Things haven’t been great for Carrie Ann Moss since the Matrix series ended. She’s worked, sure, but she’s never been quite as well paid or well regarded. Which is a shame, because she still lives on in the collective nerd unconsciousness as a halcyon example of our dream girl – the damaged hypercompetent survivalist who just wants to learn how to love. It seems like that archetype is just aching to be filled, but the media nutjobs in Hollyweird haven’t been doing jack shit to do it.
So a few months ago you contacted Carrie Ann Moss’ agent. You sent her a script, set up a shoot time and got production started on a high concept porno called “The Fucktrix,” (you’re terrible at making, naming and writing movies) where people no longer have sex, they just jack off at one another into webcams. The movie will feature Carrie Ann Moss, your roommate Franklin and Hugo Weaving as people who re-enact the plot of the Matrix using masturbation in place of fight scenes.
Weaving and Moss will only have agreed because you’ll be paying them nearly your entire budget. The film will be shot on a single digital camera in the apartments of people you know. You don’t have distribution for it yet and, honestly, probably never will. In the years to come you’ll look at the making of this movie as the point where your life really started to go downhill: your body collapsing, losing your job and all your money. But today, even if you knew what was to come, you still wouldn’t change a thing. Because today you’re going to shoot Carrie Ann Moss’ nude scene.
It’ll just be you, her and a PA in your apartment and you’ll call her Trinity for the entire shoot. By the end she’ll be visibly agitated – it’ll be all she can do to keep herself from punching you in the head and walking out – but you’ll have forty minutes of her pretending to masturbate into a camera and a strong memory of what her pubic hair looks like. It’ll be a dream come true, and in the months to come when you struggle to find distribution for your film you’ll turn time and time again to her footage, thinking that even if no one else ever sees a single frame of your film, at least you managed to get this out of it.
Congratulations on Seeing Carrie Ann Moss Naked!
Monday, October 31, 2011
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: My Arrival in Dead Island!
Full disclosure: I only got my hands on Dead Island a few days ago, and while it’s been taking up the majority of my time I haven’t actually gotten very far in it. I haven’t tried out multiplayer at all, I’m less than a third through the game if the progress counter is to be believed, and I’ve only played with one character. I’m willing to bet all of these factors will change my experience dramatically.
But so far, so good. Dead Island is an interesting beast: it opens up quietly, with a handful of highlighted bits of text guiding you out of your hotel room and into the world at large. It hits a strange, sepulchral note at its opening that reverberates through most of the first chapter: large stretches of the beaches of Banoi aren’t filled with zombies or corpses, they’re just white sand and leafy green plants. It’d be a beautiful place to take the family if it wasn’t for all the zombies.
Of course, it doesn’t last. As you explore you’ll stumble open the ruins of homes, little asides and scenes that illustrate life on Banoi before the dead began to walk. But even within those there’s a sense of calm that pervades some of the remote bungalos, that makes you stroll along the beach instead of sprint. Dead Island is willing to take its time with you, to give you a lot of pretty or visually dense things to look at and translate, and that’s good. Because when the action begins it is so intense, so furious, that a game like this without Dead Island’s pacing might be unplayable.
See the core of Dead Island is first person melee combat. I’ve got a soft spot for first person melee combat done well: games like Thief, Morrowwind, Oblivion – all classics that relied heavily on first person melee combat and built systems to match, systems that made the entire affair feel chaotic, but manageable. Melee combat even featured prominently into Far Cry 2, which until Dead Island came along had won my award for most satisfying machete simulation in a video game three years running. Melee combat done well is memorable, fun and makes a game a joy to play, a unique and immersive experience different from other firs t person games.
But the majority of first person games just don’t do it right. Most of them simply treat melee combat as a zero range weapon, your ultimate backup in the event that you run out of ammunition. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: games like Unreal Tournament, Quake and Counter-Strike aren’t about melee brawls, they’re about intense corridor battles with lots of gunplay, give and take, and enough ammo to make sure it won’t be a problem. But games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic having shitty melee combat systems, that can be a problem. And after playing Dead Island, it’s hard not to look at Dark Messiah and shake my head at it sadly: clumsy, repetitive combat, a limited number of choices which, inevitably, all play more or less the same and a total lack of spontaneity all combine to make that game one blah adventure.
But Dead Island hits the balance just right. It’s like an object lesson in how to do first person melee combat. Each weapon has a different feel, and even the upgraded weapons play a little bit differently than their vanilla counterparts. I’ll wade into combat with a baseball bat, knocking infected down in an enclosed space to keep them off me, but once I wrap that bat in rags and set it on fire, I’ve got to watch myself: beware flaming zombies. They will set you on fire. And that baseball bat feels very, very different from a crowbar, which feels different than an oar which feels different than a tonfa. There’s an almost overwhelming number of weapons to choose from, and each one of them is satisfying to use and has a balance of strengths and weaknesses that make it well suited to a particular set of situations.
And the combat itself is spot on – it’s immersive, confusing, sometimes oppressively so, and challenging in the best way possible. You’ll grasp the basics of it immediately: grab something mean looking and swing it at a zombie. But the complexities of timing your hits, choosing when to finish off a downed opponent, fitting weapons to situations, aren’t quite so easy to get. I’m still fucking up my timing whenever I try to get a good machete hit off on a charging infected, and I’ve lost my life more than a few times while trying to put a zombie down for good while a horde rushes toward me.
But with this challenge comes reward: there’s nothing quite like taking down a trio of zombie as they bear down on you. The viscera, the rush of success and the knowledge that you’re alive, that you survived an attack which could very well have killed you all shape into a mini dramatic arc that hits all the right notes and takes just the right amount of time with its momentary conflict. It’s so well cast and well balanced that developing a style that works, learning the ropes and putting those elements together really do put you in the shoes of a battered survivalist weaving their way through the horde with battered weapon in hand.
And the learning curve never stops: I recently began the second act of the game, and I’ve never seen a more profoundly subtle shift to the manner in which a game played before. Each combat that I dive into is mechanically identical to the ones that have come before, but a handful of new zombie types, some new dangers native to Moresby (the city where the second act is set) and new behavioral patterns that the zombies follow all combine to make combat feel new. It’s wonderful, and I can’t wait to see how it continues to develop as I move through Dead Island’s beautifully ruined settings.
You might’ve noticed that I haven’t discussed shooting in the game yet: that’s because there isn’t actually very much of it. While Dead Island certainly has guns, ammo is scarce and they’re not as effective as you’d think. Most zombies take multiple hits to drop, and when a mob of zombies is rushing at you you won’t really have time to aim. Better to run, choose where to fight and make your stand.
Running, by the way, is a crucial mechanic in Dead Island. Whether its charging through some shambling mobs that aren’t really in your way or fleeing from a fight turning against you, you’re going to want to sprint carefully. And it’s clear that the developers wanted players to see running as an option exclusive from combat: both actions draw from a mutual pool of stamina which depletes fast when the going gets rough.
The end result is a visceral, satisfying game about resource management, a game with quiet spaces spanning large sections of time, framing frenetic action with legitimate tension. Dead Island earns its scares, makes every enemy the enemy that could kill you and every challenge a challenge you can and should be able to surpass, if only just barely. It establishes a place both foreign and familiar for players using deft character development, tight visual shorthand and surprisingly apt writing. While it won’t be winning any prizes for dialogue Dead Island does grasp that less is more, and its characters speak carefully, naturally, and rarely. I’ve yet to feel like I’m being chatterboxed at, a welcome vacation from games where guards constantly shout at me to emerge or wherein my taciturn marine comrades spin hastily crafted dialogue to each scenario around me as we kill whatevertheenemyis.
That’s not to say that Dead Island doesn’t have its problems. Sometimes the game will get hard. Really, really hard without warning. Some people, like me, really enjoy this. Some other people might find it frustrating – Dead Island isn’t much of a power fantasy. It’s very willing to stack the odds against you, and it’s not going to do you any favors to help you beat them. And technical issues, as one would expect, abound with a PC game like this. Clipping, seat selection in vehicles and hit detection all seem a bit off at times, and shadows seem to respond strangely regardless of what I do.
But these are minor issues and overall design choices that could potentially alienate players, not systemic problems with the game as an artifact. As a game Dead Island seems to be spot on. It hits every note it goes for and it does so incredibly well. I’ll be writing a wrap up on it as soon as I finish it, but part of me is reluctant to even think of it ending. It’s been a long time since I’ve had as much fun as I am fighting the hordes of undead on the shores of Banoi.
But so far, so good. Dead Island is an interesting beast: it opens up quietly, with a handful of highlighted bits of text guiding you out of your hotel room and into the world at large. It hits a strange, sepulchral note at its opening that reverberates through most of the first chapter: large stretches of the beaches of Banoi aren’t filled with zombies or corpses, they’re just white sand and leafy green plants. It’d be a beautiful place to take the family if it wasn’t for all the zombies.
Of course, it doesn’t last. As you explore you’ll stumble open the ruins of homes, little asides and scenes that illustrate life on Banoi before the dead began to walk. But even within those there’s a sense of calm that pervades some of the remote bungalos, that makes you stroll along the beach instead of sprint. Dead Island is willing to take its time with you, to give you a lot of pretty or visually dense things to look at and translate, and that’s good. Because when the action begins it is so intense, so furious, that a game like this without Dead Island’s pacing might be unplayable.
See the core of Dead Island is first person melee combat. I’ve got a soft spot for first person melee combat done well: games like Thief, Morrowwind, Oblivion – all classics that relied heavily on first person melee combat and built systems to match, systems that made the entire affair feel chaotic, but manageable. Melee combat even featured prominently into Far Cry 2, which until Dead Island came along had won my award for most satisfying machete simulation in a video game three years running. Melee combat done well is memorable, fun and makes a game a joy to play, a unique and immersive experience different from other firs t person games.
But the majority of first person games just don’t do it right. Most of them simply treat melee combat as a zero range weapon, your ultimate backup in the event that you run out of ammunition. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: games like Unreal Tournament, Quake and Counter-Strike aren’t about melee brawls, they’re about intense corridor battles with lots of gunplay, give and take, and enough ammo to make sure it won’t be a problem. But games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic having shitty melee combat systems, that can be a problem. And after playing Dead Island, it’s hard not to look at Dark Messiah and shake my head at it sadly: clumsy, repetitive combat, a limited number of choices which, inevitably, all play more or less the same and a total lack of spontaneity all combine to make that game one blah adventure.
But Dead Island hits the balance just right. It’s like an object lesson in how to do first person melee combat. Each weapon has a different feel, and even the upgraded weapons play a little bit differently than their vanilla counterparts. I’ll wade into combat with a baseball bat, knocking infected down in an enclosed space to keep them off me, but once I wrap that bat in rags and set it on fire, I’ve got to watch myself: beware flaming zombies. They will set you on fire. And that baseball bat feels very, very different from a crowbar, which feels different than an oar which feels different than a tonfa. There’s an almost overwhelming number of weapons to choose from, and each one of them is satisfying to use and has a balance of strengths and weaknesses that make it well suited to a particular set of situations.
And the combat itself is spot on – it’s immersive, confusing, sometimes oppressively so, and challenging in the best way possible. You’ll grasp the basics of it immediately: grab something mean looking and swing it at a zombie. But the complexities of timing your hits, choosing when to finish off a downed opponent, fitting weapons to situations, aren’t quite so easy to get. I’m still fucking up my timing whenever I try to get a good machete hit off on a charging infected, and I’ve lost my life more than a few times while trying to put a zombie down for good while a horde rushes toward me.
But with this challenge comes reward: there’s nothing quite like taking down a trio of zombie as they bear down on you. The viscera, the rush of success and the knowledge that you’re alive, that you survived an attack which could very well have killed you all shape into a mini dramatic arc that hits all the right notes and takes just the right amount of time with its momentary conflict. It’s so well cast and well balanced that developing a style that works, learning the ropes and putting those elements together really do put you in the shoes of a battered survivalist weaving their way through the horde with battered weapon in hand.
And the learning curve never stops: I recently began the second act of the game, and I’ve never seen a more profoundly subtle shift to the manner in which a game played before. Each combat that I dive into is mechanically identical to the ones that have come before, but a handful of new zombie types, some new dangers native to Moresby (the city where the second act is set) and new behavioral patterns that the zombies follow all combine to make combat feel new. It’s wonderful, and I can’t wait to see how it continues to develop as I move through Dead Island’s beautifully ruined settings.
You might’ve noticed that I haven’t discussed shooting in the game yet: that’s because there isn’t actually very much of it. While Dead Island certainly has guns, ammo is scarce and they’re not as effective as you’d think. Most zombies take multiple hits to drop, and when a mob of zombies is rushing at you you won’t really have time to aim. Better to run, choose where to fight and make your stand.
Running, by the way, is a crucial mechanic in Dead Island. Whether its charging through some shambling mobs that aren’t really in your way or fleeing from a fight turning against you, you’re going to want to sprint carefully. And it’s clear that the developers wanted players to see running as an option exclusive from combat: both actions draw from a mutual pool of stamina which depletes fast when the going gets rough.
The end result is a visceral, satisfying game about resource management, a game with quiet spaces spanning large sections of time, framing frenetic action with legitimate tension. Dead Island earns its scares, makes every enemy the enemy that could kill you and every challenge a challenge you can and should be able to surpass, if only just barely. It establishes a place both foreign and familiar for players using deft character development, tight visual shorthand and surprisingly apt writing. While it won’t be winning any prizes for dialogue Dead Island does grasp that less is more, and its characters speak carefully, naturally, and rarely. I’ve yet to feel like I’m being chatterboxed at, a welcome vacation from games where guards constantly shout at me to emerge or wherein my taciturn marine comrades spin hastily crafted dialogue to each scenario around me as we kill whatevertheenemyis.
That’s not to say that Dead Island doesn’t have its problems. Sometimes the game will get hard. Really, really hard without warning. Some people, like me, really enjoy this. Some other people might find it frustrating – Dead Island isn’t much of a power fantasy. It’s very willing to stack the odds against you, and it’s not going to do you any favors to help you beat them. And technical issues, as one would expect, abound with a PC game like this. Clipping, seat selection in vehicles and hit detection all seem a bit off at times, and shadows seem to respond strangely regardless of what I do.
But these are minor issues and overall design choices that could potentially alienate players, not systemic problems with the game as an artifact. As a game Dead Island seems to be spot on. It hits every note it goes for and it does so incredibly well. I’ll be writing a wrap up on it as soon as I finish it, but part of me is reluctant to even think of it ending. It’s been a long time since I’ve had as much fun as I am fighting the hordes of undead on the shores of Banoi.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Congratulations on Stealing the Crown!
Remember that movie The Thomas Crown Affair? Of course you don’t, no one really does. But you’re going to wish you did today because you’re going to wake up in Pierce Brosnan’s body today and be forced to steal a crown in order to return to your own body, so it’s suddenly going to become relevant. We assume the plot of that movie is more or less exactly what’s going to go down with you, but we haven’t seen it ourselves so we’re not entirely sure.
Anyhow, the witch will want you help reinvigorating Brosnan’s career. After the dancing baby from Ally McBeal got all that crime press earlier this week she’ll see this heist as a potential way to get Brosnan back into the middle, where he spent a the bulk of the 90s. But Brosnan isn’t that great at anything anymore, and he certainly won’t have the gumption to pull off a robbery like the one she has planned.
So she’ll get you, a shiftless young man with a lot of dreams and no luck whatsoever in life, to inhabit Brosnan’s body for a day. Using Brosnan’s fading good looks and your can-do attitude and capacity for action and planning you’ll pull off a crown heist in a small European country that no one who reads this blog has ever, ever heard of. It’ll be super entertaining, but we can’t describe it here for legal reasons (there’s currently a film based the events on it in development, with Brosnan starring!). Once the deed is done you’ll return to your old body with a substantial sum transferred to your bank account and no regrets.
Brosnan will do a little bit better, but not that much better - let’s be honest, his ship has pretty much sailed. And as much as we’d love to say that everything is going to work out great for him after this next movie his career really won’t come back that much./ So while he’ll certainly be better off he won’t be the powerhouse he was ever again. Which is kind of a shame, but these things happen. At least you’ll have the confidence and experience you need for your next heist, which we’re sure will be bigger and better than anything that witch could’ve dreamed up.
Congratulations on Stealing the Crown!
Anyhow, the witch will want you help reinvigorating Brosnan’s career. After the dancing baby from Ally McBeal got all that crime press earlier this week she’ll see this heist as a potential way to get Brosnan back into the middle, where he spent a the bulk of the 90s. But Brosnan isn’t that great at anything anymore, and he certainly won’t have the gumption to pull off a robbery like the one she has planned.
So she’ll get you, a shiftless young man with a lot of dreams and no luck whatsoever in life, to inhabit Brosnan’s body for a day. Using Brosnan’s fading good looks and your can-do attitude and capacity for action and planning you’ll pull off a crown heist in a small European country that no one who reads this blog has ever, ever heard of. It’ll be super entertaining, but we can’t describe it here for legal reasons (there’s currently a film based the events on it in development, with Brosnan starring!). Once the deed is done you’ll return to your old body with a substantial sum transferred to your bank account and no regrets.
Brosnan will do a little bit better, but not that much better - let’s be honest, his ship has pretty much sailed. And as much as we’d love to say that everything is going to work out great for him after this next movie his career really won’t come back that much./ So while he’ll certainly be better off he won’t be the powerhouse he was ever again. Which is kind of a shame, but these things happen. At least you’ll have the confidence and experience you need for your next heist, which we’re sure will be bigger and better than anything that witch could’ve dreamed up.
Congratulations on Stealing the Crown!
Friday, October 28, 2011
Congratulations on Saving the Leg!
Medicine has come a long way since the Civil War, but we’re not here to tell you that. Your instructors at Bob Jones School of Medicine were trying to for years and that never got through to you, so why would you listen to us now? A decade of “effective practice,” most of which consists of removing slightly injured limbs that might one day become infected and calling it good, has taught you that people in the Smokey Mountains will believe just about anything and endure just about anything as long as it doesn’t shit talk NASCAR or comment on their meth habit.
But lately you’ve been feeling like you’re not challenging yourself enough. You’ve been saving most of your patients by removing the few limbs they have left and warning them about the danger of foot rot when they mention that they haven’t been changing their socks of late, and that’s really been keeping your incoming patient numbers down.
So today when a young man comes in with a gunshot wound in his leg just below the knee you’re going to look at it, consider removing it and cauterizing the wound with a flaming hot machete and calling it a day and you’re going to say, for the first time in your career, no. Not today.
You’re going to pull that boy’s leg up on the table, remove your bullet probe from its velvet case and determine the depth of the bullet’s wound. When you hit the bullet and push it into bone a little, prompting an agonizing wail from the boy, you’ll know that you’re on the right track. Then you’ll insert your narrowest calipers into the wound, prompting another series of jowls from the child, which you’ll answer with a bottle of moonshine pressed into his hand. Once his mouth is stopped by the bottle’s mouth you’ll delve back in and pull out part of the musket ball that his uncle shot him with.
“Almost done,” you’ll tell him, patting him on the thigh. He’ll wince, but the shine’ll be taking hold and that’ll help him keep quiet while you fish out the other two pieces. Once you finish your probing you’ll take the shine from him and pour it down the wound. The boy will squirm something fierce when you do it, but he’ll be so off his gourd at this point that he won’t make a peep. He’ll just lay there, eyes fluttering just on this side of consciousness , while you wrap a cotton bandage around the wound.
When you wheel him out in the barrow to his momma you’ll give her directions: change the dressing twice a day, morning and night, and pour shine into the wound to kill what’s growin’ each time. She’ll nod and chew her lip and when she leaves she’ll go with a smile, blackened gums and gray teeth shining at you before she hefts the wheelbarrow and hobbles off on the peg you left her with after that mule kicked her in the uterus however many years after her son was born.
You’ll watch her go and feel a swelling in your heart which, as it turns out, will be symptomatic of a much bigger pulmonary issue which will kill you a decade from now.
Congratulations on Saving the Leg!
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Congratulations Dancing Baby!
It's been a long time since you've seen any work, Dancing Baby. Since Ally McBeal ended you haven't really done much of anything, come to think of it, except whine about how great things used to be back in the day. You discovered pot soon after that show was canceled, and since then it's all just gone downhill.
But today it's all going to turn around. Today you're going to pull your life out of the shitter and show the world that the Ally McBeal baby's still got it!
You'll do this by waking up and robbing a bank.
"Aww!" the bank patrols will coo as you execute a guard.
"ANYONE ELSE WANT TO BE A HERO?" you'll shout at the top of your lungs as the crowd watches you with admiration in their eyes. They'll all shake their heads.
"Didn't think so," you'll mutter to yourself as you hold out your money-sack to the teller and motion to her with your gun.
When you're captured leaving the bank you'll feel so good about being in the spotlight again that you'll hardly even care about the fact that you're going to prison for the rest of your life, which is especially rough because you're actually an immortal dancing baby who existed only for one ephemeral moment in America's collective consciousness and, as such, will be alive for a very, very long time.
Congratulations Dancing Baby!
But today it's all going to turn around. Today you're going to pull your life out of the shitter and show the world that the Ally McBeal baby's still got it!
You'll do this by waking up and robbing a bank.
"Aww!" the bank patrols will coo as you execute a guard.
"ANYONE ELSE WANT TO BE A HERO?" you'll shout at the top of your lungs as the crowd watches you with admiration in their eyes. They'll all shake their heads.
"Didn't think so," you'll mutter to yourself as you hold out your money-sack to the teller and motion to her with your gun.
When you're captured leaving the bank you'll feel so good about being in the spotlight again that you'll hardly even care about the fact that you're going to prison for the rest of your life, which is especially rough because you're actually an immortal dancing baby who existed only for one ephemeral moment in America's collective consciousness and, as such, will be alive for a very, very long time.
Congratulations Dancing Baby!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Congratulations on Emerging From Your Apartment Briefly!
When the light strikes your nearly translucent skin it will burn. But only a for a moment, and when you draw your hand back inside your skin will be charred jet black. You'll tap it gently with your finger and it will be hard as obsidian to the touch and just as hot. You'll flex your hand, confirming the mobility of each individual finger before you push it outside again to see if anything will happen.
The burned portion of your arm will remain unchanged, but as you dip your body out a little more light will catch your shoulder and searing pain will shoot through you. You'll flee back into the refuge of your apartment, where natural light hasn't been seen in years and gaze into the mirror at the patch of stone-skin which will have grown over your shoulder.
"Hm," you'll mutter, briefly removing your pants and looking at your penis. Then, with a shrug, you'll head back out to your front door and stand there waiting until the burning subsides. Then you'll turn around slowly, agony firing through your body. You'll even get on your back and turn each of your feet up towards the sunlight to make sure you get your soles. At one point you'll expose your taint to the sun, just to be sure that the job is as done as it can be.
When you're finished your entire body will be covered in hairless black stone. Your shoulders will feel taut underneath it, as if the stone has granted your muscles definition. Your arms will feel light, your calves perfectly formed. None of the deformities that forced you indoors years ago will plague you any more, and your dick will be black, which apparently your ex-girlfriend is into.
All in all you'll be perfectly suited to fight crime - or you would be if not for your crippling fear of public spaces. But that's irony for you!
Congratulations on Emerging From Your Apartment Briefly!
The burned portion of your arm will remain unchanged, but as you dip your body out a little more light will catch your shoulder and searing pain will shoot through you. You'll flee back into the refuge of your apartment, where natural light hasn't been seen in years and gaze into the mirror at the patch of stone-skin which will have grown over your shoulder.
"Hm," you'll mutter, briefly removing your pants and looking at your penis. Then, with a shrug, you'll head back out to your front door and stand there waiting until the burning subsides. Then you'll turn around slowly, agony firing through your body. You'll even get on your back and turn each of your feet up towards the sunlight to make sure you get your soles. At one point you'll expose your taint to the sun, just to be sure that the job is as done as it can be.
When you're finished your entire body will be covered in hairless black stone. Your shoulders will feel taut underneath it, as if the stone has granted your muscles definition. Your arms will feel light, your calves perfectly formed. None of the deformities that forced you indoors years ago will plague you any more, and your dick will be black, which apparently your ex-girlfriend is into.
All in all you'll be perfectly suited to fight crime - or you would be if not for your crippling fear of public spaces. But that's irony for you!
Congratulations on Emerging From Your Apartment Briefly!
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Congratulations Afro Joe!
When I hear Afro Joe I immediately think of a black guy. And it's not a race thing, because everyone else in the office, including Markus, the black dude who works here, had the same response. So it is legitimately odd that you would be named Afro Joe and be a one hundred and ten pound white guy. And it's even weirder that you go by that name and have chosen to teach introductory French in a public high school in eastern Wisconsin. But hey, none of us here can judge, so don't sweat it.
What you should sweat is the tremendous scrutiny your inscrutable lifestyle choice has brought to your doorstep. No one knows why the fuck you want to call yourself Afro Joe, and pretty much everyone finds it inappropriate in one way or another. Most people think you're kind of racist. A lot of other people just think you want attention for having a slightly unusual haircut. And everyone else doesn't like thinking about you, because you make them really uncomfortable.
But today you're going to meet a young woman at work, a new substitute teacher who just arrived in Manotowoc a week ago. She'll be a beautiful woman with thick black glasses and a big heart. She'll laugh at your jokes and when you tell her you have to go teach she'll smile when she asks for your name.
Tell her your name is Joe and fuck this girl. We're sick of looking at your life and feeling depressed about it. Just lose the Afro part. We get it, you're white and you have an Afro. This girl likes you for you. She doesn't need to know it. Get laid, for christssake.
Congratulations Afro Joe!
What you should sweat is the tremendous scrutiny your inscrutable lifestyle choice has brought to your doorstep. No one knows why the fuck you want to call yourself Afro Joe, and pretty much everyone finds it inappropriate in one way or another. Most people think you're kind of racist. A lot of other people just think you want attention for having a slightly unusual haircut. And everyone else doesn't like thinking about you, because you make them really uncomfortable.
But today you're going to meet a young woman at work, a new substitute teacher who just arrived in Manotowoc a week ago. She'll be a beautiful woman with thick black glasses and a big heart. She'll laugh at your jokes and when you tell her you have to go teach she'll smile when she asks for your name.
Tell her your name is Joe and fuck this girl. We're sick of looking at your life and feeling depressed about it. Just lose the Afro part. We get it, you're white and you have an Afro. This girl likes you for you. She doesn't need to know it. Get laid, for christssake.
Congratulations Afro Joe!
Monday, October 24, 2011
Congratulations Hideous Experiment Gone Wrong!
The government has all sorts of freaky shit going on in underground labs: they're developing new weapons, making disease bombs that can wipe out entire continents in a matter of days. They're genetically engineering kids so that they can murder dozens of people like in the movie Hanna and they're growing mutant creatures intended to horrify and rip through America's enemy. Creatures like you.
But here's the thing. It's the government, so these experiments almost never seem to work out the way they planned. Sometimes the kids are just a little too unruly and they end up killing everyone on the military base and then eating all the cookies and getting obese and dying when their oversized hearts explode. Sometimes the disease doesn't so much kill as make people silver, and then they move to Montana and run in local elections like a crazy person. And sometimes they result in creatures like you.
You were supposed to be a giant wolfman possessed of heightened senses, incredible strength and agility, and an inherent hatred for terrorism of all kinds. But the government didn't quite the get the mix right, and instead of hating terrorists you're actually a pacifist. You aren't a sissy, but you don't think that conflict solves a whole lot. You like to quote Bertrand Russel a lot when people ask about your views.
Normally the government would just kill you, but you were such a success in so many other ways that it would seem like a waste to them. So instead of tricking you into wandering into an incinerator they're going to set you free in northern Canada.
So today you're going to see your first glimpse of sunlight, run down and kill your first bit of live prey and see your first young tourist bathing in public, unaware that you're watching her. It'll be a good day, one you'll remember fondly in four years when a regime shift back to the right triggers a government effort to hunt you down and results in the death of hundreds of soldiers and four or five major Hollywood actors who were hired to play soldiers during the hunt.
Congratulations Hideous Experiment Gone Wrong!
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Lovable Spaz!
I was going to write about minimalism in games, how minimalism is perhaps the finest means by which to tell a story in a video game. But then I downloaded a little game, a fifteen dollar game designed by two Canadians, and it turned out to be huge. It ended up eating a huge part of my week, most of my free time and a little bit of my homework. So my lovesong to the voiceless protagonist and the open environment is forestalled for a week - in its place this has emerged: the ultimately insufficient praise that I must muster for Space Pirates and Zombies.
When I was homeless in Vienna, bouncing from dorm room floor to dorm room floor for a month before heading off and becoming really, really homeless, I spent a lot of time indoors. But I didn't have any money. I barely spoke the language. I had to my name only a handful of books, a few changes of clothes, my laptop computer and a CAT 5 cable I would use to hook into the University of Vienna's internet. I didn't speak anywhere near enough German to navigate the Viennese landscape, a harsh and xenophobic place, its hatred of foreigners that much more ironic for how critical they were to the economy not only of the city but of Austria as a whole. So I spent most of my time indoors, reading, writing and playing games I could find for free on the internet: Warcraft III mods, flash games and an open source version of Star Control 2 called The Ur Quan Masters.
Star Control 2 wasn't a magical force that made Vienna more livable through some eldritch wizardry – that came from the surging energy brought by the World Cup's, which ignited the city and, more importantly, the city's poor, who would spend their nights watching games projected on giant canvas screens under bridges and in public parks. Star Control 2 was just a fantastic game that happened to come into my life at this point, an old school game that I could lose myself in for hours and hours at a time. When it was finally time to leave Vienna I'd spent easily a hundred hours in Star Control 2'sunforgiving environs, trying to save as many crew as possible, recruiting alien races to my cause, developing new technologies and upgrading my mothership for the final battle. When I left, Star Control 2 stayed with me, and in the months that followed I'd often find myself sitting down and opening up Ur Quan Masters whenever I needed a little taste of its magic.
But I haven’t played it in ages. I was done with it, with its wonderful universe filled with strange birds and pterodactyls and one group of aliens I’m pretty sure were the literal devil given voice as a society. There was even a bunch of sentient gas clouds. And underneath that atmosphere lay one of the most compelling and addictive gameplay models that I’ve had the privilege to enjoy. It centered around a massive fleet accompanying your mothership, a fleet you would pilot into combat against bands of enemy ships which, more often than not, were considerably more powerful, more agile and more durable than yours.
The end result was a game taking shape amidst a desperate struggle against a vastly superior force set against a vibrant, living world with factions vying for power and territory. Star Control 2 had a pulse, a pulse that changed based on how you played and rewarded you for your exploration. And this energy is what made Star Control 2 more than just a footnote or a memory: it transformed what would otherwise be a memorable footnote into a classic, a nod towards open world gameplay before the term existed.
It’s a model of gameplay that was more or less forgotten for a long while, a model that shines through in Space Pirates and Zombies, a lovingly retro sendup of the genre. Space Pirates and Zombies is an ambitious game, a smart little game with a lot of heart. It takes the top down combat of Star Control 2, mostly its take on using multiple weapons with one ship and the ephemeral, slightly sloppy “feel” of its combat, and it casts it against a slow burning RPG-like model of progression. The end result is a retro game with a modern sensibility, a game that learned the lessons of Star Control and made game progress an easy choice rather than an arduous hit-or-miss search.
See Star Control 2’s punishing difficulty only partially stemmed from its combat system and mentality of making you the underdog for the vast majority of the game. It also owed quite a bit to the fact that the game didn’t give a shit whether or not you knew where to go next. Even if you managed to win battle after battle in Star Control 2 there was no guarantee you were working towards your actual end goal, no assurance that your hard won contributions to the fight against the titular Ur-Quan masters would actually prove useful. Unless you used a guide (and at this point, who wouldn’t?) the game required a notebook scarred with directions and notes if a player wanted any chance of winning.
SPAZ, as it is affectionately known to its adherents, doesn’t have this problem. Not sure where to go? There’s a green arrow on your map showing you exactly what you need to do next. Not that you have to follow it. I’ve spent most of the game avoiding that green arrow, dicking around and acquiring new ships and resources to build them with. The sensation of unlocking a new piece of technology, of leveling up your ships or arming them with new and devastating weapons is tremendously rewarding. And while the loss of the “underdog” sensation as the game progresses is a bit bittersweet the constantly rising stakes, stacked against the sheer size of the procedurally generated world you can explore, keep the game engaging.
See, SPAZ is all about unlocking little areas of the map so you can collect one of the game’s three resources: Rez, goons and data. Rez can be traded for goons, and goons can turn into Rez or data, or they can help you out by crewing your ships, making them subtly shippier. Rez can be used to buy blueprints or build ships which, by the end of the game, will start to take up some pretty hefty chunks of change. And data is basically experience – you want to constantly be earning data. And you’ll normally be collecting a little bit of each of these resources each time you make a kill or complete a mission. You’re constantly getting bits of feedback which contribute to your overall progress. And with no timers on game critical missions and no chance to get lost, all of this progress feeds into an affably loose story about a band of space pirates, none of whom fit into conventional archetypes, all of whom seem to fit the game just right.
SPAZ is a time sink – I’ve put in over 20 hours at this point and I think I’m at least five to ten hours away from actually finishing the game – if you choose to unlock all of the technology available to you you might even spend more time with it. And the developers are so dedicated to their lovable, runty little child that they’re still building and releasing new scraps of content to their adoring fans, free of charge. It’s tough to beat SPAZ in terms of raw value – I’ve already dropped my fun-to-bucks ratio below a dollar an hour at this point, and I’m still not done with it. If I went to a movie my dollars to fun ratio would be abysmal by comparison, and if I bought a popcorn I’d probably spend about as much as I did on SPAZ.
But there’s more than just economic value in SPAZ and what it does – there’s cultural value. SPAZ is the kind of game that doesn’t get made anymore, the kind of sprawling, intelligent playground that gives us just enough direction and just enough potential for failure to make us feel like we’re actually fighting against something without ever placing overly harsh constraints on the player. This could all change for me soon – perhaps I’ll unlock a portion of the game where the grind I’ve found pleasant and empowering becomes a tedious necessity in a fight against a vastly superior force. Perhaps I’ll run up against a brick wall of difficulty which traps me in a single battle again and again. Perhaps the game will just end without letting me enjoy the fruits of my labor. But it’s difficult to imagine any of these scenarios emerging right now. And that’s something in and of itself – if nothing else, SPAZ has created an engine capable of evaporating my cynicism and making me love games, developers and gameplay the way I did when I was hunting down free to play games with low rent graphics, chortling at every childish accomplishment.
When I was homeless in Vienna, bouncing from dorm room floor to dorm room floor for a month before heading off and becoming really, really homeless, I spent a lot of time indoors. But I didn't have any money. I barely spoke the language. I had to my name only a handful of books, a few changes of clothes, my laptop computer and a CAT 5 cable I would use to hook into the University of Vienna's internet. I didn't speak anywhere near enough German to navigate the Viennese landscape, a harsh and xenophobic place, its hatred of foreigners that much more ironic for how critical they were to the economy not only of the city but of Austria as a whole. So I spent most of my time indoors, reading, writing and playing games I could find for free on the internet: Warcraft III mods, flash games and an open source version of Star Control 2 called The Ur Quan Masters.
Star Control 2 wasn't a magical force that made Vienna more livable through some eldritch wizardry – that came from the surging energy brought by the World Cup's, which ignited the city and, more importantly, the city's poor, who would spend their nights watching games projected on giant canvas screens under bridges and in public parks. Star Control 2 was just a fantastic game that happened to come into my life at this point, an old school game that I could lose myself in for hours and hours at a time. When it was finally time to leave Vienna I'd spent easily a hundred hours in Star Control 2'sunforgiving environs, trying to save as many crew as possible, recruiting alien races to my cause, developing new technologies and upgrading my mothership for the final battle. When I left, Star Control 2 stayed with me, and in the months that followed I'd often find myself sitting down and opening up Ur Quan Masters whenever I needed a little taste of its magic.
But I haven’t played it in ages. I was done with it, with its wonderful universe filled with strange birds and pterodactyls and one group of aliens I’m pretty sure were the literal devil given voice as a society. There was even a bunch of sentient gas clouds. And underneath that atmosphere lay one of the most compelling and addictive gameplay models that I’ve had the privilege to enjoy. It centered around a massive fleet accompanying your mothership, a fleet you would pilot into combat against bands of enemy ships which, more often than not, were considerably more powerful, more agile and more durable than yours.
The end result was a game taking shape amidst a desperate struggle against a vastly superior force set against a vibrant, living world with factions vying for power and territory. Star Control 2 had a pulse, a pulse that changed based on how you played and rewarded you for your exploration. And this energy is what made Star Control 2 more than just a footnote or a memory: it transformed what would otherwise be a memorable footnote into a classic, a nod towards open world gameplay before the term existed.
It’s a model of gameplay that was more or less forgotten for a long while, a model that shines through in Space Pirates and Zombies, a lovingly retro sendup of the genre. Space Pirates and Zombies is an ambitious game, a smart little game with a lot of heart. It takes the top down combat of Star Control 2, mostly its take on using multiple weapons with one ship and the ephemeral, slightly sloppy “feel” of its combat, and it casts it against a slow burning RPG-like model of progression. The end result is a retro game with a modern sensibility, a game that learned the lessons of Star Control and made game progress an easy choice rather than an arduous hit-or-miss search.
See Star Control 2’s punishing difficulty only partially stemmed from its combat system and mentality of making you the underdog for the vast majority of the game. It also owed quite a bit to the fact that the game didn’t give a shit whether or not you knew where to go next. Even if you managed to win battle after battle in Star Control 2 there was no guarantee you were working towards your actual end goal, no assurance that your hard won contributions to the fight against the titular Ur-Quan masters would actually prove useful. Unless you used a guide (and at this point, who wouldn’t?) the game required a notebook scarred with directions and notes if a player wanted any chance of winning.
SPAZ, as it is affectionately known to its adherents, doesn’t have this problem. Not sure where to go? There’s a green arrow on your map showing you exactly what you need to do next. Not that you have to follow it. I’ve spent most of the game avoiding that green arrow, dicking around and acquiring new ships and resources to build them with. The sensation of unlocking a new piece of technology, of leveling up your ships or arming them with new and devastating weapons is tremendously rewarding. And while the loss of the “underdog” sensation as the game progresses is a bit bittersweet the constantly rising stakes, stacked against the sheer size of the procedurally generated world you can explore, keep the game engaging.
See, SPAZ is all about unlocking little areas of the map so you can collect one of the game’s three resources: Rez, goons and data. Rez can be traded for goons, and goons can turn into Rez or data, or they can help you out by crewing your ships, making them subtly shippier. Rez can be used to buy blueprints or build ships which, by the end of the game, will start to take up some pretty hefty chunks of change. And data is basically experience – you want to constantly be earning data. And you’ll normally be collecting a little bit of each of these resources each time you make a kill or complete a mission. You’re constantly getting bits of feedback which contribute to your overall progress. And with no timers on game critical missions and no chance to get lost, all of this progress feeds into an affably loose story about a band of space pirates, none of whom fit into conventional archetypes, all of whom seem to fit the game just right.
SPAZ is a time sink – I’ve put in over 20 hours at this point and I think I’m at least five to ten hours away from actually finishing the game – if you choose to unlock all of the technology available to you you might even spend more time with it. And the developers are so dedicated to their lovable, runty little child that they’re still building and releasing new scraps of content to their adoring fans, free of charge. It’s tough to beat SPAZ in terms of raw value – I’ve already dropped my fun-to-bucks ratio below a dollar an hour at this point, and I’m still not done with it. If I went to a movie my dollars to fun ratio would be abysmal by comparison, and if I bought a popcorn I’d probably spend about as much as I did on SPAZ.
But there’s more than just economic value in SPAZ and what it does – there’s cultural value. SPAZ is the kind of game that doesn’t get made anymore, the kind of sprawling, intelligent playground that gives us just enough direction and just enough potential for failure to make us feel like we’re actually fighting against something without ever placing overly harsh constraints on the player. This could all change for me soon – perhaps I’ll unlock a portion of the game where the grind I’ve found pleasant and empowering becomes a tedious necessity in a fight against a vastly superior force. Perhaps I’ll run up against a brick wall of difficulty which traps me in a single battle again and again. Perhaps the game will just end without letting me enjoy the fruits of my labor. But it’s difficult to imagine any of these scenarios emerging right now. And that’s something in and of itself – if nothing else, SPAZ has created an engine capable of evaporating my cynicism and making me love games, developers and gameplay the way I did when I was hunting down free to play games with low rent graphics, chortling at every childish accomplishment.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Congratulations on Escaping the Plastic Bag!
Your name is Reno and you’re kind of a douchebag. There are plenty of good reasons for your douchebaggery. You lacked a strong father figure growing up, you made a lot of mistakes and went to a public school where you had a long line of unsupportive and angry teachers who had long since given up reinforce the sense that you were worthless for most of a decade. But the last six months have been absolutely fantastic for you. You joined the coolest gang around, a super classy gang led by a super classy dude who wears a mask and only commits crimes politely (so cool!). But you’ve had trouble suppressing your aforementioned douchebaggery, and it’ll finally catch up with you early, early this morning.
After some unfortunate events last night where you got a little bit rude while committing a crime the gang held an emergency meeting. They briefly discussed the issue of your continued membership and decided, after a brief conversation on your potential for growth and development as a criminal, that you weren’t really the kind of person they wanted in their gang.
“Terribly sorry,” the leader told you as your former gang mates wrapped you in plastic in the back of a van.
“Isn’t there some sort of appeals process?” you begged. The leader just shook his head, his fingers touching his mask.
“If you come back to us tomorrow we can discuss that.”
Then he gave a high sign to Jacob, the gang member who used to teach high school math, and the world soared by. When you hit the ground you’re pretty sure you bounced: one, two, three times before beginning your long roll to the ditch, to unconsciousness, to a darkness blacker than any night.
You’ll come to while it’s still dark out, arms bound at your sides by something outside the plastic. You’ll writhe and struggle to open up your bag, but to no avail. Air will be scarce, your muscles weak, your brain slowing. Time will start to rush in and out, the world pulsing violet, red, black, stars swimming before your vision. You’ll start praying to yourself silently, laying completely still.
It won’t be a prayer for salvation – it’ll be a cry for absolution, a feeble attempt at communion in your last seconds. Later on, when you reflect on this night, you’ll think it serendipitous that what came next came at all, but you won’t think it was in response to your prayer.
You’ll form this belief primarily based around the idea that, if God wanted to present you with some sort of divine portent he would probably opt to do something more grandiose than having a rat chew through the plastic bag wrapped around your head. Perhaps a polite motorist with a lot of bumper stickers finding you, something like that. But the rat will chew through your bag and the rush of air will strike your face and make you suck in breath in a gasp, frightening it off. As air trickles towards your face you’ll take deeper and deeper breaths, your strength returning with each one.
Dawn will nearly be upon you when you finally work yourself free of the tape and start tearing plastic off your body. You’ll unwrap yourself in a fury, ready to kill anything that looks at you, even your savior rat, but by the time you try to stand your fury will have abated, your legs still unsteady underneath you. You’ll settle on to a nearby rock for a few moments to regain your strength and sit and think about what to do next, about going back to the gang for revenge, for a second chance, or for information on where to get your GED. You have a feeling that they’d know where you could do that.
Congratulations on Escaping the Plastic Bag!
Friday, October 21, 2011
Congratulations on Beating Thom Thompson!
Today you and your gang of street toughs will happen upon an elderly gentleman with a bowler cap and a refined air whilst engaging in some no goodery outside the local bowling alley.
"Halt!" you'll say, holding up your hand. You're a very well put together gang and you like to fit your diction to your victims, so this won't be out of the ordinary at all.
The man will halt obediently, tip his hat and smile at you and your cohorts.
"How man I assist -" he'll begin, but he won't get halfway through his sentence before Reno, the least refined member of your gang, punches him right in the face. Reno will punch him two more times on the ground before you walk up behind your unruly compatriot and rap him on the back of the head with your cane, sending his body down on top of the already seriously injured dandy.
"Apologies," you'll say, taking a long draw from a cigarette while two of your gang mates pull Reno off the horrified gentleman. "You know how kids are."
You'll lift the gentleman's bowler cap from the ground and hold it out in front of him upside down. Your intent will be clear, his eyes wide and fearful.
"If you'd be so kind," you'll purr at him. He'll reach into his pockets, trembling, but he'll be shaking so hard he won't be able to grasp anything. Fear will rack his body, incapacitate him. His inability to act will be so complete that he won't even flinch when you raise your cane again and strike him on the temple, knocking him unconscious in one swift stroke.
Your boys will strip his body, handing you his watch and his wallet, after they've taken all the cash out of it (you don't like to get your hands dirty). Bemused by this man, this evolutionary dead end, you'll check his driver's license. It will read Thom Thompson, Esq.
You'll toss the wallet at his supine body and nod to the bowling alley attendant who will be waiting for your signal outside. The attendant will hurry back in and dial 9-1-1 while you and your boys go on a leisurely stroll and you start to put together the chat you plan on having with Reno about savoring the moment and staying in line in the future.
Congratulations on Beating Thom Thompson!
"Halt!" you'll say, holding up your hand. You're a very well put together gang and you like to fit your diction to your victims, so this won't be out of the ordinary at all.
The man will halt obediently, tip his hat and smile at you and your cohorts.
"How man I assist -" he'll begin, but he won't get halfway through his sentence before Reno, the least refined member of your gang, punches him right in the face. Reno will punch him two more times on the ground before you walk up behind your unruly compatriot and rap him on the back of the head with your cane, sending his body down on top of the already seriously injured dandy.
"Apologies," you'll say, taking a long draw from a cigarette while two of your gang mates pull Reno off the horrified gentleman. "You know how kids are."
You'll lift the gentleman's bowler cap from the ground and hold it out in front of him upside down. Your intent will be clear, his eyes wide and fearful.
"If you'd be so kind," you'll purr at him. He'll reach into his pockets, trembling, but he'll be shaking so hard he won't be able to grasp anything. Fear will rack his body, incapacitate him. His inability to act will be so complete that he won't even flinch when you raise your cane again and strike him on the temple, knocking him unconscious in one swift stroke.
Your boys will strip his body, handing you his watch and his wallet, after they've taken all the cash out of it (you don't like to get your hands dirty). Bemused by this man, this evolutionary dead end, you'll check his driver's license. It will read Thom Thompson, Esq.
You'll toss the wallet at his supine body and nod to the bowling alley attendant who will be waiting for your signal outside. The attendant will hurry back in and dial 9-1-1 while you and your boys go on a leisurely stroll and you start to put together the chat you plan on having with Reno about savoring the moment and staying in line in the future.
Congratulations on Beating Thom Thompson!
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Congratulations on Not Beating Tom Thompson!
You're going to get a twenty, he's going to get a twenty one. It'll be really really exciting for like, fifteen seconds, but really, the tension of blackjack is something experienced over time and with varying stakes, so we really don't feel like wasting everyone's time by making you sit through a bunch of meaningful glances as he somehow comes out on top despite the astronomical odds against him.
So Tom Thompson going to hit you in the face again, but this time a tooth won't come loose.
"Huh," he'll mumble to himself, rubbing his jaw as he rises from his seat for what will be, as far as you know, the first time in years. "Must be losin' my touch."
He'll help you up and pat you on the back, shaking your hand as he does so.
"You sure can take a punch, boy," he'll mumble with a twinkle in his eye. Then he'll hand you the diamond and a business card. The card won't say anything on it, but you know that's just old Tom Thompson's way.
Years later you'll return to that lonely shack on the edge of town, looking for Hidei and Tom and a little bit of money the hard way. But they'll all be gone - no note or notice. By this time you'll have long forgotten the business card, the way he looked and what he said. Man like that couldn't be what he was and be anything less than a legend. He had to go after that day.
You won't remember much of it, but you will remember never beating him. No one could ever beat old Tom Thompson but Tom Thompson himself.
Congratulations on Not Beating Tom Thompson!
So Tom Thompson going to hit you in the face again, but this time a tooth won't come loose.
"Huh," he'll mumble to himself, rubbing his jaw as he rises from his seat for what will be, as far as you know, the first time in years. "Must be losin' my touch."
He'll help you up and pat you on the back, shaking your hand as he does so.
"You sure can take a punch, boy," he'll mumble with a twinkle in his eye. Then he'll hand you the diamond and a business card. The card won't say anything on it, but you know that's just old Tom Thompson's way.
Years later you'll return to that lonely shack on the edge of town, looking for Hidei and Tom and a little bit of money the hard way. But they'll all be gone - no note or notice. By this time you'll have long forgotten the business card, the way he looked and what he said. Man like that couldn't be what he was and be anything less than a legend. He had to go after that day.
You won't remember much of it, but you will remember never beating him. No one could ever beat old Tom Thompson but Tom Thompson himself.
Congratulations on Not Beating Tom Thompson!
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Congratulations on Finding the Tooth!
It'll all start with big Tom Thompson. Lots of stuff does, and none of it's good.
Tom Thompson runs a card room on the edge of town. Nevermind which town, if you have to ask this isn't a story you need to hear. If you haven't heard about it before, you have now. Go to the edge of town and just shout "Marco" into the air. You'll find it eventually.
Once you find it you'll be let inside by a one eyed Chinaman what answers to the name Hidei. Hidei won't talk much, but he'll walk you through old Tom Thompson's antechamber safe as a house and bring you to the man hisself. Then he'll walk you into a room with the biggest, meanest man you ever did see, beard down to his belly and eyes like the devil lit two acorns aflame. Hidei'll leave without a backwards glance - he'll know you're past his saving if you're there. God himself couldn't help you there - you'll be in your own hands from then on.
Once the door closes behind Hidei Tom'll lean across the table and look you in the eye.
"What now?" he'll say.
"We'll play," you'll nod back, drawing a deck of cards out of your suit and handing it to him. Tom Thompson will fiddle with the deck for a moment, cards dancing from finger to finger. She'll shuffle them once, twice, three times, then hand the deck back for you to cut. Then he'll deal - two cards, one face up, one face down.
You'll get the biggest of grins on your face and tap the table twice and Tom, he'll nod and flip you a card face up - a queen to match the king showing on your hand.
Tom won't bother flipping the last card, he'll know his hand well enough that you ain't got no ace under there. But he will bother to take the time to raise his hand and, without ever seeming to leave his seat or even lean forward, slug you so hard you'll tumble backwards out of your chair and onto the floor.
You won't lose consciousness, per sec. But the world will go all white and when you finally know what's what around you again you'll have to regain your bearings for a second. You'll tongue the inside of your mouth, assess the damage and, sure enough, one brand new gap will be standing in the middle of your mouth.
You'll stand up and dust yourself off, doing your best to ignore the blood stain running down your nice white shirt. Then you'll set to finding what's yours.
You'll search the whole room - under table and under couch - while big Tom Thompson just sits and watches. After five minutes of doing that you'll find your tooth, or at least a tooth, sitting just behind the door. Who knows how it got there - this sort of thing just happens with Tom Thompson around.
You'll walk right back up to that big old son of a bitch and slam the tooth down on the table.
"Ante up," you'll tell him with a wink. And sure enough he'll crack a smile.
"Guess you're man enough to play after all, boy," he'll mumble, drawing a diamond out of his sock and slamming it down on the table. "Let's see if you're man enough to beat Tom Thompson."
Congratulations on Finding the Tooth!
Tom Thompson runs a card room on the edge of town. Nevermind which town, if you have to ask this isn't a story you need to hear. If you haven't heard about it before, you have now. Go to the edge of town and just shout "Marco" into the air. You'll find it eventually.
Once you find it you'll be let inside by a one eyed Chinaman what answers to the name Hidei. Hidei won't talk much, but he'll walk you through old Tom Thompson's antechamber safe as a house and bring you to the man hisself. Then he'll walk you into a room with the biggest, meanest man you ever did see, beard down to his belly and eyes like the devil lit two acorns aflame. Hidei'll leave without a backwards glance - he'll know you're past his saving if you're there. God himself couldn't help you there - you'll be in your own hands from then on.
Once the door closes behind Hidei Tom'll lean across the table and look you in the eye.
"What now?" he'll say.
"We'll play," you'll nod back, drawing a deck of cards out of your suit and handing it to him. Tom Thompson will fiddle with the deck for a moment, cards dancing from finger to finger. She'll shuffle them once, twice, three times, then hand the deck back for you to cut. Then he'll deal - two cards, one face up, one face down.
You'll get the biggest of grins on your face and tap the table twice and Tom, he'll nod and flip you a card face up - a queen to match the king showing on your hand.
Tom won't bother flipping the last card, he'll know his hand well enough that you ain't got no ace under there. But he will bother to take the time to raise his hand and, without ever seeming to leave his seat or even lean forward, slug you so hard you'll tumble backwards out of your chair and onto the floor.
You won't lose consciousness, per sec. But the world will go all white and when you finally know what's what around you again you'll have to regain your bearings for a second. You'll tongue the inside of your mouth, assess the damage and, sure enough, one brand new gap will be standing in the middle of your mouth.
You'll stand up and dust yourself off, doing your best to ignore the blood stain running down your nice white shirt. Then you'll set to finding what's yours.
You'll search the whole room - under table and under couch - while big Tom Thompson just sits and watches. After five minutes of doing that you'll find your tooth, or at least a tooth, sitting just behind the door. Who knows how it got there - this sort of thing just happens with Tom Thompson around.
You'll walk right back up to that big old son of a bitch and slam the tooth down on the table.
"Ante up," you'll tell him with a wink. And sure enough he'll crack a smile.
"Guess you're man enough to play after all, boy," he'll mumble, drawing a diamond out of his sock and slamming it down on the table. "Let's see if you're man enough to beat Tom Thompson."
Congratulations on Finding the Tooth!
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Congratulations Horrible Woman!
The world is full of shitty people - we spend most of our days watching appalling numbers of them. But you really take the cake.
Today, while working on your horrible mystery novel in your disgusting apartment full of cats, a young man will tumble from the roof above past your apartment, just barely catching himself on the fire escape by your window. He'll be screaming incredibly loudly, which will distract you from your "writing" (repeatedly refreshing Google in an effort to find nude photographs of Ryan Gosling) and force you to open your shades, allowing a cascade of light into your apartment for the first time in days.
"Whaddya want?" you'll ask the young man, who will be gibbering in fear.
"Puh," he'll begin, but the words will catch in his mouth. "Puh-puh-puh-"
You'll shut the window to block out his stuttering and turn back to your "work."
"Gul dern liberals," you'll mumble, scratching yourself in full view of the window. You'll catch yourself thinking for a moment as your hand plays over your crotch that that young man did look a little bit like Ryan Gosling, and that helping him out might've helped you a bit, maybe, if it worked out alright. But by the time you find your grabby-stick and return to the window he'll have already fallen to the ground.
"Easy come," you'll mumble to yourself before thinking better of finishing your sentence.
The situation resolved, you'll turn back to your Dell laptop and get back to Googling, occasionally pausing to type a few lines of lazy prose into your computer. Most of them will relate to how much better women are than men at solving crimes, and how if women ran police departments there'd be no more crime. The rest will be too racist to repeat here.
Congratulations Horrible Woman!
Today, while working on your horrible mystery novel in your disgusting apartment full of cats, a young man will tumble from the roof above past your apartment, just barely catching himself on the fire escape by your window. He'll be screaming incredibly loudly, which will distract you from your "writing" (repeatedly refreshing Google in an effort to find nude photographs of Ryan Gosling) and force you to open your shades, allowing a cascade of light into your apartment for the first time in days.
"Whaddya want?" you'll ask the young man, who will be gibbering in fear.
"Puh," he'll begin, but the words will catch in his mouth. "Puh-puh-puh-"
You'll shut the window to block out his stuttering and turn back to your "work."
"Gul dern liberals," you'll mumble, scratching yourself in full view of the window. You'll catch yourself thinking for a moment as your hand plays over your crotch that that young man did look a little bit like Ryan Gosling, and that helping him out might've helped you a bit, maybe, if it worked out alright. But by the time you find your grabby-stick and return to the window he'll have already fallen to the ground.
"Easy come," you'll mumble to yourself before thinking better of finishing your sentence.
The situation resolved, you'll turn back to your Dell laptop and get back to Googling, occasionally pausing to type a few lines of lazy prose into your computer. Most of them will relate to how much better women are than men at solving crimes, and how if women ran police departments there'd be no more crime. The rest will be too racist to repeat here.
Congratulations Horrible Woman!
Monday, October 17, 2011
Congratulations Wannabe Sous Chef!
You were once a culinary arts student at a culinary arts academy so elite we dare not name it here, lest its fierce guardians track us down and butcher us for violating their trust and secrecy. But this was long ago, and one fucked up souffle and six years of hard luck later has you slinging on Chef Ramses' Kitchen Challenge, which we assume is some sort of Egyptian themed cooking show.
Most people there are competing to become a professional chef of some kind - maybe they'll work as a low level employee in the kitchen of the asshole who ridicules you all day in and day out, or maybe they'll open their own restaurant and thrive on the publicity afforded to them by their time on a third rate cooking show. Whatever, they have dreams.
But not you. You're on the show so you can put it on your resume and get work as a sous chef in the future. Your goal is to stick around just long enough that you'll be remembered, but not for so much time that you'll be remembered too well. You want to be seen as reliable, but not overly motivated so that anyone who hires you won't expect very much from you and will let you rest comfortably in the middle, which is just where you like it after years of mediocrity and more years of crack addiction.
And we're pleased to tell you that today is going to be your lucky day - today you're going to be voted off the show. You won't be particularly hated, nor will you be a fan favorite. During the exit interview people will say "she was nice enough, but she wasn't really that motivated" and "she was really quiet, especially about her past."
You'll spend most of the day savoring your thing that resembles success, watching TV and masturbating languidly in the bathroom so as not to disturb your cat or your roommate who works as a web designer. Tomorrow you'll start applying for your "dream" job, but today is for you. Savor it. You're going to be working for scraps for the rest of your shitty life.
Congratulations Wannabe Sous Chef!
Most people there are competing to become a professional chef of some kind - maybe they'll work as a low level employee in the kitchen of the asshole who ridicules you all day in and day out, or maybe they'll open their own restaurant and thrive on the publicity afforded to them by their time on a third rate cooking show. Whatever, they have dreams.
But not you. You're on the show so you can put it on your resume and get work as a sous chef in the future. Your goal is to stick around just long enough that you'll be remembered, but not for so much time that you'll be remembered too well. You want to be seen as reliable, but not overly motivated so that anyone who hires you won't expect very much from you and will let you rest comfortably in the middle, which is just where you like it after years of mediocrity and more years of crack addiction.
And we're pleased to tell you that today is going to be your lucky day - today you're going to be voted off the show. You won't be particularly hated, nor will you be a fan favorite. During the exit interview people will say "she was nice enough, but she wasn't really that motivated" and "she was really quiet, especially about her past."
You'll spend most of the day savoring your thing that resembles success, watching TV and masturbating languidly in the bathroom so as not to disturb your cat or your roommate who works as a web designer. Tomorrow you'll start applying for your "dream" job, but today is for you. Savor it. You're going to be working for scraps for the rest of your shitty life.
Congratulations Wannabe Sous Chef!
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays: Brothers in Arms!
At first Gaz doesn't really take to me – maybe he's threatened. But he warms up to me, him and Price. We have a rollicking good time together – we break into a freighter, we kill a bunch of people, steal a bunch of shit and travel the world for a few jam-packed days of fun, sun and murder. We get to be buddies, me and my SAS bros, touring the world through our gun-cams. By the time we reach the end of our journey things have changed a lot: we've got a black friend who I watched pass through the same friendship inauguration process that I did, there were some nukes we did some thing about (I think we...stopped them?) and we killed some douchebag's son in a Ukrainian apartment complex.
But as the final frames dawn upon us we find ourselves on the ground – Zakhaev closing in on us. Our black friend dies. Gaz is thrown from us, distant: we watch him fall helplessly. Price gives me the tool I need to resolve the situation – my weapon, my perspective on the world. Just as he did during training, when so much less was at stake, he presents me with this perspective, this framing device existing simultaneously with his own, and through it I save something: the world, my life, the remnants of our friendship.
It's not always the case, but a fair number of First Person Shooters focus heavily on elements within their stories like brotherhood. Some games are obsessed with it to the exclusion of most other themes – Brothers in Arms has it right in the title, and the Hells Highway expansion (or sequel, depending on how you look at it) examines the concept of brotherhood set against the backdrop of Market Garden, tearing the concept apart and building it back up under the light of one of the bloodiest and most disheartening American losses in World War II. Half-Life 2 constantly throws bands of saucy rebels your way to make you feel connected to them and imbue your actions with not just a sense of anarchic glee but true revolution as well. Far Cry 2 even goes so far as to imbue the game with a literal “buddy system,” which blossoms into a crucial mechanic.
All of these potent narratives about brotherhood all move towards more or less the same goal – a story about community, conflict and resolution told from behind the barrel of the gun, a story where your identity is more or less that of a gun. And why shouldn't it be? We've been romanticizing that conceit of identity for decades now, ever since Marines chanted “This is my rifle. There are many like it but this is mine.” on screen. To be a part of something bigger is to lose a part of yourself, to place it in another object – to find a constant in a world where you are not fully in control. The gaming shorthand to this end is the weapon: the rifle, the spinfusor, the crowbar.
It establishes our identity and our ability to act upon the world. In Modern Warfare we aren't placed behind a real, controllable character until we're given the opportunity to choose our guns, to shoot our guns and act upon the world. Even then we're eased into our guns, our guns are given context and friendly faces to help us feel comfortable using them – we're taught that our guns are how we can interact with the world, and the better we do with our guns the better off our brothers are. Far Cry 2 goes one better, crippling you and making the gun your means of empowerment. Considering how weak and finicky guns are in Far Cry 2, and how sickly your character is, constantly on the verge of collapse, it does a great deal more than establish brotherhood. But it does so at that - it establishes not only your worldview but your working relationship with every other character. Each time you interact with a friendly character in Far Cry 2 you are given a gun. Each act of aid, cooperation and coordination comes with a firearm – even if you already have one, your buddy will give one to you.
Perhaps the best example stems from Half-Life 2, where Barney officiates your re-integration into the revolution by giving your a crowbar. He turns you from a man on the run to a force of nature, and the first action you take with that crowbar is to defy the Combine – to disarm and destroy them while defending your Resistance brothers and sisters. Half-Life 2 is a bit of an odd example, especially considering how much of that game is spent running through various kinds of corridors alone. But the role the Resistance plays in the game is undeniable, and without Barney giving you the tools for your work, without you being the chief Guy With a Gun for the Resistance, and without your gun-camera adventures from the first game there simply wouldn't be a Resistance. Half-Life is fundamentally about a revolution built around a camera that swings around a gun.
And don't even get me started on Hells Highway – a game centered around a gun and its nigh mystical implications for a band of soldiers. Hell's Highway has a highly refined system of directing AI teammates and a third person cover-cam that gives you a view of you and your brothers in arms sitting shoulder to shoulder behind cover, your little gun-pricks poking out overhead. It's a game where characters, their roles and their personalities are defined by the weapons they wield, and characters who cannot wield a weapon are literally crippled. The gun isn't just a tool for building camraderie and community in Hell's Highway – it's a necessity if you want to survive in the world.
So guns are more than just a way to kill things – they're a way to bond over killing things. But what about games where guns don't kill people, where “guns” aren't really guns at all?
Portal is obsessed with ideas about community, cooperation and the role of the player as collaborator rather than opponent for developers. It's also a game with a very feminine gun model in it that fires vaginas at walls. As such Portal's commentary on community isn't so much about brotherhood, the way that Call of Duty or Hell's Highway are, as relationships in general. There are some brilliant close readings of Portal which take apart the player's relationship (and Chell's relationship by extension) with GlaDOS out there, and I'm loathe to try to recreate it here. But what I do find interesting is the complexity within Portal's relationships seems to stem somewhat from its new take on guns.
Portal never really saddles you with enemies. Even the turrets are collaborators of a sort, characters who assist you in creating a story, make witty quips and make you feel better about the world around you with their adorable little voices. As such it concerns itself less with making you look at the world from the gun's perspective, replacing the usual gun-centered orientation with a spatial orientation that introduces you to your character. As the game unfolds your relationship with GlaDOS, the Portal Gun and the Weighted Companion Cube all unfold through similar constraints – the space is what undoes characters and brings them closer together, and the spatial passage the crucial element in the game. Without destruction, Portal centers on movement, cooperation and collaboration – it centers on personality and coordination where other games might use violence as a shorthand for moving the plot forward.
This gets really interesting in Portal 2, wherein you and a friend can play adorable robots together to solve puzzles and generally make a mess of the world. It's a different situation than the aforementioned single player experiences, to be sure, but it's still worth discussing the way that you're introduced to your ally and the way you're encouraged to look at the world. Portal 2 never asks you to look at the world through a pair of iron sights. Rather every piece of visual information, from your initial orientation to the final steps in solving a puzzle, is centered around the bodies of your little robo-avatars and their place in the environment. In a game with a first person perspective there's a staggering amount of spatial data to absorb, and Portal 2 gives you plenty of subtle cues about where you are, who you are and how you fit into its uniquely cooperative play before it lets you loose on puzzles.
It's facile to say that this is solely a result of the lack of violence within the game, but it is worth considering (perhaps in another, longer essay) that the relationships built in Portal are not built around violence. Instead your portal gun, or vagina gun as I've been calling it of late, makes you take not only a new perspective on the world around you but also a new perspective on the relationships you encounter. The ease afforded storytellers by violence and violent action is replaced by a more complicated kind of relationship building: our brothers and sisters in arms become a more general sort of brother and sister and, in turn, become more complex individuals with richer pallets developing them.
But as the final frames dawn upon us we find ourselves on the ground – Zakhaev closing in on us. Our black friend dies. Gaz is thrown from us, distant: we watch him fall helplessly. Price gives me the tool I need to resolve the situation – my weapon, my perspective on the world. Just as he did during training, when so much less was at stake, he presents me with this perspective, this framing device existing simultaneously with his own, and through it I save something: the world, my life, the remnants of our friendship.
It's not always the case, but a fair number of First Person Shooters focus heavily on elements within their stories like brotherhood. Some games are obsessed with it to the exclusion of most other themes – Brothers in Arms has it right in the title, and the Hells Highway expansion (or sequel, depending on how you look at it) examines the concept of brotherhood set against the backdrop of Market Garden, tearing the concept apart and building it back up under the light of one of the bloodiest and most disheartening American losses in World War II. Half-Life 2 constantly throws bands of saucy rebels your way to make you feel connected to them and imbue your actions with not just a sense of anarchic glee but true revolution as well. Far Cry 2 even goes so far as to imbue the game with a literal “buddy system,” which blossoms into a crucial mechanic.
All of these potent narratives about brotherhood all move towards more or less the same goal – a story about community, conflict and resolution told from behind the barrel of the gun, a story where your identity is more or less that of a gun. And why shouldn't it be? We've been romanticizing that conceit of identity for decades now, ever since Marines chanted “This is my rifle. There are many like it but this is mine.” on screen. To be a part of something bigger is to lose a part of yourself, to place it in another object – to find a constant in a world where you are not fully in control. The gaming shorthand to this end is the weapon: the rifle, the spinfusor, the crowbar.
It establishes our identity and our ability to act upon the world. In Modern Warfare we aren't placed behind a real, controllable character until we're given the opportunity to choose our guns, to shoot our guns and act upon the world. Even then we're eased into our guns, our guns are given context and friendly faces to help us feel comfortable using them – we're taught that our guns are how we can interact with the world, and the better we do with our guns the better off our brothers are. Far Cry 2 goes one better, crippling you and making the gun your means of empowerment. Considering how weak and finicky guns are in Far Cry 2, and how sickly your character is, constantly on the verge of collapse, it does a great deal more than establish brotherhood. But it does so at that - it establishes not only your worldview but your working relationship with every other character. Each time you interact with a friendly character in Far Cry 2 you are given a gun. Each act of aid, cooperation and coordination comes with a firearm – even if you already have one, your buddy will give one to you.
Perhaps the best example stems from Half-Life 2, where Barney officiates your re-integration into the revolution by giving your a crowbar. He turns you from a man on the run to a force of nature, and the first action you take with that crowbar is to defy the Combine – to disarm and destroy them while defending your Resistance brothers and sisters. Half-Life 2 is a bit of an odd example, especially considering how much of that game is spent running through various kinds of corridors alone. But the role the Resistance plays in the game is undeniable, and without Barney giving you the tools for your work, without you being the chief Guy With a Gun for the Resistance, and without your gun-camera adventures from the first game there simply wouldn't be a Resistance. Half-Life is fundamentally about a revolution built around a camera that swings around a gun.
And don't even get me started on Hells Highway – a game centered around a gun and its nigh mystical implications for a band of soldiers. Hell's Highway has a highly refined system of directing AI teammates and a third person cover-cam that gives you a view of you and your brothers in arms sitting shoulder to shoulder behind cover, your little gun-pricks poking out overhead. It's a game where characters, their roles and their personalities are defined by the weapons they wield, and characters who cannot wield a weapon are literally crippled. The gun isn't just a tool for building camraderie and community in Hell's Highway – it's a necessity if you want to survive in the world.
So guns are more than just a way to kill things – they're a way to bond over killing things. But what about games where guns don't kill people, where “guns” aren't really guns at all?
Portal is obsessed with ideas about community, cooperation and the role of the player as collaborator rather than opponent for developers. It's also a game with a very feminine gun model in it that fires vaginas at walls. As such Portal's commentary on community isn't so much about brotherhood, the way that Call of Duty or Hell's Highway are, as relationships in general. There are some brilliant close readings of Portal which take apart the player's relationship (and Chell's relationship by extension) with GlaDOS out there, and I'm loathe to try to recreate it here. But what I do find interesting is the complexity within Portal's relationships seems to stem somewhat from its new take on guns.
Portal never really saddles you with enemies. Even the turrets are collaborators of a sort, characters who assist you in creating a story, make witty quips and make you feel better about the world around you with their adorable little voices. As such it concerns itself less with making you look at the world from the gun's perspective, replacing the usual gun-centered orientation with a spatial orientation that introduces you to your character. As the game unfolds your relationship with GlaDOS, the Portal Gun and the Weighted Companion Cube all unfold through similar constraints – the space is what undoes characters and brings them closer together, and the spatial passage the crucial element in the game. Without destruction, Portal centers on movement, cooperation and collaboration – it centers on personality and coordination where other games might use violence as a shorthand for moving the plot forward.
This gets really interesting in Portal 2, wherein you and a friend can play adorable robots together to solve puzzles and generally make a mess of the world. It's a different situation than the aforementioned single player experiences, to be sure, but it's still worth discussing the way that you're introduced to your ally and the way you're encouraged to look at the world. Portal 2 never asks you to look at the world through a pair of iron sights. Rather every piece of visual information, from your initial orientation to the final steps in solving a puzzle, is centered around the bodies of your little robo-avatars and their place in the environment. In a game with a first person perspective there's a staggering amount of spatial data to absorb, and Portal 2 gives you plenty of subtle cues about where you are, who you are and how you fit into its uniquely cooperative play before it lets you loose on puzzles.
It's facile to say that this is solely a result of the lack of violence within the game, but it is worth considering (perhaps in another, longer essay) that the relationships built in Portal are not built around violence. Instead your portal gun, or vagina gun as I've been calling it of late, makes you take not only a new perspective on the world around you but also a new perspective on the relationships you encounter. The ease afforded storytellers by violence and violent action is replaced by a more complicated kind of relationship building: our brothers and sisters in arms become a more general sort of brother and sister and, in turn, become more complex individuals with richer pallets developing them.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Congratulations on Finally Seeing the Ocean!
People have been telling you about the ocean for years. You usually try to ignore what they’re saying, shrug it off like it ain’t nothin’, but lately you’ve been wondering if it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
“Hear they’ve got sharks there,” you’ll mutter to your wife, who will respond by changing the channel from NBC to ABC on the off chance that CSI Miami will be on to show you just how uncool the ocean really is, especially when David Carusoe’s around.
“Heard it’s big,” you’ll tell your estranged son at the coffee shop meetup he arranges so that he can tell you he’s gay. He won’t know how to respond, he’ll be so shocked that you’re cool with him liking dick.
“Guess I might as well see it,” you’ll say to your father’s casket the morning before you get into a car and brave the two hour drive from Springfield, Massachusetts to Falmouth, Massachusetts, where you’ll just barely find parking and stumble on to the beach to find it all but abandoned, a handful of local kids out playing in the surf in the middle of the day.
“Bigger than I thought,” you’ll say to yourself. You’ll stay out there a few hours before driving home to not speak to your wife for the rest of the day.
Congratulations on Finally Seeing the Ocean!
“Hear they’ve got sharks there,” you’ll mutter to your wife, who will respond by changing the channel from NBC to ABC on the off chance that CSI Miami will be on to show you just how uncool the ocean really is, especially when David Carusoe’s around.
“Heard it’s big,” you’ll tell your estranged son at the coffee shop meetup he arranges so that he can tell you he’s gay. He won’t know how to respond, he’ll be so shocked that you’re cool with him liking dick.
“Guess I might as well see it,” you’ll say to your father’s casket the morning before you get into a car and brave the two hour drive from Springfield, Massachusetts to Falmouth, Massachusetts, where you’ll just barely find parking and stumble on to the beach to find it all but abandoned, a handful of local kids out playing in the surf in the middle of the day.
“Bigger than I thought,” you’ll say to yourself. You’ll stay out there a few hours before driving home to not speak to your wife for the rest of the day.
Congratulations on Finally Seeing the Ocean!
Friday, October 14, 2011
Congratulations on Making the Fields Fallow!
It’s fair to say that we’re prone to hyperbole here at Sexy Results Future Agency. We sometimes exaggerate. In fact, we’ve posited that we might one day elevate the art of hyperbole to such an extent that it’ll grow into a future sport pronounced “hyper-bowl” that people will flock from galaxies away to come and see.
We only say this to let you know that we are not exaggerating when we see that you are so ugly that today you’re going to stare at a field in southern Greece and render it fallow with the force of your hideousness. It’s new to people over there, but it’s what caused the majority of the east coast to become untenable as farm land, and the opposing principle is what allows people in certain parts of Brooklyn and Portland to plant and eat their own crops in their yards.
If you want to keep farming we’d recommend that you invest in masks. There are a number of very stylish ones (Eyes Wide Shut really helped bring them back into fashion) and you can pass as normal in most social situations while wearing one.
And sorry about your fields, Uggs.
Congratulations on Making the Fields Fallow!
We only say this to let you know that we are not exaggerating when we see that you are so ugly that today you’re going to stare at a field in southern Greece and render it fallow with the force of your hideousness. It’s new to people over there, but it’s what caused the majority of the east coast to become untenable as farm land, and the opposing principle is what allows people in certain parts of Brooklyn and Portland to plant and eat their own crops in their yards.
If you want to keep farming we’d recommend that you invest in masks. There are a number of very stylish ones (Eyes Wide Shut really helped bring them back into fashion) and you can pass as normal in most social situations while wearing one.
And sorry about your fields, Uggs.
Congratulations on Making the Fields Fallow!
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Congratulations Awkward Birthday Boy!
It’s your seventh birthday and you literally could not be more excited about today. It’s widely agreed upon that seven is the best age ever, the year before you start to see how awful the world is and the year after you really can’t do enough in the world to enjoy how wonderful it seems to you as a kid.
So you’re going to be super duper nervous about your birthday party today. You’ll know in your marrow that it’s going to be a good one, but your mom won’t have told you a gosh darn thing about what’s going to go down. So when she leads you into your backyard and all your friends leap out of the bushes and shout “Surprise!” at you you’re going to be quite surprised indeed. So surprised that you’re going to pee.
And not just a little tiny sprinkle of pee, like a few drops coming out after you sink a particularly difficult shot during a B-ball game. No, you’re going to void your bladder in a torrent that will soak your pants and leave you reeking of urine. Which would be embarrassing enough, but you’re going to insist on wearing those pants as a badge of honor and you’re going to spend the entire day walking around your party soaked in your own piss, shaking hands and smiling at people. It’s going to be the most awkward birthday party ever, but you won’t seem to notice.
Which, of course, makes it that much worse for everyone around you.
Congratulations Awkward Birthday Boy!
So you’re going to be super duper nervous about your birthday party today. You’ll know in your marrow that it’s going to be a good one, but your mom won’t have told you a gosh darn thing about what’s going to go down. So when she leads you into your backyard and all your friends leap out of the bushes and shout “Surprise!” at you you’re going to be quite surprised indeed. So surprised that you’re going to pee.
And not just a little tiny sprinkle of pee, like a few drops coming out after you sink a particularly difficult shot during a B-ball game. No, you’re going to void your bladder in a torrent that will soak your pants and leave you reeking of urine. Which would be embarrassing enough, but you’re going to insist on wearing those pants as a badge of honor and you’re going to spend the entire day walking around your party soaked in your own piss, shaking hands and smiling at people. It’s going to be the most awkward birthday party ever, but you won’t seem to notice.
Which, of course, makes it that much worse for everyone around you.
Congratulations Awkward Birthday Boy!
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Congratulations on Falling Out With Your Sister-in-Law!
You married your wife ages ago for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to you and ever since then you’ll had an uneasy alliance with your sister-in-law.
The two of you never really got along. You met during the wedding, where your sister-in-law was basically trying to Bridezilla the whole fucking thing before it even started. She’s always kind of hated her sister and she wanted to see her special day blow right up in her face. It didn’t really happen that way – trying to make your wife panic about the dress, asking her if she was sure so many times the words lost what little meaning they had and asking about the sex, requesting greater and greater details, all just culminating in pissing your wife off so badly that she swore off talking to her for a year. You conversed with your sister-in-law briefly during the ceremony and didn’t find her too unpleasant, but didn’t shed any tears over having her walk out of your life when she did.
After the two of them starting talking again they enjoyed a renewed friendship where your wife wanted the best for her insufferable piece of shit sister and your sister-in-law just wanted to tear down everything your wife built for herself. You stayed out of it mostly, laughing as the two argued, smiling as they made up and once jacking off in the shower to a (admittedly wrong) fantasy about sleeping with the two of them at once. The result was an uneasy peace centered around your neutrality in the matter, a peace which is going to collapse today.
See, today your sister-in-law is going to stop by for dinner at your place. She’s going to get into an argument with her date which will lead to him leaving early and to her and your wife drinking way, way too much. You’ll drink quite a bit too but you, as well as your sister-in-law, will be practiced hands at drinking by this point in your lives and you’ll easily outlast your wife. She’ll pass out on the couch watching some show on the Discovery channel and you and your sister will get to talking about the sort of shit you’d discuss in college: religion, politics and, after the first bottle of Old Crow is gone, sex.
Once sex comes up as a conversation topic you’ll start discussing it in graphic detail – favorite positions, thoughts on oral, things that no one ever discusses with someone they plan on sleeping with. Unless, of course, they’re as drunk as the two of you are.
When it happens it won’t be the product of a seduction play or even the product of a carefully measured and considered campaign to get into someone’s pants. Instead it’ll be a wave crashing over the dam, a slip up of a kiss that will lead to a trip to the bathroom together which will lead to your jeans on the floor, her skirt hiked up, her hand against the wall and your leg precariously balanced on the toilet to keep her thigh elevated.
When it’s over you’ll feel incredibly dirty, as will she, and the two of you won’t be able to talk for days. When you do finally email each other you’ll agree to avoid communicating for a long time, long enough for this to die down. This will lead to an uneasy silence at family functions and a six year period of silence that will persist until, on the sixth anniversary of your little mistake, while at another dinner party with your sister-in-law’s latest slice of man, she’ll get into a shouting match with your wife and reveal that the two of you had some pretty intense sex a while back.
Enjoy the ensuing months of marital therapy!
Congratulations on Falling Out With Your Sister-in-Law!
The two of you never really got along. You met during the wedding, where your sister-in-law was basically trying to Bridezilla the whole fucking thing before it even started. She’s always kind of hated her sister and she wanted to see her special day blow right up in her face. It didn’t really happen that way – trying to make your wife panic about the dress, asking her if she was sure so many times the words lost what little meaning they had and asking about the sex, requesting greater and greater details, all just culminating in pissing your wife off so badly that she swore off talking to her for a year. You conversed with your sister-in-law briefly during the ceremony and didn’t find her too unpleasant, but didn’t shed any tears over having her walk out of your life when she did.
After the two of them starting talking again they enjoyed a renewed friendship where your wife wanted the best for her insufferable piece of shit sister and your sister-in-law just wanted to tear down everything your wife built for herself. You stayed out of it mostly, laughing as the two argued, smiling as they made up and once jacking off in the shower to a (admittedly wrong) fantasy about sleeping with the two of them at once. The result was an uneasy peace centered around your neutrality in the matter, a peace which is going to collapse today.
See, today your sister-in-law is going to stop by for dinner at your place. She’s going to get into an argument with her date which will lead to him leaving early and to her and your wife drinking way, way too much. You’ll drink quite a bit too but you, as well as your sister-in-law, will be practiced hands at drinking by this point in your lives and you’ll easily outlast your wife. She’ll pass out on the couch watching some show on the Discovery channel and you and your sister will get to talking about the sort of shit you’d discuss in college: religion, politics and, after the first bottle of Old Crow is gone, sex.
Once sex comes up as a conversation topic you’ll start discussing it in graphic detail – favorite positions, thoughts on oral, things that no one ever discusses with someone they plan on sleeping with. Unless, of course, they’re as drunk as the two of you are.
When it happens it won’t be the product of a seduction play or even the product of a carefully measured and considered campaign to get into someone’s pants. Instead it’ll be a wave crashing over the dam, a slip up of a kiss that will lead to a trip to the bathroom together which will lead to your jeans on the floor, her skirt hiked up, her hand against the wall and your leg precariously balanced on the toilet to keep her thigh elevated.
When it’s over you’ll feel incredibly dirty, as will she, and the two of you won’t be able to talk for days. When you do finally email each other you’ll agree to avoid communicating for a long time, long enough for this to die down. This will lead to an uneasy silence at family functions and a six year period of silence that will persist until, on the sixth anniversary of your little mistake, while at another dinner party with your sister-in-law’s latest slice of man, she’ll get into a shouting match with your wife and reveal that the two of you had some pretty intense sex a while back.
Enjoy the ensuing months of marital therapy!
Congratulations on Falling Out With Your Sister-in-Law!
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Congratulations Discount Shoe Salesman!
You’re a discount shoe salesman and today you’re going to meet your wife.
“How will I meet my wife?” you’ll ask yourself, having received only the first sentence of our cryptic prediction before rushing off to sell discount shoes to dissatisfied housewives. You’ll assume that you’ll meet her while selling shoes, which is what you spend most of your time doing anyway, so you’ll look at every woman who enters your store with an appraising eye, examining her ass, her eyes, her lips, her teeth, to see if she’d be a good long term mate. You’ll smile at each acceptable lady wide as you can to show that you’re kind and polite. You’ll try to put out a positive vibe so that they’ll think “nothing bad could come from taking this man home and letting him into my bed.
It’ll pay off towards the end of your shift, at around 3:45 PM. A dissatisfied housewife named Margaret, age 42, will see in your smile a glimmer of what she once saw in her husband of four years, Earl. She’ll ask you when you get off and then wait patiently outside your store on a bench for fifteen minutes, reading a J.D. Robb novel and humming to herself, already glowing from the act to come.
The two of you will leave the store and go to a nearby hotel, where you’ll rent a room using your credit card. Margaret will give you half of the room rental fee in cash, and then she’ll have sex with you in the room to make up the difference. It’ll be alright, but Margaret will be really into ass-play and she won’t be up for discussing it. This is a bit of a deal breaker for you.
She’ll also insist on not using a condom, which will limit your enjoyment. You’ll know she’s a cheater because she won’t bother to take her ring off and you’ll know she does this fairly often by her practiced approach to not being caught, which will leave you with the sneaking suspicion that you’re going to catch something from her. You’ll leave after briefly showering while she lays in bed, satisfied with herself, believing that she’s performed the magnanimous service of introducing you to the magic of your own butthole.
On your way out of the hotel you’ll stop by the concierge. A young woman, no older than twenty three by your guess, size eight most likely, will be alone there, looking bored. You’ll cough before you ask her if there’s a Planned Parenthood nearby where you can get tested. She’ll laugh.
“That bad, huh?”
You’ll smile at her, a little embarrassed, and she’ll find your blush appealing. After a few moments of consideration she’ll tell you the address of a nearby free health clinic where you’ll be able to get a quick exam and some blood work done. Then she’ll hand you her phone number and wink.
“Give me a call when you get the results, playboy.”
You’ll turn red, which will make her smile, and walk out in a hurry, which will give her a reason to pick up the phone and agree to go out with you for drinks in two weeks when your results come back clean. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Congratulations Discount Shoe Salesman!
“How will I meet my wife?” you’ll ask yourself, having received only the first sentence of our cryptic prediction before rushing off to sell discount shoes to dissatisfied housewives. You’ll assume that you’ll meet her while selling shoes, which is what you spend most of your time doing anyway, so you’ll look at every woman who enters your store with an appraising eye, examining her ass, her eyes, her lips, her teeth, to see if she’d be a good long term mate. You’ll smile at each acceptable lady wide as you can to show that you’re kind and polite. You’ll try to put out a positive vibe so that they’ll think “nothing bad could come from taking this man home and letting him into my bed.
It’ll pay off towards the end of your shift, at around 3:45 PM. A dissatisfied housewife named Margaret, age 42, will see in your smile a glimmer of what she once saw in her husband of four years, Earl. She’ll ask you when you get off and then wait patiently outside your store on a bench for fifteen minutes, reading a J.D. Robb novel and humming to herself, already glowing from the act to come.
The two of you will leave the store and go to a nearby hotel, where you’ll rent a room using your credit card. Margaret will give you half of the room rental fee in cash, and then she’ll have sex with you in the room to make up the difference. It’ll be alright, but Margaret will be really into ass-play and she won’t be up for discussing it. This is a bit of a deal breaker for you.
She’ll also insist on not using a condom, which will limit your enjoyment. You’ll know she’s a cheater because she won’t bother to take her ring off and you’ll know she does this fairly often by her practiced approach to not being caught, which will leave you with the sneaking suspicion that you’re going to catch something from her. You’ll leave after briefly showering while she lays in bed, satisfied with herself, believing that she’s performed the magnanimous service of introducing you to the magic of your own butthole.
On your way out of the hotel you’ll stop by the concierge. A young woman, no older than twenty three by your guess, size eight most likely, will be alone there, looking bored. You’ll cough before you ask her if there’s a Planned Parenthood nearby where you can get tested. She’ll laugh.
“That bad, huh?”
You’ll smile at her, a little embarrassed, and she’ll find your blush appealing. After a few moments of consideration she’ll tell you the address of a nearby free health clinic where you’ll be able to get a quick exam and some blood work done. Then she’ll hand you her phone number and wink.
“Give me a call when you get the results, playboy.”
You’ll turn red, which will make her smile, and walk out in a hurry, which will give her a reason to pick up the phone and agree to go out with you for drinks in two weeks when your results come back clean. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Congratulations Discount Shoe Salesman!
Monday, October 10, 2011
Congratulations Discount Taint Inspector!
Venereal diseases are a huge problem nowadays, no foolin’. And there are few things more important to a person’s physical, mental and social help than getting checked regularly for VD. But who can afford it? Who can take the time to slog over to Planned Parenthood for their “free” check up? Time is money, PP! And two subway stops is a little bit far for most of us to venture in order to keep our diseased members from infecting our various partners with god knows what that we already have. If those people want to be lil’ miss fresh and clean they can go out on their own and get their precious little holes poked and prodded at great inconvenience and expense.
That’s why we all jumped for joy when we spotted your Craigslist ad for your services as a “discount taint inspector” today. Your reasonable rates that circumvent unfortunate social constructs such as “the healthcare system” and “doctor-patient confidentiality.” Your convenient at-home services (billing for transport to and from locations an understandable necessity). And most of all your plain, easy to understand language in the ad itself, with terms such as “hoo ha” and “thingamajig.”
So today we salute you, sir! We hope that our internet plug and your inherent ability to suss out just what’s wrong with stranger’s junk serves you well in the coming months and that your indefatigable optimism sees your through your many pending lawsuits!
Congratulations Discount Taint Inspector!
That’s why we all jumped for joy when we spotted your Craigslist ad for your services as a “discount taint inspector” today. Your reasonable rates that circumvent unfortunate social constructs such as “the healthcare system” and “doctor-patient confidentiality.” Your convenient at-home services (billing for transport to and from locations an understandable necessity). And most of all your plain, easy to understand language in the ad itself, with terms such as “hoo ha” and “thingamajig.”
So today we salute you, sir! We hope that our internet plug and your inherent ability to suss out just what’s wrong with stranger’s junk serves you well in the coming months and that your indefatigable optimism sees your through your many pending lawsuits!
Congratulations Discount Taint Inspector!
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Where Have All The Bad Guys Gone?
Making a sympathetic antagonist for your story is tough. Making a story in general is tough. It’s all about striking a balance. Move too quickly, you’ll leave your audience behind, too slowly and you’ll bore them. Give them trust and you might omit some key detail you thought was obvious, hold their hand through every twist and turn of plot and you risk insulting them. Too much detail and there isn’t enough of a chance for your audience to insert themselves into the story, too little and only the most enthusiastic audience members will be able to conjure the investment necessary to engage your story.
Video games have a nice shorthand for the insertion of the audience into stories: they manage to do that almost effortlessly by demanding the participation of the audience in order for the story to progress. But there’s a downside here: that narrative facility afforded games by their format also means the bar for writing them is that much lower and that people who cannot engage an audience in any other format are acceptable writers for video games, occasionally even receiving praise for their work (Rockstar).
I digress. Villains are why I’m here. Villains are tough in video games. They’re either moustache twirling over the top nonsense figures (any of the villains in a Modern Warfare game), madmen driven wild with power that don’t quite make sense under close scrutiny (Fontaine from Bioshock falls into this category) or toothless fops who serve more of a comedic role than one of intimidation (Breen in Half-Life 2 has all the menace of an angry cat).
But every once in a while a villain appears who is just spot on. Just the right kind of motivation, motivation that makes sense. A sensible kind of menace backed by a reasoned, logical kind of power that fits into the game world. Bastion is a great example, where the world itself functions as a villain before, spoiler alert, Zulf of the Ura snaps and reveals himself as a new antagonist, driven mad by realizations he’s had about the cause of the apocalypse that destroyed the world and made it necessary to restore the Bastion. Zulf is a perfect villain: he has a strong motivation, dangerous but reasonable resources and goals that make sense. I never rolled my eyes at his struggle or scoffed at his choices or his speech (products of Bastion’s exceptionally strong writing – take notes aspiring designers!) and I never thought he was less of a character than anyone else in the game.
And then there’s Ulysses in Lonesome Road. Ulysses eclipsed Caesar in so many ways for me: Caesar had menace, as did his Legion. But he was never sympathetic, and part of his appeal was that I never understood why he was pursuing his aims, aside from power. I know, I just established that this was usually a knock against a villain, but there are exceptions to every rule, and an ill defined menacing villain can be just the right fit for a game if they seem like enough of a natural force in the world, something unsurpassable that cannot be fought, that threatens to flood the world if it is left unchecked. The faceless beauraucracy of the NCR has the same function, if a great deal less bite to it. But Ulysses is so much more than either of them.
He’s a personification of the Legion’s ideals and a refutation of them at the same time – a strong, independent operative who cannot be stopped, checked or controlled, purportedly of no culture but with memories running deep from his own tribe as well as the Legion as a whole and America as a historic memory. He is constantly searching for a new identity, at odds with his role as one of Caesar’s frumentari and when his search for this new identity is interrupted, even unintentionally, when his path towards a new history burned around him, he lashes out at the one he holds responsible, a villain in his eyes: you, the Courier.
These villains both have all the ingredients key to a solid antagonist. They both have menace, key if you want your villain to be taken seriously. They’ve got motivations that are outlined clearly, but not too clearly. They make sense as individuals and they forward the story of the game through their actions. They never force you to do anything, and their power, until the final conflict emerges, is always expressed through catspaws. And what’s more, you feel for both of them. Zulf’s madness is a product of his feelings of betrayal as well as the loss of the woman he loved. His ruthless survival instincts tempered by love make him into a person worth rooting for, but the damage he has endured is too much for him to handle and when he finally breaks his position as a war-leader for the Ura makes perfect sense. Even his downfall from his post as the Ura’s guide through the world after the Cataclysm makes sense, and the way you choose to resolve your fight with Zulf is a touching, engrossing choice. In that moment you define yourself as villain or savior. Do you crush the memory of the Ura to dust or do you truly defeat Zulf, destroying the ideas he perpetuated about the world by saving his life?
And Ulysses is a figure rich with history. You feel as if he was a person long before the events of Lonesome Road brought the two of you together, thanks in large part to his appearances in other New Vegas DLC. His relationship with Christine, as well as the Courier’s own relationship with Christine, informs the way we see him. And when we finally meet him we see a complicated individual with his own history, a history which led him to a very different worldview, a completely sensible one. His rejection of Caesar’s ideology seems perfectly reasonable in light of what he’s seen, as does his completely separate beef with the Courier. His love of the blossoming America that was, his self-definition through history and his acquisition of American identity both place him at odds with the Courier and make him into an appropriate villain under the circumstances.
These ingredients also make Ulysses into a sympathetic figure: a noble man who wants to see the empires that have risen from the ashes of America burn together, who wants to see America rise from those ashes in turn. His grasp of history, reaching and distant, gives him a strange kind of mysticism, one that anyone who’s studied the subject of history in depth can appreciate. And in the end you can resolve your conflict with him peaceably, which is what really counts with a villain: there’s no forced conflict. Ulysses is interested in engaging you in a conversation, in proving his point to you with the fires awoken under the Divide. If he just wanted to kill you he could’ve and would’ve tried long ago – he wanted to make you watch the world burn, to understand what he understood. That peaceful resolution, that admission of sympathy and association, is what sets these villains asides and truly makes them exceptional among video game villains. They’re more than just bogeymen – they’re characters who happen to form the antagonistic basis for a narrative.
To truly be effective a villain has to evoke some sort of sympathy, some sort of logic that holds up to close examination. A good villain should be interesting to you, just as interesting as any ally (maybe more so). A good villain should make you feel a little guilty for fighting him, although it can be just as good for a villain to make you truly sick and horrified of what he’s capable of. A villain should evoke a specific kind of feeling and have a particular function within the narrative beyond just generating conflict. If our villains cannot do so, if their actions don’t make sense, we notice. Instead of growing into characters we have relationships with they become jokes – punch-lines that we eventually dispense with, leading to a neat little cutscene that wraps up our gaming experience.
This seems to be a lesson big studios are failing to learn. Call of Duty, for example, is especially bad at providing logically consistent villains who evoke some sort of feeling, though you could critique so many elements of Call of Duty’s storytelling of late that doing so is all but pointless. Even games I love, games like Deus Ex, do a miserable job of casting villains in their stories and developing them as real characters with real worldviews (I challenge you to make the Templar viewpoint seem reasonable by game’s end). But so long as beacons, both indie like Bastion and mainstream like New Vegas, remain in public view hope remains for video game villains. Because video games are fantastic fonts of conflict, wonderfully immersive narratives that press their reader figures into service against big enemies that represent big ideas. Or at least, they do when they’re at their best, and as long as a few titles can realize that end, we’re not doing so, so bad.
Video games have a nice shorthand for the insertion of the audience into stories: they manage to do that almost effortlessly by demanding the participation of the audience in order for the story to progress. But there’s a downside here: that narrative facility afforded games by their format also means the bar for writing them is that much lower and that people who cannot engage an audience in any other format are acceptable writers for video games, occasionally even receiving praise for their work (Rockstar).
I digress. Villains are why I’m here. Villains are tough in video games. They’re either moustache twirling over the top nonsense figures (any of the villains in a Modern Warfare game), madmen driven wild with power that don’t quite make sense under close scrutiny (Fontaine from Bioshock falls into this category) or toothless fops who serve more of a comedic role than one of intimidation (Breen in Half-Life 2 has all the menace of an angry cat).
But every once in a while a villain appears who is just spot on. Just the right kind of motivation, motivation that makes sense. A sensible kind of menace backed by a reasoned, logical kind of power that fits into the game world. Bastion is a great example, where the world itself functions as a villain before, spoiler alert, Zulf of the Ura snaps and reveals himself as a new antagonist, driven mad by realizations he’s had about the cause of the apocalypse that destroyed the world and made it necessary to restore the Bastion. Zulf is a perfect villain: he has a strong motivation, dangerous but reasonable resources and goals that make sense. I never rolled my eyes at his struggle or scoffed at his choices or his speech (products of Bastion’s exceptionally strong writing – take notes aspiring designers!) and I never thought he was less of a character than anyone else in the game.
And then there’s Ulysses in Lonesome Road. Ulysses eclipsed Caesar in so many ways for me: Caesar had menace, as did his Legion. But he was never sympathetic, and part of his appeal was that I never understood why he was pursuing his aims, aside from power. I know, I just established that this was usually a knock against a villain, but there are exceptions to every rule, and an ill defined menacing villain can be just the right fit for a game if they seem like enough of a natural force in the world, something unsurpassable that cannot be fought, that threatens to flood the world if it is left unchecked. The faceless beauraucracy of the NCR has the same function, if a great deal less bite to it. But Ulysses is so much more than either of them.
He’s a personification of the Legion’s ideals and a refutation of them at the same time – a strong, independent operative who cannot be stopped, checked or controlled, purportedly of no culture but with memories running deep from his own tribe as well as the Legion as a whole and America as a historic memory. He is constantly searching for a new identity, at odds with his role as one of Caesar’s frumentari and when his search for this new identity is interrupted, even unintentionally, when his path towards a new history burned around him, he lashes out at the one he holds responsible, a villain in his eyes: you, the Courier.
These villains both have all the ingredients key to a solid antagonist. They both have menace, key if you want your villain to be taken seriously. They’ve got motivations that are outlined clearly, but not too clearly. They make sense as individuals and they forward the story of the game through their actions. They never force you to do anything, and their power, until the final conflict emerges, is always expressed through catspaws. And what’s more, you feel for both of them. Zulf’s madness is a product of his feelings of betrayal as well as the loss of the woman he loved. His ruthless survival instincts tempered by love make him into a person worth rooting for, but the damage he has endured is too much for him to handle and when he finally breaks his position as a war-leader for the Ura makes perfect sense. Even his downfall from his post as the Ura’s guide through the world after the Cataclysm makes sense, and the way you choose to resolve your fight with Zulf is a touching, engrossing choice. In that moment you define yourself as villain or savior. Do you crush the memory of the Ura to dust or do you truly defeat Zulf, destroying the ideas he perpetuated about the world by saving his life?
And Ulysses is a figure rich with history. You feel as if he was a person long before the events of Lonesome Road brought the two of you together, thanks in large part to his appearances in other New Vegas DLC. His relationship with Christine, as well as the Courier’s own relationship with Christine, informs the way we see him. And when we finally meet him we see a complicated individual with his own history, a history which led him to a very different worldview, a completely sensible one. His rejection of Caesar’s ideology seems perfectly reasonable in light of what he’s seen, as does his completely separate beef with the Courier. His love of the blossoming America that was, his self-definition through history and his acquisition of American identity both place him at odds with the Courier and make him into an appropriate villain under the circumstances.
These ingredients also make Ulysses into a sympathetic figure: a noble man who wants to see the empires that have risen from the ashes of America burn together, who wants to see America rise from those ashes in turn. His grasp of history, reaching and distant, gives him a strange kind of mysticism, one that anyone who’s studied the subject of history in depth can appreciate. And in the end you can resolve your conflict with him peaceably, which is what really counts with a villain: there’s no forced conflict. Ulysses is interested in engaging you in a conversation, in proving his point to you with the fires awoken under the Divide. If he just wanted to kill you he could’ve and would’ve tried long ago – he wanted to make you watch the world burn, to understand what he understood. That peaceful resolution, that admission of sympathy and association, is what sets these villains asides and truly makes them exceptional among video game villains. They’re more than just bogeymen – they’re characters who happen to form the antagonistic basis for a narrative.
To truly be effective a villain has to evoke some sort of sympathy, some sort of logic that holds up to close examination. A good villain should be interesting to you, just as interesting as any ally (maybe more so). A good villain should make you feel a little guilty for fighting him, although it can be just as good for a villain to make you truly sick and horrified of what he’s capable of. A villain should evoke a specific kind of feeling and have a particular function within the narrative beyond just generating conflict. If our villains cannot do so, if their actions don’t make sense, we notice. Instead of growing into characters we have relationships with they become jokes – punch-lines that we eventually dispense with, leading to a neat little cutscene that wraps up our gaming experience.
This seems to be a lesson big studios are failing to learn. Call of Duty, for example, is especially bad at providing logically consistent villains who evoke some sort of feeling, though you could critique so many elements of Call of Duty’s storytelling of late that doing so is all but pointless. Even games I love, games like Deus Ex, do a miserable job of casting villains in their stories and developing them as real characters with real worldviews (I challenge you to make the Templar viewpoint seem reasonable by game’s end). But so long as beacons, both indie like Bastion and mainstream like New Vegas, remain in public view hope remains for video game villains. Because video games are fantastic fonts of conflict, wonderfully immersive narratives that press their reader figures into service against big enemies that represent big ideas. Or at least, they do when they’re at their best, and as long as a few titles can realize that end, we’re not doing so, so bad.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Congratulations on Selecting the Best Blanket!
It’ll be the one the orphan is clutching. It always is.
“I’ll take the orphan’s blanket,” you’ll announce to the crowd. They’ll gasp.
“It’s the nicest,” you’ll explain.
They’ll nod in agreement.
“Is that really fair?” a woman in the crowd will ask.
“WITCH!” a man in the crowd will shout in response, hurling a stone at the woman’s head and knocking her to the ground. She won’t get back up right away – it’ll be unclear if she’ll be getting up again at all.
The orphan, who will have great respect for The Lottery, will step forward and hand you his blanket, which you’ll accept gladly. You’ll wrap yourself in it luxuriously and smile at the crowd silently, thinking to yourself, Suckers.
Congratulations on Selecting the Best Blanket!
“I’ll take the orphan’s blanket,” you’ll announce to the crowd. They’ll gasp.
“It’s the nicest,” you’ll explain.
They’ll nod in agreement.
“Is that really fair?” a woman in the crowd will ask.
“WITCH!” a man in the crowd will shout in response, hurling a stone at the woman’s head and knocking her to the ground. She won’t get back up right away – it’ll be unclear if she’ll be getting up again at all.
The orphan, who will have great respect for The Lottery, will step forward and hand you his blanket, which you’ll accept gladly. You’ll wrap yourself in it luxuriously and smile at the crowd silently, thinking to yourself, Suckers.
Congratulations on Selecting the Best Blanket!
Friday, October 7, 2011
Congratulations Prison Queen!
Today you’re Queen of the Prison.
“More oral sex, please!” you’ll shout to the inmates, who basically told you you were the Queen of the Prison because they all wanted to see and taste your genitals and they knew you’d go for it.
They’ll be getting ,kind of tired of it at this point, but they won’t want to give up on the ruse quite yet. They’ll all have a lot of time left on their sentences, and offending you would mean that they’d be eliminating a potential source of sex in prison. Plus your vagina will taste pretty good, like a healthy person’s vagina, putting it head and shoulders over most of the vaginas that obese meth heads have made them eat.
They’ll consider informing you that Prison Queen is a made up title that they invented to see and taste your genitals, but they’ll think better of it. You’ll just seem so happy that making you queen for a day won’t seem like a bad thing in any way. Their tongues might get tired, but if they work as a team they’ll be able to get the job done for a long time.
So they’ll acquiesce, lapping obediently as you adjust your crown and coo pleasantly, thinking that maybe stabbing that mailman with an ice pick wasn’t such a bad decision after all.
Congratulations Prison Queen!
“More oral sex, please!” you’ll shout to the inmates, who basically told you you were the Queen of the Prison because they all wanted to see and taste your genitals and they knew you’d go for it.
They’ll be getting ,kind of tired of it at this point, but they won’t want to give up on the ruse quite yet. They’ll all have a lot of time left on their sentences, and offending you would mean that they’d be eliminating a potential source of sex in prison. Plus your vagina will taste pretty good, like a healthy person’s vagina, putting it head and shoulders over most of the vaginas that obese meth heads have made them eat.
They’ll consider informing you that Prison Queen is a made up title that they invented to see and taste your genitals, but they’ll think better of it. You’ll just seem so happy that making you queen for a day won’t seem like a bad thing in any way. Their tongues might get tired, but if they work as a team they’ll be able to get the job done for a long time.
So they’ll acquiesce, lapping obediently as you adjust your crown and coo pleasantly, thinking that maybe stabbing that mailman with an ice pick wasn’t such a bad decision after all.
Congratulations Prison Queen!
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Congratulations Zen Master!
Buddhism is about a constant pursuit of wisdom which itself cannot be fulfilled: a methodology more than a philosophy, a state of attempting to attain which demands constant effort and promises nothing in return. So when you claim that you’re a “Buddhist master” you have to understand how that sounds – like you’ve won at Buddhism, like you’ve “made it” at long last.
And with that understanding in mind you have to understand why the International Council of Buddhists, a notoriously angry group of passive aggressive old men and very, very calm Jewish mothers, will vote today to disbar you as a Buddhist.
“But I’ve been Buddhing so hard!” you’ll protest, at which they’ll shake their heads.
“To try is to fail,” the old men will gently inform you before sharing angry glances with one another and making blowjob gestures at one another, occasionally pausing to point at you.
“It seems like you rejecting me is pretty un-Buddhist,” you’ll say as a pair of bald dudes in yellow robes seemingly emerge from the walls to take you and drag you off.
“We checked the charter,” one of the Jewish moms will retort. “It’s actually not.”
You’ll want to ask to check the charter too, but then you’ll realize that asking to see the charter would be an admission of not being a master, which would make you look pretty silly. So you’ll let the guys in robes drag you from the hall in silence. They’ll leave you outside the temple, which will be located behind the Hooters in Missoula, Montana (where no one would ever think to look!). A gentle rain will be falling upon you, as if to mock your predicament, inviting tears.
You’ll raise your fist to the sky and shake it.
“I will found a rogue school of Buddhism!” you’ll shout at the sky. “Where people can be as Buddhist as they want!”
Then you’ll kick a can for getting in the way of your serenity.
Congratulations Zen Master!
And with that understanding in mind you have to understand why the International Council of Buddhists, a notoriously angry group of passive aggressive old men and very, very calm Jewish mothers, will vote today to disbar you as a Buddhist.
“But I’ve been Buddhing so hard!” you’ll protest, at which they’ll shake their heads.
“To try is to fail,” the old men will gently inform you before sharing angry glances with one another and making blowjob gestures at one another, occasionally pausing to point at you.
“It seems like you rejecting me is pretty un-Buddhist,” you’ll say as a pair of bald dudes in yellow robes seemingly emerge from the walls to take you and drag you off.
“We checked the charter,” one of the Jewish moms will retort. “It’s actually not.”
You’ll want to ask to check the charter too, but then you’ll realize that asking to see the charter would be an admission of not being a master, which would make you look pretty silly. So you’ll let the guys in robes drag you from the hall in silence. They’ll leave you outside the temple, which will be located behind the Hooters in Missoula, Montana (where no one would ever think to look!). A gentle rain will be falling upon you, as if to mock your predicament, inviting tears.
You’ll raise your fist to the sky and shake it.
“I will found a rogue school of Buddhism!” you’ll shout at the sky. “Where people can be as Buddhist as they want!”
Then you’ll kick a can for getting in the way of your serenity.
Congratulations Zen Master!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Congratulations on Passing Your Qualifying Exam!
The months and months (or hours and hours, we haven’t been paying attention to you before this happened) of effort will finally pay off today. Today you’re going to pass your qualifying exam!
It’ll begin at 6:50 AM, the same way all your days begin. You’ll remove the manacles you chain yourself into every night just in case you suddenly become a werewolf, make yourself a big cup of coffee laced with LSD and skip down the street to the local bus, which you’ll ride to the lab you work in.
“SCIENCE!” you’ll shout at the bus driver, who has long since stopped listening to you. In your mind, though, he’ll respond, grinning.
“Science indeed, mind cadet!”
But today after departing the bus and entering the university campus you’ll do so much more than just sit in front of a graduated cylinder and scribble down whatever the fuck pops into your head so that you can keep collecting grant money to discover the long term affects on acid on science.
Today you’ll sprint across the campus, punching an old man in the face on your way and bursting through a building’s doors so that you can run down the halls to a testing room where you’ll once against punch an old man in the face.
“TEST!” you’ll shout at him.
This will be your third time attempting to pass your qualifying exam, so he’ll be familiar with your mannerisms at this point. He won’t call security or attempt to restrain you. He’ll just point to a desk and direct you to sit, which you’ll do happily. Then he’ll put a piece of paper in front of you and ask you to write everything you know about acid on it.
You’ll gladly capitulate, your pen appearing to move in a blur in your hand (to you – it’ll look like you’re just writing normally to the proctor).
After around five hours of this shit he’ll be adequately impressed by how high you are to give you a gold star on your qualifying exam, which will mark you as one of “the chosen ones.” You’ll take your paper to the school cafeteria where you’ll receive a free brownie from your lunch lady. Since your lunch lady is also the Dead of Students at your university she’ll also begin the paperwork to rescind your pending expulsion from the school following your attempt to replace the university’s water supply with thousands of rats.
Congratulations on Passing Your Qualifying Exam!
It’ll begin at 6:50 AM, the same way all your days begin. You’ll remove the manacles you chain yourself into every night just in case you suddenly become a werewolf, make yourself a big cup of coffee laced with LSD and skip down the street to the local bus, which you’ll ride to the lab you work in.
“SCIENCE!” you’ll shout at the bus driver, who has long since stopped listening to you. In your mind, though, he’ll respond, grinning.
“Science indeed, mind cadet!”
But today after departing the bus and entering the university campus you’ll do so much more than just sit in front of a graduated cylinder and scribble down whatever the fuck pops into your head so that you can keep collecting grant money to discover the long term affects on acid on science.
Today you’ll sprint across the campus, punching an old man in the face on your way and bursting through a building’s doors so that you can run down the halls to a testing room where you’ll once against punch an old man in the face.
“TEST!” you’ll shout at him.
This will be your third time attempting to pass your qualifying exam, so he’ll be familiar with your mannerisms at this point. He won’t call security or attempt to restrain you. He’ll just point to a desk and direct you to sit, which you’ll do happily. Then he’ll put a piece of paper in front of you and ask you to write everything you know about acid on it.
You’ll gladly capitulate, your pen appearing to move in a blur in your hand (to you – it’ll look like you’re just writing normally to the proctor).
After around five hours of this shit he’ll be adequately impressed by how high you are to give you a gold star on your qualifying exam, which will mark you as one of “the chosen ones.” You’ll take your paper to the school cafeteria where you’ll receive a free brownie from your lunch lady. Since your lunch lady is also the Dead of Students at your university she’ll also begin the paperwork to rescind your pending expulsion from the school following your attempt to replace the university’s water supply with thousands of rats.
Congratulations on Passing Your Qualifying Exam!
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Congratulations on Ruining Scott Pilgr for Everyone in Your Office!
Please, please, please. Stop talking. You’re a terrible storyteller and every time you open your mouth what emerges is a mix of cliché and ignorance. Your inability to discern between expensive things and good things has grown irksome to even your occasional acquaintances and your perception of culture is so hilariously distorted that trying to follow your point is like trying to follow some sort of retarded ninja: it’s fucking impossible, and pretty pointless.
Even when you find something cool it’s like hearing a lobotomite discuss a topic to hear you elucidate it. Case in point: today you’re going to see one of your co-workers wearing an X-Men t-shirt and you’ll proceed to describe the Scott Pilgrims in such inaccurate and inarticulate detail that you’ll make them sound like the plot of Steel Magnolias. We’d go over how you fuck it up line by line, but we don’t have all day (Jerry needs a ride to his court date so he can try to keep his kid) so we’re just going to give you our breakdown of the last bit.
Scott Pilgrim is not, as you claim, “exactly like the Matrix except without robots.” It isn’t like the Matrix at all and it has robots. Just stop talking in general and you’ll make everyone around you much, much happier.
Congratulations on Ruining Scott Pilgrim for Everyone in Your Office!
Even when you find something cool it’s like hearing a lobotomite discuss a topic to hear you elucidate it. Case in point: today you’re going to see one of your co-workers wearing an X-Men t-shirt and you’ll proceed to describe the Scott Pilgrims in such inaccurate and inarticulate detail that you’ll make them sound like the plot of Steel Magnolias. We’d go over how you fuck it up line by line, but we don’t have all day (Jerry needs a ride to his court date so he can try to keep his kid) so we’re just going to give you our breakdown of the last bit.
Scott Pilgrim is not, as you claim, “exactly like the Matrix except without robots.” It isn’t like the Matrix at all and it has robots. Just stop talking in general and you’ll make everyone around you much, much happier.
Congratulations on Ruining Scott Pilgrim for Everyone in Your Office!
Monday, October 3, 2011
Congratulations on Redefining Racism!
Today you’re going to go on stage during an open mic in Harlem and unleash a series of racial epithets the like that we’ve never seen. Now, a few of them will be directed at black people, but those won’t draw any attention from the crowd (they’re mostly black, like you). And some of them will be directed at white people and Mexican people (the identifier you apply to all people of Hispanic background because you’re a huge fucking racist). Again, no one gives a shit about these epithets. Or the ones you sling at Jews, the handicapped, Jehovas Witness’ (who we didn’t consider a race before tonight) Finnish people, New Zealanders and Brazilians. While your thoroughness will be impressive the epithets themselves will be boiler plate; bog standard racism we’ve all heard before.
It won’t be until you define and deride a heretofore undefined racial group in America you deem “Cuthwizards,” which we assume is a corruption of “cunt,” “meth,” “wizard” and possibly “ass.” We can’t really go into what a “Cuthwizard” is but we ask that everyone keep their eye out for any open mics scheduled for tonight and do their best to be there so they can get the full experience. People won’t want to miss it, and Youtube’s dickishly strict policy on removing inflammatory speech will make it tough to see the “event that shakes America to its core” on the internet in the weeks following your amazing act.
Congratulations on Redefining Racism!
It won’t be until you define and deride a heretofore undefined racial group in America you deem “Cuthwizards,” which we assume is a corruption of “cunt,” “meth,” “wizard” and possibly “ass.” We can’t really go into what a “Cuthwizard” is but we ask that everyone keep their eye out for any open mics scheduled for tonight and do their best to be there so they can get the full experience. People won’t want to miss it, and Youtube’s dickishly strict policy on removing inflammatory speech will make it tough to see the “event that shakes America to its core” on the internet in the weeks following your amazing act.
Congratulations on Redefining Racism!
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: That Lonesome Road!
The world doesn’t end. Fallout has always been about that core message – there’s always life, always something going. Emerging into the light of day from Vault 101 is less about discovering a dead world and more about discovering yourself amidst the remnants of humanity, discovering what matters to you, what you find interesting. Will you ignore the people of the Vault and do…well, whatever you want to do, or will you carve your way through super mutants to keep them safe?
Each iteration of the Fallout series is about this core of human endurance at its heart. Each time we examine its world we see how life has grown, has determination has blossomed into new civilization. Fallout 3 hints at how big the world really is, how durable life is. Fallout: New Vegas shows how deep these trends run, how cultures develop and grow in this new world. It’s about history, the history you find, the history you make. And Lonesome Road, the latest Fallout: New Vegas DLC, is a sort of capstone on this entire tale of endurance, which is odd considering how lifeless the Divide is. But it manages to drive home this trend of endurance and the sense of history at the heart of New Vegas.
Lonesome Road is the final piece of DLC announced for New Vegas, so it was tough for me to approach it without a touch of melancholy. I’ve been enjoying New Vegas’ DLC for months now, watching as it slowly grew the world out from the Mojave, hinting at the places you could find beyond it. Chicago, the east coast, the lands of the NCR to the west and the hidden world of technology buried under the earth in caves, bunkers and craters. I’ve liked watching the narrative of Ulysses develop among the people outside of the Mojave, watching how his travels mirrored my own, hearing his musing about the world around him. I’ve learned a lot from him, about The Legion, about being a Tribal beyond the reach of the NCR. And in his footsteps I’ve learned a lot about what the world of Fallout used to be like – more than I have in any other game. The varied settings of New Vegas’ DLC have done a fantastic job of concise world building both in their settings and in the world at large.
And Lonesome Road heralded the end of these slices of stories. Which has to happen, I suppose, life being what it is, but I still felt a little pang when I loaded it up and stepped through the trailer into The Divide. What I found wasn’t what I expected at all.
The previous downloadable content focused primarily on exploring new parts of the Fallout landscape – places we’d never been before. But, spoiler alert, Lonesome Road wants you to return to a place you’ve visited long, long ago back when Fallout had an isometric view and bugs that would make the fair-weather kiddies of this gaming generation quake in their quakey-boots. It all ties into a bigger idea about histories: the ones you find and the one you make, the central theme to Lonesome Road and, once you’ve finished it, Fallout: New Vegas in general.
Lonesome Road is all about Ulysses: who he is, where he’s been and what he wants. It’s as close to a character study as video games have managed to create to date and it manages its task of relating you to its subject with virtually no contact with him during your journey. You occasionally receive messages from a loudspeaker that hangs on your heels every couple of minutes, but mostly you’ll spend your time wandering through the silent ruins around you, listening to old audio tapes and reading journal entries. There’s a lot of spectacle to admire, and I felt more like I was in a devastated cityscape than ever before within the Divide’s confines, but spectacle is old hat for games. What’s really impressive is how the spectacle forms its own narrative and informs your impression of Ulysses.
By game’s end you’ll know him well – better than he knows himself if you look hard enough. And you’ll know more about the war between Legion and NCR, just what happened to New Canaan and what makes people like Joshua Graham and Christine tick. There’s an obsession with obsession that Ulysses embodies and narratives skillfully, and it’s a pleasure to watch it unfold. If I get around to writing about a piece about storytelling and voice in games in the next few months, it’ll be about Ulysses and the Divide.
But I’m dancing around the topic of the game itself: what’s new, how does it play. Obviously it tackles big themes skillfully – Avelone has been doing that since he was a wee twenty-something decades ago. But how does it play?
The careful selection of skills that makes New Vegas such a wonderful challenge will likely have evaporated by the time you reach The Divide – the extended level cap makes the game easy, sure, but it kind of makes it too easy. I made huge mistakes creating and leveling up my character and I still managed to do just fine in every fight I ran into. I managed to max out all but two of my skills and had a collection of resources at my disposal that let me deal with any situation (barring some one hit kill scenarios that came up while fighting the jacked up Deathclaws of the divide – dick move, Obsidian) without breaking a sweat. The hard fought battles with a scrappy, under-dog character against incredible odds that made the core game of New Vegas so enjoyable at times have been reduced – you’ll still fight droves of enemies, but you’ll be able to breeze through them unless you make some serious mistakes.
That said, there’s a lot to explore, and that’s probably why you’re still playing New Vegas at this point. The array of gear and the new enemies, while well designed and engaging, aren’t too interesting. Flashbangs add a new element to combat, one well suited to my style of play. There’s some interplay between these new toys and the new enemies you’ll encounter, but for the most part I stuck with my old gear and wasn’t poorer for it. And the strange new foes you’ll encounter will actually play in a pretty familiar way. I found myself falling back on old tactics almost immediately.
But the world these creatures inhabit, the structure and design of the new places you can explore, is awesome. Surveying toppled skyscrapers is breathtaking, and blowing up nukes to scavenge goodies from their ruins is a bit like cracking open an irradiated piñata: even when you don’t get anything decent out of the exchange the act of blowing them up is satisfying, and key to Lonesome Road. But there isn’t a whole lot of new experience to recommend it: just an abundance of old.
In a way, that’s just consistency of theme: everything old is made new again in Lonesome Road, and some of the choices you make can change the Old World you’ve spent so much time in already, shaking up the relationship between Legion and NCR in a way you might not expect. But if you’ve read this far and if you’re still playing New Vegas at this point you should probably just admit to yourself that you’ll love Lonesome Road and all the bullshit it has on offer.
I’m not sure I’d consider it a revolution of design – as a game there isn’t a lot to recommend Lonesome Road over previous iterations of New Vegas. But as a work of writing, art design and level design there’s a lot going on in Lonesome Road. Ulysses has one of the most distinctive video game voices that I’ve heard in recent years, right up there with Far Cry 2’s Jackal. And the dialogue and the story chunks that populate Lonesome Road hold up well to close reading as well as the normal gaming pass-through.
So if you care about storytelling in games, if you care about how a game can reinforce its own story by removing ideas like urgency and structure from its narrative and if you’re a Fallout: New Vegas fan then Lonesome Road is a no-brainer. If you played through Fallout: New Vegas and it didn’t grab you the first time around, why are you reading this review? Yeesh – you should probably know that you won’t enjoy additional content for a game you didn’t like in the first place. Dummy.
Each iteration of the Fallout series is about this core of human endurance at its heart. Each time we examine its world we see how life has grown, has determination has blossomed into new civilization. Fallout 3 hints at how big the world really is, how durable life is. Fallout: New Vegas shows how deep these trends run, how cultures develop and grow in this new world. It’s about history, the history you find, the history you make. And Lonesome Road, the latest Fallout: New Vegas DLC, is a sort of capstone on this entire tale of endurance, which is odd considering how lifeless the Divide is. But it manages to drive home this trend of endurance and the sense of history at the heart of New Vegas.
Lonesome Road is the final piece of DLC announced for New Vegas, so it was tough for me to approach it without a touch of melancholy. I’ve been enjoying New Vegas’ DLC for months now, watching as it slowly grew the world out from the Mojave, hinting at the places you could find beyond it. Chicago, the east coast, the lands of the NCR to the west and the hidden world of technology buried under the earth in caves, bunkers and craters. I’ve liked watching the narrative of Ulysses develop among the people outside of the Mojave, watching how his travels mirrored my own, hearing his musing about the world around him. I’ve learned a lot from him, about The Legion, about being a Tribal beyond the reach of the NCR. And in his footsteps I’ve learned a lot about what the world of Fallout used to be like – more than I have in any other game. The varied settings of New Vegas’ DLC have done a fantastic job of concise world building both in their settings and in the world at large.
And Lonesome Road heralded the end of these slices of stories. Which has to happen, I suppose, life being what it is, but I still felt a little pang when I loaded it up and stepped through the trailer into The Divide. What I found wasn’t what I expected at all.
The previous downloadable content focused primarily on exploring new parts of the Fallout landscape – places we’d never been before. But, spoiler alert, Lonesome Road wants you to return to a place you’ve visited long, long ago back when Fallout had an isometric view and bugs that would make the fair-weather kiddies of this gaming generation quake in their quakey-boots. It all ties into a bigger idea about histories: the ones you find and the one you make, the central theme to Lonesome Road and, once you’ve finished it, Fallout: New Vegas in general.
Lonesome Road is all about Ulysses: who he is, where he’s been and what he wants. It’s as close to a character study as video games have managed to create to date and it manages its task of relating you to its subject with virtually no contact with him during your journey. You occasionally receive messages from a loudspeaker that hangs on your heels every couple of minutes, but mostly you’ll spend your time wandering through the silent ruins around you, listening to old audio tapes and reading journal entries. There’s a lot of spectacle to admire, and I felt more like I was in a devastated cityscape than ever before within the Divide’s confines, but spectacle is old hat for games. What’s really impressive is how the spectacle forms its own narrative and informs your impression of Ulysses.
By game’s end you’ll know him well – better than he knows himself if you look hard enough. And you’ll know more about the war between Legion and NCR, just what happened to New Canaan and what makes people like Joshua Graham and Christine tick. There’s an obsession with obsession that Ulysses embodies and narratives skillfully, and it’s a pleasure to watch it unfold. If I get around to writing about a piece about storytelling and voice in games in the next few months, it’ll be about Ulysses and the Divide.
But I’m dancing around the topic of the game itself: what’s new, how does it play. Obviously it tackles big themes skillfully – Avelone has been doing that since he was a wee twenty-something decades ago. But how does it play?
The careful selection of skills that makes New Vegas such a wonderful challenge will likely have evaporated by the time you reach The Divide – the extended level cap makes the game easy, sure, but it kind of makes it too easy. I made huge mistakes creating and leveling up my character and I still managed to do just fine in every fight I ran into. I managed to max out all but two of my skills and had a collection of resources at my disposal that let me deal with any situation (barring some one hit kill scenarios that came up while fighting the jacked up Deathclaws of the divide – dick move, Obsidian) without breaking a sweat. The hard fought battles with a scrappy, under-dog character against incredible odds that made the core game of New Vegas so enjoyable at times have been reduced – you’ll still fight droves of enemies, but you’ll be able to breeze through them unless you make some serious mistakes.
That said, there’s a lot to explore, and that’s probably why you’re still playing New Vegas at this point. The array of gear and the new enemies, while well designed and engaging, aren’t too interesting. Flashbangs add a new element to combat, one well suited to my style of play. There’s some interplay between these new toys and the new enemies you’ll encounter, but for the most part I stuck with my old gear and wasn’t poorer for it. And the strange new foes you’ll encounter will actually play in a pretty familiar way. I found myself falling back on old tactics almost immediately.
But the world these creatures inhabit, the structure and design of the new places you can explore, is awesome. Surveying toppled skyscrapers is breathtaking, and blowing up nukes to scavenge goodies from their ruins is a bit like cracking open an irradiated piñata: even when you don’t get anything decent out of the exchange the act of blowing them up is satisfying, and key to Lonesome Road. But there isn’t a whole lot of new experience to recommend it: just an abundance of old.
In a way, that’s just consistency of theme: everything old is made new again in Lonesome Road, and some of the choices you make can change the Old World you’ve spent so much time in already, shaking up the relationship between Legion and NCR in a way you might not expect. But if you’ve read this far and if you’re still playing New Vegas at this point you should probably just admit to yourself that you’ll love Lonesome Road and all the bullshit it has on offer.
I’m not sure I’d consider it a revolution of design – as a game there isn’t a lot to recommend Lonesome Road over previous iterations of New Vegas. But as a work of writing, art design and level design there’s a lot going on in Lonesome Road. Ulysses has one of the most distinctive video game voices that I’ve heard in recent years, right up there with Far Cry 2’s Jackal. And the dialogue and the story chunks that populate Lonesome Road hold up well to close reading as well as the normal gaming pass-through.
So if you care about storytelling in games, if you care about how a game can reinforce its own story by removing ideas like urgency and structure from its narrative and if you’re a Fallout: New Vegas fan then Lonesome Road is a no-brainer. If you played through Fallout: New Vegas and it didn’t grab you the first time around, why are you reading this review? Yeesh – you should probably know that you won’t enjoy additional content for a game you didn’t like in the first place. Dummy.
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