Congratulations on Finishing All the Liquor In Your House!

Your wife will tell you couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Won’t. She’ll be right, at least on the first two counts.

But stay at home dads need to party sometimes too, and after your kid’s asleep you like to pretend that you can still “throw down” with the best of them. So tonight after you’ve washed your hands of baby feces and vomit you’ll sit down at your four person kitchen table slash office desk, put away the laptop you’ve been tapping out your “novel” on and break out all the whiskey in your house.

Since your wife’s in AA it’ll just be a bunch of bottles in the back of your cabinet that you forgot to throw away when she first started, all mixed into one Nalgene. Your wife will finger her coin as she watches you pour them in one by one, mixing ouzo with bourbon with vodka.

“This is a terrible idea,” she’ll say.

“You think that about all drinking!” you’ll shout back at her, shutting her up and beginning a fissure in your relationship that will eventually destroy your marriage and force your child into a broken home that never needed to be. Then you’ll examine the mixture you’ve made and down it in one massive gulp.

Your throat will flex with the pressure of the liquid sliding down it, your gullet will burn. There will be other homoerotic metaphors here but we’ll leave those to your imagination. Suffice to say it’s going to suck. But you’ll get the entire thing down in your tummy and plop the bottle down on the kitchen table.

You’ll turn to your wife, give her an “I told you so” look, and then let out a long, satisfied burp. That burp will then turn into a choking cough, which will turn into an explosive fit of projectile vomiting,

“Holy shit,” your wife will say, laughing to herself while she finds some old rags under the counter. When the entire process ends you’ll be face down on your kitchen floor, moaning, while she drops some rags on you.

“I’m going upstairs to masturbate,” she’ll tell you. “Clean yourself up before you come to bed.”

She’ll leave you there gasping, whimpering, and wishing you’d chosen to just go down on your wife instead of making terrible decisions with alcohol.

Congratulations on Finishing All the Liquor In Your House!

Congratulations Army Man!

We don’t want to spoil this, so we’re going to avoid going into greater detail. Let’s leave it at this:

You’re an army man. Today you’re going to become lodged in former President George W. Bush’s throat and choke him to death. It will be your finest hour, rich with symbolism and the death of former President George W. Bush.

Congratulations Army Man!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: How Level Design Helped Kill Black Ops!

I have a friend who is trying to enroll in graduate programs for sound design in video games, and I can’t help but applaud his nobility. He’s trained most of his life as a musician, but he has never really tried to make performing and recording into his primary income, so he’s doing something he thinks he’ll enjoy to pay the bills while he still makes music. And he knows that what he’s doing is a sort of thankless task, something which is only noticed if it’s done poorly. Good sound design, in almost all things, means that no one notices anything while the sound is playing. The same goes for sound mixing and mastering in movies and music, or audio design in plays. If the sound designer does their job perfectly then everything seems to fit just right. The people who are just enjoying the product don’t notice anything as being amiss. It all just seems right. It’s functionally invisible.

And video games have a lot of really talented sound designers who seem to never want for work, so I think he’s going to do great. But his pursuit of this noble, oft unrecognized enterprise made me think of another thing we don’t notice until it’s done wrong in games: level design.

Level design has long been something everyone and anyone can do. The infamous Stevie “Killcreek” Case even did it, although she’s far more notable as a gamer and can, to some extent, be blamed for doing level design for some of the shittier games of the late nineties and early “naughties.” Duke Nukem 3D is known for making a generation of people believe (and occasionally prove) they could design a level just as well as, if not better than, the pros. My point is that there’s no shortage of talented people with a lot of experience in building levels, and that the toolsets that allow people to construct them are the primary bar in actually allowing them to do so.

There are schools of architecture that write about level design in games, standards of functionality and attempts at subverting these standards that people. The short version of what I’m saying is that a professional game development company, a well funded experienced company, has no excuse to ship a game with a haphazard or downright poorly designed level in it. If that group is designing a triple A title, a veritable blockbuster, than this goes double. I shouldn’t wonder why a vault is maze-like in Fallout: New Vegas or why there are invisible walls in a seemingly open level in Borderlands. And to be fair neither of these titles are actually guilty of these most awful of sins. They’re both solidly built games that have great level design, both of them massive and sprawling constructs that deliver in even the smallest areas. A destitute shack isn’t something to be thrown in for these teams, it’s a chance to offer players who explore the world a little treat, something most people won’t notice. It’s nice and it makes the game feel like a crafted object, a labor of love.

Call of Duty: Black Ops totally fails in terms of level design. Many of the multiplayer levels are competent, although none of them are exceptional. There are balance issues, optimization issues, resource management issues, but nothing too terrible. The game is completely playable, and you’ll never encounter a game where you think “man, this is a terribly designed map.” You might think “Wow, nuke-town is way too crowded for sixteen people,” but the design of Nuke Town still feels okay. Play it with eight people and you’ll see that it’s not really a bad level, it’s more an abused one. But there’s no guide to how many players should be on a given level and, from what I’ve seen, no attempt to make one, or to set up play-lists that cater to server size. A customized one might exist, but it seems like Treyarch doesn’t really care about how their maps play.

A brief aside: I believe Treyarch does care about how their game plays. Although they did a terrible job of testing it they are working hard to patch it and we will hopefully see some real improvements in terms of performance very soon. But I don’t think they get how bad their levels are. I don’t think they realize how important a solid level design and a solid integration and recognition of the design of levels is to making a game great.

This point really comes up during the single player campaign. During the campaign you will be asked to figure out what the fuck developers want you to do time and time again. You’ll occasionally receive waypoints, which will be your only guide. The levels themselves will be a baffling series of tunnels transposed on a variety of settings. Want to play a game where you fight through a series of tunnels disguised as a jungle? They’ve got that. A riverboat ride which is really a corridor shooter with unlimited ammo? They’ve got that too. Want a tunnel-run where you fly a fucking helicopter? That’s also here.

This is and of itself isn’t so bad. The FPS as a means of delivering tunnels to players isn’t necessarily a broken system, and tunnel shooters can be good, even great, when they’re done right. Modern Warfare, for example, had a lot of tunnel levels in it that played with the idea of an FPS being a series of haphazard, repurposed and occasionally elegantly designed tubes. I’ll even admit that Modern Warfare 2, a game I despise in so many ways, executed well on this front, serving up a game where nearly every engagement was a fight through a set of tunnels and hiding it marvelously. But in Black Ops the tunnels aren’t just glaring, jarring parts of the level’s makeup, they’re also ill wrought.

My favorite example is the level which reconstructs the Siege of Khe-San as a series of tunnels. Not necessarily a bad idea, right? Could even be kind of fun, running through the outskirts of a base murdering a vastly superior force, feeling like you’re an unstoppable badass. Except there tunnels are so slipshod, the consequences for not responding immediately or correctly to directions so severe, and the directions themselves so muted and poorly phrased, that the level is just a giant piece of shit. Let me show you an example of how the design failed me. Upon spawning I found myself in a triage area, an underground segment of trench where we had overhead cover. Scattered mortar fire was coming in all around us, but nothing was falling directly around me, so I decided I’d run back a little and see if the fallen soldiers behind me were carrying any interesting weapons. It’s not like they were using them anymore, right?

I was immediately cut down by a hail of mortar fire after stepping back into the trench I had just come out of. No warning shots, no shouted request for assistance from my teammates. Just a bunch of explosions and a brief statement telling me that I must defend Khe-San at all costs.

I was pretty pissed off, but since I don’t generally quit games (see Jericho) I decided I’d stick it through. I pressed through the level, followed my allies through tunnels, had a scripted cutscene where a VC threatened to kill me if I didn’t press the V button fast enough and then came out into a wide open area where I found fire down on an endless stream of foes. I stood up there for a while and picked off enemies, thinking I’d lighten resistance before I headed down. I went through two drums of M-60 ammo, hit with most of them, and then ran forward into the trench, only to find my progress blocked. I ran back and forth, looking for an exit, for anything, but there was nothing. Just a hail of bullets from newly respawned enemies that I guess I was supposed to kill.

I reloaded and played through it again. And again. And again. Finally, once, after standing at the top of the hill for a seeming eternity I noticed that Woods, the character I wish I was playing instead of Sam Worthington, rushed up to a barrel and kicked it into a ditch where it blew up and spread a wall of fire obscuring enemy vision. Then I noticed a barrel right next to that one and got the message: I was supposed to knock down a barrel too! I ran up to do so and was promptly shot in the face by roughly a kajillion bullets. Then I respawned, timed by running up to the barrel so that it more or less synced up with Woods and managed to move on to the next part of the level, where I was confronted with another infuriating series of what could charitably be called “puzzles,” if your definition of “puzzle” was “frustrating series of trial and error tests without any visible criteria for success or hints of any kind.”

You’ll run into these moments a lot in Black Ops, moments where the game wants you to do things that aren’t clear at all, either in purpose, aim, or execution. And it’s frustrating every time. There will be relatively few occasions where you’ll look at the problem Treyarch has given you and think “okay, this makes sense, here we go.” Far more often you’ll die, reload, and then try again, hoping for the best this time. Russian riot troopers, endless streams of foes from the banks of rivers, and superfluous scenes involving you directing units from a Blackbird spy plane (seriously?) all fall under this category. And those are just the examples that come to mind right away. I’m sure a second playthrough of the game would find more.

From an amateur developer working under limited funding I could understand some of these issues, even sympathize with the people behind them, but considering just how poor the design is, how well the game was funded and how prominently advertised the release has been, it’s nothing short of atrocious. This is to say nothing of the story, which is pretty standard fare with a weak kneed play at being somewhat psychological and an interesting, if poor utilized framing device. Even if everything else were excellent, and it most certainly is not, Black Ops’ single player is in my eyes a total failure as a design, simply because of the levels. And in a day and age when amateur level designers are creating amazing games and content it’s enough to dismiss this game from anyone who wants a well constructed single-player experience’s wish list. By all means, buy it if you want an incredible multiplayer game that gets exactly what makes Call of Duty great as a game type. But if you’re interested in a series of competently designed corridors that you shoot your way through while getting little snippits of Cold War story? Look elsewhere.

Congratulations Southern Dandy!

You are a southern dandy, one of the last. You are a rarified breed now, isolated and noble in your ways but difficult to find, even for those who are looking. You put on your white/off white suits each day, smoke your hand rolled cigarettes on the porch on your manor home white you watch dark skinned people work around you and drink mint julips at the slightest provocation. You also carry a flintlock pistol in your breast pocket, just in case.

You are, in many ways, a protected species, a critical subset of the American social wilderness which demands careful protection. You are, in many other, more prominent ways, a force of intense destructive power whose very existence threatens our world. If you didn’t keep to yourself this latter part of your persona might be a bigger issue, but for most of the last decade you’ve been satisfied to just sit and rock on your porch, occasionally playing board games or gin rummy with other southern dandies.

That ends today.

Today you’re going to wake up, carefully dress yourself, shave your face to maintain your carefully manicured moustache and step up on the steps. Then you’ll look out across the fields and notice your workers looking upset about something.

“What’s wrong, boy?” you’ll ask a black man four years your elder. He’ll look at you like he wants to hit you, but then he’ll remember how much you pay him to put up with his shit and think of his daughter and her gay ass art school bills and he’ll cluck his tongue and tell you what’s what.

“Man on the radio spoke ill of the first black President today,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “Enough to boil my blood.”

You’ll thumb your beard and wonder aloud. “A negroid President? Such a thing shall’nt be!” Then you’ll toss your white gloves into the air and enter your antique model-T automobile, so enraged at the state of things that you’ll drive it yourself, unassisted by an attendant.

You’ll drive four days and four nights from southern Georgia all the way to Washington D.C., travelling at a steady thirty five miles per hour for ten hours a day until you arrive, gloveless and upset, in the capitol.

“I demand to see the President!” you’ll shout at the first resident of D.C. you see, a homeless man named Carl who lives underneath an overpass.

You’ll hold him bodily and threaten to throttle him until he agrees to show you where the President is, as all D.C. residents are required by law to do upon request from a southern gentleman such as yourself. Once he reveals the President’s location, in yonder manor house ‘pon the green, as you would put it, you’ll stride up and announce to the Secret Service, “I am here to see the President.”

The Secret Service will step to the side, as they’ve been trained for years to do, and let you pass into the President’s inner sanctum. There you’ll find him at his desk, signing some bills into law or whatever Presidents do. You’ll stand in front of him until he looks up, and then give him a gentle pat on thc eheek.

“I demand a duel, you upstart quadroon,” you’ll say, stroking your moustache as you speak. The President will look at you, narrow his eyes and sigh.

“Very well,” he’ll say in his Presidenty voice. He’ll know the rules, well as anyone else, that if he were to refuse a duel you’d become the new President in all but name, and Barack Obama loves America too much to see it fall back into the hands of retards like you.

So the two of you will meet out on the lawn. He with his wife and children watching on, holding an SIG automatic he borrowed from one of the Secret Service guys. You alone spare your butler, who will have walked to D.C. in the time between your departure and the duel, who will stand with a white cloth over his arm, wondering what he’d do if he were set free, hoping he’s loaded your flintlock pistol correctly so as to avoid a whooping later.

The Secretary of Defense will stand between the two of you, staring at a digital watch before he shouts:

“DUEL!”

And the two of you will draw. You’ll be an old man by this point, decrepit and out of shape, whereas the President, despite his stresses, will be in excellent physical condition, aside from the smoking. He’ll move fast, faster than you’d ever thought a man could, and pump two rounds in your direction. The second one will catch you in the shoulder and knock you to the ground, where your butler will run to you.

“Young master!” he’ll cry, shuffling to your side.

But you’re a tough old bird, and that won’t make you give up, no sir. You’ll sit up, look the President in the eye and declare “I am bested, sir. Good day.” Then you’ll let your manservant haul you to your feet, drag you to your car and drive you home, where you’ll plot social revenge against President Barack Obama, conspiring to never again invite him to your wondrous afternoon teas.

Congratulations Southern Dandy!

Congratulations Zulu Chief!

You’re a Zulu chief, which isn’t actually that weird or significant in modern life, and today you’re going to luck out. You’re going to find a briefcase full of money!

You’ll find it in a bank, in America of all places, that you just happen to be robbing.

“Oh, hello,” you’ll say, grabbing the briefcase and taking it out of the vault, polite mostly from your Southern Africa upbringing, where such values were stressed more than actual nicities.

“Nice briefcase,” one of your heist-mates will tell you, nodding his approval.

“Thank you,” you’ll respond in that incredible accent that all Zulu chiefs manage so effortlessly.

Then the lot of you will shoot your way out of the bank, murdering three police officers before going to live in Canada, where you have diplomatic immunity due to some obscure laws that came up when Afrika Bombaataa formed the Zulu Nation and some Prime Minister really dug his sound.

You’ll live fat, happy, and surrounded by children and die quiet and pleased with the life you’ve lived, and rightly so.

Congratulations Zulu Chief! You’re a prince among thieves!

Congratulations Kim Basinger!

This one goes out to the lovely lady, the K-Bas. Let’s face it, you gave a great many of us our first boner while we watched Never Say Never Again. And Batman? You defined weird, forced romantic interests inserted into beloved existing narratives for a generation.

But times have been tough lately. Even though you’ve been making movies it’s been hard to pay any attention to them when they have titles like 8 Mile and The Mermaid Chair. We want boners, including slightly older lady boners, not anti-boners generated by those gay ass wastes of celluloid.

Which is why we’re all going to be super psyched tomorrow when you announce your next feature film: Kim Basinger Convincing Rachel McAdams to Make Out. It’ll be directed by Oliver Stone, and will be universally recognized as “the only movie he’s ever made which isn’t utter shit” by Rotten Tomatoes. Its box office gross will be equivalent to the annual GDP of Panama and the movie will simultaneously end the debate over gay marriage in America and cure all forms of AIDS everywhere, ever.

Also we’ll get to see you make out with one of today’s hottest actresses, so that’s pretty sweet. Thanks for making this instead of another shitty movie like Charlie St. Cloud!

Congratulations Kim Basinger!

Congratulations on Blinding Yourself with the Cold!

Today you’re going to be out indulging in your first and greatest love: rubbing your face violently into permafrost.

“I LOVE THIS SO MUCH!” you’ll shout as your girlfriend approaches you with some lotion and a glass of warm milk.

“I know, honey,” she’ll say, sitting next to you on the ground as you violently press yourself against it. She’ll bite her lip and glance at the ground, away from you, which will be strange. She loves watching you rub yourself against the ground normally.

“WHAT’S WRONG, DEAR?” you’ll scream at her, since that’s the only way you can comfortably speak from the ground.

She’ll bite her lip and let loose a deep sigh before she announces to you. “I don’t feel the same way about watching you rub your face against frozen ground until you almost die.” Your body will go cold, not just because of the horrible cold you’re pressing it against. It’ll be the cold of sudden heartbreak, the cold of realizing that the life you built for yourself is collapsing.

Blinking in disbelief, you’ll pause in your constantly efforts to look at her. She’ll be beautiful, just as beautiful as the day you met her. But the way she looks at you, you’ll understand what she sees: a dirty man in a tattered parka rubbing himself ceaselessly against the earth.

“IS THERE SOMEONE ELSE?” you’ll scream at her, furious this time, although it’ll be impossible to tell from the intonation of your voice.

She won’t speak. She won’t be able to speak. She’ll just run away and leave you there on the dirt, weeping. You’ll redouble your efforts to grind yourself into the ground, still inconsolable.

“THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT!” you’ll shout, grinding your face into the frozen earth until your tears freeze to it and it takes a team of doctors to pry you away. They will be unable to save your eyes.

Congratulations on Blinding Yourself with the Cold!

Congratulations Pinball Composer!

Today you’re a douchebag who does nothing put compose music on a pinball machine. You use the sounds from your pinball machine to create sounds which you later mix and arrange on a sound board your mom bought for you when you were nineteen.

All this would actually be kind of cool if you used the pinball machine to make art of your own or re-create older musical works of note to recast them in a new, interesting light. But you won’t do that. What you’ll do is nothing short of heretical. You’re going to spend almost all of your time arranging covers of Metallica songs on a pinball machine. And you’re going to do it poorly.

You’ll play them for your mom, who will weep openly at the horror she has spawned on the earth. Confused, you’ll turn to the internet for a second opinion, where retards the world over will flock to you to be their new god. Your stupidity will be truly profound, and your complete inability comprehend it will inspire them. Perhaps wealthy, lonely older women will one day take pity upon them and buy them expensive equipment they can use to make completely terrible cultural contributions.

You’ll be awash with positive Youtube comments from unemployed Metallica fans who do nothing but surf the internet from seven in the morning until eleven at night when Conan’s new show comes on. They’ll tell you how great you are and how great Conan’s new show is and how much Jay Leno sucks. Then they’ll all talk about how they’d love to hang out with one another if they lived closer together which, thank god, they don’t.

All this will be undone when your mother, bless her heart, realizes what her womb has visited on the living world and sets fire to your home with the two of you in it. You’ll die of smoke inhalation in her arms while she chants verses from the bible, so it’s actually kind of great that you both died together.

Congratulations Pinball Composer!

Congratulations Iron Chef Viewer!

You’re a thirty-something without much ambition but with plenty of heart and one Jewish parent who lives with her sig-o in Brooklyn’s well-established Shithole district. You “write,” which means a magazine, three times a year, pays you two thousand dollars to leave them alone and pushes out one of your “what it was like to watch Transformer’s on opening night” bullshit pat pieces in the middle of their socialist rag so they can fill up space and you can stay on food stamps. You hate just about everyone you meet and, to top it all off, you don’t like bagels.

Yours is a joyless, tedious life. Well, most of the time.

But soon you’re going to discover something wonderful. Something magical. Something that will make you happier than even the best sex (which is still pretty ho-hum) that you have with your purposefully gender neutral partner.

Tonight you’ll be flipping through channels with your partner’s hand in your crotch, idly fondling you while you talk about the latest novel outline you’ve written. The two of you will smile and laugh and know, deep down, that you’re not really going to write a three hundred page book about a young woman who subverts the publishing business in dystopian future New York by hacking all of the city’s Kindle’s and making them output nothing but Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It would end with the young authoress dropping a manuscript on the desk of the last publisher in the world, a manuscript that would strongly resemble the book that the reader had just finished. You’ll use the word metatext like eight times describing the fucking thing.

But you’ll mercifully shut your fucking mouth when your partner flips on the Food Network and you both catch of sight of the thing that brought you both together in the first place. It will be a serendipitous moment and you’ll swear for that heartbeat of the world starts again for you in that instant, as you speak to your children (artificially inseminated or otherwise) about the day you started hoping again.

Turns out the Food Network decided to start airing Iron Chef again which is, to your credit, pretty much the best show ever. And as the two of you watch it, leaning ever closer, your hands will wander off each other’s genitals to your own knees. You’ll become self-sufficient people, whole people who can feel and think on their own again. Your partner will stand up and shuffle to the kitchen, where they’ll start cooking again for the first time in months, and you’ll sit in rapture, laptop across your still naked crotch, watching Iron Chef and smiling while you work on the greatest thing you’ve ever written: a novel about a unicorn with a serious cigarette addiction.

Congratulations Iron Chef Viewer!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Gays in Games!

Gays are tragically underrepresented in video games. Along with blacks, women and just about anyone who represents someone outside the cultural and social milieu of the action hero in the 1980s, but I digress. Gays have it particularly bad. At the very least black people and women have attempts, albeit all too often ignorant and pandering ones, made at positive portrayals in games. Some of them still turn out to be incredibly offensive, but the attempts are still made. But with an impressively spare selection of exceptions games don’t really have any positive or intelligent portrayals of homosexuals, male or female.

The most prominent one to emerge in recent memory was the unfortunate DLC for GTA4, the Ballad of Gay Tony. In this add on to a game which was already offensively ignorant towards a number of cultures in general and is woefully misinformed about the way homosexuals live and act we were treated to Gay Tony, a character who was simpering and homoerotic in all the wrong ways, a faggot through and through in Rockstar’s eyes, an ineffectual leader who required the machismo of a straight man he had simultaneously mentored and corrupted in order to survive. Which might’ve made for an interesting dynamic if the straight character so reliant upon him had not been cast as an ultra-masculine in the opening scenes of the game, so incredibly potent that the ladies just couldn’t keep off him, preventing any of that messy gay from getting on the player and making them feel all icky.

I’m hard pressed to come up with another specific portrayal of a homosexual character in a video game in recent memory. Even Dragon Age, and Mass Effect, which had some nice positive things to say about characters who would totally go tab to tab or slot to slot if the case arose, hedged it by making those characters bisexual. And let’s face it, Mass Effect’s questions about sex and sexuality are a lot more concerned with the mechanics of doing it with aliens more than the politics of same-sex relationships in the future. Alpha Protocol’s Marburg, who could be an incredibly interesting character if he was given a little more screen time, is barely developed at all, and his sexuality is little more than a joke we get to chortle at – the bad guy is a homo, tee hee! So we’ve been left with The Path, which has a brief, touching, horrible moment centered around a young woman’s first lesbian experience, and World of Goo, where I am almost positive one or perhaps all of those little ball guys are gay. I’m honestly not even sure how they could tell, so I feel like it’s a safe bet.

Perhaps much of this blame can be laid upon the facile understanding that the majority of game makers seem to have of human interactions in general. The relationship section of most games consists of some stunted bullshit some asshole tacked on to an existing game engine, and it rarely simulates what it means to be a person who loves, loses and grows. Far more often it just exposes the relative immaturity that people accuse us of as a culture all too often, giving them more fodder they didn’t need in the first place. There’s also the fact that most games aren’t concerned with relationships, which aren’t really things that can be easily fostered between people and virtual beings easily. And the best attempts at crafting relationships have to be done in broad strokes so that they can work in a video game context. For example, Alyx Vance is more or less a cipher in Half-Life, even though the weirdly sexualized relationship Gordon has with her is a key part of the game.

So I was quite pleasantly surprised when, during Fallout: New Vegas, I discovered something about Felicia Day’s character. While talking to her about her travels through the wastes and just what she’d been through I found out that she was still nursing some heartbreak. And, when pressed, I found out the object of her affections had been a lady, a lady who had left her society because they’d looked down on lesbian couples for their refusal to reproduce. The Brotherhood of Steel, the relatively magnanimous organization which seemed to want to seem like a bunch of angry isolationists sometimes, was a bunch of breeders who couldn’t tolerate her lifestyle. But she was so loyal to them, to their principles and the way she’d been raised, that she couldn’t reject them. So Veronica, little Felicia Day, stuck around as her lady love wandered into the wastes to forge her own future.

It was a smart, poignant moment about real loss, about a real reason for loss, about an every-day kind of loss that I could relate to, that people force their children into all too often in our society every time they try to pray the gay out. It wasn’t a big plot point, and as far as I could tell Veronica’s lady wasn’t present in the game at all. It was just a part of her character, a part of who she was, the same way that Cass was an irascible, drunk or that Boone was a humorless dipshit. Paired with New Vegas’ new perks, which allowed characters to essentially choose a variety of sexual orientations which would provide them with special dialogue options, it was very clear that New Vegas had taken an adult stance on human sexuality, that it wanted me to realize that just because the world had ended we hadn’t stopped having feelings and we hadn’t stopped mistreating people because they were different.

As I explored the world I saw more and more examples of this sort of equaninimous treatment of human sexuality. I saw gay and straight characters who were assessed not by their preference but by what they could contribute to society. They fit into the world perfectly, and while their sexuality was a part of their character it was just that: a part. You’d never see a straight character defined as “the straight guy,” and that seems to be what Fallout: New Vegas got, what every other game has missed: that sexuality is an aspect of a person, not something that defines them. That a gay character is a gay character, but that they’re something more than just gay.

I’m eager to see just what Arcade Gannon has to say to me on this second playthrough, on a related note, because I’m almost positive that he’s gay. I want to see how they take an arrogant asshole and make me like him, because even Boone got me to like him by the end. I’m more interested in his deal than I am in Danny Trejo’s no doubt hilarious Raul or the weird and fascinating Lucy who, let’s face it, is perhaps the single most original companion in any game ever. I shouldn’t be so shocked, given the care that went in to making each and every one of these characters a unique and interesting person, that the same care would’ve extended to the social issues that are a reality in this world, but I am. So Gannon, and Gannon’s sexuality or lack thereof, is something I want to see fleshed out.

I’m not writing this to say that the flag of homosexuality is flying over gaming in general and that gays will, forevermore, be able to look to games as a media where they are treated with equality and respect. And I’m not writing this to say that the cause of gay rights has found a particularly strong champion in Fallout: New Vegas, which is a game that likes being funny just about as much as it likes being serious about things like issues of the heart. But I did want to recognize, in some small way, the manner in which Fallout: New Vegas respectfully and intelligently addresses the idea of sexual orientation in general and homosexuality as an element of human nature. Sure, it’s a small step, but it’s encouraging, especially given the number of copies that New Vegas moved and the sustainability of the game in general.

My only woe is that the game had to be so riddled with bugs, so often unplayable, that the conversation on it will never turn to this minor, powerfully encouraging part of one of the best games I’ve played in years. The press is far from likely to step back from the buggy mess that Fallout: New Vegas is surrounded by and pick out little heartwarming moments like their ability to evoke and portray real human relationships, especially as things speed up with the start of the holiday season (and what a holiday season, Jesus). In a way this brings up a problem I have with the gaming press, with their desire to find a story and run with it, their desire to act as a consumer assessment tool rather than a device for cultural discussion, but really it’s not entirely their fault here. There’s only so much time to discuss things like the way gays are portrayed in the medium we love and, as I’ve already pointed out, gamers don’t seem to think about that too much.

Congratulations Richard Jenkins!

Two years ago I wouldn’t have been writing this. Two years ago I wouldn’t have known your name. I’d be writing a lengthy warning to a balding man, telling him that Step Brothers was a terrible film to be in but that he should stick with the whole acting thing because he was super great at it.

But time makes fools of us all, and there is no foolishness sweeter than the foolishness of being humiliated when you ask the people in your office “Hey, what was the name of that guy in The Visitor?” and hear a universal cry of “Richard Motherfucking Jenkins!” Truly, you have arrived, sir, and were you to fall off the earth in a week’s time, which you won’t be be, because in three weeks you’ll be in Cancun sipping a Mai Tai when Gilbert Gottfried gets hit by a rogue jet ski (sweet, right?), you’d be remembered forever for playing the lovable curmudgeon better than anyone else.

So today we’re proud to tell you, actor Richard Jenkins, that you should step three feet to the left at around 4:37 this afternoon, a few minutes after you’ll leave your house for some weird ass celebrity reason we don’t totally understand. Just wait until the safe falls into the spot that you were once standing and then pick up as much of the cash as you can carry. Don’t go crazy and get all greedy, or a bear will find you and do horrible things to you. And then we wouldn’t have you, our precious, precious Richard Jenkins.

Congratulations Richard Jenkins!

Congratulations Billy Idol!

Your peroxide hair, your sneer, your cheekbones. You established good looks for a generation, a movement. Your wannabes have long populated the subcultures you helped to established, feebly aping at the combination of cool disregard and respect you managed effortlessly for so many years. But you’ve fallen out of the public eye more of late. Showing up in the Wedding Singer was a big deal for your fans, and really who could blame them? You’ve been off raising kids you fathered with all those weird looking hot chicks we all never got to fuck in the eighties or some shit, leaving those of us who used to rely on you to our own devices.

Today those devices will include taking an entire building full of people hostage until you agree to arrive via plane and play a brief, casual concert for the hostage-takers and the hostages alike, so that everyone can enjoy Billy Idol’s music together one last time before they’re dragged off to jail for the rest of their life or shot in the face, as sometimes happens in hostage situations.

You’ll refuse to do it at first, but then the queen will show up in her queenly hat and ask you really nicely and, since you’re British, you’ll have to go do it. You’ll hop on her helicopter, reminding her of how rusty you are, and she’ll say pish posh or whatever it is that queens say and try to boost your confidence.

It won’t work.

You’ll arrive at the office complex where the hostage situation has developed a nervous wreck, strung out on a lack of sleep, too much coffee and not enough contact with whoever the fuck you spend all your time with these days. You’ll chew your lip, look around nervously and then walk into the office complex, where you’ll be greeted with great accolade, even though you’ll be wearing your dad clothes. The hostage situation will just be so excited to see you, they won’t be able to contain themselves. They’ll give you a microphone and tell you to just have fun, and you’ll do your best, apologizing for how rusty you are.

You’ll start in to Rock the Cradle, doing your best to make an acapela version of it happen, but it’ll come out all wrong and everyone will know it. Still, you’ll soldier through, for England and the lives at stake and just to prove you still got it, pulling off a mediocre performance that leaves everyone feeling a little uncomfortable and more than a little silly that they took a whole bunch of people hostage to see a concert that you really didn’t want to perform.

They’ll apologize to you profusely and surrender to the police unceremoniously, walking out without you. The queen will give you some sort of fancy cross and thank you and all of those fans will realize that, great as you were, you’re older and different now, and they need to stop worshipping you and find their own lives at last. Or, at the very least, take anger management classes so they don’t try to resolve all of their various conflicts using hostage taking anymore.

Congratulations Billy Idol!

Congratulations Tommy Tutone!

Today you’re going to step into one o’ them Star Trek style transporters as a group so that you can get to the exotic world where you have to play a concert or some shit so that some alien overlords who just heard your one fucking hit song from the retarded ages won’t up and destroy our entire sad little planet and everything’s going to go horribly, horribly wrong. How so, you ask? You’re going to be fused into one giant mass of flesh, seething and writhing in mindless agony and rage. All you’ll be able to do is sputter, sputter and beg for death. And when death cannot come because of your five beating hearts and five pulsating brains you will dream of it, as only the damned may dream.

Congratulations Tommy Tutone!

Congratulations Dreamweaver!

Today you’re going to gain ultimate power over the dreams of all man kind. Since there are just so fucking many of us most of dreams about marshmallows or dreams that consist of scenes from Ghostbusters. You’ll have just watched that movie and it’ll be foremost in your mind. Also, it’s a pretty solid fallback when you can’t come up with any better ideas.

But for a few of us you’ll reserve some very special dreams.

For your exes, dreams of you giving them bone creakingly good orgasms, the kind they can feel the next day. They’re gonna dream so hard they’ll wake up in a puddle, wondering what just happened and scrambling to find your phone number so they can get in touch with you and get their disappointment on.

For your mom and dad? Dreams about unicorns, sex when they were young (which will be tough for you to make, but you’re a good son and you love your parents) and dreams about owning boats. When they wake up they’ll wake up with a financial plan that will put them within spitting distance of boat ownership, which will be a nice little gift from you to them.

And as for your enemies? Terrible dreams of an endless whiteness, where their only company is Ray Romano and their only hope is for the sweet release of death. Only a handful of them will find their way back to the world of the waking. The rest will be taken by madness, cast aside by the world and left to metaphysically drift, or worse will die within the dreamscape, condemned to reside there forever.

Congratulations Dreamweaver!

Congratulations Guy at Pixar!

Today you talented fuckfaces are going to wake up and, without evening meaning to, reduce an entire theater filled with adults to tears in a matter of a few heartbeats using only cartoons. Fucking cartoons. It’ll start with your coffee.

You’ll make your coffee by boiling water in a tea pot and pouring it into a french press. Your french press, you see, doesn’t waste electricity, so it’s a greener way to make coffee. You’ll give the rest of the water to your insufferable wife, who works from home making insufferably adorable children’s book while looking after your no doubt soon to be declared impossibly brilliant spawn.

You’ll kiss them goodbye and then drive to work in your Prius, braving the thirty minute commute from your home without honking your horn once at the other insufferable shitheads who populate this horrid world we live in. Once you get there you’ll smile at your receptionist and trade genuine conversation for a few minutes about last night’s episode of Mad Men before going to your desk and sitting down for a long day of modeling the movements of an adorable robot who will teach us to love by fixing one of the six legs of a space dog that he’ll find while exploring a previously uninhabited moon.

Then you’ll go to lunch at Chili’s, just to make us think you’re one of us mere mortals, fixing us with your shit-eating grin while you wolf down your cobb salad and tip your waitress generously. Then it’s back to your god damn dream factory so you can edify us more and make us realize just how frail we are, both as physical and emotional constructs in this world.

Congratulations Guy at Pixar!

Congratulations Conservative Lesbian!

Today you’re the world’s only conservative lesbian, and boy does it ever suck to be you. Every day you wake up and look in the mirror and think “what can I do to make myself less of a person in the eyes of our culture today?” Then you think about how morbidly unattractive all the women on the right are by your standards (exception: Michelle Bachman) and breathe a sigh for all the time and effort you’ll have to put into faking that you’re someone else when you go to a lesbian bar this evening, just on the off chance that you might meet someone you’d like to take home.

Finally, completing your morning ritual, you’ll brush your teeth. Up and down then side to side.

By the time it’s all done you’ll be nice and safe and tucked inside your own head. Driving a Prius down to work in the accounting department of an ad agency, your mind will have adapted almost perfectly to removing thoughts of these internal and external conflicts from your daily consciousness. They will be there, sitting just outside your mind, outside the car. Thoughts of how you’ll deal with your aggressively gay male co-worker who still wears that fucking Hope t-shirt every Thursday like it’s his laundry shirt. Thoughts of what you’ll do to avoid being around your co-workers for an hour as soon as you’re given the chance.

These thoughts will rest as you focus on the stop and go of hellish Seattle traffic, the moribund crawl towards work that you’ve come to pride yourself on your ability to endure, the bombardment of hate from people you’d just like to get a little fun from, if only they’d set aside their fiscal politics for five minutes and examine your meticulously shaped bush.

But you’ll never think of stalling out your own opinions, of concealing who you are to these people. You’ll be deeply, self assuredly proud on a level that you’ll never be able to shake. And for that we say congratulations conservative lesbian. We hope you find someone apathetic soon!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What's Wrong With Westerns?

I thumb the iron at my hip, wondering when my foe will appear. I’ll have seconds to strike then, seconds to react, to dodge out of the way. His bullets will fly quickly, obscurely, inaccurately. He’ll be lucky if even one of them connects. If he’s using a repeater he’ll have to move slowly, to pick each shot carefully. If he’s trying to snipe me he’ll have to stand all but perfectly still, and missing could be his end. So it’s my iron against his, in my head. Because we can only really trust our irons, nothing else.

This is how I play Lead and Gold. I play as a Gunslinger, because it makes sense to me. The movement, the play, the shots, the rolls. I understand what I’m supposed to do, how I can use my class to gain an advantage over others. I understand how to make the various abilities at my disposal work, and I understand what I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be a fierce desperado, constantly pressing my enemies, putting pressure on them. I’m a fierce, punkish fighter who does his all to make sure his enemies are keeping their heads down and focusing their attention his way. That way the Deputies and Trappers can pick their shots and the Blaster can get in close enough to break up enemy defenses

I’m well aware that most people don’t like Lead and Gold. Most people think it’s a bad game and don’t get why people keep trying to hype it. Most people think it’s sloppy, loose and unacceptably buggy. Most people don’t think it’s worth five dollars. And this seems to be the overarching opinion of the gaming community not just with regards to Lead and Gold, but to westerns in general. Red Dead Redemption went the way of Bully in terms of sales and, to some degree, acclaim, and I can’t think of another high profile game that executed on the concept of being a western well, unless you consider Call of Juarez high profile.

The best I can come up with is New Vegas, which I’d rather not mention too much in this essay (even if it did partly inspire it) which is only a western inasmuch as it plays on the western motif and draws elements of westerns into the game, mixing them with things like power armor and two headed cows and Roman legions. Even if you’ll frequently want to be using a Sequoia pistol or a Cowboy Repeater, New Vegas is not, fundamentally, a game about the lawlessness and ruthlessness of a Western. In fact, it’s more about the decay and decline of that genre, so it really doesn’t work for our purposes here.

And, let’s face it, most of the games that have components from westerns rarely feel like they’re actually western games. They feel like they’re trying to shoehorn western concepts into existing game types. Timesplitters 2 western section, for example, is just painful. It’s basically every other section of the game with the shittiest selection of guns imaginable slapped in there. And, all too often, that is all that ambitious western games are. They lack the distinct personality of westerns and aspire to the sharpness, the distinctness, of modern first person shooters. Which isn’t necessarily something you want in a western game.

See, when we think of westerns we think of the impeccable marksmanship of The Man With No Name, Blondie, or any of Clint Eastwood’s other nameless badasses, the spirit of the Good. We think of the tenacity of the downtrodden Ugly. We think of the implacability of the Bad. And we want to combine these elements into one fantastic perfect western figure. We want to be a badass, but we want to be the only badass. Westerns are all about a filmic sensibility, and any game that operates as a western has to tap into that filmic sensibility. But you can’t mix those disparate elements and still make a good, interesting game, one that holds to the style and thought governing a western. Think about how dull The Good, The Bad and the Weird would be if everyone was like the unbreakable pretty boy who, when the chips are down even a little, folds.

But it’s the rare game that’s willing to make you feel very limited, to make you feel like a single part of a larger landscape, a part of a team that has to work together to survive. But that’s exactly what westerns are all about: the posse, the motley crew gathering together for a job. Tombstone would be shit if it was just about Kurt Russell, and Doc Holiday would’ve been a lot less interesting without his relationship with Wyatt. Silverado without the gang wouldn’t have been Silverado, and the relationship between characters is what shapes Unforgiven. Westerns are, at their heart, stories about people coming together under difficult circumstances, people persevering against all odds. And games are for the most part solitary experiences, paths to self-exploration or lone exploration of a world.

The few games that break this tradition are decidedly non-western. Team based shooters, cooperative RTSes and MMOs are the only games that insist players interact with one another in order to accomplish goals, and many of these sub-genres exist mostly as optional parts of larger games. For example, Dawn of War II, which sports one of the most impressive co-operative multiplayer games in all of RTS-dom, also has a very robust single player game type that you can enjoy without ever noticing the lack of a pair of teammates. And the few shooters that do make use of the sort of co-op that a good western game would need are almost all too precise or too completely unrelated to really make good on the sloppy, uneven nature of the western. Left4Dead has its hands full simulating zom-bocalypse, and I’m hard pressed to think of symmetrical team based shooter that forces teamwork well off-hand. Maybe the venerable Counter-Strike, or the newer CS; Source, both of which have been ousted from popularity following the resurgence and domination of Call of Duty. And even if these games offered up templates for western play, could they really be that helpful given how focused on precise, modern weapons they are? Could Call of Duty or Counterstrike accurately simulate that sloppy feeling of a repeater or a revolver? Could it make that double barrel shotgun feel like more than a gimmick put in to infuriate players? Could it give you that feeling of desperation as you cower behind a stack of boxes, thinking about which way to run?

And even if the framework existed to make a solid western, even if the tech know how and the drive was there, is there a market? Could a western game get solid funding, press through the ultra-competitive world of game design and become a winning property? Probably not, given Red Dead’s relatively slight performance despite its emergence from a studio that essentially shits money, the abysmal sales attached to properties like Juarez and the struggling efforts of legitimately good and thematically solid western games like Lead and Gold.

Which brings us back to the beginning. To my love affair with Lead and Gold, with its posse enforcing game play, sloppy, at times frustrating play and tricky, purposeful shooting against durable opponents. It’s not a game for everyone, much as real westerns aren’t movies for everyone. They’re long movies, often boring and often incredibly roundabout in their storytelling. Their appeal is far from universal, and they’ve got a decidedly low-fi vibe to their production and execution. They’re not blockbusters, and what sex appeal they have isn’t very widespread. They’re never shovel ready, and neither is Lead and Gold. It’s no mistake that the game’s default menu opens with the offer of a tutorial detailing the unique asymmetry of the game, imploring players to try all of the classes, get comfortable with one of them and learn the ropes before leaping into the game itself.

But for those who are willing to brave its menus, for those who are attuned to what it’s trying to do with its sloppy aiming and fast paced chicanery, Lead and Gold has a lot to offer, just like the western genre. And while its poor representation in games isn’t really anything new (Sunset Riders, for example, wasn’t much of a western game, even if it was super, super fun) games like Lead and Gold are making our future look brighter. And if games like Lead and Gold and Red Dead can prove that games capturing the western spirit can exist and work while games like Fallout: New Vegas and Red Faction Guerilla prove that games all about big frontiers and enforcing your own law on the landscape can work too, it could be that a real western, a western that isn’t just a wonderful bite sized multiplayer game or a neat, atmospheric single player experience could be on the horizon sooner rather than later.

Congratulations Religious Sycophant!

We don’t care what you think. The TV show MASH was not better than the movie MASH. The movie MASH was more artful, darker, funnier and smarter, and it knew when to stop. It also didn’t let Alan fucking Alda take any sort of creative control over the process, so there’s that feather in its cap as well.

But people are stupid. We all know it. And you know it all too well, which is why you’ll finally start laying brick on your church to the TV show MASH today. You’ll even be proud of what you’ve accomplished, and when people decry your efforts and tell you that you’re taking attention away from the much better MASH movie you’ll either ignore them or have them undone by the violence of your followers.

But we’ll still plot quietly to burn all you have made. We know you won’t listen to reason, but we won’t let you ruin the world. And so we will plot quietly in the shadows, gathering supplies and support and information, learning every detail of the fetid citadel which you are building. But for now we will not act. We know that this is not the time. We will simply watch as you build it higher and higher, brick by brick, stretching your dream to the sky. But one day soon you will be undone.

Congratulations Religious Sycophant!

Congratulations Vegan Douchebag!

“This vegan chili is delicious!” you’ll shout, loud as you can, at no one in particular. The people around you will do their best to ignore you, staring at their plates, pretending that you’re not there.

“What’s most impressive is how they managed to get the texture just right for it!” you’ll shout a little bit louder, hoping that someone will notice how sensitive and intelligent you are and how dedicated to the cause of eating Vegan you’ve remained in the face of a modern society that more or less tolerates your lifestyle completely. The other patrons will continue to do their best to ignore you, audibly grinding their teeth as you continue talking.

“There’s really no reason to engage in the cruel practice of eating meat at all!” you’ll declare to no one in particular, adding hot sauce which uses gelatin as an emulsifying agent to your supposedly vegan dish. “What a wonderful world!”

As the other patrons of the restaurant quietly talk among themselves and try to figure out the best way to collectively murder you without being caught and tried for it the waiter who delivered your dish will emerge from the kitchen, fear in his eyes. He’ll hurry up to you and ask you in a hushed voice:

“How is your meal, sir?”

“DELICIOUS!” you’ll shout, looking around to all of the other patrons, daring one of them to make eye contact with you, a vegan, sacrosanct in your opinions.

“Good.” he’ll say, shifting his weight a little away from you. “Unfortunately, due to a mistake on my part, that dish actually has meat in it.”

You’ll pause for a moment, your fork hovering halfway between your mouth and the plate, staring at the food you’d once believed made you better than other people. Your jaw will hang in shock as you process this information. You are a vegan no more. Not even a vegetarian anymore. You simply are a person, a horrible, vile meat eating person.

Death would have been a more welcome fate.

“NOOOOOO!” you’ll cry, flipping your table over as you scream. “YOU FUCKERS!” You’ll leap to your feet and take a swing at your waiter, missing and spinning yourself around with the force your intended blow, toppling implausibly on top of the leg of the table you just overturned.

A healthier person, one who eats meat and doesn’t spend all of their time jerking off about how great it is to be a vegan, would be fine. But your body, weakened by constant douchery and a diet based on ideals rather than necessity, will allow the incredibly blunt table leg into your rib cage. It will permit the table leg to pierce your lungs, silencing you in an act of remarkable mercy, and making a nice big hole for all of your blood to slowly ooze out of your corpse, although you’ll be so weak from not eating meat that it will move like syrup, a thick disgusting thing pushed by a heart which has long since tired of its work.

As you lay face up, the table leg piercing your lung, you’ll reach out to the waiter, the first person today who will look you in the eyes. Grimacing you’ll mumble at him, “I am undone!”

And then you’ll die.

Congratulations Vegan Douchebag!

Congratulations Moustache Comb Manufacturer!

Your industry has been in decline for decades. Pretty much since the end of the 1970s. And there’s no real relief in sight. Or at least their wasn’t. I mean, people just don’t grow moustaches any more, and those that do have no desire to carefully groom them using specialized, unbreakable hygenic devices that are frequently and easy lost. They’re hard to sell soap to, for fuck’s sake.

But moustaches have slowly, surely been making ground with American youth. Between the International Moustache Growing League, Moustache Grower’s Anonymous and California’s various measures to decriminalize moustaches, things have been looking bushy (pun intended!) for moustache related industries over the last decade or so. Finally your market is growing beyond creepy dudes and dads who have pool tables in their basements to include insufferable people who order PBR and board game enthusiasts.

Which is why, today, the CEO of the Dollar Store chain is going to walk into your office with a check.

“How much for many comb?” he’ll say, scratching at an unkempt moustache of his own, one clearly cultivated in order to keep up with the youth who are no doubt clamboring over him to get a hold of his position within the company. It will be full and bushy, like a pair of hairy insect wings unfolding over his lip. It will be beautiful to your eyes.

“What?” you’ll say, baffled by his loose grasp of English.

“You sell one million comb,” he’ll say, again scratching at his moustache. Smiling, you’ll slide him a comb and stroke your own perfectly cultivated handlebar stache, a magnificent pair of twin tufts streaking off to the side. the CEO of the Dollar Store will sniff at your moustache comb and eye you suspiciously.

“One hundred million?” he’ll say. You’ll shake your head.

“Let’s start a little lower,” you’ll say, showing him the actual costs of producing, transporting and stocking combs for him over the next five years. Excited, he’ll write you a check for forty million dollars.

“Very good moustache comb,” he’ll say, combing his moustache as he leaves. As the door slams shut behind him you’ll smile to yourself, thinking of the drive in your Toyota Camry to the bank to deposit the check. Just imagine what your mom will say when she sees all that sweet, sweet cash in your joint account. Maybe her hip will just up and realign itself she’ll be so excited.

Congratulations Moustache Comb Manufacturer!

Congratulations Vampire Promoter!

Vampires have been huge for the last decade, and it’s no secret why. As Americans get fatter and oranger, vampires grow slimmer and paler. They embody everything we wish we could be, and they do so effortlessly. They don’t have to work out to be incredibly strong, or pretend to be working on a novel in order to justify the hours and hours they spend inside avoiding human contact. They can be what we all desperately dream of without even lifting a finger. They’re badass sexy loners who can draw the ladies to them without trying.

But they never really needed publicists. Cameras can’t photograph them, and public appearances usually end in assassination attempts by some “wronged family member” of a person they “drained the fucking life out of.” It’s a vicious cycle.

Or it was a vicious cycle, until you stepped on the scene and found the perfect way to let these blood sucking fiends cash in on the popularity of the Twilight novels. By making it seem like vampires are just killing the terminally ill and the mentally handicapped and encouraging people to see the movie Thirst you’ve managed to make vampires incredibly sympathetic despite the fact that they are little more than fiendish killing machines from the bowels of hell. And through a combination of book deals, audio interviews and Lifetime style specials, you’re going to commoditize your process and turn it into raw money.

So Congratulations Vampire Promoter! Things are going to go great for you until one of your clients gets hungry or someone whose had a vampire kill their entire family figures out where you live and murders you in a fire.

Congratulations Pregnant Teen!

One of the biggest problems most Americans have with President Obama nowadays is that they can’t really relate to him. His problems are so big, so multinational. We miss the days of George W. Bush, when the biggest problem our president would talk to us about was how he couldn’t control his whorish daughters. We need some new blood in American politics, some blood we can relate to.

The midterm elections were supposed to be all about that. That’s why people elected so many “Tea Partiers,” obscenely wealthy sycophants who cast themselves as populist everymen pulled up by their own bootstraps while bankrolling their own campaigns with millions drawn from personal funds or money taken from massive amoral corporations. But it turns out that those people were actually asshats who weren’t going to do anything and we figured that more or less the day after the election, so as of a week ago we were left with a government more or less exactly like it was for the last two years, except with more retardation. No one we can relate to, no one we can get behind, no one we can gossip about in the grocery store, listing off their various all too public embarrassments to our cashier with social impunity.

But today, early in the morning, Senator Elect Richard Blumenthal, who won a race against insane, drama heavy bitch Linda McMahon, is going to die under weird circumstances (bystander in a wizardly duel!) and a succession will have to occur. Since Connecticut is an old, old place by American standards there are going to be some obscure ass laws on the books about the subject (the Wizard Control Act of 1785, specifically) and instead of having a special election the entire process wil be done by a blind lottery which includes every citizen of Connecticut (wizards included).

At 11:30 AM your name will be picked. You will be Tammy Hargrave, a pregnant sixteen year old girl whose boyfriend just broke up with her because she was quote “getting too fat.” Your first speech will be about how huge a jerk your boyfriend is. It will be received as a return to the politics of the previous decade, the politics we have so severely missed under Obama’s leadership, and the politics that we need to return to as a nation if we want to establish America is the nation we truly know it can be, the nation the rest of the world sees us as.

Congratulations Pregnant Teen!

Congratulations to the Producer of a Goofy Movie!

We hope you’re happy, because if you are that will make this that much sweeter.

Today, at nine AM, a group of horribly mutated dogs will assault your homes, attacking your doors with their freakish, oversized skulls. They’ll ram your door repeatedly, desperately trying to get to the delicious humans contained within. They’ll rake the wood with their massive talons.

You’ll hear the scratching at your door, the horrible baying.

“Goofy?” you’ll ask your empty home, your family having long since abandoned you for your crimes against humanity. The dogs will respond with more horrible baying, which will sound a little bit like the celebrated cartoon character, whose memory you’ve made a modest living defiling, but it will still be horrifying.

You’ll rush through the house to catch sight of the dogs clawing at your door, their massive barbed phalluses swinging beneath them as they hammer their engorged skulls again and again into your door. You’ll immediately recognize them as a part of a failed promotional effort when you made the film that defined your career nearly a decade ago. They’ll be the by-product of an attempt to make actual living copies of Goofy, an attempt which succeeded in making only one copy who later went on to touch kids.

You’ll immediately know that they’ve come for their revenge and, having tried to keep them in cages years earlier, you’ll know that the door won’t hold them for long. Panicking you’ll rush back through the house and run out of the back door, hoping to find a river or a pile of burning tires that could possibly cover your scent and delay their pursuit.

You’ll make it around fifty feet before they close upon you. They’ll circle you rapidly, rushing up behind you and taking your hamstrings with their vile, crowded teeth, razor sharp and streaked with filth. You’ll drop to your knees unwillingly, gibbering with fear. That’s when the dogs will be mounting you, carefully, almost gently. Their massive brains will have granted them awareness of just how to make your death as horrible as possible. And as two of them penetrate your ocular cavities and begin skullfucking you ever so gently while a third one of them violates you anally you’ll realize that you should’ve chosen a different path.

You’ll wish that you could stop screaming, if only to cry out that you should’ve finished art school, but you won’t be able to. Turns out being skullfucked by mutated dogs while a third dog rapes you anally is super unpleasant, and you’ll die screaming while most of the sentient world cheers your fate.

Congratulations to the Producer of a Goofy Movie!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Permanance of the Open World!

The face of an open world game is a stony thing. Immutable and harsh. To look upon it is to look upon a landscape, and to see that landscape change would be unimaginable. Landscapes do not change dramatically over the course of a month or a year, the span at which we interact with these environs in our games, and in holding to that principle the landscapes of open world games are unique in their permanence, in their perceived liveliness which is truly no more than tableau. Rare is the open world game that allows you to meaningfully reshape the world around you. It’s something I’ve mentioned that I’ve written about before, something that Fallout: New Vegas made me think of once again.

There’s a reason these games are fairly immutable, a reason that the occasional manners in which they develop is highly structured, like the turf wars of San Andreas or the smoking crater you can turn Megaton into, should you desire it. These are big projects, tough projects to effectively generate in the first place. Making them something players can impact? A nightmarish, sysiphysian task. You can spawn new items in certain areas at certain points in the game, but if you’ve allowed other dynamic changes to occur you have to account for those. And if you allow trends to develop throughout the game, trends that emerge from the manner in which players play indirectly and dynamically, then the world itself can change in all sorts of weird, unexpected ways. What if a player generates enough super mutants in the world by opening a vault that merchant caravans can no longer travel? What if you hunt raiders to extinction and the same problem emerge from that root? What if those traders would grow weak or strong based on your presence, rather than scripted funding issues? What if you could effectively force patrols out of a given quadrant of the map, effectively rendering a territory uncontested, allowing one side to actually take ownership of an area? Would the game wig out, breaking quests and the like? Would the challenge vanish, or would it be replaced with a real sense of accomplishment?

New Vegas doesn’t really endeavor to answer these questions. As I mentioned last week, it loves its ambiguity. And it’s hard to tell, thanks partly to Obsidian’s masterful design and party to their ham-handed QA process, just what is really bug and what is really feature. It’s never easy to tell if something is intended of if it’s simply occurring because of things I’d done that Obsidian didn’t expect. I can’t tell if I talked Rose of Sharon Cassidy out of killing her assailants, for example, or if it just happened because of how buggy the game is.

This isn’t a huge problem for me. I enjoy games as developed experiences, collaborative efforts that occur after the developer has stepped away. It’s where games shine as a medium, where they can tell significant stories only possible in their medium, and games designed around this loose framework, around the expectation that things can and will go wrong, are usually the best games. But it does raise a lot of questions about design, about intent, and about how acceptable bugs are.

Bugs can be crippling, especially in a game with open world elements. Take, for instance, the lamentable Alone in the Dark follow-up from last year which demanded that players drive around an “open world” Central Park annihilating roots until they could enter a forbidden area. Bugs crippled the experience, forcing errors in the scripting language and leading to repeated, unexpected and unexplained fail states. The key to navigating areas was to figure out exactly how developers had intended it, how they’d tested it, and following that path. In a game with less of an open world vibe, less encouragement to improvise, it would’ve been fine. But in Alone in the Dark it was infuriating. It made a game that could’ve been incredible and dynamic miserable and unplayable. It was, in a way, unforgivable.

But a lack of bugs can, in a way, be just as bad. Red Faction Guerilla, for example, is an amazingly well crafted game, and an amazing game to play. But everything in it works exactly as intended, at least most of the time. This is going to sound silly, but hear me out.

Red Faction Guerilla operates on such a steady series of behaviors and respawns that the world’s growth is completely predictable. Not in a “I did this, so this happened,” way, but in a “I completed this scripted event to trigger this script” way. In a game so script heavy a little bit of mess would’ve been welcome. Instead players were left with a deeply predictable, incredibly fun and well crafted, world which didn’t have much to offer after the main question was completed. In Fallout I spend time wandering around without quests, simply seeing how I can change behaviors in the world. I’m still hoping to find a way to clear out that Cazador nest down by the Bitter Springs quay.

It’s a balance that people have been working to strike since the first Elder Scrolls game, since Arcanum introduced the term “open world’ into our diction as gamers. And it’s a balance which never seems to be discussed – the balance of unpredictable, perhaps unintentional elements against transparently generated and meticulously planned elements. It’s hard to really say that one camp has it right or wrong. To uphold Fallout: New Vegas as a paragon of practice would highlight just how foolish championing the side of bugs that can have dramatic impacts on game play can be. Just look at all those 360 players who can’t finish the game, all those people (myself included) who have lost ED-E to bugs. It’s kind of sad, but also wonderful if you’re willing to let go of expectations. But it’s not perfect, and it’s not for everyone. You shouldn’t have to worry about companions catching fire accidentally or being destroyed by a random series of events that developers didn’t expect. You shouldn’t have to wonder if your companion will figure out how to work that sweet Ranger Sequoia pistol you gave her, or calculate which item Veronica will choose to hit things with. You should be able to count on certain rules of the game to operate reliably, most of the time.

And that’s the catch. The sloppiness that permits this sort of invisible reforming of landscape, the sloppiness that let me hunt Legionaries on the banks of the Colorado until they no longer stood and entombed my still active robot companion in the depths of some shithole vault, cuts both ways. Because I’m kind of pissed that I don’t know what ED-E’s deal is. I’ve even used console commands to try and fix it from the back end, but to no avail. This is what the freedom of bugginess means, in a way.

But to be without it, in an immutable open world that functions, more or less, exactly as intended is to be in GTA IV’s unchanging urban hellscape. No game ever made me feel less like I was in a living world than GTA IV, where literally nothing is permanent, spare the death of the one character you might actually like. This is the alternative to Obsidian’s sloppy, ambitious design: over-funded, under-ambitious attempts at pandering to the biggest base possible. To me that’s far worse than Fallout: New Vegas’ bugs. Bugs can be patched out, ambitions grounded over time through the effort of hard working coders who legitimately want to make their game great. The sort of dross offered up by GTA IV, cowardly cash-ins on open world principles, are harder to fix, maybe even impossible.

The key is walking a fine middle ground, between invisible events governing a game world and transparent disclosure of just why things are actually occurring. And the best example of that isn’t even in an open world game – it’s in Left 4 Dead, with its incredible director. The director lets us know just enough about what it’s doing, and why, to let us anticipate events reasonably, but it never fully discloses just what’s going on and never tries to explain itself. Instead it just iterates us, gives us enough information to try to predict it and then subverts that data at a time and place of its choosing. It’s simple in its methods, elegant in its execution, and inscrutable without being infuriating.

But to see something like the Director applied to an open world game is all but unthinkable. As ambitious as Obsidian’s buggy efforts were, such an effort would have to take place on a scale so far above their own its hard to imagine. Indeed, it’s hard to even think of an AI as meticulous and monitoring-crazy as L4D’s being applied on such a large scale with even a moderation of success, given the overwhelming amount of resources and tech required to make such an effort work. So for now, celebrate the flawed open world games, the greats that don’t do it all right but do enough that we can enjoy them as they show us things we never expected to see in a video game. Even if they are, at times, a little bit too predictable

Congratulations Little Brown Boy!

Yesterday you were just another little brown child in a little village in the middle of nowhere in some nameless, godless island in the South Pacific, but today you’re going to be king. After freeing all those prisoners from yesterday, most of whom were actually just tourists visiting your country for its gorgeous beaches and lax laws regarding the consumption of weed and opium, there’s going to be a need for a new infrastructure to govern your diverse island paradise.

Previously the Japanese remnants that still thought they were fighting World War II kept order, or rather terror, in your little village through a combination of violence and general shameful looks. But without their constant teasing and general douchiness you’ll all need to find a new way to maintain order.

Since the majority of the tourists are Americans they’ll just vote for themselves when asked who should be leader if you use a wide open ballot, and while none of them would be nearly as bad as the Japanese no island has ever really been put on the map by the leadership of drug addicts and people who use “extreme” while referring to activities that involve massive amounts of safety gear. That leaves native inhabitants of the island.

Most of the natives will have had their spirits broken long ago by the Japanese and the horrible ravages of your island paradise (so much banana diaharhea) that their reigns would be dismal, hopeless things. It’ll be up to you, little brown boy, to take all of their native energy and turn it into something positive, instead of sulking and shooting at things with antique firearms all day.

And so, in an almost completely uncontested election that Disney will later immortalize in a terrible movie, you will run for the office of President of the Island. You’ll be elected almost unanimously, largely because you saved all those white people earlier and they’ll do most of the talk and the voting during the election, and when all is said and done you’ll be in charge. Which will be great news for the island, because the very idea of a child leading an island will spark so much tourism that within a month your income will have multiplied tenfold.

Congratulations Little Brown Boy!

Congratulations Prisoners of War!

Being a prisoner of war sucks. You’re often abused, you rarely get to speak with people from home and when you even try through messages in bottles of various forms of decorate glassware cast out to sea they just bring the glass back and make you eat it. Every day is just suck, suck, suck.

That is, except when one of the prisoners has a birthday. Then they bring out the cake and eat it right in front of you. It’s the best day because it makes you feel like you’re eating cake. And also because the guards, pussies they are, think that eating cake in front of you is actually a sort of punishment instead of a reprieve from the constant beatings. Also they abandon their guns, briefly, during the cake-eating ritual.

Which doesn’t seem that cool, until you realize how friendly that native boy from nearby is, and how much he hates Japanese people who still think it’s World War II and think white water rafters are secret American commandos too. Factor in how little attention the guards pay to him and you’ll have those guns in your hands in minutes, and those guards pumped full of bullets in seconds. Now if only you knew where the key was!

Congratulations Prisoners of War!

Congratulations on Passing on the Right!

You won’t want to do it, but she’ll just be biking so slow and so far out. The only option will be to come up inside her and roll on by.

You won’t think much of it. You’re an experienced road biker, after all. You’ve ridden cross country, you attend those pretentious little bike and build seminars and while you’ll know it’s an eggrigious violation of the rules of the road, you won’t care. You’ll be in a hurry to get to whatever the fuck vegan juice bar fag fest you’re headed to.

Which is why we’ll all be so incredibly pleased when you burst into flames as you try to pass the fat chick on her right.

“WHYYYYYY!” you’ll cry to anyone who’s listening, dropping to the ground and rolling about in vain.

“BECAUSE YOU TRIED PASSING ON THE RIGHT!” a passing motorist will scream at you from their window, and you’ll know in that moment that it is true.

Congratulations on Passing on the Right!

Congratulations on Restoring Your Border Collie's Trust!

It won’t be easy. First you’ll need to buy him some flowers. Preferably his favorite kind although, honestly, this is a fucking dog, so really, does it care?

Second you’ll have to write a very nice, very thorough note apologizing for what you did. Again, it’s to a dog, so make most of it pictures. Hire a professional if you can’t draw.

Finally, figure out how to say “I’m sorry I removed your balls with a pair of scissors under the supervision of a physician” in collie. It’s the only way to make shit cool between the two of you again.

Congratulations on Restoring Your Border Collie’s Trust!

Congratulations on Fucking the Devil!

When you wake up this morning your head will be splitting, your mattress spinning. The world will seem a blur, a horrible place you’d rather avoid if you could but it’ll be right there, pouring into your skull through every freshly opened crack and crater. Sunlight will ooze under your skin and burn you cold, an oil slick cross your consciousness.

Your lids will flutter open unbidden, letting in the horrid vision of your bedroom. Sheets will be wrapped around you, strangely moist with some indistinct bodily fluid. You’ll pause for a moment, breathing in tentatively before you realize, with relief, that it’s sweat they’re soaked in. Your relief will last until you look to your left and see who’s laying with you.

It’ll be the devil. Not like an overly suave, handsome dude who talked you into bed, but the literal fucking devil. He’ll have horns, dark red skin, a goatee and a shitty hair cut. The whole deal. You’ll feel his tail flicking you under the covers as he smiles at you, hungrily.

“Last night was wonderful,” he’ll say. He’ll clearly have been watching you for a while as you slept restlessly. You’d like to think that he was watching to see if you’d throw up on yourself, watching you to keep you safe, but you’ll immediately realize, upon looking into his eyes, that he’d most likely wait for you to choke to death on your own vomit and then fuck your corpse if that had happened.

“Oh God,” you’ll say under your breath, tasting a little bit of throw up with the words. He’ll let loose a laugh, a terrible sharp thing over his smile.

“Not quite,” he’ll say, wincing out a new smile, somehow crueler, as he brings himself up to mount you.

“Whoa,” you’ll say, putting your hand on his chest. “Whoa.”

The devil will frown and lick his lips. “Where was this fight last night?” he’ll say, grabbing your tit over the sheets. You’ll pull away from him, exposing his penis. It will be a narrow, needle like thing, its color implying disease which may or may not be there.

“You need to leave,” you’ll say, looking him straight in the eye.

He’ll sigh as he gets up, collecting his cloak and boot cut jeans from your floor. “Everyone on your Facebook friends list is going to know about this, FYI,” he’ll say as he slips out of the door, his tail nearly catching in the jamb on his way out.

Once he’s gone you’ll wrap yourself in sheets and pray that you have the day off. You’ll stare at your cell phone, waiting for Marv to call and tell you you’re late. You’ll stare for a seeming eternity before a new, greater dread takes hold of you and you realize that the devil might have your phone number. You’ll weigh the trouble of rejecting him against the bother of navigating Verizon’s customer service to change your phone number.

It will not be an enviable choice.

Congratulations on Fucking the Devil!

Congratulations Cake Monster!

Cakes have been oppressed for thousands of generations (since a generation of cakes is like, a month, this isn’t as long as it sounds). They’ve dreamed their whole lives of something better (again, a cake’s life is like, a month at best), an existence where they can do more than simply be devoured, an existence where they can find love, settle down and live out their (month long) lives in peace raising families with more options than just being devoured.

But cakes haven’t had a lot of say in the matter. They are, after all, fucking cakes. So really, who’s going to listen to them?

Everyone after tomorrow, when you, a horrible monster disguised as a cake, reveal yourself by devouring the entire population in attendance of the Steinberg-Katowitz wedding. The day will be flawless, the ceremony will go off without a hitch, right up until you sprout arms and begin devouring guests left and right, starting with the bride and groom. There will be no survivors.

This will usher in a period of cooperation with cakes the world over, as we endeavor to cooperate with cakes so as to avoid future encounters with Cake Monsters such as yourself as a species. This plan will last for roughly a month and a half, until you turn stale and die and all the cakes who had all these dreams also die and their memory is buried like so many crumbs under an infinite field of picnic tables.

Congratulations Cake Monster!