Like so many others I was never into comic books until I read Alan Moore. Likewise, like so many others the affair began with Watchmen, then V for Vendetta and then so on and so on as I’ve continued to work my way feverishly and determinedly through his bibliography, £14.99 by £14.99. Anyway, that’s a story repeated all over – all you need to know is that Alan Moore is a better writer than you and probably all of your favourite writers – if you haven’t already you must urgently skip through his panes where you’ll find truth and beauty spun into all manner of shapes and sizes you’ll not often see elsewhere.

I’ve just finished reading Moore’s From Hell, his graphic novel set in and around London’s East end at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. Moore finished From Hell ten years ago this month and so it’s as good an anniversary as any to go and read the work.

As an experience From Hell is tiring (but never tiresome), gruesome (but never pornographic in its portrayal of violence) and, like every Jack the Ripper work historical and fictional (if indeed such a distinction can really be made), takes a ringside seat as fact and conjecture endlessly wrestle each other towards a conclusion that will never come.

But far more interesting than the always sadly compulsive Ripper detail are the ideas that Moore bats around underneath the From Hell narrative; the discussion and comment on poverty, subjugation, media manipulation and deification of the arch-villain (which he argues is a practise begun at around this time before snowballing through the years into our contemporary Daily Mail/ Sun-shock-horror! headlines). Moore is also preoccupied with spiritual geography as it relates to and stretches across London’s streets and centuries.

You’ll hear of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s terrifying penatgram of churches and the Masonic architectural stamps on so many of the capital’s principal sites of worship (including St Paul’s Cathedral where a stone from Solomon’s Temple rests and on which Hawksmoor may have also provided architectual assistance to the allegedly high-ranking freemason Sir Christopher Wren). Likewise, Moore delights in expounding upon the spiritual history of London (his overarching point being that the grim façade of Hawksmoor’s Spitalfield’s church –built upon the Ho-spital fields where dead were buried after the plague – provides some kind of towering connection as a backdrop for the Ripper murders). It’s all fascinating and the kind of well-researched and delightful conspiratorial flavouring that Dan Brown would likely trade his fortune for the skill to be able to write.

Thanks to these themes and ideas the ugliness and gore of the immovable narrative (meticulously drawn from fact and faithfully represented by artist Eddie Campbell location by location) is manageable and, keep your eyes open and you’ll likely come out the other end surprisingly enriched for such a morbid journey.

Moore has what, in synopsis at very least, sounds like a frighteningly controversial new work coming out this summer, Lost Girls. In the comic book scene conversation and debate over this ‘pornographic’ work featuring 19th Century children storybook characters is already gathering, albeit in hushed tones in the hope that no-one from an inflammatory and two-dimensional media source hears of it prior to release). There’s a fascinating three-part interview to chew over here.

Finally, Kieron Gillen’s forthcoming comic Phonogram is fast gathering hype-type momentum. The weekend before last, at the glorious All Tomorrow’s Parties festival where we shared a chalet he admitted to me: “I know we’re clever but we’re just not sure if we’re good yet…”

Judging by the preview panels out this week there’s nothing to worry about there.

As a new release by a new author and a new artist it will help them out if next time you pop into your local comic shop you ask if they’re getting it in this autumn. Please do so.

If we had a new Dreamcast game every time someone said, “That was definitely the last videogame to be released for the Dreamcast”, we’d pretty much be in the situation we are now.

Under Defeat is Japanese shoot ‘em up developer G.Rev’s latest attempt at a final eulogy for Sega’s beloved machine, a system still doggedly scratching at the inside of its coffin – at least in native Japan – five years and two months after Sega prematurely pulled the plug of financial life-support.

But despite the intervening years, the 1998-born Dreamcast is still technically a current-gen machine. Indeed, as Under Defeat’s helicopter gunship lurches across grey skies, blades nicking at swaying tree tops, a trail of black billowing callcards marking where each of your catastrophic explosions wrenched enemy gunship pilots into airborne oblivion, it’s every inch pretty and PS2 – an enticing postcard from a alternative present where Sega hardware still matters.

Of course, it doesn’t still matter one bit and to the vast majority of gaming’s onward-marching consumers, Under Defeat is of no consequence – something hardly helped by the comprehensive lack of innovation or evolution to mark this game. As traditional an expression of videogame’s eldest genre as we’ve seen this century, Under Defeat dodges all rivals’ ideas with startling single-mindedness: no bullet hell (a la Ibara), no scrape bonus (Psyvariar), no learnable attack patterns (Gradius V), no augmentable main weapon (Radiant Silvergun), no 360° craft control (Zero Gunner 2), no delicately balanced multiplier (Radirgy) and all ‘80s muddy tanks, camouflage paint and white explosion.

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Ste from videogame radio show One Life Left says:

“LOL JAPAN!!! is the name of the feature — What we need as a super-future technology ident for it. It’s not meant to be a full production thing, more like we’ve dropped a jingle in front of it not knowing what to expect. And that jingle should be super hype-filled techno OMG LOL Get Ready For This Crazy Shit! type thing, maybe 10 seconds or so, maybe less. And an outro too.”

goz says:

“I am totally on to it.”

More than 200 award winning photographs from this year’s competition are on display at the Royal Albert Hall until 28th May.

Here are a few of the winners:

Henry Agudelo, Colombia, El Colombiano.

A bull attacks a horse during a corrida at La Macarena bullring in the city of Medellín in western Colombia. Picadors mounted on horses play a role early on in a bullfight

Finbarr O’Reilly, Canada, Reuters.

The fingers of malnourished one-year-old Alassa Galisou are pressed against the lips of his mother Fatou Ousseini at an emergency feeding center in the town of Tahoua in northwestern Niger

Kieran Dodds, United Kingdom, Evening Times/The Herald.

Every year an estimated eight million straw-colored fruit bats (Eidolon helvum) are among the seven different bat species that arrive in the abundant Kasanka National Park in Zambia in October.

Uriel Sinai, Israel, for Getty Images.

In August, Israel brought to an end its 38-year occupation of the Gaza Strip. Under Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, some 8,500 settlers were withdrawn from land seized during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Pål Hermansen, Norway, for Orion Forlag/Getty Images.

A polar bear eats a seal on an ice flow near the Monaco glacier on the northwest coast of Svalbard (Spitsbergen) in Norway.

Xin Zhou, People’s Republic of China, Guangzhou Daily.

Five thousand kong ming lamps are released into the sky at Bang Niang Beach, in Khao Lak, Thailand in a commemoration ceremony one year after the December 2004 tsunami. The lamps symbolized people killed in Thailand in the disaster. They are part of an ancient local tradition.

Todd Heisler, USA, Rocky Mountain News/Polaris Images.

Fellow marines drape a flag over Cathey’s casket, as passengers on the plane that carried the body to his hometown of Reno, Nevada, watch his family and colleagues gather on the tarmac.

Donald Miralle, Jr., USA, Getty Images.

World-record holder Aaron Peirsol streamlines off the wall after the 200-meter backstroke preliminary heats during the Santa Clara Grand Prix in California in June.

Edmond Terakopian, United Kingdom, Press Association.

A commuter, still clutching his morning newspaper, leaves Edgware Road Underground Station in London after a suicide bombing on July 7.

You can see all of the winning entries here

Over at Gamesindustry.biz a pre-E3 podcast I edited/ soundtracked has just gone live featuring news, predictions and interviews with most of the GI.biz/ Eurogamer.net in-house team as well as a response from Nintendo’s UK boss David Yarnton RE: the announcement of the company’s new console name, Wii.

Click here to listen/ download it.

There should be a second, mid-E3 podcast later next week.

More friends of Chewing pixels mid-project: This time ex-editor of Develop, Owain Bennallack and ex-editor of Edge magazine, João Diniz Sanches, plus other old industry heavyweights I don’t know, work on a site dedicated to all things pocket sized in gaming.

I’ve been writing for them for a little while before the launch a month or so ago – the trickle of work dictated largely by the trickle of Sony PSP games. Anyhow, the site is aimed at the casual gamesplayer and as such there are fairly strict regulations on what you can and can’t do in reviews. It’s good fun though and I was pleasantly suprised when the opening par of the latest review of mine to go up there, for Megaman Powered Up, got past the subs.

It’s a good site and, in particular will tell you lots of things about forthcoming exciting moble phones games that nobody else will.

Sign up to their forum and you even get a free mobile game. Enjoy.

My portfolio (?) for them is here if you’re interested.

Friends of Chewing pixels, Ste Curran and Robert Howells have been running their latest brainchild, videogame talk radio show One Life Left, on London Arts station Resonance 104.4FM for a few weeks. It’s now sufficiently settled enough that they’re telling people about it.

I’ve been contributing indents, jingles and all the feature music production for the show, which is a very enjoyable mixture of laid back videogame talk and features that will appeal to both those in and out of the know.

The list of contributers is suitably elevated and the features line-up suitably leftfield that you should know what to expect.

You can listen live on Resonance’s website every Monday at 3:30 pm or download the podcast from itunes (just search for ‘one life left’ in the music store and click to subscribe for free). Watch out for the excellent title theme written for the show by Iain from Aereogramme.

Also, they/ we also have a myspace place here you can visit.

Guitar Hero has a spangly guitar, Dancing Stage a blinking dancefloor and Gran Turismo a steering wheel that, when you push it, pushes you back. Samba De Amigo has tequila-fragranced maracas, Maestromusic an erect conductor’s baton and Steel Battalion a huge cock-off robot dashboard. These are all videogames that have seen their manufacturers carefully pipe plastic into (mostly) recognisable real world shapes: an effort to normalise that most alienating abstract interface – the videogame controller.

The DS’s stylus is already a real-world interface. Anyone that has held a pen or chalked a board or drawn pictures in the sand with their finger already understands how it works. And so, the leap of imagination Lost Magic requires you to make – that your stylus is a magic wand with which arcane symbols must be traced to unleash magnificent physics-bending spells – is pleasingly unnoticeable. Indeed, it’s such an obvious move, and one sure to be replicated on the wand-like Wii controller in one form or another, that you wonder why so many Potter tie-ins have failed to make use of it.

At least, that’s what you wonder while tearing the wrapping off the box. In-game it becomes increasingly clear that this is a tricky gimmick to make good.

You can read the rest here