Saturday, May 30, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Where Have All the Spinfusors Gone!

I’ve self-identified as a gamer for some time now, probably since I was in third grade. Back then it was just me sitting in with my SNES on weekends, playing Chrono Trigger until I couldn’t stand up, I’d be crouched in front of the TV for so long. Since then I’ve changed quite a bit. Some of the changes are gradual, shifts between various, similar genres that made me reconsider the games I’d been playing and approach new experiences. Others were singular games that drew me wholehearted into new realms of gaming.

X-Wing, for example, put on me on a three year space-sim kick that took me past Freespace (which was incredibly hard for a twelve year old, by the way) and well through to Jumpgate. Ultima Online had me playing MMOs compulsively until I quit WoW due to a technicality. Myth showed me the wonder of both destroying physics engines and competitive RTS. And then there was the game that made me a real multiplayer gamer, a small, oft discussed, now all but ignored game called Starsiege: Tribes or, by its stalwarts, simply Tribes.

Anyone who played Tribes can tell you that it was, for its time, revolutionary. Team based first person shooter, especially ones made by dedicated development teams, were few and far between back in those days. The same could be said of games with limited weapon systems. Classes were being explored in a number of titles, but Tribes mix and match system was nothing if not an original and compelling take on just how you could play.

But what Tribes really brought to the table was its unique take on how first person shooters should be played. In an age of tunnel running FPSes, one which we are arguably still smack in the midst of, Tribes was a visionary of open world play. No boundaries, no lines, every player equipped with a jetpack. The invisible limits were enforced by a gradual kill switch, not a perfect means of enforcing boundaries but probably my favorite one to date in an open world game.

These revolutionary game play twists were wrapped around a series of mechanics that focused on map control in whole new ways. While the tried and true “capture the flag” mode was still in place the game its trappings were completely original. Various defensive measures, powered by destructible and repairable generators, made it harder to grab and escape with the flag. Outposts could be taken which would shift the balance of the map and force teams to adopt new strategies and styles of play in order to circumvent these obstacles. And vehicles, for the first time, played a serious role in just how you needed to play a first person shooter.

Who can forget those twitchy, finicky scouts? Those overbearing transports? And those god damn missle launchers, raining fire down on anyone who tried to stay in the sky? Tribes was a layered tactical shooter based on teamwork, coordination, and verticality in an age of Quake clones. It was brilliant and, in a way, this was its undoing.

Tribes was revolutionary, but it wasn’t very attractive and it wasn’t much of a marketing endeavor. It had no copy protection to speak of and, while it was incredibly fun, it relied on player mods in order to sustain itself. This resulted in an increasingly fractured community which, as time went on, made it harder and harder to find a game. Compounding these issues was Tribes 2.

Tribes 2 was, on paper, exactly what Tribes needed. Updated graphics, updated vehicles and an improved system of buildings and weapons were all there to add new depth to an already incredible experience. Flares and handheld missile launchers, a cloaking system and melee weapons; these elements, along with tighter map design, combined to make a game that, while aesthetically similar to the original Tribes, proved completely alien in game play.

As if this unintentional bait and switch wasn’t enough to alienate former players while baffling new ones, Tribes 2 was also plagued with technical issues at launch. It was nearly unplayable during its early period and by the time patches had made the game what it could’ve been it was too late. Most prospective players had wandered away to greener pastures, leaving on stalwart fans to keep Tribes 2 alive. And, to their credit, they’ve done an excellent job doing so with open source projects and the TribesNext project allowing players, both new and old, to soar through the air and fire disks at one another.

But there wasn’t a true successor to Tribes until three years after Tribes 2’s lackluster release. This time it came in the form of Tribes: Vengeance. Vengeance was an inversion of previous trends, focusing on the key aerial combat aspects of Tribes to the almost total neglect of vehicles. Paired with a single-player focus and a multiplayer system which offered up, at best, dodgy experiences for me personally, it departed dramatically from what had made Tribes so great and suffered for its attempt.

Part of the problem was that it encapsulated what was, in many ways, the worst aspects of Tribes. The bots, while better than previous iterations, were still bots and so much of Tribes’ appeal came from facing devious human opponents. And so much of the game was set in tightly contained arenas which fought the sort of play that made Tribes so much fun. The fast moving, high flying game play was gone, replaced with twitchy corridor battles which, while present in the original Tribes, were certainly not the game’s focus.

Paired with the unreliable multiplayer and an elaborate story which neither fit the tone of the previous games and was more like a reboot than a treatment of the existing Starsiege universe, it was no surprise that Vengeance failed to reignite the embers of the franchise. Vengeance had a sense of what made Tribes great, but it tried to ignore the improvements Tribes 2 had brought to bare on the franchise. It played too close to the core of Tribes, oddly enough, and because of that it lost the bits and pieces that made Tribes such an involving experience.

What is perhaps most puzzling is the way that most shooters have ignored Tribes to date. Some, such as Halo, have made vehicles a key part of play, and some smaller games, such as Fallen Empire: Legions, have tried to re-create the intense feel of Tribes’ combat. But the games which mostly closely resemble Tribes’ tactical mindset are the Battlefield games, which lack any of the depth of play which Tribes possessed.

So let’s end this article with a moment of silence for Tribes and the impact it had on players. It was a wonderful multiplayer experience, one that changed gaming for me forever. And even if its influence ebbs and its creators have all left to pursue new projects after making some hand handed moves with the property it still has a passionate, loyal fanbase who will be keeping the experience alive. At least for a little bit longer.

Congratulations on Telling Off Your Boss!

Offices are dark and terrible places, filled with people who have long since abandoned their dreams. Yours is no different.

You work for a small drug development company, developing a drug tentatively called “The Silver Bullet.” It isn’t, as you might hope, a product aimed at eradicating some especially terrible form of cancer or terminal illness, but instead is a compound intended to dissolve fat by forcing the body to release large stores of lactic acid in improper ways.

The resulting process, at present, causes complete muscle and tissue degeneration is targeted areas, but your bosses are hoping that, with a little work it could become a miracle weight-loss drug and become their meal ticket for the next forty to sixty years.

Since they’re standard drug-development people with few or no morals and an eye for how to squeeze as much money as possible out of venture capital companies they’ll have relatively little sympathy for the people who have died testing their product (currently 100% of your test group, with a 0% fatality rate in your controls) but they’ll have a great eye for profit margins and how to twist data to make it seem their drug will turn a profit instead of murdering everyone who comes into contact with it. They’ll also have an incredibly low opinion of support staff and researchers in general.

As a research coordinator, in charge of compiling and performing an initial assessment of the data, you’re barely a step above the receptionist in the company, so they’ll look at you like you are, at best, a tool to be sent to fetch coffee and occasionally yell at when the numbers don’t squeeze just right.

But you’ll know more about your drug and how it works, thanks to your bachelor’s in biology and functioning brain, than almost anyone else in the company. You know that if it ever works it’ll be because of statistical anomalies rather than science and that even the current volunteer testing is incredibly illegal.

Your drug is criminally bad for the people who use it, and it serves no practical purpose. This is in the forefront of your mind whenever you’re being chewed out by your supervisor, who happens to also be your CFO and your VP (it’s a very small company). A close second in your head is the remaining balance on your student loans.

But the voice of reason in your mind has been getting quieter and quieter of late, and it won’t be long before it finally falls silent and you cave and start screaming at your asshole boss that he’s a murderer, and that an NDA can be violated if you see crimes being committed, which you most certainly do at present.

This thought process will reach critical mass tomorrow. Your boss will call you into his office to chew you out for no particular reason. It’ll mostly be because of his increasingly severe erectile dysfunction, but it’ll come out as you miscalculating the margin of error on some of your data, which you didn’t do.

You’ll know this. You’ll also know that he’s a small, insignificant man, even within the company which he holds such high esteem, and that he’s clinging on to life by his fingernails. You’ll know that this is the only real power he has, the power to chew you out. He can’t even fire you; your CEO would need to be involved for that to happen.

You’ll know all these facts and suddenly you’ll snap. You’ll tell him to go fuck himself. You’ll tell him that you’re sick of dealing with his shit and covering his bullshit. You’ll tell him that he can take this position and give it to another fresh undergrad with no ambition and a burning desire to avoid graduate school for another year.

Then you’ll turn around and leave him at his desk, red faced and sputtering. He’ll be dialing the CEO, rather than walking the fifteen feet to his desk, but he won’t be able to remember his extension, so he’ll start shouting the receptionist’s name.

You’ll smile as you walk away and pack your shit into your messenger bag, slipping knick knacks and desk clutter, along with a healthy portion of pens, into a pouch to put them to good use as you search for new work.

As your final action at this desk you’ll slip in a photocopy you made earlier this week of the statistical projections for the drug’s success/mortality rates. Then you’ll turn on your heel and walk out the door.

You’ll know you’ve opened a can of worms, that you’re going to be living rough for a few weeks at best and a few months at worst, but you won’t care. You’ll know that you’ll be involved in a long, taxing legal process when you mail the evidence in, along with a brief testimony describing the company’s internal processes and that you’ll have to fight for a good long while before you see any results.

But you won’t care. You’ll have done what you know is right, and you’ll feel free. For the first time in twenty-five years, you’ll free. So congratulations on telling off your boss. You might’ve lost your recommendation, but it was easily the best decision you’ve ever made.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Congratulations Buzzcut!

You set stock by three things in your life: your impeccably straight teeth, your incredibly well constructed investment portfolio and your absolutely fabulous hair. The first just come from the way you were born. The second is kind of boring, and if we were to describe it here our readership, yourself aside, would probably black out from boredom.

But the latter is nearly beyond description. Your hair is a work staggering beauty. It’s wondrous in its simplistic perfection. It’s short and sassy, but it has depth to it and makes a big statement without saying much. It has more to it than hair, in general, deserves to.

And you spend a lot of time thinking about it. So much, in fact, that it has cost you two wives, three mistresses, and one girlfriend, but it has been worth it. Oh so worth it.

After all, you attribute all of your success to it. Your wealth, your physical fitness and your many cats, all of them came from your hair. The cats more specifically because of your conditioner, which drives cats fucking wild.

Lately things have been good for you. You’ve got a wife who understands your relationship with your hair, and you’ve been weathering the recession better than most people in your line of work, in your mind all because of the hair.

But you changed mistresses last week (the old one just couldn’t deal with how fabulous your scalp was or the fact that you invested so heavily in factory farms, the crazy twat) and she’s been kind of tough to deal with. And, to boot, various stock drops have been cutting in to your holdings. You’ve begun to lose money. Slowly, now, but if your hair is right (and it always is) its going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

By the way, you believe your hair can tell the future.

Which is why it will be so devastating tonight when your bitch of a mistresses takes a trimmer to your glorious follicles. She won’t get the whole thing, just a little piece, but it’ll be enough to destroy the entire look.

Your confidence will be shattered, you’ll be filled with rage and you’ll hit her. Hard. Then you’ll do it again. And again. You’ll break her nose and her jaw and you’ll make a lot of noise doing it. The neighbors will call the cops and you’ll end up in county within two hours.

It’ll bode ill for your marriage, your money and your reputation as a cool, collected investment banker. You’ll be sitting in your cell considering hanging yourself with your belt at day’s end. It was all going so well for you this morning, but now there doesn’t seem to be any hope in sight.

We suggest that you wait until tomorrow morning before you make your big decision. You might just discover that the strength of your investments had nothing to do with your hair and that the power was in you all along.

The health bit was accurate, though, and you’ll start to slowly die of scalp cancer.

It’s a tough choice to make. A slow death with pride or a quick, relatively painless snap. Either way, congratulations buzzcut!

Congratulations on Hitting Your Mark!

You’re a wildly successful actor who is totally gay, but so far in the closet that it borders on a national conspiracy. Every lover you’ve ever taken has been blindfolded and handled by someone else before and afterwards, and a massive quasi-religious organization has made it their very personal business to make sure your secret stays safe. We’re betting you’ve just guessed who you are.

Anyhow, you’ll be taking a break from your latest film, the sequel to a movie whose title rhymes with “Mop Bun,” to do some dramatic work in The Theater next month.

You’ve been playing to the camera for so long that it’ll be tough for you to think of how to behave on stage. After all, you’re used to static audiences and tightly controlled conditions ensuring that all your acting is flawless, but here there are so many other factors that can trip you up. There’s no time for a second take if someone messes up. Plus you have to remember all those words from those fucking plays.

It’ll be infuriating at first, as if your hellish personal life has intruded on what used to be your fun-filled escapist work. A single mistake could bring the whole performance crashing down, just as it has always been in your bedroom. One slip of the tongue, a moment’s thoughtlessness and bam, you’re done.

But as you work at it more and more it will begin to feel natural. Eventually you’ll start to long for it. The only thing you’ll have trouble with is hitting your stage mark.

You’re used to mugging the camera, but blocking for an audience is difficult for you. You worry that you’ll end up checking out some hot dude and accidentally popping a boner or walking to the wrong side of the stage in a moment of distraction, and this anxiety further distracts you.

It’ll be a rough few weeks, and because of the upcoming show you’ll be under a magnifying glass from the press. This means no sex with barely-legal boys until after opening night.

But after a little montage and some unprotected gay sex with an acting coach (congrats on your first open experience by the way!) you’ll be all set on your marks. You’ll also feel way better about being gay.

On opening night you’ll step on stage filled with acceptance for yourself, wondering if it wouldn’t just be best for you to tell the whole world your secret and be done with it. Living a lie is so exhausting.

You’ll decide, as you stroll out on cue, that tonight will be the night. After the show you’ll tell the world that you like boys. You’ll feel liberated before you’ve done it. You’ll hardly be able to wait.

Unfortunately as you step on your mark a forty pound sandbag will drop from the rafters and partially collapse your skull. The whole thing was arranged by the acting coach, who felt jilted after you refused to cuddle post-coitus.

After the accident you’ll be rushed to a hospital, where the most expensive doctors will stabilize you and manage to get you upgraded from “dying” to “in a coma.” We don’t know when you’ll wake up.

Still, congratulations on hitting your mark! Also, as an aside, if you held your lovers afterwards this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. Just be considerate. We know you’re a big deal and everything, but that’s no reason to be a dick.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Congratulations Tigerfucker!

You’re a leopard (rar!) who we can only assume has learned to read through some cruel twist of fate which would permit you to understand a world you can never enter yourself, thanks to your lack of opposable thumbs and vocal chords capable of making intelligible sounds. But with this literacy comes incredible intelligence, and you’ve used that to make quite a career for yourself as the first Animal Planet porn star.

Here’s the deal: you travel around from habitat to habitat and zoo to zoo hanging out with other leopards. You do this largely by carefully monitoring shipping manifests and methodically studying security systems so that you can move between locations with minimal headache. Then once you’re chilling with other leopards you find a lady leopard you dig, wait for the cameras to start rolling and then you give it to her. Hard.

You engage in leopard sex with a relish normally reserved for species that walk around on two legs, and you do it with a sense of eroticism which is simultaneously deeply disturbing and fundamentally right to everyone who watches it.

As a result you’ve risen to fame in both the human and leopard communities as an instinctive master of eroticism. To leopards you are a lengthy growl, which roughly translates to “he who haunts our dreams and makes our nightmares delightful.” To humans you are “that leopard who keeps fucking those other leopards.”

You’ve enjoyed this fame, but of late it hasn’t been enough to keep you satisfied, which is why tonight you’re going to break into the Bronx Zoo and make your way to the tiger cages using all of your impressive stealth.

You’ll secret yourself in there, hiding in the shadows and biding your time until tomorrow when you see a family filming the tigers with a handheld camera. You’ll choose this moment to slink out and start sniffing the tigers until you find a lady tiger who does it for you.

Then you’ll tenderly, affectionately put your paws on her hind legs and mount her. After that you’ll start to do what you do best.

Most big cats just pump and then pass out, but not you. No, you’re going to give it to her nice and slow at first. If she was capable of enjoying it you know she would be. You’ll start to move faster and more intensely, your claws reflexively tensing and un-tensing as you go. As you come close to climax you’ll start to lose your shit and claw her wildly, leaving long bloody gashes all along her hindquarters, finally stretching your body over hers as you come to your fall inside her.

She’ll actually seem to like that bit.

The camera will catch all of it, documenting every moment of your grand erotic display. It’ll even capture you winking at it as you slink off into the shadows to hide until you have another chance to escape.

It won’t be long before that video finds its way to You tube, then onwards to Animal Planet, where you’ll rise to fame as the first practitioner of interracial sex between big cats. From there its onward and upward as you ad more and more notches to your belt, in the form of other large felines.

So congratulations Tigerfucker. It won’t be long before all the big cats learn to fear and long for your soft growls and tender ministrations and you haunt the dreams of all the people who see you. Just avoid taking partners who aren’t big cats. It won’t end well. Trust us.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Congratulations on Buying Lube!

You and your girlfriend have been trying to have sex for a few weeks now, and its been a little bit dicey. Along with your tortured psychological histories which make intimacy a dodgy, at best, proposal for each of you you’ve also been having considerable friction issues.

It has sort of been a relief for the two of you, since the friction issues are an easy scapegoat for you to use to avoid discussing your real problems, like the fact that her uncle used to touch her or that your dad’s best friend video taped you masturbating when you were ten.

This is a real shame, since this discussion would be great for the both of you. You’d finally see that people who have had terrible, traumatic experiences can become beautiful, whole human beings. You’d stop feeling like your whole life is a lie designed to get you away from the horrors that made your youth into a waking nightmare from which there was no escape.

But since you’re both New Englanders you refuse to discuss feelings, yours or anyone else’s, on principle. So you’ll both cry a lot during sex and the chafing will get worse and she’ll eventually suggest lube.

You’ve never used lube in your fourteen years of sexual activity. You won’t even be sure where to buy it, but you won’t want to lose your girlfriend. She’s super nice and she has an amazing body to boot. So you’ll do some asking around and eventually find out that it can be purchased at any number of sex shops, as well as your local Walgreens.

You’ll want to avoid anyone who isn’t a pervert, so you’ll head to a nearby sex shop where a one eyed man with a partially paralyzed face will laugh at your “extra slick” selection. He’ll be masturbating as he rings you up, and the entire experience will be deeply unsettling.

But that generally disturbed feeling will disappear when you fall into your girlfriend’s arms with the lube. The lube will become a sort of placebo for the two of you, and just having it around will help you open up. Once you actually apply it to one another’s genitals it’ll start to do its thing and you’ll both be on cloud nine before you know it.

The walls separating you will collapse. For anywhere between fifteen and forty minutes the two of you will be one person, one fluid, continuous being. For the first time there will be no tears.

Afterwards the two of you will lay in one another’s arms and stare at the ceiling together, relishing your newfound sense of unity. Your sticky hands will be tangled in one another’s hair and you’ll feel a strange compulsion suddenly. You’ll turn to your love, kiss her cheek, and speak up.

“I’ve have something I need to tell you,” you’ll say, staring deep into her eyes.

They’ll be tinged with sadness, but they’ll be locked on yours right back. You won’t even see her lips move when she responds. “I do too, love.”

What comes next will be hard, but it will be worth it. Congratulations on buying lube. It is a fine product.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Where My Zombies At?

It’s no news to anyone that nerds love zombies. I mean, people in general love zombies, but nerds love them a lot. Maybe too much. We give them a lot of our time. We watch overlong movies with them, we dress up as them in public, we discuss the social ramifications of their existence in our culture. We even bicker over which ones are better, zombies vs. zoombies (speedy zombies).

So it’s no surprise that they find themselves in our games so often. They’re such a great foil. There are so many aspects of what make us us that they can comment on, and they make an ideal stumbling block for players. They can fit almost any role with a little bit of creativity, and make a great point as to just what it natural to people (the scene with Bob and the gun from Day of the Dead, anyone?). But even when they’re used traditionally they can convey a great depth of meaning.

Consider the first Resident Evil games. These were games that represented zombies in a fashion faithful to their roots. They were less an immediate threat and more an obstacle, something we pit ourselves against which forces us to conserve our resources and carefully consider our movement, rather than react quickly. Whether by design or technological constraints Resident Evil’s zombies were everything Romero’s were. They were slow moving, slow witted and hard to put down. And once they got a hold of you things were not going to end well. Even if you escaped you might wish you hadn’t.

As a result the threats in Resident Evil come from other places, a topos echoed from Romero’s work. Except here it’s not a resourceful group of survivors beset by outsiders who want what they have to survive, instead its a long survivor beset by mutant plants and dogs. Fucking dogs! The impact remains the same.

The pervasive and perceived threat isn’t the challenge we’re faced with. The challenge we’re faced with is how to deal with what the trappings of our once ordinary lives have become in a world where society at large is now our enemy. It’s about how we deal with isolation and how we manage the resources we can scavenge. It has more in common with post-apocalyptic games and fiction than it does with other members of the horror family.

Of course, Resident Evil abandoned this in favor of the trendier “zoombies” of late, as showcased in 28 Days Later. But by this time the game play posed fewer questions and instead demanded more of the player. Instead of being left to consider our place in this horrible new world or how to escape it we got a recap of the story of Bad Dudes and a series of Saw level monster-closet horror scares.

Not that Resident Evil 4 and 5 are bad games. They’re awesome games, and they’re very smart in their own right. They’re just smarter systems than they are games. The part of the game that we can think about is far smaller here, and the part that wants to challenge us has not necessarily grown larger but has certainly become more direct and invasive. Later Resident Evil games are less about experiencing survival and more about surviving challenges, and as a result they lose some of the perhaps unintentional intellectual oomph they held in the first place.

This is not to say that games can’t use zoombies to communicate their point. Halo and Fallout 3, neither of which are “zombie games” per sec, both execute on this point expertly. Fallout 3 uses ghouls as “too human humans” in a world gone wrong and as an embodiment of mindless rage as the situation merits. And Halo uses the Flood to show us just what our warring societies could become if they submit to their religious extremism and military-industrial obsession. Granted zoombies are tools here utilized in order to make points about the game world, rather than the focus of the game itself, but they’re utilized to great effect.

After all, speedy, rage filled zombies embody so much of what we fear about our society. They give physical presence to our fear of the rage and horror which all human beings are capable of. They are mindless, strong and relentless, driven by the instincts we are all taught to fear. And when a game uses zoombies to this end, it can be a powerful means of conveying a message.

Enter Left4Dead. Now as a rule a game with a number in its title is not going to make some bold artistic statement (please, please, please prove me wrong, Thief 4) but, as with many rules Left4Dead breaks this one.

What could’ve been a Counter-Strike mod was carefully crafted into an interpretation and realization of cinematic tradition and variations on a very versatile theme. At its most basic level, Left4Dead is a very standard, samey shooter filled with mostly dull obstacles that you do your best to charge through and especially big ones you use teamwork to get through or around, depending on circumstances.

Sometimes there’s a big cinematic moment intended to cause tension and sometimes there’s a really cool spontaneous moment that showcases just what procedurally generated content in capable of in this day and age, but it doesn’t say a lot. Its less a way to show us something about ourselves and more a fun place to be, an ever changing playground filled with shambling corpses. At least on its surface.

But when you consider the tremendous effort that went into designing each of the look ofbasic Infected along with their movements and their intelligence you see that they’re labors of love. And when you consider their role as cannon fodder they become commentary on video games in general.

After all, the danger in Left4Dead doesn’t come in the form of expected or predicted threats. It comes in the form of unexpected waves, striking between safe areas and choke points. It comes in becoming isolated from your friends by fast moving or dramatically acting zombies. It comes from the unexpected, the random, the threat which is normally posed by human players realized by an artificial intelligence.

Left4Dead has this great Thermopolis feel when it’s doing its thing best, where you’re fighting against impossible odds, seemingly endless legions besetting you, and you know that the game is designed to let you fail. You’re eking by, trying to beat the designers as they do everything they can to laugh at you and play cat and mouse with you.

And moreover you’re moving through familiar places, seeing familiar faces while an entire society pushes you to conform. And of course, as we as gamers are trained to do, you refuse. You fight, you struggle and sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose, too, but that’s life, isn’t it? You can always pick yourself up and try again.

All of this from a zooming group of baddies without brains in a game with a grand total of eight weapons (nine if you count fists and rifle butts). Left4Dead is a minimalist, experimental game which owes far, far too much to its interchangable, raging antagonists, and it couldn’t work with anything but super fast cracked out rabid zombies.

Of course, even as these examples illustrate just how powerful zombies can be in video games there are plenty of examples of “meh” zombies thrown in to what could be great games.

Jehrico’s generic and completely personality-less undead are a great, low profile example of “zombies” being misused. That game could not have been possessed of more boring, turgid examples of the walking dead in all their forms. And Plants vs. Zombies’ zombies? Sure, they’re cute and funny, but they’re bereft of social commentary. Bah, I say to them!

But there is perhaps no worse offender than the Alone in the Dark reboot’s “zombies.” An awkward mix of fast and slow, requiring unnecessarily obtuse methods to be dispatched and beyond frustratingly buggy, they lacked personality, depth, mythos and threat all at once. They were less a barrier and more a sideshow, and they failed on almost every level as video game baddies.

The only thing they to succeed with was to avoid commenting on either the greater overarching threat of the game and the main character at the same time. And that’s sort of impressive, since antagonists can usually help to define both of those in some way. But not the hands of Lucifer, no. They’re content to smolder in generic rage and occasionally leap towards you after a lengthy period of confused shuffling.

Zombies are a potent tool, but they aren’t a panacea to be applied to a bad idea, however much we might like them to be. Throwing zombies into the mix doesn’t make everything as fun as you’d think it would and they work best when they’re treated as thought provoking and resonant tools for commenting on the nature of other elements of a work rather than as obstacles or a objects put in place for a little flavor.

Zombies deserve love. They deserve it more than they get it, because they’re like our little retarded cousins. We all secretly fear that one day we’ll become them, but at the same time it doesn’t seem that bad to be them. They’re not too bright, sure, but they seem to be doing alright. And occasionally they offer us some really profound insight. At the very least they’ve learned enough about life to no longer be ashamed of their own bodily fluids, and I think that’s a lesson we should all take away from these wondrous, diverse, laconic teachers.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Congratulations Horsefucker!

You’ve been trying to shake that nickname for years, but its been chasing you. You’ve left your home, your family, your best friend and the woman you love all to escape from that god damn nickname.

We’d go into how you got it but... Well, that’s a little private, and to be honest you know it pretty well. After all, you’re you. And most of the state of Washington knows it too.

But the population of Washington isn’t nearly as familiar with your efforts to lose the name. They’ve varied vastly, from writing an unsuccessful novel to murdering a street gang with a ball peen hammer. None of them have worked though.

Tomorrow you’re going to engage in your most ambitious attempt yet. You’re going to kidnap the King of Spain.

Juan Carlos is a sweet old dude, but you’ve got a few issues with him. For example his total disrespect for Hugo Chavez and his generally abrasive public manner. His support of shadowy, exploitative private businesses in South America doesn’t help either and, while the Wikipedia entry you used to research your job doesn’t say for sure one way or the other you’re almost positive that he supported the war in Iraq.

So you’re going to try and kidnap him. We won’t give away the how, when and wheres of it. That would make the Spanish Secret Service’s job way too easy. But we are going to let you know that its going to go horribly wrong.

Your gun will backfire after your pants are caught on a particularly treacherous fence and you break your leg falling around seven feet. Then Juan Carlos will spend fifteen minutes waiting with the ambulance for you while his sexy assistant performs basic first aid for you. You will become awkwardly aroused and she’ll see your incredibly bent penis.

Worst of all, though, you’ll still be best known for fucking that horse. The title “that horsefucker” will just be amended now to “that horsefucker who totally botched kidnapping the King of Spain and blew off his own hand before he embarrassed himself in front of that hot Spanish chick.”

On the upside the King of Spain needs a PR boost badly so he’ll keep you around to show he’s got a softer side. Granted, he’ll mostly be using you as a human footstool, but he’ll never refer to you as a horsefucker at public functions. Just in private, and in all of his memos.

Anyhow, congratulations horsefucker. And remember, bad as life is right now, it could be and likely will be much much worse in the future.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Congratulations on Perfecting Your Impression!

Ever since your grandma moved in its been super lame. She keeps stealing your pot, she won’t share any of her pills, and she always keep the TV tuned to NCIS. You weren’t even aware that there was a 24 hour NCIS channel, but this is the sort of horrible knowledge your grandmother has imbued you with.

You’d throw her out but you’re almost positive that your parents would cut you off if you did. Plus her social security checks are pretty sweet and they help keep the two of you in Taco Bell and brew.

But she’s way old and you know she won’t be there forever, which is why her death on Friday night won’t come as much of a surprise. What will is the profound sadness you’ll feel at her loss and the sudden fear you’ll have of losing her monthly checks from the government.

This is what will keep you from reporting her death to the government. It’ll keep you from doing it for months and months, for faking her voice on the phone to your parents and then passing it off as a lame joke. Since Gam Gam hates talking to your “bastard father” and your “whore mother” (her words!) it’ll work.

At least, at first. But after a while they’ll get suspicious. They’ll demand to talk to her. They’ll keep paying your rent since they don’t want her to end up on the street and they’ve long since given up on you finding gainful employ, but they will contact the Department of Social Security and try to get your Gam Gam declared legally dead.

Now, let’s face facts; your impressions suck. You’re a terrible actor, you have no sense of self and no real knack for observing people and their actions and you’re kind of oblivious. Also you sort of have a mild form of voice imodulation disorder.

This is going to pose some pretty serious problems. But you’re nothing if not pragmatic. You’ll spend months and months working on your impression, sleeping to tapes of your grandmother swearing at various family members (check various video tapes of family events to get some good samples for this part) and ordering Chinese food as her in order to get it delivered more quickly.

You’ll be doing pretty well, but you won’t feel one hundred percent on the big day. In fact, you’ll start to panic. You’ll end up just locking yourself in the bathroom for hours and hours on end, muttering over and over to yourself in your best approximation of your grandmother’s voice.

This is how the Social Security investigator will find you, muttering over and over again in her voice. He’ll come into your house through the unlocked front door, assuming that Gam Gam was living there alone, and call out her name.

At first this will make your blood run cold, but almost immediately you’ll realize its a blessing in disguise. You’ll do a quick hammy throat clear and launch into the best impression of her you’ve ever done.

“Why hello there, sonny,” you’ll say. The Social Security investigator will ask if you’re alright.

“Oh, of course I am. Just very very old.” You’ll do a quick gesture which approximates to ‘jackpot’. The investigator will see nothing wrong with this statement. In fact, old people say it surprisingly often.

But he’ll ask a lot of questions, mostly about shit you find it hard to focus on for more than a few seconds. Things like grandchildren, President Roosevelt and your opinion on blacks.

You’ll start to freak when you stutter and stall trying to think of answers, but then you’ll shout something about getting into the shower and he’ll excuse his rudeness and depart immediately.

Turns out that the elderly taking incredibly long showers where they often die, and he really didn’t want to have to deal with your corpse that night. So nice job with the corpse gambit. We’re glad it paid off for you, and congratulations on perfecting your impression. It really got you out of a jam there. Also, you’re a terrible grand son.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Congratulations on Burning Alive!

It’s just another day in your life. You’ll wake up around noon after a night of partying and walk your beat, incinerating a few hikers and blinding one young man who tried to photograph you doing it.

After all, you’re a magma monster living in an inactive cindercone volcano in Northern California, and this is pretty much what you do. You spend every day of every week this way. The only reason today will be special in any way is because you’ll meet a woman today.

You’ll burn her horribly, but she’ll be so pretty on the inside that your heart will just melt for her and you’ll take her back to your lair, where you’ll teach her about being a magma monster, and love.

It’ll be hot (pun intended! A ha ha ha!).

Later on you’ll offer her a choice between a grisly death and life eternal as a fiery monster by your side. We honestly don’t know what she’ll choose, but either way we want to say congratulations on burning alive. It might be commonplace for you now but its still quite impressive to the rest of us.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Congratulations, You're On the Case!

It’ll be raining outside. Seems like its always raining outside when beautiful women walk through your doors soaking wet with too many problems and just enough money in their savings to secure your services. That’s because you live in Seattle and cater to an unsavory crowd.

When she comes in the door she’ll take off her overcoat to reveal a dress that men would kill to see on their floor. Her head will be shaved, her arms decorated by long, lacy scar tissue a butterfly tattoo on the inside of her right elbow.

She’ll look like she’s been crying, but she won’t have been. Its a trick of the rain. Don’t fall for it.

“I hear you’re the man to see when you need help with a problem.”

You’ll push up your fedora and look at her. Its 2009 and no one really wears fedoras anymore, but you’re a traditionalist and you have thinning hair.

“Depends on the problem,” you’ll say in your gruffest voice. If that doesn’t get her a little wetter, we don’t know what will.

She’ll smile a little.

“A man is trying to blackmail me. An old lover.”

The word will sound wrong coming out of her mouth, like something a stage performer would say to establish setting. She’ll be mocking your gritty nature and anachronistic tastes and you’d tell her to get the fuck out of your office right then and there but she’s super hot and you really need the money badly, so you’ll sit calmly and stare at her. After a few minutes she’ll get uncomfortable and get honest.

“My boyfriend. He’s got some important things of mine and he wants me to engage in illegal activities to get them back.”

You’ll nod.

“Ex-boyfriend,” you’ll correct. “Why not go to the police?”

She’ll stare you down. “Why do you think?” she’ll spit at you, like you’re an idiot. A grin will form on your face.

“Good,” you’ll say, removing your hat and twirling it. “You’re not an idiot. But don’t treat me like one. I need to know all the details, and I need to know them now.”

She’ll be taken aback by your brusqueness, and a little bit aroused. She’ll also notice your thinning hair and feel a twinge of sympathy for you. In her eyes you’ll have become a little bit more of a real person.

Her eyes will lock with yours and you’ll know for a fact that you’ll get more than just your hourly billable rate out of this job. Something that you won’t be able to get a receipt for.

It’s sex, in case you couldn’t tell.

Congratulations, you’re on the case. Now go get detecting.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Congratulations on Acquiring a Tidy Fortune!

You’ll be seated in front of the lawyer’s desk along with the rest of your family. It’ll be the first time you’ve all been together in years.

They’ll all be there. Uncle Jake and his hermaphrodite wisband, your cousin Kenny with his hip flask and sunken eyes, Jamie, still topless after all these years, and all the rest. They’ll all be there to see what grand pappy has for them.

The lawyer will take all of you in with his impassive, thoughtful nature. He’ll shuffle the papers on his desk and then he’ll begin.

“Thank you for coming here today,” he’ll begin.

“Faggot,” Roy, the neo-Nazi, will mutter under his breath.

“Please, hold your comments to the end,” the lawyer will say, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Your grandfather-“

“Grand pappy,” your mother will correct, eyes wild from her morning speedball.

The lawyer will sigh. “Your grand pappy, then, requested that you all be present for the reading of his will, as it was one of his last desires to see your entire family together again. Since he saw this as unlikely he believed that his death could be a unifying experience for all of you.”

“You ain’t better than me!” Darlene will shout, hurting a chair across the room in a fit of rage. She dislikes it when people use the word experience.

The lawyer will pause briefly, taking in the ruined chair and Darlene’s panting, enraged visage.

“Can we continue?”

Darlene will nod and sit on the floor, Indian style.

“Excellent. He also wanted to be sure that you all knew just how much he loved you and how glad he was to have all of you in his life.”

“FUUUUUCK!” Jimmy will explode. His tourretic outburst will be ignored by the family, although he will get a slight reaction from the lawyer.

“Moving on. He also wanted to be sure that there were no secrets. As such it is conditional that each of you be here and listen to the entire distribution of his estate in order to receive your share.”

“God damn Jews,” Aunt Esther will say in a normal tone of voice to no one in particular. She thought you were gay for a solid decade, even after you married Sarah, the only one in this room who ever formed a personal relationship outside of the family. By now the lawyer will be ignoring your family’s various outbursts and he’ll get down to brass tacks.

“To Francis Del McWalkerson I hearby bequeath my incredibly profitable soap company. I know you’ll ensure that the business stays strong and will never rest of your laurels. I’ve always been proud of you.”

You’ll jump out of your chair, hand clasped to your chest. You always knew your grand pappy loved you, but now you’ve got proof. You’ll want to book it right out of that room, but then you’ll remember that if you do so you’ll lose every last penny that the only sane member of your family just gave you.

You’ll take a deep breath and sit down while your family edges forward, anxious to hear what will be announced next. The lawyer will be grinning now, and he’ll gesture for you to stand again. You’ll do so and he’ll begin reading once more.

“To the rest of my family I bequeath my beloved attack dogs. I hope that they find you in good health.”

Your family will look about, puzzled. None of them knew about grand pappy’s hounds, the care he’d taken to making them into man eating killing machines. None of them knew that he’d named each of them after a member of the family, raising them to be just as mad and mean as every drop of blood he’d ever known.

But they’ll understand what he meant by it when the lawyer flips his switch and their chairs suddenly give way to trapdoors in the floor, sending them into a pit where the dogs have been sleeping. Their loud screams will wake them, and the dog’s hunger will do the rest. You’ll still be there standing alone, stunned by what has just happened as the lawyer smiles genially at you, as if he hadn’t murdered your entire family with the push of a button.

“That concludes our procedings,” he’ll say.

Don’t be too sad afterwards if you can help it. Everyone in your family was a dick, and half of them were thinking of how they could murder you and take everything you had the moment that lawyer announced you’d get the soap company. Instead try to dwell on the happy times, like that time your grand pappy let you help him teach a rotweiller to attack a mannequin dressed like your mother.

And congratulations on acquiring a tidy fortune! Get it?!

Monday, May 18, 2009

Congratulations Saxman!

Not to be confused with our previous Coltrane entry, we’re here to talk to James Parsons, an aspiring third grade musician who is going to blow into a saxophone for the first time today and HOLY SHIT.

Shit’s gonna go from zero to real in less than a second once your lips touch that reed, Jimmy-boy. Your teacher is going to slap his knee and say “daaaaamn!” Then he’ll offer you some reefer which has materialized simply because of how smooth you are. This would be less impressive if he wasn’t a sixty three year old white man from southern Nebraska.

He’ll call up a friend of his in the music biz, who he met through AA, and hold the receiver up as you blow into your horn again. His friend will be over in a few seconds and he’ll have the paperwork drawn up for a record deal in seconds.

You’ll be a little bit unsure about whether or not you should sign, as will your parents, but you’ve got nothin’ to worry about. Once your folks get down to the school your teach is going to offer them a drag off the J and ask you to do your thing. You’ll oblige and your parents will be on that contract before you can open up Hot Crossed Buns on their asses.

This will be the start of a long, profitable music career which will afford you a life of leisure and wealth. Assuming, of course, that the note you play each time is a D (the one where you hold down all the buttons). If you play a B (one of the ones where you don’t hold down all the buttons) your teacher will throw up all over you. An A (also one without all of the buttons) will cause him to shit uncontrollably until he dies from dehydration.

Your music is powerful, is all we’re saying, and we’d like you to use that power wisely. Use it to play a D. The D is debatably the best saxophone note, and certainly your teacher’s favorite. Play that D short and true so that it can resonate in our hearts, and before you know it they’ll all be slapping you on the back saying congratulations saxman!

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Far Cry 2 is My Muse!

I’ve always found that my writing is influenced heavily by other art I engage. Movies, books, comics, paintings, even games; even if I don’t love something I still find that it makes me think about writing, how I write and, in some weird, cosmic cases, just compels me to write.

There are lots of weird examples I could rattle off. People I’ve shared creative writing classes with who irritated the living hell out of me, but made me just feel compelled to write. The Walking Dead comic books, which make me think about zombies and character development more than most “proper” novels I read do. Trashy mysteries which make me want to write better, equally trashy mysteries.

Oddly enough, Far Cry 2 falls into this category as well.

Other games have elicited creative impulses in me before. Sometimes playing a game turns into a kind of performance art because of this (see Assassin’s Creed), sometimes it simply makes me reflect on stories and how they are told (see Bioshock). And sometimes, as is the case in Far Cry 2, it inexplicably draws ideas out of me.

Far Cry 2 is a game with a lot of problems. There isn’t a whole lot of complexity to it, it has some serious repetition going on and the story jerks around like a man having a seizure. The Jackal’s inexplicable shift from McGuffin to Best Friend and the “uh oh, better kill your friends” twist in the final area are, at best sloppily executed and, at worst, can ruin the game for someone who enjoyed FC2’s plodding, character heavy storytelling.

But it’s also a game with staggering visuals and a “go anywhere, do anything, try to break the rules” mentality which is surprisingly well executed for a game with such severe limitations on what you can do. Far Cry 2 is possessed of an old school sensibility that certain areas will simply be inaccessible, and if you beat your head against the wall trying to get to them you will perceive that you are making progress while you’re really not.

Its a strange game with a strange world, and it could be considered a new step in gaming art, but no one is going to head to Far Cry 2 to take writing lessons or game design lessons. It’s standard shooter fare with the game classic guns we’ve seen copy-pasted a thousand times before. Its sole unique weapon, the silenced shotgun, has to be purchased through DLC and even then, you’ve already used a shotgun in this game. Seeing this slightly different shotgun probably won’t rock your world if the game didn’t on its own.

Despite an almost pedestrian modus operandi and a world where you are perpetually retracing your steps, however, Far Cry 2 manages to make me feel...different. It makes me change my approach to video games, and I’m not entirely sure why.

I normally take a highly methodical, completionist approach to gaming. Digging up Holocrons, unlocking hidden characters and class bonuses, finding hidden supply caches – these are the things I find myself forced to do unconsciously.

But in Far Cry 2 I barely care about the collectibles. That’s not completely accurate; I care about them enough to get out of my car whenever I see that little green light go off. I care about them enough to look for a guide on how and where to find all of the Jackal Tapes. But I don’t find myself invested in searching for minutia as I normally am.

Perhaps its the relative uselessness of some of the collectibles. For example, the Golden AKs, scattered throughout the game world, eliminate one of the game’s most interesting features: weapon decay. You can just carry that shiny new all-purpose through the whole game, never worrying about jams or breakdowns. You’ll miss out on the diverse options available at the shop but the game itself will get a lot easier.

And the diamonds, while diamonds and ergo desirable by nature, just aren’t that handy after a certain point. I mean, sure, they’re diamonds and you want them and you want the guns they let you buy, but I found myself out of purchases to make well before the end of the game, and I barely found half of the things. Eventually I was going off the beaten path to find them just to see what sort of original and inventive hiding place Ubi had cooked up for me.

But Far Cry 2’s collectibles don’t trigger my OCD the way Assassin’s Creed’s do. Maybe its the slipshod nature of the game world, the constant feeling that everything is going to fall apart that the game elicits so effortlessly. So I’m freed from that burden and left to experience a strange and vibrant setting.

And, for some whack ass reason, this makes me want to write. Not just about Far Cry 2, although the game definitely had that effect on me too. No, Far Cry 2 makes me want to write about motion through spaces, about friendships you don’t really enjoy having, about unpleasant work environments and the hideous irony of human nature. Far Cry 2 has that je ne sais quoi that makes me want to sit down and do stuff, and it has it in spades.

I didn’t really notice until all of the releases I’d been catching up on had kept me from it for almost a week. Suddenly I found myself feeling down, struggling for ideas. Instead of being able to sit down and tap something out I had to stare at a coffee cup and will ideas out of my skull. Then I’d take a quick five minute break, kill some bad people, steal some of their ill-gotten gains for myself, pop a few pills and then log off to let the ideas flow out.

The game is so cavalier in both its successes and its failures. It knows what its doing, and it knows it well. It doesn’t always succeed, sure, but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do it take you away from where you are and let you play there, where you feel safe because you have nothing to lose. Maybe its not the greatest game ever, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be a good game. And that uncautious swagger, that confidence in its simple act of being makes me happy. It makes me feel okay. And it makes me want to make something too, even if its just one of many rough diamonds. Because sometimes the small payoffs are the best ones.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Congratulations on Driving Fastest!

You’re a girl with too sweet a heart and a bad boy on her mind too much of the time. This bad boy, he’s into some bad things. One of the not so bad things he’s into, those, is drag racing.

You think you can change him. Hell, you know you can. All you know is some time alone with him. After all, you might be a good girl but you know how to be bad when you have to.

Those two preceding paragraphs are there to explain how you ended up behind the wheel of a souped up hot rod with a scarf around your face and a pair of sunglasses over your eyes at night. They’re there to explain how you’ve fallen in with thieves, crackheads and, yes, that’s right, graduate students.

You entered this underground race because you knew he’d be there. You had a little help from Vin Diesel (he’s your cousin or something, we’re kind of confused just how you know him to be honest) but a lot of what got you there came from your excellent driving skillset and your work experience in daddy’s garage.

You’re also straight edge, so you’ve got a leg up on almost everyone there. If they haven’t been chaining poppers for hours on end they’ve probably been drunk since noon. Hell, even the boy you like will do a handful of speed before he gets into his car, and he’s one of the people who “uses instead of abusing.”

Anyhow, after a length pre-race posturing and preparation session where you and your boy of interest dance fight you’ll be lined up in your souped up, shitty looking cars, revving your engines and making complicated gestures at each other.

You’ll still be high on adrenaline from the dance fight, especially the part where the two of you almost touched while using dance moves against one another, so when the race starts you’ll be on the top of your game.

You’ll shift fluidly at the perfect moment each time, flawlessly drag racing your rig down the road. And since you actually knew what you were doing when you put your car together, and didn’t use altavista searches and shitty movies from the early 2000s as references to your automotive work, your car will actually be in good shape. You’ll win the race with a commanding lead.

After you finish you’ll step out of your car and Vin Diesel will give you a big old hug. Then you’ll shake the boy’s hand and take off your mask before you give his shocked old mug a big sloppy kiss. He’ll think the whole thing is awesome and the two of you will start dating.

It’ll last around a month and a half until the two of you have sex and it is absolutely awful. Then you’ll break up and start to learn about hacking computers in an effort to seduce another boy who, in this case, would totally go out with you if you just asked.

You should reconsider your courtship approach, is all we’re saying. Oh, and congratulations on driving fastest. Think of the experience as its own reward, right?

Friday, May 15, 2009

Congratulations on Starting Your Restaurant!

You’ve had the idea for weeks. That’s a long time for you.

It’s a family style restaurant called “Holy Shit! TITTIES!” Just like that, with all caps in the second sentence. It’ll be an old fashioned home-style joint featuring only the hottest topless waitresses.

You drew up the business plan yesterday and you’ve scheduled an interview to secure the necessary bank loan today. You’ll show up at Chase Manhattan in running shoes, jeans and a sweatshirt. You’ll reek of marijuana smoke and you’ll be carrying a pint of whiskey wrapped in a paper bag with you.

The banker will look at you askance. He’ll take you in in one languid glance before he speaks.

“Sir,” he’ll say, “I’m not sure you’re the type of person we’d like to offer such a high risk loan to.”

You’ll ignore him and put your business plan on his desk, tapping it emphatically. He’ll take a measured sigh and pick up the manila folder. After all, he blocked out this time to see you, he might as well go through the motions.

At first he’ll look skeptical. Understandably so. After all, your business plan opens with the following phrase: Who likes looking at some titties? Everyone. I don’t care who you are. And who likes chicken strips? Everyone, the answer remains.

But your economics degree from Harvard isn’t entirely worthless, even if you do mostly use it as a glass surface to snort cocaine off of. And as he continues reading his eyes will begin to light up.

He’ll see your carefully considered supply cost estimates, your growth projections. He’ll see that you’ve planned out every problem you could run in to, every direction this flailing economy could turn in. He’ll see that you’ve even thought of a backup plan where, if business doesn’t initially go well you’ll brew your own beer and grow the business to make it sustainable. After all, while Portland has no shortage of titty bars or breweries it has very few places that are both.

Within around fifteen minutes he’ll have the paperwork ready and you’ll have your loan safe and secure. For the first time in the last six years you’ll have a future.

This is going to be a huge success. We know we’ll be there. Congratulations on starting the restaurant. Also, could you make us a reservation? That place is going to be packed.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Congratulations on Finding Your Dog!

You’ve been there for three days now, three days searching the ruins of Minneapolis. You crossed the river after your dog. It was the only thing you could think to do.

He left when you were sleeping, left you in the burned out shell of one of the schools in Groveland. You avoided the dorms; too obvious, too likely to be found. Instead you opted for an old function building, some sort of hall or chapel. It was concealed and open with plenty of ways out and plenty of cover from the weather.

Everything had gone well. In fact, you’d slept better than you had in weeks, slept like you were protected by something you couldn’t see. You dreamt for the first time since everything had happened. You dreamt of your wife and your daughter, safe and sound in Seattle.

You knew it couldn’t be real. If it had been real it would’ve been what was left of Seattle. But it still made you feel better.

But when you’d woken up Jacques, your dog, was long gone. Normally he sleeps right next to you, but normally you don’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. After six hours you wonder if he’d assumed you were and moved on.

But you hadn’t survived this long without learning something about tracking and come dawn you followed his erratic, soot stained little paw prints out of the building and west, away from the sun.

It was quiet at first. People don’t like to stay in the big cities anymore for the most part. Most of them are pretty picked clean and that’s where the Wild Ones like to spend a lot of their time. Something about them, about the residue of humanity, seemed to attract them and make them more comfortable.

But you’ve got a pretty good system for avoiding them. You walk carefully and slowly and you keep your wits about you. You know that most of them have a sort of ocular degeneration from the Blight, linked to the changes their brains go through, so they rely on sound to hunt for the most part. Wear soft shoes and avoid talking. Nothing that jingles, nothing that shines.

Jacques has helped too. He’s smart, loyal, and something about dogs keeps them at bay. The two of you had been together for five months and you’d only had to fight them once that whole time. That’s why you followed him.

You’ll move slowly. You and Jacques are both weak and you know it. You’ve barely been eating and when you’re in cities you do your best to spend as little time as you can in the noon sun so you’ve only got so many traveling hours in each day.

Still, you’ll reach Minne, or what used to be Minne, in less than a day. You’ll move confidently down sprawling, wide open roads without stopping to scavenge, tracing those paw prints.

But once you hit the other side of the river you started to run into Wild Ones and worse. People, normal people, who had decided to give up what made them people and live like Wild Ones, but smarter and more dangerous. You don’t run into a lot of them, but when you do its never good.

But this time you’ll avoid them. It means you have to move slowly, creeping block to block, but they’ll never see you. It’ll be working perfectly until you hit an old grocery store. Outside you’ll see a young man with a jagged mohawk, dressed in tattered rags. He’ll be petting a dog. That dog will be Jacques.

He’ll have a rifle on the ground next to him, propped up against a chair under an umbrella. The front of the store, however, will be decorated with corpses in varying states of decomposition. You won’t want to look at them but motion will draw your eyes.

Then you’ll realize that some of them aren’t corpses. Not yet anyway.

You’ll check your backpack. The .44 magnum will still be there, along with nine rounds of ammo. Jacques will look a little scared, like he knows something is wrong, but he’ll want to be there. He’ll want to be around a person.

You’ll just want your dog back. You’ll load the gun and check it, then check the pocket watch you took off your old boss. It’ll be a few hours before nightfall, so you’ll lay down and wait. No sense going in during daylight. You know there are more of them.

You’ve never seen fewer than a dozen raiders living together, but you think you can do this. Jacques is a good dog, after all, and it wouldn’t be right to let him get eaten.

Still, no sense making it harder than it has to be. The raiders look full, so there’s no rush, but the clock is still ticking. Good luck with what comes next, and congratulations on finding your dog.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Congratulations on Your Sweet Tat!

It will incorporate non-euclidian geometry and drive mad anyone but you who gazes at it.

The tattoo artist will be blindfolded throughout the process, issued directions by you as you look upon the eldritch sign being etched into your skin with great excitement.

It will illustrate the madness which has taken over your life and the strength you have found in it which has made you into the person you are today.

It will also unlock one of the seven gates of hell. Your six brothers will need to get their own sweet tats to unlock the others.

It will be a real conversation starter with ladies in bars. The conversations will, of course, consist mostly of their horrified screams, tortured moans, and screaming orgasms (of course!)

And, finally, it will take between four days and two weeks to heal completely. Pay close attention to your artist’s directions and remember to let the area breath as much as possible during the healing process. Avoid direct sunlight to prevent fading and don’t show it to anyone you can’t afford to drive insane.

And congratulations on your sweet tat. It looks great!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Congratulations on Avoiding Detection!

Friday nights are anal nights. You know it and your husband knows it. Its part of the dense, obtusely worded contract he made you sign when you entered into this marriage. You agreed to it because he was rich, and because you were willing to settle for comfort rather than happiness.

But come each Friday he takes that contract and waves it in your face. Sometimes he makes you stare at the verbage while he fucks you in the ass. It’s kinda weird.

He does it with great relish, knowing that you’re only there for his money but that he has you completely under his thumb anyway. If he can find you, that is!

That’s why you’ve decided to weasel out of it tonight. You can’t just tell him no. That would violate the contract and you’d end up losing all that sweet, sweet paper you’ve been giving up your black cherry for all this time. So you’re going to do what you do best: hide.

Normally you only hide from your problems, but the concept is the same really. You’ll scatter a few Realdolls, purchased with your husband’s excessive largesse, around the house as distractions and then climb into the laundry hamper, almost too excited to stay still.

You’ll sit there with sheets on your head for two hours before he even starts looking for you, but when he does the tension will get ratcheted up a notch. He’ll saunter through the halls, crooning out your name. He’ll say that its time for “me time.” You’ll hear the contract in his hand, occasionally brushing against his clothing. The crinkle of the paper will make you cringe each time you hear it.

He’ll keep up the search for four more hours, tromping back and forth calling out your name all the while. By the time it ends you’ll have pissed yourself a little bit, and you’ll wish that you’d prepared better for this. You’ll also deeply regret not having Tivoed Top Chef for that night.

But the Realdoll plan will have worked out fine and when you emerge from your hiding spot at 12:01 AM Saturday morning your husband will be asleep in your bed with his penis rammed inside a Realdoll. You’ll take a picture and consider how to go about blackmailing him as you saunter out the room, smiling, to check if Hulu's Top Chef channel has been updated yet.

Congratulations on Avoiding Detection!

Monday, May 11, 2009

Congratulations on Vacuuming!

As the most successful hit man in the tri-state area you don’t have a lot of time for daily chores. Your work takes up most of your time, and when you aren’t traveling or murdering someone for money you’re trying to cobble together some semblance of a social life from the disparate collection of friends you gathered around yourself before you started to kill.

Which is why this weekend is going to be so odd. For most people it would be completely normal. Par for the course of their boring life. But for you it will be the climax of the one week of vacation you’ve opted to give yourself this year.

You’ll have done a lot. You managed to get coffee with an old flame, buy some new plants, strip, clean and reassemble all your guns and assemble some clips to save on time during the week. You even sat down one day and did nothing but read and order takeout. It was wonderful.

But what you’ve been looking forward to most of all is vacuuming your apartment. It’s kind of embarrassing, but you put a lot of effort into it, buying a nice expensive vacuum and getting as much of your shit off the floor as you could, practically, before you settled in and started your “business.”

It will go pretty well at first. You’ll fill up like two bags with shit because your apartment is so god damn messy, and you’ll constantly be throwing shit around. Which is why you won’t notice when you knock that box of nine mil hollowpoint on to the floor.

You’ll be on such a rush that you’ll just keep vacuuming with single minded ambition., You’ll feel great, the way you do when you focus on your murdering. Unfortunately this single minded focus won’t pay off as well in this case.

You’ll vacuum over one of the rounds and it will, sure enough, zip right out of the back of the machine and towards your dishwasher. From the dishwasher it will bounce into the fridge, and from the fridge it will bounce into your chest. Its a one in a million shot, we know, and the coroners will be talking for weeks about how awesome it is.

You, however, will be less impressed. You’ll mostly just be confused, to be honest, and frustrated that all of your cleaning efforts have been undone as you bleed out on your freshly vacuumed carpet. Your last thought will be “Well, there goes a whole week of vacation.” Then the darkness will take you.

Still, it looked pretty good there for a while. Congratulations on vacuuming!

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What's the Use in Wonderin'?

Popcap’s latest release, Plants vs. Zombies, dropped this week to expected and well deserved acclaim. To no one’s great surprise, the game is exactly what one would expect from Popcap: a highly polished iteration on some tried and true game play mechanics accompanied by adorable, impossibly inoffensive and infectious graphics, spot on music and airtight pacing. It is a worthy addition to the library of anyone who enjoys tower defense games and frankly, if you don’t like Plants vs. Zombies it probably has more to do with your personal tastes than the game itself. Also, you’re a thought criminal, and Popcap has dispatched a retrieval unit to your location in order to acquire you for re-education.

So Plants vs. Zombies is a fun game. It’s tough to really say it isn’t. It has a lot of meat, especially considering it costs about as much as a Chili’s entrée. It’s a simple, elegant game well worth your money.

But it’s also a game which raises a lot of questions. Questions like, where did my week go? How much head room is there in tower defense as a genre? And are the terms hardcore and casual useful terms when discussing games?

This last one rang especially true for me because of my time spent with another game this week: the latest Prince of Persia iteration. If you’ve played this game you know that the controls are, to say the least, simple. For the most part you just need to press the corresponding button at the correct time.

It’s a lot like a very low rent rhythm game, but with no musical elements and a much dodgier recognition system. At its most basic, Prince of Persia is about jumping at the proper moment. Occasionally this becomes more complicated. Sometimes it’s about jumping in the proper direction at the proper moment or noticing the visual cues to press the Y button at the proper moment or the B button at the proper moment.

But for the most part the game is all about fitting your button pushes to the game’s obtuse timing standards. There’s very little depth to the experience, and nearly all of that comes from the story which, frankly, isn’t nearly as engaging as past iterations.

The only thing to really set Prince of Persia aside as hardcore, aside from its hefty industry standard price tag, is the relative inaccessibility of the game. It’s hard to see anyone who isn’t already self identified as a “gamer” picking up a controller and playing Prince of Persia. And it’s unthinkable that they’d actually finish it.

What really baffles me is that, as a hardcore gamer, I don’t feel engaged by Prince of Persia. I’m playing it and I’m planning on finishing it, but that’s more out of a sense of loyalty to the series than anything else. The movement I love is there, and executing it can be breathtakingly pretty and fun, but there’s no challenge. As a game it has completely failed to draw me in, and I’m working through it because if I don’t I’ll feel like I’ve wasted $40. That and I know for a fact that I’ll never come back to it again after I’ve finished, because there just isn’t a lot there.

The basic mechanics of the game are introduced in the first fifteen minutes and they never really change. All of your movements are based around the same set of rules. This could change before the end of the game but so far the only addition has been a few new obstacles that seem to come from the dark places of Japanese culture rather than Middle Eastern mythology.

I’m completely serious when I say that the original Mario Brothers contained more depth for me than the most recent Prince of Persia. After all, it had that wacky replay option, it required that you solve new puzzles and it had a profound sense of urgency which Prince of Persia lacks. Prince of Persia has had every fail state mapped out of it. You cannot die, no matter how badly you might want to.

Prince of Persia is like Groundhog Day. Its sometimes good, sometimes bad, but it’s always the same set pieces arranged in different ways and even as you change the way you interact with them the outcome is usually the same and the process begins anew before long.

Now let’s compare this to Plants vs. Zombies, a loud and proud casual game from the kings and queens of casual games. I spent a quarter of the money on Plants vs. Zombies and I’ve actually lost sleep to that game. I’d never lose sleep to Prince of Persia; it would be like staying up just to watch C-SPAN or to work out. It’s indicative of a type of mental illness which, for all my profound dysfunction, I lack.

And Plants vs. Zombies is immediately accessible. There aren’t a whole bunch of weird buttons to grasp. You play the game with a mouse. You click icons and click on the ground so you can make plants shoot their plant matter at advancing zombies who, for all their aggression, aren’t particularly threatening. Your grandmother could play this game.

But PvZ is possessed of a depth that many hardcore games aspire to, but will never reach. It has some real tactical chops. The puzzles it offers up are engaging and challenging without being intimidating, and the game endeavors to teach its players without forcing them down a set path.

I don’t want to espouse the game’s virtues too much; plenty of other places will do that, and it’s really unnecessary. If you play video games you already know how you feel about Popcap, and if you don’t you don’t care. But what I do want to speak to is the dizzying space that PvZ leaves for thought and interpretation.

By Popcap standards it is possessed of an absurd amount of extras and doo-dads. It has a myriad of mini-games and puzzle modes, all of them engaging in their own right, and an unlocking system I expect to waste quite a bit of time on. It has a dizzying variety of plants, complete with a number of upgrade options for players to explore. It asks us to manage resources for maximum efficiency, but it’s very forgiving when we make errors.

I consider myself a gamer. In fact, hell, I consider myself a hardcore gamer. I spend between 20-40 hours each week playing games. But the game dominating my thoughts most of the time right now is Plants vs. Zombies. A casual game.

Ugh. The word tastes bitter in my mouth. Casual. It sounds so weak wristed, so limp and lifeless. Why would anyone be casual when they could be hardcore? Would anyone watch casual pornography or listen to casual metal? Perhaps. But not anyone I’d like to know.

And yet, this casual game has so much to it that I can’t stop playing. I had a similar affair with Peggle, where the simplicity of the game was matched with a commanding depth. And if I hadn’t been playing Prince of Persia at the same time, it never would’ve occurred to me that we’re not longer using hardcore as a term to define the experience a game offers us.

Instead we’re using it to describe the ethereal price of entry required of a player, the amount of time and condition you’re expected to put in to a game in order to learn its systems. Casual games are no longer games that need only be played in a web browser while your boss isn’t watching.

Rather they’re games that anyone can pick up and understand, conceptually simple products that ask the player to grow and adapt. And hardcore games are more and more becoming games that you must have a history in gaming to understand, games that demand a stint in a graduate level seminar in order to play.

So I’m going to make a futile demand. I’m going to ask people to stop using the terms casual and hardcore. I know, this is the internet, and I’m hardly a luminary of the world wide webs. No one’s going to hear my plea. But I’m going to make it anyway. These terms have long outlived their usefulness.

They no longer describe meaningful differences in what a game offers us, but instead simply serve to generate a divide between newcomers to the medium and its veterans. And they shouldn’t.

Now more and ever games are becoming a legitimate means of expression and developers are working harder and harder to make them accessible to larger and larger groups, and the divide between industry stalwarts and gaming virgins is shrinking as games slowly but surely work their way into society at large.

So let’s move past numeric scores that run a five to ten gamut. Let’s move past debating who’s got the real old school cred. Let’s all just sit down together and watch our pea plants tear some zombie shit up. Because, in the end, isn’t that what really matters?

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Congratulations Coltrane!

“Hey, fuck off Isaac Hayes!” the children will shout.

You’ll be hurt, not by their sentiment, but by their ignorance. You don’t croon or use your deep, seductive voice (which you have, sort of). You blow your soulful horn into the night air.

For the last three years you’ve lit up Newbury Street with your songs, from the area just outside of Sugar Heaven to area immediately around the Copley T stop, but every time someone fails to appreciate your craft it still stings.

Luckily you’re a strong soul and instead of letting it grind you down you’ll take all that negative energy and make it into some positive music.

It’ll be all for naught, though, because you perform exclusively on street corners. Or so it will seem.

After the children have finished ridiculing you and gone on to buy discount candy and air guitar to classic rock outside of the store a man dressed in rags will shamble up to you. He’ll look like life has just ground him down to a nub, so you’ll blow your horn twice as hard for him, knowing that if you do it just right you’ll make his night.

At first he’ll just sway back and forth to your music, smiling all the while. After the second song he’ll be dancing in gentle circles, occasionally sipping from a paper bag. By the end of the night he’ll be working the crowd for you, collecting tips and chatting people up, getting them into the mood.

By the night’s end the two of you will have earned almost two hundred dollars. Not too shabby for one night’s work. You’ll thank him and offer him half the pot as a reward, but he’ll shake his head and push it back towards you. Then he’ll introduce himself.

“Son,” he’ll say in a thick, drunken Irish accent, “Me name be Seamus O’Tannery-Flannery.”

Your eyes will go wide. Seam O’Tannery-Flannery, famed homeless soul music producer and all around bon-vivant, just spent the night traipsing with you. He’ll smile at your shock.

“I see ya know me then.”

You’ll nod emphatically, excited to be standing in the presence of such an incredible character.

“Well ‘n.’ How would ye like to spend the night in me recording studio?”

You’ll do your best to ignore his leprechaun like speech and follow him to his studio, where you’ll have the night of your life. Except for the part where he gets a little bit too drunk and tries to rape you. But these things happen in the music industry, especially when you get hobos and booze involved.

Just try to be cool about it and enjoy the start of your new rise to fame as a musician.

Congratulations Coltrane!

Friday, May 8, 2009

Congratulations Wally the Walrus!

You live far, far north of the arctic circle. You are covered in thick layers of fur and blubber and you have a magnificent pair of tusks. Your name is Wally the Walrus, and you teach us all life lessons.

Today you’re going to be teaching us about peer pressure. An older walrus will try to get you to smoke weed, and you’ll say no. But then you and your girlfriend will do it on your own terms and it’ll be awesome.

It’ll improve sex, food, movies and make the whole world seem better in general. Your girlfriend will want to do it tomorrow but you’ll tell her no, you’d rather it stay a special experience rather than an everyday thing.

She’ll carefully consider your argument and agree with you, realizing that if she were to do it all the time it might become commonplace and less of a wondrous thing in your lives. Then the two of you will bone sober, which will be hilarious for anyone who’s watching, because you’re walruses and there are few things funnier than watching you go at it.

You have so much wisdom to share, my friend.

Congratulations Wally the Walrus!

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Congratulations on Your Stealthy Retreat!

The lines are drawn. Weapons have been assigned. Rules have been established and summarily thrown out. It’s time for you and your wife to settle things once and for all.

That crazy bitch thinks Enterprise was a good Star Trek show, and you can’t stand to hear her talk about how handsome Scott Bakula is. If she really loves that washed up fuck so much she can have him over your dead body.

And your wife can’t understand what you see in the classic Star Trek episodes. The acting, writing, and cinematography is terrible and some of the props were just taken from people’s kitchens! Great television this does not make.

The two of you will have decided that violence is the best possible way to solve this problem (you’re both cutting edge professional therapists, which is why you have ideas like this and fight with each other over Star Trek trivia) and that the best place for this violence is your home. We don’t pretend to understand your marriage, but apparently these techniques have worked for the last twelve years.

Tonight you’re going to try a new strategy. Well, new to you. Your wife’s been using it in bed for years. ZING! Anyhow, you’re going to put a dummy in your favorite hiding spot and get the fuck out of the house.

Your wife will be none the wiser, and she’ll proceed to beat the living shit out of the dummy, believing all the while that it is simply your unconscious body. Meanwhile you’ll go over to the apartment owned by your mistress, who really gets you, and watch Deep Space Nine DVDs while you eat thai food together.

It’ll actually be a pretty fun Friday night, and way more enjoyable than what you and your wife had planned. So congratulations on your stealthy retreat. We can really see both sides of this argument, by the way.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Congratulations on Skullfucking Your Nemesis!

It was tough for you when your wife died. She was your whole world: the woman you loved, the center of your universe, the mother of your children, those as yet unborn. And to boot you were framed for murder.

The real killer was actually the DA’s nephew so you didn’t have a fucking chance. Maximum security prison was just a brief trial with some flimsy evidence away, and before you knew it you were sharing a cell with a racist sociopath named Carl.

You’d always thought of yourself as a good person, but once you went inside you found out just how wrong you were. Everything you’d believed in was torn apart faster than you could blink. There was no good fight, no chance the make the world better. There was just a laundry list of threats and humiliations, lessons in just how hideous a creature man is.

But you’ve always been a quick learner and you adapted to it. You did things to other men you never thought you’d do. You’ve performed sexual favors and acts of violence that would make most people quail in terror. And you’ve found a strange, deeply unsettling strength in yourself in these acts, a powerful ability to survive.

Over the last few months you’ve been working through your appeals, still unsure of just why you’re in here. After all, you’ve had no idea just who was responsible. But today, following your latest rejected appeal, you’ll receive a visit from the DA’s nephew.

He’ll know all the guards, and it’ll be clear you’re not the first person he’s put here. As he strolls in he’ll pat a fifty into the guard’s hand and the guard will nod, then head out after disabling all the recording devices in the room.

The man is a monster, and if it wasn’t for the glass you’d tear him to pieces. He just sat there and rattled off the details of your wife’s murder, the things he did to her and the people he’d done the same to. Then he told you, calmly and carefully, that you were going to rot in here for the rest of your life. That you’d never have a scrap of power again.

Then he’ll walk out. He won’t even feel nervous about turning his back on you. Instead, he’ll feel strong. Your fury will amuse him, and he’ll see himself as something of a godlike figure here. You’re trapped in a tiny box and he’s running free, taking the lives of whoever he pleases.

When you get back to your cell you’ll be fuming. Carl won’t be having any of it, though. He’ll want his rape-toy-time, and to hell with what you have to say about it. But you’re smarter and faster than Carl, and when he comes at you swinging you’ll have him on the floor before he has a chance to even think about grabbing his shiv.

Then you’ll gouge his eye out with your bare hands and thrust your now erect penis into the empty socket. You’ll shout “I’m coming for you!” while you do it. It’ll be pretty fucking scary.

The upside of this is that you’re going to get a lot more respect on “the inside.” In fact, you might even be able to join a gang one day and exact vengeance on the DA’s nephew. The downside is, your appeal’s process is fucked in a whole new way now.

But when you think about it, it was already fucked pretty bad. So we’ll just say congratulations on skullfucking your nemesis, and leave it at that.