Congratulations on Meeting Up With Kristen Bell Again!

You haven’t seen Kristen Bell since your disastrous Quizno’s breakup last year. It was supposed to be a one time thing to distract you more than any kind of meaningful gesture, just one of many of Ms. Bell’s charitable projects which she’s taken up since Veronica Mars was cancelled.

Since then you’ve spent your days online dating and smoking weed. It’s been a quiet noble existence, its mundanity only interrupted by occasional visits to the Burger Shack, the egalitarian highway bound burger joint within walking distance of your shithole apartment.

The Burger Shack is where you go when you want to be left alone. It’s frequented by a diverse crowd, ranging from junkies to college kids to creative types. Occasionally someone in business dress shows up there, removes their suit and orders a pair of double cheeseburgers and fries before retreating to the inside of their car. So it won’t be too unbelievable when you see Kristen there tomorrow afternoon, occasionally glancing at her iPhone.

At first you’ll think it’s just that girl you hit on constantly who looks a little bit like Kristen Bell, but with each bite of burger you’ll become more and more certain that that is, in fact, the celebrated actress. After a few more pensive bites you’ll raise your hand and walk up to her.

“Hey Kristen!” you’ll shout, burger bits spitting out of your mouth as you speak. She’ll look at you with a sort of vague remembrance, as if you’re a face she could once pick out of a crowd many years ago.

“Hey...you,” she’ll respond, looking around nervously. You’ll ignore both her body language and the unspoken rules of The Burger Shack and advance on her, hand outstretched. She’ll take it, uneasily.

“I was the guy at Quizno’s? A year ago?” She’ll nod in recognition.

“Right. That guy. How you been?” She’ll fake a certain folksie accommodation for your unwanted attention, but it’ll be readily apparent that she wants you to go on your way as quickly as possible.

You’ll shrug, still ignorant of the subtext of her behavior.

“I’ve mostly been spiraling into a dark place I’ll never emerge from since then. You know how it is.” She’ll give you a quick “I noticed” look before nodding with a little half grin on her mouth.

“Wouldn’t have guessed,” she’ll say, checking her iPhone again. You’ll misinterpret this as a statement that you’re looking good and that she wants a little piece and move in towards her.

“You know,” you’ll demure, “If you’d like to get a drink together later I’m available. Like, constantly. My life is in shambles since that day.”

As you begin your pathetic pass she’ll look at you with sympathy. But you’ll take it way too slow and miss the hint, and as you try to put “the moves” on her Kristen will mutter “Fuck” and start running past you towards a weeping man fleeing the Burger Shack.

“Is that a no?” you’ll shout after her, but her only response will be her raised middle finger. You’ll interpret that as a sign of how close the two of you are and smile at yourself, hoping she calls you soon, thinking nothing of the person you just denied the same comfort you received on what had once been the worst day of your life.

Congratulations on Meeting Up With Kristen Bell Again!

Congratulations on Not Taking Their Shit Anymore!

Regular readers or drunks who have somehow stumbled into our archives here at Sexy Results Future Agency should know that we’re all a bit grumpy. For example if our regular editor was here he’d have some unkind words to say about my description of our organization, probably calling me a “g-d v-word” and then telling me to “man up and use real person words.” Luckily he’s been incapacitated due to consumption of wood alcohol so I’m left with the solemn duty of relating how you’re going to totally lose it on everyone you know in the near future.

It’ll start when you get a cup of coffee from that cute girl you haven’t worked up the courage to ask out yet. She’ll give you a friendly smile and your eyes will drop to the ground as you stammer your thanks and step to the side to wait for your latte. On most days this would be the end of it, but today a tremendous man with a bluetooth headset and a Steelers jacket will come up to the counter behind you.

He’ll order a needlessly complicated drink in a rude and dismissive fashion, then wad up his money and throw it at your favorite barista, knowing she’ll have to pick it up and unfold it herself.

Normally you lack the courage to even mention that someone messed up your Tom Collins at a bar, but today you’re going to ball your fist and smash it into that large man’s face. He’ll drop to the ground like a wet sack of feces, which should be the end of it but you’ll give him another quick set of punches to make sure he learns his lesson.

By the time you’re back up your hopeless coffeeshop crush’s co-worker will have your morning treat ready and you’ll give it a grab and be out the door in a few seconds, giving only the quickest of glances to your hopeless lady love on your way out. The admiration you’ll catch in that moment along with the adrenaline will make you feel amazing and you’ll resolve to stand up for yourself at every available moment that day.

You’ll get your next chance soon after when you walk into work and one of your co-workers is wearing a baseball cap. You’ll give him a quick tap to the testicles and he’ll drop to the ground, laughing dumbly. You’ll want to keep going but his tumble will remove the offending hat from his head and you won’t feel justified going after him any more.

After that the lady who wears sweaters with Christmas trees and teddy bears on them in your office will come up and ask you to donate money to a Christian charity which tries to convince homosexual boys and girls that the way they’re feeling is wrong and that they can fix themselves through a combination of prayer and criticism of others. You won’t stop with one punch with Christmas-tree-sweater-lady, and when the cops finally pry you off her no one will really know how to proceed.

If you aren’t changed with assault you’ll be celebrated throughout the office. If you are yours will become a name whispered in admiration throughout the office, a legend once seen and never forgotten. It’ll really depend on how your boss interprets your co-worker’s incredibly inappropriate behavior. Either way you’ll become something of a folk figure in your office. So Congratulations on Not Taking Their Shit Anymore!

Congratulations on Destroying the Stained Glass Window!

Let’s be frank – you’re a bit of a klutz. Sorry if that was too harsh, but it’s true. You once – no lie – accidentally slipped and rammed your penis into a young woman’s anus instead of her vagina. That shouldn’t be physically possible without warming up or lubricant, but you did it and boy did it ever not end well.

But that’s all in the past. Today’s entry is about your terrible future, specifically the part of it which will emerge during your upcoming survey of early American churches.

We don’t want to ruin the surprise so we’re going to be a mite dickish and not specify just which American church you’re going to ruin a priceless stained glass window in. After all, we’d hate for your to undermine your religion and prove that you have control over your own actions and that making whoopie with your cousin wasn’t “the lord’s will” as you call it but was, in fact, a choice you made will full knowledge of what you were doing.

So we’ll be as vague as possible – you’re going to be visiting a church with “tabernacle” somewhere in the name, you’re going to be leaning on a stained glass window trying to impress one of your female relatives who is on the trip with you. Your hand will over the face of some saint who doesn’t particularly approve of your incest and you’re going to push yourself through hundred and fifty year old lead-lined glass.

You’ll be left with scars running up half your arm and some light tissue damage on the side of your face which will heal fully after a few weeks. The scars and muscle damage would be great pickup material if you tried to get with anyone who wasn’t a family member, or if you were even mildly interested to talk to. Instead they’ll just make it more difficult to masturbate.

Congratulations on Destroying the Stained Glass Window!

Congratulations on Vomiting On One Of Your In-Laws!

You loathe visiting your In-Laws. The insufferably successful doctor mother and the functional, present dad who works in an indistinct but non-threatening and secure field of employment just rub your face in how colossally fucked your family is. Your wife, bless her heart, totally gets it and gives you a lot of leeway during these unfortunate visits regarding the amount of weed you can smoke.

Unfortunately recent crackdown efforts on the part of The Man have lead to difficulties in both acquiring and transporting your weed. After one of those TSA dipshits rummages through your bag and bogarts your weed you’re going to arrive at your hellish in-law’s house with no weed, an increased stress level and a spouse who is fearing that you’ll be incarcerated by some square who took a two week training course.

It’ll set the whole weekend off to a poor start. After a brief, awkward conversation where those self-righteous fucks express joy at seeing you and ask with legitimate interest how your year has been you’ll be out the door and on your way to the nearest and shittiest bar which, thanks to blue laws pock marking New England, is a twenty minute drive away.

You’ll pound a dozen shots and race home as quickly as humanly possible so as to “race the liquor” and return home before you feel of the liquor. You’ll make it, but just barely, so you’ll start to lose it in the driveway of your In-Law’s home. You’ll briefly fumble with the door handle before losing consciousness as blessed mother alcohol takes thought away from you.

This would be just dandy if your cunt of a mother-in-law could just leave you be, but no. Tomorrow when she goes to get the mail she’s going to see you breathing shallowly in your car, alone and apparently drunk and she’ll rush over to make sure you aren’t dead. When she cracks open the door you’ll get a little bit of a rush of cold air, which will feel great. But then she’ll lay her hands on you which will completely turn your stomach.

Your body will respond reflexively, projectile vomiting roughly a quart of bile and part of a taco on to her cord knit sweater. She’ll be all good natured about it and take you inside to get you some water and let you lie down somewhere where you can’t be arrested for “intent to drive under the influence” but you’ll sort of catch her eye with yours when one of your swollen lids edges open and you’ll see that she looks a little disappointed.

If you were more sober you’d ask if she was disappointed in you, your wife, or herself, but you won’t have any energy for pithy rejoinders. You’ll just groan and hold on to the woman you hate for dear life.

Congratulations on Vomiting On One Of Your In-Laws!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Avatar's Game!

I usually don’t get a chance to see movies on my own. I spend most of my time working, writing, playing games, or writing about playing games. But when I went home last week I had a chance to sit down and see Avatar in 3D with some old friends.

There are people more qualified to critique Avatar than myself, although I will say it’s a “dumb movie that’s worth seeing if you just want to turn your brain off for three hours and enjoy some action sequences.” Plenty of people have said the same by damning its impenetrable, poor story and praising its asthetic and artistic accomplishments, important so long as we look at films with our eyes. But there aren’t too many people who have discussed the fact that the story is essentially constructed as a video game’s is.

Think of the beginning of the film, up to Sully’s first immersion in his new body. It’s basically one big cutscene. It establishes the characters, their roles and the world surrounding them. We get that there’s a Big Bad Corporation, that people have gone out into space to get resources and that there are dangers all around them that they’ve had trouble dealing with. Then Jake goes into a tube and the game starts.

First there’s a tutorial where it’s revealed that Jake’s Avatar can walk. Jake then learns how to use his walking skills to walk through a garden and jump. Then he learns how to use weapons, manage his inventory, and avoid hostile threats while coming to terms with his control system before the story proper begins and Jake is cut off from his friends and forced to begin the game proper.

Jake then incrementally gains skills so that he can one day deal with the end game of Avatar. He learns to ride horse-things, learns about flying-things, learns how to use bows (weapons with unlimited ammo) and use stealth. It’s not a perfect parallel during the body of the film by any means (although if the film had considered the relationship between self-insertion into another character and self the way that actors and gamers deal with it it might have been a good deal more interesting) but the seeds are there. The film is mostly about his training and his transformation.

Eventually it becomes a story about the transformation of the world around him, rather than any transformation he actually undergoes. Don’t be fooled by the throwaway line about coming to relate more with the Na’vi than his own people and beginning to skew realities. Jake Sully’s reality is always plain. He’s in it, where ever he is. He’s grounded in human life by the knowledge that he can’t use his legs and in Na’vi life by his physical capacity. He wants one to be truer than the other, he doesn’t feel that they’re blurring together and he never shows any signs that he’s letting them.

He does, however, show that he’s sympathizing with them and their ties to the planet. He comes to associate with the setting more than his new character, the culture surrounding the character rather than the identity of the character. In a way this is what video games do in lieu of telling us a story – they draw us into places. It’s their power, to make us feel like that Forerunner ring is huge and boring or that the African Savannah is vast and beautiful and heartless. But Cameron doesn’t really do anything with this. It’s less a statement and more a part of the film he’s making – with so little to hold on to in terms of character and character development we’re left only with the remarkable visuals Cameron deftly doles out. As in games the archetypal nature of the characters and their stymied, telegraphed development forces us to appreciate the space we’re given instead of the story we’re being told. If this was intentional it would be kind of amazing – Cameron would have made us unconsciously relate to a place by giving us a cast of characters who most people with half a brain couldn’t give half a shit about.

But, as in most games, it’s generated by omission rather than intent. Cameron’s treatment of his characters is tooth grindingly self-serious and totally unaware of just how laughable it is. My friend laughed out loud when Michelle Rodriguez abandoned the battle against the Na’vi alone, and it was tough not to join in. Every character is set from their introduction to fill a role, and I don’t think I was shocked by the progression of a single character in the film. Faced with such a weak story you have to grab on to something to love for the three hour experience that is Avatar, just as you have to find something in your twelve hour game to enjoy, and for me it was the visuals.

There’s a whole world’s worth of details in Avatar’s lovingly rendered CG performances, and watching Sam Worthington’s bad acting rendered on to a Na’vi was just as impressive as seeing Sigourney Weaver’s subtly projected on to one. But this focus on visuals wasn’t the real turning point for me thinking that Avatar could’ve been an okay video game instead of a bad movie. That was the climax of the film or, as I like to call it, the multi-stage boss fight.

To those who haven’t seen Avatar and have already spoiled it for themselves by reading this overlong critique of the film and its relationship with games, Avatar climaxes with a multi-stage boss fight. It starts out in the vehicle stage, where you have to destroy vehicles by riding a pterodactyl or some shit. Then you destroy a big vehicle with guns and your pterodactyl goes away for some reason. That’s when the boss fight gets a little dicey.

See, after the vehicle section a robot runs out of the flaming vehicle to attack your gamer/parapulegic. Then your partner has to fight the robot with a giant cat and damage it enough that you can attack it with a part of a robot-gun and break its weak spot open. After its weak spot has been opened you have to fire arrows into its weak spot until you kill it. Before the timer runs out on your body’s air supply. I think. I was sort of drunk when I saw it.

But for the most part what I described was accurate. Avatar’s climax had special units you could call in to help you, mini-bosses and trash mobs you have to clear before the big fight and then a series of arenas where the big fight takes place. The big fight even makes you use all of your training and summon the giant cat you had to run away from during the tutorial. It would be adorable if it was intentional, but again I don’t think Cameron knows what he’s doing. I think he kind of went crazy after Titanic and we’re seeing the fruits of that insanity, an attempt to make Star Wars designed by committee. The film has a message, a setting, a big battle and everything. Everything except characters. And in this it’s just like the great bulk of video games.

So while I’d advise that people take their action movie oriented moms to see Avatar I also suggest that anyone who reads this and hasn’t seen it yet look at it not just as a passable action movie but also as a statement on just how terrible the storytelling in games can be when interactivity is removed. It could be a great learning experience for aspiring developers and shows us a laundry list of things not to do.

Congratulations on Freshening Up!

After what you did last night you’ll need to. You should start with washing your face. Focus on the blood. You won’t be able to get all of it off, but you want to get enough off that you won’t have to explain anything to people on the street. This will also get rid of most of the semen still caked on there.

Next you should burn your clothes and look around the room for something to drape yourself in. Trust me, walking through downtown Manhattan in a curtain is going to look a lot better than strutting around wearing your duds after that little adventure.

Third, find a homeless man and remove all his teeth before filling his pockets with your ID and torching a car with him alive inside it. Sure, it’ll be kind of messy and tough and you’ll want to wear gloves for the whole thing but it’ll give the cops reason to slow their search. They know that sometimes teeth just pop like popcorn when they’re on fire and that they just can’t solve a crime after that happens.

If you follow these steps everything should be fine. So Congratulations on Freshening Up!

Congratulations on Piercing It!

You’re a bit of a coward, it’s fair to say. There are lots of things you wish you could do that you simply can’t. For example, you’ve wanted to get a facial piercing for a long time, but you never had the balls. You wanted to get your tongue pierced but you worried about ruining your dental work. You wanted to get your belly button pierced, but you were worried your boyfriend would call it “too faggy.”

So you’ve remained un-pierced, not for a fear of needles but a fear of permanence, of losing something your body never really had and a fear of what others will think of the choices you’ve made.

Plenty of people have those same fears. But guess what gets rid of them? That’s right, tequila! And where you’re going there will be plenty of it. Because tomorrow you’re going to go to Mexico and get wasted on shooters or blasters or whatever they call measurements of tequila you ram into your fat face where you’re from.

After a few dozen of them the world will become a wondrous blur and your fears will be mitigated. Well, some of them. The fear of permanence specifically. Your deep seeded fear of what others think of you will remain, so you won’t be able to get a facial piercing. But you will be able to stop worrying about permanence, and that means you’ll up and get a “utility piercing” right through the shaft of your dick.

It won’t hurt at all, thanks entirely to tequila, but if will require excessive care over the next few weeks so remember to keep the piercing clean or your dick will fall off long before your boyfriend’s jaw drops when he thinks of how that’ll feel up his asshole.

Oh, and Congratulations on Piercing It! We’re all very proud of you.

Congratulations on Being a Big Hit!

You normally avoid office Christmas parties, mostly because you hate sleeping with your co-workers and are unstoppably charismatic. But everyone once in a blue moon you let it all out and just put yourself in the mouth of whatever interested parties are available.

That’s, following your big ugly breakup, you’re going to show up stag at the Festivus party with the goal of sleeping with as many women as possible and ruining as many marriages as possible in the process. You’ll arrive to a round of applause and a single pair of panties and everything will seem to be on schedule.

At first, that is. But after fifteen minutes you’ll ask Crissy if she wants to blow you in the copy room and, to your great surprise, she’ll turn you down, mentioning how much she loves her husband. You’ll shrug and blame the economy, but everywhere you go you’ll get the same response. For the first time in two decades you won’t be able to get women to abandon their significant others for casual sex with their super hot co-worker.

Crestfallen, you’ll stop by the wine bar to drown your sorrows. While you pound glass after glass of merlot the incredibly gay bartender will look at you with tremendous sympathy. Once his relief shows up he’ll ask if you want to talk about how you’re doing. You’ll shrug and say okay and he’ll drag you to the copy room.

Once in the copy room he’ll rip your pants off and blow you more violently than you’ve ever been blown before. You’ll be smiling when your gay co-worker stumbles in upon the two of you and falls upon your spent cock, sucking it until you come again.

You’ll feel uncomfortable at first, but as the night progresses a staggering number of men, some of whom will surprise you, will come in to that copy room and rock your world. Before the party is over and you leave, swerving your way home in your Acura, you’ll be baffled by your own sexuality but you’ll be sure that you’ve still got your charm. Its just changed so that you only attract gay dudes, which is just fine with you at this point in your life.

Congratulations on Being a Big Hit!

Congratulations on Piecing the Other Night Together!

After that whole pope hat thing you spent the next day, understandably, convalescing and trying to rack your brain as to just what happened last night. After hours and hours of deep soul searching which resulted in zilch you decided to leave your lavishly appointed hotel room (paid for with trust fund money, of course) and head out onto the town the next day.

Immediately after exiting your hotel room you’ll be attacked by an albino assassin. Luckily, as a trust-fund werewolf you’ll be in excellent physical condition and be mostly impervious to conventional weapons, so even after he shoots you twice in the chest you’ll still crush his throat easily. Then you’ll hide the body in a vent shaft and begin your investigation, more sure than ever that you’re in a plot of Dan Brownian proportions.

Turns out you’ll be right. After a day of searching various church establishments, espresso shops and sex clubs you’ll discover that the Catholic church is, in fact, just a front for Dan Brown so he can publish more horrible books about how the Catholic Church is ruining everything for him. You discovered that the pope was one of Dan Brown’s minions and stole his hat and killed him to try and keep Dan Brown from making any more fucking awful books.

But of course your efforts were only a minor setback and Brown, with the massive amount of free time that his lifestyle allows him and his general douchebaggery, decided to strike back against you instead of trying to write about a topic other than Catholicism and art history as a means of solving crime.

Since you’re a supernatural creature and the only people who pay attention to Dan Brown are fucking idiots you’ll have zero trouble breaking into his secret chamber in the Vatican and hanging his guards by their intestines, never having to “wolf out” a once.

But when you get to Brown he’ll plead for his life, claiming that he’d like to write a terrible book about the shit you just did, but replacing himself with someone like Nora Roberts or something to make it seem like there’s a stupid writer feud going on and sell a few more hundred thousand copies that way.

After carefully reading the contract you’ll agree and Dan Brown will produce a shoddy “novel” about a werewolf who uncovers a conspiracy against Dan Brown run by the Catholic Church and Nora Roberts. He’ll add some really weird sex scenes and shoehorn a love interest who knows a lot about Celtic mythology and art history in there and it’ll sell like hotcakes.

That means you’ll be able to live well beyond your trust fund’s already excessive means in the future and that you won’t be able to kill Dan Brown. Some days you’ll regret your decision, but the millions of dollars will quell most of your personal qualms, which just goes to show that money doesn’t make good people.

Congratulations on Piecing the Other Night Together!

Congratulations on Stealing the Pope's Hat!

You’re an American student on vacation in Rome who happens to also be a werewolf. Today you’re going to wake up from a night of binge drinking with the pope’s hat over your dick and no memory of what happened. You’ll spend the next several days trying to find out if the moon is full and if you killed anyone recently, but for the next hour, pre-panic, we suggest you just try to enjoy your vacation and take pride in having stolen and desecrated one of the most recognizable catholic artifacts in the world.

Congratulations on Stealing the Pope’s Hat!

Congratulations on Getting Snowed In!

Tomorrow you’re going to be flying home for the holidays like so many other denizens of America. Unfortunately, despite the fact that it happens for like a quarter of the year every year, Americans haven’t really learned to cope with snow yet, so when a few flakes touch the ground at Chicago O’Hare the entire place is just going to shut down.

We’re not saying they’ll cancel the flights and give you discount rates on already flooded hotels. No, they’re just going to seal the doors and set sniper teams outside the airport to pick off anyone with the savvy to escape. Within hours you and the dipshitty fucks that you’re being forced to spend the holidays with will have devolved from being somewhat polite to being complete shitbirds.

Society in the airport will be made up of several tribes. The former businessmen will remove their ties and tie them about their heads, wooping and yelling about finance, hoping to dissuade larger predators. The members of the military traveling home on vacation will barricade themselves inside the Admiral’s Club, shooting anyone without a platinum card who approaches. The college students will devolve into one big naked pile. The fat people will just sit on anyone they disagree with. And the disaffected twenty somethings, like you, will be left to huddle around burning piles of shit from Brookstone’s and try to plan your escape.

Sheryl, the enthusiastic young woman who works in marketing but wants to write short fiction, will start the planning session. “Maybe we should try and steal a plane and fly it to some other airport where they know how to deal with snow. Does anyone know how to fly a plane?”

Everyone in your fire circle will shrug, except one young man, Mark, who will raise his hand about halfway up. The circle will turn its wordless gaze upon him. “I went to flight school for a few years. But I flunked out.”

The circle will let out a collective sigh and turn away from him. But Cheryl, the young mom who was working towards a career in journalism before she was knocked up, won’t be dissuaded.

“Snowmobiles!” she’ll shout, waking up some of the other circles. She’ll drop her voice when she notices. “Maybe we can steal some snowmobiles. Do they have any?”

Julio, the office worker who barely escaped from the streets of LA to live in Portland, will shake his head. “The nearest snowmobile emporium is at least twenty miles away. And if we got past the snipers the only way they wouldn’t be cleared out is if they were armed too.”

Another sigh will ripple through the crowd, but then you’ll raise your hand.

“What if we melded our group with the college students?” you’ll ask. The circle will look up at you, intrigued, and you’ll continue.

“Well, we’re more sexually experienced, we have more practical skills and, even though most of them look better naked than us and haven’t had their souls broken down into a substance just as destructive as crushed glass, they might still want to sleep with us. So why don’t we offer them some fire?”

The group will consider your thoughts for a few seconds. Some of the women around the fire will fondly think back to when they “went lez” back in college, and most of the guys will think about how impressively low the standards most college girls set for their sexual partners are.

The circle will let out a collective hurrah, leaving two of the least attractive members of the circle to guard the fire while the rest of you go to convince the college students to help you share body warmth and work together to avoid being raped by the Fatties and the Business People.

Congratulations on Getting Snowed In!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Seven More Things I Hate About Modern Warfare 2!

In light of recent developments, including continued graduate applications and perpetual travel, I’ve decided to avoid missing a single post by permitting my standards to plummet inexolerably. Therefore instead of forming an intelligent essay about a video game I’ve had a profound or interesting experience with I’m just going to list off some more thing I hate about Modern Warfare 2 in an odd numbered list. Let’s go with seven items for this one. And away we go with Things That Are Bullshit About Modern Warfare 2!

1 – Double shotgun dude.

I didn’t get what all the fuss was about (He’s got two shotguns? So what! That’s nothin’) until I started to play a lot of multi. The Double Shotgun Dude is someone you really have to face constantly in order to appreciate just how profoundly broken his build is. See the problem isn’t that Double Shotgun Dude does a lot of damage or can ostensibly attack without pause for an entire game. The problem is that his effective range when firing both shotguns is obscene. It’s an insta-kill at assault rifle ranges and it makes me sad and angry all the time.

2 – Knife wielding psychopaths

If shotgun dudes are douchebags then knife dudes are their nigh indistinguishable guido cousins. There’s nothing more frustrating than an extra speedy dipshit with a knife and a revolver blitzing up to you and stabbing you in the throat, except when it happens to several spray and praying teammates before he catches you from behind. What’s worse is how accessible this build is. You can seriously use this one out of the gates by selecting the First Recon build out of the box. But if I’m going to side with most critics and give IW way too much credit for their efforts I’m going to go ahead and call the whole thing a really funny practical joke, because IW claimed that look-lean commands were removed from the game in order to preserve an apparently non-existentalance.

3 – That Guy Who’s Hacking

Within days of Modern Warfare 2’s release the peer to peer service had been dramatically compromised by a number of modders who wanted to watch Infinity Ward weep emo tears as their statements about the improved security of Peer to Peer matchmaking, a series of statements the most neophyte PC gamer could have readily interpreted as bullshit. While the modders successfully cracked the game and began offering pay-to-play hacks, Infinity Ward seems largely unconcerned. In lieu of any kind of intelligent response they’ve taken up the banner of ignoring the problem, and since the PC community still doesn’t have any way to police themselves thanks to the lack of dedicated servers the game has become profoundly broken on my platform of choice. I never know if I’m dying because I made some mistake and alerted an already nearly prescient “pro FPS player” or if I’ve just been assraped by someone with two shotguns and his mom’s credit card who decided that he wanted to look through walls.

4 – The Rediculous Number of Killstreak Items

Seriously? A lot of these are duplicates. Do I need two different kinds of attack helicopters? Is there a notable difference between them? One’s slightly faster and one’s slightly harder to kill? Really? I think I’ll be too busy trying not to die to notice the difference. Is anyone ever going to use the EMP? I’ve yet to see it in a month of solid play, and I’m not sure it would help anything given how much players love to shoot from the hip. Maybe some terrorists have pacemakers and this will take them out remotely? And while we’re on the subject of utility, is it at all necessary to give someone who has achieved 25 straight kills a game ending item? Hasn’t the game ended by this point? Even the interesting rewards like supply drops are too often sort of worthless. And then there’s the Counter UAV, which is hilarious in its total lack of utility. In tossing everything but the kitchen sink into Modern Warfare 2 IW created a dense list of reward items which people will only use a handful of, and they put a lot of time and effort into doing so.

5 – Tactical Insertion

Why is this even here? Voluntarily allow the enemy to camp your spawn? Seriously? Again, I’ve yet to see this used in a game, but if it’s anything like its introduction in the single player campaign it keeps you from being bombed after an EMP has been activated, assuming you’re in the White House. In all seriousness, permitting players to choose their spawn location might be useful in a thoughtful, tactical game. But in case you haven’t noticed Modern Warfare 2 is less thoughtful and tactical and more of a clusterfuck. They might as well call this skill “give the enemy some free claymore kills and make yourself ragequit.”

6 - Underslung Shotgun Attachments

Completely worthless, kind of funny, referential to Aliens and hilariously out of place, these are probably the stupidest possible buy for an assault rifle. After using these items in single player I’ve got to admit, I don’t see the value in an un-aimable attachment which effectively gives me a third gun I wouldn’t pick if I had four weapon choices. If you find one of these slapped to an ACR then the apocalypse is likely upon us, or someone is choosing a purposefully bad build in order to embarrass you.

7 – The Fact That This Game Is a Straight Console Port

2009 was actually a pretty good year for console ports. Red Faction: Guerilla showed its chops nicely, and while Resident Evil 5 shipped without some features it was still well received overall. Arkham Asylum has been met with acclaim, with special props going to the PC, and I think GTA IV might have been big enough to count as a 2009 release still. There were some great console games that PC gamers had a chance to play this year and Modern Warfare 2 wasn’t one of them. Clumsily ported without any concern for its user base or, in some cases, even the most basic of tests, Modern Warfare 2 lost dozens of features that make the PC a great platform in order to disincentise the use of the PC as a gaming machine. What IW did with their port wasn’t just sloppy, it was an act of psychological violence against the PC gaming community, informing them that their dollars were inferior to those offered by the X-Box community. All of the aforementioned design choices were bad, and some of them tie into this last one but the fact that someone with an editor can crack open MW2’s local files and read X-Box Live code on a Windows is representative of just how little IW cares about their audience now that they’ve made it. They’ve essentially become Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, forgetting that hard work caused their success, resigned to being told they’re great by people who have long since stopped thinking about why certain things work and don’t work.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t work nearly as well as it could, and it’s because of decisions like these that a third of its players need to deal with profound bullshit in order to derive even moderate enjoyment from a game that will still be selling for full price in a year’s time. So my advice? Find some way to steal a copy and backdoor into IW’s incredibly porous multiplayer system. I doubt it would be that hard for someone so inclined.

Congratulations on Ruining Most Things With Your Vagina!

Today scientists are going to run some science type tests on your lady bits and discover that they are, in fact, the font of most evil things in the world. These things will include (but are not limited to):

Bats
Locusts
Swarms of things (including the former)
Joe Francis
Episodes of The Man Show
Dry Brisket
Your Horrible Daughter.

This list is a work in progress, and we encourage posters to supply and discuss various additional ways that your vagina is ruining everything. Thanks for your contribution to society and consider killing yourself!

Congratulations on Ruining Most Things With Your Vagina!

Congratulations on Spilling the Gasoline!

You’re an up and coming mob soldier who wants to impress his bosses like nothing else, but really isn’t very good at his job. So tonight you’re going to slip while dousing a cop in gasoline and all of your buddies are going to burst out laughing. It’ll be super embarrassing but later at the mob clubhouse they’ll buy you an apology card and give you some hugs and everything will be better. It’ll be a weird bonding experience and even though you won’t advance at all in the mafia you’ll know your mob friends really care about you, so that’s good.

Congratulations on Spilling the Gasoline!

Congratulations on Jumping Most of Those School Busses!

Attentive readers might remember a story about being shot out of a cannon some time earlier. This is completely unrelated. Today is all about temping and trying to make it.

Today you’re a daredevil. Normally you work in office environments, but you know how it goes. You go where the agency tells you to. It’s how you pay your rent. So tomorrow you’re going to drive out past the Reno city limits to a monster truck rally where a safety supervisor named Bruno will hand you a helmet and ask if you know how to ride a motorcycle. You’ll lie and tell him you do.

Once you’re on the bike you’ll take it around a few turns and it won’t actually be as hard as you thought it would be. You’ll actually feel pretty confident when they raise your platform to the top of the ramp and finally tell you what your assignment is for the day.

So when you redline the throttle heading towards the jump and you don’t pass third gear on the way down you won’t be thinking about whether or not you have enough energy to reach the other side of the jump. You’ll just be thinking about that paycheck and whether or not the agency will cover you if you’re injured.

In the end this will lead to you smacking face first into the side of one of the buses and slipping a disk when the bike carries your legs in front of your body before tearing away your pants and most of your dignity to the crowd’s wild cheers. The agency won’t pay any of your medical costs, although they will give you $48 for the four hours you worked. Unfortunately, since you didn’t make the jump they won’t be calling you again for a while.

Sorry about that, but Congratulations on Jumping Most of Those School Busses!

Congratulations on Showing Up Where You're Least Wanted!

You tend to wander when you’re drunk. It’s one of your more endearing qualities, which is saying quite a bit about how unbearable you are since you’re incredibly irritating when you wander around.

Tonight is Wednesday, so it’s your night to go buck wild with your parole officer and see what kind of tail is at the local shithole bar within twenty feet of your rathole apartment. After around twenty or thirty shots your parole officer will take off and the night will really get started. The whole thing will be a blur until Thursday morning when you find yourself in a church drinking free coffee staring at a vaguely familiar woman.

“Sherry?” you’ll ask the man next to you in a hushed voice. He’ll look at you like you’re mentally ill before getting his coffee and shuffling to his seat. You’ll keep staring at that woman, though. You’ll have been looking at the back of her head for a solid twenty minutes when she gets up and heads to the front of the room to some sort of applause. You’ll join in, still staring at her, not wanting to stand out.

“My name is Karen,” she’ll begin, “And I’ve been sober for two months.”

That’s when you’ll recognize her. It’s Sherry, your ex. She broke up with you three months ago because “you were ruining her life” as she put it, and you haven’t heard from her since. Seeing her here tonight makes you wonder how she’s doing. After she finishes her spiel about addiction and recovery and admitting you have a problem you’ll walk up to her and nod at her, still drunk and swaying despite the coffee.

“How’s my special lady doing?” you’ll say in your sleaziest voice. Sherry will look at you like you’re a snake. She won’t be far off.

“You need to leave here,” she’ll say, her lip quivering. “Now.”

“What’s wrong?” you’ll slur, eyes flitting between her tits and her face. Her skin has already started to clear up now that she’s quit drinking. It’ll be pretty impressive, actually.

“If you’re near me, I’ll backslide again. I’m glad you’re here, but find another group. Please.”

She won’t be able to look at you when she says it. She’ll be staring into the distance just over your shoulder. You’ll move towards her, trusting your instincts the way you always do when you’ve been drunk for over 48 hours.

“Oh, no. No, no. I didn’t come here for that. I came here for you.”

You’ll believe it on some level when you say it, smirking at her with your eyes still glassy from drink, and she will too. This is how she’s being tempted in her mind. This is how she’ll fall back into alcoholism.

She’ll start crying right away when you say it, that open uncontrolled sort of weeping you want to stop and can’t. She’ll push through the milling crowd and out the church door to parts unknown. You’ll notice your friend from the coffee pot staring at you and shrug at him.

“Women, right?”

He’ll shrug in response and turn away, hoping that you’ll leave him alone soon enough.

Congratulations on Showing Up Where You’re Least Wanted!

Congratulations on Raising Your Kid Right!

This dad thing is hard. Ignoring the thousands of books written on the subject of child rearing no one gave you a fucking handbook and showed you how to be the best dad you could be. But you learned from your own pops when he wasn’t on the run from the police or in prison or locked in the basement making meth and you think you’ve got this thing down pretty right.

Which is why today you’re going to sit your nine year old son down and talk to him about the birds and the bees. Sure, most “doctors” say that puberty doesn’t set in for another year or two, but those doctors are idiots. You know the real story. This is around when you lost your virginity to your cousin, Lorna, and even though your family’s come a long way from the panhandle of Oklahoma to anywhere else in the god damn world you think it’s still important that he know how to be a man as soon as possible.

By “sit him down” we mean “lock him in a room with a tape of you and your wife doing it.” It’s the family way. And even when DSS shows up at your house a few weeks later to take your child into custody you’ll know that their fancy laws can’t fool you. You did right by your boy and in a year or two when you can apply to get him back he’ll thank you for it.

Congratulations on Raising Your Kid Right!

Congratulations on Finding the Ark of the Covenant!

Remember when we were all young and idealistic and it was thought of as odd for a politician to be involved in a sex scandal or a priest to touch kids? These were the salad days when movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark got every single detail wrong and still inspired poor saps like you to pursue a career in archaeology which, as it turns out, is a lot more boring than you thought.

For the most part it consists of hanging out in dig sites, dusting off pieces of ancient pottery and trying to hook up with whichever undergrad seems loosest that week. It has its rewards, but swinging through ancient ruins on a whip isn’t one of them.

Today your occupation will start to make up for that, however, when you’re hurled into a desperate life or death race with a group of white supremacists to find the Ark of the Covenant. You specialize in Greek and Roman ruins so you’re not even entirely sure what the Ark is, but as a rule if white supremacists want something it’s probably bad for everyone else so you’ll pack your bags and depart Malta on a charter flight - destination: Tikrit.

Tikrit will be a war torn hell hole, and as a white guy you’ll be constantly shot at. Luckily the white supremacists will have the same problem and since you’re in much better shape than they are you’ll have no trouble at all reaching the Ark long before them. But since you’re a wimpy academic type and you didn’t think ahead enough to bring even a single TA with you you won’t be able to lift or move the Ark anywhere. So the white supremacists will eventually find you and the Ark and then you’ll have a problem.

See you’ll be able to convince them that you’re a wizard and that you’ve placed a spell that will destroy the Ark if they don’t use the right password before opening it, but instead of respectfully negotiating with you until you give them the password they’re going to just beat you senseless until you tell them a random word. Then they’ll head into the other room to see if it works or if they’ll have to beat you some more.

You’ll know that they realized they could open the Ark without issue when they start screaming endlessly and begging for mercy. After a while the room will go silent and you’ll consider entering and seeing just what the Ark let loose. After careful consideration, though, you’ll realize that the most recent Indiana Jones movie was pretty awful and that the film series you love isn’t really worth risking your life over. Which is smart, because the giant snake monster that lived inside the Ark would totally have fucked you up if you’d gone in there.

Congratulations on Finding the Ark of the Covenant!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Five Things I Hate About Modern Warfare 2!

In case you didn’t notice in my essay a fortnight back, I have some issues with Modern Warfare 2. A lot of them wouldn’t exist if the first Modern Warfare hadn’t been such an exceptional release. I did my best to address some of those concerns last time I was writing but in the end I wanted to discuss how Modern Warfare 2 could be redeemed. It’s rottenness, the aura of decay hanging around it, is the low hanging fruit of the Modern Warfare 2 discussion. Attacking it that way would be lazy.

That’s why, this week, as graduate applications come nigh, I’ve decided to discuss a few of the incredibly stupid, shitty things Modern Warfare 2 does that it could’ve done better just by following its predecessor’s example. Won’t you join me?

1 – Tell a God Damn Story

Modern Warfare told us a story. It was an interesting story, cogent and poignant, about how war dehumanizes us, devalues human life and forces us to do terrible things in terrible situations. It told us a story about how we were just as disposable as those dozens of baddies we had grown so accustomed to dispatching and how we, as a culture, had come to celebrate violence. Also, the story had a beginning, middle and end and it made sense.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t bother with that. Right from the get go you’re thrown into a faceless, senseless “ripped from the headlines” battle in Afghanistan, bereft of context or explanation. You’re fighting because the game told you to, and you’ll be enjoying this sort of storytelling for the rest of the game. The events of Modern Warfare 2 are inexplicable where they aren’t offensive, clichéd where they aren’t random and juvenile when they aren’t exploitative. Its efforts at storytelling represent the worst that video games have to offer, and it’s all the worse that Infinity Ward is reaping such benefits from their half assed efforts.

2 – Make Their Game Replayable

This is something that the first Modern Warfare had down in spades, something that the Special Ops mode tries and fails to make up for. After you’d finished the first Modern Warfare you could play through the campaign in nice little bursts that you’d receive a score for. It was, appropriately, called Arcade Mode, and it had all the slick addictiveness that made the arcade era so great.

But in Modern Warfare 2 this mode is missing, inexplicably. They could’ve copy-pasted the scoring system into the game; indeed one of the Special Ops seems to try to do just that. But instead they excised it altogether, making their flat, heavily scripted single player campaign as unreplayable as it is brief. What’s really unforgiveable is that all they had to do to make their game a little shittier was remove features that were there in the first place. Which brings us to point number three...

3 – Learn From the Past of the Genre

Modern Warfare was the pinnacle of the FPS genre in many ways. It had lots of slick little guns that looked similar but all had distinct personalities. It had a nice, intuitive control system that allowed you to use cover from a first person perspective, dropping down, popping up and leaning around walls when necessary. It also had an incredible multiplayer system, one which combined Punkbuster and dedicated servers to make a slick, niche friendly multiplayer community where anyone could find something they liked.

Players could then use all these advantages, drawn from the history of first person shooter development, to play out wonderfully brief and succinct firefights tied around a system of player advancement which made Modern Warfare slightly less addictive than crack. Modern Warfare 2 again excises two of the features that seemed like standards to both the FPS genre and Call of Duty games in general without explanation – dedicated servers and the ability to lean. It might seem nitpicky but playing without either of them now makes me feel like I’m playing a devalued version of the first game rather than a natural artistic progression from its humble origins.

4 – Offer a Balanced Multiplayer Experience

One of the best things about the advancement system of Modern Warfare was also that it never left players behind. As they continued to “move up” in experience and rank they acquired more options, but players could be just as effective using the tools available to them early in the game as they could be using their hard fought and hard won gear. In fact the last weapon unlocked was the MP44, a bit of a “middle finger” weapon which, while still effective, was considerably less so than its more modern counterparts.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t seem too concerned with balance. At time of writing I haven’t gotten very far in multiplayer but so far I’ve been plagued by double shotgunning dog fuckers, knife wielding, teleporting psychopaths and seemingly prescient experienced players with weapons thoroughly stacked with various high level “goodies” that assist them in shooting through walls and generally making my life miserable. What’s more, many of the guns available early in the game don’t seem to have any purpose aside from being “new weapons.” Why would anyone use an MP-5 over a Vector? Or an AT-4 over a Stinger or a Javelin? I understand wanting to give players a sense of progression across various types of play but progression without depth is a poor substitute for game design and it feels like exactly what Modern Warfare 2 has done by flooding the game with gear and upgrades that they could never possibly have balanced for.

5 – Pace Their Experience, Period

This is sort of an amalgam of all the previous points. Modern Warfare was exceptionally well paced in every respect. You’d earn new gear and new challenges with satisfying frequency in multiplayer which never felt too quick or too slow. It was encouraging and managed a delicate balance between challenge and reward that few experiences can attain. The single player experience had the same claim – each level dovetailed into the previous one until you reached a satisfying conclusion which fit the rest of the experience. In the end you were left with a nice, even game with a lot of diverse levels and experiences which held together nicely when taken a whole.

Modern Warfare 2 has none of that. The developers themselves admit that one of the levels they left in could’ve been completely excised without harming the experience and they flit between gravitas and action movie bravado without warning. You go from being shot in the chest to defending the top of a TGI Friday’s in seconds. The experience isn’t that of a rich tapestry coming together, it’s the jarring feel of stop and go traffic with someone who doesn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. You feel a little sick and irritated, and you think the person behind the wheel probably shouldn’t be there.

The fact that this pacing problem carries over to the multiplayer of Modern Warfare 2, the ostensible selling point of the game, should be frightfully embarrassing to Infinity Ward, but I have a feeling they don’t care. They made an “alright” came and it sold absurdly well. Even though it’s riddled with bugs and, at best, poorly balanced, people will still buy and praise it all for the sake of letting the emperor know about the fine nature of his new duds. And it’s a crying shame, because Infinity Ward has proven themselves to be immensely talented when they challenge themselves and take risks.

But if this is how they’re developing games from here on out I probably won’t end up buying Modern Warfare 3 when it drops. I’m sure it’ll be decent, sure, but the experience will seem cheap compared to its predecessors and the hype that it enjoys will cloud the judgment of all around it. If the pace keeps up I’d imagine Modern Warfare 3 will be an updated version of Battlefield 2 with an expanded class system and a story about a shooting at a local community pool. It would fit the direction Infinity Ward seems to want to take their games in nowadays.

Congratulations on Getting Your Show Made!

We never thought you’d do it. After your concept for a show about David Bowie flying through space, fighting Rob Paulson and doing it with strange alien groupies was rejected we thought “Well shit. If that kind of gold doesn’t get on air, what could?”

Turns out it’s your worst idea. It’s a show called “Mom Fight” and principal photography begins today. The concept is that Moms fight to determine whose kid is cuter. Winner receives a tidy cash prize and custody over the loser’s kid until such a time as the losing mom is proven to be “less of a loser.” All court proceedings are resided over by Judge Judy, with Judge Joe Brown filling in when necessary.

The first episode airs Monday which, as normal people know, doesn’t leave much time for post. We’re all excited to see what kind of shit the asshole of network television is going to produce for us this time around.

Congratulations on Getting Your Show Made!

Congratulations on Disgusting All of Us!

Any other day of the week your revolting-ness would be totally manageable. We all spend hours and hours of each day avoiding eye contact with the unfuckable masses that flood American cities and public transportation and you’re not even that bad by their standards. But by any sort of objective standard of physical attractiveness you’re beyond hideous. Only in America could you ever get laid.

And tomorrow that’s exactly what’s going to happen. You’re going to be waiting for a bus with a handful of other uggs when a tanker carrying Axe body spray jackknifes. The crowd around you will be killed almost instantly but you’ll find yourself alive, mostly unscathed and completely drenched in Axe body spray. We’re sure you can see where this is going, but since it’s our just to do we thought we’d flesh it out.

You’re going to be assaulted almost immediately by a mob of screaming models while a film crew representing Massive PR films the entire thing. The models will rip your clothes off, foaming at the mouth all the while. Then they’ll hold you down and take turns having sex with you without any regard for your gut or your disfigured face. Once your penis goes flacid and they can’t use you that way it’ll go to a pretty dark place. Let’s just say that Axe makes a poor lube and leave it at that.

After they’ve finished with you they’ll drop your bleeding, bruised ass off at the emergency room of a nearby hospital before leaving with the crew from Massive and their horrible, horrible footage which will end up forming the backbone of a “viral” campaign Massive plans to use to advertise Axe to fat ugly douchebags with low self-esteem.

It’ll be a huge success and the rest of us will have to suffer through watching your hideous corpse getting gang raped by women you have no right to be around. Humanity will be collectively cheapened because of your unwitting contribution to society. Suicide rates will spike and you’ll starting receiving modestly sized residual checks which will make your tortured existence seem slightly less horrible.

Congratulations on Disgusting All of Us!

Congratulations on Your Sweet Scar!

It’s one of those ones that runs over your eye and makes people think you’re a badass. As long as you don’t tell anyone that it was caused by a Lego related incident you should be able to milk it for a lot of Poon™. You’ll be the most in-demand single dad in town if you play this right.

Congratulations on Your Sweet Scar!

Congratulations on Accidentally Watching Braveheart!

Normally you avoid this movie like the plague but ever since D left you shit’s been rough and watching USA at 3 AM is the only way you can really feel anything at all. Since it’s USA late at night you don’t feel good about yourself or anything, but you know you’re still alive which is enough. But tonight you’re going to accidentally sit through the film Braveheart. After three overrated hours you’re going to wish that you were numb to the world again. You’ll retire to your room and curl in bed with a bottle of whiskey, too depressed to even sob as you pull the covers over your head and wish that someone had invented a time machine, if not to save your relationship than to keep you from making the same mistake at least six other people watching USA just made.

Congratulations on Accidentally Watching Braveheart!

Congratulations on Marrying a Sleestak!

New Hampshire is going to legalize marriage today. Period. They’re going to make some crazy ass libertarian laws that will pretty much let anything go up there. That means dudes can marry dudes, chickens can marry foxes and you’re going to be able to marry your Sleestak life partner, Gregory, after almost a decade of waiting.

Things have been great for the last few years but come tomorrow fighting and pointless arguments will plague your relationship until the two of you have to seek counseling because you’re just as dysfunctional as same-species couples when you come right down to it.

All of this could’ve been avoided if you hadn’t decided to drive through that tunnel during an earthquake.

Congratulations on Marrying a Sleestak!

Congratulations on Misfiling Your Tax Return!

Today it’s not today. Today it’s two months into the future and you, as one of the few people who files their taxes in February for whatever retarded reason, are going to be in deep shit.

While filling out the interminable forms required by our government in order to properly document which sex workers will take it “in the pooper,” a statistic kept largely for the purpose of competing with Brazil for sex tourism money, you’re going to misfile as double anal capable and be automatically tagged for an audit. When the auditor checks out your butt and sees that nothing larger than a fist has ever been up there he’s going to call foul and you’re going to get slapped with a nice big fine.

Now most people would just pay the fine and get on with their lives, but you don’t make very much as a male prostitute and, as you so eloquently put it, “getting fucked in the ass is my job and I’m not going to let the government do it to me for free.” So you’ll get one of your more militant and closeted clients to help you put together an assault on a highly secure government building which contains the paperwork for your return. The plan is that the two of you break in, replace your paperwork with an edited copy that appropriately labels you as being a single-anal man, and then find somewhere quiet where you can blow him while he closes his eyes because “he ain’t no faggot.”

But just like art school nothing is going to go the way you’d hoped. The local IRS building will be surprisingly well guarded, and you’re going to have kill a lot of rent-a-cops to get into that record room. Then, once you get there it’ll turn out that the records aren’t nearly as organized as you’d thought. They’ll be arranged by social security number, which will make you super uncomfortable. Even though you’ll altering government records you still won’t want to infringe upon the privacy of others.

After a brief moral dilemma your client will tell you to “stop being a god damn fairy about it” and you’ll acquiesce, rifling through the drawers and replacing your tax return with the edited version.

After that the two of you will begin a daring escape which will end with your “buddy” being shot and killed just outside the building. Since he won’t have any ID or any official ties to you you’ll just book it away from him.

This will spell the end of your tax troubles and the beginning your brief, exciting tenure as the gayest arms dealer outside of California.

Congratulations on Misfiling Your Tax Return!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Unbearable Immensity of Dragon Age!

Dragon Age: Origins has been out for a while now. Almost a month, in fact. As Bioware’s latest opus we all knew it would be pretty big. But I don’t think I personally realized just how staggeringly large the game could really be until I started playing. Sixty hours in I feel like I’ve barely gotten to know the world Bioware has created for me. This is hardly new to veteran Bioware fans. Their games are usually overwhelming in their immersiveness and their scope, offering up hilarious vignettes and enlightening asides to any who are willing to look.

But Bioware has outdone themselves here. Even as I eke my way through the central plot, battling the usual Bioware pitfalls of buggy design and side-quest creep, I feel like I’m missing so much by merit of the choices I’ve made in both creating my character and playing through the game. After three weeks or solid play I’m nowhere near finishing the game, but after discussing it with two friends who are also playing it I’ve already realized just how much I’ve missed.

By playing a human rogue, for example, I’ve unlocked some really cool quest lines. Now I get to know all about Arl Howe and his shady politicking, but I know nothing of the events surrounding the death of the dwarven king. I know nothing of growing up as a city elf in an alienage or living in the wilds with the Dalish. My perspective has shaped how the plot events in each of the locations I just mentioned have played out as much as my perceptions as a player have. Bioware has done something games (aside from arguably The Path) have never really been able to accomplish before: they’ve created an unreliable narrator.

The narrative figures within games who shape our story are an aggregate of the characters we control and the NPCs they interact with throughout the world. To a lesser extent objects, places and set pieces do the same thing, but for now let’s keep it simple. In most games you, the player, shape most of what the player character can see or do. There might be some areas barred to you in the context of the game but for the most part the world is open and awaiting exploration. It’s simply a matter of you taking charge and seeing what you can of it.

Games like Call of Duty and Fallout 3 rely on this sort of narrative freedom, scattering goodies throughout their worlds which we are then incentivised to grab. Even Bioware, which planted false memories in your character’s psyche, allowed us to learn more about the world around us largely through exploration and consideration. In these games we never have to worry about our choices impacting what our characters can see. Even in purposefully duplicitous games like Dead Space and, in a better executed example, the Thief series, there is a “correct” version of events which we can uncover with enough effort and exploration.

Not so in Dragon Age. In Dragon Age events are shaped not only by your perceptions as a player but also by the choices you make within the game. Not in the normal “make bad decisions, get the bad ending, make good decisions, get the good ending” fashion, but instead in a way that casts every fact the character learns into doubt. If you become a member of the Circle you’ll be perceived differently than any other character. This, in turn, will lead to you perceiving the game world differently. Like Raymond Carver’s Cathedral before it, Dragon Age forces you to relate to a character you’d normally attempt to dissociate yourself from.

It’s not brutal with its attempts to get you to associate with your protagonist. In fact you could easily miss it if you distance yourself from the game’s mechanics or only allow your self one play through of Bioware’s epic, a totally reasonable decision given the mammoth scope of Ferelden. But each play through of Dragon Age is unique based on your approach both within and without the game. Each choice you make reflects on the world around you in a real and noticeable way. Even minute details such as the way that NPCs speak to you and the way you interact with minor characters are effected greatly by the path and origin you choose.

It’s a difficult leap to make from telling a meticulously crafted story to granting players immense amounts of interpretive freedom, however, and it shows. Many of the larger events in the game which I’ve encountered are walled off in such a way that events must unfold. Personal history simply colors these events rather than allowing them to emerge as some of the smaller, more interesting occurrences do. For example, I’ve just reached the Landsmeet. As a human noble I’m not giving much away when I say that I want to kill Howe as quickly and violently as possible.

But I’m almost positive that I’d be handed a set of arbitrary reasons for wanting to kill him just as much were I a city elf or a dwarf noble. In fact I’ve now been given a political mission to break into his palace and rescue the sitting queen. Sure, I’ve still got that “he killed my family” undertone going my way, which shapes my perceptions as a player greatly along with my character’s perception and his dialogue options, but the actual events are all scripted. I have to fight Howe for the game to progress. As such a blanket reason is offered to me and all the rest is just flavor text.

I understand the limitations that force them to do this sort of thing, and to their credit Bioware does their all to mask the seams but they still show through, sometimes to a jarring extent. For example the various reasons we are each told that we cannot possibly comprehend the plight of the Dalish depending on our background. The flipside is that I want to play through to see how I’ll be told I cannot understand the battle against the werewolves as a Dalish citizen, simply to see what hoops I’ll have to jump through to convince Tuvok to stop being a douche bag.

But I’ll always have to find a way to make him less of a douche, and that’s the problem with Dragon Age, and with games in general. So much effort goes into crafting each part of the game that we’re encouraged to experience it. Some older games, such as Star Control 2, Fallout and Baldur’s Gate 2, didn’t really buy into this completionist philosophy. They’d let you complete the game without encountering certain places. In fact Star Control 2 made some serious efforts to prevent you from doing everything in the game. And completing every action in Fallout would actually cut down on the time you have to explore the wonderfully textured world Bioware made so long ago. Dragon Age has many of these traits as well, but the seams still show.

Even if I can never utilize an NPC’s quest line they’ll still be there with a snippit of dialogue hinting at how the right person could activate these quests. Even if I don’t support evil-dwarf-Prince his quest remains in my quest log and the nobles he wants me to talk will always have single option dialogue trees. They don’t even know what I’ve done to the Anvil of the Void. Don’t these people read the Orzamar times?! Get with it, dwarves!

Then there are the other, more egregious examples such as the infamous in-game salesman. I’ve also somehow made a perfect storm of bugs which has completely obliterated all of the expansion content I purchased, which perfectly illustrates the line between original and “expanded” content. But the commoditization of content isn’t really my issue with this game. I’m used to being fucked over by various game companies for my money (for example, I bought Overlord II for full price four months ago – it now costs five dollars). What I take issue with is the ways that we still can’t permit ourselves to omit experiences and allow players to miss things in games. It seems as if the industry is entirely dedicating to making sure everything hangs together, that the game is played in the “correct” way.

And changing this could be very difficult. Some games, such as The Path, have actively tried to and were met with rage and bewilderment for their efforts. After all, why put content in a game if other content precludes or prevents its accessibility? Why force players to endure multiple play throughs in order to have a full experience? Perhaps if the cost of games were lower or the authorship of the medium more focused these questions wouldn’t be significant, but presently the issues these questions raise about the rights of consumers are valid, and they outweigh any concerns that pundits attempting to qualify games as art might raise. And while it is totally understandable, it’s still a bit of a shame that we don’t get to see an interested party like Bioware completely run with their unreliable narrator. That really could’ve been something great.

Congratulations on Marketing Your Skills Properly!

Markrham and Howell will have changed dramatically since its founding in 1946 as a shell law office which would allow “wronged parties” to “fully prosecute nips for what they done did.” Between that time and today it’s grown into Montgomery’s single most respected law office focused on civil rights and civil liberties. They are, to the best of your knowledge, the only member of the ACLU in your congressional district, and the only one to side against white people from the late seventies to the present day.

As a newly graduate college student you don’t have a lot of practical experience that would allow you to become an effective paralegal, but you do have two things going for you: your sexual talents and a very large penis. You think you can translate these things into a job at a predominantly female law firm, and you’ll be right.

When you sit down across from the HR rep, Shelly, who’s looking through your résumé with intense detachment, you’ll feel pretty confident. Even as she dismisses the “work experience” and “extracirricular” parts of your résumé, you’ll have great faith that, once she reaches the end of the document where you clipped a photo of your penis to the paper and wrote “I eat the puss” beneath it she’ll be sold.

You’ll be right and you’ll get the job post haste, as the Markrham HR rep will know she and her co-workers will be able to exploit you sexually without fear of reprisal, as theirs is the only law firm in town which would ever take a sexual harassment case.

Thus will be begin a rollercoaster ride of sex with older women and health insurance. Be sure to get tested regularly as to prevent an office-wide outbreak of VD, and remember to develop some skills since you’re going to become a terrible lover and a bit of a spoiled dick in a few years since you’ve never had to work for anything sexually in your life, and your youth will soon fade, leaving you a shell of the man you once were.

Congratulations on Marketing Your Skills Properly!

Congratulations on Waiting Outside!

Her light will be on and you’ll be there alone outside. She’ll come to her window and look out like she knows you’re watching but she won’t see you. It won’t be because you’re hidden or anything. It’s just the light in the room making it impossible to see out into the street where you’re standing, holding flowers, wondering if you should ring her bell and tell you’re sorry. You’ll wait there for an hour and a half waiting to be seen before the light in her apartment switches off and you decide that maybe she won’t come out tonight. You’ll toss the flowers in her trash can and go home, seeing how much of the walk one cigarette will last you.

Congratulations on Waiting Outside!

Congratulations on Evading Kim Cattrall!

It’s no secret what Kim Cattrall gets up to when she thinks no one’s watching (which happens to be most of the time). Her habits as a “praying mantis” are well documented by various law enforcement agencies. The only reason she hasn’t been prosecuted is because cops universally love the film Big Trouble In Little China and they’d never do anything to hurt the woman who made that movie the masterpiece that it is.

As a young male model it was almost inevitable that you’d come to her attention sooner or later. But unlike your contemporaries you didn’t know the stories, so when you arrive at her house and see her collection of knives on the wall behind her bed you’ll be a little surprised. Unlike most male models, however, you’re great at practical problem solving, so you’ll hatch a plan straight away to save your skin.

You’ll inform the aging actress that you need to be pursued in order to become aroused. She’ll like the idea a lot until you tell her that you don’t want to be chased while she’s wielding a knife. You want to play hide and seek.

She’ll acquiesce begrudgingly (you’re super hot) and you’ll sneak out of her house and head to the police, where you’ll be dropped off at her home again in order to both satisfy their beloved actress and destroy any potential witnesses to her crimes. The following sex will be fair at best, mostly because of the fear involved, but the dismemberment which follows will be expert.

Congratulations on Evading Kim Cattrall! For a while at least!

Congratulations on Sitting Across From One Another Indian Style!

You’re going to stride into the room together in bathrobes at the appointed time, both frowning. This isn’t so much a celebration of your togetherness as an attempt to keep your dying relationship afloat. You wouldn’t even be there, but apparently this once kept David Blaine and one of his models together for an extra week so you figure maybe it’ll help normal, non-retarded people together for a good long time.

The room will be completely empty. You and your brother will have taken care of that last night, emptying out each piece of furniture, every wall covering, until it was ready: a white walled room with a hardwood floor, awaiting the sweet embrace of your buttocks.

“Ready?” she’ll ask you, as if it was her idea, as if you didn’t have to quote the David Blaine statistic four times before she finally agreed to try this. You’ll nod your response instead of snapping at her. That, after all, is why you’ll be there.

The two of you will move to the center of the room, simultaneously disrobe and plop down ass-first, facing one another in all your awkward, naked glory.

You’ll be sitting indian style, so as to avoid looking sexual in any way. It’ll be pretty tough for either of you to look erotic, you with your flaccid penis balanced on the surprisingly cold heels of your feet, her with her shoulders squared forward, breasts hanging as if she was ten years older than she really is, pubic hair hinting at her genitals without giving you a view of the goods. It’ll feel sort of dirty and removed from who the two of you are. You’ll just be sacks of meat staring one another down.

At first the cold from your feet will get you a little aroused, but staring at her that way will kill your boner like a picture of Margaret Thatcher. She’ll shift uncomfortable every few seconds, the slight movements of her hips and shoulders hinting at the sexual power this woman once held over you, but for the most part you two will follow the exercise to the letter of the law.

At least for the first hour. But at the start of hour two your perception will start to change. You’ll stop seeing your girlfriend’s body and start to focus on her face, her eyes, her mouth. You’ll realize that her body is going to vanish one day and this visage is what will remain. It’ll be kind of scary, but it’ll make your dick stand up like a man at arms.

Around the same time she’ll start shifting more often, almost squirming. You’ll wish you could see her genitals, just so you could know what was up, but you’ll be left wondering. Ere long you’ll be staring at her crotch with a huge boner, and when your eyes flit up to reassess her face your eyes will meet and you’ll see your desire echoed in her eyes.

The exercise will be gone, the ugliness of your bodies completely receded. There will only be a pair of terricloth robes and one another, and then you will fall upon one another and the room and the robes and the floor will vanish altogether.

Congratulations on Sitting Across From One Another Indian Style!

Congratulations on Being Kicked Out of Your Sewing Club!

Mary will slam a subpoena down on the table in front of you, but since it’s a subpoena and therefore not very big she’ll less “slam” it and more “slap” it down. It’ll make a whooshing sound and make you stab yourself with a needle, prompting an effete wincing sound and a quick wrist flick after you pull the needle out.

“What the fuck, Mary?” you’ll ask. She’ll tap her finger on the subpoena twice, as if it’s supposed to mean something off the bat. You’ll tentatively open it with your injured hand and start flipping through.

Apparently you’re being kicked out for sexual harassment. Women have complained about being groped in the supply closet, and since you’re the only dude in the sewing club it wasn’t long before blame fell upon your slightly-wider-than-your-contemporaries shoulders.

You know you didn’t molest anyone in a dark closet. You’re incredibly gay and a perfect gentleman aside. But if you come out to the police with this information you’ll lose your “straight boy” scholarship and have to go back to selling yourself to lonely people in their fifties who want to have a crack at a hot, tight gay boy.

As such you’ll have to uncover information about the sewing club in order to determine just who the real molester is so that you can clear your name and avoid finding a new place to sew, along with a spot on the sex offender registry.

Unfortunately the police won’t accept “trying to find out who really did these terrible acts” as a reason for visiting your sewing club, and after a brief conversation they’ll remove you from the building and toss you out on the street, hungry for justice and a place where you can be yourself and darn your socks in peace.

Congratulations on Being Kicked Out of Your Sewing Club!

Congratulations on Getting In Her Pants!

“Rebecca!” you’ll cry across the football pitch. She’ll shuffle from side to side in her bear suit as if she doesn’t hear you but you won’t be fooled. You’ll push through the crowd of dozens watching semi-professional soccer towards what you understand is called a “pitch.” When you get to the end of the bleachers she won’t be able to pretend anymore.

Her antics will cease and the bear’s head will be trained on you, impassive, immeasurable. You’ll wish you were inside that bear head, scent of sweat and whiskey stinging your nose, just so you could know her expression. You’ll also kind of like the idea of having your face uncomfortably close to hers inside the costume. You’re not sure how big the costume is, but your loose grasp of physics has instilled in you a belief that love can make anything spatially possible.

“I love you!” you’ll shout down at her, just blurting out whatever’s on your mind as usual. She’ll remove the costume’s head and smile up at you, tears welling in her eyes. You’ve seen enough movies to know what to do at this point.

When you drop down and start running across the field the soccer fans will start cheering wildly. Not because they want to see a white dude in his late 20s “win” the girl he’s been wooing over, but because they think they’re going to see you get decked by police. But this is American semi-pro soccer, and there’s none of that here.

Instead the players will stop playing briefly and watch as the much more interesting spectacle of your romance unfolds. They’ll watch as you clear the field with more vitesse than any of them have mustered throughout the game.

As they watch you take her massive cartoon bear hands in your own they’ll wonder if the passion you bring to your romance is something they could apply to sport. As you lean in to kiss her they’ll cheer as loud as the crowd did when they thought you were going to get brutalized. They’ll have seen a heartfelt and remarkable performance.

Underneath their cheers you’ll lean your head in close to hers.

“I’m so sorry I erased Top Model from the Tivo. It’ll never happen again.”

You’ll look up into her beaming face as she sweeps you off your feet and takes you back to the women’s locker room where you’ll be disabused of many notions you had about both women’s locker rooms and sex therein.

Congratulations on Getting In Her Pants!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Game Night - Love In the Borderlands Part 2!

I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with the ammo shops in Borderlands. On the one hand, it’s nice to be able to conveniently buy ammo at bargain prices. On the other hand, there’s no “fill me up with this kind of ammo” option. Moreover, the cost of ammo makes purchasing it less a decision pertinent to resource management and more of an inconvenience you have to deal with every once in a while.

But what really gets my goat about ammo shops is that they demonstrate a serious problem with Borderland’s loot system – the ammo drops are erratic and all too often unhelpful. If the loot system in Borderlands functioned as one might expect there’d be no need for ammunition stores. Instead you’d receive plenty of ammo for the weapons you use. But no, the ground is littered with repeater rounds and shotgun shells, absurd heaps of them that no one has any room in their inventory for. In this post-Half Life 2 world responsive random loot systems aren’t an unreasonable expectation, especially in a game like Borderlands where you don’t want to be running back to the shops every five minutes.

Why, you might ask, would you not want to make these shop runs aside from the obvious inconvenience of moving across a huge map again and again? Because Borderlands tends to respawn its enemies fairly quickly. I suppose if it didn’t do so I’d complain about Borderlands seeming barren. After all, it is set in a desert and its inhabitants are jam packed with personality, but it can be problematic to run into hordes of screaming enemies on your way back to sell the loot from a particularly difficult fight.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The only redeeming quality of the ammo shops is the nice feeling of fullness they give you when they’ve let you fill up your personal stores to the brim. The ammo upgrades are nice, too, but the real appeal of ammo shops is that feeling that your hunger for bullets has been sated. That’s how I felt after I’d finished stocking up mid-quest. Like I was ready for anything.

As it turns out I was mostly right. After a little bit of yammering we moved back towards Moe’s last known location. This time I’m not the first one on the scene. Instead of seeing Moe and getting a good warning, I find out from Alex.

“Found him,” he says. “Mother fucker.”

I’m about to ask what’s wrong, but before I have the chance Alex runs into view, firing as he walks backwards like some sort of militant, less talented Michael Jackson. Bounding behind him is Moe, electricity crackling from his skin as he charges and shakes his head.

We don’t talk much at this point. Borderlands has taken its toll on our psyche, and we all know what we need to do. We pour ammunition into Moe’s gaping mouth. Each time he spits lightning or charges at us we briefly scatter, then reform and redouble our efforts to attack him. Before long he falls to the ground mid charge, showering me with loot. Alex and Dan rush up and we grab whatever we can. Well, I do at least.

“What the fuck Grove?” Alex interjects as I pick up a shiny new submachine gun, a vast improvement over my current one.

“What? I’m the SMG guy.”

“So you just take it?”

Alex has a good point. Loot in Borderlands varies from crucial to useless, and it depends entirely on the luck of the draw and your personal preferences. But showing each other gear and trading it is difficult. In fact the only way to do so is through the same methods the first Diablo used. You need to drop the item and then let your friend pick it up. Even if you just want to show a friend an item it has to leave your inventory.

This is the point where a nice person would apologize and then explain his case. Instead I shrugged and equipped the new gun.

“Whatever.”

“God you’re greedy.”

It’s a valid point, but greed pays in Borderlands. Why give your friends firearms if you could use them instead? After all, I’m the SMG guy. I should get the SMGs. I let him have most of the sniper rifles, except the ones I want to use or sell. I don’t get what he’s all bent out of shape about it. I decide to change the subject.

“Let’s just drop off the quest and decide what we want to do next.”

“Whatever.”

It’s hard to begrudge Dan his silence at times like this. If I’d followed his example the issue of the submachine gun would’ve fallen out of collective memory in a few seconds. What’s a single piece of loot in a game where you receive a new, potentially better, one every five minutes? But now the argument and my greed are the subject more than the gun itself. This is the power of multiplayer games – the ability to make seemingly trivial decisions about resource management into larger issues about social interactions emerging through play.

Our trip back to the bounty board, much like our trip from the ammo store to Moe, is filled with trash mobs. The snap at us and taunt us and die quickly and easily without giving us much in the way of reward. The loot we do find is largely worthless, and by now this is the fourth time we’ve passed through this area and fought these enemies. It’s unpleasant, it’s irritating, and it’s unnecessarily repetitive. The only upside is that it’s frustrating enough that it distracts Alex from my greed.

“Fuck. Why are they still here?” he asks. I hear the clink of glass as he takes another shot. I follow suit; I assume Dan already has.

“It’s the game,” I choke out through the whiskey’s burn. “It fucking hates us.”

“It’s annoying,” Dan says, putting a combat rifle round through the head of the same bandit bruiser we’ve killed three times already. If I were given a survey and asked about this I would check “strongly agree,” but we’ve become quite good at clearing out the bandit camp and the scags “hive” by this point so it doesn’t take us long to clear the last hurdle and rush back towards Fyrestone.

The return trip from the Arid Hills is much like the original trip. Dan leaps into the driver’s seat and takes us far past the entrance to Fyrestone, forcing me to leap from the moving vehicle and be launched several feet when he backs up over my legs and most of my torso. When I finally do get back to the bounty board I mash enter until there are no more green quests left on our docket.

“Let’s go into the cave next,” I suggest. Alex grumbles something that approximates a response while Dan continues to drive in circles outside town. It is decided, then.

I could describe the trip into the cave in detail, but it’s much the same as our adventure with Moe and Marley. We rush off to the diamond highlighted entrance to the cave. We enter. We kill several new enemies, and the interest they present rapidly gives way to boredom as we realize we’re going to be fighting identical copies in the same spot in five minutes when it’s time for us to leave this place. We fighting some creatures and take turns dying. I yell at Dan for failing at the simple task of resurrecting me while he’s taking fire from multiple bandits. We rescue a claptrap and get a little inventory boost. It’s a heartwarming celebration of a set of jobs very similar to the ones we just did.

By the time we’re finished I can’t disagree with Alex’s next sentiment.

“Fuck I’m sick of this game. Let’s go play Sins.”

“Let’s turn in the quests first.”

Alex sighs. “Fine.”

I couldn’t agree with him more, but I don’t like leaving quests half finished in this game, especially when we spend most of our time playing it as a group. Borderlands is pretty unforgiving in how it allows you to deal with the completion of scripted quests and I’d rather not take a chance.

But he’s right to be bored of the game by now, and I am too. Borderlands is repetitive. Really repetitive. It’s like Diablo with guns, plain and simple. You point your gun at enemies and fire down the sights until they go down. Sometimes you might change your tactics up but you’re going to be running into the same handful of enemy types for most of the game, again and again. There’s not a lot of variety when you come right down to it, and that can be frustrating.

So when the “host has left the game” message flashes across the screen I lose no time n leaving Borderlands behind and leaping in to Sins of a Solar Empire’s waiting arms. Because as fun and conceptually fascinating as Borderlands is, it’s taken in small doses, and we’ve certainly had enough of it for one night.