The Church of England has become rather hot under the dog collar after it learned that one of the locations aliens have chosen to launch their invasion of Earth in the PlayStation 3 shoot-'em-up Resistance: Fall of Man is modelled on Manchester Cathedral.

Manchester cathedral: real and not real

C of E officials will today ask Sony to apologise; withdraw the PS3 game or modify it; and make a "substantial" donation to the cathedral's youth-oriented education programmes, BBC Radio 4 reported this morning. It threatened legal action if the consumer electronics giant proves unpenitent.

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The Church is cross with Sony because it claims the games developer visualised the cathedral without permission. This begs the question of who actually - if anyone - owns visual representations of the cathedral. Certainly not the architect, who's been dead and buried these past 700 years or more.

Sony responded by claiming it had all the permissions it needed, but would discuss the matter with cathedral officials today. The company also pointed out that R:FoM is an entertainment and not based on reality. The rendering of the cathedral, it added, was entirely virtual - no videos or photographs of the building are used in the game.

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