsworthy because schools should be apolitical zones, places where children learn skills like math, science, and reading and then go home. They certainly shouldn't interrupt the teaching of the curriculum for a movie with a political agenda. Sure, Gayby Baby is political. But so is all education.

A school doesn't have to disrupt normal classes to inculcate its students into a particular way of thinking about the world. The decision to teach primary school students the history of Australia without going into any detail about what happened before white settlement has lasting political ramifications. The decision to do the opposite would too. Choosing art and literature for children by limiting yourself to wholly apolitical material is impossible.

Not to mention the times when class is disrupted. No child in Australia goes to school on Anzac Day. Holidays are organized around times of the year important to the Christian calendar.

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On a Remembrance Day when I was in primary school my class was asked to observe a minute of silence, the teacher telling us to reflect on "those who had died for us." This particular view of our military and our military history was my own for many years—it remains the view of many today. It wasn't apolitical, it was a cultural ritual that had a great impact upon me. Is there anyone who'd argue that doesn't push certain values onto children?

Instead of teaching us about any particular war and the cultural and political reasons Australians died in Turkey and France in the 1910s, we were given the vague impression that there was something holy about our war dead, and that our military was always wielded in our defense.

The Daily Telegraph doesn't believe schools should be apolitical anymore than they think the Daily Telegraph should be apolitical. It's why they don't even bother presenting intelligent arguments for their point of view.

An opinion piece by Piers Akerman acted as a companion to the article. In it Ackerman goes on a tirade about something a child, Ebony, said in the documentary.

"'It's not normal. You're not normal.' They're the kind of things that go through my head."

Well, Ebony, normality is the state of being usual, typical, or expected according to the Oxford Dictionary and according to the 2011 Census, there were only around 33,700 same-sex couples in Australia, with 17,600 male same-sex couples and 16,100 female same-sex couples. Same-sex couples represented about 1 per cent of all couples in Australia—which would indicate they do not meet the definition "normal."

Children in same-sex couple families are one in a thousand of all children in couple families (0.1 per cent). Statistically, you are not in a "normal" family, no matter how many LGBTIQ-friendly docos you may be forced to watch by politically-driven school principals.

The drive to create the fantasy that homosexual families are the norm come from the politically left-leaning Teachers Federation..."

Firstly, one in a hundred probably fits most people's idea of "expected" even if it isn't "typical" or "usual." Secondly, honing in on one quote from a child is hopelessly obtuse, even as political criticism. Obviously the purpose of the film isn't to show that children of same-sex couples, and same-sex relationships in general, are the norm. It's to show that they're a part of the community. It's to educate people about the peculiar struggles they face. It's to provide proof of how very alike they are to every other family in Australia.

Using Piers's logic we should be telling all sorts of children they're not normal. Like kids with red hair, and orphans.

If the Telegraph had a purpose (other than to sell papers) it failed. The film's director and an alumnus of the school, Maya Newell, gave a talk to the students in lieu of a screening and you can't pay for the kind of press and attention the Telegraph's story and opinion gave the documentary.

The truth is you can't avoid pushing political agendas on children, socio-political opinions inform everything we do. There's a political agenda behind the status quo, and the Telegraph knows it.

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A memorial for Deputy Darren H. Goforth at the gas station at which he was shot. Photo via the Harris County Sheriff's Office's Facebook.

At about 8:30 PM on Friday night, Deputy Darren H. Goforth was pumping gas at a Chevron station in suburban Houston. That's when prosecutors say Shannon J. Miles—a 30-year-old with a long rap sheet—got out of a red Ford truck and shot him in the back of the head.

Miles went on to fire 14 more times, and left the 47-year-old father of two to die in a pool of his own blood, the prosecution claimed in court on Monday. The alleged killer is currently being tried for capital murder and being held without bond. While the motive for the crime isn't clear yet, Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman has claimed that Deputy Goforth was targeted simply "because he wore a uniform."

Though the facts of the crime are awful, the case has made headlines because it's become a rallying point for those who argue the Black Lives Matter has gone off the rails.

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"At any point when the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, coldblooded assassinations of police officers happen, this rhetoric has gotten out of control," Hickman said at a news conference on Saturday. "We've heard 'black lives matter.' All lives matter. Well, cops' lives matter, too. So why don't we just drop the qualifier and just say 'lives matter,' and take that to the bank."

On Tuesday, the Voice of Texas Law Enforcement, a law enforcement advocacy organization, said it was just about to send a letter to President Barack Obama demanding that he recognize "blue" lives. "Too many community leaders and ever [sic] politicians have used false characterizations of certain tragedies to widen the schism between law enforcement and the communities that they serve," read a copy of the letter provided to VICE. "In too many incidents this has resulted in an irrational hatred of our brave men and women who wear badges."

One of those instances came last December, when a man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley drove from Baltimore to Brooklyn and executed two cops in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood as they sat in their patrol car. On Instagram, Brinsley suggested he was acting in revenge because the Staten Island cop who killed Eric Garner was not indicted by a grand jury.

"Since the execution of two NYPD officers last December, cops have been on a heightened alert for their own personal safety," says Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD detective sergeant who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. "When you make statements that the cops are all bad, brutal killers, those amongst us that have mental issues or those criminals that wish to make a name for themselves will take up the offer."

If there are legitimate, new dangers to cops in a climate of anger at police brutality, there are also still plenty of right-wing trolls on hand to downplay or dismiss civil rights concerns. This has been especially pronounced over the past couple of days during discussions of Goforth's death. While guest-hosting a Fox News show yesterday, a comedian named Tom Shillue called Black Lives Matter "criminal stuff"; that same day Elizabeth Hasselbeck asked why the movement wasn't labeled a "hate group."

Since 2005, Miles has faced several misdemeanor charges, and according to CNN he may have some mental health issues. About three years ago, he was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after getting into a skirmish with another man at an Austin homeless shelter over a television remote. He was found mentally incompetent to stand trial, and the case was eventually dropped when prosecutors lost track of the alleged victim.

One of the 30-year-old's attorneys says that Miles had a "blank stare" during Monday's hearing, "which is always cause for concern."

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