Saturday, February 28, 2009

Congratulations on Becoming Captain Pike!

You won’t actually be Captain Pike, of course. That would be fucking crazy, if Star Trek was real and you were somehow transformed into a particular fictional character from an aging TV series. No, no, no. You’re just going to be mangled in a horrible car crash.

It’s going to suck pretty bad, but you’ll survive just barely. Unfortunately your voicebox will be destroyed, your hands will be too mangled to work a vocoder, and the majority of your body so devastated that you’ll be confined to a wheelchair where your worthless, bandaged hands will work the motorized controls.

It’ll be kinda shitty until you visit ComicCon (you’re a giant nerd) to get your spirits up, dressed as the Star Trek character you so identify with (your mom will help you with the costume).

Once you wheel in there in your tricked out wheelchair and start beeping your heart out you’re going to have girls dangling from each unusable arm. Unfortunately, once they get back to your hotel and discover your useless shell of a body, they’ll ditch. Politely, of course.

But, in two years, when stem cell research finds a cure for your horrible injuries, you’re going to be walking pretty with a solid knowledge of morse code and a great story. For now, though, congratulations on becoming Captain Pike. It would be funnier if it wasn’t so tragic.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Congratulations on Remembering How to Love!

This weekend is looking like a pretty standard one for you. You plan to stay in, drink scotch and hire a prostitute to give you a half and half and spend the night.

However your regular call girl, Carla, is out sick with strep this week. The agency will apologize profusely (Carla gives hand jobs just the way you like them and doesn’t move much when she sleeps) but assure you that Laura, the girl they’re sending over in her place, is a fine replacement.

You’ll be upset, but you’ve been so doped up on antidepressants and painkillers lately that you won’t put up much of a fight. You do force the agency to repeat several times that she is not a cop before you let them off the line thought, so you’re not completely off your game.

The moment Laura shows up at your doorstep you’ll know she hasn’t been in the business long. She’ll smile a lot, looking nervous, and she’ll be wearing revealing clothes. Carla usually shows up in sweats, sometimes jeans if she’s feeling fancy. But Laura will be there in a cute black dress, dolled up with earrings and everything.

When you welcome her in she’ll be a little bit surprised by the state of your place. It isn’t filthy, per sec, but you haven’t cleaned up much this week so Chinese food containers and beer bottles litter your coffee table. She’ll be even more surprised when you invite her to sit on the couch and watch According to Jim.

Neither of you enjoy the show, but you’re both uncomfortable enough around each other that you won’t say anything. When it finally ends you’ll eye her with sadness and a tinge of remorse and she’ll feel a little bitof pity for you, even though you’re a creep who’s paying for sex. She’ll fix you with her Hooker Gaze™ to see what’s up.

Like all sex workers she’s great and reading people, and when she stares into your eyes she’ll see what you truly are. She’ll see a weak little man whose world has fallen apart, a man who hops from prescription to prescription so he can avoid confronting his issues. She’ll see that you never really had love, not even the idea of love, just the thought that it might be out there somewhere until that bitch took it away.

When she sees the pathetic wreck that is your life played out across your face she’ll crumble inside and break the cardinal rule of hookerdom: she’ll kiss you without using too much tongue. Then she’ll take you upstairs and make love to you with a tenderness you’d known only in movies.

The next day she’ll call the agency and tell them that she’s taking a personal day. She’ll wake up before you, cook you breakfast and clean up your place. She’ll tell you some bullshit about the agency giving him a freebie because of loyalty and current circumstances. The two of you will spend a lazy Saturday together and she’ll sit and listen to what you have to say in a way no one’s done for you in a long, long time.

When the night comes you’ll sleep together again, this time with the gentle familiarity that comes from not exchanging money for physical affection. When it’s done and you drift off to sleep she’ll pour each of your prescriptions down the toilet, flush it, and arrange the empty bottles on your bathroom counter. Then she’ll sit down and write you a long, elaborate note explaining why she did it, and how you need real help. Then she’ll pin her shrink’s card (girl’s got mad baggage) to the paper and leave your house at 4 AM, moving through your neighborhood like a ghost.

When you wake up and see what she’s done you won’t feel pissed, which will puzzle you. The rational part of your brain that knows you’re dying slowly from the inside will scream at you to come to rage, but the part of you that realizes you’ve been given a gift will be in charge that morning.

You’ll see the note and realize she risked her job, her livelihood, and her future all so she could try to help you. A stranger who paid her to replace an old lover with cheap sex.

You’ll sit down with the card and contemplate calling the number, then think better of it. After a few minutes staring at the sunlight creep across your floor you’ll sit back up, go upstairs and fill out an OkayCupid profile.

Not the greatest romantic move ever, but hey, its the right direction. Congratulations on remembering how to love, stud.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Congratulations on Leaving the Woods!

It’s all soft edges and soil smells.

Stifled breath and tense motion.

Then a spark, unawares, coming to rest on a piece of birchbark.

Slowly rising in intensity, your father with his hand on your shoulder.

Breath in.

Breath out.

Close your eyes.

And then it shatters.

Two kicks and then ground, hushed laughter and whiskey breath.

Your father’s pistol, a single shot, then stillness.

Your first taste of beer, pale and watery and awkward against the fire.

And then the car the next day, riding in back with her, you can’t help but stare.

You can’t help but fall in love a little.

We all wish it could’ve happened some other way.

Congratulations on leaving the woods.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Congratulations on Masturbating to the Film Desperado!

Tomorrow you (and by you I mean Don Juan Carlos, the world’s greatest Antonio Banderas impersonator) will fasten a belt around your neck and jerk it while you watch Antonio Banderas shoot bad guys and simulate sex with Salma Hayek. Nothing new, this is a nightly ritual for you now.

Around halfway through the film you’re going to pull the belt too tight and you’ll begin to suffocate. You’d be really angry but just before you lose consciousness you’re going to climax, and it’s going to be the bee’s knees. Luckily this act will lead to all of your muscles relaxing and you’ll somehow avoid death and simply fall into a coma.

Your maid will discover you and believe that you have (as you frequently claim you intended to do) kidnapped Antonio Banderas and tied him to your bed so you can watch him masturbate and die while you masturbate in order to absorb his power.

Normally she simply laughs and says “Oh, Mister Gay,” but when she finds you like this she’s going to flip shit, whip out her cell and call 911. She’ll start screaming at the operator in rapid Spanish and it’ll be almost two hours before anyone gets to you. By then the coma will have become a long term affair.

Science doesn’t want us to tell you this, but the part of your brain that remembers how to wake up is a bit of a pussy. It gives up and dies if you give it the slightest little excuse. So its going to do just that for you and you’re going to be trapped that way for months.

While in your coma like state you’ll be visited by many of your adoring fans (roughly half of whom will also take sexual advantage of you) but none of these guests will rouse you in the slightest. None of them, that is, until Antonio Banderas himself stops by.

He will arrive in true style, riding in an olde tymie carriage drawn by giant fire breathing gila monsters. He will be wearing a velour cloak and tuxedo made from the skins of pandas. Under it all will be a Hanes undershirt (of course).

Antonio Banderas will step into your room and, with a single gesture, order the dozen or so occupants lined up to fuck you to leave. They’ll hurry out, star-struck even as they try to pull up their trousers. They’ll whisper to each other, was that really THE Antonio Banderas?

Then he’ll walk over and stroke your cheek gently, admiring your resemblance to him. After a minute or two of this he’ll plant a ginger kiss on your lip and take his turn banging you silly.

He’ll be nice about it, though, giving you a reach around and everything (he really is a class act) and when the two of you finally reach simultaneous orgasm the part of your brain that controls not being a pussy and waking up is going to go “whoa” and make your eyes flutter open.

For a moment your vision will be out of focus, but after only a second you’ll find yourself gazing into his eyes, your hearts beating as one. As he turns soft inside you you’ll smile and say “Hello, my friend.”

Thus will begin your lengthy stage tour and whirlwind romance. And none of it would’ve happened if you just masturbated with Lubriderm and your imagination instead of various improvised self-strangulation implements.

So congratulations on masturbating to the film Desperado. It truly was a brilliant career move.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Congratulations on Eating the Entire Wedding Cake!

You’re an obese man who is being filmed by a sitcom crew without his knowledge. They haven’t aired any of the footage yet (they spoke with your doctor who says, given your atrocious diet and lack of exercise, you’ll be dead within a year) but they plan to after your death in the form of a television show called Living It Up!

Today you’re going to discover their existence when you devour the entire cake at your sister’s wedding. One of the PAs is going to laugh so hard he’ll fall out of his chair while all the other guests simply look on in a combination of disgust and amazement.

A second PA will run up and drag his laughter-crippled comrade away, but now you’ll start to notice that a small group of young men are following you everywhere you go.

This will make you incredibly self-conscious and the behavior which had previously made your life a never ending sea of hilarity will vanish. In its place will be the life of a sedentary, angry young man who has no self-control. The show will shift from being a wondrous unintentional sitcom to a candid, shameful documentary about the horrors we bring to bear on ourselves.

You’ll still die, since you have absolutely no self-control, but now their sitcom will be torpedoed and you won’t live on forever as one of the greatest television legends of all time.

You ruin everything you touch, is what we’re saying, and you shouldn’t have ruined your sister's wedding that way. There were many other ways you could've ruined it. In fact, you made a big step in that direction just by showing up.

But congratulations on eating the entire wedding cake anyways, fatass. On the upside most of America won’t have to stare at your ugly face on NBC from seven to eight on Wednesdays now.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Congratulations on Rejoining the Workforce!

Sorry this is coming out so late. I really hope it gets to you in time.

At 2:47 PM today you’re going receive a phone call regarding your résumé. It’ll be from a traveling circus in Vancouver, Washington. They’ll have found your résumé while sifting through the dumpster of a Pizza Roma who believed that while your MFA was impressive it did not qualify you over Reggie, who, although he didn’t finish high school, totally knows how to party if you get his drift.

The circus will be looking for a last minute replacement for their human cannonball, and while you don’t have any prior experience they’re not looking for a long term hire, just someone intelligent and reliable to help them out while they’re in town.

You’ve been desperate for work ever since you came to Portland and your long term girlfriend left you for some douchebag with a moustache, a trust fund, and a mistuned acoustic guitar, so you’ll shrug, say fuck it and take the job.

This will be the beginning of a successful career which will rocket you to the top of the performance art world. It will also lead to your death in three months when a safety net fails and you’re impaled by a horribly placed spike pit.

Bare in mind, you’ll enjoy those three months a lot. Being a human cannonball is actually a lot of fun. And you’ll end up sleeping with a contortionist for most of them. Her name will be Holly and she’ll be really nice and pretty except for a cesarian scar and a certain air of inexplicable and terrible sadness she carries with her at all times.

But you will end up dying in a terrible circus accident that everyone close to you totally saw coming. You can still get out of it, but it’ll get harder and harder as you continue working with the circus.

Basically, we’re just saying congratulations on rejoining the workforce. Also you might want to hire someone who isn’t an alcoholic to be your safety coordinator. Just a thought.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Long Live the RTS.

Tom Chick recently put out a pretty neat read regarding Ensemble Studio’s recent closing. I highly suggest heading over to Quarter to Three and reading it. Check out Fidget while you’re there, he’s got some cool ideas about games.

Anyhow his essay regarded Ensemble’s closing. Chick said it was the final nail in the coffin for real-time strategy as a genre, and he had some valid points. It has taken some hits lately. Blizzard has been delaying Starcraft 2 like it’s getting its first tattoo, and most of the major RTS releases of late have either been lackluster or broad departures from the genre.

This led Chick to make a Nos-like declaration that, with the death of Ensemble, one of the mainstays of the industry, RTS as a genre is going to die. And it’s kind of a reasonable declaration to make. Few gamers of this generation didn’t play at least one Age of Empires game. And let’s face facts, Age of Empires was great. All of the Age games were.

Age of Empires 2 offered up an immersive and impressively balanced set of factions, Age of Mythology offered an intelligent and interesting counterpoint to Warcraft 3’s heroes, and Age of Empires 3 blended turn based card games with the real time strategy genre. Ensemble made great games. But they made a pretty narrow set of games, games that, while impressive, didn’t do anything to push the genre forward.

As Supreme Commander proved, strictly traditional RTSes still have a lot to offer. But they aren’t the genre entire. And pushes that failed years ago could very well revive the strategy and tactics genre.

Myth, way way back in 1997, tried to revolutionize the genre with things like physics and a focus on tactical engagement, things that are becoming mainstream a decade later. In fact, physics engines in contemporary real time strategy games are less functional than the one Myth showcased. Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War 2 are just now trying to utilize the same concepts that Myth put to work back in 1997.

In fact, most of the ideas of Myth I find represented anew in Dawn of War 2. A focus on formations, cover, and a balance between ranged and melee troops without a slavish dedication to a rock-paper-shotgun model were all central to Myth. When I found myself stuck in Myth I found that I didn’t have to just use one unit in order to move forward, but instead understand how all of these factors worked together in a given scenario. The game taught me how to improvise within a set system instead of how to simply utilize a system.

Dawn of War 2 offers me a good deal less of this improvisation and a good deal more of the rock-paper-scissors balance we’ve all come to expect in RTSes. And this, for the most part, is the sort of play most real-time strategy games offer. Homeworld, Warcraft 3, even the first Dawn of War, are all dedicated to this trend. Sometimes they’ll mix it up. They’ll make it a four or five item game of rock paper scissors. And no game series in my memory seemed more intent on this than the various Ages. That’s the unfortunate path that Ensemble was traveling down.

And, while Ensemble was venerable, the loss of this thought process isn’t the worst thing to happen to the industry ever (that was probably the purchase of Bungie by Microsoft). I don’t want to imply that Ensemble is the only studio to ever release this sort of advanced rock-paper-scissors simulator. Almost every major studio is guilty of it to some extent. Even Relic did it with Homeworld. The game could be reduced to fighters vs. cannon and missle cap ships vs. ion cannon cap ships and super cap ships.

And this is what’s killing the genre. It’s not bad, per sec. It’s just how certain genres work. They reproduce successful gameplay models. First person shooters do it, survival horror games do it, third person action games do it with a passion. This is what’s strangling the industry. Its what killed Too Human, its what broke the Prince of Persia franchise and it’s the reason most of the first person shooters released since Halo have strongly resembled it.

But people still innovate. And this is what breaks down, blends and, through erosion, sustains genres of games and games as a media and an art form. A genre’s ability to change and reshape itself doesn’t represent the death of a genre, but rather its growth. Tom Clancy’s EndWar, for example, is a game Chick passionately recommends in another Rush, Boom, Turtle, and is about as far away from Ensemble’s design philosophy as you can get. And RTS, of late, is changing like crazy.

Even if the rock-paper-scissors model can be applied to most games the approach to this model is starting to differ widely. Communities are reshaping games to their liking in immense, immersive mods like DotA and, in doing so, breaking out of the melee-missle-air balance of Warcraft 3. And Dawn of War 2, while it certainly has elements of rock-paper-scissors play, is just as much about understanding and effectively utilizing each individual unit in the right situation.

And games like EndWar, Civilization Revolution and Halo Wars are all trying their hardest to show that real-time strategy can survive in other places and be controlled in new and interesting ways, that you don’t need to stay married to the keyboard-mouse model if you want to see RTS make it as a genre.

Of course the flip side of most of the examples that I’ve mentioned is that each of them, except Halo Wars, could be classified as something other than an RTS. EndWar and Dawn of War 2 could both be called tactics games, or fusions of real-time strategy and tactics. And Civilization Revolution is a turn based 4E game, so despite its similarities to many RTSes it is, at best, a TTS and really not even that.

But both of these genres are becoming part of real-time strategy as it matures. Sins of a Solar Empire and Sword of the Stars have both expanded what it means to be a 4X game by adding real-time strategy elements to their models. And Dawn of War 2, as well as Company of Heroes before it, resembles a streamlined RTS more than a tactical game, with its light economy and retained focus on acquiring and spending resources.

And Starcraft 2, if it ever comes out, promises to be an amazing addition to the genre, one firmly rooted in tradition with an eye towards expanding RTS-dom. When one of the founders of the genre as we know it today is still making new games with new ideas and new mechanics, it’s hard to see RTSes as dead.

So what I’m essentially saying in the same way Aesop Rock responded to Nos (in both my goal and in the attention I expect to see this rebuttal receive) is that RTS isn’t dead. It just got here, and it’s going to be here for a while.

Ensemble had a lot of problems. The made games that were more difficult to understand as a whole than they were to master and be able to play effectively. They made games that had a compulsive focus on economic micromanagement, something not every player is going to be interested in. They’d gone a decade without making a real engine update and moreover without updating the core game play of their series. And let’s not forget, Ensemble has always been a subsidiary of Microsoft (which explains their creative output, or rather their lack thereof) and Microsoft is doing a lot to ham-handedly kill the games industry as it tries to make its mark.

So I’d say that Ensemble’s death knell is, if anything, a rallying cry for real-time strategies. One of the giants has fallen. We all saw it coming, and its a shame that they won’t be stomping around anymore, but now there’s plenty of room for the little guys to step up and thrive. Who knows what we’ll see in their wake.

A renewed focus on tactical play and a streamlining of economic management? Or a revival of immersive economies with a more refined system which allows units to interact? Maybe we’ll see games completely separating themselves from the conventions RTS has been held down by for decades.

But the one thing I doubt we’ll see is the end of the real-time-strategy game, whatever the talking heads in the game industry say. The only thing that can really destroy a genre, as was proven with adventure games in the first half of this decade, is a conscious decision to stop making games. And judging by the companies which still flock to make RTSes, there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Congratulations on Reaching the Land of Spells and Faeries!

Tonight you’re going to drop some acid in an attempt to liven up your Saturday night and it’s going to be tops. You’re going to have all sorts of crazy hallucinations which will culminate in you leaving your apartment and running down the streets searching for, as you call it, “the magical land of spells and faeries.”

You’ll find it in the pizza freezer at Safeway. It will be a bit of a letdown since they’ve got a serious conservative lean. Birth control bans and a strong tendency to deregulate industry will have lead to widespread poverty, but harsh anti-immigration laws will prevent any of the faeries from entering The World Outside (what they call Safeway).

It’ll be pretty depressing and you’ll actually feel relieved when you get out of there. Then you’ll go home and contemplate suicide, since even the mystical realm you imagined as an escape from your mundane accounting job sucked.

We here at Sexy Results Inc. would like to suggest that you take an active hand in the world around you and try to improve both the worlds you live in. We know you’ll ignore us and go buy coke next weekend, but we had to make our voice heard.

Oh, and congratulations on reaching the land of spells and faeries. A better person would’ve helped them.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Congratulations on Winning the Martial Arts Tournament!

Well, after yesterday’s devastating predictions your future might seem pretty grim. And it is, but not for those reasons (you’re eventually going to learn from us that your son is going to kill you and, in an act of hubris, force him out of your home at a young age ultimately ensuring your demise at his hands) so we thought we’d give you some follow up news right away to get your spirits back up.

So, to recap, your wife left you, you lost the tournament, and you lost your best friend. But once you’d lost everything you felt like you finally had the resolve to follow your dreams.

First you’re going to take up smoking, then give it up. This is going to be tough. Quitting smoking is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do (you’ve had a pretty easy life) and even after that it’ll be a while before you get back in the saddle and start roundhousing it up.

Once that dream’s been accomplished you’re going to have a moment where you realize you’ve always taken Gwen for granted, fuck her and then marry her in a small civil ceremony conducted by your dad.

Once you’ve got the perceived love of a good woman at your back again you’ll be able to train so hard at Tae Kwan Do that you’ll become a force of nature. Every kick will be a thunderbolt, every punch a much, much smaller thunderbolt of similar origin and nature.

By this time roughly a year will have passed, and it’ll be time to enter the tournament. You’ll enter as a running joke now, a highly publicized cuckold who couldn’t fight without a lady going ra ra ra from the corner, but the jeers will be silenced after your first round in the tournament where you totally dominate a guy with roundhouses.

You’ll excel at the tournament once more, and your detractors will quickly come to root for you. Yours will be a tale of true redemption, and when you face the man you fought in the finals last year he’ll smile as you roundhouse him, knowing that this time the better man truly has won.

Then you’ll go on to the final bout against Sean. Sean and your ex-common-law-wife will, by now, have had two kids. They’ll watch in horror from the sidelines as you unleash your newfound fury upon Sean’s body. He’ll never walk again, but you’ll have a ribbon to tie to that little belt thing you’re wearing. If that isn’t worth crippling an old friend over I don’t know what is.

So...congratulations on winning the martial arts tournament, I guess. We’d all feel more comfortable if you took anger management classes instead of kicking people, though. We’re all glad you came to terms with your horrible breakup, but you were a lot cooler before you got so angry.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Congratulations on Losing the Martials Arts Tournament!

Ever seen the movie Foot Fist Way? Well, you might want to. In addition to being a fine film, your life over the next week is going to strongly resemble it.

You’re going to be participating in an All American Tae Kwan Do tournament dominated by white dudes, most of them extremely southern. There will be moustaches, roundhouses, and sordid affairs that ruin lives both inside and outside of the ring.

You’ll be doing pretty well, though. Your “special lady,” as you call her, or Common-Law Wife as most of us call her, will consistently offer you support, and you’ll use that support to rise from a brand spankin’ new participant to a household name in the few households following this tournament.

But come the final round she’ll burst into your dressing room (for some reason you have a dressing room) weeping and confess that she’s been cheating on you with your best friend and trainer, Sean. Sean will sheepishly trail in behind her and apologize.

Your first reaction will be anger.

“Why couldn’t you have told me this in two hours?” you’ll scream.

Your wife will respond weeping.

“I’m sorry. We just felt like we had to get it out. And I didn’t want you winning this tournament on the false pretense that my love was guiding you instead of your own natural ability at kicking people in a highly structured fashion.”

This will puzzle you.

“What do you mean?”

Sean will step forward, head still low because he expects you’re going to roundhouse him at any second.

“You thought you were winning because your wife believed in you. But she’s been cheating on you for the last three years. The only thing guiding you has been your own skill.”

This will only exacerbate your confusion.

“Wait, the two of you have been having an affair for the last three years? What the fuck man?!”

A lump will form in your throat and tears will well in your eyes. You’ll have to sit down. But your wife will rush up to comfort you, placing a hand on your shoulder. You’ll recoil slightly, since all you’ll be able to think about is that hand caressing Sean’s package.

“Honey, don’t you see? The love you thought was giving you strength was never real! It was just your own martial arts prowess!”

You’ll push her away, get out of the chair and stare into the mirror, taking in the image of the three of you. After a few minutes of controlled breathing you’ll be able to talk without your voice breaking.

“Didn’t you stop to think that my perception of that love is what was giving me strength, and not the metaphysical force itself?”

This will give the two of them pause.

“Oh...shit,” Sean will say.

Your wife will put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh god, honey. I’m so...so sorry... I never...”

This is the perfect moment to burst up from your chair, walk past her brusquely and head out to the floor for your final bout where you’ll lose quickly and dramatically. People will be disappointed in you, and your wife and friend are going to feel like idiots. That second one is totally deserved, though.

Talk to your second best friend, Gwendolyn Steinmenz, and get back to training. You’ve got more future in store for you tomorrow.

Congratulations on Losing the Martial Arts Tournament!

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Congratulations on Stopping the Bleeding!

Her name is Christine. You met her two weeks ago and she’s all you can think about right now.

You’ve been single for the last two years, and every day has been a little bit harder for you. Ever since Jean shattered your heart into a thousand tiny little pieces you’ve wanted to love but it’s been hard for you. Going out, talking to people, not crying when you get a woman back to your apartment. All of these things have been challenges you’ve tried and failed to overcome.

But Christine will break down those barriers almost immediately. Her easy smile, her everyday beauty and her captivating conversational abilities made you believe right away that she was the one who’d build you back up. So you asked her out, she coyly nodded and the two of you are soon to embark on a night you’ll never forget.

So far it’s been one hell of a first date. It all began when you picked her up from her parents house. You thought it was a little odd that a twenty six year old woman would still be living with her parents, but you’re not the judgmental type and she had a fantastic body so you went for it.

Twenty minutes later she had her skirt around her waist while she played with herself and you thought you were the luckiest guy in the world. She mumbled something about sex addiction while she mounted you on the highway, but just so you know it was a total lie. She just wanted to quickly develop a bond with you so that you’d trust her no matter what came next.

She knew she’d need a man like that tonight, and she knew you’d be desperate enough to fall for it. When you pull up to the restaurant, a moderately priced Thai joint in downtown St. Paul, she’ll bounce from the car and eat her meal with all the fervor and joy of someone relishing what could be their last bite of real food for the next five to twenty. Then she’ll lean over the table and whisper in your ear that she has something to show you.

She’ll give you directions until you’re well into Northeast Minneapolis, threading you through streets you’ve never heard of, let alone visited. When you reach the safehouse she’ll signal for you to stop. Then she’ll look you in the eye, kiss you on the mouth and say to you “Do you trust me?”

You’ll nod. Even though you barely know her you already feel more of a connection than you have with anyone else you’ve ever met.

“Good,” she’ll say. Then she’ll withdraw a small .45 caliber automatic pistol from her purse, check the chamber, attach a silencer and leave the car while you look after her, puzzled. Two minutes later she’ll emerge from the building covered in blood.

She’ll leap in the car and say to you “Drive,” in a voice strong and low. You’ll obey without hesitation.

You won’t even think about where you’re going, so before long you’ll be cruising down Selby. After a few minutes driving down the thoroughfare she’ll put her hand on the wheel, eyes tracing over the streets as she speaks.

“Take the next left.”

Again you’ll obey without question, and after a block and a half of driving she’ll gesture for you to stop. You’ll pull over, put the parking break on and your mind will snap back to reality. You’ll snap the doors closed with the power lock and turn to look her in the eye. You’ll speak clear headed for the first time that night.

“What the fuck is going on?”

She’ll stare you down and tell you everything. She’ll tell you about the three million dollars she’s going to take tonight, about the Chinese triad smuggling young women through the Twin Cities, young women like herself. She’ll tell you that the only way to stay safe was to stay off the grid by living with her parents and working at various Jiffy Lubes over the last four years and that, after all that effort, she’s going to take those mother fuckers down and ghost to Alberta where no one except the moose and the wolves will find her. And she’ll tell you you can tag along, if you want to, if you help her tonight.

She’ll reach under her skirt suggestively during the last part.

You’ll nod your assent and the two of you will take off, raiding warehouses and hideouts until only one last, big take remains in the hands of Chow Yun-Fat (not the actor), current leader of the Chinese mafia.

After a protracted gun battle you’ll finally fell Yun-Fat with a shotgun blast to the face. He’ll fall to the ground with a sickening thud and his last surviving underling, an accountant, will flee the building soiled by a mix of blood, sweat and urine.

Heather will be on the ground bleeding profusely from the arm. You’ll rush to her side and take off your shirt, holding it to the wound and putting her hand on top of it as you hurry to take your belt off one handed.

She looks at you as if this isn’t the time or the place but you’ll ignore her and slide the belt around her arm before tightening it until she groans. The flow of blood will slow at first, then stop altogether once you pull the clasp closed. Once you fasten it you’ll see that she’s looking at you with genuine wonder in her eyes. There will be something else there, too, you’ll think, but you don’t want to rush things.

She’ll lean forward to kiss you and you’ll drop the shotgun, pick her up with one hand and grab the money with the other. You’ll stagger to the door under the weight of the two of you and the future you’ve just made knowing that the night isn’t over just yet. You still have to get her back to her parents’ house.

And congratulations on stopping the bleeding. That was really a pimp move.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Congratulations on Taping Street Sharks!

It’s been a tough couple of years for you. You and your wife have been going through a rough spat and recently entered a period of trial separation to see if your relationship was worth saving.

She’s been having a great time with it, by the way. When she isn’t clubbing she’s doing it with some strange dude she brought back to the studio apartment she rented to get her life back on track. She’s sleeping well, eating better and she’s even quit smoking since she purged your toxic presence from her life.

But you haven’t been doing so well. You mostly sit at home and cry now, occasionally eating whipped cream right out of the can in a gesture which is simultaneously awesome and fucking gross.

The only upside is that you have a lot of time to catch up on TV you missed years ago. Thanks to the combined efforts of Netflix, the internet and hulu you’ve watched obscene amounts of cancelled TV which has found a second life on DVD.

But one show has eluded you constantly: Street Sharks. A short lived animated series intended to sell action figures, Street Sharks has been without proper DVDs or hulu-enthusiasts (hereafter referred to as hulusiasts) savvy enough to secure its immortalization on the web.

Well, today it’s going to be broadcast on the WB from 2 PM to question mark. Some dude took the entire station hostage in an effort to get that show back on the air. He’s going to kill three people and eventually be shot to death by cops, so don’t let his sacrifice be in vain.

Dust off your old VCR and slam some tapes in. If the only tapes you have are wedding tapes don’t worry about it, erase them anyway. Your bitch wife will use it as a reason to formally divorce you, but trust us, you can do better. Tape that show’s brains out. Switch out tapes after every sixth episode, during commercial, and you should be able to get the entire series on five VHS cassettes.

After that you’ll have all you need to start building your life back up. We’ll let you figure out the details on that; we’d hate to ruin the surprise.

Oh, and congratulations on taping Street Sharks. We’d love to borrow those tapes some time, by the way.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Congratulations on Completing Construction!

It was several days ago when the seeds of Fort Cootiefree were first planted in your head. They came to you after Jessie from down the street rammed her tongue into your ear. You wanted to make a space where no man would ever have to endure such tortures again. And so the fort was born.

Since then you’ve collected couch cushions from half the neighborhood, bedsheets enough to blot out the sun. You’ve even acquired a pair of sedentary, socially outcast fifth graders who can use their superior size to guard the door and didn’t have anything better to do than help you.

And tomorrow you will complete the final phase of construction, hanging the vintage bead curtain your parents lent you as a gesture of good faith over the entrance and ensuring your freedom from the horror that is womankind for at least a month to come.

You will be hailed by other young men in the neighborhood as a hero and young women will stare awkwardly at you across the playground, mystified by your folk hero status and the quiet strength that must permit such an undertaking. Girls will attempt to gain entrance to your new utopia soon, and you need to organize your new republic and brace yourselves for the upcoming violence so that you can stay free.

Get at least three kids who know judo and someone’s dad’s gun and you’ll be okay for the first week. If suicide bombings start (and they probably will) just remember that you don’t want to be remembered as the kid who gave in to terrorism.

This is bigger than the tongue in the ear thing now. This is about remaining men, remaining free. If this fort is still standing at the end of the year it will become a rallying point for second-graders everywhere, a sign that they too can remain cootiefree.

And if it falls, no one will remember it happened come third grade, except that one kid no one likes who doesn’t shower and owns way too many Magic cards.

So congratulations on completing construction. It is a shockingly inventive piece of engineering for a second grader.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Cthulhu Cult of the Geek

The nerd is a mysterious creature, shrouded in mystery and obscured by misunderstanding. Our culture is diverse, ill-defined, and filled with people who view each other with naught by contempt. But we’re still a cultural group, one rooted largely in self-identification. And there are a few things that most nerds enjoy. And enjoy, in this context, ranges from “genuinely appreciates” to “needs to shut the hell up about.”

Zombies are first and foremost on the list. Then pirates and maybe ninjas, depending on personal preferences. The list goes on, delving into some more embarrassing television territory, a handful of films and, occasionally, books that people keep on the lower shelves. But sometimes something finds its way into nerd canon which is both remarkable and underappreciated, something for which enthusiasm is not another form of pariah-hood. Something like the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s works have been acquired partially by geek culture, largely in the form of references to Cthulhu. One might even say they’ve been decontextualized by geek-dom, stripped of their oppressive and fearful treatment of the world around them and instead condensed to a bestiary of squid like creatures of near limitless power.

Nerd culture more frequently refers to Cthulhu than any other part of Lovecraftian mythos, and with good cause. It’s the only real face that Lovecraft ever offers. His other antagonists are abstract, oppressive ideas or forces which threaten both our lives and our sanity without our knowing it. Our minds naturally shrink away from them and to come to know them is to know madness.

Cthulhu lets nerdhood dumb down what Lovecraft was doing, which is a bit of a shame because it really is something amazing. Lovecraft was less interested in Cthulhu, in big highly visible demons that can cause madness with their visage and drew some nice parallels with gothic literature, in general and more interested in the unknown and the known. His writing touches on the idea that knowledge itself is both harmful and crucial, and that to understand the truth of the world around is, in and of itself, a kind of death sentence.

In The Color Out of Space the villain is a swath of discolored ground which slowly eats away at both the physical and psychological health of whoever is nearby. Other similar examples involve an intangible vampire who only manifests himself as a horrible smell and a strange object buried deep under a house, a strange young man who conjures his brother, an invisible and all consuming monster that devastates large sections of American farmland and can only be seen through the use of special dust and lengthy research.

Lovecraft’s horror is self-aware in a way that most people don’t consider the genre. It considers the scientific process and, perhaps more intensely, the emergence of the theory of relativity. It isn’t so much obsessed with a fear of the unknown as it is with the simultaneous dangers of ignorance and knowledge. To truly understand the world beyond ours is to know how unimportant in the human race is on a cosmic scale. But to understand this is, by nature, to rise above the pack, an act which draws attention to oneself. And Lovecraft is always quick to point out that the best way to survive is to not draw attention to oneself.

Lovecraft grasps the knowledge both protects and isolates us from the world we live in. The more we understand the more we are encouraged to act, but with greater understanding comes greater comprehension of just how dangerous it is to act. Of course, if we have no knowledge of these horrible forces then eventually they may come to bear on us and we’ll be helpless to deal with them.

Lovecraft’s obsession with the duality of knowledge and its pursuit is at the core of nerd culture. Nerds are, by definition, people who seek out knowledge about subjects, who are obsessed with and consumed by this pursuit. But this pursuit also isolates us from the world. That’s why we’re nerds: we set ourselves apart from the world in the way we see it.

If we were normal people we’d be content to live our lives and watch TV. But like Lovecraft’s ill-fated explorers that isn’t for us; we have to fly to the roof of the world, dig up the scions of an ancient race of starfaring beings and then be eviscerated by them. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

In Lovecraft’s writing the pursuit of knowledge both isolates and endangers the seeker, and survival isn’t a guarantee. And death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Madness, insidious changes in your nature and psychic imprisonment are all options. Even if you finally comprehend the world around you more keenly, was it worth the price you paid? Was it worth losing the people you care about?

Lovecraft never really answers this question. He doesn’t seem to interested in it, to be honest, and that’s spot on for commentary on geek culture. We don’t choose to seek knowledge, we do it by nature. And we’d do it even if we knew for a fact that it would destroy us, because we can’t help ourselves. We look down on smokers and people shooting up H, but we never sit and look at ourselves, at our inability to, in the words of that one aunt all of us have had, just be normal for five god damn minutes.

But he also knows that without nerds the world would be destroyed. Even though our very existence ensures that horrible things will come to pass, it also ensures that people will be around to stop these seemingly unstoppable forces. Because Lovecraft’s nerds aren’t passive, and they don’t accept their smallness in the universe. None of them resemble Swift’s Gulliver. Instead in their pursuit and attainment of knowledge they find some measure of power and authority and realize that even if man is not the greatest form of life in the universe it is still a worthwhile one, and can be just as capable with a little luck.

So it is fair to say that Lovecraft loved nerds more than nerds currently love Lovecraft. His estate is doing fine, sure. He’s selling books and occasionally people are making movies, but he’s never really gotten the recognition he deserves. The people who adapt his works seem to miss the essence of what he wrote, and they pick and choose to the point where the true kernel of Lovecraft’s horror, the isolation that comes from knowing that you are simultaneously completely and never alone in this world, is rarely maintained.

There are some examples of relatively faithful adaptations or nods. The Penny-Arcade game, for all its absurdist humor, does a faithful job of thematically portraying Lovecraft’s mythos. And Fallout 3’s Dunlop Building is spot on in conveying that sense of creeping isolation as you seek out the truth of what has transpired there.

There are some larger examples, but they’re more dated. The first Alone in the Dark centered around the Cthulhu mythos, and Eternal Darkness leaned heavily on Lovecraft, utilizing it with reverence and great effect. But lately it’s hard to find a solid example of a film, book, or game which faithfully reconstructs the horror and isolation Lovecraft offered.

Unfortunately, by and large, Lovecraft’s body of work has just been misinterpreted, perhaps due to its dense nature. It has been distilled and decentralized through a literary game of telephone until its image in popular culture bears little or no resemblance to what it truly represents.

But if you are a nerd, or someone interested in nerd-dom, sit down with a collection of his stories and read them. Because in his dense, stolid prose there are glimmers of genius and a true understanding of what it means to keep fighting even when you know that the world and the forces that guide it are way too big for you to ever stop.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Congratulations Jockey!

Today, and today only the entirety of man will be transported into the body of an aspiring jockey.

In this young man we will find ourselves experiencing the insecurity of an aspiring professional athlete who is constantly fretting over his weight, appearance, and performance and feels constant inadequacies because he has not “made it” yet.

Simultaneously we will feel the sense of isolation that comes with being fundamentally different. Because of his size and build our jockey (who is today, ironically, our mount, in both the loa and horse-riding senses) has always had trouble with women, fitting in at a young age, and reaching high objects.

This size is partially responsible for his insecurity and constant aspiration towards success. There is far, far more to it, however, and you will be graded based on how well you can both perceive and explain his internal struggle.

Teams of four or fewer may combine their efforts, since this is basically a team building exercise for the world, but everyone here in the office knows from experience that if groups get any bigger some people just won’t do work and will instead smoke pot and get felt up in the library archives.

As for the jockey himself, he’s going to be super freaked out because every human being on earth but him will simply be staring blankly forward. There is one exception to this: a kindly Indian man in Brooklyn named Jerry. Jerry, we hope that you do not take this responsibility lightly and that you help our young jockey through this trying time.

As for everyone else, try not to judge him when he masturbates himself to sleep. More people do that than you think. And I would like to say, to all participants, congratulations jockey! Maybe now you’ll be less of a dick to midgets on the bus.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Congratulations on the Success of Your Sherbets!

Many here in the office scoffed when Frank entered into a trancelike state and began to recount the epic tale of your rise to fame as a sherbet craftsman. We know your sorbets are a delight, but the mere thought that you could apply those skills to any other part of your life and still be such an inept lover and inattentive partner was untenable for us.

But next week you’re going to prove us wrong when the quality of your sherbet, paired with the variety of available flavors, brings peace to the Middle East by giving both sides just enough common ground to agree on some key issues, which will lead to them to see each other’s point of view and live together in harmony meeting once a week to try new flavors for almost two decades before they run out of new tastes and cascade back into violence.

Its impressive, but I’m sure your wife would appreciate it if you brought those ice cream making skills to bare on giving her at least one orgasm in six years of marriage. There’s a reason she’s cheating on you.

Congratulations on the success of your sherbets!

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Congratulations on Ruining Your Marriage, Career and Friendship in One Fell Swoop!

It’ll all start at O’Flannigan’s. You have just gotten off of work and you’ll be outside whispering on your cell phone at your wife, who just told you she wants to enter couples therapy.

Your sex addiction has been trying your marriage since the very start, but lately it has taken on a sinister bent, with some really fucked up role-playing (no one finds Mendel as interesting as you) and spankings that have been too frequent and rough. It’s pent up aggression because things haven’t been going well at work, and because your dad has cancer.

As soon as you get off the phone with your wife you’ll go back in to the bar, where your co-worker Mary will be sitting there with two frosty beers. You’ll relate the story back to Mary and Mary, who’s just an awesome friend and has never really seen you in any sexual way, will tell you that the two of you need to get wasted.

You’ll be at O’Flannigan’s for another three hours doing boilermakers before you’re cut off and have to leave. More 86ed than cut off, since you’ll call the bartender a fag and are violently thrown out the door.

From there you’ll board the Red Line at Downtown Crossing, eating Chinese food and talking about who is and isn’t hot in your office. You’ll head outbound and get out at Harvard, where you’ll hop from bar to bar, getting cut off at each one, until you arrive at Hong Kong, where it’s impossible to be cut off.

There the two of you will share several “scorpion bowls” and in a drunken slur you’ll tell Mary how pretty she is. She’ll thank you, smile coyly and drink more of the most potent mix of liquors money shouldn’t be able to buy.

At two in the morning you’ll finally be asked to leave Hong Kong. Even after you offer the bartender one hundred dollars to stay and drink some more, you’ll still be pushed to the street, since the Mexican barkeep will have been working since six and will really be jonesing for some sleep.

Once outside Mary will offer to let you crash at her place; she lives in Davis and you’re all the way out in JP so it’s a totally platonic gesture on her part. The two of you will catch a cab and spend the ride awkwardly pressed to opposite ends of the backseat.

Once you get to her house you’ll try to start kissing her. You’ll get half a kiss off before she shoves you back and asks what the fuck you’re doing. You’ll confess a slurry of emotions before you finally spill the beans about your sex addiction and she’ll be uncomfortable with you spending the night.

She’ll pretty much push you out in the street where you’ll sit, too drunk to call a cab, until you fall asleep in a fetal position on her concrete porch. This is how the police will find you in three hours, before they take you to the detox and call your wife.

They’ll tell her where they found you, and your wife knows Mary and will assume that you cheated with her (you were always bugging her for a threesome with your favorite co-worker) and won’t even show up to check you out. When you get home you’ll find a note reading “FUCK YOU!” in sprawling letters taped to the fridge, and most of her shit gone.

You’ll pull a beer out of the fridge without removing the note and sit alone at the kitchen table, staring at a wall wishing you were better at reading people. As you sit there, you’ll realize that after last night you’ll never be able to go back to your job and as you recall your aggressive sexual behavior towards Mary, you’ll know you can’t face her again, not without taking drastic apologetic measures.

You’ll sit there at the table feeling the moisture from the beer on your hand thinking that this is the only thing you have left.

Congratulations on ruining your marriage, career and friendship in one fell swoop!

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Congratulations on Winning at Croquet!

Today your father is going to be killed in a drive by shooting in East L.A.. You’ll be playing croquet on his undersized lawn and, until recently, you’ll have been losing.

All of this will change when a small gang of H-dealers he owed money to pull up and fire seven hollow tip nine millimeter bullets into his torso.

You’ll fall to the ground and wrap your arms around him and scream why to the sky.

The answer to this question is obvious. Your father was a terrible person who peddled horrible, addictive substances to the downtrodden. He also overcharged for an inferior product and used unsavory business practices. You just have trouble seeing these facts because he’s your dad and you love him.

Also, you must know this on some subconscious level, because if you’d actually called 9-1-1 instead of having your dramatic moment your dad would be alive right now, so you kinda killed him. On the upside, you are now by default the winner of the yard sport you were engaged in.

Congratulations on winning at croquet. Services will be held at St. Mary’s in two weeks.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Congratulations on Founding That Penguin Preserve!

Next month, in an extremely misguided attempt to woo the affections of a Linux obsessed barista, you’re going to found a penguin preserve in southern Florida.

You’re an extremely rich young man with no practical skills and a crippling social disorder and you’re going to pour all of your resources into this preserve. That means putting out a call for penguin experts in the state of Florida.

There are relatively few penguin experts in the state, and even fewer unemployed ones. But you’re going to get some promising responses to your ad, and for a while it’ll look like this preserve is going to take off despite your ineptitude. That’s when you’ll meet Shiloh and it’ll all fall apart.

Shiloh will be a self-taught “expert” with no real experience and a lot of heart. He’ll also be great at talking people into things, and ere long he’ll have a quarter of your total funding dedicated to his pay and projects and have you convinced the other experts are tools of the government trying to undermine your entire operation.

Once Shiloh takes over he’ll force you to leave the preserve until opening day, so that he can “work without having his vibe harshed.”

We could go through what he’s doing to do, but due to the legal battle going on in the next few months that would constitute publically disclosing evidence so our hands are pretty tied. We can tell you how the opening is going to go down, though.

You’re going to bring the barista to the opening and all of the penguins will either be dying or will have been eaten by an alligator. She’s going to flip shit, you’re going to be confused, and the entire thing will be torpedoed.

Have fun with the impending litigation and next time check references instead of listening to con men. And congratulations on founding that penguin preserve. It will easily be the least retarded attempt to get some pussy you make over the next few months.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Congratulations to You and Your Island Lover!

You met Javier five years ago in Barbados. The two of you were both young men in unsatisfying marriages, vacationing with your bored spouses in an effort to stave off inevitable, soul crushing depression.

You were an investment banker, he a commercial fisherman. He was the embodiment of competence and confidence, you the personification of overpaid ineptitude. After a few pitchers one night the two of you went for a walk together and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since then both you and Javier have left your wives, although neither of have openly announced your homosexuality. You’ve still been playing as hard as you work on Wall Street, occasionally taking a lover from the ranks of your underlings.

They usually find you revolting and only stomach your affection in order to advance in the firm either through your attentions or by using your gayness to blackmail you. In truth, Javier is the only man you’ve ever felt completely comfortable with.

He’s become much more successful, by the way, and now runs a small fishing fleet. He’s still sure to go out with the boats at least a handful of times each year so that he can spend time in the sea’s embrace, but for the most part he simply manages finances and cooks his simple meals.

The only real joy either of you have had in your lives have been the two-week long trysts you’ve forced yourselves to take each summer. You don’t talk to each other about it much, usually just an email or two to double check that you’ll both be there or to make sure you’re at the same hotel. Still, on a day to day basis the two of you think of little else.

Which is why this last year has been so hard for you. Since the recession you’ve been struggling. With no practical skills you’ve been forced to live off your savings for a while now, and when the time for you to meet rolls around you’ll have a tough decision to make.

You won’t have the money to both pay your rent for that month and fly down to Barbados. You don’t want to abandon your life here, but when you think about it there really isn’t much aside from watching Obama do his thing that really makes you happy here. On the other hand you don’t want to put upon Javier or make him feel like he’s a backup plan for your life, but that’s exactly how you feel right now.

So you’ve got two choices: spend the money on your rent or fly to Javier and tell him that you want to be with him forever. This is kind of a no-brainer.

Tell your friends you’re gay. They all already know, but it’ll make them happy that you’ve come to terms with it and it’ll put the whole thing in context. Then step on that plane and haul ass down to Barbados. Javier’s waiting, and he’s ready to teach you all about the fishing biz.

The two of you are going to be really happy. Your lives are going to be a lot like a much gayer end to The Shawshank Redemption. So congratulations to you and island lover. We’ll all be sure to come and visit you on your villa populated exclusively by super, super gay animals.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What the Fuck Is Wrong With You People?

Hello all. Today's essay is a bit of a short one, but its about a topic which has been pissing me off for a while now: the method and metric game reviewers have been using.

The current method for reviewing, and moreover “scoring” games is incredibly odd. It’s exacerbated by the fact that people in the gaming community have come to see this sort of thing as normal. Think of it in terms of other mediums. No one attempts to assign numeric values to the quality of other works. Occasionally metrics are used, a la Metacritic, but the quantifiable difference between works of art is difficult, if not impossible, to establish.

Why did Rogue receive a 100% fresh rating and Forgetting Sarah Marshall receive an 84% on Rottentomatoes? Where did those 16 points lie? What element of Rogue held more inherent value?

I’m being a dick here; fewer people reviewed Rogue and all of them did so positively, while Forgetting Sarah Marshall received mostly, but not unanimously, positive reviews. But that sort of metric isn’t thought of as reflective of the quality of the film.

But the majority of game reviewers impose this sort of metric on themselves. Mirror’s Edge is a 3.5 or a 4 or a 7 or a 6. Call of Duty is an 8, a 9, a 10. But do these scores actually reflect the games and their quality? Is it possible to qualify quality with a number? Is it useful to even try?

This isn’t a new topic. Dave Jaffe’s Calling All Cars sparked a heated discussion on the topic some time ago, and more recently Killzone 2’s extremely high scores have elicited outcries from both PS3 and X-Box 360 fans. Even positive reviews which are not perfect have been assessed as slander.

This seems to be what scoring reviews accomplishes. It foments arguments and discussions bereft of actual information and allows people to distill their complex opinion to an inexplicable metric. I’ve never played a game and thought “This game deserves an 8.7.” I’ve also never purchased a game based on a numeric review.

In fact, I often ignore scores in favor of actual discussion. And luckily people are making this easier and easier of late. Tom Chick and Ben Crawhee are two ends of the taste spectrum who assess games through intelligent discussion only. And Crispy Gamer doesn’t issue scores at all, instead using a three tiered means of assessing quality, based on the attached article.

It might not be so bad, but the people who issue reviews in score form seem to have an almost psychotic means of assessing games. A reviewer who might criticize Mirror’s Edge’s failure to innovate could also praise a game like Killzone’s faithfulness to the first-person shooter genre. It’s rare that we hear the reviewer discussing the circumstances under which they played the game or hear the game assessed the same way you’d see a book assessed.

Instead it’s almost as if reviewers are attempting to direct our purchasing power, rather than our artistic intake. The biggest hurdle games seem to have towards being perceived as art is their own community, intelligencia included. Reviewers seem to be more interested in reaching some sort of consensus rather than engaging in a discussion.

Of course there are exceptions, but overall it seems like people want to cluster towards accolade or revulsion based on seemingly arbitrary standards. I’d like to illustrate my point with two examples: No More Heroes and Assassin’s Creed.

They’re a pair of games with a lot in common. Innovative gameplay, excellent UIs and self-aware approaches to the subject matter. They even received similar score aggregates, within around 2-3 points of one another. But it’s difficult for me to remember No More Heroes without recalling the almost unanimous praise it received around release, and it’s hard to separate Assassin’s Creed from the harsh criticism even positive reviews levied against the game.

Both games involved repetitive tasks and unique mechanics, unusual characters and new and imaginative intellectual property. Both games should have been hits in their own right, and indeed both games did attain a healthy following. But even two years later Assassin’s Creed is sometimes used as an example of wasted potential.

In this era of gaming, where buggy games with poorly wrought stories are thrown to snarling, snapping masses hungry for something to play, the apparatus we as gamers use to assess products has to become more fine tuned. And the treatment Assassin’s Creed received exemplified this for me.

Technologically, that game was simply stunning. Games using the Unreal Engine have trouble allowing a character to move through a mostly 2D plane in a limited field, but Assassin’s Creed executed perfectly on its message of freedom. You could reach nearly any place in the game, and you could do it the way you wanted to.

It was a game, in a way, about gaming. And it had some issues that could be seen as points by some. It was repetitive, it had some sloppily written segments, and sections of it seemed ill-paced or forced. But all of this is wrapped around a game which was wholly original, a game which I’d argue warranted a look solely for what it tried and succeeded at doing. If you don’t find rooftop running from place to place in that game enjoyable, I’m not sure what to tell you. We must see the world in very different ways, you and I.

As for the repetitive nature of the game being negative, this is something which is levied as a negative quality in arbitrary situations. Almost every game ever made can be described as repetitive, and its something modern studios aspire to. Remember Bungie’s 30-seconds of fun philosophy? Try to apply it to any game you enjoy and odds are it will work. Most games can be distilled to little regularly sized chunks that can be recreated. Criticizing a game for being repetitive is like criticizing a cake for having carbs. It might not be what you’re looking for, but you’re simply applying a negative value to something inherent to the object.

My point is that Assassin’s Creed had a vision. It executed on that vision handily, and it was a pretty impressive, imaginative and immersive product in the end. It wasn’t perfect, but most things aren’t. It certainly warranted a look from people who are interested in games as an art form and the progress of technology in general.

But the existing review system seemed to put a surprisingly large amount of effort into pushing people away from experiencing the game. Instead they’re directed towards “safe” fun. Because reviewers seem more concerned with offering people a metric to score whether or not a game should be purchased rather than generating a discussion of whether or not a game has artistic merit.

And we, as a community, are going to be time locked in adolescence until we step back from arbitrary numbers and start to assess games as complicated, multifaceted works which deserve a careful look which could not be replaced by a two to three digit score.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Congratulations to Our New Masters!

Early next week the earth is going to be taken over by hideous, many limbed monsters from a distant star. They will come without warning, kill billions and enslave those who remain so that we can toil in their Phunk mines.

That’s right, it turns out Phunk, a misspelling of the music genre, is a precious resource to some. And these aliens, after hearing a George Clinton record somewhere, decided to invade so they could get their hands on some more.

So half of the office would like to announce that they’re forming the roots of a revolution early, so as to be able to get started rebelling as soon as possible. The other half would like to remind our new masters that many humans are useful, and that perhaps they could be valuable assets if only they were given a chance.

But just in case, and because we aren’t a bunch of fucking snitches, the entire office would like to come together today and offer our most sincere congratulations to our new masters. We wish our military had spent more time employing strategists and less time trying to place lasers in orbit.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Congratulations on Your Coronary Failure!

You’ve been living pretty rough over the last few years. Since your wife left you it’s been binge drinking and binge eating almost non-stop. It’s all you can try to do to fill the void in your heart and, of course, it’s failing.

So next week when you finally up and try a speedball to ease the pain your body is going to flip shit and you’re going to go into cardiac arrest. You’ll technically die for around six minutes before you’re resuscitated by a team of doctors and one night nurse named Charlene.

It will be Charlene’s last night as a night nurse and she’ll be transferred the next day, ironically enough, to the recovery ward where you’ll spend the next two weeks laying in bed like the lazy son of a bitch you are, pumped full of the best drugs your HMO can find.

She’ll be watching you every day, fascinated by your case and your recovery. She truly cares for you, and all those like you who fall under her care, and she wants to see you well again. Nearly every spare moment will be spent over your unconscious form until, twenty-eight hours after your surgery, your eyes flutter open and you catch your first sight of her.

“Shit,” you’ll say gruffly, “I’m dead.”

She’ll smile and burst out laughing.

Two weeks later, when the two of you lay together naked in your apartment, forms tangled together, she’ll tell you she fell in love with you at that moment. She’d been fascinated by you before, your insides and the miraculous way you lived against all odds. But when you said that, a shivering mass of human weakness finding beauty in the world around him, she fell for you.

As for you, you’ll be engaged by her beauty, her intellect, and her kindness. She’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you, and when you die mid-coitus in around three months after you guys decided to get more experimental it’ll be just what you’d always hoped for.

Charlene will hold you as you go. By then she’ll understand the tortured mess your life had become, and she’ll have given you a brief respite before your final rest. She’ll know that you’re happier this way, and even though she’ll weep after your eyes close she’ll smile all the while as your breathing struggles and you stare at her face.

When she leans in to kiss you one last time, she truly will take your breath away, and you’ll slip into the long gray hereafter.

You’ll end up in hell, since the two of you weren’t married and it turns out God is kind of a dick about this sort of thing, but hell won’t actually be that bad. It'll be a lot like the normal world, but with all the famous and intelligent people you always wanted to meet and a bunch of your friends who died young under a variety of circumstances.

So anyhow, we’re glad you found this small moment of joy towards the end of your life. You’ve certainly had it coming after the last decade. Congratulations on your coronary failure. Without it this beauty would be lost to you. Symbolic, n’est pas?

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Congratulations to Your Monkey Friend!

You’re a bored young man with a large inheritance and you’ve been directionless of late. Which is why the last few months have been so therapeutic for you. You’ve spent them bumming around the Mediterranean with your monkey companion, Stanislaus.

The two of you met when you were walking down a street in Istanbul and a man, Stanislaus’ current owner, tried to stab you. He perceived that you had slightly him by not applauding as he and Stanislaus performed a silent reenactment of Archie Bunker’s Place on the street, and believed that murdering someone of your wealth could provide him with money enough to retire.

Unfortunately for him Stanislaus gave his ploy away by chirping and pointing at the knife to get your attention as he crept nearer. You withdrew your vintage Luger pistol from your coat (your granddad was a Nazi) and shot the man repeatedly in the torso.

Stanislaus, understanding the rules of monkeys well, then walked over to you, your newfound property.

You’ll treat him far better than his previous master, giving him sweets and the like as the two of you have adventures the monkey had only dreamed of as he’d spent his nights in the street performers cramped studio apartment. The two of you will foil smugglers, uncover treasure and charm debutants all across Europe and Western Asia.

Stanislaus will be as happy as he’s ever been. His blood pressure will be low, he’ll be eating well and he won’t constantly be under the threat of physical violence from his owner.

It will be a good life for him, but he’ll know in his heart of hearts that he wants something more. He will yearn for freedom.

He can’t read or write, so tonight he’s going to hastily scribble some lines he hopes you can discern to indicate his intention to leave. Then he’s going to take all the money you have on you, a pittance by your standards, and head off back to his homeland at the Brooklyn Zoo.

Once he arrives he has concocted an elaborate scheme to purchase his family from the zoo using a clever disguise and a mastery of the English language he hopes to develop enroute.

When you awake and find him gone, you’ll be heartbroken. His note won’t clarify anything, and will just make you feel more frustrated at the whole incident. It’s only once you see your money gone that you’ll understand; Stanislaus is gone for good.

It’s a scenario you’ve encountered all too often, usually with prostitutes and kindhearted college students who thought there might be something more to you than just the money, then discovered there wasn’t and stole whatever they could to pay for speed and textbooks. You just never saw it coming with Stanislaus.

You’ll be hurt and a little surprised, although we don’t know why. This is the third time this has happened with monkeys since you started touring Europe. You think you’d wise up or at least carry less cash on your person.

Our advice would be to take his note to a Monkey Speaker. There are plenty in Florence, where you’re currently lodging. They’ll let you know just where Stanislaus is going to be. If you play this right you could meet him in New York and help him get his family back.

By then he’ll speak English, and you’ll be able to set him and his peeps up at one of your many sweet ass mansions. Then you’d have a whole family of super smart monkeys hanging around who owe you big. They could help you commit crimes, woo women and best rivals; they’d be indispensable.

But whatever happens, we’d like to say congratulations to your monkey friend. Freedom must be earned, and he’s done it.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Congratulations on Winning the Roller Derby!

Today’s prediction goes out to the Minnetonka Truckfuckers. The Truckfuckers, a local favorite, have been rapidly climbing the ranks of amateur roller derby over the last few months and, following a strong endorsement from The Soviettes, have become an upstart favorite for the championship.

We’re here to tell you just what’s going to go down when the Truckfuckers face off against the Ladybirds. It’ll be pretty general, but if you want to be sure to avoid spoilers don’t read on.

The Ladybirds, while more experienced and generally larger than the Truckfuckers, lack the heart that the Truckfuckers bring to the game. Also, most of the Truckfuckers have lower centers of gravity and are generally vicious, violent people who have had the world shit on them quite enough already, thank you very much. And they’re going to let all that rage out in the rink.

The Ladybirds will have an impressive laundry list of casualties, not the least among them Shelly “Indestructible” McGill, their powerful team captain. They’ll put up a solid fight, and the Truckfuckers will take some hits as well, but in the end the Ladybirds just won’t have what it takes.

The victory will be glorious, bloody and absolute. Both teams will have fought a battle well and will have earned their places in roller derby history.

So congratulations to the Minnetonka Truckfuckers on winning the roller derby! Your name is becoming embarrassing to say.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Congratulations, Rapist!

Well, it’s been a long three years. Evidence has been brought to bear, and many have testified against you, both men and women. You’ve denied their claims roundly, without guilt or sympathy but it was only a matter of time before Priscilla took the stand and put an end to all that.

You never raped Priscilla. You’ve done terrible things in your lifetime (you murder people for a living, and all of your “victims” loved ones are trying to get you in jail because of that) but you’ve never actually raped anyone. But the night you killed Priscilla’s husband you fell in love with her. You pulled that trigger, destroyed her world, and you’ve never been able to forgive yourself.

That made you get sloppy. And it gave the number two hitman in the United States a chance to get all of the families of your victims together to put you away for a long time. Long enough for him to make number one at least.

It’s happened to friends of yours before, you just never thought it would happen to you. But it did, as it does to all hit men. And now you’re paying the price.

When Priscilla takes the stand to lie just to see you rot in prison she’ll have tears welling in her eyes. You won’t be able to look away from her, your face locked in an expression of profound disappointment in both yourself and the justice system. Her eyes will fall upon you and the two of you will share a moment and you’ll know what needs to be done.

You’ll whisper to your lawyer, who will shake his head, and then stand at your chair before Priscilla has a chance to finish her account. The judge will bang his gavel and you’ll hold up your hands, indicating that you have something important to say.

Once silence falls on the courtroom you’ll look to the judge with your demanding gaze and say “I’d like to change my plea to guilty.”

He knows what’s going on (he’s been a judge for a long time, and knows the drill on these things) so he’ll nod solemnly and bang his gavel again. The courtroom will erupt in a cacophony, but you won’t care.

You’ll turn your gaze to Priscilla and say to her, soft and true across the din, “I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you, Priscilla. I understand you can never forgive me, but I’m sorry.”

Tears will well in her eyes, and she’ll know you mean it more than you’ve ever meant anything in your life. She’ll know in that moment that she’s the only person who ever could’ve drawn the good out of you, and that you deserve to be here less than any of the people on that stand against you.

You’ll sit down, your last crucial statement in life delivered to the woman you barely knew, but still loved. Boos and hisses will fall upon your back, but you won’t hear any of them. You’ll just see Priscilla, her grim determination replaced with confusion as she processes what she now knows.

You’re going to jail tomorrow. In six months the DNA evidence which had been falsely brought against you will be thrown out and you’ll be released thanks to the efforts of mob lawyers. The key will just be living that long. Rapists don’t have an easy time in prison, especially white rapists who had so many people testify against them. Lucky for you your entire body is a deadly weapon.

And in six months, guess who will be waiting for you at the prison gates? Priscilla in her powder blue Ford Taurus, smiling, tears still in her eyes. You read her right (hitmen are always psychic) and her capacity for forgiveness and human good will be without equal. In her arms you’ll finally have a chance to be something more than just a killer. It’s something to look forward to as you dream of a life without strife.

But tonight you’re going to be settling in to your new cell, surrounded by catcalls and hushed threats. As the lights go out your cellmate will whisper his goodnight to you.

“Congratulations, Rapist.”

Break his wrists quick, before he tries to shiv you. Keep up the pace for a few more days and prison will get a lot easier.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Congratulations on Receiving Your First DUI!

Not that this is the first time you’ve ever driven drunk. Oh, god no. That was that time you shot your pappy while he was teaching you to hunt because even if the good lord had seen fit to give you titties, he was going to raise you like a boy. He had you drink a bottle of Wild Turkey with him and you still don’t remember how you survived the trip. You were 14 at the time, by the way.

Nor is this the first time you’ve ever been caught. You were 18 at the time then, and you agreed to blow the police officer in order to be let off the hook. Your boyfriend, 19 at the time, watched from the passenger seat. This is actually how he realized he was gay.

This is just the first time you’ve been charged. We’re surprised you made it this far, but you’re 23 and the cop who pulled you over is one of those “fags” who doesn’t accept sexual favors from people he’s arresting.

You’ll be riding with an open bottle of Jameson between your thighs and he won’t even perform field sobriety on you. He won’t have to; you’ll scream how wasted you are at him for a solid ten minutes while he tries to keep you standing upright so he can get you in the cruiser.

When you come to at 4 AM the next day you’ll look out the bars of your cell to see him there, at his desk in that small town Arizona prison, filling out paperwork. You’ll be struck by his piercing eyes, strong jaw and flawless skin. It won’t even take a heartbeat for you to fall in love.

So here are some tips on how to play this: remember, he knows you like to party, so you don’t need to tell him that again. He already turned you down once, but that doesn’t mean you can’t win him over. Show him another (sober, if you have it anymore) side to yourself. And finally, buy a shirt that isn’t a halter top. Cops dig classy dames.

Oh, and congratulations on receiving your first DUI. Even if shit doesn’t work out this morning you’ll still see him at your hearing.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Tale of Two Demos!

Demo before release is the way of things on the PC. Companies releasing a new property have to woo consumers on the fence, and in order to do that they’ll release a gameplay snippet. Maybe it will be the first hour or two of gameplay, maybe it will be a short segment created just to demonstrate the game’s selling points. But, for the demo to be effective it needs to be compelling. A bad demo can torpedo sales, giving people critical info about how shitty your game is so they can avoid the $50 stupid tax they would otherwise end up paying. And of late this is especially important.

Video games have hit an age of sequels, and quality has started to suffer en masse. People are willing to ride of the coat tails of earlier titles, and gamers have been eating it up for a while now. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with sequels, its more that developers aren’t as smart as they think they are. They’ll take elements from a previous game without understanding what made them work and copy paste them into a new setting, bereft of the context that had made it great.

And now two of the first major releases of the new year, both sequels, have dropped their demos and the time has come for self-important douches like me to weigh in and give our two cents on them. Of course, I’m not a professional reviewer and so, like other consumers, I have to rely on demos. And so I thought it might be nice to look not just as these two demos, but the demos of their predecessors as well as the concept of what makes a good demo.

Killzone 2 doesn’t really make a blip of my radar, incredibly high review scores aside, so the first major releases for me this year are about to drop: Project Origin, F.E.A.R.’s long awaited proper sequel, and Dawn of War II, Relic’s amalgam of their two most successful games in recent memory. Both DoW2’s beta and Project Origin’s demo appeared at about the same time, and they both made profound impressions on me.

To start this off I’d like to bring up the first F.E.A.R.’s demo. It was the first demo I’d ever played that made me excited for a game. I must’ve played through it seven or eight times before I bummed a ride to get to Best Buy after its release. It was well crafted, intelligent, and expertly paced; everything that F.E.A.R. itself would be. It gave access to the toys and gameplay that would make F.E.A.R. great and didn’t beat us over the head with its horror aspects. They were irregular and disturbing in a way that horror games usually aren’t, thematically true to their cinematic inspirations.

Not to say that F.E.A.R. was piss your pants scary, just that it operated on the same principle as Eternal Darkness: it’s a lot more unnerving when you alter the context of the game and force the player to adapt to these new circumstances. By spacing out these events and never letting the player know what was around the next corner the F.E.A.R. demo managed to communicate exactly the sort of experience the game had. I’d also like to praise it for being a spoiler free piece of game consisting of a few gameplay segments slapped together, rather than levels ripped from the finished project. It ensured that people who purchased the game would experience something new. At the risk of sounding cliché, it showed that the designers cared.

Judging from the demo, Project Origin’s hasn't learned a single lesson from the original series, bullet time aside. The opening scene could be charitably described as a “horror sequence,” which consists of our latest voiceless protagonist following Alma down a burning, backlit city street. There are no traces of the remarkable and unnerving sound design from the original F.E.A.R.. In fact judging by the scene’s placement they want us to get good and comfortable with these horror sequences. They’ve essentially used one as our tutorial.

The game goes on to go through a 1-1 ratio of gunplay to horror sequences. Each time a gun battle ends you can reliably expect your next experience to be “horror” themed. It kills the pacing of the game and, moreover, negates any sense of surprise you might normally get from the events they show you. They even kill off a character in the demo, a character introduced through a text file and a few random sound bites, as if we’re supposed to care. It’s reminiscent of Jankowski’s death in the original F.E.A.R., but the ambiguity surrounding that was easily the more disturbing element. And let’s not forget that Jankowski's arc was a big fat unresolved plot point, one of the few disappointments I had with the original F.E.A.R.. Basing a large part of your demo on one of the weakest parts of your previous game is a bad idea.

What’s worse, the staple gunplay seems off somehow. In F.E.A.R. it was fun, if routine. Your approach to each scenario could vary and multiple tactics were effective at any difficulty level. Even the demo managed to showcase this, giving you access to new and interesting toys with each encounter.

Project Origin’s demo, on the other hand, consists of an unexpected arsenal of SMGs, assault rifles and shotguns until the very end, when it hurls a bunch of genuinely interesting weapons at us without giving us time to use them. But even within the arsenal we’re given none of the guns are particularly compelling, a crippling factor for a first person shooter. The assault rifle is sort of enjoyable, but judging by the number of headshots it takes to down an enemy it might as well be shooting spitballs.

Even the powered armor sequence at the demo’s finale seemed poorly planned. The interface is claustrophobic rather than awe inspiring and the controls are pretty clumsy. What could’ve been an amazing “holy shit” moment was instead sort of “meh.” Enemies will walk into your field of vision, obscured by the atrocious mech interface, and you’ll squeeze off a few rounds at a time until you stop seeing incoming fire indicators. The giant mech's appearance at demo’s end added a little variety to it, but it reeked of trying to capture the “Oh fuck” moment at the end of the original F.E.A.R. demo, and ended far too quickly with too little of a threat.

So in case you haven’t gathered, I didn’t like the Project Origin demo. In fact, it convinced me not to buy the game, which wouldn’t be quite such an accomplishment but I’d been looking forward to PO since its initial announcement. If I hadn’t played the demo I’d probably be $50 in the hole. Now I’m going to spend that money on something more productive, like hard drugs or prostitutes. The demo was toothless, clumsy, and made me think that the game would be more of the same. Still, I encourage you to play it before you make a decision. Maybe you’ll see something I haven’t.

And now on to Dawn of War II. The original Dawn of War and its demo were solid pieces of work. The demo wasn’t a “here’s the first two hours of the game” segment, instead giving the player brief storyline previews and access to late game units. It did a solid job of demonstrating what Dawn of War had to offer: visceral, varied strategic combat with an intriguing balance between infantry and vehicles.

And the game itself lived up to expectations, although the storyline was overlong, plodding and repetetive. It was all fun, original, and realized a classic IP in an exciting way. It even expanded on the way RTSes work, introducing new ideas about map and resource control. It had a lot in common with Starcraft, sure, but Starcraft had a lot in common with Warhammer 40k in the first place. It was a new take on some old ideas, and even if you didn’t think it was the “best game evar” it’s hard to deny that DoW had some interesting pull and deserved a look.

Enter Dawn of War II’s multiplayer beta, one of the most compelling games I’ve played in recent memory. I’m a big fan of RTSes that focus on the control of territory or specific tactical assets and limit resources. Myth was one of my favorite games of all time, and I still play DotA more than I play conventional WC3 (and enjoy it a lot more). So perhaps I’m just the sort of person this is targeted to, but Dawn of War II’s gameplay is expertly crafted.

DoW2 has the series traditional focus on map control, along with its much touted removal of base building but what is more compelling is the way all the various tactical pieces fit together. Flanking, mixed forces and fixed positions are all necessities in this game, and I rarely find myself giving an attack move order, the traditional RTS standard. Instead the game encourages you to think of the resources you can lose or gain with a specific move.

Each time my scout marines probe a control point or my devastators pack up their heavy weapon I find myself a little afraid. What if the scouts meet heavy resistance? What if the devastators are ambushed before they can set themselves up again? Every action brings with it tension and the chance for great rewards, even if its as simple as choosing how to move a unit from point A to B. Paired with a default game mode which allows for last minute comebacks and daring gambits, Dawn of War II is an intense and fun RTS, and probably the best crafted RTS I've played in almost six years.

Of course, it is a beta, and as such is plagued with bugs, balance issues and other problems. Games for Windows Live is one such problem. The service, which works well enough on the X-Box, seems horribly out of place on the PC. Its clumsy matchmaking, tiny chatboxes and piss poor voice communication all take away from the game experience. I understand why they’ve attached it; Microsoft wants to make it a big deal, and they need a great game to make sure that people will actually use it. But the entire thing is crippled by bad design. Jerry Holkins has done a much better, more reputable write-up on this, but I just want to say that as I play I wish I could use Steam’s friend and matchmaking tools over the ones provided. As the late Mitch Hedburg might say, GFWL is like a midget trying to strangle the grown man that is Dawn of War II. It’s not a real threat but it is an inconvenience, and it’s fighting the product tooth and nail.

But even with these issues the beta has convinced me to buy the game. If it maintains even a fraction of the promise it holds now it’ll be amazing. And, given the treatment Relic has given past serieses I’m very excited to see what the rest of the Warhammer universe is going to look like come expansion time. And all this excitement has spawned from a beta that crashes just about every fifth game.

So I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the demo and the beta are underappreciated means of reaching the consumer. Generally, people aren’t stupid and they want a chance to assess a product. Showing them that you know this, and that you’ve made something incredible even if it still needs some polish, is just a good thing. And trying to overhype a project that adds nothing to an existing franchise is just a bad idea. If you’re going to fail try to do it quietly. The first Killzone should have taught us all that.