Friday, September 30, 2011

Congratulations on Making Being a Sailor a Little Bit Gayer, Homo!

There’s nothing gayer than the ocean. All that water rubbing up against other bits of water? Who knows what’s going on there. It’s safe to assume that some of that water is gay.

Also, isolated conditions and relatively loose sexual morays have perpetuated a stereotype, be it warranted or unwarranted, that most sailors are gay or like gay sex even if they aren’t gay. We’re not sure how the second part of that works.

Recently New York state has forwarded the ocean’s gay agenda, making matters worse by legally recognizing gays as people with rights like marriage, having sex and privacy when they’re not having sex. It’s kind of a boondoggle, and it’s been hotly contested by assholes, shitheads and fuckwits alike. And today you’re going to make it that much worse.

You’re a riverboat captain who works primarily on Niagara Falls, captaining tall ships that sail magnificently near the base of the falls. You do a lot of weddings and a lot of parties, but you’ve always maintained a strict “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for both your crew, and the attendees of those parties. You genuinely don’t care if the people you marry live, die or get divorced, so you haven’t thought overmuch about whether or not any of them are faking being straight.

But today your beliefs are going to come crashing down around you when a gay couple boards your ship and very politely asks you to be married.

For the first time in the history of your career as a captain who sails ships near or around the Great Lakes and marries strangers who wanted to have small ceremonies where they’re doused in water your heart will melt a little. These young men will have a look to them like they’ve been together for years, maybe even a decade. They’ll have a surety to their presence around one another that few of the straight couples you’ve married will have possessed, and they’ll look at one another with such love and passion that it’ll be impossible not to feel something powerful welling up inside you when you look at them.

You’ll acknowledge their request by officiating their ceremony with tears welling in your eyes. You’ll hope that everyone just assumes that it’s the water so that your crew doesn’t think you’re a big old homo, but as the ceremony rushes by they’ll all appear on deck, applauding the two young men before you and their love.

“Bless you both!” one of them will shout.

“Lock that sugar down, honey!” another will cry at them.

A third man will whistle, and your remaining crew members will smile at one another awkwardly and wink.

At this point you’ll realize just how gay your whole life has been and burst into tears, sobbing through the final intonations of the ceremony.

“I now pronounce you man and man. You may kiss the man.”

Congratulations on Making Being a Sailor a Little Bit Gayer, Homo!

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Congratulations on Ruining Your Daughter's Favorite Book!

We know you’re a professional book censor, which is bad enough. But you shouldn’t be bringing your work home with you.

For example, editing out sections of Shel Silverstein’s books. We’d understand if you were editing out parts where he talked about how parents shouldn’t hit their kids to make sure your kids never worry about you or your wife doing it. But you’re cutting out parts about lighthearted ways to look at life a little differently because you’re afraid that your child might look at the world with a sense of wonder and joy that might give them a raging case of “the gays.”

We get that you’re petrified of your kids telling you they’re interested in sex or that they’ve even heard of it. But studies show that parents who censor parts of Shel Silverstein books so that they seem less imaginative have super gay kids who are in the closet for a long time and generally unhappy until they get past thirty a hundred percent of the time.

So loosen up, broaden your horizon, and for fuck’s sake, stop deleting episodes of Queer as Folk off your Tivo. You’re not fooling anyone anymore.

Congratulations on Ruining Your Daughters’ Favorite Book!

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Congratulations on Winning the Falafel Arms Race!

Most people don’t know this but the falafel business is super aggressive. There’s a food cart every few feet looking to take down its nearest competitor, and doner salesmen who shell out low quality falafel along with their be-spoked mystery meat are constantly trying to undercut hard working Middle Eastern men like yourself who special in the ancient and time honored art of preparing falafel.

There are many paths to success. Coming up with the most delicious recipe, marketing your cart well, or just being lucky enough to have a store in a hippy-heavy neighborhood where protein crazed attractive young people flock to your shop to keep from keeling over. But in New York, the biggest of apples, sentiment against the Middle East following Nine-Eleven, a dense concentration of falafel related businesses and a diffusion of hippies in areas where it is not economically viable to rent store space have combined to make an especially hostile environment for making and selling falafel, be it over rice, in a sandwich or in a nice summer salad with some balsamic vinegar and a little pinch of love.

But you play games to win. You came to this country after the first Iraq war, you kept your business running through the second one while depression razed many of your competitors to the ground and now you stand on the eve of your victory. Today you’re going to win the falafel arms race.

The day will start with that new fryer you order showing up. You’ll have been waiting for it for months and months, and its arrival will signal a red letter day for your business: the day that you can finally stop worrying about running out of falafel in the middle of the day. With this new fryer you’ll be able to keep up with demand and produce fresh falafel with unprecedented speed. That means better ground, fried chickpeas for your customers and less waste for you.

This will be the final piece of a business plan you’ve been working towards for half a decade, but it won’t be complete without a quick call to homeland security to inform them that “Nature’s Best Falafel,” the store run by white people next door to you, is a terrorist cell.

“Why else would white people run a falafel store?” you’ll shout at the agent when he questions the authenticity of your evidence. He’ll quickly agree to your reasoning and hang up, eager to arrest someone who isn’t brown for a change.

Your opponents will be carried out of their shops during peak business hours (just after normal person lunch when hippies are either just waking up or just getting out of their bullshit hippy jobs) to the jeers and boos of onlookers. Everyone hates a terrorist, and even if the charges are eventually refuted they’ll never be able to recover from that. You’ll wring your hands and cackle as you watch, and when your customers look at you like something’s up you’ll shrug at them and shout at the top of your lungs.

“FUCK TERRORISM! I LOVE AMERICA!”

Congratulations on Winning the Falafel Arms Race!

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Congratulations Mechanical Pencil Hoarder!

Your office doesn’t do pens the way most places do. They’re bigger and better than that. They don’t fuck around, they don’t waste time and they’re not afraid of paying a little extra to get something much, much better. So instead of ordering Bics they order dozens and dozens of mechanical pencils each week and stock them in the places you’d normally find pens.

Most people show up and see this shit and they’re just blown away.

“Fuck me,” one of your temporary co-workers will have said upon her first day in the office, her jaw dropping. “Pencils.”

But you, you’re kind of a dick. And when you show up to temp for a four day period where you’re expected to do some light filing and answer phones while the permanent receptionist is out to get a boob job using the company’s health plan (they really are a spectacular company) you’re going to see those mechanical pencils and react in a startlingly similar way to the woman we mentioned earlier.

“Fuck me,” you’ll mumble. “Pencils.” Then you’ll stroke the beard you grew to look a little more like Jonathan Frakes and start plotting on how to steal as many pencils as possible over the next four days.

By the end of day once you’ll have collected a dozen mechanical pencils. You’ll have also mapped out the movements and habits of everyone in your office so thoroughly that you’ll be able to double that sum tomorrow and triple it the next day without attracting any notice. What’s really impressive is that you’ll have a scheme in place to clear out the entire supply of mechanical pencils for the office, hundreds of the things, on your last day.

This will mean that, should we ever need a mechanical pencil or should mechanical pencils ever become a form of currency within our society, you’ll find yourself in high demand. It also means that you will never be asked to temp at that particular office or by the agency that placed you there again. But at least you’ll have your pencils. Hundreds and hundreds of pencils.

Congratulations Mechanical Pencil Hoarder!

Monday, September 26, 2011

Congratulations on Finding the Raccoon!

It’ll be concealed inside of your trashcan, where it will be devouring the corpse of a squirrel that was unfortunate enough to die several days ago and has been rotting inside of a bad of Funyuns for the interim period.

You’ll happen upon it when you take out the trash and it leaps upon your face, startled by your intrusion into its makeshift home. It’ll dig its raccoony claws into your flesh and lash upon your eyes with its tiny, sharp fangs.

You’ll fall to the ground, crying out in pain as the raccoon savages you, trying to reason with it. But your attempts to do so will come out as half formed sentences and moans of pain rather than the thoughtful arguments about what home really means that you hoped to serenade your onetime companion with.

Luckily the raccoon will have a conditioned response to this sort of thing: he’ll start urinating uncontrollably, which will in turn make him calm. Calm enough to be removed from your face and carried under your arm like a stinky little parcel of love.

When you return to the dinner table with the raccoon under your arm your wife’s face will light up.

“Thank god, you found Jeffery!” she’ll exclaim, standing up from her chair so violently that it’ll fly backwards into a wall and shatter. Then she’ll get up and fawn over the little scamp, and to a lesser extent your wounds, before the two of you go upstairs and put Jeffery next to your sleeping infant son, where he belongs.

Congratulations on Finding the Raccoon!

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Closed Open Ends!

I’m prompted to press B to bring up my “tactical overlay.” My gun vanishes and is replaced with a series of calm triangles and hexes, geometry codifying the already highly symbolized language of the game world around me. As I pass my reticule over each triangle I get a little note on it. Some of them represent Cell Operatives, who are apparently very angry people who like shooting at me. Some of them represent piles of ammunition, some of them guns which, despite having a series of little bars next to them, remain mysteries to me more or less.

The most interesting part of this secondary visual language comes in the form of a set of golden hexagons with numbers on them. These hexagons offer suggestions to go to a certain place and use a certain tactic. Resupply, one of them tells me. Snipe, another invites. Stealth kill, number three recommends. Number four tells me “infiltrate,” which I guess means “walk here while invisible.” I can highlight any of these options, in case the level design doesn’t imply enough about what they want me to do, for future reference.

I examine each of them, considering the value of resupplying over there, instead of just using the piles of ammunition at my current position. I consider sniping in that building across the way, again instead of simply remaining in my current position. I stealth kill the person they suggest stealth killing and pick up his rifle and begin sniping from there, a position removed from the recommended course of sniping. I die, I reload, I try a new tactic, something bold and revolutionary: I ignore the suggestions the game throws my way.

The end result is something I’m used to: a brief, improvised firefight where the AI moves down a corridor at me and I beat them back, knocking out enough of them that I can move up the corridor and mop of the handful of AIs who realized that running away from me might be a good idea. When all is said and done I’ve moved from the beginning point of the level to the end point of the level successfully. I go back to investigate the various recommended routes, trying to discern some sort of rhyme or reason to their layout that would justify the advice the game had offered me when it asked me to traverse the level in a specific fashion, but I really can’t All I can see is a set of corridors which emerge into an arena which in turn becomes another set of corridors.

It’s an issue that has beset two of the ostensibly open world games I’ve been playing, and enjoying, of late: open-world isn’t what it used to be. Giving players a handful of options and asking them to move between two points rarely presents an open world so much as it presents a somewhat open ended question. No game better personifies this than Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which spends far less of its time expounding to be an open world.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is open ended, sure. But it admits that it’s a heavily structured game right in its introduction. It tells you about its city hubs and their function within the game. It rewards you for exploring and guides you, step by step, through the various means of accomplishing objectives available to you. It gives them all equal weight, letting you decide if you want to avoid enemies, confront them, hack your way through computer systems or knock them out and stack their bodies into a cozy log cabin, ninja style.

All of this gives you the impression that you’re in a world filled with possibilities. But as you move through levels you begin to see that there is less possibility at work in Deus Ex and more pathing. The design guides you towards certain solutions, subtly recommending that you take a certain route if you like a certain style of play. And regardless of what path you choose the ending is more or less the same. As I moved from place to place in the world of Deus Ex I was amused by how little the environment reflected my movements. I could kill an entire factory full of people, murder all of the bangers in D-Row, and no one in the city noticed that the DRBs were no longer with us. Purity First doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the loss of one of their cells. And the world itself remains a set of corridors guiding me from cutscene to cutscene.

But this is to be expected from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The Deus Ex series has always been all about multiple choices guiding you to linear outcomes with minor tweaks to them depending on your in-game actions. The first Deus Ex did it so well it revolutionized shooters, made them all want to give players options that didn’t really mean much for years to come. And when that finally started to fade and the Call of Duties and Battlefield: Bad Companies started to rise to prominence, it was a bit bittersweet to see such a rewarding kind of gameplay fade, even if it was satisfying to see their claims of any kind of open-ended problem solving finally laid to rest.

Crysis 2 is a far greater offender, if only for the games it shares its proximity with. The first Crysis had an impressive open world system that was completely subverted by its level design. You could avoid enemy positions completely if you chose to wander off the beaten path, but the game guided you along roads and through structured environments, encouraging you to move through its set pieces instead of around them. It was brilliant, in a way: you could cut through enemies, playing the “game” portion of the game, or you could run around them completely using the map to guide yourself across open territory, pausing when you find a patrol, measuring their movements and deciding whether or not it’s worth your time to fight them.

And Far Cry 2 must be compared to Crysis 2. These games are really all the misbegotten children of the first Far Cry, and Crysis 2 directly represents the creative direction of the team which produced that game. Far Cry 2, on the other hand, represents perhaps the most ambitious and creative effort in crafting an open world environment for a first person shooter. It presents no barriers, its sense of consistency is fluid and encourages characters to move carefully, to plan their actions and scout gingerly. It has moments of unexpected, unscripted beauty and the story missions can often constitute the least interesting portion of the game. Even those story missions truly are open ended: there’s no limit on the tools available to you. Far Cry 2 focuses mostly on the items you bring with you. The environment provides you with little tricks that you can engage, but it never attempts to guide you to them for anything more than shits and giggles: you’ll spend more time following level design cues to find hidden items than you will to achieve objects in Far Cry 2.

But Crysis 2, a game that does everything short of calling itself an open world game, is slavishly linear. Each firefight plays out the same way: a passage through an arena of some sort into a corridor. Occasionally the arena is a corridor, as is the case in one of the earliest and one of my favorite moments in the game where your first earnest battle with the Ceph occurs. But you’re always moving through a map with a set destination, with a set of recommended tools that the designs want you to use.

You can ignore them, sure. But lifting up that machine gun, stealth killing those guards, or sniping from that elevated position will make the game easier. But it won’t make the end experience any different: you’ll almost always slip a little and find yourself fighting your way out of a situation you fell into by accident. You’ll move to the end of the level under a hail of bullets, whether you wanted to or not.

And there’s not actually anything wrong with this. It’s totally valid. Plenty of games make it their central modus operandi, and it remains impressively profitable and interesting to see. Rage, for example, is the end result of id making such games for over a decade. But Crysis 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution imply in their advertising and the discourse surrounding them that they are open world games, places where you have choices. But when push comes to shove these choices dissolve – players will always encounter the same examples time and time again. They’ll always ask you to reach the same destination, and the manner in which you can do will rely on a set group of tools the developers want you to play with. They won’t offer up a series of possibly endings to each individual scenario the way Far Cry 2 does, or present you with an option that essentially involves completely ignoring the mission for your own fun the way that the first Crysis did (in its early levels, before it completely jumped the rails).

What we’re left with is a culture where linearity with options imbedded in its design is becoming an alternative to open world play, which is bad. Not in cases like Deus Ex, where meticulous level and game design makes the puzzles and options available to players (boss fights aside) interchangeably useful and in most cases mutually exclusive. But in cases like Crysis 2, where players are given the impression that they have options which are then stripped from them through haphazard level or game design or made meaningless by the surroundings the player is imbedded there is actual harm being done.

Because open world games are valuable experiences. They represent the true potential of games as narrative devices: machines of self insertion where we can imbed ourselves in a story and make it our own, write our own story on the pages of the world before us. Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution provide a similar canvas, a sort of paint by numbers which allows players to express themselves through available options and create a meaningful experience from those options by making the decisions you make important enough to change the way the game plays as it goes on. But games like Crysis 2, games with pretentions of being placed in real, breathing worlds, undermine the conversation surrounding these games. While it’s not sexy to market a game like Crysis 2 as a corridor shooter, that’s what it is. You can doll those corridors up to look like overpasses or subway terminals or shattered city streets, but they’ll remain corridors where you run and gun. And when you refuse to embrace these facts about your game you undermine the experience as a whole. And what’s worse, you draw attention away from other games with new ideas, open-world ideas, when you invite a discourse on your game which casts it as a game where options are important and the player is king. There’s nothing wrong with being a corridor shooter, nothing at all. But there’s something wrong with claiming to be a game about choice where the only decision players are asked to make is which weapon to use.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Congratulations on Your Amazing Spit Take!

You’re going to spit take all over Dick Cheney during a Q & A session sponsored by your student government.

It’s not going to be televised, because Cheney still has his people. It’s not even going to show up on Youtube, because six young men at the University of Iowa are going to die from “gun related complications” in their beds in various discrete incidents over the next four days, preventing the dissemination of any incriminating material.

But you’re going to spit all over Dick Cheney when he responds to your question about shooting a “friend” of his in the face. You’re going to spit take so severely that he’s going to decide that the only way to make it right is to murder you and buy the company that sells the green tea you were drinking and burn the warehouse where they store all that green tea to the ground.

Your school’s student government will also be disbanded, and everyone you’ve ever loved, every hand you’ve ever shaken, every ear that a word of you has fallen upon, will be made no more.

On the upside, the Indian reservation adjacent to the town you grew up in is going to grow substantially during the next week, so that’s pretty cool! Those guys get good news so rarely.

Congratulations on Your Amazing Spit Take!

Friday, September 23, 2011

Congratulations on Beating Your Own Echo in a Shouting Contest!

Most people don’t have the balls to do what you’re going to do today. But most people also don’t have the balls to live in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or to hunt and kill tourists as a means of sustenance, so you’re a singular individual in many respects.

Most days consist of you just tracking and killing obese people so that you can keep your ribs from meeting your spine and keep your now-carnivorous donkey happy. But sometimes you get a windfall of obese couples or poorly prepared families, and you don’t have to hunt for a few days. You normally occupy yourself during these lulls by shouting at the walls of the canyon in the hopes of silencing that voice that shouts back.

You’ll shout for hours and hours each day, but the voice always returns to you, failing to acknowledge your supremacy as a shouter even when you shout so much louder and prouder than it does. But today you’re going to go so crazy that you’ll go deaf for half an hour, and in that time you’re going to assume that you’ve beaten your echo in a shouting contest.

“FUCK YOU!” you’ll shout at your echo which, to your ears, will not respond.

One of your victims (the fattest one) will hear it and moan “help,” however. But you won’t hear him. You’ll just hear the rush of blood in your ears which, to your completely batshit crazy brain, will sound like victory music playing in honor of your success.

Congratulations on Beating Your Own Echo in a Shouting Contest!

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Congratulations You Pork Eating Mother Fucker!

Pizza is great. And so is the Muslim faith. Both things, at their best, promote peace on earth and the idea that there is a brotherhood between all men centralized by a unifying power that embraces all of us, infuses all of our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose and, when we are open to it, can give us a nearly limitless sense of joy.

But here’s the thing. The Muslim faith has a pretty stark stance against eating pork. And while pepperoni pizza is delicious, you can’t really call yourself a Muslim if you bring it to your mosque during a meeting and eat seven slices of it in front of your imam.

Which is why he’s going to be totally justified in calling you out on it.

“You really can’t do that here,” he’ll say, resting his hands on his ample belly. You’ll be pacing back and forth, ready to hit something (you have rage issues).

“FUCK YOU MAN!” you’ll shout at him. He’ll shake his head and look at you with an expression of sadness.

“I think we’ve talked about your anger before. Could you please calm down?” he’ll say.

You’ll throw a chair across the room in response.

“YOU’RE NOT MY DAD!” you’ll shout.

He’ll shake his head sadly and wave his hand, summoning a pair of massive black men in immaculate suits to his side.

“These gentlemen will see you out,” he’ll say. As he speaks the men will advance on you. It’ll be clear that pepperoni pizza and anger management trouble will have come up before and forced members of his congregation out into the cold, and these young men will have administered his will on this matter many times in the past.

“NINE ELEVEN WAS AN INSIDE JOB!” you’ll shout at him as his henchmen forcibly drag you out into the street.

“Not really,” he’ll say to you in a quiet but firm tone of voice that will echo through the room as you are removed from his presence, through a long silent hall, vaguely reminiscent of high school, and into the street.

The young men will hold you there outside until you calm down.

“We hope you understand that you’ll be welcome if you’re willing to calmly discuss this matter,” the smaller one will say.

“Other kinds of pizza are fine,” the larger one will say, nodding his agreement.

After you stop trying to hit them they’ll leave you there on the street, fuming, pacing back and forth. You’ll know that Allah can’t really want you to not eat pepperoni, but you won’t be able to articulate why. This will just make you angrier. To mitigate this anger you’ll stomp back to your apartment, plotting the whole way to try and trick your former imam and all of his followers into eating pepperoni so they can understand just how great it really is.

Congratulations You Pork Eating Mother Fucker!

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Congratulations Chemistry Teacher!

Public school teachers don’t make what they deserve. They certainly don’t make a living wage! They qualify for shit like food stamps and whatnot, but that ain’t no way to live. So you’re going to make like those folks you’ve seen on the TV and you’re going to try and cook and sell your own meth using your knowledge of chemistry.

Step one is to go to the hardware store where your brilliant but troubled student works and try to recruit him.

“Making meth is a terrible idea,” he’ll tell you. “The process of cooking meth is horribly dangerous. Even if you don’t blow your lab the fumes can do serious permanent damage to your lungs, eyes and skin if your protective gear is less substantial than a hazmat suit.”

“Pfft,” you’ll tell him with a wave of your hand as you purchase a bunch of industrial strength cleaners from his co-worker after he refuses to sell them to you.

“You’ve just made me and everyone else in here an accessory!” he’ll shout as you leave the store. He’ll be waving his cell phone at you, 9-1-1 emblazoned on its screen, but you won’t pay him any heed. Instead you’ll go to the home of your second most promising troubled student, who could probably get Cs if he really tried. He’ll be super psyched that you came to ask for his help.

“I fucking love Breaking Bad,” he’ll shout, nearly rousing his mom from her alcoholic slumber. The two of you will high five and embark to your van, driving off to the trailer in the middle of the desert you’ll have rented using a credit card. You’ll have rented and stocked it for the express purpose of trying to cook meth.

Using your bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, which is little better than reading a Wikipedia entry on how to make meth, you’ll try to cook up your first batch. After around forty five minutes of effort the trailer will have transformed from a vehicle for subsistence living into a big old acid filled bomb. The fumes will render both of you unconscious in minutes and swiftly begin eating away at your lungs and soft tissues.

After around two hours the fumes will grow thick enough that the air inside your mobile meth lab will ignite. The entire trailer will be transformed into a makeshift bomb, exploding with a slow, pulsating burn out that will sear the area around the trailer and scar the desert with volatile gas. This will destroy some evidence of what you were trying to do, but not enough to keep your life insurance company from giving your parents the money they so richly deserve after. You’ll go to your grave just as much of a disappointment and financial drain on them in death as you were in life.

Congratulations Chemistry Teacher!

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Congratulations on Discovering the Illuminati!

You spend your days pinning pieces of yarn on to some maps you hang on your wall. It’s not that productive a way to live, but it keeps you busy and it keeps you entertained. Yarn, after all, is cheaper than cable, and times are tough all around nowadays.

Most of the time the shit you spin is so completely bonkers it could never possibly reflect the truth about reality. But today you’re going to make a number of connections related to the Illuminati, the secret society that secretly governs all of the things that happen in the world around you. You’re going to put some yarn on a map connecting where various homeless people around your apartment congregate and put a post-it note in the middle of all these yarn strings reading “Illuminati.”

This assumption will be based on the fact that the homeless people kind of stand around in the shape of a pyramid when you map them all out. This pyramid happens to be the shape of the downtown area of your city, but you won’t think of that because you’re a crazy person who puts yarn on maps. Your roommate won’t think much of it for the very same reason.

But tonight you’ll be vindicated, kind of. Tonight a bunch of homeless dudes are going to bust in on your apartment and hold you down by your sheets. They’ll surround you and remove their hooded sweatshirt hoods from their heads and stare down at you, their beards ruffled, their stench overwhelming.

“How did you know?” they’ll ask. You’ll stop thrashing when they speak, fear gripping you. You’ll try to hold back, but after only a few seconds your answer will spill out.

“I didn’t. I swear.”

They’ll look at you, then at one another, then at you again. Their looks will be cool, calculating, mercenary. You’ll swear they were eying you up, guessing your weight. How much meat they could get from cutting you up. Then one of them will speak.

“Interesting.”

They’ll share looks again, never glancing at you, never speaking a word. After a few minutes of looking at one another and smelling really, really bad they’ll turn their attention back to you and vocalize their thoughts.

“How would you like to be a member of the Illuminati?” they’ll ask.

You’ll shrug, which will consist of a very specific kind of struggle against the sheets that will remain drawn tightly against you. They’ll smile, an expression erupting simultaneously across all of their faces, black toothed gashes checkered with white. Then darkness will overtake you as the process begins and you’re inducted into the second most crestfallen secret society in the world today.

Congratulations on Discovering the Illuminati!

Monday, September 19, 2011

Congratulations Turkey Sandwich!

Today you’re a turkey sandwich. The greatest turkey sandwich in America.

You’re going to find yourself in western Pakistan, near the Afghani border. You’ll be air dropped in with a mission: to find and eliminate one of the top al Qaeda operatives in the region, making his death look like an accident. You’ll begin your mission by imbedding yourself amongst other turkey sandwiches. This will involve maneuvering yourself on to a platter of sandwiches and remaining completely inert for days on end. Hardly a challenge for an operative of your skill.

After days of waiting you’ll be brought to one of the many Secret Lairs of Al Qaeda that have been established in Pakistan, as we all know. Deep inside this Secret Lair (a townhouse on the outskirts of Zhob) you’ll encounter your target: some dude with a generically foreign sounding name who, despite his wealthy Saudi upbringing and relatively lavish lifestyle, has become synonymous in our minds with terrorism.

You’ll find him alone in his room. You’ll be on a plate, sitting there quietly, waiting for him to act, to give you your chance. You’ll wait there for nearly three hours before he finally makes his move, taking a bite out of you.

He’ll tumble back, reeling after just one bite. The subtle peanut oil covering every inch of your tasty, tasty body, infusing the delicious sauce smothering your peanut glazed meats, will have gone undetected by his underlings. And this particular terrorist, who has more in common with a suburban kid from Connecticut than he does with the people who fight and die for him, shares that suburban child’s embarrassing peanut allergy.

He’ll fall to the ground choking, gasping. He’ll struggle to rise to his feet, to press a button calling for help. But you’ll move quickly, standing on his back ever so gently (you’re a sandwich) and pressing him down as he lays on the ground, choking to death.

“Goodnight,” you’ll whisper in his ear before departing from his window, a bite removed from your body, and making your way towards India, where extraction awaits.

Congratulations Turkey Sandwich!

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Infinity Engine In Memorium!

If the Source engine is an infinitely malleable piece of software, a golden calf constantly being reshaped to meet the needs of its users, then the Infinity Engine is wrought of folded steel: a tool, perfect for its task, but totally intractable in its function. Still, there’s something about the Infinity Engine, its simple elegance and adaptability to various kinds of RPGs, that makes it not only important but beautiful in the context of its time.

There were many top down RPG engines that took advantage of point and click interfaces. Fallout has its home-brew engine, resplendent with bugs and with iffy context sensitive cues that failed to activate as often as not. This wonderful toybox that made one of gaming’s classics possible had many, many problems that the Infinity Engine solved handily, running the gamut from unreliable hirelings who could barely be ordered, let alone controlled, to tricky triggers and a forced turn-based combat system with one of the single worst user interfaces I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.

Arcanum had the same set of problems, paired with scripting issues that dwarf the considerable ones apparent in later Infinity Engine entries, more than enough contextual issues and a completely un-usable real time combat system, which wouldn’t be so bad if Arcanum hadn’t come out so long after Bioware released the Infinity Engine and fixed all those problems Troika’s developers ran into while they were making Fallout. Even Lionheart, a hilariously ahistoric game with a me-too top down isometric perspective, failed to take the lessons of the Infinity Engine to heart, using its own bugged out, poorly interfaced control methods to trailblaze new ground in making games unnecessarily difficult to play.

Compared to these games the Infinity Engine and its various entries had an understand elegance all their own. With a user interface designed to translate the rule set of Dungeons and Dragons, a rule set aped by nearly all of the abovementioned games to one extent or another, it managed to simplify complicated ideas and add wonderfully intuitive context sensitive elements to its operations without making them overly buggy, a challenge that most script heavy games still encounter today.

Streamlined design, unobtrusive and some of the least demanding technical requirements in gaming history all made the Infinity Engine a great tool for delivering content to a wide array of gamers. But what truly made it impressive was the loyalty to its source material and diversity it offered to developers within its context. While the Infinity Engine only represented Dungeons and Dragons rules, it did so with such aplomb that its hard to critique its realization of D&D’s mechanics. While there are more literal translations of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons there’s no game that more effectively captures the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons, its exploration, discovery, progression and combat, than the games of the Infinity Engine.

Take, for instance, Baldur’s Gate, which introduced a generation of gamers to the “vanilla” flavor of D&D, Forgotten Realms. Baldur’s Gate essentially ran a campaign for players, but it never forced players into any situations or artificially gated any gameplay areas off. There were places you could not visit, but the triggers that opened them related not to timelines being met but rather events proceeding as planned. The world was wide open for exploration, and the plot could be advanced completely out of order, various sections of the game bypassed or omitted as the player desired. Baldur’s Gate delivered the campaign hook, gave the players vague directions, and then never asked them to stay on the beaten path. It was essentially an introductory campaign rendered in silicon, a new and terrific accomplishment over the punishing and sometimes slavishly linear and punishingly arranged Gold Box games of old.


And if some of the other Infinity Engine games, the like of Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate 2, seem derivative of Baldur’s Gate’s game play formula think of Torment, the game that redefined RPGs for a generation.

With a complicated system of variables running beneath its hood and a world as vibrant and alive as anything I’ve ever played, Torment took the basic framework introduced in Baldur’s Gate and reshaped it into an event more contextually sensitive world. It fixed many of the issues that plagued Baldur’s Gate (randomly generated stats, duping tricks and under or completely undeveloped NPCs) and blew them out of the water. Torment showed just how well the scripting language of the Infinity Engine could work in the hands of masters, just how well a primarily text based engine could work with some minimalist visuals and some truly expert writing behind it.

The Infinity Engine didn’t last long, nor did the era of small, isometric RPGs. Even though these titles still live on vibrantly in gaming memory (so much so that they still occasionally go on sale in storefronts as prominent as Impulse) they were but a flash in the pan. Eventually the Infinity Engine would give way to the Aurora Engine, a three-dimensional shit show of an interface that introduced a brand new set of problems that it would never fix. With the death of the Infinity Engine there was a marked decline in party RPGs, and Dungeons and Dragons licensed RPGs in general. Neverwinter Nights made a good attempt at sustaining the environment, but it simply couldn’t do the job. The Aurora Engine was not the Infinity Engine, and its means of resolving the complicated and sometimes fickle rules of D&D, even if it was more loyal to the official rules of the game, lost something in translation.

But it is with fondness that I recall the Infinity Engine and the golden age of role playing games it provided us with. While it was just a piece of software, infinitely replaceable in the eyes of both its players and its developers, it accomplished something incredible: it made, and indeed sustained, an entire mode of play for half a decade, creating some of the most interesting titles I’ve ever played and bringing me back to them again and again to this very day.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Congratulations on Fucking the Hottest Chick at Chili's!

Some people go to Chili’s for the baby back ribs. Some people go there for the chicken finger dinners or the molten chocolate cake or the margaritas the size of your head, resplendent with water.

You go there for the pussy.

Usually the spread at Chili’s is pretty meh. A handful of desperate women with poorly applied makeup trudging about, leaning over tables with young men at them, looking to rub up against someone, anyone. But tonight there’s going to be a choice piece of tail, and you’re looking to capitalize.

She’ll be dressed in a yellow cardigan and a long, flowing dress. Her son will be there, no more than eleven years old, so you know that she’s got trouble keeping men in the house and that her junk isn’t still all messed up from having the kid. And you’ll know exactly how to play it.

You’ll walk up and open up with “Sup mamacita,” leaning over her table as you do so so that your tie hangs down just past the edge of the table, pointing downwards at her thighs like a sexy neckcock. She’ll respond by placing her hand on your chest.

“Oh my,” she’ll murmur at you. “My son needs a strong father figure. Maybe you’d be interested?”

You’ll nod. “For at least one night,” you’ll tell her. She’ll smile and hold up her finger for the check and you’ll pump your fist in the air and turn around to give your friends a thumbs up. But they’ll already be distracted, their eyes wandering after battered waitresses and female hockey players. They won’t see your sweet, sweet victory as you walk out of Chili’s and into the mini-van of the hottest piece of ass in the entire place. They won’t be able to imagine your journey as you ride to her condo in the backseat, sitting behind her son.

They won’t know the feeling of air rushing on your face or the nervous tension you’ll feel as you quietly wish you could ask her son to roll up the window. But that might make things weird, and you really won’t want to jeopardize getting into his mom’s pants tonight. But the ride will be short, and a little nervous tension can be good sometimes. You’ll mull this thought over in your head as the highway races by you. A little nervous tension can be good sometimes.

Congratulations on Fucking the Hottest Chick at Chili’s!

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Congratulations on Convincing Her to Come Into Your Fallout Shelter!

As the bombs drop the girl next door will cower beneath the awning outside your building, gazing at you across the street. You’ll have the door to your fallout shelter open, your hand braced on the wheel to seal it in the event that a teenager or a person of color comes along and tries to kill you to secure their safe haven.

“Come on,” you’ll call at her. “It won’t be that bad.”

She’ll frown as she looks at you. Mentally she’ll be recording every oddity you ever visited upon her, every late night game of “gayser tag” that she had to walk by in the hallway, the loud sessions of masturbation every other night, groans cutting through the paper thin walls between your apartments.

She’ll think of the time you spent carving out a fallout shelter in the basement beneath the building next door under the condition that, if it ever came down to it, you’d let the super stay there with you. She spent weeks watching the two of you hollow out a passage leading to god only knows where in the company of that heavyset Ukrainian man, laughing with him, sharing bottled water with him, asking him about his family. He’ll be laying a few feet away from you now, his skull crushed with a brick.

She’ll frown and bite her lip, eying you up and down, looking at the fires in the sky, threatening to collapse upon you at any moment.

“Will we have to do sex stuff?” she’ll ask. You’ll almost hear the bile in her throat.

You’ll shrug and look at your shoes for a moment before nodding. She’ll bring her hand up to her mouth and look at the skies again. You’ll be losing her; you’ll be able to tell.

“But we can do it with the lights out,” you’ll shout over the cacophony as the next round of bombs fall. “And you won’t have to do any kind of oral on me.”

“Can I receive oral?” she’ll shout back. You’ll nod.

“I don’t see why not. Unless there’s something weird down there.” She’ll hold her thumb and forefinger apart and wince a little, and you’ll shrug.

“Come inside and we can discuss it,” you’ll cry, glancing at the sky, preparing for it to fall at any second.

She’ll run across the street, clutching the grocery bag filled with all of her worldly possessions to her chest (a laptop computer and charger, a bottle of water, some beans and rice and a tattered paperback, erotica judging by the cover). When she darts through the door into the concrete interior of the passage you’ve carved, etching under the city to one of the fallout shelters of old.

As you spin the wheel of the door shut, sealing the two of you underground, she’ll put her arm on your shoulder, look into your eyes and ask you.

“No weird stuff for the first year, right?”

You’ll nod. “Unless anilingus counts as weird,” you’ll reply.

She’ll smile and the two of you will walk towards the old fashioned fallout shelter, hand in hand, each of you silently hoping that the other’s genitals aren’t too, too weird.

Congratulations on Convincing Her to Come Into Your Fallout Shelter!

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Congratulations Juniper Jackson!

Juniper Jackson got a few stories to tell.

Juniper Jackson ain’t never known no failure. He ain’t never known no chains of any kind. One day his daddy told him to sit in the corner quiet like and wait ‘til he was told to come back and what did Juniper Jackson do? He stood up lickity split and left that chair sittin’ in the corner by isself afore he went off into the big world to find his fortune.

Juniper Jackson took his first purse at the age of five, a week after he left his daddy’s home. He did it so quick and so calm everyone thought he was holdin’ it for his momma, and he ate for a month off of what he found in there.

Juniper Jackson took his first bank at the age of fifteen, bandana tied around his head and no gun or nothin’, just his hand in his pocket and his swingin’ balls. First time he ever did it he felt such a rush like you wouldn’t believe walkin’ away from that place. He knew he’d found his callin’ and that sure as shit he’d be doin’ it for years to come.

You be Juniper Jackson, and you’ve got yourself a few stories to tell from years gone by. You been runnin’ all around the world and seen all kinds of banks, taken all kinds of paper. And in all your forty years and hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs you pulled you ain’t never shot nobody.

All that changes today.

You’ll be pullin’ a quick in and out at a Wells Fargo in the southern part of Wisconsin, in some small town you wouldn’t be able to name if you saw it on a map. You’ll have your gun in the bank of a teller’s neck while she’s counting out the money, whispering to her that it’s all gonna be okay.

And it will be, for her. But a security guard, a young white boy who musta grown up no more’n a mile from that bank, will come up off the floor holding his gun and you’ll slide your weapon right towards him and pow. Right in the chest, he’ll go down with a spin and a clatter as the gun hits the floor and not a peep elsewise.

The way he’ll be layin’, it won’t look right, but you won’t look overlong. You’ll take the money, that as which you’ve gotten from the teller, step out the door and nod at the people inside.

“Sorry,” you’ll tell them afore you start your way outside, walking down the street, across the main drag and towards the parking lot you’ll have stashed the car you stole in.

As you drive away to the movie theater where your real car is parked, two hours north in another town without a name as far as you know, you’ll feel a pang of regret.

“Didn’t want to,” you’ll tell the empty car, looking at the money. “Just had to.”

You’ll sit there and drive and calculate from the weight of the sack how much that young man’s life was worth. Won’t be more than a few thousand dollars, you’ll guess. Ain’t no life worth that little.

Congratulations Juniper Jackson!

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Congratulations Rainstorm!

You’re a rainstorm, and today you’re going to ruin everything.

“Agh, my wedding!” the bride will cry, shaking her fist at the sky while her goth little sister shrugs and eyes the groom, wondering how he feels about marrying her sister now that she’s shown him who she really is under all the makeup.


“Hm,” the retired investment banker will declare from inside his Lexus as the first droplets of what will soon be your torrential downpour scar his windshield and make him rethink the nine holes he planned to get. He’ll weigh the possibility of a DUI after a few drinks at the Nineteenth Hole against the chore of seeing his wife sober so soon after storming out, both of them grisly prospects.

“Agh,” the homeless man will mumble as he turns over and tries to put a piece of cardboard between the part of him that lays exposed from under the loading dock where he’s taken shelter and you. He knows it won’t hold up long, but if he can even get a few hours of rest in before walking to a park to find a better place to spend the night it won’t be so bad.

Every one of these people will be upset today, and it’s going to be entirely your fault. The only people who won’t be pissed at you are all the couples, roommates and co-workers who decide to take your cue and spend the day inside fucking one another. Those people will be pretty psyched to see you show up. But everyone else is just going to be rat pissed at you for fucking up all their plans, however loosely formed they may have been.

Congratulations Rainstorm!

Monday, September 12, 2011

Congratulations Persian Douchebag!

Polish up your golden chains and put on that t-shirt that doesn’t actually fit you that Jersey Shore made you think was a good idea, because tonight you’re a Persian douchebag. You’re going out on the town and you’re going to dress that way even though you, like every other person alive today, should know better.

You’re going to go to “da club,” which is what you call your friend Greg’s parent’s basement in their house in the Bronx. You’re going to get way too drunk and you’re going to end up sucking Greg’s dick in a bathroom while a bunch of girls peek through an open door and giggle uncontrollably.

You’re going to wake up the next morning in Greg’s arms, dazed and confused and feeling strangely fulfilled at first. This feeling will rapidly translate into a sort of disgust you’ve always reserved for gay dudes you see on the train – the sort of creeping disgust that always comes from trying to look at something you simply cannot bear to see, a truth you cannot bear to face.

As you leave Greg’s parent’s house, stepping over unconscious men and women alike, you’ll feel dizzy. Finding your footing will be a chore. And as you reach the door you’ll want, desperately, to look back and see if Greg is watching you, to see if he’s looking at you as you go. You’ll want to see if he’s turned over after waking up a little. You’ll want to see if he acknowledges just what has passed between the two of you.

But you won’t turn to look. You’ll step outside, put on a pair of oversized sunglasses, and use your i-phone to find the nearest subway stop that can get you back to Manhattan, where you can hold off on taking a shower as long as possible while you and your roommates lie about hooking up with various women last night.

Congratulations Persian Douchebag!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Deus Ex Comes Again!

It’s a bit late, sure, but I couldn’t call myself a video game blogger if I didn’t write about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and it took me this long to finish it, damnit. There’s been a pretty accurate and appropriate critical consensus about the latest installment of Deus Ex, which I’m pleased to see. Some of the reviews have been incoherent, some fawning in ways I’m not sure I agree with. And I’m absolutely puzzled by the fact that people haven’t compared it to Alpha Protocol, which kind of addressed a lot of the problems that Deus Ex has and did a better job of telling a story, allowing players to develop their own story and letting players develop their character than Deus Ex does, though it does so at the cost of Deus Ex’s frenetic capacity for action and impressive polish.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution plays like an homage to the first Deus Ex, a tremendous improvement over the ambitious mess that was Deus Ex: Invisible War (a brief aside: why is this series so averse to numbering its sequels and so fond of offering up nearly incoherent subtitles in their place?). The touted “four pillars of game play” which guide character development provide players with an impressively customizable experience, especially at the beginning of the game. I spoke with a friend of mine who normally plays FPSes in a “kill ‘em all” style who took an unexpectedly peaceful approach which still differed from my own totally non-lethal approach to the game. Everyone he’d spoken with had a totally different approach to each mission as well, from a guns blazing shootout with the DPD to a stealthy takedown of local gang members. I’m now playing as a ruthless killing machine armed with a revolver in the tradition of Count Zero’s street samurai and the experience is very, very different from my first playthrough, though even with the difficulty cranked up to 11 the shooting approach still smacks of playing the game on easy mode for me.

This touted diversity of play is achieved mostly by making its levels chock full of stuff to interact with and giving players a lot of options on how to move through this stuff and interact with this stuff in order to find other stuff and achieve stuff. There are some skill trees that determine how you can move stuff around or hack stuff and there’s a skill that makes you invisible so you can grab stuff if you want to. There are other skill trees that allow you to take less damage while you kill stuff or recharge your energy faster when you knock stuff out. But it’s not just the wealth of options available to you that make Deus Ex work: a great deal of what makes these various methods of play so great and infinitely usable is that the developers have taken pains to offer many different routes to accomplish each objective, each fitting some sort of skill set or play style, none of which is “better” than any other.

But this also leads to a problem: because the success of their system hinges not only on a painstakingly designed skill system but also on the design of each individual level there are some pacing issues. The most notable pacing problem emerges during the game’s horribly designed boss fights. Each “boss fight” feels like something an executive at Eidos forced into the game, a totally incongruous progress marker crammed into an otherwise fluid experience. Unofficial “boss fights” are wonderfully brief experiences against named enemies and their cohorts, and they suit the plot just fine, but each actual “boss fight” consists of a drag out match against a super-powered enemy with erratic movement and shitloads of health in an arena made by a level designer in twenty minutes. Sometimes the boss fights will occur against enemies who cloak themselves, which is just infuriating in and of itself. But the real crime is that there’s no non-violent solution to any of these arenas.

The original Deus Ex never forced you to fight anyone. In fact you could famously make your way through the entire game without ever fighting an enemy – you could evade even the most challenging opponent through stealth and intrigue. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution wants you to sit down and fight three mercenaries three times. It wants you to associate these mercenaries with an artificial difficulty curve which is absent from the rest of the game and it wants you to care about killing these mercenaries based on their appearance in a brief cutscene at the beginning of the game. It’s a huge problem, one addressed in a handful of amazingly developed “unofficial boss fights” that take place on actual levels and have actual non-violent solutions. If the mercenary fights had been more like these “non-boss fights” they could’ve served as incredible set pieces that players could discuss their approach to and use to shape their overall experiences. But instead they’re just levels with only one solution at hand in them, poorly constructed pieces of level design that lay bare the underlying principles behind Deus Ex.

They’re sort of the real price of admission here: Deus Ex is unquestionably worth the hefty price tag of a new video game. Given how high this bar is becoming for me as my life goes on, that’s saying quite a bit. But the boss fights are tremendous speed bumps. They make me want to stop playing. They were the single biggest contributor to the feeling I had at game’s end that the whole experience was becoming a chore. But they are the only real black mark in the game. Late game level design is a little meh compared to the vibrant settings and meticulously structured areas you’ll encounter in the first few places you wander through, and the developers re-use city hubs a bit too often for my taste. I would’ve liked to see a third hub somewhere along the line, and one or two more new areas that would’ve rewarded exploration and given me some new chances to interact with the world around me in a situation where my choices weren’t limited “run and gun” or “turn invisible and run.”

But how long would it have taken Deus Ex: Human Revolution to emerge as this perfect project? The game already took nearly four years to develop, a fact illustrated in the game’s strangely poignant end-sequence and credits (an aside, I’d say that Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a set of credits worth watching if you care at all how your games are made: a deeply human tribute to the time and effort that Eidos put into making this title) and these rushed bits of game seem less like a failure of design and more like the end result of a hostile development environment becoming more and more of the norm in video games.

Deus Ex is wonderful. It is well crafted, intelligent and provides players with lots of tools to engage lots of interesting puzzles. It has some great fan service, which you can miss if you aren’t watching. It has a bit of a weak overall story (if you don’t catch the plot twist within the first five minutes of the game then you might be asleep) but it’s not really a game that wants to tell you a story: it’s a game that wants to give you an awesome framework to play around in. The story gives you just enough context to let you have fun with the whole thing, gives you a few characters to care about and some forced backstory to “motivate” you.

But never forget: the play is the real motivator. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of those rare titles that evokes joy in its players simply through its mechanics. It allows them to make choices, gives them a framework to make those choices meaningful from a game play perspective, and gives you enough options that you simply cannot use all of them during the course of play. While its boss fights are chores and its ending is a bit of a design nightmare the core game is so much fun, the joy of exploration and exploitation so wonderfully sustained throughout, that it is well worth the time and money it asks of you.

Given Alpha Protocol’s middling critical response and poor sales we’re unlikely to ever see a sequel to it. So if you’re like me and you loved Alpha Protocol I’d double down on my recommendation for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s not perfect, but it provides that wonderful sensation that you are truly changing the world as you play, the sensation that you are influencing the environment around you. The choices you make develop in unexpected ways that never feel trite or unexpected, and while a handful of story issues and scripting bugs persist in the final product Deus Ex is so evocative and well crafted that it’s hard to approach it with anything but love.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Congratulations on Getting Out of Gitmo!


This week has been a roller coaster ride for you. It started off with you fingering the First Lady, then getting the shit kicked out of you by our surprisingly bad-ass President. Since then you’ve spent most of your week learning basic Spanish along with the operational procedures of Guantanamo Bay. Your natural hotness has been kept under wraps due to your relatively heavy bruising and the fact that most of your days are spent in isolation, where no one can see your face or know that you have feelings, family members who care about you or memories of any kind.

The end result will be a super introspective week where you’ll have learned a lot about who you really are, what you really want and just how far you can be pushed. You’ll have learned that you have a very low threshold for pain, and that you don’t really deal with it well when people don’t give you food or water for an entire day. But don’t despair! Today things are going to get way better.

Today instead of just kicking the shit out of you first thing in the morning the guards will burst into your cell with a set of manacles and a hood. They’ll hold you down while they fit you with the restraints and then lead you out, occasionally bumping you into walls.

“Oops,” they’ll mumble sarcastically each time they do so, laughing under their breath as they push you on. The walk will last for around fifteen minutes, and it will come as a tremendous relief to your atrophied muscles, bundled from hours spent shackled, prone in your cell.

The walk will end with you being shoved into a loud place with a metal floor. The sensation of dramatic movement paired with the rhythm of the noises surrounding you will eventually let you figure out that you’re on a helicopter. A very fast helicopter, by the way it makes you feel.

You’ll remain hooded for the entire flight. Not until you’re back on the ground and you’ve been lead through several halls will the hood be removed, revealing a doctor’s office with a tired old man in a lab coat standing in it. He’ll give you a brief physical, occasionally making marks on a clipboard, speaking to you only about your medical history. When the entire process is done he’ll knock on the door and a pair of Secret Service agents, including the one that caught you on Monday, will burst into the room.

“Come with us sir,” he’ll say in a forceful tone, not a whit of familiarity in his voice.

You’ll follow them through incredibly decadent, vaguely familiar winding halls. After a minute of walking around you’ll realize just why they’re so familiar: you’ll be in the White House. And you’ll be heading towards the Lincoln Bedroom, where you once banged Susan Rice.

When you reach the doors the Secret Service agent who caught you will open it for you, holding it open with a grin on his face.

“They’re waiting for you,” he’ll inform you tonelessly as his compatriot gently pushes you through the opening.

Inside the Lincoln Bedroom you’ll find Michelle Obama waiting for you in a nightgown with the biggest of grins on her face.

“Welcome back,” she’ll purr at you.

Your first reaction will be panic.

“Your husband,” you’ll begin, sweating pouring from your pores, stinging in your still-open cuts. But then a hand will come down on your shoulder, strong and reassuring.

“Let’s do this,” Barack Obama will tell you, grabbing your belt from behind as the First Lady advances on you, propelling you into the annals of history.

Congratulations on Getting Out of Gitmo!

Friday, September 9, 2011

Congratulations Vampire Fucker!


You’re not actually very interesting, and not nearly as unique as you think you are. The fact that you frequent clubs filled with people who are dressed exactly like you should’ve given that away by now. But you still get out there and twitch arthymically on the dance floor until some cute boy is sufficiently relaxed by your total inability to move your body to work up the courage to ask you to come home.

Tonight you’re not even going to make it out on the dance floor. While you’re downing your third appletini, checking your fishnets to make sure they’re torn in all the right places, a young man will walk up to you. He’ll place his hand on your shoulder, put his lips by your ear, and speak.

“Let’s go. Now.”

You won’t be able to resist.

You’ll follow him home through alleys and side roads, winding footpaths through concrete jungles that you later won’t be able to recall or even describe aside from the inordinate length of the shadows and the whispers that seemed to emerge from them. When you reach his apartment you won’t notice walking up stairs or opening any doors – you’ll simply be inside of his apartment suddenly, sprawled across his couch with his hand between your legs and his mouth on your neck.

What passes in the night will be in a fog as well, a mist of passion, pleasant sensations accompanied by shocking intensity that will plague your dreams for weeks to come. The only thing you’ll remember is waking up on an unfamiliar stoop, wrapped in a blanket. Your neck will feel sore, and when you touch it you’ll notice a pair of red marks, conspicuously spaced dots, adorning your neck. You’ll feel along your body, checking to see if you’re dressed, making sure you still have your purse. After a few minutes of fumbling you’ll find a small note, hastily scrawled.

“That was fun,” it will read. “You should get tested.”

You’ll crush the note in your hand, stand up and walk home, cursing under your breath for the loss of your perfect record.

Congratulations Vampire Fucker!

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Congratulations on Avoiding a Lengthy, Unpleasant Conversation With Your Ex!


When you show up to see your ex at the hospital you won’t come bearing flowers. You won’t even come bearing a smile, just a computer bag and a weight on your shoulders like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll spend the entire elevator ride up to his floor chewing your lip and wishing you were better at avoiding consequences, or at the very least better at drinking yourself into a constant state of oblivion like Shelly, your crazy bitch of a roommate.

But you always try to do the right thing, even if you try to do the right thing by yourself first and everyone else second. So it’ll be kind of a relief when you show up in his room and he’s passed out in a traction harness, his face twisted in an expression of agony. This means you won’t have to talk to him. You’ll just leave your note to him filled with your list of reasons for leaving him on his bed stand and head back to the elevator.

As you ride down you’ll feel lighter, the knowledge that you did the right thing shining in your mind. And as you make eyes at the male nurse in the elevator with you, tracing the outline of your aerieola through your shirt and pressing your tongue into the side of your mouth to give him the impression there’s something in it, you’ll know that deep down you’re a giver, and you just gave your ex the greatest gift of all: closure.

Congratulations on Avoiding a Lengthy, Unpleasant Conversation With Your Ex!

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Congratulations on Falling From Her Fire Escape!


It’s tough to say goodbye to someone you loved. And it can be even tougher to say goodbye to them when they refuse to speak to you or respond to your text messages.

Which is why you’re going to find yourself on your ex-girlfriend’s fire escape late, late tonight, climbing up, wincing at each moan of the metal beneath your feet. You’ll be a floor and a half beneath her window when her roommate will poke her head out and look down at you.

“She doesn’t wanna talk to you!” she’ll slur down at you. She’ll have been drinking. The half-empty bottle of Jack in her fist will be evidence enough of that.

“I’d like to hear that from her!” you’ll shout back up. Her roommate will drag her head back in the window for a moment, and you’ll hear speech from within the apartment. It won’t quite be shouting, but it’ll be close, and when her roommate reappears in the window it’ll be clear that the outcome wasn’t in your favor.

“She dasn’t wanna!” she’ll scream down at you.

This will give you a moment’s pause. You’ll have climbed up like four stories at this point, and you’ll have jumped up to get her fire escape down in the first place, which was really really hard. You won’t want to turn back empty handed, but if your ex doesn’t want to talk to you there really isn’t a lot you can do about it.

But nobody ever accomplished anything by quitting. So you’ll grit your teeth, step up on the next rung on the ladder and shout up at her roommate.

“Fuck you!”

You’ll scramble up as fast as you can, trading sure footing for speed. Her roommate will duck back inside for a moment while you rush up, and when she reappears she’ll have the whiskey bottle, now empty, clutched in her hand.

“No!” she’ll shout before throwing the bottle at your head.

She won’t hit you, but she will make you shift your weight to dodge her. And as you shit your weight you’ll feel the fire escape twist beneath you and give way a little. Not all the way, but just enough that you’ll go tumbling off of it.

You’ll plummet down, your shoulder catching out of the guard rails, sending you spinning into the dumpster beneath your girlfriend’s apartment. You’ll land with a crunch on a combination of cardboard, scrap wood and paper products. Coughing and crying a little you’ll hear muffled cursing from the apartment above.

As you lay in that dumpster you’ll think long and hard about whether or not you should try moving, about your relationship to your ex and about just why you thought it was a good choice to try climbing up an ex’s fire escape to talk to her when she clearly wasn’t interested in speaking to you anymore. The ambulance will arrive ten minutes after the fall, long before you manage to figure anything out.

Congratulations on Falling From Her Fire Escape!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Congratulations on Meeting Your Online Stalker!

The Quizno’s will be nearly empty, an all but unheard of occurrence for the part of Brooklyn you’re in. There is no such thing as an empty Quizno’s near Fulton Mall. That is, unless something is very, very wrong.

He’ll be seated towards the back wearing a panama hat and a pair of dark glasses, just like in the picture he sent you. He’ll look worried, like he’s not sure you’re going to show up. Well, you’ll say to yourself, time to rock his world.

When you sit down across from him he’ll look surprised.

“Cheryl?” he’ll ask tentatively. You’ll nod in response, smiling. “You look different from your pictures.”

He’ll be referring to the pictures on your OkayCupid profile, which won’t have been updated in almost three years. They’ll portray a much, much heavier you with skin problems and some pretty clear self-esteem issues. There will also be a few that are just your cleavage from that time, which was pretty awesome.

You’ll shrug at him. “They’re old pictures. I should probably update them.”

He’ll look uncomfortable, gazing past you. After a moment’s hesitation he’ll tug on the brim of his hat and stand up.

“Well, it was good to meet you,” he’ll start, but movement behind you will distract him again.

“Seriously?” you’ll ask him. He’ll have been badgering you about this meeting for almost four months at this point, a ceaseless series of instant messages, emails and one very sweet and entirely inappropriate handwritten letter with a comic strip that portrayed you, circa two years ago, on a bear skin rug. It was kind of sweet.

He’ll nod at you, a jerking motion that carries his whole body up and down.

“I was just interested in murdering you and taking your skin to make a dress. James over there wanted to wear it.”

He’ll point to a slender young man in jean shorts with thinning hair and a pair of aviator glasses on. The young man will wave back.

“There really isn’t enough of you to work with. Sorry for the trouble,” your stalker will say, tossing money on the table.

You’ll just sit there, your honey mustard turkey unwrapped in front of you, surprised at how the whole thing turned out. You knew there was kind of a risk that someone online wouldn’t turn out to be who you thought they were, but you didn’t think they’d ever be that shallow and materialistic.

It’ll make you reflect on the nature of online dating. It’ll make you wonder if it was worthwhile to lose all that weight if you aren’t going to flaunt it. And, most of all, it’ll make you start looking at boy’s asses in the room, lamenting the spread of man at this particular Quizno’s.

Congratulations on Meeting Your Online Stalker!

Monday, September 5, 2011

Congratulations You Rapacious Scoundrel!


You’re quite the scoundrel.

Not like Han Solo. You’re not a crazy “playa” who saves the day and lives by his own rules. No, you’re an ascot wearing, fluffy shirted rich kid who doesn’t know how to be in a relationship and doesn’t take no for an answer.

Usually people like you get the shit kicked out of them so often and so hard that they end up giving up their scandalous ways before they’re over twenty, but you’re special. You’re really, really handsome. You’re so handsome, so fucking handsome, that even straight dudes and lesbians kinda want to fuck you. This handsomeness has kept you from being severely beaten even as you fuck our wives, our girlfriends and, upon a few occasions, our really hot grandmothers.

But sooner or later everyone’s luck runs out.

Tonight you’re going to find yourself at a state dinner, a perk of your incredible handsomeness and your tremendous wealth. You’ll be seated between the Chancellor of Germany and none other than America’s sweetheart: Michelle Obama.

Since Angela Merkel can’t really hold up to the Lady Obama’s charms (Who has a name like Merkel?! Seriously?!) you’ll spend most of the night talking to Michelle. And since you only know how to flirt with women, you’ll end up seducing her. Not because she doesn’t love her husband, and not because she’s a floozy. You’re just that amazing a flirt. Which is how you’ll end up in a bathroom with the first lady, hand up her skirt, teeth digging into her neck, asking her how long you have until Secret Service personnel bust in on you.

She won’t respond, since she’ll be really distracted by how hot you are, which is why you’ll be so shocked when a Secret Service agent kicks in the stall door and pulls Michelle Obama off of you, underpants around her knees, tongue lolling. He’ll look at the two of you, baffled, before handing the First Lady off to one of his Secret Service buddies.

He’ll keep one hand on your chest, pressing you back on to the bathroom stall, looking at you through his dark glasses with a constant frown.

“The boss won’t be happy,” he’ll mumble at you, shaking his head.

The two of you will wait this way for an endless ten minutes before Barack Obama finally shows up. He’ll enter the bathroom with all the stately grace he brings to speaking and basketball, taking off his jacket and handing it to one of the Secret Service agents watching the door. Then he’ll roll up his sleeves the way he does during a campaign speech when he wants to show he’s ready to take care of business, and he’ll wave the Secret Service agent holding you down aside.

You’ll immediately stand up and extend your hand.

“Big fan,” you’ll begin, but you won’t get a chance to get any farther. Barack Obama will slug you right in the gut, lifting you three inches off the ground with the force of his blow. You’ll rise with his fist like it’s a wave before crashing back down, your legs caving beneath you, splaying you across the floor. He’ll start walking away from you right away, letting the Secret Service agent who was holding you pick you up and wipe the spittle from your mouth.

“Have fun in Guantanamo,” he’ll say to you as he collects his jacket from one of the agents at the door. He’ll step out without putting it on, pausing to poke his head back in and offer you one last parting word.

“Prick,” he’ll utter with complete dispassion, his head and shoulders barely entering the room at all. Then he’ll leave for good, and the Secret Service agent who has been holding you will shake his head and pat you on the back.

“Tough break,” he’ll whisper in your ear. Then he’ll punch you in the face, knocking you to the ground where you’ll be cuffed, have a bag placed over your head and be dragged to a car which will swiftly carry you to a helicopter bound for Cuba.

Congratulations You Rapacious Scoundrel!

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Source!

The versatility of the Source Engine has long stood as one of its greatest selling points, so much so that it’s kind of old hat to even mention it. But recent events have brought this to the forefront of my thoughts about gaming. Long term readers will recall that Defense of the Ancients, or DotA, is a game near and dear to my heart, and that DotA clones are a hobby horse of mine. Most recently DOTA 2 began releasing massive amounts of footage and information to the public in the form of a fascinating and incredibly lucrative invitational tournament where the finest teams in DotA-dom beat the shit out of each other for our entertainment. This would be impressive enough on its own, but DOTA 2 and its smooth, efficient play is all coming to us courtesy of the Source engine.

It’s not the first top down game to come out of the Source Engine, sure. But it is the first RTS game to use Source’s venerable tools to bring its play to bear, at least that I’m aware of, and it’s a testament to the versatility of the engine that it is absolutely indistinguishable from all of the other DotA clones. I’m sure that some unique element from the Source Engine will make itself known during play, some sort of operational physics perhaps, or improved arbitration of DotA’s many obtuse rules. I can’t wait to see just how DOTA 2 makes the Source Engine work for its needs.

This comes on the heels of my finally playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, another genre bending game that totally defied all of my expectations. For the uninitiated, Might and Magic is a venerable real time strategy title that has a bunch of generic fantasy stuff in it which I have been informed is actually described by an elaborate canonical underpinning. It’s mostly about armies of orcs fighting armies of people and people usually winning. Dark Messiah is a first person shooter set in that world, filled with might and maybe a little magic if you level your character up properly.

It’s a fascinating first-person-slasher, a melee combat oriented first person shooter that also occasionally allows you to cast spells, use physics operable objects and shoot bows every once in a great while. It also has jumping puzzles galore, key hunts, switches that you’ll pull to make things happen, weak cutscene-ish story asides and everything else first person shooters bring to bear. Coupled on to all of this is a leveling system that allows you to purchase skills for your character which dramatically change the way the game plays, eventually shaping your character into a role falling between or into one of three traditional fantasy classes: fighter, mage and thief.

It’s a middling game with an interesting concept and a lot of repetition (by the end of the game you’ll be a little sick of ramping up your attack of choice and letting it loose on every enemy you see). The leveling system actually does a great job of encouraging specialization while permitting a little bit of multi-classing, and the product as a whole hangs together wonderfully, even if it does drag a bit by the end. Cyclops will transform from exciting bosses to lamentable chores later on, and the final boss fight is more annoying than interesting or challenging. It has pacing problems, like most shooters, issues with its own learning curve, level design and voice acting. The writing is sloppy, even if it does switch up a few classic bits of the “chosen one” trope that video games love investing themselves in so much.

Aside from its overarching concept, it’s not even really worth discussing as a game. It has all of the problems that middling examples of all of its various genres have, and it shapes them into a competently executed product worth about fifteen to twenty dollars, depending on how much you like seeing new game play concepts executed. Thief did the sneaking, slashing and exploring from a first person perspective earlier and better, and Deus Ex did being kind of an RPG better. Deus Ex did boss fights way better, which is saying quite a bit considering how frustrating so many of its fights were. The only thing that nets Dark Messiah a place in a thousand word piece instead of a place in a two hundred word piece is that it showcased the versatility of the Source Engine.

That’s right, all that wacky blending of genres I just defined was accomplished entirely within the generous confines of the Source Engine. All of the leveling, all of the exploring, all of the fighting, the environmental manipulating, the crazy little jumping puzzles and the magic, all of it worked in Source. And all of it worked seamlessly, without loading screens of breaks. Even Bioshock’s amazing alteration of the Unreal Engine needed loading screens and menus to separate out its leveling and character development from the rest of the game, but the Source Engine accommodated all that and more in Dark Messiah. As a work of game design it’s middling in every way, but as a feat of engineering Dark Messiah is fantastic. It showcases the power of an engine which, at its inception, was considered just a fantastic means of delivering real-time physics to shooter game play. It took the Source Engine and shaped it into something new.

This is the power of the Source Engine, the power it shows through both middling games like Alien Swarm and Dark Messiah as well as amazing games that have long subsisted on in terrible engines such as DOTA 2. It gives people the power to make their ideas shine, to bring their art and concept to life. It gives designers untold opportunities, remarkable versatility available to a far greater breadth of people than most tools they’d use. It’s so incredible it makes me see beauty in things I’d otherwise write off as meh experiences. So raise a glass to the Source Engine, to the remarkable things it is capable of and the wonderful games it’s bound to present us with for years to come.