Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Congratulations on Finding Someone Who Really Appreciates You!

Today you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when you’re abducted by small but tenacious group of giant sapient ants. They’ll burst into your suburban home and load you into a windowless van, spiriting you far, far away to the warehouse district of your closest metropolitan area.

Once they have you there they’ll speak to you about how they’ve watched you toiling for your unappreciative husband for years, eagerly awaiting the day when they’ll be able to spirit you away and make you their “fleshy queen.” Then they’ll make with the foot rubs and Baskin Robins, which is apparently all women give a shit about.

It’ll all seem perfect until your husband bursts in with a shotgun and starts firing at random. He’ll hit you, seriously injuring your left arm and sending you into shock, but no worries. Since he sees you as a valuable piece of property he’ll have you whisked off to the hospital in no time, where the doctors will “fix his god damn property” as he puts it, to make sure you can take care of his house again without ever having to worry about giant ants kidnapping you and taking you to a life of luxury ever again.

Congratulations on Finding Someone Who Really Appreciates You!

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Congratulations on Giving Her One Too Many Back Massages!

We understand that Shelly has low self esteem and that you want to try to fix her if at all possible. We understand that you’re a virgin and that, since you’re also a college student, this makes you deeply uncomfortable and more than a little awkward. And we understand that deep down you really mean well.

But come Tuesday night, when you give Shelly a “stress relieving back rub” and end up rubbing the sides of her tits for like, two hours with a giant erection pressing into her spine she’ll be totally justified in turning around and popping you one right in the dick.

When you fall to the ground gasping for air we’ll feel a little bit sorry for you, sure. But not very. We’ll feel much worse for Shelly who is still going through a really difficult breakup thank you very much and really just needed a friend, not some douche bag trying to get into her pants.

And so your muffled sorry will not suffice, will not win over her affections, nor will it curry ours. Instead it’ll just make us a little angry that we invested time in predicting your future at all, since really anyone could’ve seen this coming.

Congratulations on Giving Her One Too Many Back Massages!

Monday, March 29, 2010

Congratulations on Burning This Fucker to the Ground!

You’ll be there in front of her on one knee, palm extended upward, the nearly empty box like a promise. You won’t be able to meet her eyes, your face turned down. You’ll chew your lip a little for a minute or two before you look up at her. She’ll be smiling, a frail frightened and shocked thing, and there will be tears in her eyes. When she answers it will come as a whisper.

“Yes.”

You’ll leap up to your feet, hefting the bottle of Cuervo Gold into the air and shouting.

“WOOOOO!”

She’ll leap up and wrap her arms around you.

“WOOOOO!” she’ll shout as you split apart to open the tequila.

You won’t bother with glasses, gulping off the mouth of the bottle like men dying of thirst in a desert. It won’t take long, no more than a handful of gulps before liquor begins to run its course through your body, seeping into your hands and crawling gently up your spine into the base of your brain.

It won’t be long before the evening turns to frenzied, drunken lovemaking on the floor of your apartment. This will, in turn, lead to premature ejaculation which will lead to more tequila. Then the two of you, hugging and smiling and drunk as a pair of Irish Mexicans, will decide to commemorate this great event in a way that the entire neighborhood will never forget. You’ll torch the place for insurance money.

Even drunk you’ll be smart about it. You’ll pack up your laptops and put an iron into a pile of gas soaked rags in your kitchen. Then you’ll spray acetylene all over the walls and plug the coffee maker in, making sure that there are some matches pressed up against the heating surface of the iron for good measure. You’ll also fashion a makeshift fuse out of a piece of string, also soaked in gas, and lead it towards the pile of rags. Then you’ll turn the iron on and stumble to a 24 hour coffee shop to “work on your novels together.” Mostly you’ll just make out while bored baristas watch.

It’ll be a foolproof plan. Six months later you’ll be rich as fuck with a bunch of new shit in a way swanker apartment in a much better neighborhood. Also you’ll have a kid (part of one, anyhow, growing within your wife) and a real job, no longer doing “contract computer repair work,” whatever that is. And no one will ever be the wiser.

Congratulations on Burning This Fucker to the Ground!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Selling Me on DLC!

The concept of episodic content is hardly new to video games. Half-Life 2 popularized the concept with their incredibly spread out six hour experiences which took as long to develop as an Infinity Ward game (which totally showed in their exceptional storytelling, pacing, and tech). Downloadable content has now expanded the concept of iterative development and release cycles, although glorious failures such as Sins: Episodes have proven that it is a method best left to already successful properties In a very real way episodic content is changing boht the way we buy and release games.

Borderlands is an excellent example. Downloadable content for that game can now potentially cost more than the original game did, assuming you bought it at a package price. What’s more it contains features that, by all rights, should’ve been in the original product. Things like item storage, PVP arenas and small, self-contained narratives that might keep casual players interested in the game until the end have all been inserted by the many various DLC packages offered up by Gearbox so far. And who knows how many more they’ll release? Much love to Gearbox, but they way they’ve attempted to monetize their well deserved success has been nothing short of blatant. Still, at least their content is packaged and delivered in a convenient way for their customers and is clearly advertised.

Compare this to Mass Effect 2, a game that launched with DLC in the box. As someone who played Mass Effect 2 on the X-Box (almost entirely so that I could carry over the many playthroughs I’d earned in the previous Mass Effect) in order to use content that I’d purchased with the game I would have to hook up my X-Box Live subscription, which involves generating a new identity since I can’t use my existing Live ID to sign in, since it was created on a computer, download content to my normally offline X-Box and then hook it up to the internet for verification each time I played. All this so I could explore one extra area, get a few scraps of armor, a shitty gun and a lackluster character.

The real goal behind this procedure is to make sure I’ve done the legwork of establishing a conncetion to Mass Effect 2’s virtual storefront when additional content launches later on this year. Bring Down the Sky’s lackluster sales (which likely contributed to Bioware’s decision to stop producing new content for the first Mass Effect) have probably put Bioware into damage control mode as they attempt to find a way to successful sell work they’ve spent a lot of time and effort on to people they know want it, but I find this particular pretty frustrating. In order to access content I’ve already purchased I need to engage a virtual storefront which punishes me for being a PC gamer first and an X-Box gamer second. I understand that they want brand exclusivity but everything on my gaming rig is already stamped with Microsoft’s brand of corporate approval.

Perhaps I’d have the same complaints about Dragon Age if I’d purchased it on the X-Box. But, as with most games I can do so with, I chose to play Dragon Age on the PC, and my DLC experience has, as a result, been considerably less painful. Sure, I once had my install drop all of my downloaded content from a sixty hour experience and refuse to reload it, preventing me from talking to my favorite character and removing all of the epic armor that I’d sunk so much time and money into, but at least it never made me drunkenly slog through menu screens for an hour and a half before informing me that I couldn’t link my X-Box Live account to my Games for Windows Live account, or even to the email which my GFWL account was created under.

Instead I used Steam’s shell to access all of the content and, for the most part, had a chance to enjoy it as intended. While this didn’t inure me enough of their systems to try purchasing the Return to Ostagar expansion, worth 400 Bioware points where each Bioware point is a piece of your soul to be revalued at a later date of Bioware’s choosing, it did make me perk up when the Awakening expansion emerged from Steam’s wondrous bowels. Sure, it cost as much as some full price games (four times as much as my beloved Flotilla!) but Dragon Age: Origins was an iincredible experience, and damnit I’m willing to throw down money to encourage people to make more of them, especially when I do so through a service that remembers my credit card information.

I’ve had precious little time to spend with Awakenings so far. It has been a busy week and social and literary commitments have kept me from spending my requisite 80 hours a week playing games. But three hours in I have to say that it is everything I enjoy in Dragon Age. It features a nice mix of new and old characters, a nice reboot that establishes the stakes of Dragon Age’s world and the sort of people it encapsulates quickly and deftly. Instead of bringing out a “best of” of Dragon Age it offers some nods to previous decisions you’ve had to make. I’ve already seen the fruits of my labor in Origins appear in this game when an old friend paid me a visit and let me know how he was doing.

What’s more impressive is that Awakenings has come so soon after Dragon Age: Origins, and promises so much content. While I haven’t seen an hour count I’d imagine a forty dollar expansion promises at least an additional sixty hours of content, using math derived from the fiirst game. The timing, in fact, is almost perfect. The rush of the new year has ended and I just now feel ready for more Dragon Age. I’d forgotten the quiet catharthis of chopping my way through hordes of Darkspawn with my badass close combat specialized rogue.

What I’m trying to spit out is that Awakenings seems to be the best piece of DLC I’ve seen to date, even better than Half Life’s incredible episodes. Tonally it has hit all the right marks so far, and while its price tag is a bit high I’ve spent enough time with Bioware to know that this is a promise that the game will not fail to deliver. Bioware has never asked for my money without good reason (I assume they needed drugs or something when they released Jade Empire, which is a good enough reason in my mind) and a forty dollar game from them will usually have more content than a sixty dollar game from most developers.

DLC has been a bit of a four letter word of late. Companies have been using it to try and squeeze already tight dollars out of consumers for seemingly asinine pieces of products that would make their gaming experience “more complete.” EA in particular has been bad about this, selling products that impact the balance of multiplayer experiences with a seemingly total lack of concern for their consumers. But Dragon Age’s quasi-expansion has given me hope. While it is clearly an addition and not a standalone product it is, in the tradition of Half-Life’s episodes, more of what made the game released, sooner and for less money. And while my opinion of the product may change as I delve deeper into it, so far it seems to be exactly what I’ve wanted: a larger version of the episodic expansions that let me keep enjoying Half-Life 2 despite the absence of any sort of Half-Life 3.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Congratulations on Running Away from Andrew W.K.!

Today, following the two month anniversary of your graduation from college, you’re going to finally up and run away from your comfortable home in the well appointed Oklahoma ranch of music legend Andrew W.K.. You’ve lived there ever since he kidnapped you in an attempt to improve your relationship with your dad, decades earlier. He decided to keep you after briefly meeting your father and the two of you never looked back.

But times must change, and today you’ll leave his home with nothing but his cell phone number, all your shit, a 2006 Mazda Miyata, twenty thousand dollars in a Wells Fargo account and the clothes on your back. He’ll wave as you go, trying not to cry. You’ll try to do the same as you hold up your hand and say to him, in a whisper, goodbye Andrew W.K..

Congratulations on Running Away from Andrew W.K.!

Friday, March 26, 2010

Congratulations on Riding in a Bentley!

You’ll be waiting on the corner with the money in a satchel tucked under your arm. It will be raining, just as you expected.

You’ll be alone, as directed. You’ll be dressed in a blue windbreaker, as directed. It will be doing very little against the rain, which will be seeping through the thin mylar and into the flannel shirt and cotton undershirt you are wearing underneath, purely of your own volition.

You’ll be there for thirty minutes, which is what you were told to expect, before a stylish automobile pulls up in front of you and rolls down its windows. You’ll try to remember what its called briefly, but once the script you have memorized begins you’ll forget all about models and makes and focus on getting your daughter back safely.

“Are you ready?” a voice will ask from inside. The light of dusk and the natural shadow of the car will combine to make the speaker invisible, but the voice, gruff and masculine, will sound vaguely familiar.

“Ready to party,” you’ll say flatly, just as you rehearsed.

The door will open and you’ll step inside, ducking awkwardly in. The car will heave forward before you’ve had a chance to secure your seat belt and the money will go flying across the floor of the car. You’ll curse and try to pick it up but the figure sitting next to you will push you back into your seat.

“Buckle up,” he’ll say, his face unsmiling.

It’ll take a moment before you recognize him. He won’t be wearing a stained white t-shirt or ripped jeans, his typical vestments abandoned for a casual suit, but it’ll be him, un-aged after all these years of obscurity. Andrew W.K. will be sitting next to you, pushing you back into your chair, carefully examining you for some sign of betrayal or anxiety. You’ll be completely floored.

“You’re Andrew W.K.,” you’ll say, mouth agape.

“Your daughter is fine,” he’ll respond. “Very safe. I need you to understand that.”

You’ll nod, dumbly. “Is it true you hit yourself in the face with a brick for that album photo?” You’ll blurt out, interrupting him as he details just where your daughter is being kept.

“Is that really what’s foremost on your mind here?” he’ll say, pressing his fingers against his temples as if he is stifling some sort of pain. You’ll look at him, confused for a moment, before you nod.

“Oh, right. My daughter. Good. Yeah. Good. That she’s good.”

Andrew W.K. will look at you. He’ll look at the admiration in your eyes, the complete lack of anxiety over your daughter’s kidnapping or her safe return and he’ll shake his head.

“Take the money back,” he’ll say.

“Huh?” you’ll ask, still staring at him, a million questions about his beard running through your head.

“Take it back. I’m keeping your daughter.”

“What?” you’ll say, your heart dropping a little. “Why?”

He’ll look you up and down and start collecting the money from the floor and stuffing it back into the briefcase.

“I no longer believe you’re fit to be a parent,” he’ll say, stuffing the briefcase into your arms.

You’ll want to ask him more questions, like is there any way you can convince him you are and is his house as cool as he is and what has he been up to lately, you’ve missed his songs about partying, but you won’t get a chance. He’ll signal the driver and the car will slow. Then the door will open and you’ll be dragged by a be-suited man back out into the rain.

Andrew W.K. will drive away then, without further contact or gesture, and you’ll be left on another corner, far from the neighborhoods you know, clutching a briefcase filled with money and secure in the knowledge that your daughter has finally found a good home.

Congratulations on Riding in a Bentley!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Congratulations on Trashing Your Hotel Room!

Today you and your boyfriend are going to fuck in a hotel room in Tucson. It’ll be a shitty place to start with but the two of you will have unprotected anal sex without any sort of dietary or rectal preparation. The entire room will be stained with unintentional slips of shit and blood all over the carpet and the sheets. Your boyfriend will joke about smearing some on the walls, just to fuck with the conservative cleaning lady but you’ll tell him that the cleaning lady is probably some poor immigrant who doesn’t care about the two of you and wouldn’t even look twice if you walked out of a Starbucks holding hands. He’ll be angry and refuse to hold you or even talk to you in bed. After a while it’ll get old and you’ll hop out of bed to take a shower and wonder why you didn’t start to leave Arizona sooner.

Congratulations on Trashing Your Hotel Room!

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Congratulations on Doing Acid With the Woman You Love!

It’s been a long hard marriage. It has been through ups and downs and trial separations. The two of you have raised two wonderful children and three fucking amazing cats. Now you've put all of them through one sort of college or another and now you’re settling into your twilight years.

Part of this is that you’ve recently come to accept that you won’t be able to do all the things you’d dreamed of. You know that you’ll never walk across the surface of the moon or visit the depths of the Marinas trench in a submarine. You’ll never sit in a flying car or sleep with your wife and an Asian teenager. But there’s one thing you haven’t been able to come to terms with.

You and your wife have long wanted to drop acid together. As responsible citizens and parents it was impossible for you to balance your desire to try hallucinogens with your desire to do right by your kids. But now that you no longer have to worry about money or setting a good example you’ll decide to drop acid as a group at the ripe age of seventy.

You’ll come home this evening with some tabs freshly purchased from one of your son’s old high school friends who never left town. You’ll have your fridge well stocked with frozen foods and delicious beverages so that you won’t have to leave the house for a while. Then the two of you will sit down in your incredibly comfy chairs (which all septuagenarians have by government mandate) and slip two tabs each under your tongues.

“Do you feel anything?” your wife will ask, her head replaced by the face of one of the sleestak from Land of the Lost.

“Not sure,” you’ll say, your forked tongue flicking out of your mouth.

“Want to do it?” she’ll say, standing up and shredding your clothing.

“Guess so,” you’ll say, looking down at your penis, which, for the first time in years, will function again.

Congratulations on Doing Acid With the Woman You Love!

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Congratulations on Your Shocking Endurance!

Most men hear the words “Julia Roberts Marathon” and quiver, but not you. You liked Pretty Woman and didn’t have any problems with Runaway Bride. Julia Roberts, whose very name should fill you with fear, doesn’t really do much for you as a result. You can deal with her on a physical and emotional level in a way that most human beings, male and female, simply aren’t capable of.

Which is why your wife will be so shocked when you don’t file for divorce halfway through Erin Brokovich. It’ll be film number five of your marathon, and none of the movies so far will have been related to elaborate heists. By the two third mark of Brokovich she’ll have begun to tremble visibly. When you ask her what’s wrong she’ll refuse to answer and the two of you will just continue watching Erin Brokovich.

She’ll enter a seizure around twenty minutes later, just before Erin Brokovich ends. You’ll drive her to the hospital post-haste, since you weren’t terribly invested in Erin Brokovich anyways. She’ll get there and you’ll describe the situation and doctors will immediately put 28 Days Later on a fly-ass plasma screen in her hospital room, resuscitating your wife in a matter of minutes. She’ll thank you profusely and apologize for putting you through all that terror just to make sure you really loved her and weren’t fucking her sister, which you’re doing, but your genetic abnormality will have cleared you of all suspicion in her eyes. So it’s really win-win for everyone involved, all thanks to your unique ability to watch Julia Roberts without losing your mind.

Congratulations on Your Shocking Endurance!

Monday, March 22, 2010

Congratulastions on Frequenting Your Neighborhood Bar!

The bartender won’t say your name. He doesn’t know it. You don’t know his either. That’s not part of the compact you two have established, the tacit agreement of this place. So he’ll nod and you’ll nod back and he’ll slip you a three dollar whiskey without either of you saying a word and you’ll slip a five dollar bill over to him and he’ll slide two dollars back and you’ll take one.

Then it’ll be done. You’ll step away from the bar and look around until you find her. She’ll be in the corner where the light is lowest, her head resting against the table. Her face will be entirely obscured by her hair, but you imagine that she’s frowning, wondering on some level where you are. You’ll slip in next to her and give her a gentle shake.

“Wake up,” you’ll whisper in her ear, the temptation to nibble on it already palpable.

“Huh?” she’ll reply, rearing her head in such a way that it just barely misses yours. She’ll look around, baffled, her eyes adjusting to the now unfamiliar act of sight. There will be deep bags underneath them, as if she hasn’t slept in days, and a slightly mad look to her as if she fears the act of waking as much as she fears dying alone.

“How’s it going?” you’ll say, your mind filling with the desire to take her back to your place and wash her hair for hours. Her eyes will suddenly flash with recognition. Dim at first, then bright, then dim once more as she plays back the last month and a half to herself.

“You holding?” she’ll say, licking her lips.

You’ll shake your head. “Not yet, my lady love.” She’ll bite her lip and tuck her hair back behind her ear.

“Then its twenty for some time, fifty for the night. Or free if you can find some crank before the night is over.”

You’ll nod, then pick up your whiskey and stride across the bar to where Roscoe is sitting, watching the entire exchange. He’ll shake his head as you sit down.

“I’ll never understand why the two of you don’t just make it official,” he’ll say, already withdrawing a baggie from his coat. “Forty,” he’ll say, the baggie clenched in his fist.

“Such is the price of love,” you’ll say, setting down your whiskey and withdrawing a sweaty twenty and a pair of ruffled tens and sliding them over to him. He’ll hand the baggie over to you and smile, sipping his beer.

“Go get her, tiger,” he’ll say, winking at you as you get up to leave, heading back to her corner where her eyes have already brightened and she looks at you as if you were the only man she’s ever loved in the whole wide world.

Congratulations on Frequenting Your Neighborhood Bar!

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Outside the Game!

I’d never seen City of Lost Children until the other night. This seminal French film, which would catapult Ron Perlman into a superstar career of playing intimidating, if somewhat slow, characters, immediately made me think of the much better known and harder to avoid Dark City (itself still somewhat obscure) with its evocative imagery and pale, shuffling cultists. It might’ve been the whiskey, but I thought the themes of the films matched up nicely as well, with the power of one’s own mind granting freedom when realized. The thematic similarities (aside from creepy midgets) kind of end there, but as the images of City of Lost Children seemed familiar in my mind.

The man in a diving suit carrying the child, the idiot giant working ceaselessly to protect his surrogate little sister, all the while searching for another surrogate family member, fighting his own mind at times and eventually defeating an evil, selfish madman who wanted to exploit and even kill children to create his own fantasy world... I’d seen all of this before. This was Bioshock, twelve years before Bioshock ever hit shelves.

Leigh Alexander frequently discusses the manner in which games need to look outside of their own medium (and moreover the comfort zone of their culture) in order to find source material, and Bioshock is a great example of a game steeped in this practice. From the art-deco architecture to the Randian themes penetrating the game, the influence of the larger world outside of video games is apparent in every brushstroke making up its tableau. I’d never heard City mentioned in the context of Bioshock before either, but it seems fairly clear right now (although that could be the hangover).

This is not to say that Bioshock ignored video games. It also took into account the structure and success of games like System Shock 2 and, to hear the art designers discuss the game’s structure now, titles as venerable as Doom. Bioshock emerged as a conglomeration of influences, both video game related and not, centered around an original creative center, and as a result it was fucking incredible. Its narrative is pitch perfect, the pacing unusually good for a video game. I have veteran gamer friends who have trouble playing it for long stretches, just because it measures and delivers tension in a way that makes them uncomfortable after decades of playing games like Unreal and Call of Duty. And the story, with its various character arcs and betrayal, actually made me angry and sad in turn. I even teared up like the bitch I am when those little girls (all grown up) grabbed my dying hand and let me know I’d done right.

This powerful narrative came not only from Ken Levine’s amazing capacity for creativity. It also came from the manner in which he was aware of and engaged existing material to make his story. The story is literate in the best traditions of narrative. Like Baxter’s suburban Delphi in The Feast of Love, Levine clearly knows the people who have tread this ground before and knows how to reference them without calling attention to the references. He’s got a deft hand for making characters and fitting them with both our world and the world they live in.

Compare this to the creative direction of say, Mass Effect. The creative directors of Mass Effect are almost proud of not having read what is frequently interpreted as their source material. Listening to Tom Chick interview Casey Hudson of Bioware made me feel bad. They trotted out a Tennyson reference in the first game to moderate effect and they had some nice awareness of Star Trek which lead to an ironic interpretation of what the Federation might actually look like if an upstart group of humans tried to storm the galaxy and make their mark on it, but the story ran shallow and their lack of reference points becomes readily clear when you examine the moving parts of their narrative. The Quarians are possessed of the resources to maintain a small armada but cannot use it to defeat the Geth, a group of creatures who could be rendered inert by electromagnetic forces. The Geth are a group of sentient machines who apparently want to be left alone or destroy all intelligent life, depending on the day of the week and who you ask. The Krogan somehow managed to dominate the universe without any apparent capacity for naval combat or medicine. Unless they were hurling their people through space and crashing into planets where they’d breed I fail to see how the Krogan could possibly constitute a threat in a world where a spaceship is required to grab a god damn carton of milk.

Then there are the more specific references. Hudson readily admits to not having read Berserker or Battlestar Gallactica, two works that deal directly with themes that Mass Effect’s story is all about engaging. It wouldn’t shock me to hear that he hasn’t read Asimov either. Before writing a novel a novelist will take great pains to research the topic of the novel. Everything from politics to traffic patterns to the factory default weight of a 1986 Malibu’s clutch, these are the details that make your narrative, and one of the more challenging parts of writing a book is making sure that your story accounts for and utilizes these disparate facts to some effect.

But game developers seem largely unconcerned with stepping outside of their normal consumption of media to research their worlds and flesh them out. Not to rag on Hudson too bad, but listening to him rattle off the creative influences of Mass Effect 2 is like listening to your nerdy freshman roommate list of his favorite movies. Making games is hard work, certainly, and far more time and cooperation intensive than say making a novel or even a film, but writing is writing, and when you’re planning on releasing a artistic work for and pricing it at $60 you’d better take the time to write it well and do what writers do: research, research, research.

In the end it’s not just about engaging media outside of the world of games, although that is important. Music, art, film and literature are all important mediums that can teach games quite a bit, but its not enough to just look at them and reflect upon them. Game developers need to take lessons from them as well, to look at them critically and understand how they were both developed and what they can offer as narrative touchstones. They need to think about the work they’re making and the elements that compose it, the way the parts of that work fit together and whether or not their world makes sense when placed under a microscope. They need to know about the existence of similar works and account for them, even if they don’t build off of them.

No author would ever write a mystery novel without considering Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as, more recently, Michael Chabon. Well, no author worth his salt. No filmmaker would make a western without considering The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Tombstone and Unforgiven. A really good western director would also spend some time with The Quick and the Dead and Yojimbo. An artist wouldn’t make a Pointillist painting without looking at Monet, as well as Van Gogh and Picasso. And that’s sort of the difference. People working in other mediums who want to be taken seriously will look beyond the sort of work they want to produce to get a sense of the context surrounding that work. Art never exists in a vacuum, but this seems to be a lesson many game developers have yet to learn. The staggering scale of the undertaking they engage in makes that statement more than a little unfair, but people like Levine and Schafer prove that this is far from impossible. I shouldn’t feel that Brutal Legends world was better thought out than Mass Effect’s, but I do, motorcycle pigs and all.

So while Alexander is totally on the right track, I think we need to go further while proscribing advice that developers are almost certain to ignore. It’s not enough just to engage works outside of your medium and consider them while creating your own world. I think that creative success relies on a combination of research and critical thought on your own creation, regardless of medium. And the reticence games have shown towards this as a medium is discouraging, but not so pervasive as to be overwhelming. For every Casey Hudson there is a Ken Levine. For every Mackey McCandish there is a Tim Schafer. For every developer like Infinity Ward making a thoughtless, structurally lazy and technologically impressive AAA title there is an indie developer like Tale of Tales making a pensive, thoughtful thing that might not even be a game by modern standards which puts more thought into its story than its ability to push a technological envelope. And that gives me hope, although I’d like to see it more often.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Congratulations on Trying Fox Hunting!

This weekend you’re going to go out with your straight uncle and try fox hunting. He’ll force you to dress up in an absurd outfit and follow him into the woods with some incredibly gay dogs which will have graphic gay dog sex with one another while he watches and claps and he’ll pretend he doesn’t hear you when you ask him “Are you sure you’re my straight uncle?” again and again throughout the trip.

The whole thing will be pretty gross, and not because of the dog sex. It’ll be gross because those poor foxes won’t have a chance. They’ll be half starved things, limping through the last traces of snow as the hounds bray and leap after them. The hounds will take them down in a pack, not through elegance but through brute strength, and after the second one is loosed you’ll get off your horse and walk back to your Prius, informing your uncle that you’re not really into this.

He’ll continue ignoring you, watching the hounds snap at one another over pieces of the fox’s still twitching body. As you near your car he’ll shake his head and cluck his tongue.

“Fucking faggot.”

Congratulations on Trying Fox Hunting!

Friday, March 19, 2010

Congratulations on Your Recent Windfall of Burger King Toys!

The young man’s lip will quiver with every move you make. They’ll make you feel powerful, his winces and tears, but you’ll do your best not to let it get to you.

“Nut up,” you’ll say quietly as James pats down his co-worker on the floor behind the counter.

“Clean!” James will shout, his glock pressed against the back of the young man’s head. His breath will come ragged from across the room and his managers will stand against the wall, horrified. The youngest of them, a young blonde woman, will stammer.

“Please. Just take whatever you want,” she’ll say, hands fussing at her blouse near her neckline. You’ll think back to your first robbery when you tried to take what you wanted and the seven years of your life that cost you. Now with one good eye on your work and one bum one looking towards your retirement you know better. You’ll sigh and hit the terrified young man in the head, sending him sprawling to the ground.

“Do. Not. Fuck. With. Us.”

You’ll take great care with each word, giving it a moment to seep in without raising your voice. Then you’ll cock the hammer of your pistol and point it at her.

“Do not speak unless asked a direct question. Do not move unless instructed to move. Remain calm and follow these rules and we will not have to kill any of you. Nod if you understand.”

The standing employees will nod, eyes jumping between your gun and the young man’s prone form as he writhes and groans. You’ll step over him so that you can watch all of the employees and train your gun on the young woman who spoke. She’s the last one you’d like to kill but it shouldn’t come to that, not today.

“Take the kid in back and get the shit,” you’ll say to James. He’ll nod and heave the young man to his feet, Glock still pressed into the base of his skull. James’ gun isn’t loaded and he knows it, just for safety purposes, but it makes everyone more complacent when they have a gun shoved into the back of their head.

You’ll stand there with the employees for a few minutes. Every once in a while one of them will open their mouth like they want to speak and you’ll give them a look of genuine interest, which will silence them immediately. Then you’ll nod and continue watching them, glancing occasionally at the clock.

James will have been gone for less than five minutes when he emerges, leading the young man carrying two duffel bags at gunpoint in front of him. You’ll step over the prone young man once again, listening to him mutter a cachism over his tears. Your gun will never leave the pretty, brave young woman. You’ll wonder for a second if she’ll need therapy after this, then immediately wonder why you care in the slightest. You’ll want to shrug but you’ll keep walking backwards towards the door as James leads the young man to the front door.

“Drop the bags,” he’ll say, and the young man will comply.

“Walk back to the wall with the others,” he’ll say and the young man will do so.

“Stand up straight,” he’ll say and the young man will slouch a little in surprise before stiffening bolt upright.

“Good,” he’ll say, tucking the gun in his belt and picking up the bags. He’ll push through the door and you’ll walk out behind him.

“Have a nice day,” you’ll say, tipping your hat to the horrified employees and customer.

The two of you which reach the van in a few seconds. Marty will be there behind the wheel, ready to go. She’ll have the engine on before you’re halfway across the parking lot and you’ll pull easily out into traffic in a few seconds. As the three of you cruise towards the side street where you left red 1998 Camry you’ll take a second to unzip one of the bags and stare at the wealth of Toy Story 3 and Cars toys that fill it. It’ll be quite a haul. Not enough to let you retire, but a step in the right direction.

You’ll pat James on the back.

“Good job,” you’ll say.

Congratulations on Your Recent Windfall of Burger King Toys!

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Congratulations on Using the Word Colorful Incorrectly!

Today you’re going to use the phrase “colorful” to refer to activities of a sexual nature. It’s really hard to misuse this word in general and the amazing aplomb with which you’ll misuse it is nothing short of exception. We commit this brief post in honor of your complete inability to speak like a normal human being, even in passing.

Congratulations on Using the Word Colorful Incorrectly!

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Congratulations on Finally Finishing Finnegan's Wake!

Ever since you left your bear-lover and found a separate cave and you moved far, far away to more comfortable caves in warmer climates you’ve been searching for ways to fill the emptiness in your life. You’ve tried online dating, but bears are very different on the internet and you fast grew tired of being raped by relatively unattractive men with self-esteem issues.

You tried writing a novel, but it turns out that’s really hard, no matter how many books on writing a novel you read. In fact the time it took you to read all those novel writing books is pretty impressive on its own. It’s no wonder that you only came up with a few hastily handwritten pages about a little girl looking across a field at a wildebeest and calling out her father’s name to it.

After that you tried to start a small macramé business, but it turns out that making macramé, selling it out of a cave and branding it “Marc’s Carlsbad Cave Macramé!” isn’t a viable business strategy. After the cease and desist you decided to take it easy, stay in and read a good book. You originally considered the Hardy Boys series in its entirety, but you dismissed it because you didn’t want to have your parole officer stop by and think you were a pedophile or something. Then you thought about Tristram Shandy, but you decided it was too hard and wouldn’t command enough respect, since people generally don’t know what it is.

After a lengthy deliberation you chose to read James Joyce’s pretentious, barely literate masterpiece: Finnegan’s Wake. You began the process by stockpiling food, batteries and water. Then you opened the book, turned on your reading flashlight and began.

Nearly a year and a half later you’re going to finish, emaciated and stumbling out of your cave towards civilization. Coughing you’ll meander over hills and into town, rushing towards the nearest bar (which you will now be able to sense thanks to the fact that you’ve finished Finnegan’s Wake) and burst in, slamming the last currency you have on the table and ordering a plate of fish and chips and a double of Jameson’s whiskey. The bartender will look at you, then your money, then shrug and count out your change.

“Enjoy, wino,” he’ll say, casting a look of derision back your way.

“I just finished Finnegan’s Wake,” you’ll tell him as he walks away, but he won’t turn around. No one in the bar will be looking at you. In fact, they’ll all clearly be looking away, as if to engage you in the slightest would conjure a torrent of references to and non-sequitors regarding Finnegan’s Wake that absolutely fucking no one wants to hear. When your food finally arrives it will taste delicious, but only because you’re starving. If you weren’t starving it would taste a little worse because you just wasted a year of your life reading Finnegan’s Wake instead of doing something even moderately useful with it.

Congratulations on Finally Finishing Finnegan’s Wake!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Congratulations on Only Doing a Little Crack!

You’re a great dad most of the time, much like yesterday’s erotic cake dude, but you’ve got one serious problem. You’re hooked on crack. But because you’re such a great dad your wife is willing to work through it with you, help you go through the steps and even offering to help you ease on to just smoking pot as a group so you can still party as much as you like to.

But there’s a problem. Crack is super addictive and you’re not good at making difficult sacrifices. Even though you love your wife and daughter a ton you sort of love crack more, until you’ve recently had crack and then you’re wondering why you did all that crack just now and maybe if there’s any more that you could do in a little bit.

But with your wife’s help and with benefits from your recent firing (you’re a black Eskimo and even though they fired you for smoking crack while driving a school bus the district didn’t want to risk a lawsuit) you’ve been seeing a therapist who suggested that you not try to quite cold turkey, but rather just fellate men for crack to smoke and then smoke it in a filthy alley with the taste of semen on your breath a little less often, and maybe smoke a little less until you barely feel like smoking it at all.

Today you’re going to put her plan into action. You’ll only agree to give your dealer a handjob in exchange for a smaller than usual amount of crack, and when you smoke it it will already have lost some of its luster, because the horrible scent won’t be blotting out the flavor of semen on your tongue. Instead it’ll cover up the odor of your wife’s perfume with an offensive smell akin to burning styrofoam.

As you sit there, letting it rush into your lungs and course through your veins into your mind you’ll feel a little sad, which will kind of ruin the whole crack experience for you and make you wonder just how good at her job your therapist really is.

Congratulations on Only Doing a Little Crack!

Monday, March 15, 2010

Congratulations on Baking A Cake!

It’s your little girl’s sixth birthday and today you’re going to bake her a cake. Unfortunately you specialized in erotic cake-craft during your time in culinary arts school and, as a result, have to concentrate intensely to make a cake that doesn’t look like a set of breasts or a penis or a man and a woman having sex. And for those without children it can be very difficult to concentrate during the time immediately surrounding your spawn’s birth celebration.

So it’ll come as absolutely no surprise when you open the oven to see a smiling cartoon penis staring back at you. You’ll consider driving to Carvel and purchasing a new store bought cake for your little girl, then decide against it after you recall the sheer amount you’ve had to drink over the last four hours and the fact that you can’t remember if Carvel is still in business.

After a lengthy period of internal monologue and deliberation you’ll just decide to fuck it and talk to your daughter about human sexuality, art, and how objects are just objects while eating some of the most delicious yellow food cake shaped into a penis that anyone will have ever crammed down their gullets.

It will be a tremendous hit.

Congratulations on Baking A Cake!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Navies In Spaaaaaaace!

It’s official. Space is the new sea.

They’ve been interchangeable concepts for a while now, vast tracts of hostile environment which can be easily and safely traveled unless something goes terribly wrong, as it always must. Ever since Star Wars opened with lasers streaking the sky over Tatooine space has been cemented in my mind as a valid substitute for the ocean, maybe even better. After all, you can drift on the ocean for a few days on just your own power. In space it’s only a few seconds, a minute tops.

And spaceships are, by nature, submarines as well. Firefly had some of the best sub-battle moments of recent cinematic history, measured tension and the crew’s visible knowledge that the slightest mistake would be their undoing easily trumping the efforts of films like The Widowmaker. Nothing says “oppressive environment” quite like nothingness pressing all around you.

And let’s not forget that space takes a really long time to cross, and is pretty peaceful for the most part. Except when its not, and then it usually kills you.

“But Mike,” you croak, hung over from Saturday night. “We listened to the commentary for Firefly! We already know this! Why are you still talking?”

To you I say, please shut the hell up and leave my essay, sir. The rest of you bear with me. I am trying to make a point.

Naval combat has long been one of the trickiest things to manage in games, and as a result painfully few attempt to accurately recreate it. Why would they want to? It’s tense, messy and unpleasant. It’s impractical and unending, tactically tied to the control of supply lines and means of transit. No one wants to escort supply ships for twenty hours. Hell, you have trouble getting most people to watch over a single scientist for more than fifteen minutes. If you’re old enough to remember Total Annihilation you’ll remember how unpleasant it was to integrate naval forces into the rest of your army, how devastating they could be if used properly and how incredibly shitty they could be if used incorrectly. It’s no mistake that a good many maps were made for that game without so much as a lake in them. It was hard enough to form a coherent strategy without throwing navies into the mix.

This is to say nothing of how difficult it can be to make a dedicated game about naval combat. There was a time when a few of them populated the gaming market, ranging in dramatically in complexity, but they seem to have fallen off the map completely of late. While I remember everyone and their grandma playing Pirates! Gold on Sega back in the day, I can’t think of many hardcore gamers who can discuss recently released naval sims. Indeed, its hard for me, a self proclaimed huge fucking nerd, to even recall a title released in the last five years. Off the top of my head the only one that comes to mind War Plan Pacific, and a look at Wikipedia informs me that there is no article dedicated to the subject of naval combat simulators, although they’d love for me to create one. As if, Wikipedia! I’m busy!

What am I busy doing, exactly? I’m busy playing the weird ass games that have replaced naval combat simulators: the space naval combat simulators.

The first one I’ve been dealing with, which is also easily the roughest of the bunch, is Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB, or “The Game With the Single Best Title I’ve Ever Seen,” as I like to call it, is all about the lack of direct control a good naval combat simulator embraces. Even Pirates! knew that you couldn’t make a game all about posturing and give players perfect control. The sea will brook no navigator and take no master – to fight upon her is to fight her along with your foes.

GSB doesn’t really do too much with the idea of the world as a hazard, giving it lip service by forcing certain arbitrary conditions on you based on the scenario you’re playing, but it does strip out any ability you might have to navigate the world it drops you into. Instead you give your little ships orders and see how they respond to them. This layer of abstraction reminds me of the winds in Pirates!. It’s impossible to predict just how your ships will respond to your orders, although you can get a pretty good idea through study and experience, and the battle is won or lost based on how well you manage to guess just what your space captain is going to feel like doing during a given battle.

Beyond this simple layer of abstraction GSB is about big fleets clashing together and pounding the shit out of one another. It’s a refreshingly simple game with a lot going on under the hood, and the way you construct and arrange your fleet has a lot to do with just how well you’ll fare. Do you want to make zippy little bombers or zippy little interceptors out of your fighters? Should you mix the two and trust your capital ships to pick up the slack, or would that be a disaster? And what about those capital ships? Are they going to be heavily shielded beam weapon behemoths? Heavily armored, point defended auto repair sluggers? Will they have those horribly inaccurate plasma launchers affixed to them, or will they bombard the enemy with missles? Each choice can be balanced out by building another ship to accent the abilities of the other ship you’re producing, but if you lose a ship of a particular type at the wrong moment...

No game has ever driven home the importance of having a well rounded fleet of ships, each of them designed to a specific purpose, all of them working together towards a common goal, quite as well as GSB. And the layer of abstraction really does make you feel like an admiral watch your forces slug it out with the enemy. But that’s not to say that GSB is your one stop shop for all your naval space combat needs. It’s no Homeworld.

GSB doesn’t have any of the maneuvering or feigning that a great naval combat sim makes a part of its core play. It doesn’t have maneuvering, period. In fact, as far as I can tell it just has some moving bars and targets that the computer does some quick math to make decisions regarding. It rolls a 4 and your fusion beam is destroyed by an errant missle from that Empire cruiser. It rolls a six and your plucky fighter plugs that little cannon right through that thick imperial armor. It’s a game you plan and watch, not a game you play, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But players who like the delicate ballet of ships or subs in combat will come away from GSB wishing they could tell their little ships just how to fight and fire in a three dimensional environment.

Luckily there are games for those people. While I haven’t played it I understand that Star Trek Online’s naval combat system is pretty much a real time semi-cooperative version of GSB’s epic slogs, complete with nitpicky ship design and crew selection. But, like most people interested in naval combat sims, I have a job and limited money and have no desire to spend scads and scads of it on a game that insists I play it. So I’ve moved to the opposite end of the spectrum to a neat little game called Flotilla.

Flotilla is about as far from GSB as you can get without leaving space for the horrible ravages of atmosphere. There are around six ship types, each of which has pre-defined weapons and characteristics. Ships in your fleet can be outfitted with special equipment to tweak some of their numbers, to make their little missles fire more often or travel through space more quickly, but for the most part its a game about known quantities clashing in space. It should be a clinical dance around space junk wherein a rock paper scissors game plays out again and again.

But, of course, it isn’t. Flotilla is turn based in the best tradition of turn based naval combat games, wherein you plan your ship movements simultaneously with your opponent and then watch them play out in real time. This means that your every action is responding to the previous action of your opponent who is, in turn, responding to your response and attempting to anticipate your counterattack. The result is a dynamic game of cat and mouse with some of the most unexpected results possible. Choose the wrong course heading and you’ll end up running straight into a cruiser’s missles or, far more embarrassingly, straight into a chunk of debris. And most of the ships of Flotilla can’t take a whole lot of damage. Aside from the Battlecruisers they’ll fall apart after a handful of good shots, and the Battlecruisers, amazing as they are, aren’t of much use in taking down a flanking opponent. So it’s all about balancing your force against the enemy’s and jockeying for an advantage is the depths of space. Its about calculating and guessing just what your foe is going to try next and crossing your fingers that you guessed right. And let’s be frank. There are few things more satisfying than destroying an enemy fleet without taking any casualties, flooding their exhaust ports with missles and ripping through a collection of massive dreadnaughts with nothing more than a pair of destroyers, and few things more disheartening than losing your veteran ship to one poorly executed gambit.

In Flotilla naval combat is a delicate, horrible thing, accented by classical strings and nail biting sessions where your ships carry out your orders in thirty second intervals, and its one of the most profound gaming experiences I’ve had this year. A game I purchased for $10 has made me remember the appeal of games like Star Control 2 and mostly shut down by Modern Warfare 2 gear hunting sessions, and that’s nothing short of incredible. No wonder those dudes at Infinity Ward were fired. They’re getting hosed by a crazy guy in his basement.

Flotilla also takes place in a surrealist universe filled with Rastafarian cats, renegade toucans and crazed space hippos who just want to be left alone. It contains jilted navigational officers, resentful yetis and a time limit that insures that I don’t spend as much time min-maxing as I normally would. Its one of those games, like the Path, that kind of breaks gaming for me. I care less and enjoy myself more when I’m telling my destroyer how to move in Flotilla, and I find myself avoiding the “good guy” decisions I’d normally cop out with. It’s a game about accepting consequences and learning from them. It’s an amazing game.

Astute readers have likely, by now, noticed that Silent Hunter’s most recent entry was recently released and that it is a bonafide naval combat simulator. These astute readers might also be asking why I’m leaving it out of this discussion about systems representing the various elements of naval combat, and I have to admit that it is in part due to the prohibitive costs of Silent Hunter V. But the bigger part of it is Silent Hunter’s focus on interactions with the crew. Granted that is a part of a naval sim, but it’s not a part I find particularly interesting, and it’s not something I want to spend $50 on, especially if its going to be leaking all over my naval combat. Why bother with lengthy conversations with Germans when I can just blast space Reindeer out of the sky?

This is also why I omitted Silent Hunter V from my earlier list of new releases. By all indications it is a war game, but its a war game with the trappings of an RPG. Not the kind of trappings Close Combat and Myth had, wherein you were given ample opportunity to form relationships with your units and encouraged to keep them alive, but the trappings of a game like Mass Effect, where you develop your teammates largely by asking them again and again how their day was.

But this is not a time to despair. Whatever Ubisoft might be doing with the venerable Silent Hunter series, it won’t suddenly generate a dearth of naval combat simulators. You might have to look to space for some of those sims but you’ll still be able to find them, and thanks to the incredible prosperity indie developers have been experiencing in recent years you’ll be able to pick these incredible new games up at bargain bin prices. Overall it looks like indie gaming is generating something of a renaissance in quirky little titles that the mainstream developers and publishers have all but ignored, and this renaissance is nothing short of excellent for naval combat sims and people who like them, be they on sea or in space. For my money, though, I prefer the space ones.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Congratulations, It's Slightly Irregular Blowjob Day!

Today is a day for getting discounted blowjobs. But the discount may be minor if the blowjob is more or less your average blowjob. For example let’s say your wife sucks you off while wearing dungarees. This will barely result in you receiving any kind of reduced blowjob charge. But let’s say your wife blows you while pleasuring herself with the pope staff and dressed like Amelia Ehrheardt? That’ll have a nice discount attached to it.

Other irregular blowjobs include blowjobs while some dude watches, blowjobs from people you work with, blowjobs from teachers you used to have crushes on who have since aged, blowjobs from political figures, blowjobs from furries and, of course, Grab Bag.

We suggest taking advantage of today’s wondrous holiday and receive a slightly irregular blowjob of your own, shouting “Congratulations, It’s Slightly Irregular Blowjob Day!” in accordance with the holiday’s rules.

Congratulations, It’s Slightly Irregular Blowjob Day!

Friday, March 12, 2010

Congratulations on Separating the Paper from the Plastic!

It’s the day before the big heist and because you’re part of an eco-friendly group of thieves you’re going to spend it sorting through your recycling making sure that the mixed paper and cardboard don’t have any plastic bottles or aluminum cans mixed in with them. You’ll take it one step further and break into your neighbors apartments to do the same while they’re at work. It’ll mostly go smoothly, except for one time when a woman returning home to get something she’ll have forgotten will almost notice you, but it’ll all work out and you’ll go back to your apartment and watch Everybody Loves Raymond and go to bed early to make sure that you’re well rested for the next day’s heist.

Congratulations on Separating the Paper from the Plastic!

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Congratulations on Catching the Killer!

The nets will be full when you start hauling them on deck, their tremendous weight nothing unexpected. The whining of the winches, the grunts of your shipmates, all will be expected. But when the scaled man tumbles out of the nets, dazed, on to your deck the entire operation will grind to a halt. You’ll all just stand there, staring at him until the captain yells at you to stop blowing each other and get back to work and helps the scaled man to his feet.

He’ll take him below decks covered in a blanket with a cup of tea in hand as if he was just another crewman who had fallen overboard. It’ll be clear that he knows exactly what’s up, unlike everyone else on the boat, and it’ll give the whole affair a sort of normalcy. At least until the other scaled people show up.

They’ll be dressed in flowing robes that barely cover their genitals and cling to their bodies suggestively when wet, and they will always be wet. They’ll clamor over the gang rails as if they just belonged there the whole time and limp awkwardly down below.

After a while shouts will be heard, followed by the sounds of a struggle. The merpeople, with their strange lilting voices, will be screaming as loud as their airless lungs can manage and you and your co-workers will once again stop work and watch the hatches to see what comes out.

When the naked merman finally emerges, babbling incomprehensively, he’ll have your captain in a headlock with some sort of trident pressed to his forehead. He’ll be halfway across the deck when the other merpeople emerge from down below, all of them holding tiny tridents of their. It’ll clearly be a bad situation, with each group watching the other for the slightest slip up, the life of the closest thing you’ve ever had to a father hanging in the balance.

Most of the crew will shut down. A few will just watch in anticipation. A handful will weep. But you, and only you, will remember the time the captain took you aside and told you that in the event that he was ever held hostage by a mermaid you should use the emergency harpoon. You’d just assumed he was high on shrooms at the time, but at this moment you’ll know exactly what he meant.

You’ll grab the nearest emergency harpoon from its hiding place (which is a secret and will not be reproduced here) and hurl it full force at the naked merman’s face. It’ll take him in the jaw and send him sprawling to the ground, pinning him awkwardly half off his feet to a lower gang rail. You’ll think that he’s kicking and trying to free himself for a moment before you recognize that his body is shutting down, his brain firing randomly, telling his legs to move one last time.

Your captain will be fine. He’ll translate some of the mer speech and let you know that the merman you just harpooned was actually a serial killer famous for sleeping with fish and then murdering anyone who noticed, which was a lot of people because sound carries underwater and he tended to do his thing in pretty public areas. In exchange for your service they’ll give the captain a trident and a chest filled with treasure and the captain will gave you a handle of vodka that costs nine dollars and his personal thank you so really everyone will come out on top here.

Congratulations on Catching the Killer!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Congratulations on Choosing the Third One From the Left!

The way you crack open your fortune cookies at Panda Café is nigh ritualistic. The peeling of the plastic, the gentle tension of the cookie as it collapses and the way you set the crumbs on your plate and unfold the paper, it’s almost a religion. Most of the missives you get involve mistranslations or misprints of Confuscian philosophies with all their context stripped away. But occasionally you find something inexplicably odd, like “Stand next to the woman with red hair” or “Avoid dogs” and it turns out to be somewhat relevant. That’s why when you see the relevant fortune, a few days earlier on March 3rd, after finishing your Lo Mien, you’ll fold it up gingerly and put it in your pants pocket.

When this Wednesday rolls around you won’t even remember having deposited it there. You’ll just be sifting through your pockets as the sand drizzles out of the hourglass. The gypsy will be laughing her horrible, horrible laugh and you’ll be baffled as to which one of the doors doesn’t contain a lion. When you withdraw the paper and read it once more you’ll know right away.

You’ll stride up to the correct door and the gypsy will stop laughing just as you enter. When you emerge clutching the treasure chest filled with her gold her smile will have vanished completely and she’ll be grinding her teeth, the sound clear from across the room.

“Leave,” she’ll say, and you’ll nod politely and do so, because being rude to gypsies you’ve just bested is generally a poor idea.

Congratulations on Choosing the Third One From the Left!

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Congratulations on Giving Up Selling Cocaine for a Day!

You’ve long wondered if people really like you for you or simply like you because of your wonderful, wonderful cocaine. That’s why today you’re going to give up selling cocaine for a day.

It will begin like any other day at the crack of noon. Your girlfriend will flop out of bed on to the floor and writhe to her feet, stumbling towards the bathroom. You’ll turn over in your bed, expecting to hear the reassuring flush of the toilet and the sound of her brushing her teeth as she tries to get you up for the day. Instead you’ll hear an unearthly scream and she’ll burst into your bedroom, panting.

“WHERE IS THE COCAINE?!” she’ll shout, her hands clenched into tiny little fists.

“I decided to stop selling it,” you’ll say, your morning haze shielding you from realizing just how horrible her rage truly is.

It won’t last.

She’ll cross the room like a force of nature, lightning striking your body and hurling you against a wall. You’ll taste blood in your mouth and feel plaster fall to the floor all around you, dusting you. You’ll try to get up but your arms and legs won’t work.

She’ll walk over to you slowly, violent intent in her eyes, and pick you up by the throat. “Get out of my apartment,” she’ll say, staring you in the face.

“But,” you’ll struggle to say, “This is my apartment.”

Her eyes will narrow and she’ll hurl you out of the fourth story window of your apartment and across the street on to a car.

You’ll be stunned, not just because of the impact. You’ll also be shocked at just how strong your girlfriend is and just how much she cares about your status as a neighborhood cocaine dealer. You’ll be laying on top of the crumpled vehicle, pondering these topics and slowly testing your body’s ability to move to see if you’ve been permanently injured when a friend of yours, Terrence, who sometimes buys cocaine from you notices you and will come over to ask if you’re alright. Terrence is a professor of English literature at Sarah Lawrence College.

“Jeez,” he’ll say, removing his hipster glasses to assess your condition. “Do you feel alright?”

“Yeah,” you’ll say as he helps you to your feet. “Thanks, Terry.” He’ll nod.

“No problem.” After a brief pause where the two of you examine your body for additional injury he’ll perk up a little. “Hey, do you have any cocaine I could buy?”

You’ll shake your head. “Sorry. Stopped selling today.”

He’ll nod, calmly, then punch you in the face as hard as his angry little body can manage. You’ll see stars and tumble backwards on to the pavement once more, the taste of blood now familiar in your mouth.

The day will continue in this fashion, more or less, with you meeting various people that you know and them asking you for coke. At one point little girls will throw mixed nuts at you, chanting that you’re a pussy for holding out on your friends. A homeless man will refuse to pee on you, a hipster will smile at you and everything in The City will be out of alignment. After a long, harrowing journey, all the worse for the relative social acceptance you’ve enjoyed as a coke dealer, you’ll finally reach your supplier, Jacob.

“Jacob!” you’ll shout at him from the street. He’ll poke his head out of his window and look down at you, dreadlocks all atumble around his face. He’ll look angry that you’re there. “I want to start selling cocaine again!”

His frown will turn to a smile and he’ll throw down a package of drug product to you. Within seconds a young man will high five you on the street and by the time you get home world will have gotten to your girlfriend, who will be back to pretending she loves you once more.

Congratulations on Giving Up Selling Cocaine for a Day!

Monday, March 8, 2010

Congratulations, You're Going to Space Jail!

It’s quite well documented that aliens pick up and molest strangers all the time. Its an epidemic facing American cities, and it’s no laughing matter. We suggest contacting your local youth minister about the issue as soon as possible, as he will likely know exactly what to do to help (most likely it will involve removing your pants and dropping to your knees).

Its mostly harmless, but sometimes aliens hurt themselves while raping humans. Its bound to happen. An alien will awkwardly thrust his swordlike phallus into your rectum and you’ll turn at just the wrong moment and it will snap like a syringe, its razor tip stuck in your flesh. That only applies to one kind of alien, and one very specific type of mishap which, surprise surprise, will happen to you while you’re being raped under the influence of an alien mind beam. Monday morning

The alien, furious, will demand that you be taken to space-court so that he may receive reparations and, thanks to Space Republicans, space-court will not only indulge him, they’ll find you guilty of injuring an alien’s penis without previous authorization.

Your sentence will be three years in space jail, where rape is strictly forbidden. The court will gasp and you’ll be tased into unconsciousness during the hulabaloo following the announcement.

Once you arrive in space jail you’ll be introduced to your cellmate, who is not a rapist and has some weird blue skin and a nose thing and some other stuff that makes him an alien. The two of you will become fast friends and will agree to one day start a shipping business once you are released from space jail. It’ll be one of the many wonderful bonding experiences you have while incarcerated in space jail.

Congratulations, You’re Going to Space Jail!

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: A Return to Rapture!

I’m willing to forgive a lot if a game gives me an interesting place to explore. Great games are made excellent by their settings, and some of the most memorable experiences I have in games come from exploring the reaches of the Rickenbacker and the streets of Venice. The ruined city of Acre, three years after finishing Assassin’s Creed, remains a distinct place with its own personality, its own pulse.

But it’s just as easy to ruin a game with a banal setting. Half-Life, for all its imaginative storytelling, didn’t find its legs for me until it forced us into Xen. Creeping around Black Mesa was fun, but the textures were bland and only occasionally evoked a response. Running across a hydroelectric dam might as well have been running across a highway overpass. And when your game is middling in the first place, as was the case with Mass Effect 2, boring, lifeless settings can force it into the territory of bad. I can only recall one place in Mass Effect 2 that had even the slightest effect on me as a player, a brief missive in the place Jack was raised which was both haunting and evocative of all the feelings that Jack had come of age with. Aside from that even the inside of a derelict Reaper lacked personality. It might as well have been the inside of a Blue Eclipse cargo freighter or a moon base.

The worst can be attempts to revisit previously successful settings. Assassin’s Creed 2’s lone stumble (aside from the ending) came to me when it did just that, giving you a brief glimpse of my beloved Acre. Thief 2, for all its wonderful level design, was almost unbearable when it pushed you back into a familiar Thief setting. I fear for the day when I’m asked to explore the Ishimura again or to run across the walls of Mirror’s Edge’s nameless City.

But when its well executed it can be a wonderful and evocative thing. System Shock 2 brought us back to Citadel Station with style and poise, using it to great effect. It was a buildup with a purpose and great payoff, and it showed why you should reuse settings. So when, as so many have stated, a game like Bioshock, which didn’t really need a sequel, received one from a completely different team, it seemed like it was bound for disaster. Rapture, after all, was the backbone of the first Bioshock, and the entire city had a tremendous feeling of being a real place behind it. Each district had its own personality which, taken as a whole, maintained the motif and feeling of Rapture. To return to Rapture in new hands seemed like a fools errand. Why bother showing us this already well tread earth?

Bioshock 2 answers that question early on with the screech of cracking glass and the rush of water flooding your vision. The first time I was caught in the rush of water I understood why I’d come back to Rapture so many years after the fall of Ryan. It wasn’t to celebrate the accomplishments of the first game or adore the architecture. It was to watch the ocean slowly take it back.

Bioshock 2 is a game with a bit of an older target audience than the first Bioshock. Bioshock the First was primarily a coming of age story. You confronted various father figures, came to terms with a mother figure and various sibling figures and eventually you claimed your place in the world, forever changing it with the force of your actions. But Bioshock 2 is all about being a daddy. It’s about being a daddy who has been forced to miss his child’s journey into adulthood, a father torn from his already ramshackle family and now barred from seeing the one person he loves by seemingly insurmountable forces. And your journey is less about your own personal growth and more about the example you set for your child. Bioshock 2 is less about your future and more about the future you build.

This fatalism and knowledge that all things must end deeply informs Rapture’s new status at the bottom of the ocean. Gone is the triumph of steel and wood and glass, replaced by a tenuous balancing act constantly under siege by nature itself. Even as you restore various sections of Rapture it becomes quite apparent that all of them are rapidly decaying. Unlike say Fort Frolic from the original game places like Siren Alley are clearly on their last legs. Despite the effort which has gone into preserving them and filling them with art and decoration, even population they are clearly on the verge of collapse. Pipes leak, rubble blocks your path. The ravages of war from the first Bioshock have been replaced by the march of time in Bioshock 2, and it shows early on. The rapid descent into madness is replaced by a fixation on the progress of age and the creeping certainty of death surrounding all of the characters. Only the Little Sisters are truly given any hope, and theirs is a delicate thing, subject to our whims and, in the end, time itself.

To say that the ocean encroaches on Rapture in Bioshock 2 is to say too little. To say that time has visibly passed in this place is to put it more accurately. The ocean has, after all, been encroaching in Rapture since you first rose out of it in your bathysphere, the water streaming down your view port until your way was clear, burst pipes and frozen passageways constantly impeding your progress. Bioshock 2 progresses this idea, showing the ecology of the sea reshaping itself with Rapture. From the influence Rapture has on marine life to the presence of barnacles and coral formations within the passages of the city, it becomes clear that Rapture has become intertwined with the sea since Ryan’s death. And as nature marches on all the futile plans levied against it, crafted from steel and stone and glass and muscle, all prove worthless against the coming tide. In the end the only way to achieve anything in Rapture, to affect any kind of notable change, is hope. Hope not only in the future but in a child you have gone long wthout seeing, in a child who believes in you completely.

Bioshock 2 did a number of amazing things people have written about extensively, building a narrative about an oft ignored subject, building on an already noteworthy mythology and doing it justice in the process and making one of gaming’s most powerful denizens seem vulnerable and, at times, a little pathetic. But one thing I’d like to celebrate it for is recapture and reusing a sense of place in a way that few games can manage. Sequels are all too often simply repackaged game play with a new set of maps, and while Bioshock 2’s maps are all new the feel of Rapture still permeates them. Not a one of them would’ve been out of place in the first Bioshock, and you can bet that 2K knows it. What makes the places in Bioshock 2 its own is the sense of decay they bring, the sense of loss and the certainty that one day, not far off, Rapture will be no more. Never before has a game traded so heavily on the reuse of a place, nor has it done it so well.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Congratulations on Killing All the Spiders!

You’ll do it late tonight, so late it almost won’t make it into the day. You’ll do it because they’ve been poor roommates, eating their fill of insects and never paying rent. You’ll do it out of spite more than anything else.

You’ll do it with fire. You’ll do it when they least expect, when you’re usually asleep and, ergo, you assume they to be asleep. You’ll come upon them as they tend to their spiderly duties, mending all the webs you broke in a passive aggressive fit of rage earlier in the day.

You’ll drop the gas can with a burning rag in it near them and tell them “If you were better roommates you’d be able to put out the flames before they made the entire place go up.” They’ll pretend they haven’t heard you and you’ll take that as the last nail in their coffin, turning and leaving the apartment with your laptop bag and most of your clothes packed into a duffel slung over your shoulders.

When you leave there will be silence for a few moments, then an explosion that rushes out the door after you. You’ll drop to your knees when you realize what you’ve done. You’ll spend the next few years fighting crime before a woman finally takes pity on you and you get your act together.

Congratulations on Killing All the Spiders!

Friday, March 5, 2010

Congratulations on Giving Us All Boners!

If boners were a limited commodity you’d have completely bankrupted our national reserves long ago. To say that you’re attractive is a disservice. You are mouth watering, leg weakening. You’re Jessica Alba multiplied by Heath Ledger divided by Carey Grant to the Carey Ewles power. To look upon you is to know the love of god, or gods, depending on whether or not you’re a Cylon.

But normally your beauty isn’t spread around. Normally it’s a jealously guarded secret held close by the ones who love you. They won’t let you leave the house without a hoodie and giant douchey sunglasses, and they’ll never let you do it alone. But like all other things in the world your beauty yearns to be free. And as such it will find a way.

In this case its way will be to get you on the local news one day when you’re walking down the street with the roommate who masturbates thinking about you every night but is too scared to ask if you’d like to make out. She’ll have lost track of you for a moment, distracted by some kittens in the window of a pet shop, when the newsman will fall upon you.

“What do you think about muffins?!” he’ll shout at you, spittle flying from his mouth as he does so.

You’ll remove your glasses and look at him with those gorgeous gray-green-blue-hazel eyes and he’ll drop his microphone and start weeping. The cameraman, however, will do his job and get some amazing footage of you. By the time your roommate notices the hullabalooh he’ll have shot three and a half minutes of you talking about what you like about muffins.

It will be three and a half of the most profound minutes of television ever shot.

The network will refuse to air it, realizing its potential for both mass bonerage and its potential to make people recognize the beauty inherent in the world give up the random message of “consume” which dominates their abysmal lives. But the camera, god bless his heart, will have expected such a cowardly course of action by the studio. He’ll have kept a copy of the footage for himself and he’ll put it up on Youtube.

Within hours he’ll be dead, killed by network assassins, but the footage will be out and the world will never be the same.

It will be titled “AMAZING GIRL TALKS ABOUT MUFFINS” and it will attain several hundreds of million hits within 48 hours. Within a week everyone with an internet connection will have seen your shimmering eyes flush with joy as you talk about breakfast pastries.

This will lead to a worldwide surplus of boners, thanks entirely to you. We just hope you lay low afterwards. There are a lot of crazy fuckers out there (we’re looking at you, nation of Armenia) and they might hurt you if they figure out where you are. Just trust in your roommates and keep your head down. We’re all rooting for you.

Congratulations on Giving Us All Boners!

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Congratulations on Finding the Face of God!

Turns out its in a fucking taco. But not in Mexico, the way the Weekly World News constantly spouts off. It’s in a taco in Harvard Square in Cambridge at Phillipe’s Tacqueria. It appears there in every taco produced between two and three AM. We highly recommend visiting there and finding it yourself. You won’t regret it.

Congratulations on Finding the Face of God!

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Congratulations on Learning Guitar!

You’ll notice we didn’t say “to play guitar” in the title above. That’s not a mistake. You’re going to learn guitar tomorrow. Not how to play it. Because playing an instrument insinuates that you’ll use it to produce music and express yourself in the world. What you’re going to be doing is a lot less like that and a lot more like “spending eighty dollars for an untuneable piece of shit at a used music shop.”

When you bring it back to your dorm room you’ll open up the “my first chords” teach yourself how to play guitar book and awkwardly place your hand over the fret. You’ll give the instrument a few strums, producing a horrible sound with each of them. You’ll start to hate yourself a little with each pluck of a gnarled and spiteful string, wondering what kind of gypsy curse forced this guitar into your hands.

After a few minutes of lazy plucking your mind will be on fire, the book the last of your thoughts. You’ll think only of how to destroy the guitar, how to remove it from your life. That, of course, will be when the co-ed comes in.

She’ll be blonde, or brunette, of medium build and height. She’ll be made up but not an aggressively trampy way. Just a semi-trampy way, the way that makes you think she’ll give it up if you seem kind of interesting just so she can tell the story to her friends who she doesn’t really like but spends time with anyways because that’s what you do as a freshman at college.

She’ll sit on the side of your bed and stroke the sheets.

“Keep playing,” she’ll say in an unaccented American voice, and you will comply. You will understand the power of the guitar. And when she slides her hand inside your pants you’ll understand why you were drawn to this horrible instrument. It will be the most magical five minutes of your life, until your roommate walks in and starts yelling at you, beginning a seven month campaign of psychological and sexual warfare between two previously civil people.

Congratulations Learning Guitar!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Congratulations Skater Jack!

Today your name is Skater Jack, we don’t care who the fuck you think you are. We specifically chose Skater Jack because it sounds like either a super laid back dude or a really fucking hot chick. Since names are a powerful force in certain belief systems you will become one of these two body and personality types today. Transsexuals will become irresistible, intensely approachable objects of sexual and emotional desire to everyone who looks upon it, so a very small percentage of the population will be able to fuck anyone they want today.

Whatever your personality archetype you will also become incredibly talented as skating boards for the day. We understand skating boards is a sport many young white people participate in out of doors due to a lack of general danger in their lives, so expect to perform many sweet “tricks” and “flips” for your friends cell phone cameras during the day.

A small number of you will no doubt “wipe out,” a common occurrence in skating boards. This is a term for an occasion upon which a board skater falls down and injures themselves, sometimes severely. The injuries produced by such “wipe outs” can vary dramatically from a simple boo boo to several months in traction. Our best wishes go to those who “wipe out” while skating boards today.

To all the rest, we understand that people of lower intelligence and/or self esteem will be more attracted to you than usual today. We suggest that you take full advantage of this windfall of sexual attention but remember, wear a condom. Because you’re only going to be a douchebag for the day, but herpes lasts forever.

Congratulations Skater Jack!

Monday, March 1, 2010

Congratulations on Meeting the New Love of Your Life!

Today anyone, and I do mean anyone, who licks a frozen pole anywhere in American will find their true love. I’ll give you a few minutes to finish giggling over our use of the world “pole.”

Done, then?

As we were saying, on this special day the poles of America will align to bring together any two people who pay homage to them. This offers extends not only to the perpetually single and psychotically lonely. Married men and women and gay married women and men are also subject to this capricious event.

So unless you want to meet the one you’ve always wanted but never known the name of keep your tongue away from that pole. To everyone else I say Congratulations on Meeting the New Love of Your Life!