Monty's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 101

The English disease has reared its ugly, little head again with punch-ups, death threats, Police involvement and chairs being hurled violently at innocent bystanders. This brings shame on all decent English people and is blight on our national character. When will it all end and normality be resumed? Will somebody have to die for us to stamp out this thuggery?

Yes, Big Brother is back... And what's more, the fifth series of the show is very, very good. Who needs Lord Of The Flies or Battle Royale when there's this lot of monsters to gawp over? Of course, it's a freak show and it's indecent and it's crass and the inmates are the worst-of-breed. But, it's absolutely hilarious and this degenerated series has completely regenerated what seemed to be a dying format.

And what a fine punch-up it was this week... except nobody saw it because Channel 4 pulled the plug for an hour. Times don't change; they did the same thing to the web feed in the first series when it looked as if Nasty Nick was going to get a hiding from whateverhisnamewas.

In the intervening four years, however, it is interesting to see how the mobile aspect of the show has evolved. In the first series the offering was distinctly lo-fi, but now viewers can vote by SMS and watch a live feed on their mobiles (fights permitting). But where's the decent mobile game?

This year's paltry offering is a puzzle game and follows other lame efforts such as Virtual Housemate where 'fans can feel the pressure akin to that of being inside the Big Brother house'. Granted that after this week's events the mobile game should be a beat-'em-up or suchlike, such a brand demands good mobile gameplay.

Maybe Endemol is missing a trick. The company could bring out a quality mobile game with animated (and familiar) housemates from the previous year's show in the run-up to the new show. This would reacquaint Big Brother fans with the format... then these fans could download a new quality mobile game on the day the show starts.

Maybe mobile gamers could even vote on which game they should download, but maybe I'm watching the show too much and it's time to put this England-victory-hangover to bed.