The game involves no running, shooting, stabbing, driving, flying, blowing up or indeed down, no stomping, belching, inventorying, levelling up or in fact any concrete goals of any kind, save one: explore. You play a character visiting an island in the outer Hebrides. You explore the island. There are buildings and strange landmarks to visit. As you journey around the island, music is played (the music is beautiful, as far as I’m concerned, and worth the price of admission alone) along with a voice over recalling, perhaps, a car crash. Things aren’t quite clear; someone, certainly, is absent, and sorely missed.

The mod was so successful that, when the original team decided to re-develop it – expanding the soundtrack into full orchestration, re-building the island in high-resolution – Valve, the makers of Half-Life, decided to give it a full release via Steam, their digital distribution network.

It’s out in February – I honestly haven’t been this excited about a game ever. It’s given to be absolutely beautiful.

‘Lo all. Just wanted to post a quick link to an anime short directed by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame) called Cannon Fodder.

The short was part of a three-piece compilation film called Memories, and is my favourite of the lot. It’s a anti-militaristic film (though not stridently so) that focuses on a day in the life of a family in a small town locked in a perpetual war with an enemy that they cannot see. The entire town is studded with artillery, crowned on every rooftop; the people mesh into the machines like cogs. (Those of you who’ve read The Boy with Nails for Eyes will probably have figured out already why I like it.)

[There are spoliers coming up, so I've posted the clips below. All are in Japanese, and not subtitled, just so you know - but the film works perfectly without necessarily understanding what is said.]

The animation is remarkable for the fact that it is composed of a single, unbroken shot. Rather than cut or fade from scene to scene, Otomo’s frequently made use of obscuring clouds of steam or smoke (amongst other techniques) to bridge transitions.

This isn’t simply for artistic purposes. The unbroken train of images gives a sense of the inertia that the lives of the townspeople have now acquired; though dissatisfaction is evident, there appears to be little opportunity for dissent. Finally, by returning to the same bookend image of a child in bed that opened the film, an endless chain of unvarying days is implied.

The use of cloud to facilitate scene transitions also fits into the film’s theme of misinformation and obscurity. Though the population of the town accept the conflict with no question, it is subtly implied through use of a brief, quiet shot of a cloud-marked plain soon after the film’s most frenetic scene that there is, in fact, no enemy at all (the only point an enemy does appear is in one character’s fantasy).

Hence, to me, the title Cannon Fodder; whereas the phrase typically applies to infantrymen sent into battle for little apparent purpose save to be chopped up by machine gun and artillery fire, here it applies to the people who feed the guns with the day-to-day machinery of their lives. When an accident occurs that could injure the father of the family, the immediate reaction of his superiors is to punish him and his co-workers, rather than ensure that they’re unhurt. It’s notable that the father is much more worn and hopeless than his young son, who accepts his role in the militaristic town happily (even flashing an out-of-place peace sign at his mother – and at the viewer – at one point in proceedings).

There’s quite a bit more I could say about the short, about which I find little to dislike. The only duff note I would say is the soundtrack, which does the job it’s supposed to (undercutting the dignity of the aristocratic gun-firer, for example) but doesn’t feel very polished. But still, well worth the half hour it takes.