Review: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords: Chapters 1 & 2 for the iPhone

It was the word cull that finally made me balk. The sallow humans who needed me to thin the numbers of goblins in the nearby forest: sunken eyed and dark-lipped as if inbred with their ghoulish neighbours to the south. They wanted the goblins dead, but phrased the process in terms of clinical population management. The same goblin race that I was trading with across the mountains were here no more than cattle or game overrunning it's permitted habitat.

Sure, I killed a few. But the word echoed in my head as I butchered the first three: burnt flesh and blood on my hands (and boots, and hair and everywhere else that the clubbing blows I inflicted sprayed their arterial viscera). And I stopped. Not because of any moral code but mere distaste for the work. (and the decision fell nowhere in the deliberate morality I had chosen: freeing the daughter from an arranged marriage, who still travelled with me, never stealing or cheating - but brutal, brutal bloody murder...)

The storm giants were next. Their chieftain I had somehow chosen to spare, turned and asked for the head of one of the thieves who had guided me to his mountain habitat. I agreed to his request, but no thief will feel my stormblade. I did hunt pegasus eggs in the mountains for them, but the nobility of the mother in her throes of death turned me from hunting any more - even though taming one of these beautiful creatures as a steed would have greatly benefitted me.

The collection of heads as bounties is no trivial matter. The tendons in the neck are tough, and need to be cut, or more often hacked through with a sharpened blade post-mortem, with particular attention paid to popping the vertebrae apart between segments. You should move the body between three and four a.m. to minimise the risk of being noticed, cut into four or five approximately equally sized pieces in the bath or shower and double-bagged in plastic garbage bags. Store the parts in the freezer to avoid the stench of decomposing flesh until you're ready to proceed, and change the sumps that could trap human matter to minimize the forensic footprint.

Every fantasy world feels like a Pangaea through which you wade waist deep in a bloody river of your own design. Humanity has always acted this way: from some primeval fear when we stared deep into the eyes of Neanderthal man and saw something truly alien staring back at us. Our so-called civilisation still gives lip-service to the idea of universal intelligence, saving dolphins to sack the rest of the sea. But as soon as we can stuff it in our mouths and swallow, we'll 'harvest' it until the wellsprings run dry. Witness the fiasco of governments stumbling to avoid declaring the bluefin tuna an endangered species. But governments have always stumbled: perpetual extensions of our partitioned, hypocritical by design brains.

Humanity as a xenophobic monoculture - eusocial and spreading through the stars in a genocidal crusade. That's why science fiction to me rings truer than those tired recreations of the hero myth.

Distract me with the shiny gems of achievement, and let me not think.