Instead, we've gone for both the absolute legends of gaming wretchedness and, more controversially, the titles that promised the moon on a stick, but cruelly delivered a deflated football on a rusty metal shard – which then gave you tetanus.
Read the news – both in the games press and the mainstream – and you might believe that Rockstar has reached a new low, a more appalling depth of wretchedness than the whole Hot Coffee thing, which was at least consensual sex.
Read the news both in the games press and the mainstream and you might believe that Rockstar has reached a new low, a more appalling depth of wretchedness than the whole Hot Coffee thing, which was at least consensual sex.
And if, a little later, you find yourself feeling that the book has after all raised more questions about the condition of wretchedness than its ending quite resolves, this is only further evidence of Hage's large and unsettling talent.
Many of the film's most powerful moments seem to belong in a more serious, less ironised film: especially Aviva's tearful wretchedness, as she listens to her mother's anguished advocacy for abortion, no matter how much she wants her child.
Modernist theologians in particular have tried to make use of his main contention, that "man is infinitely more than man," in isolation from his other contention, that man's wretchedness is explicable only as the effect of a Fall, about which a man can learn what he needs to know from history.
It's more fun than Kurva, in which the Reial Companyia de Teatre de Catalunya recreate the wretchedness of roadside prostitution on a byway in the hills above Hove.
In contrast, from the very first moment Breivik was utterly alone, and his smallness and wretchedness, which were, in a way, grotesquely inflated by his actions, make it all the more difficult to reconcile oneself to the crime, which the media have termed "the worst attack on Norwegian soil since the Second World War".
On the other hand, the deaths and the injuries and the general wretchedness of life in limbo in a jungle camp will be tacitly used to deter asylum seekers overseas and, more importantly, to remind voters that Abbott is hard on refugees, just as he promised.
"Prokofiev was more characterised by delight in life; Shostakovich had a more tragic view," says Titel. "I think they both understood the full, loathsome wretchedness of the political and ideological system that repressed them.
