Congratulations on Talking About Bands!

You and Kerri watch CSI: Jerusalem every Monday night together. It, along with awkward, brief sex and a dislike of people different than you, form the cornerstones of your relationship. Without it the two of you would never last.

Or so you thought.

This evening, after a long day working at your mid-level accounting job with moderate hope for advancement to an identical, higher paying position with a less transparent name, you’ll get home hoping for nothing more than forty minutes of rapidly interrupted entertainment filled with inaccurate information about science, technology and society and lots and lots of jump cuts. You’ll also hold out aspirations for getting to cup Kerri’s left boob during one of the many tense scenes which will receive unsatisfying resolution at episode’s end.

Which is why it’s going to royally fuck with your head when you open the door to your apartment, step inside, close it and the lights promptly go off. You’ll flick the switch up and down several times, hoping that this is some sort of hilarious misunderstanding between you and your home’s wiring, but without luck.

You’ll stand there, dumbstruck in the dark, until your girlfriend enters the house and almost runs in to you. She’ll be sweating from taking the stairs and holding a flashlight.

“You okay?” she’ll say.

You’ll nod. Speech will not have returned to you.

“I think the power’s out on our block.”

You’ll nod again, jaw hanging a little. She’ll look a little worried and frustrated. Mostly frustrated, actually.

She’ll pause for a few seconds to see if you’re going to say anything, but you won’t so she’ll shrug, step awkwardly around you and head over to the kitchenette to get the candles out. She’ll cluck her tongue as she uses her Bic to start each wick and sets each of the bases on saucers reserved for coffee with company you never have.

Your speech will return as she pokes through the fridge, looking for something that doesn’t need to be heated up. She really won’t want to get take out that night.

“What will we do?”

She’ll assume you’re talking about dinner, rather than your ritualistic Monday night activities.

“Maybe we should just get a pizza?” she’ll say her brow furrowed as she runs her flashlight’s beam over the interior of the fridge. “I really don’t feel like heating hummus again today.

You’ll nod. “But what about after? What about Monday?”

She’ll laugh. “I wouldn’t worry about it, honey,” she’ll lilt as she juggles phone, flashlight and flyer to dial out. After a brief exchange she agrees to meet the pizza man downstairs, where the two of you wait.

While you’re down there you’ll tell her, in a strange burst of honesty, that you’re really freaked out about not watching CSI: Jerusalem tonight for reasons you’re not entirely sure of or comfortable with.

She’ll pat your hand and nod.

“It’s okay. We can find something just as devoid of emotional and mental content to occupy our Monday night while we eat takeout.”

You’ll nod in response and the two of you will head upstairs to eat your sausage, onions and peppers pizza by candlelight. Then you’ll break out the old acoustic guitar and discuss bands like you’re college freshman, using a lot of terms you half-understand and generally trying to reach a consensus rather than engaging in an actual conversation.

It’ll go on for a while until you start rambling about Kenny Rogers and Kenny Loggins and which one is the better artist and she’ll just stand up and hurl her wine glass across the room.

“Jesus Christ!” she’ll shout, trudging over to your front door to put on her shoes. “You are fucking unbearable.”

You’ll be a little bit confused, and ask her if it has something to do with the fact that you think Kenny Loggins is slightly better and she’ll throw one of your shoes at your face.

“I’m cheating on you!” she’ll shout as she stomps out the door, even though she isn’t. She’ll just want to make you feel small, and she’ll succeed.

She’ll trudge outside the door thinking about your relationship, why she’s with you, and how much she’s willing to trade her own happiness for comfort. She’ll start smoking again while she’s out there and consider getting a tattoo, also.

You, you’ll just sit there as your pizza cools staring at the door as the candles shrink under their own flames. You’ll sit there staring until the power flickers back on around you and you see the clock.

It will read 10:21. Your relationship will have lasted a whole three hours without television. So the two of you technically did, briefly, sustain your “love” without the intellectual war crime that is CSI.

Congratulations on Talking About Bands!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Post-Classicism in the First Person Shooter Genre or What Section 8 and the Eagles of Death Metal Have in Common!

Section 8 entered Open Beta recently and I, being the loyal Tribes fan and news enthusiast that I am, started to play it. At first I was upset. No plasma? No explosive spinning discs? Mortars as of yet unlocked? What a load of shit!

As I played it more I began to see Section 8 as more and more of its own game. Its focus on ballistic weapons where Tribes had only one, its curious shield and jump jet mechanics and its impressive passive upgrade system are all its own. And it uses them incredibly well. Section 8 has a strange, military sense of effective weapon ranges, a sense of role decided before the battle. The choices you make as you drop in make as much difference as the choices you make after you hit the ground.

It’s unique. It’s wholly original and startlingly smart, especially in today’s era of cover-obsessed first person shooters. It walks its own path and treats its own ideas very seriously. It does its best to give players an almost overwhelming number of choices, none of which are wrong. And they’re all new choices.

Want to be faster? Tougher? Hit harder? Have an easier time hitting your targets? Be a better defender, drop right next to anti-aircraft turrets? Thanks to the passive modules you can. You choose how you want to interact with the battlefield, what role you want to fill. You can drop behind enemy defenses or fly around neutralizing vehicles.

Section 8 is largely open in terms of how it allows players to work as a team, and, as a game in its nascent stages without a solid community, this shows in the relative chaos that is playing as a team in public game. But the potential is unrecognizable, despite all the balance issues, connectivity and stress issues you’d expect to see in a beta. It’s a very promising, smart FPS.

And, despite its apparent originality it’s soundly rooted in FPS tradition. Every decision made in Section 8 can be traced back to the Quake 2 modding community where, let’s face, it, current generation multiplayer gaming began.

Before Quake 2’s mod community made team CTF games with multiple classes a standard we were locked in a nigh endless cycle of twitch games that came down to inscrutable math between weapons and who had the better reflexes. This is the sort of game play that spawned the like of Jon Romero and Katie Kilcreek, of pandering playboy spreads and Duke Nukem sequels sentenced to death after a decade of limbo. This is the generation of gaming that former the first person shooter, the generation John Carmack has spent the last few years trying to shed and the generation that gifted us with the enormous, humorless douchebag that is “Fatal1ty,” known to his parents as Jonathan Wendel.

Wendel, to the uninitiated, is possibly the worst thing to ever happen to gaming. Regardless of his talent at pointing and clicking in order to eliminate opponents his public appearances, general attitude, and devotion towards marketing low quality products at extreme costs to the most gullible of consumers remain a testament to the adolescent nature of gamers as a community. Even today, each time someone utters the word “fag” on X-Box chat I think of Wendel and grimace. He had a chance to become a mouthpiece for gaming and he turned it into a marketing opportunity which has since seen use in two failed “professional gaming leagues” with narrow focus and little, if any, draw outside of the gaming community. Even within the gaming community, it’s difficult to see a dedicated gamer purchasing one of his products. I consider myself a hardcore gamer and to me, the standard remains the effective, inexpensive Intellimouse.

Many of the negative stereotypes about gamers today can be traced back to Wendel’s behavior in the early television spots netted to him when he was possibly the only recognizable North American competitive gamer. But his star has fallen and one will be hard pressed to even find video of Wendel on Youtube now. And this is the sea change, the remarkable reaction to Raphaelite art, to put it in a fashion only Leigh Alexander might get, that Section 8 indicates.

Section 8 emphasizes team play. It emphasizes controlling ground and holding it, fighting and making important decisions both before, during, and after combat. It’s about assessing objectives, using existing cover and concealment and conserving resources. It’s about choosing how and where to fight and, most of all, it’s about interacting with your fellow players.

It embodies the traits that Quake 2’s modding community drew out of the gaming community, the sense that playing as a team was as important as individual competence, and it has been sustained since in games like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress, as well as their Source based sequels. It is, in a very real way, representative of the best parts of FPS gaming.

Spawning and spawn times are dealt with through a thoroughly original, engaging and tactically significant means wherein the way you spawn and the upgrades you choose beforehand determine how effective you’ll be when you hit the ground. The importance of match persistence is dealt with by allowing players to purchase air dropped gear which allows them to fight their enemies in new and interesting ways.

And it plays in a very straightforward fashion. You circle-strafe your opponents until one of you drops dead. There are variants depending on terrain and decisions made on where and when to fight, but for the most part the game boils down to closing to range, firing your rifle and doing your best to evade enemy fire while still shooting accurately.

It’s something which has generated a notable divide between gamers who are coming of age, people who primarily play TF2’s remarkable, unique and almost entirely divorced from its roots style of specialized play, and older gamers who recognize the first person shooter genre as an elastic thing largely rooted in map control and decision making. I’ve heard a few cries of “TF2 is better” from audience who, when pressed, can’t recall games they played before.

This is both a testament to how much this genre has changed in a decade and the power of Team Fortress as a game, the amazing pull Valve has had towards both gamers and non-gamers alike.

Because while Section 8’s focus on teamwork and cooperation do allow it to be easily compared to Team Fortress 2, it has so many qualities that divorce it entirely from that venerable title. Team Fortress 2, for example, lacks a single assault rifle. Section 8, on the other hand, embraces the assault rifle as the most basic of weapons, the gamer’s general purpose firearm. Like Counter-Strike it demands that you select and skillfully use a midrange firearm in order to be combat effective, even if you try to fill a role outside of that capacity.

Snipers, to their credit, can still be quite frustrating.

And it is this combination of the old and new commandments of first-person shooting, the game play deliberately and intentionally reminiscent of Tribes and the depth applies to every aspect of the game which makes Section 8 the game I am most excited for in the months to come. Time was that the PC release of Red Faction: Guerilla, with its marvelous new physics and equally back to roots game play, promising a focus on rebellion and creation destruction, used to dominate my attention. Section 8 was a footnote, a brief “Pfft,” in conversation which has now become an “Oooh” after I had my time with it.

Because it embraces the best parts of what makes first person shooters great. It’s all about teamwork and reflexes, making big decisions before and during battle and combining elements of older space-sims and role-playing games. It’s a delightfully old school game with a futurist perspective, and when it’s well played it’s simply marvelous. Even when it’s poorly played it’s great. And it’s not a major release from a big studio. It’s a game from Timegate, a company best known for Kohan and the F.E.A.R. expansions. Scratch that, not best known for. Only known for.

Timegate has worked on two games, one of which wasn’t even their own and both of which were critical and commercial flops. But they’ve done something amazing with Section 8. They’ve demonstrated a love for gaming that few veteran game designers have before them. I wince as I say this, but I rank them next to Jon Carmack and Hideo Kojima in their reverence to tradition and their desire to comment upon and improve the bits and pieces that have made gaming great.

So consider this overlong discussion of Section 8 and the first person shooter genre in general a giant pair of thumbs directed skyward. Section 8 is a wonderful game, worthy of the attention of any first person shooter enthusiast and, I’d argue, any strategy game enthusiast as well. It recall many of the great parts of Tribes while blending elements from the Enemy Territory games and offering up its own unique ideas about just how people should play multiplayer first person shooters, and its intelligence and importance in doing so is undeniable. If you’re the sort of gamer who likes fighting other gamers you owe it to yourself to buy Section 8 and let the good people at Timegate know that they’ve made their big hit and that they can rest easy for a few months, until they have to start work on Section 9 at least.

Congratulations Mole-Man!

People have lots of reasons for moving into the New York subway tunnels. Some of them are teenage runaways who just wanted to bone where it’s dark and private. Some of them are mommies and daddies who didn’t want to take care of their children and decided that the state line was a little bit too far Some of them are just homeless people who got tired of the streets and decided to become part of a less judgmental culture.

But no one’s down there for the reason you are. And, honestly, it’s hurting your ability to relate to them. They’re all running from one thing or another. None of them are working on books about urban exploration and having a lot of trouble securing funding from their publisher. A few of them were evicted from Brooklyn apartments though, so you can occasionally relate to them on that level.

But mostly they think you’re an insufferable, pretentious prick, and for the most part they’re right. You spend most of your time down there judging them and talking about how much smarter people are at Sarah Lawrence.

But tomorrow something is going to change. The king of the sewers, former mayor Rudolf Guilani, will have lost his cat that morning and he’ll be horrified that one of the warlike Morlocks who oppose his rule but are too emaciated to do anything about it, kidnapped and ate her.

You’ll calm him down and find her in a sewer pipe that he thought he checked when he was high on painkillers, but as it turns out he totally missed it. He’ll be super, super happy and he’ll offer you drugs and his protection as you traverse the sewers. That means the locals will stop beating you up, stealing you notes, peeing on you and generally refusing to speak to you on civil terms.

That means that in about eight months you’re going to be sitting on one hell of a book about sewer people and what’s edible and what’s not in what is sure to be New York’s fastest growing night spot after Brooklyn stops being trendy again in a little under half a decade!

Congratulations Mole-Man!

Congratulations on Emerging From the Flames!

Words won’t do it. Sounds won’t do it. Sights won’t do it. It’s all about the smell now, now that nerve has gone and flesh has been torn from bone and the air is soundless against the scalp you can feel is too tight and too smooth. You don’t want to wonder what you look like now, you can’t, won’t be able to.

That fear echoes worse than the pain ever could, than the feeling of your nerve endings seared off, the memory of agony that embodied your world a few seconds earlier. That fear is all that keeps you moving forward step by step without looking anywhere.

There is no world. No air, no song, no wisdom but what lies before you.

They really shouldn’t have tried to take your Eggos, but these things happen. These things happen and people have to pay.

Congratulations on Emerging From the Flames!

Congratulations on Acquiring a Pair of Olivia Thirlby's Underpants!

The NSA has had to deal with some pretty serious budget cuts ever since the Department of Homeland Security emerged to soak up funding and do its best to make our country alarmingly similar to Iran in its stance on civil liberties. As a result there are few incentives for you to protect America aside from a smug sense of self-satisfaction and freedom from the constant threat of decimation which exists in all American intelligence agencies.

So when the order comes down that someone has to shoot a bunch of terrorists with akimbo style pistols and disarm a nuclear bomb in the middle of East L.A. there are only three volunteers: you, a Mexican guy named Steve who has family in the area and Cheyenne, a female agent with a chip on her shoulder and everything in the world to prove to the brass.

Suffice it to say they’ll be denied and you, an alcoholic thrill-seeker who happened to be born white and middle class, will be given twenty minutes of firearms training and parachuted into East L.A..

While there you’ll almost instantly be accosted by a group of Latino gang members, most of whom are actually UCLA students from various departments who happened to be well armed thanks to their affluent parents and living in East L.A. in a rented flat together to have a “cultural experience.” It’ll be dodgy at first, but you’ll do a quick impromptu rap session and win them over in record time in order to enlist their aid in defeating the terrorists.

Mean streets of Beverly Hills or no, these kids love America and hate terror as much as the next fellow and they’ll all but jump for joy when you ask them to help you shoot people. Unfortunately, they’ll be woefully poorly trained and the vast majority of them will die from bullet wounds during the ensuing dockside shoot out.

But their sacrifice will give you the time you need to jump through the air and fire blindly the way the government trained you, which will prove surprisingly effective. You’ll handily kill all of the terrorists and only be shot about three times (luckily the training program also encompassed gritting your teeth and dealing with the pain, otherwise you might not have made it).

After the shootout and a hasty bit of work with wire cutters and a very informative field manual you’ll pick up your lone surviving ethnic companion, a young man named James whose father teaches film studies, and the two of you will drag yourselves to a police station to declare your mission accomplished.

James will be held for six hours before being released into his parent’s custody and you’ll be held for two days on suspicion of intent to purchase narcotics from a minor until the NSA shows up and informs them that you are, in fact, a government agent and they’d very much like you back.

After that your wounds will be treated and you’ll be flown coach back to D.C. where Obama will give you a handshake and your choice between a box of cupcakes and a set of decorative soaps. You’ll take the soaps and thank the President, and he’ll smile, splitting the box of cupcakes anyways with you because he’s classy that way.

It will be two weeks later when you receive a package with his name as the sender. You’ll have been sitting at your desk wishing there was another opportunity for you to kill or be wounded for your country, just so you can feel something again, when your boss drops the package on your desk.

“Sorry this took so long,” he’ll say, exhaling a long plume of smoke from his cigarette because the NSA is rough and tumble and still lets people do that shit in their office. You’ll nod your thanks and open the package.

Inside there will be a brief note, reading Thanks for taking three for America. Then under that there will be a pair of slightly used underpants and an autographed picture of established young actress Olivia Thirlby.

You’ll simultaneously feel kind of dirty and kind of honored that she decided to give you her underpants. You’ll also be a little bit weirded out that your country has stopped giving out medals for being wounded in lieu of soliciting patriotic young actresses for their underpants, but you’ll still take them. You’ll feel a little dirty, but you’d hate to insult her. And your wife will love the autographed picture.

You won’t be sure whether or not you should tell her about the panties, but we suggest that you give her the full rundown. That way she won’t think that you were cheating on her during your two day absence with the terrorists, because trust us, that’s exactly where her head is going to be at if you don’t do some serious damage control.

But hey, it’s your marriage. Either way, Congratulations on Acquiring a Pair of Olivia Thirlby’s Underpants!

Congratulations on Finishing Up Vocational School!

You’ve always been a bit ashamed of not having completed your degree. You gave it a shot a good many times, studying at Oxford, Harvard and even ITT. But you’ve always had an ailing relative or a meth problem or a crazy girlfriend who sabotaged your life and stole all your credit cards.

Which is why it’s going to be such a big deal when you complete vocational school next Thursday, covered in blood and chanting in Sanskrit for a demon goddess to bless you with the power of her thousand unnameable young. You’ll stand proud amongst the few other DeVry students who didn’t succumb to madness or worse, become enslaved by the demons.

Now you’ve just got to find a job with a small warlocking firm and start working your way up in the world. It’s a competitive industry, but with the skills you’ve developed and the pride you’ve found through your studies you’ll be prepared to sink that sacrificial dagger into your boss’ belly when the time comes so that you can take his place.

It wasn’t an easy path to tread, but you’ve done it. So congratulations on finishing up vocational school. Now get out there into the world and make us and your demon masters proud!

Congratulations! Kentucky is For Lovers!

Kentucky is kind of a rough place. Most people don’t go there if they can help it. Some of us have family or illegitimate children staining its amber plains, but for the most part the majority of humankind can and does avoid Kentucky at all costs.

But you’re not like other people. You’re part of a lesbian bank robbing duo with nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go. So surprise sur-fucking-prise, you’re going to go to Kentucky.

You and your girlfriend will get into a pretty big fight about it. The term “breakup” will come up a few times, along with the phrase “fucked with a piece of glass” and “rather give Bigfoot a blowjob.” But in the end the two of you will agree that Kentucky, with its unique combination of conservatism, relative isolation, total lack of significance and crippling poverty, is the best bet for you if you don’t want the feds to catch you.

In reality they’ll be busy trying to track down various fields of pot in locations scattered across the west coast. Far, far too busy to be looking for the two of you and the absurd amounts of money you’ve stolen from the government.

When the two of you arrive you’ll buy some land dirt cheap. After that you’ll hire some Mexicans to farm it for you and generally form a circle of friends around you. Life will be good for the first two months before the hate crimes start.

Even though you purposefully built your lives on a place almost as far away from “civilized” Kentucky as possible hicks will be drawn to your gayness, all the more so because only your partner could be considered conventionally attractive. The thought of a hot chick with an okay looking chick will fill these men with rage and they’ll be forced by forces they cannot understand to track you down and beat you with tire irons.

You’ll fend them off for a few months with the help of your Mexican friends/laborers. You treat them right and they know that if you fall they’re next. Once this country is done dealing with the gays it is almost universally understood that Mexicans will be next up against the wall.

You’ll kill thousands of hicks with your bank robbing skills and your general resourcefulness. The general stupidity of the hicks will help too. But there will be a seemingly endless supply and eventually the two of you will decide to take what money you have left (1.6 billion dollars) and depart for greener pastures.

You’ll share a kiss as you torch your barn and wave goodbye to your frustrated Mexican employees, getting in your 1998 Camry and start driving for the Ohio border with dreams of the mystical city known as Cleaveland stuck in your heads. You had a good run, but Kentucky wouldn’t have any of it. Sure, they could’ve used the money, but they’ve just got so many problems with who you are fundamentally that they never would’ve taken it.

Ah well. You tried, right?

Congratulations! Kentucky is for Lovers!

Congratulations Freak-Face!

A lot of people would be afraid of going out in public with a mug like that, elephant man. But you’re out there every day, clubbing it up and letting your flag fly. The weird thing is just how successful you are.

You took lessons from that douchebag who uses terms like “escalate the situation” in regards to sex and women in general, and it turns out they work. They work freakishly well. You have to be kind of weird looking, so you can qualify as a “what the fuck fuck” and you need to behave in a fashion bordering on dickishly aggressive most of the time, but you get a good deal of play.

The problem is that to a woman everyone you’ve ever hooked up with has woken up the next day and recoiled in horror at your fucking face. So even though your sexual conquests could form a reasonably sized secret society you’re almost suicidaly depressed due to loneliness.

You’ve tried picking up only blind women in the hope that they’ll see your “inner beauty,” but you’ve put so much of yourself into that douche bag persona that they touch your brick wall of a face after listening to you talk and usually knee you in the balls. You even gave a “Helen Keller” a shot. We’re not even sure how you found her, but we both know how well that ended.

And that brings us to the present day, when you’ll be walking to Katz’s for a nosh. You’ll be more bummed than usual and you’ll be feeling like life couldn’t get any worse when a construction worker above you drops a hammer. The hammer will fracture your skull, knocking you unconscious and completely eradicating the part of your brain that remembers your past – most importantly the part that remembers the douchebag conditioning which has rendered you incapable of expressing genuine human emotion.

As fate will have it an attractive young blind woman who has no idea how hot she is will be walking by at the time. She’ll use her super blind senses to detect your injuries and use her freakishly well honed skills as a medic who served three tours in Iraq to stabilize you before the ambulance arrives. She’ll stay by your side for a day and a half until you regain consciousness, muttering constantly about not losing another one.

She’ll have felt your head and will know full and well how ugly you are, but she’ll also have grabbed your crotch while she was checking you for additional injuries and she’ll know what you’ve got down there (a 14 inch penis) so she’ll shrug and decide to give it a shot.

And once you wake up and start talking with your default polite, shy personality, the one that made all those sensitive girls who were too insecure with their own bodies to act on their desires want to fuck the shit out of you in high school, she’ll be deeply enamored. She’ll feel like she’s made her first right choice since she got home from overseas.

As for yourself, you’ll be incredibly charmed by this beautiful, intelligent young woman and a little bit intimidated by her raw capability. But her post-traumatic stress disorder will give her a sense of vulnerability to even it out and you’ll love the seemingly unconditional affection she heaps upon you. It’ll be the best possible match for you, really.

Once your family helps you recover your memory and informs you of how unbearable you were before your head injury you’ll take her hand and force her to promise to smash your skull using her Army training if you ever display those old habits. She will dutifully execute her duties until you die of a concussion at the age of sixty-eight, aggressively attempting to hit on a barista.

Congratulations Freak-Face!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Let's Talk About Games!

Games are a strange medium, and the way they’re written about and discussed is just as strange to match. In relatively few other mediums do we assess our entertainment as an investment rather than an experience. Occasionally people will bring up the rising price of a film ticket to demonstrate something’s poor quality or claim that a book isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, to take our cultural discourse back a few steps, but no other medium really seems as obsessed with consumer costs as video games.

Games like World of Goo and The Path, for example, can afford to be touted as experience because of their low price point. But compare that to games like No More Heroes, Call of Duty and Dawn of War. In each case we’re forced to assess these works with an eye towards their cost because we’re in an industry obsessed with how much these objects cost.

And it’s totally understandable, really. Other mediums have delivery methods which allow them to focus on critical reception and response. They develop “classics,” and the creators of these classics move in to public discourse and become indelibly connected with their creations. Games are just starting to develop this sort of developer-player trust, whereas films and television have had it for years. If Joss Whedon makes a show there is an established audience. It will be a relatively sizeable one, at that, and the strength of his work will probably draw in people unfamiliar with his creation.

But aside from Shigeru Miyamoto there aren’t too many household names in games with Whedon’s sort of pull. There are rising stars like Ken Levine and old stalwarts like Ron Gilbert, but these names mean relatively little to the “man on the street.” And it shows. Whose name is being used to sell Brutal Legend? Is it Tim Schaffer, critically celebrated game developer who has a lengthy career of making wonderfully imaginative games with vastly varying degrees of commercial success but consistent quality throughout? Or is Jack Black, a comedian whose career could be used to model a high frequency wave, who’s still trying to ride Tenacious D to some sort of public goodwill almost a decade after their antics, whose most memorable recent performance was as a junkie who remakes Eddie Murphy movies?

This sort of shit is commonplace. We lack real celebrities because our creators, like our players, are awkward nerds. They’re not outdoor kids. And if they were we’d hate them. Remember Jon Romero, back in the 90s, with his talk of sports cars and his supermodel girlfriend? Remember how great it felt to watch him fail? And today we have CliffyB, whose is possessed of an awkward dual person where he drives a lambourgini and poses with giant replica weapons from his games and also speaks softly and eloquently, with great enthusiasm, about games as an art form.

And this is the sort of dichotomy we have to embrace in discourse of our games. We have to recognize that we are enthusiasts in a medium that is simultaneously a huge, developing business and a nascent art form. As a result the only way to effectively write about this medium is to write with both of these points in mind. And that’s completely alien to any other sort of writing about entertainment.

Let’s take a look at Starcraft 2 and the recent news of its delay for a perfect example. There were two stories here, one about a perfectionist developer trying to hammer out the kinks in what most of the gaming public already believed was an excellent multiplayer matching service and the tale of a greedy CEO and CFO purposefully fudging their numbers so that their public shareholders wouldn’t develop unrealistic expectations for next year. The only person I saw reporting both these stories was Tom Chick, despite the prolific nature of the news. What’s bigger, especially to gaming in a global context, than Starcraft’s sequel? Nothing, that’s what.

But we, as a cultural group, seemed content to watch one side of the story push through, doing our best to ignore the business end. We found the story we wanted, the story of artists perfecting their craft, and as a result we lost the entire story. It’s something we do all too often, something which tends to skew our expectations for various games. We try to look at the game from one perspective or another rather than viewing it simultaneously from both an artistic and a business-minded perspective.

And it makes life a lot easier. Let’s look at EA, a company which has undergone some pretty serious changes in the last year but still has some serious problems. EA’s marketing machine is completely divorced, or so it would seem, from the artistic input of their game makers. The abysmal Dragon Age trailers, the absolutely retarded Dante’s Inferno marketing campaign twists, the continued pursuit of booth babes and the attempt to convince non-gamers that games are just as cool as summer blockbusters in order to get their attention, all of these trends display a profound disrespect for the established community of gamers who now, in their approaching maturity, want to be sold something on its genuine merits rather than being treated like they’re at the kids table at Thanksgiving. But if they market it this way they still get to make great games and introduce new people to games as an art form without risking money, because they’re divorcing their brainless marketing machine from their frankly incredible creative enterprise.

Of course, this causes no shortage of hate speech targetting EA, and rightly so. They’re hurting our medium, stifling our growth and our attempts to become all grown up. But then we actually sit down and play their games and nod in satisfaction: these games were made by people who get games and their production and should continue to make them. Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect and, hell, even Mirror’s Edge were all clearly games for gamers and all of them attempted to forward gaming as a medium and make an interesting statement about games as an unconventional narrative form.

But we’d never know to watch their seemingly carelessly hired marketing agencies tout their products. The only hints we get of how much EA genuinely cares for their creative people come during crisis times. Remember when Mass Effect came under all that flak for having a PG-13 sex scene in it? Bioware didn’t rush to their own defense. Instead it was John Ricotello, of all people, who came out and defended the game. They got Geoff Keighly on Fox News to defend it and they did all they could to let people know that this was an artistic labor of love and not a softcore porn sim. And when the invisible wall between the business and art ends of their business collapsed, a strange thing happened.

I developed a modicum of respect for John Ricotello.

I know, I probably just lost all of my gamer cred there, but hear me out. The people he represents, the people upon whose creative efforts his empire is built, came under attack. And he stood up for them. He spoke to the legitimacy of their creations as the man who bankrolls them. He made sure we knew he cared about games as more than a meal ticket. And that’s the sort of discourse we need.

Some people are taking a very direct approach to it. Gamasutra, for example, discusses both the business and artistic elements of games with great aplomb. Leigh Alexander is sort of a paragon of this. Anyone who wants to see how the discussion of games should work should check out her blog piece on Evergreen titles, the titles which result in sustained hardware sales for a particular console. Leigh grasps that this is a creative industry with a high per-unit cost which results in a really strange sort of business and consumer environment, and she’s willing to talk about the issues that this brings up both on her personal site and on Gamasutra through amazing business authors like Christian Nutt, who exposes elements of the way games are made that I would never understand without his aid.

And other critics, such as Tom Chick and Geoff Keighly, combine these elements in their discussions, consciously or unconsciously, Chick through his sometimes scattered but always intriguing writing, Keighly by bringing people like Michael Patcher into discussions with people like David Jaffe (with hilarious results). These are the sort of writers and reporters we need more of, people who perceive games as both a business and an art form and who can impart the importance of both these aspects on to their readership.

Because games as a business and an art are so different from anything else out there right now. Games cost more to produce and purchase and take more effort than any other sort of medium. And no other entertainment medium, aside from perhaps television, has to be quite so concerned with both public and critical reception. And games have it much rougher. There aren’t magazines dedicated to the private lives of the people who make games, nor is their discourse on the behavior and thoughts of any but the most outrageous of game makers. The closest thing we have to a Joss Whedon or a J.J. Abrams is Shigeru Miyamoto, and it’s hard to tell just how much creative input that venerable game maker has nowadays.

Because we’re not trying to talk about it. We’re not sitting down, micing him up and asking him where he wants Mario to go as a franchise and why he’s making the games he’s making. Instead we’re satisfied to look at his games as commercial measures which succeed or fail and then discuss them as entirely separate artistic endeavors which accomplish their goals or don’t. We’re willing to let things like Beyond Good and Evil and Psychonauts happen again and again because we, as an audience, aren’t stepping up and forcing our writers to engage in a higher level discussion.

And that’s a problem. It’s a problem with an easy solution, though. Stop reading industry-only press run by people who seem to want internet fame and start reading writing by actual, legitimate journalists like Keighly and Alexander who want to elevate the discourse on games and bring it to a popular audience without losing any of its heft. Because the only people we can really blame for the current state of discourse on games, on the iron curtain between people who love games and sell them, are ourselves.

Congratulations Mattressman!

You’re the third best mattress salesman this side (the east side) of the Jersey Turnpike. But tomorrow that’s going to change.

Tomorrow you’re going to take an axe and murder Robert Gauling, the second best mattressman this side of the Jersey Turnpike with an axe.

You’ll be placed in prison, but your assets, thanks to your mob contacts, will be allowed to flourish. That’ll push you up into the coveted number two position. Now all you need to do is avoid being raped or murdered for a few months and then you’ll be in a perfect position to leverage Mike “Matressman” Mitchell in to merging your businesses and ruling the east side of Jersey’s mattress world as two kings until you murder him on a boardwalk with a croquet mallet while his family watches.

Keep your head up and you’ll be riding high, my friend.

Congratulations Matressman!

Congratulations on Meeting Judge Reinhold!

AA is a big community, spanning coast to coast. That said, if you move around enough you’ll see the same faces for the most part. People worn down by life, people who have all but given up, people who are showing up because it’s court mandated and it gets them out of their house arrest for an hour every Tuesday.

Watching them struggle, fail and succeed, it can get to be a little much. There’s only so much regularly scheduled, touching human drama you can handle, especially when it just hits every fucking week. Karen will backslide or Greg will slip up and end up spending the night with his ex again.

Its just so hum drum. Which is why, despite desiring to be a part of something in order to keep yourself grounded, you’ve decided recently to give it up and start drinking.

You’ll start tomorrow night in the seediest of San Francisco bars, a little joint called Chipolte, located in the mall food court. You’ll bring a bottle of Canadian Club in with you and pound it right there, just to make sure that everyone in the joint knows you like to party. Most of the patrons will start to lose their shit.

“Why is this man drinking in our burrito establishment?” they’ll ask.

“FUCK YOU!” you’ll reply.

“That is not a valid response,” they will retort.

“GAAAAAY,” you’ll parrot, not helping yourself at all.

At first it’ll seem like you’re in for some of that fierce violence and scorn the San Francisco gay community is so famed for. But then, even as some of the queens and the sweater-vest wearing liberals slip on their brass knuckles, a lone straw of a man will stand up and stretch out his hands.

“Sir,” he’ll say calmly. “You seem like you like to party.”

“FUCK YEAH!” you’ll respond. You do like to party, and this eerily familiar man will have proven himself quite a perceptive individual by noticing this. “I LIKE YOU!” you’ll declare.

The man will laugh. “Of course you do,” he’ll say, his slight belly shaking with laughter. That’s when you’ll recognize him.

“HOLY SHIT,” you’ll exclaim. “YOU’RE JUDGE REINHOLD!”

He’ll spread his hands wider as the crowd oohs and ahhs and generally agrees. Then he’ll nod and say “Guilty as charged.”

Everyone will burst out laughing and forget all about murdering you, and Judge Reinhold will sit down with you for a drink and a taco salad. This will lay the groundwork for one of the most successful bank robbing duos of the 21st century as well as our office’s new favorite “will they, won’t they” same-sex, ostensibly straight couple.

Congratulations on Meeting Judge Reinhold! Shit is about to get real.

Congratulations on Being Invited to the Circle Jerk!

You’ve been trying to join the Illuminati since junior high. Not because you crave political power or anything like that, but because you hear they have the coolest parties and find the Hottest Bitches™, at least according to the Warholm-Flannery Scale of Bitch-Hotness (arguably the most objective bitch assessment system).

But it’s been a difficult journey. The Illuminati Club in college was okay, but it was more about enthusiasm than participation. It helped you make a few connections, but you found out that hanging around the Lyn-Lake PopEye’s was more beneficial than sitting around with a bunch of Ivory Tower fuckers talking about how much they love the idea of a super secret organization controlling their lives.

In fact Greg, the manager of that PopEye’s, became something of an acquaintance and recently, after you blew him for the fifth time in the PopEye’s break room, he invited you to an Illuminati event. You immediately agreed to go without listening to any part of his description, so you’re going to be pretty shocked when you show up to the warehouse and find not a single hot bitch waiting for you.

Instead the warehouse will be about half-full of white dudes in vastly varying states of physical fitness. It’ll run the gamut from Dick Cheney to Tom Cruise, not to give anything away. They’ll all be wearing hooded robes and it’ll seem like some sort of initiation.

But as it turns out they’ll just start right up into reading the minutes of the last meeting. It’ll consist of a lengthy debate about who the best Three’s Company character was which never really resolves itself. Then they’ll disrobe and begin the “act of unit,” which consists of masturbating in a series of circles into kiddie pools filled with strange Asian women of varying malnutrition.

They’ll all be horrified, and none will really qualify as “hot” by any standard. In fact, most of them will be missing teeth.

But the Illuminati, these men you’ve spent so much time trying to endear yourself to, will be jerking off on them with wild abandon. You’ll shrug your shoulders and decide to join in halfhearted, failing to spill your seed on a Vietnamese prostitute who will look at you like you’re the only one who can save her life.

You won’t be invited to another meeting, and you won’t mind, since next week you’ll meet the head of the Masons in a Starbucks and find out about a full out rave at their mansion next week.

So Congratulations on Being Invited to the Circle Jerk! It wasn’t very fun, but it was a great learning experience, right?

Congratulations Fans of Foreigner!

As a social group there are few people more disenfranchised than fans of the band Foreigner. In many nations they’re relegated to the role of second-class citizens. Many of them are without food or water, and some have to receive aid from Sally Struthers and that really trustworthy looking black guy no one in the office could remember the name of. You know the one I mean, the one who does the State Farm commercials.

But I digress. The bulk of the issue with Foreigner fans stems from a lack of centralized leadership. The band is too busy dealing with organ failure or being high on H most of the time to actually manage their fan base, and a strong leader has never emerged to unify the fans under one banner.

A big part of the problem there is disagreement about just which Foreigner song is best. Some claim Cold As Ice is their greatest hit, others Hot Blooded. Obviously these view points have some serious trouble co-existing. Then there are the people who believe Europe’s Final Countdown is the best Foreigner song. That’s a whole other can of worms.

It’d take some pretty serious shit to get the lot of you to agree, and come Thursday you’ll be getting it when the nukes start flying during a Foreigner concert.

Every living Foreigner fan in the world (there are roughly two thousand of you, and the stadium will be largely unoccupied) will be in attendance, and you’ll all be elated to potentially die listening to your favorite performers on the planet. But the members of the band will be busy panicking, and they’ll all OD and enter comas right after the first bomb hits Langley.

Crestfallen, the crowd will quickly degrade into violence over the Cold As Ice – Hot Blooded issue. It will seem like your little subculture will destroy itself without a strong leader. That’s when you’ll step up on stage and silence the crowd with a rousing speech:

“We must dedicate our future to caring for these scions of the world! Just as they have fallen into a deep slumber during the world’s darkest hour, so will they arise for its rebirth! And we are the gifted few who will guide them through these troubled times!”

You’ll be thanking your lucky stars you took that public speaking class at the community college last fall, and the crowd will be entirely swayed by your declaration of their importance. The majority of them have cripplingly low self-esteem and desperately just want to be a part of something bigger than themselves, hence their rabid fandom for the band Foreigner.

Now that they’re in a group they’ll find a measure of confidence and strength and begin carving out a nice chunk of continental America to preserve for Foreigner, should they ever awake from their drug induced haze.

It will be the first time that the Foreigner fan base has ever been treated fairly, and it will all be thanks to your effort. So kudos to you and congratulations fans of Foreigner!

Congratulations on Evading Those Crafty Nigerians!

Almost a decade ago you were a prominent member of the Nigerian Secret Service, meaning you killed people with a machete but you did it in a quiet way so no one ever really knew exactly what you’d done or gotten away with. But after several new governments your land has been trying to track you down.

They want you to stand trial for war crimes, a preposterous claim since all your actions were mandatated by the government of the time and the few that weren’t were simply minor boo-boos, the result of miscommunication more than anything else.

But try telling that to a room full of rape victims and their families in the Hague. So you’ve been laying low in the last place anyone is ever likely to look: Tucson, Arizona. The only way the Nigerian government’s law enforcement bodies, with their shoestring budgets and resources stretched wafer thin, can expect to find you is by sending out mass emails claiming that people have won various prizes.

They then viciously beat these people until they determine that they are not you and let them go with their purses substantially lightened. It’s a subtle tactic, one you’ve been able to deal with for the most part.

But lately the Nigerians have been getting trickier and trickier. They’ve been watching the aliases you’re known to use and they’ve been plucking various realistic interests from them to seed their probing spam.

You’re so numb to it by now and so fucking lonely from living in Tucson that when you see a piece of mail that even vaguely relates to your life you’ll click it without thinking. Hence the fact that you’ll be drawn in by their latest mail “Fabulous aword, computer user!”

The fact that it referred to you as a computer user and that you were using a computer made it seem trustworthy, or prescient and therefore akin to some sort of god and worthy of your respect.

When you click it you’ll see that it asks for your bank account information so that it can arrange a meeting in a Dutch airport where you will then be transported to an area in Liberia where your “aword” for being a computer user will then be processed and completed in your presence, for maximum trustworthiness.

That’s when you’ll catch yourself. Amidst their promises of fabulous three million pound prizes you’ll notice a flaw: award isn’t spelled aword.

You’ll cluck your tongue and shake your finger at your adversaries, smiling at the game of cat and mouse that your life has become. You’ll give a brief salute to the men and women who have taken over your old job, that is to say the work of finding men like you.

Then you’ll log on to Lolcats and spend the next two hours staring at memes and sending people e-cards until your wife forces you to go for a walk in the searing Tucson heat.

Congratulations on Evading Those Crafty Nigerians!

Congratulations on Removing the Thorn!

There aren’t very many lions in the Twin Cities. Sure, there’s a few in the Como Zoo, but they aren’t terribly indiginous to the area and even if they were, people just don’t go out that much without good reason in the midwest.

It’s freezing cold in the winter and searing hot in the summer. Just leaving your home is to risk death from exposure. That’s why so many midwesterners pride themselves on their thick layers of body fat. It helps to insulate them not just from the catty high-school grade social interactions populating the Midwest but from these extremes of temperature as well.

Lions, lazy as they are, find themselves completely fucked by these conditions. The erratic temperatures and the trying social circumstances are just too much for them. The ones the elements don’t kill suffer from a slow, wasting sickness. Excepting, of course, those contained in the safe, controlled environment of the Como Zoo.

Which is why you’ll know something is up when you see a lion sitting in the Hamlin law library on Snelling, flipping through a case law book. He’ll look anxious, which is to be expected, but he won’t appear to be panting or shivering or slowly wasting away. You’ll assume, correctly, that he’s magic, and your natural midwestern nature will force you to pry into his business?

“What wrong?” you’ll say.

He’ll look up from the book with tears in his eyes and clumsily his face with one of his paws.

“Oh, Christ,” he’ll say. “It’s that obvious, isn’t it?”

You’ll nod. “What’s up?”

He’ll shake his head. “It’s this god damn thorn.”

He’ll lift his paw to expose a seven inch railroad spike protruding from his paw. It will appear not to exit the other side, despite being almost entirely imbedded in his body.

“That’s a doozy,” you’ll say, displaying the Midwest’s talent for understatement.

He’ll nod. “And I can’t do a damn thing about it. I’ve got no opposable thumbs and no healthcare.”

You’ll smile.

“Tell you what,” you’ll say, leaning over the table as sultrily as possible. “I think I can help you out.”

The lion will look at you, baffled, but he’ll acquiesce when you ask him back to your apartment and uncork a bottle of wine. He’ll be so drunk and horny that by the time you rip the spike out with a pair of pliers he’ll barely notice. After you dress the wound the two of you will bone and he’ll offer you one wish (natch).

This is how you’ll become the first super hot under 30 Attorney General in American history. Congratulations on that. Oh, and congratulations on removing the thorn. Even though it was less a thorn and more a colossal spike. No good deed goes unrewarded in that magical land that is the midwest, eh?

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Monkeys, Bikers and Imagination, Oh My!

A lot of very smart people have written some very intelligent reviews about Monkey Island and its recent remastering. They’ve accurately discussed the wonderful way the game has aged and the somehow self-defeating nature of the additional voice acting and the graphical update which, while very well executed, seems to take something away from the venerable Monkey Island. The two-click interface certainly doesn’t help matters, but it’s hard to play through Monkey Island: Special Edition, in its newfangled, voice acted mode and not feel like something is a little bit off.

I’m not coming out of left field here. A lot of people have discussed this point. But what people haven’t been talking about is just why we feel this way. What is it about the voice acted version, with its painstaking, hand drawn look and wonderfully realized cut scenes, that makes the remastered Monkey Island somehow inferior to the classic, blocky version?

I’d like to start our discussion by taking a big step back and looking at Monkey Island with regards to its relative contemporary, Full Throttle. Full Throttle occupies a similar place in the gaming pantheon. It’s a funny, witty, unorthodox adventure game without fail states, with well executed, technologically dated art and some of the best writing, bar none, in games. It introduced me to the concept of games in general, dealt with adult themes deftly, in a way a child could comprehend but an adult could appreciate and interpret in a larger context.

But it wasn’t as great as Monkey Island for me.

Full Throttle was amazing. Sure, there were some issues with combat and there were the standard “pick up everything that isn’t bolted down” adventure game problems, but aside from that it was just a great game. It told a story, told it well, and gave us lots of room within that story to define it for ourselves. That last part is key. The more room we have for self-expression and, more importantly, interpretation in a story the more we feel like we’re a part of it, like we’ve taken some of it with us.

It’s the appeal of authors like Stern, Pynchon and Joyce. People will claim that it’s some sort of inherent “brilliance” which they then falter in expressing, but the appeal of these writers has always been, to me, the way we can re-interpret their worlds in our readings. Certain events will always be there: Blazes Boyle and Ms. Bloom will always be lovers, Leopold Bloom will always masturbate in public, but their thoughts, inherently dishonest and unreliable, will always be interpreted in different ways by different readers. That’s why people return to these otherwise impenetrable, infuriating texts and hold them up as a gold standard of sorts for literature. It’s very hard to have read the book and have an incorrect interpretation of the events portrayed therein.

Games operate on the same principle. Even when telling a linear, unalterable story they’ve got to make the player feel like a part of it, like their actions make up the bits and pieces between the great events. Full Throttle did this, to some extent. Not a great one. It’s a very linear game, and as such there are only so many spaces wherein we can re-interpret Ben’s quest as our own. But they are there.

But with the voice acting and the scripted scenes, the blanks grow fewer and fewer. Ben is never really “us,” he’s always “Ben.” We’re separated from him by his strong portrayal as a character. An actor is interpreting his words and we, in turn, are interpreting this actor’s performance. I’m not trying to denigrate the late Roy Conrad’s spectacular performance, I’m pointing out that his performance sets another part of the game in stone. By having an actor, especially such a talented one, make such an impressive interpretation of a character, you’re obliterating all other possible interpretations of that character. It’s Schrödinger’s principle as applied to narratives.

And therein lies one of Monkey Island’s initial strengths. We never hear Guybrush speak. We never really need to. His speech, as written, is more than commanding enough to make us care about his quest to become a pirate for dubious reasons. In fact, we never hear anyone speak.

Due to technological constraints, the game has no voice overs and only the most rudimentary of sound effects. We’ll occasionally hear a parrot squawk or a mug of grog slosh, but that’s about it. The barrier of having to run on 286s and 386s kept Monkey Island’s design simple and streamlined. Understanding and working within these constraints meant that in order to tell the story that they wanted to Ron Gilbert, Tim Schaefer and the other, less famous designers, would have to acknowledge the limits imposed upon them by technology. They worked these limits into the interface, making occasional nods to it and insuring that players were aware that the developers were aware that they were making a video game, a video game telling a story with limits imposed on it by the medium.

And it worked out pretty well.

Monkey Island was smart and funny, had a nice, solid story that moved along at a brisk pace. The story had plenty of room for player-interpretation of Guybrush, with his personality easily ranging from lothario to annoying twerp to laconic everyman. And the fact that he never speaks forced players to create his voice with their own imaginations. The crude graphics pushed us to interpret the images around us and mine them for information, to fill in the blanks of the language each character used and lend them a voice which stemmed from our imagination. Less was more and in the act of playing the game we made it our own.

I could rail on about generalities, but instead I want to get down to a few nitty gritty points. So let’s dive right in to this not-essay.

Point A: Otis.

Otis is the adorable criminal locked in a cell, sharing his name with Andy Griffith’s affable, constantly bound convict. Points for the reference, Mr. Gilbert. Otis was sort of a voiceless, affable image of our future in the game, a generic pirate whose only personality trait was his relative non-pirateness. This was, of course, in the original game. In the remastered game he’s sort of an offensive hispanic stereotype, talking in a hammed up accent about how he’s innocent, dropping his th’s in favor of t’s. It’s sort of heartbreaking to see the man I’d imagined speaking in the exact voice of Andy Griffith’s character realized as an inexplicable, innocently racist, and it showcases why you shouldn’t voice certain characters: it makes them in to something they don’t have to be.

Maybe Ron Gilbert always thought Otis should be hispanic. Maybe he envisioned Otis as the stereotype of a lazy Mexican, who says “Me so sleepy” and pretends he doesn’t speak English. But, judging by the name, I’m going to guess that he initially conceived of him as an ignorant Southerner, anachronistically thrust in to Melee Island’s™ wondrous world and completely out of depth in it. A similar missed opportunity is presented in the Fettucini Brothers, who really don’t need their over the top Italian accents at all. Even so, it’s not as if his being voiced gives away one of the key plot points. And that brings us to our next example.

Point B: Sheriff Shinetop.

Shinetop was a faceless dick in the original game, everything we gamers love in a authority figure. He had no real personality qualities aside from being an arbitrary and apparently inept and cruel arbiter of the law (He tosses Otis in to the clink but he never once even scolds us for shoplifting the shit out of the storekeeper? Interesting.) and he doesn’t need any. He’s a front for the pirate LeChuck.

But the moment he’s given voice he’s a telegraphed punch, a sly wink that hey, LeChuck is on the island, voiced by the same actor without a ghost filter on his voice, and that you should totally be able to get this.

It’s absolutely no problem for people who have played the game before and already know it, but I weep for the children who will have this hilarious plot twist ruined for them because voice acting is now industry standard in games with a lot of dialog. They could’ve used some light encouragement to read.

It also shifts the pitch of his character. Games in the 80’s, 90’s and, hell, games today even, are sort of obsessed with undermining authority. It’s rare to see a ruling body or law enforcement agency in a game portrayed as anything but faceless and cruel. Sometimes they’re simply inept, sure, but in almost every case they exist only to be torn down or used as an obstacle.

The original Monkey Island did a neat little trick by making a faceless, menacing authority figure into another faceless, menacing authority figure without skipping a beat. But it did it without telling us that they were the same person first. It’s frustrating to hear Shinetop speak and know with the unfortunate perspective of dramatic irony that I’ve come to hate so much. But it’s not all bad. Let’s see what’s in store in...

Example C: The Bridge Troll.

Alright. I will admit that the voicing sometimes offers a new take on characters and that that new take can add something to the game. The Bridge Troll’s British droll is pretty fucking funny, and it casts the whole “bridge troll role” in a new light for me. I wonder if he was a failed graduate student or something before he became a bridge troll? It’s worth considering.

But the troll is the exception displaying the validity of the rule. He’s great fun, but he only sticks out as being funny because of the abysmal interpretations many of the bit players unjustly receive. Even the interpretations which seem spot on, like Guybrush and Meathook, seem to do less to add to the game and more to reaffirm opinions I had going in.

Which is why it’s so strange that I’m not playing in the Old Tyme mode on my first playthrough. Maybe I’ll do it on my second, but for now I’m quite content to roll through the game appreciating the re-mastered visuals and critiquing the voice acting. Perhaps it’s the feel of something new and original on top of a beloved property, or perhaps it’s that, despite the meh choices from producers (I’d like to reinforce that the actors, I think, are very skilled, and that the fault lies in the people who made these seemingly inexplicable choices) voice wise, the art is a great re-imagining of Monkey Island’s classic look.

But even as I’m playing the new version all I can think about is how people experiencing the game for the first time will lose a part of what made Gilbert’s masterpiece worthy of the over the top descriptor. They’ll be losing the feeling of interpreting Guybrush Threepwood and, eventually, coming to inhabit him as a guy trying to get the girl or the guy trying to get the booty or however you want to spin it.

They’ll be losing something in the performances they’re given, and I think that’s regrettable. But it has almost nothing to do with the technical competency of the re-mastering and everything to do with the current state of games.

Of late we’ve been all too willing to trade our imaginations for spaces to inhabit. We’ve been willing to trade power as players for perceived powers given to our avatars. We’ve forgotten the joy in being a faceless underdog whose only boon is their wit. And that’s a god damn shame.

So join me in buying the special edition of Monkey Island on Steam, playing through it once in its re-imagined mode, and then shaking your head and playing through it again in the old way. Because for all the wonder that technology has brought to gaming, it’s all for naught if we don’t get back to the roots of what makes our past-time great: the ability to be someone else, to have a unique experience which we can share and discuss with other people but which will never be truly be duplicated.

Congratulations on Stalling the Cops!

She’ll be in her bra still when the first knock comes.

“Shit,” she’ll say, rolling out of bed with a practiced grace. She seems to have the motions of this moment down pat. She’ll dance between the heaps of her clothing, instinctively drawn to its locations in your already familiar apartment.

You’ll come out of bed clumsily by comparison, largely unaware of just where your clothes fell last night. You’ll feel like you just came out of a deep sleep even though you’ll have been awake next to her for at least an hour.

“Honey?” you’ll mumble, your mouth tasting still of cigarettes and sleep.

“Sorry,” she’ll say.

You’ll shake your head in response. You knew she was a professional thief when you entered in to this relationship. She told you with a sly grin on her face on your first date, never thinking that you actually believed her.

When you went back to her apartment and saw the original Matisses and the priceless Fabrigé eggs you didn’t freak out. Instead you asked her the story behind each of her conquests and she told you, a grin on her face and a beer resting in each of your hands.

She took you to her bed that night and you refused to leave until the two of you arranged a second date.

“You’re too good,” you told her the night after. “You stole my heart without even trying.”

She jokingly threatened to hit you and said it was the cheesiest line ever, but you could see behind her eyes that she thought it was adorable. She thought you were adorable. And she knew that she wanted you just as much as you wanted her, even if it was for completely different reasons.

“I’m a big boy,” you’ll tell her this morning. She’ll nod, stoically. It breaks her heart to put you through this, but you have no qualms about it. It’s just a part of being with her and as such you love it just as much as the sex and the Thursday night sitcoms and the East Village Thai Food.

She’ll tug on clothes with that dancer’s grace and you’ll stumble to the door. You won’t have to act very hard to seem beligerant, hungover and sleepy. The cops won’t have to push you too hard to make you see them as power hungry dicks.

“Who is it?” you’ll shout without even looking through the peephole.

“NYPD,” the response will come. “We had a call about a domestic, we’d like to come in.”

She’s told you that this is their SOP. Some trumped up charges that dictate they enter the apartment without a warrant and don’t conduct a full search, but ensure that all parties are accounted for.

“What?” you’ll say.

“Neighbor lady said she saw you bring someone home, then heard fighting.”

Mrs. McGillicutty, that traitorous cunt. You’ll wonder what they offered her that made her turn on you. You help her carry her groceries on Tuesdays.

“What?” you’ll say again.

You’re an old pro at this game, and even if they are too you’ve still got the advantage. They have to abide by procedures. You just have to play pissed off Joe Citizen long enough for them to get frustrated and break a rule.

You’ll hear muffled cursing on the other side of the door, then a new voice, a woman’s, will come through.

“Sir,” she’ll say, politely, “We need to enter your apartment to ensure that everyone’s safe.”

You’ll bite your lip and nod. Got to get into character.

“Just a second,” you’ll say. “Got to get my pants.”

You’ll hear a sigh on the other side of the door and shuffle off to put on the sweatpants you carelessly draped over the counter on your way in last night. You’ll take a good minute and a half to get them on, but the cops can’t prove you’re anything other than a groggy drunk.

When you come back to open the door they’ll come storming in, the guy twice as big as his voice made him seem. He’ll hold you while the woman, one-hundred and twenty pounds of bitch, runs in to your bedroom to scope the place out.

“Fuck,” you’ll hear her say from your kitchen. Her partner will just blink dumbly.

She’ll emerge from your bedroom and shake her head at him and the two will file out of your apartment dutifully. She’ll shout back at you, “Sorry for the mistake,” half-heartedly.

You’ll smirk as she goes and saunter over to your cell phone, still next to the open window in your bedroom. You’ll text the number labeled ICE “Love you,” and press send. It’s not how you wanted to start your Saturday, but sometimes love makes us do strange things.

Congratulations on Stalling the Cops!

Congratulations on Your Period Accurate Garb!

“What the fuck are you wearing, Jack?”

That’ll be the first thing you hear as the elevator opens on to the big business meeting/ice cream social your work organized. You can’t say you didn’t expect to hear something like it, but you certainly didn’t expect to hear it this soon, or from your boss, or in such brusque language. Still, you’re a professional, so you’ll do your best to shrug it off.

“Hah! I wear the rags of the good queen, peasant,” you’ll say with a slightly fey British accent. “What are these fabrics that thou hast hastened to cover thy nudity with, knave?”

Your boss will shake his head, totally lost. “I bought this shirt at Abercrombie and Fitch,” he’ll say, pulling on the fabric like someone’s supposed to be impressed by that.

The young woman to whom he’d be speaking will burst out laughing. He’ll look at her, a little bit embarrassed, and trundle off in a huff, looking for a bathroom where he can change in to his Volcomstone tee. The woman will take a sip from her martini glass and extend her hand to you.

“Eleanor Marley,” she’ll say to you, giving you a firm pair of pumps before letting you go, and your jaw will go slack.

“Eleanor Marley, the youngest CFO in company history? I find myself aghast that I didst not bring an extra frock to this engagement!”

She’ll laugh again and give you a “you’re so fucking cute” look. After a few more exchanges like that, a lengthy conversation about the works of Lawrence Stern and a brief discussion about the superficiality of brands you’ll be in like Flynn not just for that promotion, but also one of the wildest nights you’ve ever spent with a CFO.

And it’s all thanks to the fact that you like to dress up anachronistically at social functions. Congratulations on your period accurate garb, stud!

Congratulations on Discovering Your Dad's Second Family!

It was tough for you growing up. Your dad was a prominent Harvard professor and wasn’t around much. He was always jet-setting off to attend a conference on “xenolinguistics” or “sociological transparency and its’ quantum mechanics.”

Bullshitty, vague things like that that no one really understands are his bread and butter. Sometimes he’d go do “field work” and you’d end up with a Hard Rock t-shirt from somewhere in Arizona, because his flight always seemed to have a layover in the delightful town of Tolani Lake. The subtext on the shirt was “Hotter than the Devil’s Vagina.” Your dad would insist on reading it out loud each time he arrived home, and would laugh and laugh about it.

He disappeared about three years ago, during your freshman year of college. You only knew because the CIA dropped a check off at your house, made out to “Cash” with the memo “Our Bad” on it. You’ve assumed he was gone.

But, being a dutiful son raised with a strong impression of how important higher education was you held off on uncovering the truth behind your father’s life long enough to get your BA in psychology and political science at UCSC, then spend a year unemployed trying to “find yourself.”

After that didn’t work out at all you cashed the check, which your bereaved mother had been too grief-stricken to even look at, and started your search in Tolani Lake with nothing but a photo of your dad and the clothes on your back. And twenty thousand dollars in cash, courtesy of the U.S. government, natch.

When you arrive you’ll begin where most people in Tolani Lake do: with the stores filled with worthless, pointless knick knacks. They’ll direct you to the seedy underbelly, where emaciated, heroin addicted Native American men will point you in the direction of the food service industry.

Your search through the food service industry will lead you through a maze of Denny’s, Friday’s and Chili’s, each one more horrifying than the last, until you finally find a young woman named Carrie who claimed to know your father.

Carrie will be pretty, if a little bit haggard. She’ll tell you that she’s twenty three, same as you, but she’ll look five years older. Part of that might be your point of reference. You’ve only ever known middle class college kids, and they age at a snail’s pace compared to people who have had to spend their whole lives scraping just to get by.

You’ll wait in her section until her shift ends, and when it does it’ll seem as if a weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She’ll have a bounce in her step as she walks you home and chats you up the whole way, referring to your dad by his first name.

You’ll hold back as much as you can, just let her know that you had a close personal connection to him and that you’d like to find him as soon as possible, and she won’t press you on the subject. You’ll wonder if she was romantically involved with him and if, as a result, she finds you attractive. You sort of look like him, with a good amount more paunch and an easier smile.

But she won’t send out any signals, and the moment she hauls you into her living room you’ll become completely disillusioned with the notion of sleeping with her.

Pictures of your father with his arm around her and people you assume to be her family members will be everywhere in the room, and they won’t be pictures of a man draped around his trophy lover. They’ll be pictures of a group of yowling kids at Disney Land, the Grand Canyon, Space Camp. All the places your dad never took you because they were “too god damn expensive,” he’d visited with these strangers.

You’ll stare in wonderment at one of him holding a two year-old girl in his arms with a beautiful Native American girl at his side, beaming at the camera. She’ll smile as you gawk.

“That was back when I was first born. Dad wasn’t around as much then, but he was always sending us care packages, so we knew he cared,” she’ll say, looking over your shoulder wistfully.

You won’t feel shocked – the whole day has been building to this point, after all. Every look will click now, every sideways glance. You’ll know now that this is your half-sister, and that she deserves to know the truth.

Your mind will reel, thinking of how to tell her and, more importantly, how to convince her to come with you after the men who killed your father. It could be tough for you, you’re not very good at convincing people. You might just want to print a copy of this story out and hand it to her.

Just a thought. Either way, Congratulations on Discovering Your Dad’s Second Family!

Congratulations on Winning a Gold Medal in Discus!

Following your recent downsizing by the State Department (they’re very sorry, still, but they really don’t seen the purpose of having an ambassador to Tonga in this economy) you’ve been depressed. And rightly so. As a politician you’re literally incapable of contributing to society, and your résumé is totally worthless. You might as well scrawl “I am a douche bag” on a piece of paper and hand it to a potential employer.

Luckily being a vapid kiss-ass managed to net you a super hot wife, and despite the self-esteem issues that drew her to you she’s actually a super smart knockout with a great job and lots of money in the bank. As such you’ve been able to live comfortably while looking for jobs and toying with the idea of accomplishing something.

You decided to settle on the easiest thing your dim little brain could come up with: becoming an Olympic athlete. You’re going to start training tomorrow.

Many people become Olympic athletes in order to prove something to themselves. These people become marathon runners, weight lifters, boxers and participants in various other sports that people care about. For example, Carl Lewis became a long jumper to prove that racism couldn’t keep him from out-jumping whitey, and in order to eventually start a racist rumor about black people having an extra bone.

But you’ve always had a different philosophy: aim low. Your successful political career has proven that this strategy works and this time will be no different.

In the summer of 2012, after years of training, you will become the Olympic Gold Medalist at discus. When people ask you what that means at parties you’ll have to give them a nice, long explanation which could be easily replaced by pantomime and most of them will walk away before you finish.

It will easily be the greatest thing you ever accomplish in your entire life.

Congratulations on Winning a Gold Medal in Discus!

Congratulations on Working With What You've Got!

You’re new in New York and as a result you spend most of your time and money hopping from club to club trying to make friends and see as much of “the scene” as possible.

You’ve been hopping from Gunfight! show to Gunfight! show over the last week and a half, smoking clove cigarettes, wearing giant ironic sunglasses and spending the night in whatever Greenpoint bar doesn’t throw you out after you’ve struck out on all the women there and started getting bitchy.

But this is going to be different. I mean, if it wasn’t why would we bother writing about it?

Tonight, after two months of failed attempts, you’re going to meet someone. Their name will be Sammie, and Sammie will have the nicest tits you’ve ever seen.

“Nice tits!” you’ll shout across the bar.

Sammie will act like you didn’t say anything at all, like you’re not even there. This is exactly what you expected, so it won’t hurt you too much. The break will come when you down your drink, hang your head, and hear Sing Me Spanish Techno by The New Pornographers come on the PA.

“I fucking love this song,” you’ll mutter to yourself, just within earshot of Sammie.

Sammie will be instantly intrigued, and will saunter up to you on four inch heels and posture a few feet away, giving you a spectacular view of cleavage. You’ll amaze the both of you by looking straight at Sammie’s face, despite the welcome distraction, while the two of you discuss The New Pornographers for over an hour.

After that you and Sammie will leave the bar for your loft, which is what you call your studio apartment.

By the time the two of you arrive sparks will already be starting to fly, and you’ll start making out between inserting your key into the door and turning it. Sammie will be laughing, a husky, rich sound that makes you feel like the world is okay.

It’s been so long since your last sexual encounter that you’ll almost be bursting out of your pants when Sammie drags you into your apartment and hurls you down on your futon with remarkable force. After that you’ll start the most remarkable romp of your entire life with this person you barely know.

Time will blur together, and you won’t be able to map the events that lead to your penis being in Sammie’s mouth. Even once your in there, you’ll keep losing time against your will. You’ll faintly try to grasp as every second that goes by as Sammy treats you as you’ve always dreamed of being treated. Only your orgasm will remain in your mind once the experience has ended. Beginning and ending, alpha and omega. Your passion will be so powerful that everything else will elude you.

And so it will go when Sammie’s dress drops and you see that Sammie has a penis. A pretty nice one, too. Not enormous, not small. Very well shaped. It goes well with the rest of Sammie’s body, too. You won’t be able to tell if any of it is surgically altered or if Sammie’s just some kind of incredible freak.

You’ll have a moment of homophobic panic where you realize what just happened and what Sammie expects you to do before a great calm washes over you and you remember how right that felt. How right you feel now. And you kiss Sammie on the mouth and get on your knees to clumsily reciprocate.

The next day you won’t tell a soul, but you’ll treasure the experience, and Sammie will burn in your mind. Even the simplest task will elicit thoughts you’ve spent your life fearing. You’ll stare at the number Sammie wrote on a post it and slapped on your fridge for what seems like an eternity before you dial and Sammie answers, laughing, and the two of you arrange a date.

As for Sammie, Sammie will show up at our office, deliver coffee, answer phones, and foretell several cataclysms before receiving your call at 2 PM and opting to take a chance on that clumsy, cute boy from last night. The two of you will agree to meet in the Upper East Side, for a change of pace.

Congratulations on working with what you’ve got. This is going to be the start of something beautiful.

Congratulations on Being a Little Too Into Your Self!

This could’ve been a Greek myth if it wasn’t for modern technology. Now it’s kind of beautiful.

You’ve been working as a research assistant for some time at OHSU. Mostly stem cell stuff. You’re smart enough to have had your PhD years ago, but you never had the ambition.

You know how every piece of equipment in the lab functions to a T. You could recall thee research of each of your attached doctors from memory and you could expand it in ways they haven’t even dreamed of you, but you still spend most of your lunch break smoking weed and dreaming of better times.

You’re here because you want to be here. Because you’ve planned to be here for some time, and you’ve been biding your time, waiting for technology to catch up with your dreams. Today, after you finish fine tuning a pipette, it will finally have done so.

You’ll begin the process by extracting some of your DNA with a massive syringe. It’ll hurt like a son of a bitch, but no guts, no glory, right?

Then you’ll place the DNA in a centrifuge for reasons that are largely unclear. After a little spinning it’ll be all set for your purposes and you’ll pop it into the clone-o-mat you’ve been building in your spare time.

Fast forward two more hours and a perfect copy of yourself will emerge, puzzled by the world around him. You’ll step up and lock lips with him. The first lesson he learns will be how amazing your gentle love is. Later you’ll start teaching him language.

It’ll be the start of a beautiful and fulfilling love story which will stand the test of time. It’ll be sort of weirdly touching the same way Let The Right One In is, and it’ll all be thanks to your intellect and modern technology.

And just imagine, if you’d been born a few centuries ago you would’ve been relegated to starving to death while you stared at a reflecting pool. Oh, the blessings of the modern age.

Congratulations on Being a Little Too Into Your Self!