Officially bigger than the drugs and prostitution industries combined, yet still held in lower regard than either by society at large, what will 2010 hold for the video games industry? I haven’t got an answer to that. I just thought it was a nice intro. What I do have, however, is the top 10 most [...]

By Rassam Fakour-Zaker Know Your Money Editor There have been some amazing, life-affirming occurrences over the past ten years. But you don’t want to hear about those, do you? Thought not. Here’s the most crushing letdowns of the decade… 10. The Y2K Bug: Crappest techno-crisis ever (1st January 2000) The disappointments started early this decade. [...]

By Rassam Fakour-Zaker Know Your Money Editor After the astonishing (and entirely fictitious) success of my previous article, 10 Awesome Movies That Should Be Made Into Awesome Video Games – which became an overnight sensation, caused an internet breakdown, garnered several awards and proved instrumental in actually getting seven of the games mentioned greenlit by [...]

By Rassam Fakour-Zaker Know Your Money Editor Since this topic has been blogged to death, I shall avoid the well-trodden Mortal Kombat/GTA/Manhunt route and focus on some of the more interesting and bizarre controversies that have been stirred up by the video games medium from its blocky, monochromatic emergence in the 1970s until… just about… [...]

Trawling through eBay, yields some fascinating results, and after reading a few tales of the adventures of other eBay users, I decided to make my own journey through the wild undergrowth that is eBay’s “Weird” section. There amidst the bondage gear and sex toys, I found some truly bizarre auctions that the seller’s seem to [...]

We all love a good supercar wreckage, don’t we? Just how we all love to compare car insurance. There’s just something about seeing a car worth an extortionate amount of money smashed into bits at the hands of incompetent drivers. We take delight in the schadenfreude we experience when yet another vehicle that costs as [...]

By Rassam Fakour-Zaker Know Your Money Editor We all like to bitch about the rubbishness of games based on movies, and with good reason: in order to make a quick buck, idea-deficient developers seem to have a conveyor-belt of mediocrity that turns every crappy Hollywood blockbuster into an equally crappy (or even crappier) video game. [...]

Collecting. It’s a bizarre habit, isn’t it? Be it stamps, coins, bottle tops, beer or anything, there is some innate compulsion to amass a set of items that only truly have value to the collectors or to others that share their passion (or are as willing to use their virgin credit card or MBNA credit [...]

By Rassam Fakour-Zaker Know Your Money Editor Ever since Haunted House appeared on the Magnavox Odyssey back in 1972, many video game developers have been refining their dark arts in order to create games of increasing complexity and sophistication with one aim: to scare the crap out of us. Recent major releases such as F.E.A.R [...]

In a world where everything is becoming increasingly digitized and where whole reams of information are readily accessible via the internet and electronic libraries, extreme value is still being placed on the humble book. People are willing to pay incredible sums of money (whilst at the same time waving goodbye to their cash ISAs and [...]