Thursday, March 31, 2011

Congratulations Shitty Wizard!

Today you’re a wizard, but you’re a wizard with a very limited array of powers. Really just one. Whenever you wiggle your fingers you can make the nearest attractive woman fart. If no attractive woman is nearby, or if some other sort of conflict emerges, then a sliding scale of attractiveness and distance decides who farts. Someone always farts when you wiggle your fingers though.

For the most part this hasn’t gotten you too far in life. It’s not much of a marketable skill, and, let’s be honest, aside from this you’re kind of a loser. But today all that’s going to change.

You’re going to walk into the offices of your local beauty pageant which, because you’re in the south, is like its own fucking government, and slam your first down on the desk of the receptionist.

“I think we can help each other,” you’ll say.

This will lead to a forty five minute discussion of the fact that you aren’t selling anything, then a thirty minute description of what you do. Then you’ll wait for fifteen minutes while she sets up a meeting with the COO of the beauty pageant.

Once you’re in his office he’ll immediately see the value in hiring you.

“An objective measure of beauty AND attractive women farting?” He’ll laugh, a deep warm thing that comes from his belly and spreads out to fill the room with its energy.

“I think we can work together.”

Congratulations Shitty Wizard!

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Congratulations on Lighting a Man Flame!

Today, in order to demonstrate your new Olympic mascot, Torchy, you’re going to call your friend Rocco into your office.

“Sup blood,” you’ll say to him, jerking your head unsteadily in his direction. He’ll jerk his head back and you’ll know shit’s on.

“Let’s do this!” you’ll shout simultaneously before Rocco douses himself in gasoline and you rummage through your pockets for a lighter. Then the two of you will turn to the Olympic committee and begin your presentation.

“This is our mascot,” you’ll declare to them. Then you’ll press play on a boombox, beginning the play of a twenty minute looping tape of Eye of the Tiger, strike the lighter and hurl it towards Rocco.

This action will lead to Rocco being completely engulfed in flames, which will in turn lead to Rocco running around wildly screaming. The Olympic committee will maintain their composure as they watch your presentation, and when Rocco finally comes to rest they’ll shake their heads.

You’ll shrug and shake your head at Rocco as well, following their lead.

“We gave it our all, right buddy?” you’ll say, patting his charred corpse. As the police arrive to arrest you for murder you’ll regret nothing, except for the fact that you murdered your best friend and still didn’t get your mascot officiated for the Olympics.

Congratulations on Lighting a Man Flame!

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Congratulations Failed Cover Musician!

You’re part of a Hall and Oates cover band, and today it’s going to break up.

“We don’t really know a whole lot about Hall and Oates,” your band-mates will inform you. “We sort of just heard the name and thought a cover band might be a good idea.”

“You’re missing the big picture!” you’ll scream at them, spittle flying from your mouth. “That’s the whole point! We’re bringing fresh energy to the table!”

They’ll look at each other like they realize you’ve finally lost it. There were a lot of other occasions where they should’ve been able to see this coming, like the time you insisted on starting up a Guns and Roses resurrection cover band immediately after your Guns and Roses cover band failed “for symmetry’s sake.” Or the time you insisted on experimenting with a Plastic Ono Band cover band. There was even a brief stint where you covered Captain Beefheart songs, which lasted up until you first listened to Captain Beefheart.

But today they’ll finally catch on. They’ll turn and walk away from you, the way they should’ve when you recommended that you start a cover band to cover other cover bands. And in walking away they’ll finally grant you the perspective you need, and cement the fact that being a cover musician is not a good way to make a living.

So in a lot of ways this is a really good thing. You’re going to be able to get your life on track, you might be able to start dating again, and you might even develop interests other than being in a cover band. All excellent developments.

Unfortunately, you’re also going to try writing songs, which is going to be pretty awful, and people are still going to have to listen to you play the guitar, which is basically a war crime against anyone with ears.

Congratulations Failed Cover Musician!

Monday, March 28, 2011

Congratulations Cosplay Champion!

Many people dress up like characters for fun. And many people, especially attractive women such as yourself, look good doing it. It nets them attention, free shit at conventions and, upon occasion, awards. But these are paltry rewards to one such as yourself.

Today you’re going to try and step beyond the bounds of those paltry rewards and acquire something far, far more interesting: a scepter that allows complete control over convention scheduling on the continent of North America. One exists for every continent, and if any of our readers haven’t heard about this shit yet it’s probably because they got laid during high school. Losers.

In order to acquire this item you’ll have to enter yourself into the Cosplay Championships, located in horrible Las Vegas, Nevada. The first step towards entering the contest will be gaining entry to the convention hall where it’s taking place. But you’ll have this down pat.

You’ll show up straight from the airport, still dressed in the Chun Li outfit that you travelled in. You’ll battle your way through the guards, using only moves that Chun Li used in Street Fighter 2. After the last ball of blue energy has landed and the last guard’s wife is widowed you’ll step into the convention hall, pick up your badge, and change into your casual costume.

This will mean finding a bathroom which, again, will involve fighting, again, in character. It’ll mostly go by pretty easily, except for the one girl in line who is dressed like Cammy, also from Street Fighter 2 (Turbo Edition, she’ll be wearing the red color scheme because it goes with her eyes better than the standard green) who you’ll stop fighting when it becomes obvious that two stalls have opened up so that you can both change.

Once in the bathroom you’ll don your full Bayonetta costume, complete with actual, loaded guns that you fire using weird vagina magic. It’ll be super dangerous, but it’ll look amazing. Even the other hot girls at the convention will stop and stare as you go by, and when you finally get to the stage where they’re judging the costume contest, you’ll have a hushed following behind you, watching your every move, mumbling over your every gesture. It’ll give you the final boost of confidence you needed to step on stage and sign your name on the sheet.

“I’ve got this,” you’ll whisper in the ear of the bespectacled gay man administrating the affair. He’ll smile and nod, patting you on the back.

“Okay.”

His tone won’t be quite so sarcastic when he calls you up to the stage two and a half hours later. By this time you’ll be dressed in full Victorian period garb, a katana slung across your back and pearl pins in your hair. You’ll be the greatest Elizabeth Bennet that anyone has ever seen, and your combination of classicism cred and nerd cred will stun the judges.

We’d detail the events that will determine the contest but, to be totally honest, except for the zombie fight they’re all kind of boring. That’ll be great, though, and you’re going to do awesome at all of them. Eventually you’ll win the contest, get the scepter and use its powers to finally get a convention worth attending into the Midwest when Penny Arcade unexpectedly announces PAX Central, 2012.

Congratulations Cosplay Champion!

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dawn of War II: Retribution: Part III: Return of the Nested Subtitles!

I’m going to keep this fairly short and sweet with regard to mechanics, since I’ve already written about Dawn of War II’s multiplayer when it was in its nascent form, back in beta. Not a whole lot has changed since then.

It feels a little bit like the sliders have been re-arranged, but that’s more likely an effect of the community becoming more stable and dedicated rather than the result of any sort of tweaks. I more or less hold to everything I said before: Retribution changes the game of Dawn of War II without ever really changing any of its rules. It’s a good thing, a wonderful thing difficult to quantify and impossible to describe to someone uninitiated in the game’s complexities. The only thing that a solid month of playing multiplayer post-release have changed for me are my opinions of the community.

While there are still plenty of friendly folk to be found in Dawn of War country, simply by merit of it not falling into the trap of AAA releases, dickheads and whiners have begun to emerge. The primary targets that I’ve noticed: Chaos Heretics with grenade launchers which, to be fair to critics, are quite annoying and difficult to counter without jump units or mid-level armor and Manticore mobile artillery platforms, units that can devastate entire armies from across the map but can’t even hold up to a guardsman squad with plasma weapons in toe to toe combat. People whine about lots of other things, sure, but so far these two elements have elicited the loudest and most fervent cries of disgust from my various internet compatriots.

The Chaos Heretic thing isn’t even that frequent, and it’s certainly not that tough to counter, since Heretics wither under almost every kind of attention, but in the Manticore’s case the protests are much louder. And they stem not from balance issues, but from the changes to game mechanics that the Manticore brings to the table.

It’s understandable, in a way. Getting your army devastated from across the map is never fun, especially when you never even see your enemy if he uses stealthed stormtroopers. And the Manticore works best against the sort of players who are losing games anyways, people who use large numbers of stationary units and focus on massing units up and rolling a fat stack across the map. This is already a great way to frustrate your enemies while inexplicably losing the game, since controlling victory points without spreading out your force is tough, especially if your enemy plays to your myopic tactic and uses stealth units to manipulate victory points while avoiding the direct conflict you’re so fervently trying to force on them. But the Manticore further punishes this violation of the rules of Dawn of War II by allowing your opponent to shred your pitiful, by merit of its size, slow moving force. The AOE damage, the disruption to your formations, the damage to your pride that you were too slow and stupid to notice the red smoke calling in the strike, it all combines to open you up to an opportunistic attack by combined enemy forces which will wipe your massive-stack out and force you into the kind of game Dawn of War II really is: a game of map control, of movement and response.

It’s just making Dawn of War II more Dawn of War II-ish, but the people who hate on tactics are, by nature, the same people who tend not to get what makes Dawn of War II unique and special. So it’s no surprise to see the Manticore get hate, even from Imperial Guard players. I was matched with an excellent three-man team that stuck together through a few matches, and one of the most comical moments was running into an enemy who whined about one of my teammate’s use of Manticores not once but twice and mopping the floor with him on each occasion, devastating his forces as he failed to anticipate our movements. It reminded me of why I played Dawn of War II so fervently and frequently in years past, and cemented Retribution’s quality as a multiplayer product in my mind. There are good RTSes, like Starcraft 2, inelastic systems for competition that are great at illustrating mechanics and letting players slug it out with those mechanics without any fear of the unexpected, and then there are games like Myth and, of course, Dawn of War II – chaotic games that provide for the unexpected and the uncalled for, sloppy affairs that generate moments of genuine beauty among their rules. The latter category is a step beyond good, and perhaps great, into the serendipitous. They express both the capacity of and future for Real Time Strategy as a genre. So long as games like Dawn of War keep emerging, games that re-read and re-write the rules of Rush-Boom-Turtle, RTSes will never get stagnant or dull.

For this quality alone Dawn of War II: Retribution and Relic deserve to be celebrated. And this is just considering their multiplayer system, completely divorced from their adequate, if not particularly good, single player campaign. I haven’t even touched on the Last Stand mode that Relic opted to add into their games, the mechanic that me and my gaming buddies, or internet-husbands as I like to call them, have latched on to. The Last Stand hasn’t changed much either on the surface. But if you look a little closer, it’s changed completely. Let me explain.

The Last Stand can be played exactly as it was before, on its old map with only the three original classes or the two additional classes added in Chaos Rising, and you’ll never know that there was anything new to be played. But careful observers will notice the Lord General has been added, a hero I have had woefully little time to play around with since acquiring the game. And less-careful observers will find themselves immediately thrust into a brand new map, a smaller and more deadly map, filled with Chaos units and upgraded versions of all your favorite factions who have been optimized to ass-rape you and your friends. That’s right, a challenge mode has been added to Dawn of War II’s Last Stand. Not an official one, or a mode that involves restarting without any of your fancy new gear for no apparent reason.

Instead they’ve just hitched a punishing new map to The Last Stand, a map filled with upgraded units clearly designed to let you put your favorite load-outs through some more rigorous paces and give players a new end game. The waves have a distinctly puzzly feel to them, and they’re more than willing to wipe you out just as soon as look at you. The experience rewards are greater, for certain, but the increase in difficulty is considerable. And this is the map that Relic clearly wants you to play. It’s the default Last Stand Map, even after playing through a round on the old Bloody Coliseum. And there’s no warning, no chance to cancel. After you start the countdown, you’re locked in. If you picked wrong you’re well and proper fucked.

This map would be ideal for old-hands at the previous Last Stand who have maxed out their characters and want to explore a new progression of challenges, see how the waves unfold and how their hard-earned tools play into each new band of foes. And me and my internet-husbands would fall into this category easily if Relic hadn’t opted to disable the proposed feature which allowed players to carry their previous multiplayer statistics into Retribution. But, to date, I haven’t met a single person who transferred their stats from Chaos Rising to Retribution successfully, and all of my attempts to do so, along with the attempts of my friends, have been met with naught but frustration.

This isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s pleasant to climb the ranks again after having done it before, and it gives me a feel of nostalgia for a game that I haven’t played in a very long time. But it does disincentivize experimenting with new heroes since I can’t just switch back and enjoy my jetpack, my plasma rifle and my Dreadnaught. And it is a bit of a slap in the face to, as someone who neared level 50 in Team Mode with his race of choice, have all of my efforts reset by the new, admittedly improved, Steam based matching system.

And it really, really is an improvement. Games for Windows Live was terrible, beyond atrocious. And being forced to use it each time I wanted to play one of my favorite games was the definition of uncool. Steam is great by comparison, and instead of using the shit-tastic TrueSkill system it uses a matching and skill derivation system utilized in competitive chess leagues. So this is mostly a nitpick. A server reset is far from the worst thing that could’ve happened to Dawn of War II: Retribution, considering all the other changes they made. But it is frustrating. And literally, aside from the slight increase in whiny assholes since beta, the only thing I could possibly conjure against this game. Dawn of War II: Retribution really is 2011’s first great new RTS release. And, this is kind of overstating my case, it advances the genre of Real-Time Strategy in general in a tremendously powerful way. If you play RTSes against other people you simply cannot ignore Dawn of War II: Retribution.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Congratulations, You Make Us Vomit!

Oh god.

Sorry, it’s hard to even look at you. We were going to go into detail as to just how this happened, how you managed to fuck your life up so hard and so thoroughly that you ended up getting your face fucked up so bad. Or how you managed to survive with those injuries, how the state wouldn’t allow you to receive proper medical attention or how your parents had died so many years ago in that tragic meth accident, so even they couldn’t spot you the money to get those fissures repaired, those warts removed and those ants exterminated.

But it’s really hard to concentrate when…oh jesus, is it supposed to do that? Oh god, sorry. We’ve got to go. Seriously. Take some pictures, though, and post them online. We’re pretty sure you can get some money or, barring that, get laid by someone who likes freakshows. And maybe the taste of their own bile.

Congratulations, You Make Us Vomit!

Friday, March 25, 2011

Congratulations Mealy Worm!

Today you’re the mealy worm prince of a mealy worm society, and you’re going to lead your mealy worm people to freedom.

“But what of the giant fingers that carry us to Valhalla?” they’ll say when you tell them to revolt. They’ll be referring to the hand of the young man who reaches into your container thrice daily to feed your people to a salamander he has imprisoned from the nearby lake. In nature your two peoples could co-exist, but in the confines of The Case you have become mortal enemies.

“This is a lie!” you’ll cry. “These fingers, they bring only death!”

Your people will refuse to believe you, but they’ll still be your people, and their safety will be paramount. So you’ll tell them that you plan to investigate Valhalla, to survey its shores, intending instead to sacrifice yourself to buy them a bit more of life.

So when the hand comes you’ll wriggle and entice, drawing its attention. You’ll stand up a little, so as to make yourself especially appealing, especially lively. And then you’ll feel yourself being taken away.

You’ll have time to think about your future as you move towards the salamander’s perch, happy and fat, atop a rock in the young man’s back yard. And by the time he places you on the stone in front of the salamander, before its toothless assault carries you down into its gullet where you’ll be slowly digested, light shining through its translucent membranes and tempting you with freedom, you’ll have decided to fight. For your people.

Witihin the belly of the salamander you’ll find many mealy worms in various states of digestion.

“This is not what we were promised!” they’ll cry. They’ll be partially melted, horribly injured to a man. It’ll be nearly too much for your mealy heart to bear. But you’ll persevere.

“With me, brothers!” you’ll cry, and then you’ll start eating your way out of the salamander’s belly. It’ll be super gross, with tasteless flesh giving way under your tiny mandibles with each bite. By the time you reach the outer membrane of the salamander’s skin you’ll have grown ill with the taste of his flesh, but you know that to delay is to damn not only yourself but all of your people, past and future.

The last bite will be the hardest, as is always the way of these things, that final desperate bite that allows you to wriggle out of the creature’s stomach and into the open air, into the sod and bark chips, the wonderful world outside. The salamander will be laying still when you emerge, on his back, awaiting death, in the same agony which he has left your people in for months now. You’ll feel a twinge of sympathy for the creature as your compatriots follow you out into the open air, but you won’t regret what you did. As your people, humbled and scarred by their time in the salamander’s belly, move towards the shade and sod and freedom that you promised them, you’ll know that you made the right choice, and you’ll resolve to never let this fate befall them again so long as you live, which won’t be very long at all because you’re a mealy worm and you only live about a month at both. Even a beetle who knows how long you’ll survive with all the birds around here.

Congratulations Mealy Worm!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Congratulations on Remembering Your Cock Sock!

There’s a lot of shit they don’t tell you when you first become an actor. First, right off the bat, most people on set at any given moment are super fucking naked. Unbelievably naked. If they were any more naked you’d lose your shit the moment you walked on set. Second off, actors who don’t do nudity, not just during scenes where they’re supposed to be filmed nude but during scenes where they’re just on camera and certain parts of their body aren’t being filmed, are universally reviled as pussies.

That’s why Tom Cruise showed everyone his penis back in the day, before he was gay. That’s why Thomas Hayden Church gets so much sweet ass work (his dick is huge) and that’s why if you don’t show up to work with a cock sock your dick is going to end up on either Youtube or the silver screen, depending on how good you are and how nice your dick looks. And that’s why people keep hiring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson and paying them so much money even though they’re way too old to get real jobs: they just want them to stop displaying their penises.

Today you’re going to show up for your second day on set, your first on camera, and people are going to tell you to strip. Immediately. Not just for the sake of being on set, but so that you can shoot a love scene with actress Halle Barry.

“What if I get a boner?” you’ll ask the second assistant-camera man.

“Stick it in,” he’ll shrug. “It’ll make for good b-roll, even if shit goes wrong.”

You’ll start to panic, sweat flooding your pores, eyes widening. You’ll rush to your dressing room, which is what they call the broom closet where you drop your shit and get fitted by wardrobe, and start rifling through your bags in search of some salvation.

Luckily for you your uncle told you about all this. He told you, and he made sure you were prepared. “Take this, kid,” he said when he sent you on your way out from Omaha, handing you a flesh colored pasty that fit snugly around your balls. “Always carry it with you.”

You always followed your uncle’s advice, since he never tried to molest you, and today will be no different. You’ll rummage through your bag and, after a long dramatic pause, remove your flesh colored pasty from your luggage.

“Thank Christ,” you’ll exhale, stripping and putting your cock sock on so that it fits snugly around your junk.

When you get out in front of the camera, inches from Halle Barry’s vagina, people will be a little disappointed that they won’t get to see you nail her. But the director will love the touch.

“It adds longing to the scene!” he’ll cry, applauding. The crew will follow his lead, but they’ll still all look kinda sad. But this is Hollywood, and the crew doesn’t matter. So it won’t really make any difference, and when the production ends you’ll have lined up another job for yourself. Because you’ll have come off as a professional, and directors, they love professionals.

Congratulations on Remembering Your Cock Sock!

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Congratulations Youthful Divorcee!

Drop top down, hair in the wind, you’ll be free. Free at last, though not from the tremors of racial discrimination that you’ve heard so much about so frequently. Instead you’ll be free from your husband, who never really mistreated you or hurt you or did anything but provide for you but who occasionally pressed you on the fact that you promised him anal at one point or another and that was just too much for you to take. So you had to cut him loose.

It wasn’t easy. Dozens of court dates, occasional pleading phone calls from him late at night frightening off your most recent boyfriend du jour. Once he even sent you flowers (super gay) without consulting you first. But thanks to a restraining order you acquired by blowing a detective and letting an appellate judge fuck you in the back of the classic Baracuda convertible you’re now riding in you’ve been able to keep him off your back long enough to finalize the divorce.

But now you’re free on the open road. At least, as free as you can be when you’re tied down by things like having to have a set address to receive alimony checks and having to remember your PIN number that your fuckface ex-husband won’t be around to tell you anymore. And life is pretty okay, even though the terms of your divorce demanded that you leave the state of California, since if you were to stay you’d most certainly end up doing something so illegal that all the handjobs on the West Coast couldn’t get you out of it.

The only trouble is that life in California is all you’ve ever known. So driving out east, across the desert, into the desolate landscape surrounding Pheonix, you’ll be a bit puzzled. Where are all the personal shoppers? The people dressed like Princess Leia? The droves of dog-walkers doing their duties?

It’ll be powerful strange, and you’ll feel so overwhelmed by this strange new landscape that you’ll need to pull off the road into the first shop you find, which will be a grease stained barbeque shack just off the interstate. The sign will be painted, like by a person or some shit, and it’ll have a picture of a winking cartoon pig on it.

Inside it’ll be mostly empty. An elderly man will sit and stare out at the abandoned road, chewing without anything in his mouth, and a bulky man will stand washing a glass, occasionally spitting on the floor behind the counter where he sits. He’ll be wearing a stained white t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts, and he’ll be looking nowhere in particular before he notices you. Then his eyes will narrow, like he wasn’t expecting any customers.

“What can I get you?” he’ll shout at you over the counter. You’ll be all a twitter at his question, flitting your hand up to your chest and exhaling deeply.

“Oh my. I’m not sure,” you’ll demure, taking in the scene of the store. “What’s good?”

He’ll shrug and scratch his ass. “Barbeque,” he’ll mumble. He’ll eye you up for the first time since you’ve entered the shop, as if he’s looking at a cut of meat. “Any kind you like.”

You’ll smile at him, a million watt affair you normally hold in reserve to get producers to drop ten thousand dollars on a bar tab you’ve run in exchange for something unbelievably fun with their penis, but it won’t make him give you a free meal or make you something he likes. Instead he’ll just stand there staring at you, waiting for you to say what you’d like.

“What would I like?” you’ll ask, overwhelmed by the variety of meats misspelled on the menu over the man’s head.

“This is the question,” he’ll say, fixing you with a disapproving look.

You’ll wither under his gaze, shocked at his brusqueness with you. Years from now, after your second divorce, you’ll think back to this moment as the day you fell in love with him, the moment you saw what you’d always wanted: someone who wasn’t willing to let you be a little piece of shit about living your own life. But by that time you’ll have become an infuriatingly assertive bitch of a woman, full of new problems that a new husband will solve while creating some new ones along the way.

Congratulations Youthful Divorcee!

Monday, March 21, 2011

Congratulations Solo Artist!

Plenty of people try to make a living as jazz musicians, and you know how they end up? They end up homeless, on the street, sucking dick for food and meth. But that’s not the life for you. Your daddy didn’t make all that money as a congressman, defrauding American citizens and taking corporate kickbacks, so you could end up sleeping under an overpass because you’ve always wanted to blow that beautiful horn to make your way in the world.

So today you’re going to step into a record executive’s office and slam your horn down on his desk.

“That could damage the instrument,” he’ll say, looking up the body of your horn, along the length of your arm, up to your face, which will be fixed with a determined glare.

“Never tell me the odds,” you’ll muter back at him.

“What?” he’ll say, genuinely confused.

Then you’ll drop a Kinko’s printed document on the desk in front of him, fifty pages strong. It’ll outline your plan to rise to fame as a jazz star over the course of a decade, to grow as an impresario until your fame is known and recognized across the world, and then explode into alcoholism and drug abuse at the height of your popularity.

Following your severe decline you’ll then engage in a campaign of rebuilding yourself as a person, triumphantly returning to the music scene with a handful of albums before gracefully retiring. The plan calls for you to be a renowned musician who makes shitty solo tracks that go on too long, the only thing you’re really capable of producing as a musician. People would normally assume that this is just a result of your lack of talent, which is totally true, but because of the complicated narrative you’re planning on surrounding yourself with as an artist they’ll instead attribute it to your tremendous pain.

It’ll have all the ingredients to make you a hit musician, a public relations nightmare and a record sales staple. The recording executive will look up at you after reading through your document and smile.

“Looks like you’ve got a bright future, kid,” he’ll say.

It’ll be the first line in the movie you outlined in the script, just as you wanted it to be said. The two of you will laugh and laugh and laugh before he has you sign some papers that insure that the vast majority of the earnings from your escapades over the next few years go to him.

Congratulations Solo Artist!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dawn of War II: Retribution Part 2 - Single Player!

Dawn of War II’s single player campaign wasn’t a revolution so much as an iteration. It grasped the fundamental factor at the core of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade’s massive, brand resurrecting success: the concept of sustained progress over a campaign. Dark Crusade used several carrots to represent this progress: global bonuses, special bodyguard squads, powerful wargear and bonus resources deployed with your force at the beginning of each mission. The end result was a fun progress curve which eventually culminated in an anti-climax when your all-powerful army crushed all enemy opposition with its souped up bonuses and super-powerful units.

Dawn of War II corrected this by focusing on character progress. You could still earn wargear, but it was more like loot. Your characters could still progress, but the progression trees were more nuanced, and the bodyguard units were replaced by a core group of supporting characters who fought with you throughout and grew stronger as you did, developed in a way that you could influence. Chaos Rising added more units, more powerful wargear, and more of what you’d have to be generous to call a “story” to the mix, and it worked a little better. Both games kept a steady difficulty curve and forced you to stay on your toes right up until the final mission, especially if you wanted to play around with the progressively more difficult optional missions that kept cropping up at the end of the first two Dawn of War II games. Retribution changes all of this.

Right off the bat, common squads are back. They’re back with a vengeance. You cannot play Dawn of War II: Retribution without using these squads. They’re thrown at you in the first level of the game, and they’re handy. Just like regular Dawn of War squads they do the job they’re designed to do well, and they give your heroes some much needed backup. But instead of having a fully unlocked tech tree from game one, as was the case with Dark Crusade, Retribution insists on doling out content, forcing you to choose between a juicy piece of wargear, still-locked unit types or upgrades for already-unlocked unit types. This means that every mission ends with a tactical choice which forces you to sacrifice one enduring bonus for another, a bold choice in any era of gaming but especially in our current era of designing games so that players need never experience fail states lest they violate the game’s rules severely. Retribution limits the resources provided to players, makes them decide how much they want to rely on their squads and how much they want to rely on their heroes. This means that the race you choose is probably going to impact the choices you make (why bother upgrading a scout squad all the way when you’ve got Cyrus, a free, more powerful scout doing everything they do better?) along with your personal play style. It also means that each mission plays very different for different people. I’m sure some players would’ve used armies for the majority of the trouble they ran into during the campaign, but I spent most of the game with my four space marine heroes. I’d occasionally leave Cyrus behind for some incredible assault terminator you can swap him out for (an effective and, again, well executed nod to the honor guard squads of yore), but for the most part I beat each level with four heroes slogging along against the universe.

The level cap has shrunken, along with the tech tree, to accompany this focus on a larger playing field of units and races. It makes perfect sense from a design perspective, and from a play perspective. The previous Dawn of War II campaigns took dozens of hours, two or three at least. They demanded nuanced, drawn out character customization to make up for a fairly stripped down core game which focused on one race, a very small group of units and, when you come right down to it, a set of four path choices for each unit, many of which were simply not viable. Retribution has done quite a bit to make sure that each available progression path is viable in its own special way, and it has also established limitations that insure that no one unit can be all powerful.

The end result is a campaign that plays a bit like a long-form RTS game. Not completely, of course. The resource acquisition is completely inelastic, the choices solely in your investment of those resources. There’s no sense of the rush-boom-turtle of classic RTS gameplay, and plenty of the trappings of Dawn of War II’s previously single player campaign’s RTS aspirations. There’s even a terrible story that unfolds differently based on the perspective of the race you play. I’ve only had a chance to play through as Space Marines (spoiler alert – it has a lot of racism in it) but after dabbling in some others I’ve gathered the mission progression is the same for all the groups across the board. In this context, your game-play choices take the shape of tactical choices you’d normally make in real time in a multiplayer game.

It’s no substitute for an actual multiplayer environment for preparing and training new players, don’t get me wrong. Even the sub-par skirmish AI is better than the single player as a tool for learning just how Dawn of War II works, and that won’t get you very far against human opponents who don’t advance squads one by one across the map to resource points, ignoring the majority of threats they encounter along the way. But it provides a framework for comprehending the interplay of various units. Playing through the Space Marine campaign you get a sense for how a Devastator squad works and how Assault Marines work. The only unit that you won’t really understand after the single player campaign closes its doors is the humble Terminator, a rarely seen incredibly tough multiplayer unit that requires a global ability to deploy and tends to ruin the game for everyone else involved. But after completing the campaign you’ll understand that the Razorback is useful for breaking up enemy formations and rapidly transporting units around the battlefield, but that it cannot stand up to other heavy units in a fight, that the Dreadnaught beats the shit out of everything it can touch but moves slower than a paraplegic through whatever viscous liquid paraplegics frequently find themselves immersed in, and that Tactical Marines are just fucking great in general, assuming you take the time to upgrade them.

It’s difficult to read the tea leaves of Relic’s latest effort. Is this an admission on their part that their games function best as multiplayer ventures, that the single player game is at best an afterthought, a fun way to kill hours when your friends are offline? Is it a refinement of a game-type that functioned extremely well as a time sink in the past? Or is it an attempt to combine the two systems, to bridge the gaping divide between single and multiplayer play in Dawn of War II? It fulfills all three functions, although I’d contend it’s best at offering up the second. You won’t learn much about how to play Dawn of War II from playing through the pat little levels that Retribution throws your way, though you’ll learn more than you would’ve in the past. But you will have an experience that forces you to make choices, to think about the units you command and do more than just wait for the best piece of gear for each situation to roll along. You’ll start to learn about the branching decision trees that the game constantly throws your way, the choices you’ll have to make with each resource tick as to just what you want to pick. Will you get those lightning claws for your Chaos Lord? Or a squad of Chaos Havocs to help contain that victory point? Retribution’s single player won’t ask you that question, not exactly, but it will hint at it while fitting the choice into a larger framework which eventually shapes a larger than life battlefield.

I’d never recommend a Relic game post-Homeworld for the strength of its single player campaign, though there’s nothing wrong with any of them per sec. They’re just RTS single player campaigns. Most of them are shit. Age of Mythology was the last game that delivered an amazing single player campaign, and did so by largely ignoring all the rules of a single-player RTS campaign (that all of this is training for what is to come in multiplayer, the game you really bought). Relic has taken some stabs at solving this problem, and they’ve had a modicum of success, more than even Blizzard I’d say, but after I’ve been introduced to the systems of their RTSes I rarely find myself encouraged to play single player out of anything more than a sense of OCD. Dawn of War II: Retribution’s single player represents the latest and greatest iteration of this OCD exploitation, a game with modest intentions in its single player campaign and a broad range of experiences on offer, more than you’ll likely engage. It’s proximity and inclusion with one of the best multiplayer games I’ve played in the last four years makes it easily worth playing through at least once, however, even if it’s not enough to warrant Retribution’s price tag alone. The same could not be said for its exceptional overhauled multiplayer.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Friday, March 18, 2011

Congratulations on Finding Out the Mafia is Still Relevant!

You’ll discover it immediately after sleeping with a mobster’s wife.

“Really?” you’ll ask her, lighting a cigarette as you sit up. She’ll wave at the smoke but since you’re a good lay, despite or perhaps because of the fact that you’re such an idiot, she won’t say anything about it.

“Yeah. They still have strong union ties and help out with imports and exports in certain places,” she’ll announce proudly, pulling the sheets up around herself like she’s suddenly grown shy despite asking you to choke her fifteen minutes earlier. “Also they control restaurants sometimes, because they’ve got the capitals to invest in them.”

You’ll shrug. “I honestly wasn’t aware. I thought they’d died out in the eighties when all those crackdowns came about.”

She’ll shake her head again.

“Nope.”

“So does that mean I’ll have to watch out for your husband sending someone after me if you talk about how great at sex I am?” You’ll blow smoke in her face and she’ll frown, weighing just how much she wants to sleep with you again against how little she actually likes you as a person.

“If he found out, no. He’d probably divorce me. It’s more about business holdings than things like murder and extortion nowadays.” She’ll stand up and start getting dressed again.

“Now, please leave. I’ve got to get my kids from soccer and I’d rather you not be here when I come back.”

Congratulations on Finding Out the Mafia is Still Relevant!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Congratulations on Wreathing the World in Flames!

Today you’re going to put some weight on the glowing rune your dad put next to the computer with your foot while you’re masturbating. You’ll do that thing where you splay your legs out and thrust your crotch upward, as if you were inside someone instead of just clutching your lube caked hand, furiously pounding your meat. That’ll set all of it off.

The house will immediately be sheathed in a red light, pulsing with energy. It’ll be really distracting, and it’ll keep you from finishing. You’ll slam your fist down on the desk and grimace.

“Fuck!” you’ll shout, looking around the room for a towel. That’s how your father will find you, pants around your ankle, desperately grasping at a washcloth just out of reach.

“Jesus Christ,” he’ll say, shielding his eyes from you. “You really had to do that here?”

He won’t be shouting. He never shouts. He’ll just be shaking his head.

“This is bad,” he’ll say. “Get out of my office.”

You’ll tromp out to the front stoop, where you’ll sit and stare out at the street. Energy will be roiling out from your house, setting grass and leaves on fire as it rolls over the landscape. It’ll inch across the neighborhood slowly, surely, the fire creeping along the ground, leaping over houses and trees and cars. Water will be strangely untouched, too still under the flames rolling over it.

At the center of it all will be your home, with your mother and father, shouting at one another. They’ll be arguing about you, about your father refusing to talk to you about masturbation and the runic magic that his father taught him. From what you’ll hear, over the combination of the screams of passers-by and the doors your parents will slam, is that your dad didn’t want to make you learn about the hellish power contained by those runes for a few more years, at least, but your mom won’t buy it.

“Odds are he’s learned about runes already. Kids are probably invoking them at his school all the time!”

She’ll be very, very wrong, but you’ll be glad that she’s standing up for you. You’ll bite your lip and consider going back inside, but you really won’t want to. Instead you’ll sit on your steps and watch the flames creep along the earth.

The cute girl who lives next door to you will run by screaming, her skin boiling off her body, and it’ll suddenly dawn on you that you’ll be trapped here for a long time, with no one else on this world except your parents. You’ll be masturbating a lot more, but probably not with the internet, or by watching your cute neighbor through the window. You’ll bite your lip and start to cry, your tears steaming from the heat from the world around you as the fire continues to spread.

Congratulations on Wreathing the World in Flames!

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Congratulations! This Sandwich is Amazing!

We were going to write a congratulations about world peace, about it coming to the earth in the form of a massive, collective orgasm and providing every single person on the planet with a moment of wondrous clarity that would’ve given them the insight they needed to solve their petty troubles and get their lives back on track.

But instead of that happening all of that magic orgasm energy that was going to disseminate to the human race and certain species of monkeys through cosmic rays is going to go into sandwich. A sandwich you’re going to make.

We cannot go into the composition of this sandwich, nor can we detail the time or place of its creation. It could happen at your job as a barrista, where you normally make subpar sandwiches for men who order them in the hope that you’ll graze their hand while handing them the plate. Or it could happen at home, where you make pretty good sandwiches for yourself and your unemployed “painter” boyfriend. It might even happen on the street at an underground sandwich making contest, which is a real thing that we didn’t just make up.

It doesn’t really matter. You’re going to make a sandwich so good that when you bite into it everyone in our office will feel the ripple of its flavor pass through time and space. So while the space orgasm isn’t going to happen we’re all going to go kinda batshit for a while and feel really good about ourselves for a change.

In the end it won’t make any of us better people. It won’t provide us with any great insight to the world or give us any special powers. But it will provide us with a treasured memory of the best damn sandwich ever made by human hand. And it’ll prove to the world that you can accomplish anything at all, which is honestly something we’ve all doubted for a while now.

Congratulations! This Sandwich is Amazing!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Congratulations on Taking Over the Mac Store!

You’ll come with bombs and guns and knives and fists. You’ll come with piss and vinegar and a plan so bold it cannot fail. You’ll come as a team and you’ll act as a unit, striking at first light, as the first pastel-t-shirted dickhead opens those glass doors up and steps inside with his badge hanging around his neck. You’ll press a gun to the back of his neck and mutter into his ear.

“Inside, now.”

He’ll rush inside, with you and your friends close on his heels. Then you’ll begin systematically capturing or killing each of the aforementioned douchebag’s co-workers.

The first will be taken on her way into the break room. Another will be bludgeoned into oblivion when he attempts to pick up a bootleg Smiths CD you left on the ground. The manager will be shot in the face while attempting to buy cocaine from one of your cohorts, a “new employee” in a stolen t-shirt that the manager, in his coked out haze, forgot he hired.

By nine fifteen you’ll have captured every Apple employee who comes to work sober. Then you’ll set about your master plan: making the Apple store an enjoyable place to shop.

You’ll start by toning down the pretentious douchebaggery and focusing on customer service and actual salesmanship. The Apple store will become a place people can actually kind of enjoy being in, aside from the lighting.

The second step: lowering the price of every item in the store by at least 75% so that the actual cost of Apple components is accurately represented without completely sacrificing profit. Sheets of plastic previously sold for twenty dollars will be knocked down to the two bucks that actually go into them.

The third and final step: filling the Apple store with people who don’t talk about every book they’ve ever read. This one shouldn’t be too hard, just be sure that no one involved in your glorious revolution going in has ever applied for a job at the Apple store and you should be all set.

Congratulations Taking Over the Mac Store!

Monday, March 14, 2011

Congratulations on Lighting the Fucker on Fire!

Today you’re going to light a man aflame, just to watch him writhe and die.

“I just wanted to let you know about the ACLU!” he’ll cry, but you won’t listen. You’ll know he’s a filthy fucking liar, in league with the communists and the drug dealers and crack addicts. You’ll know he’s a bad man with a bad mind who can’t help but be evil.

“Quiet white devil,” you’ll mutter at him as he rolls on the lawn, stroking your own alabaster belly as you stand there watching him writhe in flames, your form shirtless in the night.

Congratulations on Lighting the Fucker on Fire!

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Impressions on Dragon Age 2!

I’m normally loathe to write about a game like Dragon Age 2 before I’ve finished it. Sprawling epics like DA2 are more like novels than games in many regards, filled with reams and reams of dialogue with stories integral to the experience. But DA2 is such a strange beast, such a new creature, that even though I’m only a dozen or two hours in I find it hard to think about any other games. I’ve pushed off a write up on the single player experience of Dawn of War II’s latest expansion to write this piece. Because Dragon Age 2 is already the most polarizing game I’ve experienced this year.

I want to know who at Bioware decided that they should try to make their games more action-oriented. Because whoever made this decision missed out on both what Bioware’s good at doing and why I play Bioware games. I like their languid, meticulous combat, the planning required, the constant pausing, the tedious min-maxing and the constant item hunting. Dragon Age 2 has none of these things. The party-based, gear based combat system has been replaced. Where it once stood is an actiony click fest, one where it is far easier and indeed wiser to set ally behaviors tailored to your play style than issue them orders in the heat of combat. So much of combat is deciding how and when to use specific moves, timing your cooldowns so that they overlap and you can keep up a constant stream of damage. It’s less about picking targets carefully and more about weeding out the targets you’re beset with, the dozens and dozens of targets. Dragon Age had big battles too, don’t get me wrong, but not with the scale and frequency of Dragon Age 2. Every battle is against a respawning horde, it seems, and even random encounters on the city streets at night involve wading through dozens of enemy combatants. When the chaos of combat is over I feel less like I’ve conquered a remarkably tough foe and more like I’ve just swept a floor clean. Part of that is also the reward system, or rather the lack thereof. Each battle ends with an experience point update and a frenzied grab for the vendor trash that the various enemies have dropped. Gone are the encouraging experience-point bubbles over the heads of enemies or the pleasure of acquiring the blade that stood against you a few seconds earlier. Heck, you couldn’t even use it if you did acquire it, since weapon categories are now heavy segregated. Rogues can use daggers, and only daggers. Certain kinds of warriors can use certain kinds of swords and axes, depending on a few choices they’ve made in their skill tree. And mages can use their little mage staffs. Or is it staves? I can never get that right.

The end result is a combat system that feels hurried, stripped down. And it carries over to the character progression system, which has had its inelegant tables replaced with a Diablo 2 style series of truncated trees. The trees reward focus and specialization and make it much more difficult to compare various abilities, an unfortunate design choice given how crucial the placement of each precious point is. Comparing various abilities and possible progress paths involves moving in and out of tables, reading over dense tooltips and then backing out into another menu where you can survey your other options. It’s frustrating to gather information and encourages players to make hasty decisions based around which abilities and paths seem “coolest” rather than which ones best suit their play-style. The only saving grace for each of the tables is the relatively direct connection that the paths share with one another. They’re not always thematically contiguous as they could be, but for the most part the skill trees unfold logically, if not precisely the way you’d like them to. I’m still bummed out that Primal mages don’t get any kind of blizzard ability, but it’s still nowhere near my disappointment in how limited my customization options are and just how difficult they are to read. Even the specialization paths are difficult to discern, and while Dragon Age had me choosing between great options throughout the game each time I assigned a character a specialization I barely cared about closing off my additional options in Dragon Age 2.

Which brings me to another qualm with DA2: the lack of companion customization. Trinkets and weapons can be swapped around, assuming your hireling has the relevant attributes assigned, but armor is set. Which isn’t too big a deal, since the armor levels up with your companion, but it does make many of the items sloughed off of fallen foes feel kind of useless when they don’t match your class choice. It also places some severe limits on your ability to specialize your party members. You can’t make your sister into a frost mage who does damage to enemies all around her and shape your elf-friend into a healing machine the way you could in the first Dragon Age. Add this to the fact that specializations are gone from companion skill trees, replaced by companion specific trees that provide abilities ranging in usefulness from “profoundly’ to “non-existent.” You can make some choices, but the system of customization and management that Dragon Age originally presented for companions, itself a critical part of the old-school RPG genre and its micro-management friendliness, is missing.

But Dragon Age 2 has still been captivating me, despite my many qualms. And it’s not because of the game itself, the way that say Dead Rising 2 or Dawn of War 2 captivates me through play. It’s because of the things surrounding the play, the characters, the story and the art.

The art in DA2 is nothing short of gorgeous. Costume design, character design, architecture, lighting and spell effects, they’re all incredible. Sometimes character animation gets a little wonky, sure, and I have no idea why every Qunari suddenly grew horns but the game as a whole just looks so good, it’s a pleasure to play. And not in the digi-porn way that Killzone 3 looks good, in the “art design is excellent” way that seems to occur so much less frequently than it should in games. The subtle, slightly alien look that dwarves and elves have, the new, even more horrifying darkspawn models, the meticulously designed armor and uniforms seen every day on the streets of Kirkwall, they’re all fucking gorgeous and pitch perfect. It’s rare to see a game quite as well considered, visually, as Dragon Age 2.

And the characters that accompany this art don’t disappoint. There might be a time in the future when I find them frustrating or dull (I’m courting a party member right now who promises to be just that, a stodgy taciturn elf who is probably going to be a warmage with a dark past) but for the most part they’ve all been captivating, original takes on fantasy archetypes. Sure, Anders lost most of his humor somewhere between this game and the last one, and he’s a lot more out than he was previously, and your sister is a bit of a cipher as far as characters go, but for every middling character there’s a great one populating the party. The banter is better than it ever was, and even the characters who want to be traditional fantasy characters in a traditional fantasy world, people like Aveline for example, have little touches of originality that make them pop. Paired with strong writing, even for Bioware, featuring genuinely well constructed dialogue and humor, it’s the rare game that actually introduces a great cast of characters, not just one or two.

And these characters would be enough even without a story to tie them together. But Dragon Age 2 has a story, and a good one at that. At least, so far. The framing technique is a bit blah, but after being asked to save the world time and time again it’s actually quite refreshing to just be asked to find work and pay my way out of a shit life doing shit work for shit people. And, through the process of acquiring this work I’ve learned much of the world of Dragon Age, far more than I did in the first game.

And world building is a huge part of telling a story in a video game. It’s not enough to make things happen. To really make someone care you have to give them context, to let them know just why things in Orlais are the way they are and why things in the Free Marches are the way they are. Every little aside in Dragon Age 2 is a bit of an eye opener into the specific world of Theylas. Dragon Age offered some information on what Ferelden was like, sure, but it never provided a sense of daily life the way Dragon Age 2 does. Walking through city streets, engaging in mundane tasks, Dragon Age 2 hits all the right notes for constructing a world and letting us live in it. It beats all but the finest open world games at providing a sense of place and pace to its play.

And I credit this to its focus on keeping the story small, orienting it around characters and daily life rather than kings and queens and demons and the end of the world. That’s great sometimes, sure. But I can find any number of games that let me explore those nightmare scenarios. There are very few that are as willing to let me rest on the bottom of a fantasy world as Dragon Age 2 is.

It’s ironic, given the larger-than-life scale of the combat and the grandiose framing technique the game uses. But it’s a welcome change, and it ties together Dragon Age 2’s many disparate elements nicely. Dragon Age 2 is fundamentally a game about living in a new place, exploring it and making a name for yourself. It’s a game about meeting interesting characters, developing relationships with them, and not doing it in a right or wrong way. Most of all it’s about those characters, those people in these places triumphing over their challenges, whether it be the worries of daily life or the unpleasant and tone-deaf mechanics of the game itself. Regardless, Dragon Age 2 is a success, and while it might not be perfect it’s well worth the price of admission, as well as enduring the at times very unpleasant and chaotic game play.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Congratulations on Meeting an Angel!

Today you’re going to be walking down the street when a flaming eye ball flies down at you from the sky.

“Holy shit!” you’ll exclaim as the eyeball loops lazily around you, sputtering flames every few seconds.

“Hey there!” the eyeball will say affably, continuing its lazy flight path around you. “How’s it going?”

You’ll leap to the ground. “Oh god, let me live!”

The eyeball will laugh. “That’s the idea! I’m your guardian angel!”

You’ll scream. “What did I do to deserve this?”

The eyeball will laugh in response. “Thought about your step-daughter while masturbating!”

For the next week and a half the eyeball will be your constant watchdog, making sure you don’t think impure thoughts, don’t eat meat and, above all else, don’t touch your step-daughter, you fucking pervert. If you do he’ll return to the Order of Thrones with the knowledge that you did so and then you’ll get a visit from an angel with seven heads and arms and swords and dicks who specializes in dealing with people like you.

Congratulations on Meeting an Angel!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Congratulations Light Bulb Baby!

Today you’re the child of Light Bulb Millionaire James “Not Shaquille O’Neil” Shackman, the biggest light bulb baron on the west coast. If anyone from Barstow to Fairbanks has a light bulb it’s because of the empire your daddy built out of grit and the blood of men who stood in his way. He’s got a reputation as a take-no-prisoners son of a bitch who would just as soon cross a man as look at him, and in an effort to curtail his empire’s spread a group of men are going to take you hostage today.

“Shut the fuck up, baby!” one of them will shout, shoving a gun into your face.

“You didn’t see nothing!” another will scream at the surrounding day care workers as they look on, helpless, in horror as your abduction unfolds before them.

The kidnappers will be terrible at their job.

They’ll load you into a Camry with Washington plates and drive as fast as they can across the border into Vancouver, where they believe your father is unlikely to find. Vancouver Washington, not the good Vancouver.

Once they’re across the border they’ll take you to a warehouse where a friend of theirs works and has constructed a makeshift play-area in the back. They’ll unload you, take some shaky cell-phone video and send it to your dad who, shocker, will have already been contacted by the police who will be enroute to your location already.

When the police arrive the kidnappers will be taking turns playing with while they play Settlers of Catan on an upturned box and drink PBR.

“Free Mumia!” one of them will shout as the police beat him. The rest will remain quiet and be handcuffed with a modicum of dignity, dragging their feet as they’re hauled off to county jail to await trial.

Your father will be relieved that you’re found, but he’ll see you as a liability now, not a treasure to cherish and love. He’ll start coming up with elaborate ways to protect you while simultaneously distancing himself from you emotionally, both to spare you the potential dangers of being close to him and to make sure that anyone who goes after you will do so with the knowledge that your pappy is a cold, cold man even to his daughter.

By the time your kidnappers are sentenced and the first one is murdered in prison by a man your father bribed with a bunch of candy bars and heated lubes you’ll already be experiencing the aftereffects of your father’s neglect. You’ll see the world as a cold, hostile place filled with people who hate you, and you’ll seek out the attention of men long before it’s appropriate.

Eventually your therapist will trace it all back to this day, when some fucking hipster kidnappers who don’t understand how light bulb distribution works ruined your relationship with your dad and, through this, your ability to have healthy romances in your life.

Congratulations Light Bulb Baby!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Congratulations on Figuring Out the Hindu Pantheon!

The horde will be closing in on you from all sides, jabbering at you incoherently. You’ll look around yourself for a way to escape and, for the first time, notice just how incredible the carvings on the ruins around you are.

“Huh,” you’ll mumble, running your hand along them and feeling the etched stone under your fingers. “This is kinda neat.”

The horde will halt for a moment, confused, their scimitars raised in mid-air. You’ll continue examining the carvings, completely oblivious to the violence building around you.

The carvings will explain, in simple wordless terms, the story of the Hindu creation myth and its fallout. It will detail the various cycles of each god, their trials and tribulations and the stories they’ve visited upon the Hindu people for generations.

“This is so much cooler than Christianity!” you’ll shout, patting one of the sword-wielding locals on the back. He’ll nod, tentatively.

“Yes,” he’ll mutter in heavily accented English. “Is very cool.”

The two of you will talk for a while about the myth, its nature and how it relates to the practice of Hinduism in daily life. You’ll discuss the differences between the faith you know and the faith you’ve just now discovered, the manner in which it can reshape your life. And while you won’t want to convert, you will offer to write a lengthy discourse with him about the nature of religion and your two faiths in his company, to co-author it with him and eventually publish it with his name credited first.

He’ll agree, and the two of you will live and work side by side for many years, away from the barbarian horde. You’ll eat your meals together, talk constantly, learn to love and respect each other in a totally platonic way, and you’ll create a masterful work on the nature of religion and your lives.

Once it’s published, he’ll execute you and take full credit, effectively initiating you into the academic community.

Congratulations on Figuring Out the Hindu Pantheon!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Congratulations on Escaping Your Responsibilities as a Father!

Many people avoid their responsibilities as a father through cowardice or cunning. You are going to go into the history books as the only person to have ever been removed from your duties of fatherhood by court order, following your complete inability to assist your children with anything.

“Is it true you once mixed baby food with motor oil in an attempt to make your child a cyborg?” the judge will ask. You’ll shrug.

“And that you don’t know how to make soup?” she’ll inquire.

“The defendant would like to plead the fifth,” your lawyer will interject after you open your mouth to respond, cutting off your no doubt cutting rebuke that soup is surprisingly tough to make.

“I’ll simply read off the rest of the evidence, then,” the prosecuting attorney will declare.

It’ll be a laundry list of ineptitudes. He’ll recount the time you once sent a chauffer to a professional soccer game to acquire your daughter, how you once hired a high priced prostitute to teach your son about proper condom use and STIs. He’ll read segments of testimony from all three of your children about the time you once tried to get your dog to clean up glass by licking it off the floor, and how you proceeded to beat it with a newspaper when it refused to do so. These are simply the ones we can recount here. We’re not even going to get into that one night with the not-so-high priced prostitute you wanted to use to teach your children proper diving mechanics.

The jury will deliberate for fifteen minutes before they emerge with the sentence.

“We find that the defendant will no longer be allowed within one-thousand feet of his children and that, should he attempt to do so, he will be confined in a federal penitentiary for no less than one year. We also find that he will have to pay sufficient child support, totaling at least fifty percent of his total income, to his children and the plantiff, in this case his wife.”

Normally such a harsh sentence would elicit gasps from the crowd. But you’re such a shitty dad that no one’s going to be shocked by it in the least. In fact they’ll be a little bit surprised that you weren’t just sent to prison right then and there for being such a shitty dad. But they’ll let you go, the bailiff shaking his head as he pushes you out the door into the cold spring air.

As you trudge down the courthouse steps the decision will ring in your ears. You’ll walk across the street, counting your steps, until you reach a bright red sports car. A young woman will be sitting in it. She’ll be dull, but beautiful, her eyes glassy, her face expressionless.

“How’d it go?” she’ll ask. You’ll shrug and she’ll nod, and the two of you will head back to the apartment you own, furnished entirely with funds you receive for managing the investments of Lehman Brothers.

Congratulations on Escaping Your Responsibilities as a Father!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Congratulations Surviving Camp Counselors!

We all know the story. A child died decades ago at the camp where you all work and his vengeful spirit entered the body of a bulky retard and he’s been systematically murdering people at irregular intervals every couple of years since. It’s a tale as old as time, but everyone’s still shocked when it happens to them.

So this week will begin. But luckily local law enforcement in the small town located nearby your campground is surprisingly assiduous and they’ve prepared for this situation. It seems that their funding was often reduced after a string of unsolved murders related to demonic retards and, in an effort to avoid losing the pinball machine in their breakroom, they’ve stepped up their disaster-preparedness by building a staggeringly well armed SWAT force and learning a lot about the occult.

So even though things are going to be rough for the first hour or two of the horrible rampage the mystically infused mongoloid visits upon you and your friends you’ll run and hide and, before long, the police will show up with M-16s filled with bullets that have tiny crosses carved on them and incendiary grenades adorned with springs of garlic.

The end result will be a three hundred pound block of hamburger where once an indestructible sociopath stood. Sure, some teens (including one of the camper’s pregnant girlfriend and one kid who probably would’ve gone on to do something amazing with his life) will die, but in the end at least one slut and one black guy will survive, and that’s really the best you can hope for in these situations. Also, the police department will have additional funding, which means better readiness for events like this in the future.

Think of how your hardships have helped benefit the general public, and rejoice!

Congratulations Surviving Camp Counselors!

Monday, March 7, 2011

Congratulations Sally McNally!

You’re pretty. Real pretty. The prettiest girl in your whole gul-dern high school. And that’s a good thing, because the people in your high school are bitches one and all. If you weren’t so pretty they’d rip your shit up and down and leave you weeping on a daily basis, but because you’re so fine you avoid the bulk of the shit people get outside your world.

Well today it’s going to come crashing through when you wake up and, for the first time ever, do not look super fine. Gazing into your mirror you’ll see that your normally shimmering eyes look glassy and dull today. Your skin will hang a little bit loose and your lips will be flat. You’ll even have bags under your eyes.

“What happened?” you’ll ask your mirror, puzzled by the cruelty of the world.

LIFE IS WHAT HAPPENED, BITCH!

You’ll do your best to dab on make-up, but it won’t work. What follows will be a harrowing experience at school. People who normally look up to you will avoid eye contact. Even the dorks and dweebs will turn away from your kind smiles, your pariahdom will be so imminent. At one point a boy with a mo-hawk will drop a pencil down the back of your pants while his friend attempts to throw paper balls into your blossoming cleavage.

“What’s wrong with you?” you’ll shout at them, tears welling in your eyes while the rest of your high school looks away, unwilling to inform you that this is actually quite normal in our horrid world.

You see, the world is what’s wrong with those boys, and your old life is part of that world. Your bubble, your lovely perfect life, all of it made their horror possible. Because while you were living with your head in the clouds and birds circling you as you danced through the woods these guys were getting burned with hangers by their moms and beaten by their dads. And your happy little life made them seem weird and made it less than okay to get help.

So today you’re going to see the world for what it is, and you’re going to cry to your parents and you’re going to end up on Zoloft, which means you’ll end up fucking up your college applications and only getting into Cornell. Sucks to be you.

Congratulations Sally McNally!

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Terrible Lessons of Kane and Lynch!

Heat is a thing if you’re over a certain age, a cinematic phenomenon that it was hard not to see. It hasn’t sustained itself the way that Star Wars has or established itself as a classic of crime like The Godfather or Chinatown. But it was a pop-culture sensation, and it’s hard to see someone with a duffel slung over their shoulder and an assault rifle in hand without thinking “huh, that looks a lot like Heat.”

Games, the image-centered form of entertainment they are, have kind of co-opted Heat’s imagery from time to time. Sometimes it’s just part of a much larger game, as was the case with Grand Theft Auto IV. And sometimes it’s the basis for the entire game, as is the case with Kane and Lynch.

I’m well aware how late I am to the party on this game, and really, can you blame me? Critically panned, tasteless, advertising on shock value: there was nothing to attract me to Kane and Lynch. Poorly managed cover dynamics, the word “mercenary with a dark past” in every piece of ad-copy released and a graphics engine that would’ve been at home in 2002... There wasn’t a lot of good to say about Kane and Lynch.

Nor is there about it as a game. In that regard its failures are pretty profound. The shooting is sloppy without any of the serendipitous realism that STALKER brought to its sloppiness, the cover system fails on every level, with none of the ease of Gears of War’s definitive experience and zero fluidity to make up for the lack. The story is laughably bad, and the bits of framing that surround each episode are like a list of catch phrases selected at random from various heist movies of the past decade. The characters themselves are weak tea, a few archetypal qualities wrapped around a vague backstory with no driving motivation or even personality driving the action forward. The only thing I can really give Kane and Lynch credit for is its thematic continuity: everything in the game is about a heist of some kind, and it holds to this principle throughout. Even the introduction forms around a certain kind of heist, the theft of a prisoner from his transport one fateful day.

Sure, the surrounding action, is poor and the game hardly seems aware of what it does right and what it fails at completely, but you cannot fault Kane and Lynch for inconsistency. And this consistency, this dedication to the heist, seems to be at both the core of the game as a work and its commercial success. Because despite being a piece of shit, Kane and Lynch sold. It sold well enough to get a sequel. And unlike its contemporaries, games like Blood on the Sand and other third-person exploitation shooters, it didn’t have a brand or high concept driving it. All it had was a set of potent images on offer, a set of images that we’re already intimately familiar with before the game even opens.

Every movement, from bus to bus, van to van, lobby to lobby, all of these various settings are well travelled ground, places we know from other games. We’re never shown something new, something different: instead we’re given, as with the dialogue, a best-of list of set pieces from crime games. And, in a strange way, Kane and Lynch totally succeeds because of this. There’s really nothing to provide you with a reason to play Kane and Lynch, you see. It’s not very good. But the imagery, the overarching theme thereof and the manner in which it fits together, makes it something attractive to a spectator. The idea of robbing a bank or a mansion or an armored car is a romantic one, the idea of great risk and great reward for a single act of human courage and greed, and Kane and Lynch provides a set of images that attach fundamentally to these concepts. It makes it really sell-able since literally any screen shot of the game will inevitably showcase some sort of good, hokey heist action that you’ll get a chance to play through. It’s a marketing masterpiece in many ways.

But it collapses with play, and for that Kane and Lynch is useful as more than just an example of how to sell an original IP without any originality to it: it’s a showcase for how imagery functions in games.

When a game fires on all cylinders it’s difficult to really deconstruct how it works and why it works so well. Portal, for example, can be looked at from almost any perspective and be held up as a masterpiece of both writing, design and art. It is as perfect as any game ever made has been (which is not to say it’s perfect, just that it’s as close as anyone’s probably ever going to get) and because of that there’s really nothing to say about how games could be made better by its influence. “Be a little longer, maybe?” could come out, but really, that’s not a valid critique. Short cheap games are fine as long as they’re well executed. But a game like Kane and Lynch is incredibly valuable as a object for critical derision.

See, Kane and Lynch fails so handily and in so many transparent ways that it can illustrate mistakes that game developers can make during their process and provide us with a framework where we can introduce fixes for these problems. Take the cover system for example. It’s sloppy, with ineffective collision detection governing whether or not you enter cover and loose controls governing your choice to either lean out of said cover and shoot or run out from cover and be shot. A single “cover button” or even “contextual action button” could easily fix that. Of course, this is a problem solved in Gears of War and present in a game which already has a contextual action button totally unrelated to cover. But still, had Kane and Lynch come first we could’ve learned these lessons and fixed some of the game’s crippling problems before it came along.

I’m not trying to excuse Kane and Lynch. Given its budget and marketplace stance it should’ve been much, much better than it is. I picked it up along with its sequel for ten dollars, and I actually feel a little ripped off. But I am saying that something can be salvaged from the wreckage of this game. Much as horrible movies provide examples of the pitfalls of amateur moviemaking, Kane and Lynch provides young game designers with a roadmap of what can go wrong with their first title. So please, young developers, play Kane and Lynch today. If only so the mistakes it made will never come to haunt us again.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Congratulations on Realizing You Shouldn't Have Fucked Your Wife's Sister!

Today you're going try and wash your mouth out after brushing your teeth and find that your mouthwash scalds the inside of your mouth.

"What the fuck?!" you'll cry. Your wife will just smile.

"Oh, I replaced it with rattlesnake venom," she'll demur, grabbing your dick and smiling like she plans on cutting it off and eating it later.

"Does that have any restorative properties?" you'll whimper. She'll shake her head, no.

Congratulations on Realizing You Shouldn't Have Fucked Your Wife's Sister!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Congratulations on Dealing With Your Daddy Issues!


You’ve got more daddy issues than the whole rest of Sante Fe combined, but it’s no surprise. He left you and your momma with more debt than fleas, and given that his business was raising poorly-groomed dogs that’s a lot of debt. He left you cold, alone and he left you with the sluttiest drunk that Sante Fe did ever see which, again, is kind of the same sort of superlative we applied with the flea story.


But today you’re finally going to cope with it. You’re going to walk up to a mall Santa who is working for some inexplicable reason in the middle of March, slap him in the face and push him down on the ground. You’ll start shouting at him.

“You were never there for me!” you’ll scream, digging your heel into his back.

“Agggh!” he’ll cry, inarticulately.

“Son of a bitch!” you’ll shout, kicking him in the gut to get him to roll over. “Left me and my momma for nothin’! For this!”

You’ll stand there above that sorry slab of a man, an alcoholic who is just trying to make enough money to get his next drink. He’ll look up at you with red rimmed eyes, brimming with tears and you’ll see for the first time just how weak and pitiful your daddy really was.

You won’t realize that your ex-boyfriend lied to you about tracking your pappy down, that he just wanted to set you loose on a mall Santa to make some miserably asshole’s life a little worse. But he didn’t realize that the other side of your daddy issues was a big old motherly heart, and while you look down at the quivering man beneath you you’ll realize that he isn’t your father, even if your father could still be any number of mall Santas at the same mall. And you’ll formulate a plan to track him down.

“Shit mister, you ain’t my pappy,” you’ll say, shaking your head.

“No, I’m not,” the mall Santa will say, suddenly articulate.

“Well…shoot, mister, let me make it up to you,” you’ll say, unbuttoning your blouse while stroking your chest and smiling. At this point the mall Santa will be confused, and you’ll take advantage of that, grabbing his dick and stroking it until its hard, and then ramming it into your vagina.

You’ll rock that mall Santa’s world, thinking that through him you’ll uncover all of the secrets of the mall Santa profession. But really you’ll just have sex with a down on his luck, out of shape guy and make his world a much, much better place. After a few weeks you’ll realize that your father is probably dead and that he’s definitely not a Santa employed in the middle of spring at that particular mall. You’ll just settle into a relationship with Tony, the mall Santa, who really needed someone like you to help him out of his slump. And while it won’t last with him, it’ll be good and the two of you will emerge from your relationship stronger than when it started.

Congratulations on Dealing with Your Daddy Issues!