Congratulations on Murdering Wolfgang Puck!

Everyone hates Wolfgang Puck. Spago’s is basically just a slave trafficking ring that also serves food and every restaurant that he’s founded since has just been another black site in his human trafficking empire. People put up with it because America fucking loves its celebrities, but today it’s gonna stop. And you’re gonna be the one to stop it.

Today you’re going to walk into Spago on one of the nights where he’s checking out the operation wielding a fire axe. While most people are just sitting around waiting for a glimpse of the chef himself, you’re going to walk right back into the kitchen, which is actually filled with horrified young women, and drive your axe into the small of Puck’s back as he “inspects the product” by tepidly groping a weeping young Filipina girl.

Puck will cry out and try to shift away, but the axe will have damaged his spinal column and, with it buried inside of his back, you’ll be able to pull him towards you a little before you draw it out and slam it into the back of his skull, ending his reign of terror once and for all.

The women in the kitchen will begin cheering immediately, rattling their chains so loudly that all of the diners inside of Spago will be able to hear them. You’ll move from woman to woman, destroying their chains with your axe. They’ll flee one by one until the kitchen is empty except for you, sweating and panting with the effort of your axe work, Puck’s corpse and one remaining French woman, naked except for a chef’s hat, who has been bound there for almost half a decade as a sous chef for Puck.

“Merci,” she’ll mumble through her cracked, bloody lips. She’ll kiss the side of your face and rub her cheek against yours, smearing a tear into your beard. You’ll smile in response and take off your jacket, handing it to her.

Moments like this one are the reason you took up battling celebrity chef operated white slavery rings in the first place.

Congratulations on Murdering Wolfgang Puck!

Congratulations on Fashioning Your Prom Dress From a Deer Hide!

Normally woods people don’t go to the city people’s prom. It isn’t for them. It’s not a place where they can fit in or belong. It’s a crude replacement for the woodsy ritual of sharing an elk carcass together and then sewing clothes for one another out of said elk’s remains. But you’re different. You learned to read and write, in defiance of your parent’s wishes. You hunt using slightly better made tools than other woods people. And you love outside of the woods. In fact, your eye has fallen upon a particularly pretty city boy of late and, as fortune would have it, this boy has asked you to be his prom date.

But woods folk know nothing of the ritual of prom, and you only know about a handful of details, largely drawn from your participation in city people’s culture. You know that prom-goers are supposed to have flowers, called corsages, that signify their love for one another, and that ladies, come prom-time, wear dresses.

Since almost all of your clothes are leather vests and pants this second bit poses a problem for you. You can gather up some wildflowers and make a corsage, no worries, but if you wanna have a prom dress you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands. Woods money isn’t accepted in any dress shops we’re aware of, so that’s out. The only option, as we see it, is for you to go out into the woods today and kill a deer, then fashion a crude dress from its hide.

So today you’re going to take a personal day. First you’ll tie a brief note informing the school that you’re sick to the leg of a pigeon and release the bird. Then you’ll gather up your hand-made bow and arrow and creep through the underbrush until you find an appropriately majestic stag. Then you’ll draw your bow and release your arrow, catching the elegant beast in the throat. It’ll tumble to the ground, kicking up dirt and brush in its death throes. You’ll run up to it, knife in hand, and slit its throat in one practiced gesture. Then you’ll make a slit from neck to belly and carve out its inside, racking its meat on makeshift structures formed from branches until it finishes dripping and then tucking it into hide sacks so you can bring it back to your woods family for future consumption.

Once that’s all done you’ll start on the really fun part of the process: you’ll begin making your dress. You’ll stretch the hide, tan it and sew it by hand using a bone needle and thread made of your own hair. When all’s said and done you’ll have a flowing, elegant number that shows just the right amount of top boob and hints at what pleasures lie underneath within that taut, muscular package you call a body. Then you’ll make a hat out of the stag’s head, which makes you look like a sexy deer-woman. You’ll get some charcoal and make dark slashes underneath your eyes and then you’ll board the nearest bus and head off to the prom.

When you arrive people will all fall silent. Then the boy, the cutest boy in the whole wide world, who has found himself so taken with you, will notice you standing there in the entrance. Then he’ll grab your hand and kiss the back of it. You’ll smile, a wolfish thing, and wait for him to raise, to look you in the eyes. Then you’ll grab the back of his head and pull him in for a voracious kiss. When you release him he’ll be breathless, gasping for life. After the longest pause so far in your brief, interesting life you’ll share a smile and go get some punch. After all that the two of you will start dancing to Kanye songs, grinding your little hearts out. Later on you’ll have sex in the cute boy’s bed, which will be really different than sex in the woods. It’ll be amazing.

Congratulations on Fashioning Your Prom Dress From a Deer Hide!

Congratulations on Feigning Death to Avoid Helping Your Mom Go Get Groceries!

When you hear the first footstep on the first stair you’ll know, just by the creak of her weight and the moan of the wood that it won’t be enough to just say you’d rather not go to the grocery store. You know that pretending to be asleep won’t be enough to keep your mom off your back either. Hell, even telling her in a totally reasonable tone of voice that “fifteen is too old for a young woman to accompany her mother to the grocery store” probably wouldn’t get her to leave you alone.

So here’s what you’re gonna do.

By the time your mother hits the second step you’ll have the toy gun and the M-80 you stole from your little brother out. By the time her foot hits the third step you’ll have the M-80 lit and sitting on your desk, underneath one of the cleaner bowls you’ve brought up to your room so you can eat dinner alone over the last week. By the time her foot hits the fourth step you’ll have all that stage blood you swiped from the drama department out and you’ll be smearing it on yourself and by the fifth step you’ll be just covered in it. By the sixth step you’ll have laid yourself out on the floor next to a nice big pool of fake blood and after the seventh step you won’t have to count her steps no more: you’ll be still and the toy-gun will be a little bit away from your hand on the floor, splayed out.

When the M-80 goes off the steps will hasten and by the time they reach your room they’ll be more like a gallop.

Your mother will crack the door and gasp, then fall to your side weeping. You’ll stay still, as best you can, never moving, not even breathing. You won’t want to make this into a thing. You’ll just want to stay at home instead of watching your mom avoid thinking about how much she hates your dad by choosing between nearly identical brands of popsicles with you in tow.

Sure, when the police come and discover that you are, in fact, totally alive, she’ll be upset. But then you’ll have some other people there to help you out and witness, along with you, just how crazy your bitch of a mom is. And that’s worth the hassle of faking your own death, I think we can all agree.

Congratulations on Feigning Death to Avoid Helping Your Mom Go Get Groceries!

Congratulations Sexy Reptile!

Oh. Hello there. We didn’t see you come in. Well, have a seat. Or wrap your body around something soft and just groove on the piece of future we’ve got to give you. Because we’ve got some news for you, baby, and it’s all good.

It’s all good because you’re the hottest animal we’ve ever seen, snake. And tomorrow night you’re going to put that shit to work. You’re gonna go out on the street and get into a bar and you’re gonna coil yourself around a lady, flit your tongue over her ear to make sure she’s alive and technically prey and then whisper.

“Hey, how about we take this a little somewhere more private?”

The lady, she’ll laugh, a gentle, lilting thing that will roll off her tongue. You’ll be intrigued by the sound and begin wrapping your body around her throat, applying delicate pressure to her. She’ll start to choke before you realize what you’re doing and stop, which will charm her. She’ll like men who don’t actually murder her.

“From around here?” she’ll ask you.

You’ll shake your snake head.

“No.”

She’ll smile and get her check and the two of you will leave the bar and get into her car, where you won’t say a word. You’ll just explore one another’s bodies, you mostly just wrapping yourself around her flesh, her stroking your scales gently.

When you get to her house, after nearly thirty minutes of driving and fondling, your instincts will take over and you’ll begin crushing her to death almost immediately while simultaneously attempting to mate with her. Later, after you’ve swallowed her corpse, you’ll shrug to your friends.

“I guess I just can’t catch a break with the ladies!” you’ll tell the iguanas who hang out with you now that you’ve alienated all your old friends.

They’ll laugh uproariously at your inability to process your own spree of murders.

Congratulations Sexy Reptile!

Congratulations Better Robot Butler!

After the disastrous happenings of yesterday, Bruce Wayne didn’t get discouraged. No, he picked himself up, dusted himself off, finished hosing down his laboratory floor and started work on you: another, hopefully better robot butler.

He realized that the capacity for love is crucial in getting any robot butler to not murder its cruel human master and, as such, was careful to imbue you with such tendencies. But after the disastrous outcome of the robo-boner that occurred yesterday, he knew he couldn’t let you love romantically. Robots just can’t handle it.

So instead he imbedded deep within your circuits an unrivaled capacity for platonic love. One that gave you the capacity to love but made you realize that your love could never be manifested physically, so you’d better get used to it.

You cried some robot tears over it at first (which are oil!) but after about two hours of intense sadness you came to terms with how great Bruce Wayne is to hang out with and decided that if you can make him happy then you’re proving your love for him, and in doing so you’re making the world a better place.

Also, if you don’t explode you know you’ll make his life considerably easier, so that’s a big motivator too. Keep up the good work and remember: not everyone knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman!

Congratulations Better Robot Butler!

Congratulations Robot Butler!

You’re a robot butler, and today you’re going to learn how to love.

“DOES NOT COMPUTE!” you’ll shriek. Then your head will explode.

“Curses,” your incredibly sexy owner, who happens to be Batman, will mumble into his cufflink as he shields his beautiful face from your smoldering wreckage and the toxic fumes its emitting. “I suppose I’ll have to try again to replace Alfred.”

He’ll pull the components out of your skull and hook your hard drive up to a multi-disk array where, thankfully, you won’t brick the whole god damn system just because some boy caught your eye.

Jesus. Grow up.

Congratulations Robot Butler!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: 16 Bit Love!

There’s a generation of gamers who came of age in the 16 bit era, a generation rapidly emerging into cultural relevance now. We’re starting families, starting careers and starting to make a difference in the world in a way that would’ve been considered outlandish two decades ago, when the world was a much bigger, much less connected place. But these gamers have, for the most part, moved on to other things: we’ve either progressed towards more conventional forms of literature, writing books or films or comics or whatever, or we’ve shifted totally towards making games, games that have, for the most part, abandoned what made the 16 bit era special. Modern games (I use the term in its shudderworthy application of mass produced dross, not to denigrate contemporary games in general) that have none of the wonderment or exploration or punishing willingness to allow players to run up against walls while still iteratively making progress in the game.

It’s a strange bit of connective tissue within our community, to be sure. And it’s a deeply personal bit as well. I’m sure I’m misrepresenting it for many people, who might’ve seen 16 bit games as a frustratingly difficult stepping stone in gaming history. But to me they represented a sort of perfect balance of styles, approaches and philosophies that didn’t necessarily require improving upon. I’m speaking primarily about 16 bit RPGs here, but I think the same can be said for 16 bit platformers and fighters as well (after all, the fundamental design of Street Fighter hasn’t changed much since its 16 bit inception).

So here’s one of the things I’ve noticed about 16 bit games: despite their limitations, there’s really nothing that 16 bit RPGs, puzzlers, platformers and fighters fail at representing. Terms of scale, scope, humor, pacing, they’re all there, often better executed than they are in more contemporary games. Want to represent something as big? Have it be four times the size of a character sprite. Want it to be really big? Make it much, much bigger. These shortcuts, emerging from technical limitations to be sure, were effective, simple as they were. And their effectiveness was largely a result of this simplicity. These tricks relied on the tacit participation and imagination of the players in constructing the game world: they reinforced the collaborative nature of narrative structure in games. Instead of trying to fill in gaps in our imaginations, they provided an inroad by which we could generate an environment to place ourselves within.

When you consider games like Crono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (or three or whatever) and the time we were willing to invest in these projects as gamers, as young gamers with purportedly brief attention spans, you can really see what I’m getting at. These were games that used relatively simple visuals to great effect, evoking profound emotion and illustrating complex scenes with two dimensional sprites, a limited color pallet and a rudimentary collection of animations filling in for the more elaborate sort of movement we expect from games today. And they got their message across, even if it was at times crude. I still remember islands in the sky shattering apart in both the aforementioned titles, literally restructuring the world with their impact. I remember elegant moments of self-sacrifice, moments of betrayal, profound moments that still resonate with me as a gamer.

I recently finished playing Crysis 2 for the second time. It’s tough to get much further from the 16 bit era of gaming than Crysis 2, a game where spectacle is a constant distraction rather than an evocative aspect of play, where game elements are somehow, despite being lovely rendered, possessed of a profound regularity that makes the entire endeavor feel more often middling than profound. Each time a massive piece of alien technology devastated New York I rolled my eyes. More of this? Pfft! I’d been watching New York get ripped up by weird robot aliens for fifteen hours by the end of the experience, and the enemies I found myself fighting had all been introduced to me by the game’s midpoint, along with the tools I was using to combat them.

Yeesh. Even Final Fantasy had the common courtesy to occasionally reskin more powerful versions of enemies as the game progressed. And the manner in which settings varied, even within their primitive context, was far more evocative for me than Crysis 2’s obliterated cityscape ever managed to be. This comparison likely seems quite arbitrary, and it is. Because the reason I’m thinking about this, and the reason I’m comparing Crysis 2 to the halcyon RPGs of the 16 bit era, is because immediately after finishing Crysis 2 I sat down and started sinking into Zeboyd’s smart, lovingly crafted Cthulhu Saves the World. And something incredible happened. I remembered the amazing capacity for storytelling and spectacle nested in the 16 bit RPG format.

There’s a lot to be said for the life Zeboyd brings to the aging medium, enough that I’ll probably write something up after I actually finish Cthulhu Saves the World. But aside from that, what’s reverberating with me is just how rich and full of room for expansion the 16 bit top down RPG (with random battles and all) remains. Zeboyd is doing some interesting things with the genre, experimenting with where its problems and grind lay, and it’s paying off without cutting any of the teeth out of it. I’ve had to restart a handful of boss battles already that I simply couldn’t figure out, and the random encounters, true to the genre’s form, take the shape of brief puzzles that you as a player need to solve. And while I am enjoying a distinctly traditional game as I explore this world, I don’t feel the same exhaustion that I would experience while playing other grind heavy games like, say, Final Fantasy IV. But it all fits into the aesthetic and model of play established in 16 bit games of yore.

And it works. It works well. The internal language of the genre remains fresh, and the narration, tongue in cheek, is tremendously effective. I remain impressed with nearly every element of the genre, and how vibrant it has managed to remain despite almost two decades of obscurity. And indie developers are recognizing this left and right of late, or so it would seem. Games like Lone Survivor take 16 bit aesthetics and play and turn them into profoundly original games with elements of classic 2D side scrolling action games presented alongside elements of high-tension survival horror games. There are even throwback sidescrollers with slightly more impressive visual conceits or complex concepts governing the overall games (I’m thinking of A Valley Without Wind in this case) that use the 16 bit visual style and play aesthetic to showcase an original concept.

Perhaps this isn’t necessarily a strength of the medium so much as a showcase of its capacity for creative expression in the hands of a few tremendously talented young people with few resources, little time and big ideas. Indie games have been exploding of late, and it is considerably easier to design a game in a 16 bit style and keep it on budget while dealing with a foully oppressive day-job, as many indie developers must. But even if it is easier, in general, to construct a 2D 16 bit game rather than trying to render a full three dimensional engine for a given concept, the play is what impresses me. The play and the effectiveness of the medium in conveying its ideas and purpose. Is it perfect? No, but that’s sort of the whole point. It’s good enough, and it presents players with a framework where they must be engaged in order to contribute significantly to the narrative. I believe that’s key to any successful game: if we don’t feel like we’re a part of the game itself, if we don’t feel necessary to the game reaching its full potential, why are we playing? Why should we care? I’ve never once wondered that while playing a 16 bit game.

Congratulations Whiskey Jim!

Looooook. Yur a preddy good guy. Nabaddy’s gunna say anything otherwise. But here’s the thing. Ya kinda fucked the wrong lady, and all we’re sayin’ is we wanna say sorry because tonight we’re gonna try go get ya in a parking lot and we might end up bringing some bikers and we didn’t mean to hert ya so bad. You’se a good feller, and we really jus’ wanna be buds.

Shit, we shudduna dun thissatall… We’se Eskimo Brothers.

Shiiiiiit…

Congratulations Whiskey Jim!

Congratulations Unemployed Actor!

Many actors have a niche. Al Pacino has acted angry and irrational for the last few decades, only accepting roles that give him the ability to shout and stare at the camera like it just described how it fucked his wife. Sam Worthington only accepts roles that allow him to use a different, off-putting accent and occasionally allow a stunt man to take some of the pressure off of his total inability to convey human emotion. Katherine Heigl… You get the picture.

But none of them are quite as interesting as you. You express a full array of emotions. You’re good. Really good. Academy Award that actually means something good. But you only accept one kind of role.

You only play unemployed people.

Today you’re going to get asked why for the fifty billionth fucking time by a PA on set, and maybe it’ll be the sweep of her bangs or the sharpness of her eyes, but you’ll break your cardinal rule and actually answer.

“Because I like the irony.”

She’ll laugh uproariously, even though you were dead serious. It clearly won’t be the answer she was expecting, but her laugh, her smile… It’ll be so genuine. You’ll have charmed her by opening up, just a little, to what you look like as an employed person.

A decade from now when you marry her you’ll recall the story to an audience of friends and family in the Rose Garden. They’ll all laugh, but there’ll be some tears there too. The good kind.

Congratulations Unemployed Actor!

Congratulations Semaphore Marriage Therapist!

You’ll be standing next to the husband, who will be seated in a beach chair with an umbrella blocking out most of the sun striking him. Your assistant will be standing about a hundred meters away on an identical cliff-top with the wife. His flags will be on the ground, binoculars pressed to his face.

The husband will still be talking.

“I just don’t really know why I cheated. I think it’s because…because I’m afraid of losing her. So I’m just pushing it towards happening. But I see how stupid I was and I just can’t stand the thought of losing the most important person in my life. I don’t know how I can actually show her what I feel.”

You’ll flap the flags wildly, dancing out the letters with your arms. You’ll have trouble keeping up with his words they’ll be spilling out so fast. Halfway through you’ll tell him, a cool, calm voice: “Slow. Down.”

He won’t, really, but you’re a professional. You’ll finish anyway.

When you’re done the two of you will wait in silence. You’ll hand the husband your flags and press the binoculars to your face so you can clearly see your assistant. He’ll be speaking to the wife, briefly, before he begins flapping his flags, spelling out the phrase.

She

says

this

is

stupid

and

she’s

willing

to

talk

to

him

now.

You’ll laugh out loud, let the binoculars hang from your neck and grab your flags from the baffled husband. Then you’ll quickly signal back in the affirmative that you’ve received the message.

“We’re ready for phase two,” you’ll say to the husband, holding both your flags in one hand, offering him the other to stand.

“What does that mean?” he’ll ask, perplexed.

“It means we go back to the office and have a mediated adult discussion now that you two realize how profoundly stupid your communication issues are.”

He’ll open his mouth as if he wants to say something, but he’ll shut it almost immediately. He’ll know you’re right. They all do on one level or another. Sometimes they just need a little semaphore to spell it out for them.

Congratulations Semaphore Marriage Therapist!

Congratulations Fetishist/Podiatrist!

Sometimes people find the perfect job for themselves. Sometimes someone who loves kids becomes a teacher, or someone obsessed with engines becomes a mechanic. Dipshits can become lawyers, shut-ins can become mathematicians, idiots can become economists. There are perfect fits in the world.

Today you’re going to find yours backwards.

While finishing up the second week of your residency as a podiatrist you’re going to be working on a fifty year old patient with some serious bone injuries in her foot. You’re going to recommend surgery, following a lengthy and thorough exam where you touch her delicate, supple, perfectly formed foot. During the exam you’re also going to come. Quietly.

When you’re done with your appointment and all of the relevant paperwork for your patient’s surgery you’re going to clean yourself up. But, while cleaning up your jizz soaked boxers you’re going to think about your patient’s foot again, look at her x-ray and BAM. You’ll come again.

At this moment you’ll realize, for the first time, that you’re super into feet. Specifically women’s feet.

Enjoy the realization. This cosmic coincidence eludes most people in their lives, and you’re going to get to enjoy it for a good forty years before a patient notices that you came while looking at their feet. At that point you’ll be forced to resign in disgrace.

Congratulations Fetishist/Podiatrist!

Congratulations Gay Mountaineer!

Mountain high school is a hellish place, lasting millions of years. And then mountains finally get out and find that the world is better than high school, sure, but that people are still pretty shallow, especially when it comes to mountains. Don’t believe us? Listen to “America the Beautiful” and how it’s all about ragging on the “majesty of purple mountains.” It gets better, but it’s never easy to be a gay mountain in America.

As a student of geology, you know all this already. You know how the tectonic plates have been shifting about and how mountains are lonely at the best of times and extremely lonely when they’ve had adolescences that consisted of a slough of unfair dehumanizing experiences that no one should ever have to deal with. But today you’re going to start doing something about it.

You’re going to load up your Prius with camping gear, tie up a Swiss Seat and piton your way up Mount Monadnock, arguably the gayest mountain in North America, definitely the gayest one in the United States (Mount Saint Helens is a close second). You’re going to spend the better part of a day scaling its faces and making sure it feels like a nice, important mountain and then, as the sun begins to set over its majestic apex you’re going to sit at the peak with an open bottle of wine and a joint and whisper to the mountain.

“Hey. I love you for being you.” Then you’re gonna kiss it. With your tongue. And it’s gonna be hot.

The mountain will shudder a little. Scientists the world over will be flabbergasted by this turn of events, but you and the mountain will know the truth of the matter: that Mount Monadnock experienced profound acceptance, and that you had a direct hand in it.

In a few years they’ll figure out just what happened through a combination of core sampling and seismological readings. The book you’ll publish “Climbing the Gayest Peaks,” will also help a lot. And then geologists will break out their findings, positing that we, as a society, need to be more accepting and nurturing of these mountains.

Earthquakes will decrease by sixty percent everywhere in the world except the South.

Congratulations Gay Mountaineer!

Congratulations Podcast Apologist!

We all make mistakes. And there are few better places to make them than on the internet, where they’re both permanently preserved and displayed for all to see. Facebook is basically a giant repository with everyone the groom knows, including his parents, to the face tattoo you got that gives you that “Tae Zonde look that the ladies love.”

More recently, the amazing medium of Podcasting has emerged to provide people with a fresh method for exposing the world to their ill-formed ideas and momentary lapses in judgment. To those unfamiliar with the genre, podcasting combines the tense action of radio with the editing toolset of Garage Band and caps it all off by removing that pesky live element from the whole affair. This doesn’t mean that it serves as a bulwark against embarrassment, however. Podcasters are duty bound to avoid cutting out even the smallest chunk of their treasured interview or conversation or failed improvised sketch.

This means the majority of podcasts have now, after a few years of podcastery, grown into little more than lengthy apologies to parties wronged by previous podcasts. Mark Maron of the WTF podcast basically opens and closes each show by apologizing to all of his previous guests now, with a brief series of insults to people who haven’t been on the show quite yet sandwiched in the middle for good measure. Scott Auckerman apologizes to his audience every day for something Adam Pally’s doing, and the Nerdist’s podcast listing is basically a giant set of apology letters ready to happen, arranged by subject.

But no one needs to apologize more for podcasts than you: Horace T. Podcastersman, the inventor of the podcast. You came up with the idea for podcasts a few years ago, and you’ve spent the intervening time perfecting what Nelson Mandela once called “the single greatest ally to social regression in the world today.”

Today you’re going to try to make up for it. You’re going to sit down in your soundproofed garage and record a brief, heartfelt apology to the world for your actions in introducing podcasting to the world. You’ll say some racist stuff in there, too, which you’ll also have to apologize for by the end. Then you’ll shoot yourself in the mouth, killing yourself instantly. Your wife will discover your body a day later with an apology note stapled to it. The note will also provide her with step by step directions on how to upload your more global apology to the world to the internet. She’ll dutifully do so before posting it to her webpage about how terrible you are as a husband, where it will remain until the end of the internet as a testament to your atrocious legacy.

Congratulations Podcast Apologist!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Please Keep Your Mouth Closed During!

Back in the mid nineties something hilarious happened. Video games developed the technology to articulate some fairly fine human gestures. Objects in the world and elements of character models could suddenly move in a way that mimed real action. Hands could grip things, objects could interact with objects, all sorts of crazy pie in the sky things. And game designers, in their eagerness to push the envelope, decided to do something incredible: they decided to make people’s mouths move during in-game cutscenes.

The end result was less spectacular than we might’ve hoped. Deus Ex, Half Life: Opposing Force, Rune. All of these games featured highly articulated three dimensional models with moving mouths. These games, while fantastic to play (critics almost universally in the first case, in the latter cases it’s kind of a gray area, but bear with me), had some pretty hilariously bad cutscenes not because of their dialogue, but because of the decision to render them in-engine where the lips of speaking characters moved so that they might resemble, kinda, what was being said at the time.

And yet, for the most part, we didn’t care.

I was playing through Rune: Classic, recently released on Steam. In one of the game’s introductory cutscenes one of the villains, some guy with a weird old Viking name, is shouting at the main character’s dad, who also has a weird old Viking name. His mouth moves up and down like a puppet’s, while his eyes remain still. It looks almost like a pumpkin, cut in twain, has had a joint added into the middle of it, and that joint is being used to open and close his mouth.

It’s bad. Hilariously bad. But I’m still playing Rune: Classic. And I’m enjoying it, more than I have most other games I’ve played recently. Because god damnit, it’s doing things that are different and interesting and a little bit fun. Actually, a lot fun. When you cut off a goblin’s head, that feels good. When you light a zombie on fire with a flaming axe, that feels good too. I could do with fewer rock crabs and tentacle barnacles, sure, but for the most part the game’s just a masterful piece of old school design and it’s a pleasure to step back into one of the more distinct third person action games that I remember from my high-school years.

And it’s a testament to the gameplay that I’m willing to ignore haphazardly the designers utilized the graphics available to them at the time. I mean, I can’t ignore them completely: I’m not sure I’m capable of doing that. That would be like not noticing a beautiful woman missing a leg. But the graphics, the clumsy, haphazard graphics rooted in one very distinct period of time, aren’t offensive. Nor are they making me not want to play. They’re just present. A part of the overall experience. And the design itself is good enough that I don’t really care.

There aren’t too many titles that I can say the same for nowadays. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations did some weird stuff with faces that I disregarded because of the quality of its core play (which was assailed by other, more pressing offenses in my opinion) and games like Supreme Commander 2 have done goofy stuff and been well enough forgiven for the quality of their play. But for the most part my complaints are running in the opposite direction.

Games are all too eager to skullfuck players with the latest in eyecandy without the slightest concern for designing enjoyable play or attempting some new mechanic or approach. It’s a sad state of affairs when the most financially viable properties have the words “Call of Duty” in the title and do absolutely nothing new with each iteration, while occasionally even taking tiny steps backwards with their design choices (WHY CAN I NO LONGER LEAN IN MULTIPLAYER GAMES?!). And I find these choices, or fundamental lack of choices, far more conspicuous than weird visuals. If a game isn’t fun to play, I’m going to be a lot more dismissive of it than if it looks weird.

You can see a trend in this direction as retro games, or games with relatively simple visual motifs, are produced for a fraction of the cost of other games and do quite well for themselves. Consider, if you will, Quantum Conundrum. QC isn’t a looker by contemporary standards, nor does it have the ingredients to be a AAA blockbuster. But the game is generating a great deal of hype thanks to a keen, original design and the enthusiasm of some mouthpieces of the indie games marketplace. And I’m sure it’ll sell quite well: with a reasonable price tag and an original package surrounding its energetic gameplay, I’d be quite surprised if it didn’t.

On the other side of the equation, you’ve got Spec Ops: The Line. Money is pouring out of Spec Ops’ publisher to get people to buy it, with commercial spots bombarding anyone who watches TV on the internet, and the game is gritty to the max with oodles of blood and gore and other visual spice for “the kids” to enjoy. But the gameplay sounds about as generic as can be and, to be frank, I know for a fact I’m going to skip it, especially with its hefty major release pricing.

I’m far, far more likely to sit down and play one of the indie RPGs collecting dust on my hard drive, or to try to get through the old Penny-Arcade RPGs before Zeboyd releases the final installation of On the Rain Slick Precipice of Eternal Darkness. Hell, I’m more likely to sit down and play through Rune than I am to try one of these samey-looking shooters with cover based gameplay, because at least Rune is doing something that I can’t get anywhere else. If I want a cover shooter, I can just play Gears of War. And Gears of War looks good, even if it’s just looking good with weirdly proportioned homoerotic dudes in football pads.

It often feels like we, as gamers, are taking several steps back each time we’re shown an important new lesson. Bioshock’s fantastic storytelling hasn’t echoed through the industry, nor has Modern Warfare the First’s structural awareness. But our unconscious minds still seem to scream that play is the important thing: that a game can look odd or off and still be good and be worthy of our attention. We can ignore JC Denton’s flapping gums, damnit, so long as we can still sneak around and shoot darts and guards. If a game is good enough, we won’t care how it looks. The reverse can’t really be said.

Congratulations on Finding a Flask Filled with Delicious Whiskey!

Sometimes exploring pirate ruins has its perks. Sometimes you find an ancient gem that wards off evil or piles and piles of treasure that will insure that you never have to work again. Sometimes you find your dad, or parts of your dad at least.

Today you’re going to find a small, well appointed flask that dates back to World War 1. It’ll be some sort of burnished steel, perfectly preserved without a hint of rust, and what’s more it’ll slosh about when you pick it up. When you hold it next to your ear it’ll sound mostly full. You’ll make a quick ka-ching gesture with your hand and then you’ll call your sexy assistant over to you. She’ll hustle as quick as she can on those short-short showing gams of hers, and when she slides up you’ll hold the flask above your head and shake it back and forth a little as if to say “let’s get party!”

She’ll respond by nodding and undoing the topmost button on her regulation white explorer’s shirt, exposing a healthy swath of half-moon cleavage. Then she’ll take the flask out of your hand, undo the top and throw it backwards into the ruins before taking the first swig of the night.

The next day you’ll scrabble about on your knees trying to find the lid to this priceless artifact, worth god only knows how much. But tonight you’re going to be trying to get your mouth around the opening of the flask while it’s nestled between your lady-friend’s boobs, awkwardly trying to make eye contact with her while you do so.

Enjoy the night and remember to bring your own condoms! The ones you’ll find in the pirate ruins will be unreliable at best!

Congratulations on Finding a Flask Filled with Delicious Whiskey!

Congratulations on Getting Hypnotized into Acting Better!

When she snaps her fingers you will be a changed man.

“I no longer want to smoke!” you’ll shout to the room of concerned family and friends.

They’ll cheer thunderously.

“I just want to beat my kids!”

The room will fall silent.

Congratulations on Getting Hypnotized into Acting Better!

Congratulations on Filling Up the Pool with Gummi Bears!

There are many ways to say “you’re a woman, congratulations!” You could do it with a heart shaped balloon or by hiring a mid-priced entertainer to show up and serenade your daughter. Or you could do it with pony rides and clown that no one likes who later fucks you wife while you’re trying to get the DJ to put on some Rush. Or you could do what you’re going to do: fill an entire pool with gummi bears.

“HOORAY!” your daughter will exclaim as she hurls herself forward into the pool. You’ll chortle good naturedly as you watch her sink into the mass of gelatin, sugar and food dye, waving goodbye to her sarcastically.

You and the rest of the batmitzvah goers will share a good laugh while you sit around the pool and wait for your beautiful young woman to rise above the tide of gummi bears anew. You’ll wait a solid ten minutes before you realize that your daughter isn’t coming out.

“HONEY!” you’ll shout into the gummi bear pit. The response will come from the bottom, muffled, desperate. She’ll be in trouble.

You’ll strip off your suit, remove your Bluetooth earpiece and lower yourself anxiously into the pool. Once you slip below the surface the gummi bears will mute the light above you. They’ll tumble into your mouth every time you open it and you’ll have to hold your hand over your face so that you can breathe.

“I’m coming honey!” you’ll shout into the multicolored array of sugary light that will become your world. Your daughter will shriek. It will be unclear if she is laughing or crying from the sound, which will make it that much worse.

When you find her she’ll be shaking uncontrollably. Her eyes will be closed and she won’t respond to your voice or your touch. She’ll just shake back and forth. Eventually she’ll let you hug her (she won’t have much choice in the matter) and you’ll stand that way together for almost two hours until the fire department arrives and devises a strategy for removing the two of you from the bottom of a pool filled with gummi bears.

When the two of you are returned to the surface your daughter will run inside the house and bury herself under her sheets, refusing to talk to anyone but her mother for days. When she finally does start speaking again she will talk only of the horror, of the sound that came from the bears, and of the encroaching terror of womanhood.

She’ll also develop an aversion to snacks which will lead to considerable weight loss. No one will care in high school, since she’ll be labeled the “gummi bear freak,” but in college, it’ll get her a lot of attention, and it’ll help her develop good self-esteem in non-gummi bear related situations in the future.

Congratulations on Filling Up the Pool with Gummi Bears!

Congratulations on Overspritzing Your Houseplant!

Overwatering is a dangerous and irresponsible thing for a plant owner to do. Case in point:

Today while watering your prized houseplant with a spray bottle you’re going to give it one spritz too many and it’s going to react poorly. Instead of politely ruffling its leaves in a “how dee doo” and turning a little bit greener, it’s gonna rustle a little and then BAM.

Its leaves will frond up and its branches will sprout from gentle, waving leaf receptacles to fearsome lashing vine tentacles in a heartbeat. Instead of whispering its helloes to you it will twine its vines around your neck and groin and start crushing you in the least pleasant way imaginable.

As you suffocate, your last moments will consist of a sense of tremendous pressure and a desire to apologize to your plant. But words will fail you as you lose consciousness and your plant will begin rustling harder and harder, as if it’s laughing, as if it wants you to know just how big a mistake you’ve made. As your consciousness fades the plant will press upon you an image, burning it into your mind, of a word overrun by a single plant which found it within its means to consume not just a little snicky snack of water but ALL the water in the world.

God help us, your hubris has damned the world.

Congratulations on Overspritzing Your Houseplant!

Congratulations on Blanking on Her Name!

“Hm,” you’ll say into your hands, crossed in front of your mouth. You’ll be chewing your bottom lip behind them, occasionally running your tongue along your teeth, trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in your own head. The police will be standing behind the folding table, guns in their holsters, badges slung around their necks. They’ll look very, very tired. After several days of dealing with you, it’s tough to blame them.

In front of you, behind a two-way mirror, an array of women will stand. They’ll all be middle aged, white, and they’ll all look incredibly, righteously pissed. They’ll be wearing sweatpants and sweatshirts and they’ll have their hair in ponytails.

You’ll spot the perpetrator in a matter of seconds: it’ll be the third one from the right. But there will be one problem: you won’t be able to remember her name. You’ll inform the detectives in charge of the investigation.

“I know which one it is, but I can’t recall her name.”

One of the cops will look at her partner, who will be shaking his head and tugging on his beard. He’ll have been doing that a lot over the last week and a half.

“That’s not really an issue, sir,” the lady cop will say.

“I don’t want to do this halfway,” you’ll mumble, swatting your hand at her with absentminded gracelessness.

She’ll move towards you like she’s going to punch you, raising her fist and taking two steps, but her partner will grab her shoulder before she gets close enough to take a swipe at you. You won’t notice the movement behind you, you’ll be so transfixed by the woman standing in front of you, a wisp of hair hanging down in front of her face, murder in her eyes just like the night you saw her with that gun in her hand when you were leaving that party.

You got her name from one of her neighbors, and then you forgot it. Now you’re worried that you’ll come off as rude after you finger her for the murder of that middle aged fellow who seemed absolutely horrified of her as he begged for his life at her feet.

“It’s on the tip of my brain,” you’ll mumble at the cops, rapping your knuckles on the table while you think. The cops will be silent behind you, each of them considering, inside their own head, how best to endanger you while you’re in the witness protection program. Neither of them will come up with a good method for getting you killed, which will be too bad, because you’re a waste of a person.

Congratulations on Blanking on Her Name!

Congratulations on Finishing All the Popcorn Chicken!

You told him you’d do it, and it was the old fool’s fault for not believing it. So while the barrel of the pistol is still smoking, while your mom is cradling his body as the life fades from his eyes, be sure to cherish every last bite of that popcorn chicken. You won’t be able to taste the like again for at least three months, when the prison will put popcorn chicken, briefly, into the rotation. A week after that it’ll become a form of currency for not-rape, and you’ll have to give it up again, all the while wondering what your life could’ve been if you didn’t kill your dad over the last of the popcorn chicken on that one fateful night.

Upside: you no longer need to worry about getting him a Father’s Day present now!

Congratulations on Finishing All the Popcorn Chicken!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Points to Move Past!

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about the way that games function as art in any explicit context, but recent overheard conversations and bursts of madness and independent thought have pushed me into a place where I want to express how games relate to other fields of art and how, in the grand scheme of things, they form a nascent and combinant artistic medium which, while frequently lacking in quality, is possessed of profound potential rapidly being realized in an expanding independent marketplace. One of the more interesting comments I’ve heard differentiating games from other artistic mediums stemmed from the concept of games as a consumptive good. They’re packaged and sold as products, and often reviewed as products, and as such cannot exist as art.

Let’s break this argument down. Presently films are reviewed in a similar fashion. The majority of film reviewers, spare a handful of interesting writers who assess films as films, review films as products to be engaged with. X-film is worth X-dollars because of X-factor. Its shortcomings can be ignored because it is this kind of a product. Its successes can be dismissed because it is this kind of a product. Genre dictates expectations, and work that violates the rule of genre is derided as violating the compact implied in its labeling rather than celebrated0 for exploring an intersection of genric elements. Books aren’t held to this standard, nor have they been for quite some time. In fact, genric intersection has long stood as a means by which to make unpalatable material more marketable. The first novels were derided as pornographic trash, and thus emerged the epistolary novel, which combined the puerile pursuit of novel writing with the respected literature of correspondence. Books are often praised for playing with conceits of genre. Otherwise poorly constructed books, like House of Leaves, are praised for the way that they question what it means to be a work of literature. Music enjoys a similar critical standard, though conceits of what constitutes “good” music are far more generous than they are in narrative medium, and if we try to hard to engage music as a form of art in this discussion we’ll fast run out of parallels, simply because it isn’t narrative in nature.

I’m really just mentioning it here because all of these mediums share a pattern of consumption that runs parallel to video games. In each case you purchase a physical or digital artifact and, in doing so, are entitled to engage with an artistic work. All of these art forms enjoy a paralleled consumptive pattern with video games, and a price point in line with the majority of games: it’s around $15 to buy a novel, a CD or a DVD of a film. If you buy an indie game (or a major title a few months after release on Steam) you’ll spend a similar amount. There are games with a much higher price-point in place, but the principle of the exchange remains the same. And were you to contend that film, literature or music is not art, you’d be considered a pretentious asshole, if not an idiot, even if your reasoning involved the consumptive nature of these goods.

If you were to further examine this argument, and bring paintings into the mix, we’d find an art form decoupled from a model of populist consumption, but still tied to an older, more isolationist model of consumption based around a system of patronage. Paintings, after all, are at best displayed to be purchased and, at worst, purchased and then later displayed in public or private collections. Access to these collections is either subsidized through public funding (as in the case of certain museum system in more liberal nations) or through a system of donation or admission fees (as in most museums and public art galleries. Best case scenario, a corporate sponsor will make a gallery space open to the public, essentially enabling non-consumptive access to art through the sale of consumptive goods (my personal favorite example stems from an art exhibit funded by Playboy in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a nude woman in red body paint has been documented doing post-modern chores in a French garden). Art is always tied to a model of consumptive funding, and that’s always the cruel duality of art and the cause of a great deal of tension between creators and consumers: creators must sometimes tailor their art to meet the expectations of their audience, and consumers, when they are asked to engage with a new or different artist, are being asked to risk funds on something they might not necessarily enjoy.

So there goes that argument. But we haven’t discussed how video games compare to these forms of art as its own medium. So here’s a paraphrase from Mike Krahulik of Penny-Arcade that speaks to where I want to take this discussion: if a project features dozens of artists making art, the outcome of that production is a work of art.

Games combine various mediums, considered to be or described as art, into one giant messy medium. In order for games to constitute something other than artistic works, these mediums, once filtered through a video game, would have to lose their artistic constituency. If this seems reasonable to you, it has nothing to do with reason: there’s a leap of logic present in that calculus of art which should seem kind of wrong. Games are made up of the bits and pieces of other art, they combine aspects of visual art, narrative fiction and music into an interactive format wherein narrative becomes a malleable or participatorally influenced feature of a work. There is a complicating factor, however, a sacrifice of authorship that is made when a narrative is placed within a game and structured so as to permit the input of players upon it. Lara Croft is going to seem a lot less badass when she rams into a wall for fifteen minutes straight. Or if I run around murdering people at random in GTA IV, the pathos that Niko exhibits over engaging in bank robberies and falling deeper and deeper into the grip of the mafia is going to look like absolute nonsense. In the best games, this decision to sacrifice authorship is a determining factor in the narrative, and players have room to either alter the narrative of insert themselves into it in a way that enhances the overall experience. In the worst of games, this involvement within the narrative substitutes for actual narrative or supports a narrative so thin it might as well not be there.

But I’m not claiming that every game is a great work of art, or that games are possessed of the same creative gravitas as other, older mediums. Games as an art form have only really existed for three decades at this point, and they’re still growing by leaps and bounds and discovering new creative frontiers to explore. Some come close to the standards of other mediums, and you could argue that games like Bioshock, Far Cry 2 and the Fallout series deftly weave characters and plots into stories every bit as complex as any novel or film while presenting the player with lovingly rendered visual art and beautiful, evocative music. But that’s not a discussion I want to have here. What I want to do is call attention to the fact that the components of other mediums largely recognized by reasonable people as art compose the various segments of video games as a creative medium. Video games are distributed in a manner very similar to every other medium, spare more conventional, high priced art, and their status as consumable goods exists only inasmuch as it exists for novels, films and albums. To differentiate games from other artistic mediums requires a logical leap, one that people are comfortable making, one that serves no purpose but to erect a barrier against artistic expression. It isn’t the first time this has happened when a new medium emerged, and it won’t be the last, but it remains frustrating to see, and I hope that by picking it apart I can help to, in some small way, dismantle it and elevate the discussion past one of whether or not a genre constitutes art, and into the realm of the impact of that art.

Congratulations on Finding All the Mescaline You Thought Went Missing!

When you blacked out and discovered that all the mescaline was missing, you sort of freaked out. You figured it was taken by a rival cartel or something. Maybe a local dealer who wanted to make a big score. You started compiling a list in your head of motherfuckers you’re going to have to run down and shake down before you start knocking heads together.

Then suddenly the world will shift in a subtle way, perception becoming lighter, sharper, harder around the edges. The world will be the world will be the world will be the world without the world. Light will move at odd angles, and the sound of the birds will take on a bluish purple hue, between colors and states.

Then it’ll hit you: all that mescaline when into your tum-tum.

You’ll laugh and punch yourself in the leg for jumping to conclusions, just like you always do. Then you’ll drink as much water as you can and lay down on your back to try and ride out the storm of consciousness that is about to assault your psyche. It won’t be the first time that this has happened, and it won’t be the last, but it will be the best time in that you will just lie on your back in the middle of the Rocky Mountain foothills and will not, as you usually do, beat people with a hammer.

Enjoy the journey your consciousness is about to go on, and try to stop eating so much mescaline. It’s best enjoyed in moderation.

Congratulations on Finding All the Mescaline You Thought Went Missing!

Congratulations Problem Horse!

Sometimes people have to work with horses a lot. Sometimes those horses are dicks.

You are one such horse.

“Thith hay ith too thick!” you’ll nasally intone at your co-workers. They’ll all roll their eyes at you. The new guy will jump up in the air.

“Holy shit,” he’ll scream. “Did that horse just talk?”

One of the veteran stablehands will shrug.

“Yeah, but he never says anything important. He’s a fucking prima donna.”

In response you’ll stomp your hoof twice.

“Guyth, thath not very nithe to thay,” you’ll neigh, casting an especially irritated look at the stablehand that hurt your feelings.

“You’re not very nice,” someone in the stables will mutter a little bit too loudly. You’ll throw your head back, whinny, and kick open the door to your stall before tromping out and down the hall to the stable manager’s office. You’ll kick in the door to that as well and then poke your horsey head in.

“I wann mow mawney,” you’ll whine into the office. The manager will his eyes and throw an apple at your head, which you’ll catch in your mouth. It will shut you up and distract you, for only a little while.

“I can’t wait for you to break your leg so I can shoot you,” he’ll mumble under his breath. The apple will be so crisp and juicy, though, you won’t notice. For a handful of minutes there will be nothing but apple in your world.

Congratulations Problem Horse!

Congratulations Brisket Thief!

Your mom cooked all the brisket in the house, did it up nice with a nice rub and roasted it on a barbecue in the backyard, but you know what? Doesn’t fucking matter.

It doesn’t fucking matter because you stole it, you fucking prick. You stole every last bite. Now your family is crying while you lay in your room on your belly, head on your pillow, brisket under your pillow. It will make your room reek of meat, but the whole house will reek of meat because of your mom’s cooking. No one will accuse you of any wrongdoing, which will make it that much worse.

You got it into your head that you’d be staging an act of protest against factory farming by making your whole family miserable, but it turns out you just kind of hurt a bunch of people close to you by attempting to impose your values on them.

You’ll try to fix the whole situation tomorrow when you leave the brisket outdoors for someone to find, but in the end it won’t work out so well. Before anyone wakes up to discover your brisket package, a wild animal of some kind will happen upon it and tear it to ribbons. It’ll upset your mother tremendously, but at least it’ll take the heat off you.

Congratulations Brisket Thief!

Congratulations on Discovering that Sex is Better WIthout the Sheet!

Sheet sex is safe sex, and it’s the only safe sex. Even no sex isn’t safe when there’s no sheet involved. We all know the cachetisms and the public-service videos. But do we live by them? Rarely! Handjobs and open mouth kisses abound with nary a sheet in sight.

But you, dear reader, have always stood as a halcyon beacon to true American values (where American means, as Republicans will tell you, the most retardedly conservative Christian value system imaginable) and have never, ever, ever had romantic physical contact with anyone at any time without the use of a sheet.

Until tonight. Your wife, bless her whorish heart, is going to start kissing you on the forehead without putting the sheet with a hole in it in place, and you’re going to get super aroused.

“I’m getting super aroused,” you’ll announce to your dutiful wife, who will smile knowing and then put your penis in her mouth.

You’ll open up your gab-flap to protest her amorous actions, but within about twenty seconds of raw, un-sheeted fellatio, you won’t be able to remember why you ever used a sheet in the first place. The two of you will then get a pair of lesbians and an obese man in a gimp costume to come to your house and join in on your sheet-free lovemaking, proving once and for all that true American values are under attack from the gay and gimp communities.

When you’re done you’ll have abandoned your coital sheet in favor of living dangerously, having marital sex without the intervention of a small piece of fabric intended to obscure the horror of your twined naked bodies. You’ll enjoy sex tons more, since your wife is super hot and your sheet was made of some weird, really chafe-ey fabric. But unfortunately you’ll also be condemned to an eternity of damnation, thanks to your abandonment of the true path. So you won’t be lifted from the planet when the Rapture comes in a few days.

Win some, lose some, we guess.

Congratulations on Discovering that Sex is Better Without the Sheet!

Congratulations on Getting That Tree to Love You Back!

You’re a dendrophiliac. It’s a lonely life, because trees, for the most part, can’t easily reciprocate love. They live outside, they have difficulty expressing consent, and much of their experience with romance involves being involuntarily involved in three-way sex which ends with humans carving hearts and sets of initials into their bark in the most painful way possible.

You’re a lot nicer about it. You softly stroke trees, whisper to them, and then rub their roots with teatree oil until they rustle, which you interpret as a tree orgasm. It’s actually just trees showing their arousal, but they appreciate your effort and attentiveness in general, despite their inability to communicate approval verbally.

They like the way you touch them, and tonight they’re finally, after months of slowly moving their branches towards your window, show you how much they appreciate it. They’re going to reach their branchy branches into your open window, rustle on down towards your body, get inside your pajama pants and start rubbing on your junk with their bark.

You’ll wake up with a raging hard on, bark rubbing your skin off your genitals so that pleasure and pain coalesce into the most delicious imaginable pool of fluids buttering your sex. It’ll be like a series of shocks guiding your brain in and out of states of alarm until, after fifteen minutes of overwhelming stimulus, you come all over those branches.

The three will then gently withdraw, quick as it can, which is incredibly slow by people standards. You’ll kiss and lick its branches as it passes your face, savoring the taste of yourself as it passes. You’ll smirk and throw your sheets back on yourself. You’ll resolve to sleep with your window open for every night left in the fall. When winter comes, you’ll have to make a difficult decision. It’s possible that the tree might not still be into you by then.

Congratulations on Getting That Tree to Love You Back!

Congratulations Bobby the Bullet!

Today you will be born, fictitious cartoon bullet. And through your birth children will learn a valuable lesson. It’ll be just like you’ll sing it in the various commercials and one pornographic movie that features your likeness:

“Sometimes it’s important to shoot your gun, but you shouldn’t shoot it or even point it at a person you don’t intend to seriously harm or kill!”

Kids the world over will realize, through your message, that guns are really dangerous and that they probably shouldn’t play with them until they’re ready to perform the highly sensual act of murdering another living soul, one of the most arousing actions a person is capable of.

Despite this achievement, your television series will be cancelled mid-season by some weird anti-gun advocacy group, like a group of concerned mothers or something. We don’t know who they are for certain, we just know they’re against good All-American fun.

Congratulations Bobby the Bullet!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Reflections on Assassin's Creed: Revelations!

Since I moved to Brooklyn, I haven’t had a TV where I live. Which means a lot of games I want to play, games like Mass Effect 3 and Bayonetta and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations have all been side-lined. I thought this would change when I moved, but it hasn’t. It might when I move again, but I’m not sure right now. Right now I’m sort of used to life without a TV, for better or worse.

But I’m not really cool with living without Assassin’s Creed. I love the Assassin’s Creed games with a fervent passion, and the kind of play they deliver has been a tremendous hook for me since I saw that first weird triangle back in 2007. Since then the series has changed a lot, shifting gears to an annual release schedule and offering up some of the most delightfully horrible storytelling in gaming today. I’ve wanted to play Revelations, really wanted to play it, since I heard a name title in the series was coming out. Then I heard some pretty believably poor things about it, and I got a little bit bummed out about it, but knew I’d play it when the time was right.

Then a Steam Sale reared its beautiful head and I picked up a copy of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations for twenty bucks. Score! I was excited to start playing, so excited that I was legitimately upset that my schedule kept me from really sitting down to play for three whole days. I wanted to make this game a big entry in my daily gaming diet, and I wanted to give its into the time it needed to digest in my brain.

Then I started playing the game and, within an hour and a half, stopped. I was disappointed. It was as if the scale of the game had been reduced in every way. The game opens on an island with the single most annoying unseen character from previous Assassin’s Creed games. You don’t know who I mean right away, I’m sure, but you’ll know immediately after you begin Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Then it REALLY opens with a series of corridor missions that serve as a tutorial, a tutorial that it’s difficult to see the facility of, given the effectiveness of previous, considerably less horrible tutorials. This is followed by a period of the game where you are, no shit, dragged on the ground behind a carriage during a high speed carriage chase before being dropped into a river and washed on to a shore some distance away with none of your fancy movement powers, the abilities which usually form the core of Assassin’s Creed games. Acrobatic leaping was replaced with frantic limping. Suddenly I was press ganged into playing a meh action game. The magic was gone and the frustration began. I finished the arbitrary challenges that were presented to me so I could recover my movement powers, then opted to stop playing for two days.

When I came back, I moved on to the next memory with the non-aid of my perennial unhelpful and irritating Animus-mate. I found myself in Istanbul, recently after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire. Yes! I thought. This is the Assassin’s Creed I love. Exploring the city, uncovering unlockables, getting into fun, unexpected antics. Then, I started getting into Den Liberation battles. A little more irritating than I remember them, but whatever, do-able. Then I started getting into Den Defenses, which are essentially a tower defense game no one asked for, which no one in their right mind would ever want to play. It’s as if a mix of the profound balance issues that make up play in Assassin’s Creed, which the raw enjoyability of the play normally eschews, are suddenly laid bare. Some units are totally worthless. Some units are absolutely crucial, and must be employed in a very precise way to complete these challenges. And the game is totally unconcerned with pointing out which one is which to you. Sorry if you were hoping for some sort of guidance, you’re not gonna get it.

These tedious bits might be more forgivable in a larger environment, but there’s something about Istanbul that makes it feel much, much smaller. Perhaps because most of it is unlocked from the get-go, or perhaps it simply IS smaller. I don’t know, but I know that, with less than forty percent of the game completed at this point, I’ve run the length and width of Istanbul on its map and feel pretty well acquainted with it at this point. Unless a massive portion of the city remains to be unlocked, which does not look to be the case from what I can tell, the game is going to mostly take place in this tiny re-creation of Istanbul, one of the more spectacular cities in the world.

It seems that the energy that once went into populating this city with vibrant characters, missions and nooks and crannies to explore has instead gone into building some occasionally spectacular ruins, and some tremendously middling action-oriented scripted sequences. Now, the ruin exploration sequences are fun, don’t get me wrong, and they hit the climbing-puzzle spot that I come to Ubisoft games for more often than not. But the action-oriented scripted sequences are just bad. Bad in all the ways that Assassin’s Creed doesn’t have to be bad. They lack the scope and intensity that the action sequences in Assassin’s Creed 2 had or the freeform chaos that Assassin’s Creed the First left in its action sequences. Instead it’s as if we’re put into a corridor brawler in three dimensions and asked to flip out briefly in a small collection of sets that usually feel hastily designed, when they aren’t re-hashes of areas from previous games.

The Assassin’s Creed that fans know and love is here, but it’s buried under mistakes, mistakes that feel like they’re emerging from Ubisoft’s insistence on making Assassin’s Creed into an annual franchise. I understand why they’re doing it: they’ve got to appear competitive with groups like Activision and EA, who are desperately scrabbling to get out games with words in their titles that will get people to buy them. But here’s the thing: this isn’t necessarily a positive trend. In fact, I’d argue it’s quite negative. When you get into a development cycle that revolves around putting out the same title year after year after year, you often do your games and, by association, your gamers a disservice.

Cliff Blezinski had a great piece of wisdom for game designers, one which they all too often seem to ignore: you always want to stop an activity while participants are still enjoying it. That way they’ll want to come back for more. Letting them sit with that want helps build it up and gives you time to refine your next play experience. It’s an unmitigated positive, one that Revelations ignored. Rather than just letting players sit and enjoy Brotherhood, which made some pretty amazing design choices and managed to keep the Assassin’s Creed series fresh, they’ve essentially generated a game that re-treads the ground that Brotherhood showed us previously while inserting content that feels untested. They’ve added things to their fantastic game that ignores what makes the game great where it doesn’t simply fight it outright. I don’t need a tutorial to show me how to slide down a hill, nor does the experience of sliding down a hill feel particularly rich or enjoyable to me.

Has Assassin’s Creed: Revelations made me unsure of Assassin’s Creed 3? Sort of. If this is the direction they’re taking the series, it might be moving into a place that I’m not interested in. But I’d be lying if I wasn’t going to buy Assassin’s Creed 3. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the core play of Revelations: the running, jumping and acrobatic fighting is all fantastic. And goofing off with over-the-top historical figures is great fun too. But it’s not hard to look at the looming feature creep of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and see within it an ugly beast that threatens to slow down or possibly even overwhelm that core gameplay. It’s also hard not to look at the number of scripted sequences and get really, really frustrated. Holy shit, dudes. Your first game was a genius mix of light scripting and free-form play. Every game since then has taken a step back from this concept, and it’s been your sole detractor. Don’t fall into the pit of trying to make everything more cinematic. Just let it happen.

Congratulations on Sleeping With That Guy!

Really? Him? Hm.

No, we don’t mean anything by it. Just surprised is all.

We didn’t think you were into that sort thing.

We’re not upset. Just kind of surprised.

Should we be offended? It doesn’t seem like this has anything to do with us.

What do you mean by passive-aggressive?

We’re starting to feel offended now, I will tell you that.

What do you mean “well then it’s a good thing that this happened?”

Where are you going?

Oh god, Charlene, watch out for that bus!

Congratulations on Sleeping With That Guy!

Congratulations on Breaking Into Conan O'Brien's House!

So here’s a funfact: NBC is actually powered by a not so secret gemstone that is normally kept in Lorne Michael’s chest. You can tell when it’s missing because SNL enjoys a marked decrease in quality during its eras of absence. And you thought it had to do with the cast changes!

Well it turns out that Conan O’Brien was actually promised that gemstone as part of his infamous Late Night Contract. And he got it. And when he was asked to give it back, he refused.

NBC was displeased, to put it lightly, but they couldn’t make a fuss about it in public, not without exposing the horrible truth behind their sagging fall line-up and their completely insane decision to remove Dan Harmon from his place at the helm of Community. With no legal means of addressing the issue they’ve simply begun sending intern after intern to try and retake the gemstone, with the promise of an executive producer credit on a new, potentially disastrous sitcom if they succeed.

So far none of them have come back.

Today you’re going to get farther than most do. You’ll bypass Conan O’Brien’s trained manta rays, who also have lasers strapped to their heads and patrol his outermost moat. Then you’ll evade his many fire-breathing dogs, mostly by masking yourself in Andy Richter’s scent (available through the internet to those with the temerity to look for it).

Once you breach the interior of the house, you’ll discover that O’Brien has filled it with attack robots that detect NBC employees by scanning for the radiation emitted by the microchip implanted in each and every one of you. Being an enterprising young man, once you figure this out (largely from the massive heat buildup that their scanning will trigger in your left shoulder, where your chip is located) you’ll carve your NBC ID chip out of you with a knife and then throw it into his living room, where it will be vaporized by mother fucking lasers.

With all of your hurdles seemingly eliminated you’ll crawl on your belly past the robots, not wanting to arouse any additional suspicion. You’ll keep an eye out for trip-wires and any defenses you might’ve missed, things like attack bees or Labomba. After nearly twenty minutes of crawling you’ll find yourself in the specially designed containment vault in the basement of Conan’s virtual fortress-palace-home. The gemstone will be in the center of the otherwise unmarked white room, hovering inside of a field of pulsating blue energy. You’ll pick yourself up off the floor, dust yourself off and begin walking over to the gem.

Before you get three steps in, a force will strike you in the side of your torso so severely that you’ll be catapulted across the room and on to your back. You’ll lay there, staring up at the pure white ceiling, the dim hum of the gem’s containment field beckoning you to rise to your feet. You’ll be unable to move.

Co Co himself will suddenly step into your field of vision, carrying an antiquated double barrel shotgun. He’ll pop open the breach and withdraw two shells, still smoking. Then he’ll calmly reload the weapon and snap it closed.

“Give my regards to Johnny Carson,” he’ll mutter as he takes aim at you. Then the sound of a gunshot will crush your ears and the world will go dark.

Congratulations on Breaking Into Conan O’Brien’s House!