Congratulations on Getting Laid in a Ball Pit!

It’s been your fantasy for a long while, and tonight it’s going to come true. You and your boyfriend, Slade, are going to break into a Chuck-E-Cheese through a grate on the roof and after a quick crawl through the ventilation shafts that keep those adorable kids playing in one of America’s favorite family establishments from suffocating you’ll tumble out and straight into the ball pit, right where you want to be.

“Awesome,” you’ll whisper to the balls beneath you, seconds before Slade lands on top of you and forces your face down into the pit. It’ll reek of sweat, urine and vomit. There will be an undertone of shame, but that’s such a common odor for you that you won’t be able to pick it out from the more potent native aromas. When Slade lifts you clumsily out of the ball pit, struggling with your modest weight (he’s a skinny punk boy who likes cocaine, and knows where to find cocaine, which is a big part of why you like him) you’ll gasp for air, only to find that the scent of piss and vomit is just as potent above the balls as it is within them. You’ll consider calling it off, or breaking into another, different Chuck-E-Cheese, but you’ll dismiss the thought with a shrug.

“Let’s do this,” you’ll smirk back at him, slipping your jeans and underpants under your knees in one quick gesture. Then you’ll ram two fingers into your asshole while Slade closes his eyes and unzips his jeans, humming to himself as he jerks off. You’ll watch his face to see if his eyes open. You’ll want him to make eye contact with you before you start, but he won’t. When he’s hard you’ll feel his erect dick against your wrist and you’ll pull your fingers out of your pre-lubed asshole and slip his penis in there, just below the head. The shock will force your eyes forward and you’ll clasp your thighs, for want of anything more substantial to hold on to, as he awkwardly maneuvers himself into your still quite tense asshole.

He’ll work himself in and out with a few strokes before you relax just enough for the pain to become manageable. Then you’ll lean back and look over your shoulder, again searching for some glimmer of romance or adventure in his eyes. They’ll be closed again and he’ll be humming, though the sound will be so low and tuneless that you won’t be able to tell for certain that he’s really making any noise at all.

After around five minutes of this you’ll look back forward, surveying the ball pit before you, wondering what it would be like to do this in front of a crowd. You’ll fantasize about eyes on you, eyes probing your clothed body and stripping you naked, debasing you even further with the filthy thoughts you conceal.

Just as you start to get into the swing of things Slade’s hands will tighten around your hips, his body turning rigid. He’ll thrust twice more awkwardly and then explode into your anus with a vaguely remorseful moan. Then he’ll drop his head upon your shoulder, sweat staining his bleach blonde spiked hair.

“That was fuckin’ wild babe,” he’ll exhale.

“Yeah,” you’ll murmur as you push him away and pull up your underwear and jeans to keep his spunk from leaking out of your asshole and into the ball pit. “Wild.”

Congratulations on Getting Laid in a Ball Pit!

Congratulations Spastic Colon!

You’ll be patient, waiting to strike until the ideal moment, which will be just as your owner stands up and turns his back to the conference table, flicking his extending pointer and landing it right where he wants it to be in one fluid gesture.

At this moment you will force his gastrointestine to erupt with sound, forcing out a roughshod trumpet sound that will make the majority of the board members scrutinizing him pale and a handful of them giggle. He’ll turn around with his mouth shaped into a tiny “oh” and his eyebrows raised in surprise and shrug.

“Sorry about that guys. Indian food, am I right?”

The more serious board members will start laughing at this and the less serious ones will roll their eyes and go back to doodling on their notebooks. This will be the ideal moment to follow up, right after your owner has, theoretically, dispelled his initial embarrassment.

This is the time to make him shit his pants.

It will be an audible shit. It’ll have to be an audible shit. But it’ll also be a visible shit, just the right mix of liquid and solid so that it is visible to the board members without oozing out completely. It’ll be the perfect shit, in a sense, wet enough that it will stain through his pants and dry and massive enough that it will produce a mass visible to all present.

There will be a moment of silence, terrible silence, as everyone realizes what has occurred. Then an uproar of laughter will erupt from one of the older board members, a man so ancient he is no longer concerned with anyone else’s opinion. He’ll be hunched over the table in hysterics, wondering just what will happen next.

The rest of the board will follow his lead after a few minutes of silence, chuckling uneasily and looking at one another as if to say “is it alright that we’re doing this?”

Your human’s boss will not join in, however. He’ll simply stand and say “DAMNIT JOHNSON! YOU’RE FIRED!”

And with that your human will turtle walk out of the boardroom and into the nearest bathroom, where he’ll do his best to clean himself up. He won’t have a fresh pair of trousers, however, and as such will have to ride the bus home reeking of shit. Later on, after he’s been escorted from the building and retrieved his belongings and signed an agreement stating that he will not sue the company in exchange for a modest severance, he’ll consider killing himself, which is bad news for you since as his colon you’d die too if he chose to do it. But at the very last minute, a week from today, that elderly board member whose laughter turned the room against him will call him up and ask him to work on his hedgefund, provided he shits himself at least once a month at an unexpected time.

Your human will promptly agree and the two of you will begin an uneasy alliance which will mark the first time your human gets to enjoy intimacy without your interference in almost a decade.

Congratulations Spastic Colon!

Congratulations on Getting Hit in the Face by a Book!

The book will soar over the crowd of men and women striking each other with hard and softcover editions of little indie press titles that will likely never be seen by anyone outside of this gallery. It will arc so perfectly that there will be no question in your head, years later, that it was meant to do anything but strike you in the face. At this point in your life you will not believe that that book was ever intended to be read.

It will catch you just below the eye, a particularly painful spot that will make you feel as if your skull is popping open, your ocular cavity expelling the tiny orb within it, nerve and all. Of course, it won’t be. It’ll be just fine and you’ll be just fine, albeit on your knees in the middle of a milling crowd of bookish twenty-to-fiftysomethings shouting, cavorting and hurling titles at one another with tremendous ampolmb.

It’ll be a miracle that you won’t be kneed in the head by one of the various celebrants at the book fair. But the real miracle will come when she finds you, in search of the person she struck with her book. She’ll have realized, seconds afterwards, that a hardcover copy of a thousand and four page piece of experimental prose might not have been the best item to hurl during a light hearted book fight. When she discovers you she’ll pick you up and guide you delicately out of the book fight. Her beauty and your pathetic appearance will keep anyone from attacking you for a while.

She’ll stay by your side until you finally open your eyes again. And when you see her, see those sleepless raccoon eyes and delicate curving smile articulating those full, hungry lips, you’ll know that you can never go back to sleep again without thinking of her, of her face.

You won’t tell her this until your fourth date, when you know, fully know in your bones, that you want to spend the rest of your life with this woman. But you will, to your credit, immediately summon the courage to ask her out, without invoking the pity play your eye will afford you. You’ll tell this story to your daughter years later, when she asks why you always look at her mother that way. She won’t understand what you mean at the time.

Congratulations on Getting Hit in the Face by a Book!

Congratulations on Alienating Your Fanbase!

“I just don’t see what the big deal is,” you’ll announce to the crowd. “The dad from Malcolm in the Middle is bald, I guess that’s something?”

Boos and hisses will cascade at you from the audience. One man will throw his shoe, which you’ll dodge adeptly, ducking below your podium.

“I know the guy from Mister Show is on it now or whatever. Is that why you like it?”

The boos and hisses will intensify, and more shoes will begin to pelt the podium. You’ll occasionally glance out from behind it to discern the intensity and frequency of shoe hurlings directed at you. They’ll be intensifying as you spend more and more time cowering behind the podium. You’ll disconnect the microphone and keep speaking into it, trying to dig yourself out of the massive hole you’ve created.

“I’ve got a lot of other stuff to watch! I’m sorry!”

At this point your fans will rush the stage, overwhelming the security guards who will emerge from the wings to try and protect you. They’ll tear you from your hiding place and bring you upstairs, where one of the crowd members will bind you to a chair while another one plays episodes of Breaking Bad for you on his laptop.

After you finish the first season they’ll untie you and ask you what you think.

“It was pretty good, but I think you guys might’ve blown it out of proportion for me a little. It’s tough to look at it just for its own merits when you’ve all hyped it up so much.

At this point the fans in the hotel room will start breaking apart chairs so they can use the chair legs as clubs to beat you with. They’ll continue beating you until you finally say that you love Breaking Bad, even though you just like it, at best.

Congratulations on Alienating Your Fanbase!

Congratulations on Feeling the Right Way at a Social Gathering!

As the crowd roars and surges forward against the barriers, crushing the unlucky few who came to the square early to find the best of seats for the execution against the concrete and steel dividers, you’ll feel rage. It’ll be a bleak, helpless kind of rage, both for the crime the men in front of you committed and for the unfairness and rapidity of the trial which has condemned them to death.

Stones will fly from the crowd, occasionally striking one of the men standing on the hastily constructed platform. A man in a uniform will cautiously read from a prepared statement, announcing the charges and evidence levied against the men on stage, but the roar of the crowd will drown him out. There will be no sound but the crowd until the ceremony takes off and the man in a uniform pulls a lever, dropping the floor out from beneath the line of men and forcing them out into the air, where the ropes wrapped around their necks will tighten and snap in an instant that will silence the crowd.

The silence will not last, and even as the anger within you turns to a queer sort of fear, the noise of the crowd will make it really difficult for you to feel anything but vindication for turning in your neighbor earlier that day. Maybe the next neighbor you get will think a little harder before he steals cable from you.

Congratulations on Feeling the Right Way at a Social Gathering!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: My Love for Micromanagement!

Star Wars: The Old Republic has changed for me again. I’m not talking about the latest update, the impact of which remains to be seen for me. That’s exciting, but I’m so far behind on content that it’ll be a long while before I’m actively participating in it. No, what I’ve recently started doing is, after reaching a point where I’m more or less happy with how I’ve progressed in PvP, begun to micromanage my gear. In SW:TOR, this is a game all to itself.

See, here’s the deal. I’m just not well-geared enough to run the Operations where the best gear drops, the “Campaign” gear that represents the pinnacle of how you should be playing your class. So in order to be effective enough to run the Operations where I’d get that gear (and more effectively do my job in “normal” hard mode Operations) I have to get down into my gear and pull pieces out and slip new pieces from other end game gear in. For example, my Black Hole chestpiece isn’t my Black Hole chestpiece anymore. It had too much endurance and not enough strength. So what did I do? I pulled out some strength enhancements from a Rakata drop I found and combined them with my Black Hole chestpiece, making the overall strength bonus for the gear higher without losing its armor bonus and minimizing the amount of Endurance I had to sacrifice (a crucial resource for when I inevitably draw agro or take area damage during boss fights, both occupational hazards of being a melee DPS in Operations).

Once I had a chest piece that was good enough (I guess) for me to do my job and survive the punishing battles of HM-EC (SW:TOR, shockingly, loves its two word acronyms for Flashpoints and Operations) it was time to move on to kitting out my lightsabers as best I can. The Oath of Ragnos, my Rakata offhand, was a great little toy with lots of strength and the like, but its crystal boosted Power, not Critical Rating. Power’s always useful, but for my character, who relies on getting lots of criticals one after the other after the other to stack up massive bursts of damage in a few seconds, Critical Rating is slightly better. So I removed the boring Red-Black crystal (tame only by the standards of end-game SW:TOR) and inserted a Yellow-Black color crystal that gave me a sweet critical boost. And if I’m gonna do that, then I might as well switch out the crystal on my War Hero’s lightsaber (a PVP oriented weapon which is arguably easier to acquire than a Rakata mainhand and is equivalent in terms of its base damage output, if not its strength bonuses) which just made it a little bit better against other players with a sweet looking Green-Black crystal that boosted its critical output. Now my critical percentage was a full percent and a half more likely, boosting me to just above a one-in-three chance of scoring a critical hit when I’m fully buffed.

But wait! There’s more! Now that I look sweet and my gear has been properly tweaked, it’s time to soak money into installing Augments, introduced to the game a few updates ago, into my late game gear. These Augments provide small bonuses to existing gear bonuses, allowing players to get a little bit more out of their gear if they’re willing to pay out the fucking ass for it. Augment kits cost around 30,000 credits on the Galactic Marketplace, SW:TOR’s auction house, and cost another 30,000 credits to install. Then there are the Augments themselves, which cost anywhere from 15,000 credits for a modestly priced, pretty good Augment, to 60,000 for the top of the line Augment (providing an additional two stat points in each of its effective categories compared to the “good enough” Augments) that you really want since, let’s face it, you’re taking the time to do this to your gear. The price tag for the components required to make a slot alone represents about an hour of hard farming in one of the end-game areas, easy enough to get from going through the Daily Quests you thought you were done with or just killing your way through dozens of enemies. But installing the Augment also means you have to go to a special bench with your special upgrade to make a slot in the item you want to install the Augment into. These benches are almost never located conveniently, so you might have to look for a while. You’ll almost definitely have to go out of your way. Once the slot is introduced, you’ll insert your Augment and then click accept.

Still awake? Kudos. This bullshit item shuffling, obtuse as it is, has actually been very compelling for me as I get into a sort of dirty math thinking about which upgrades I can afford to buy when. I’ve gone from having a massive surplus of cash to spending nearly all of it in a matter of days. But I’m still playing SW:TOR and I’m still upgrading my items, grinding them to be slightly better so I can run Explosive Conflict and get the last pieces of gear I need to start running Explosive Conflict in Hard Mode. These micromanagerial iterations have become the crux of the game for me in this queer interim period, where I find it banal to get better gear but need it all the same.

This isn’t exclusive to Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’ve done this time and time again in other games with other gear. Dragon Age and its varied runty offspring are a terrific set of examples. These are games of dozens of whirling parts, some of which fit into certain machines. Success in them depends on a willingness to sit down and reach wrist deep into the gear system, swapping out pieces for a plus one here or a lifesteal effect there. I found myself choosing between an improved chance to dodge and better armor class, divvying up the best gear painstakingly among my party members and doing insane things to get slightly better items that are “the best” for fights that, realistically, I wasn’t actually going to have that much trouble with. But all this could be seen as a means to forward Dragon Age’s story. Every once in a while, there were certainly fights where that game forced you to sit down and pick apart how you were playing so that you could adapt to the challenge at hand.

But there are games where this sort of micromanagement entirely forms the crux of the gameplay. Gratuitous Space Battles occurs entirely before the play itself begins, with a series of tweaks to equipment and spaceships that iteratively improve the performance of your ships and, if you’re lucky, lower their costs, allowing you to field more ships. GSB is a game that is played exclusively between the scenes: you can put your ships on the field and tell them what to do, but there isn’t much more to it than that. The end result is a great deal more engaging than you might think, but even without that tremendously valuative statement GSB’s existence as a game posits something very interesting: that this sort of micromanagement is not only acceptable in games, but that it is a compelling aspect of play for at least some percentage of the population.

Many games today seem bent on making this sort of activity optional. Civilization 5, for example, automated its most intense process of managing individual citizens in special structures within cities, allowing players to take over this activity if they chose to do so. Civilization 4 had no such concessions to its like micro-managey players (though I’ve heard many arguments as to how Civ 4 fails, and how Civ 5 continues to fail, on down the line from Civ 2). Many contemporary RPGs also stress a simplified system of equipment or progression: Skyrim’s simplification of the incredibly tweaky Elder Scrolls leveling system is a perfect example. Morrowind allowed players to equip individual gloves and rings. Oblivion took a step back, pairing gloves and denying you the specificity of selecting a different left and right hand glove while retaining all of the often infuriating bits and pieces at work within leveling in an Elder Scrolls game, and leaving the equipment system more or less intact. Skyrim dramatically decreased the number of pieces of equipment players can equip, and totally rewrote the infamously micro-managey progression system at work in the Elder Scrolls universe. Though the end result still required tiny changes and choices to be made on a regular basis, it was far less dramatic than it had been previously, and careful selection of activities was no longer a key element in progressing a character “correctly” though the game.

The micro-management elements always seem to remain, and players, some of us anyways, seem to always be drawn to them. Is SW:TOR a sign of things to come? Are we to play games in the future where micromanagement will be optional, costly and, in the end, quite rewarding? It’s difficult to say for sure: the spreadsheet management game has long been a compelling hidden genre for many, and all kvetching to the contrary, it’s difficult to see it fading any time soon, or ever really, even as we witness a world where games are encouraged to become faster, simpler and slicker.

There’s something wonderful at work there, isn’t there?

Congratulations on Manipulating Him Into Paying Your Rent!

There are a lot of ways to get a sugar daddy. Sex, clever word play, elaborately constructed dioramas that recount wars as recalled by various History channel documentaries.

You’re going to do it by stealing a painting from a man who commissioned a mystical work of art long ago that prevents him from aging. You broke into his house a few days ago and today you’re going to get his painting, cover it with a sheet and put it in the lobby of the building he works in.

“If you don’t pay my rent for the next three years I’ll show you this painting I swear to god!” you’ll hastily scream.

“Oh…kay,” he’ll respond, promptly writing you a check for three hundred and fifty dollars, the full rent on your basement apartment in southern Jacksonville, Florida.

Congratulations on Manipulating Him Into Paying Your Rent!

Congratulations on Finally Catching That Squirrel That's Been Fucking Your Wife!

Today you’re going to burst into the room while the squirrel is nestled between your wife’s thighs, tail upright, fur bristling with pleasure.

“Chitter chitter,” the squirrel will moan, romancing your wife.

“What the shit!” you’ll shout, hurling your bag across the room, straight into the ancient lamp your wife forced you to buy at a yard sale far too long ago.

“Oh god! Honey!” your wife will shriek, forcing the squirrel out from between her legs and clutching the sheets to her bare bosom, soaking it with blood from her squirrel bites. The squirrel will scrabble away, fleeing to the windowsill where the window will still be open, curtains billowing out, showcasing the ingress first used by the squirrel. He’ll pause there, giant squirrel erection pulsing awkwardly as he looks back and forth between the two of you, trying to decide if he wants to flee.

Your wife will get out of bed, the sheet wrapped around her. The stains on her chest will be spreading slowly and surely as she stares at you, horrified, not even glancing at the squirrel, whose erection will be fast fading.

“I didn’t think you’d be home from work for another hour.”

You’ll rip off your jacket and throw it at the other lamp, the one you bought at Ikea. You’ll knock this one over without breaking it and advance on your wife and the squirrel, walking towards the corner of the bed on a vector that carries you closer to both of them. Your mind won’t be made up.

“Does that make it better?” Your voice will be flat, emotionless, as scary as a voice can be.

Your wife won’t respond. She’ll be frozen in place. The squirrel, however, will not. He’ll take the cue and book it out the window. He’ll be well clear by the time you make it to the top bureau drawer, get the gun out and point it out the window, letting three rounds fly, taking chunks out of the tree.

You’ll turn from the window still clutching the gun. Your wife will stand there, trembling, eyes flitting between the revolver, still smoking, and your eyes. They’ll flit between her chest and her eyes. Your jaw will be locked. The two of you will stand there for what feels like a very, very long time, but will, in reality, only be a few seconds.

Congratulations on Finally Catching That Squirrel That’s Been Fucking Your Wife!

Congratulations on Swindling Those Worthless Fucking Orphans!

Man’s gotta eat and pay to fuck sad ladies. That’s your motto, or it would be if you had time for mottos. But a low down street hussla (not to be confused with hustler) like you can’t be bothered to write down mottos and pass them on to young toughs just starting out. Yours is not to philosophize. Yours is to swindle, finagle and steal your way to better living.

Case in point: today you’re going to roll up on an orphanage asking for donations for books and clothing that you’ll give to other orphans. The orphans will be so touched by your stories of poverty and want that they’ll reach deep into their own pockets (gaunt from poverty and want) and fork out as much money as they can spare and then some to help those other besieged imaginary orphans out. It will be, in the words of a total fucking sucker, heartwarming.

For suckers, I mean. You’ll think it’s fucking hilarious. And when you go home and buy a pack of cigarettes and a six pack of PBR with the thirty bucks those orphans gave you you’ll shove the change into your pants just so that you can know, even if the orphans never know, that you rubbed that cash on your dick.

Well done, you reprehensible piece of human excrement. You will be able to afford your sad, sad lifestyle for another day because of what you did to those kids.

Congratulations on Swindling Those Worthless Fucking Orphans!

Congratulations on Forgetting Aboutthe Treasure in Your Attic for a Decade!

Today you’re going to put a box in your attic. It’ll be a small box, a very special box. A box that you will promptly forget about for ten years.

Over the next ten years a lot is going to happen. You’re going to get hit by a car, end up in a wheelchair, join a cult, elevate yourself to the role of leader within said cult. You’re going to get circumsized again for reasons that we don’t totally understand, you’re going to try replacing your legs with crudely fashioned bars of steel that barely support your weight and, when that doesn’t work, you’re going to become a Buddhist based on the misapprehension that Buddhists are capable of flight.

There will also be a bunch of other shit, some of it related to the President and the rise of the Soviet Union’s strange respawned new form. But most of the stuff you care about, the stuff you’re capable of talking about will mostly be germane to cults and your legs.

All that while you’ll miss those Star Wars figures you cached away ages ago, but you won’t be able to remember just where you put them. Until ten years from today, when you finally recall just where you stashed all those figures. You, with your lack of legs, will be totally incapable of scaling the steps to the attic and getting inside.

The irony will be profound, a delight in its own right, but this will be a poor substitute for the original Boba Fett figurine.

Congratulations on Forgetting About the Treasure In Your Attic for a Decade!

Congratulations on Finding Your Dad's Old Porn!

When your father dies you’ll be overjoyed. Most people would be crestfallen, perturbed or at the very least, unnerved and concerned with their own mortality. But not you! You’re kind of a dick, and you’ll just be positively psyched to potentially be getting all of your dad’s stuff now that he’s dead.

So you’ll breeze through the ceremony surrounding your dad’s death smiling like an idiot and shaking hands with such vigor and positivity that all of your guests will think you’ve suffered a mental break. They’ll depart the wake and funeral thinking that you’ve become dangerously mentally unbalanced and that you’re gonna do something crazy, but really you’ll just have been fantasizing about the sweet, sweet green your daddy done left for you.

It will all come together today. Today is the reading of your father’s will, and you’ll show up to it in a pair of bahama shorts and a Hawaiian t-shirt so that the moment you get the money your dad left you you can go on a Jimmy Buffet style hedonistic rampage through whatever island culture is unfortunate enough to have the lowest ticket prices on Orbitz when you get home without even the slightest delay.

And after a seemingly eternal (fifteen minute) reading of your father’s will where he announces that he’s providing the contents of his bank account entirely to your mother (Booo!), his varied real estate developments to your twin sisters (cunts), and the contents of his safe deposit box to you your goal will finally seem within reach. Sure, you won’t be expecting the kind of windfall you were all but jacking off to earlier in the day, but you’ll still be excited. Your heart will be bursting out of your chest with its tough little pitter patter, and when you pull up to the bank you’ll be humming “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” doing your best to time the slap of your flip flops on the pavement to the beat of the song.

When you step inside the bank and inform them of the situation they’ll offer their sympathies, but by this point you’ll be finished even pretending to care. You’ll just shrug and say “Yeah, rough. Dad’s dead. Ah well. Let’s see his shit!”

The customer service agent helping you won’t really know what to say to that, so he’ll just wordlessly lead you down into the bank’s vault, where rows upon rows of tiny little steel boxes will rest one upon the other upon the other. Then he’ll insert his key into said box and leave to let you peruse its contents on your own.

You’ll practically be drooling when you open it up, which will make the outcome all the more inappropriate. Instead of finding stacks and stacks of cash money and passports proving your dad to be some sort of Jason Bourne type figure, you’ll just find a phenomenal number of stained vintage Playboys. Were it not for the (you hope) water damage and heavy use of the magazines, they might be worth a tidy sum at a rummage sale or on the internet. But their condition will render them worthless to any would-be collectors.

You’ll dig through the magazines one by one, hoping to find some sort of hidden clue to riches beneath them all, but nothing will appear. When you do finally reach the bottom there will, at last, be a note, neatly folded. When you unfold it its edges will be sticking together. You’ll have to take the utmost care not to rip it apart, but when you do reveal its message it’ll more or less explain everything.

“Son – I jacked off on all these magazines and you just dug through them. Ha ha, faggot! - Dad”

You’ll drop the note and make a derp face when you realize what you’ve just had to endure for all of zero fucking dollars. Then you’ll start weeping, dropping to your knees in the empty bank vault room. After a few seconds of that the sobs will turn to laughter as you realize that you inherited something far, far more important than money from your dad: his incredible capacity for being an asshole.

Congratulations on Finding Your Dad’s Old Porn!

Congratulations on Figuring Out Who's Been Stealing All the Pudding Cups!

For on four weeks now tragedy has beset your noble twenty-four hour Safeway, located at the junction of Caesar Chavez Boulevard and Powell Street. Each night, during the 2 AM delivery that ensures proper distribution of foodstuffs for your non-meth addicted customers in the day to come, all of the pudding cups you ordered have gone missing.

At first you thought it might be a clerical error, maybe an issue at the distribution plant. But despite your phone calls the issue persisted, and the manifest showed, time and time again, that the truck had been loaded with more than enough pudding cups to make up for the previous night’s lack. At this point, thousands of dollars worth of pudding cups have gone missing, time and time again, without any sign of perfidy or foul play. Different drivers have made the deliveries, each shipment has been unloaded by a constantly rotating cast of night shift workers, but regardless of who is supposed to be responsible for the pudding shipment, it has gone missing each and every time to date.

There’s been no pattern to be found, no evidence whatsoever. The pudding simply vanishes at some point between being unloaded from the truck and being stocked on the shelves of Safeway. It’s been a plague upon your otherwise orderly store for far too long, and corporate has been getting on your back about it of late as letters from customers (really just one customer, but she writes from a bunch of names and normally buys an astounding number of pudding cups) pour in.

But today you’re going to catch a lucky break. When the shipment vanishes right under your god damn nose at 2 in the god damn morning you’re going to say fuck it and drive home to rethink your entire life, leaving your assistant manager, Jorgina (her parents didn’t understand how Spanish worked) to watch over the store in your absence.

When you arrive home you’ll see that the garage door will already be open. Your wife’s car will be backed up to it, the trunk hanging open, cardboard boxes veritably cascading out of the back of her SUV. When you pull into the drive way next to her you’ll catch her pulling one of the boxes out and your eyes will meet and in that moment you’ll know exactly who’s been stealing all of your pudding cups.

You’ll step out of your Honda wordlessly and walk around it and into the garage for the first time in months. Inside there will be cardboard boxes of pudding stacked nearly to the ceiling, a virtual lifetime supply of pudding just waiting to be crammed on to the shelves of Safeway. You’ll be taking in the sheer spectacle of it when your wife approaches you from behind and wraps her arms around your shoulders, letting her weight hang down across your frame.

“Hey there honey,” she’ll murmur. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

You’ll open your mouth to respond, but then you’ll think, really think, about the last time you actually saw your wife awake. The two of you will both have been working so hard, plying your trade at off hours and missing each other at mealtime that the last moment you’ll be able to recall together will be your vacation six months earlier, when the two of you went camping up in the Gorge.

So instead of accusing her, of unleashing rage you’ll simply let it go, wrap your arm around her and pull her close for a kiss and whisper back.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Congratulations on Figuring Out Who’s Been Stealing All the Pudding Cups!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The Case for Doublefine's Iron Brigade!

I really admire Tim Schafer. Maybe it’s for making Monkey Island, which was a pretty important game in my life. Maybe it’s for his raw, unconcerned weirdness, which seems to inform everything he does. Maybe it’s because he pursues ideas, regardless of their marketability, making games that blur the lines of genre and never cease to impress. Maybe it’s that there’s so much going on in everything he works on: layers upon layers at work in games that, even on their surface, are at times frighteningly complex.

My point is that, when I see that Schafer has made a game, I want to play it. I want to play it over a long, comfortable weekend without distractions, without any other games in my life getting between us. That’s how I played through Brutal Legend over the course of a few weeks, that’s how I made my way through Psychonauts, and that’s more or less what I’m doing with his latest creation, a distinct Schaferism on the genre of Tower Defense, Iron Brigade.

I could gush on its humor (which is present, tongue in cheek and family friendly and filthy all in one bundle, and wonderfully witty, of course) or its art design (a marvelous blend of realism and the sort of cartoonish hyperrealism that Team Fortress 2 uses so effectively, set in a fictional time period which is simultaneously historically astutely and totally, lovingly irreverently nestled between World War I and II) or any number of other things (long parenthetical statement here). But that’s all window dressing in the Tower Defense genre. The meat of the genre is, as always, the towers. And the defending. The play, that is.

And that’s here. It’s here in spades.

See, Tower Defense games are curious beasts. They are, at their most fundamental level, formulaic games. They’re supposed to have solid learning curves followed by sharply increasing difficulty levels. They can be really, really simple (like Desktop Tower Defense, which is both visually and mechanically a really simple game that delivers marvelously on the promise of Tower Defense play) or surprisingly complicated (like Defense Grid, which has a pretty intense, rapidly shifting puzzle mechanic and a lot of moving pieces which can quickly overwhelm new or inattentive players). Tower Defense games are diverse while retaining some universal core conceits, and the manner in which those conceits are explored forms the fundamental crux of these games. The simplicity or complexity of the game, paired with its visual aesthetic, usually constitutes its appeal: a good Tower Defense game means different things to different people, but it’s always about defending something from enemies using towers.

Iron Brigade mixes this up in a couple of ways. First and foremost, you’re controlling a giant walking Trench (mech) that, while it builds things, doesn’t JUST build things. In fact, certain varieties of mech (Trench) won’t build very many things at all. They’ll lean more towards shooting things, which is a core part of Iron Brigade’s impressively frenetic tower defenses. Taking a note from Dungeon Defenders and Orcs Must Die, Iron Brigade mixes some solid third person shooting/smashing in with a lot of building and collecting. The balance is impressive, and, like in Dungeon Defender, you can shift it by selecting a different sort of “class” or ability prior to the start of the battle.

But unlike Dungeon Defender, there’s a shared progression guiding the game in the form of a vast equipment pool and a slow leveling system that doles out access to said equipment. Dungeon Defender’s class based progression system means that people who want to rely on towers will always have to rely on towers and people who want to fight enemies up close and personal will always have to be in their foe’s faces fucking shit up, since progression is always tied to a single class type. Iron Brigade, on the other hand, wants players to get in and test out all of the little toys it hands out, offering recommendations as to just what you should be doing when, giving out loot at random and letting you change between chassis, weapon loadouts and turret loadouts without any restriction spare level and the distribution of available equipment slots on a given chassis.

The end result is a smart, effective progression system gated by a universal equipment pool and a universal pool of money that lets you play however you like and then shift your style dramatically if the mood strikes you. I spent the first four or five missions playing with a combat oriented chassis, mostly ignoring building turrets until a particularly grueling mission recommended that I mix anti-air and long range turret components together in a way that only an engineering oriented chassis could. I slipped into the engineering chassis and traded my long range artillery cannon and impressive multi-machine gun array for a quaint little automatic sniper rifle and proceeded to joyfully watch my turrets shred enemies every bit as well as my guns had been doing previously.

That means that the core Tower Defense play, solidly executed in a fast paced third person fashion paralleled in the titles I mentioned previously (but aesthetically most similar to Sacrifice and Schaefer’s own Brutal Legend, a pair of underappreciated gems with unconventional interfaces) is all there, paired with a combat system that never feels anemic from any approach. I could gush over the specifics, but I don’t want to get that detailed here: there’s so much going on in Iron Brigade’s sleek, intelligently composed package that if I did get into the nitty gritty of customization and play, I’d be going on all day. Suffice it to say, it’s robust and it’s sustained itself longer than most Tower Defense games in my collection have quite handily, passing six hours of play without any sign of it getting old (I burn out on Tower Defense quick). The play, while engaging, isn’t grueling, and varied map designs with complicated approach mechanics and objectives play with the idea of static defense points in ways to make each map a distinct experience, worthy of replay from a new perspective or in an attempt to nudge your score up just a few…more…points.

But the real digression from the Tower Defense formula comes from the boss fights: combats that pit you and your mech against one big boss (who usually fights in phases) and a slurry of tiny enemies hellbent on wrecking your day. These fights have more a puzzle flair (true to Doublefine’s design chops) than the rest of the game, but it’s a good kind of puzzling feeling. The fights are frenetic, full of visual cues, swirling chaos and generously light consequences for failure. Even though I’ve replayed one of them multiple times during my brief affair with Iron Brigade, I haven’t been overly frustrated by my various failures. They tend to make the game feel more like a learning experience than a chore, a testament to both the variety of play options contained within it and the dramatically varying bonus victory conditions (good luck getting gold on every map alone).

Along with a co-op feature I’m itching to try out and all of those wonderful non-game features that I mentioned before (the puns are so spot on and the writing so cheerfully drab that I find myself smiling every time I hear my iron-lunged commanding officer speak), Iron Brigade is well worth the fifteen dollar price tag. I’m not sure it’s the revolutionary achievement that other Doublefine games have been in the past. I think co-op might reveal whether or not this is going to be something earth shattering, like Psychonauts, or something that burns bright for a few of us and fades away, like Brutal Legend. It’s being presented as a very prominent element of the game, with a four-pack on sale through Steam and its own little section on the main menu/deck of the ship, with equal face time alongside “Trench” customization and mission briefing sub-menus. I plan to engross myself in it as soon as I finish the game proper, and I’m already playing through maps wishing I had friends to help me cover various approaches.

But for now, even without that seemingly crucial aspect of play invoked, I’m having a blast (PUN!) with Iron Brigade. It’s gotten me to stop playing for most of a day, which is no mean feat. Hilarious hats off to you, Doublefine.

Congratulations Especially Frisky Kitten!

Kitties like to be frisky, we all know it. Heck, we love it. Without frisky kittens, the internet would consist entire of pornography and we’d all be really depressed all the time with no means of lifting our spirits.

But you’re gonna take it a little far today when you start a Columbian cocaine smuggling cartel out of your owner’s home. You won’t clear it with them or anything, you’ll just start stashing baggies in your old lady’s litterbox and when she starts asking questions you’ll slit her stem to stern.

When you’re finally brought to trial, in four months time, it’ll be an ugly sight. No sympathy for the devil or pleas on your behalf. Just an endless parade of broken hearts and stamped spirits talking about how they always wanted better for you, about how terrible it is that you didn’t live up to their expectations and about how immense and thorough your drug smuggling ring really is.

When you’re sent to prison (not cat prison, full on prison with jacked dudes and rape and the whole nine yards) you’ll know you’ve earned it. But a part of you will be sad that your friskiness, which lead you to such depths of depravity, such a fantastic degree of misbehavior, will be abated.

At least, for the next seven years.

Have fun inside!

Congratulations Especially Frisky Kitten!

Congratulations Lazy Train Conductor!

“No trains today,” you tell the villagers, despite the clear presence of trains behind you.

“Oh…kay?” they’ll respond impotently.

Thus is the balance of power in the Jim Crow south circa-1961.

Congratulations Lazy Train Conductor!

Congratulations on Being Proven Right!

“WE’LL SEE WHO’S RIGHT!”

Those will be her last words as she walks into the field, sweater battered against her skin by the rain, breasts firm against it, hair pasted against her scalp, mouth beautiful even as she turns it into the foulest pout she can manage. That will be how she remains, forever frozen in your mind, just outside of the canopy of the tree.

Which will be way better than the image of her a few seconds later, after the lightning bolt hits her dead in the chest, fusing her sweater to her skin, charring her bone and rocking her body with such a serious concussive force that she loses consciousness, mercifully, immediately. She won’t know how her body desperately attempted to restart itself, how you pressed your moist lips against her charred ones struggling to remember the number of pumps for CPR, weeping uncontrollably as you waited for the storm to abide, for a chance to move her back home, take her to your car, to a hospital, anywhere but that field.

We’re not sure how you’ll be able to keep those images out of your head, but that’s not our job. We’re not your fucking therapist. That’s Craig, and Craig, turns out, was fucking your wife and telling her the ways that you were complaining about her behind her back, which is a big part of why she kept getting into fights with you at the drop of a dime. Like that argument about where it’s safest to stand during a thunderstorm that made her leave the tree and get struck by lightning.

Which means really all of this is Craig’s fault if you think about it. So take the shotgun from over the fireplace, make sure it’s loaded, and take a drive to his office. You know what to do from there.

Congratulations on Being Proven Right!

Congratulations Train Fiend!

“FUCKIN’ TRAINS MAN!” you’ll shout, head pushed out of the side of the boxcar. Then you’ll pull your face back inside and just breathe heavily for a few minutes. The other hobos in the box car will just sit and stare at you. Jerry, the lead hobo with a heart of gold and a social conscious, will just shake his head. You won’t even notice. You’ll just shiver and black out a little. “I fuckin’ love trains… Unnnnh.” A tiny bit of pee will come out as your whole body relaxes.

Jerry will walk up and put his hand on your cheek, rubbing his fingers and feeling the moisture. “You might have a problem man.” The other hobos will take a break from tuning their folksy guitars and mouth harps to nod in agreement.

“Naw,” you’ll mumble. “Jus’ love traaaains.” At this point you’ll be fading fast, so high on train that you’ll barely even know where you are, and you certainly won’t care. Then you’ll black out.

When you come to you’ll be tied to a tree some distance away, surrounded by hobos. Their beards will cast wild shadows in the night as the fire dances across their faces. They’ll look like a smelly, sweaty, unkempt horde of mountain men just waiting for the order to rip you apart.

But they won’t. They’ll simply step back, leaving Jerry standing alone at the head of the hobo collective with his guitar across his back and a glimmer in his eye. He’ll look straight into your soul and murmur, in his softest hobo voice, “We’ve gotta talk.”

You’ll shake your head and moan: “Where the traaaaaaaain man?”

“That’s what we’ve gotta talk about.” Jerry will rest his hand against your cheek and smile. “You’re addicted to the rush of riding the rails. We’ve all seen it before, man. Hell, half of us have had it. But you can’t be a Woody Guthrie style hobo fighting for change if you’re high all the time, man.”

“What?! LEMME BACK ONNA TRAIN!” You’ll struggle against your bonds, feeling the ropes dig into your skin, wrists, arms, legs. Skin will start to feel raw, but the hobos won’t move to untie you. Instead Jerry will simply stand there, flanked by hobos, and give you tiny bits of food and water as needed over the next several hours. By the time the sun rises you’ll be in the full grip of train withdrawl. By the next dawn, you’ll be alone, untied from the three with a brief note from your hobo companions.

Don’t ride the trains ‘til you think you can. And don’t vote until America swears off wars, man.

- Jerry

You’ll start walking until you hit a set of train tracks. You’ll see them and you’ll just feel so tired, so filled with desire to ride on the train, it’ll only make sense to ride on the train tracks. And you’re so used to riding the rails that you won’t even notice the vibration of the train along its tracks until it’s far, far too late. You’ll barely feel the train sliding over you at all, it’ll just be an instant of intense, profound pain and then nothing at all.

Congratulations Train Fiend!

Congratulations on Misusing That Speculum!

Cold metal will press into the flesh of the vagina, expanding futilely, making her grimace and groan. You’ll look up to try and catch her eyes to see if it’s the good kind of grimace or groan but her eyes will be rolled back as she stares at the ceiling, giving you the impression that she’s just waiting, waiting, waiting for this to end. You’ll do your best to move it around a little, trying to find some pleasant spot, but to no avail.

After almost twenty minutes of these futile, blind exertions her hand will descend to the back of your neck and stroke it, beckoning you to draw back.

“Honey,” she’ll hoarsely whisper. “Could we just use your penis the way we normally do?”

Seven minutes later you’ll be collapsed in each other’s arms. Your wife will be slightly happier, though not super happy and the speculum will be sitting on the end-table, waiting for one of you to remember that it exists so you can throw it away with a tinge of shame in your hearts.

Congratulations on Misusing That Speculum!

Congratulations on Forming the Fan Club for People Who Are Too Old to Be Into Full Metal Alchemist but Love It Anyway!

This is a really specific one. You know who you are and what your backstory is. Sorry about your dad, by the way. He was a good man, and he didn’t deserve that.

But you deserve what’s going to happen today, when one of the people in the fan club we mentioned in the absurdly long title above calls you up, out of the blue, and asks to meet you in real life. She’ll be a lady (shocker) and kind of heavy, but that’s how you like them and you’ll meet up and bone and it’ll be awesome.

Congratulations on Forming the Fan Club for People Who Are Too Old to Be Into Full Metal Alchemist but Love It Anyway!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Another Fucking Essay About Star Wars: The Old Republic!

I keep writing about Star Wars: The Old Republic, even when I’ve got other things going on. It’s just such a rich experience, with so many dimensions to explore. You can examine it from a sociological perspective, a thematic perspective, explore the story of the main class plots, the collective story that the factions develop across worlds, stories that collide and interlock between the Republic and the Empire. You can look at the way the free-to-play model is supposedly going to work, the way that vanity items factor into late-game play as an incentive, the way that content is being doled out through updates. You can discuss the way subscribers are being rewarded in nearly unprecedented ways for their loyalty while simultaneously scattering their voices in collective outcry at the raw bullshit they’ve been forced to put up with.

But lately what I’ve been doing, in the latest iteration on my Star Wars chores, has been player versus player combat, a distinct and profound SW:TOR experience all its own.

Ages ago, World of Warcraft introduced a new and exciting concept to the MMO universe: Battlegrounds. PvP was no longer a somewhat consensual contract players entered into in the game world at large with total strangers for petty cash and bragging rights. Instead, players could shimmy on into a particular section of map, wait in a very real line and then enter an arena with some of their friends (but far more likely a group of anonymous assholes) and earn brownie points towards buying PvP specific gear. There were some obvious problems here: the nature of Battlegrounds forced players into one area where they had to wait for extended periods of time, the rewards, especially at first, were a bit lackluster and progress was unbearably slow for casual players. Power creep from the rewards would eventually ruin any semblance of balance, and if it was ever restored it came far, far after my time, but the idea of instanced PvP zones that treated combat in MMOs as a sport was a brilliant idea, even if its implementation was problematic.

Fast-forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic and its Warzones, which are essentially the latest (and I’d say greatest) iteration on the concept behind Battlegrounds. Unlike Battlegrounds, which had shifting level caps, imbalances and power creep issues which kept the weak weak and allowed the strong to grow ever stronger, Warzones reward every player, even the losers, with delicious delicious commendations and valor (PvP specific experience points) that then let them buy into a system of player versus player gear specially designed for end-game PvP combat (and arguably not too useful outside of that). Warzones also temporarily shift player statistics to level 50 regardless of a player’s level at any given moment, so even a fresh level 12 character can still participate in epic e-sports combat with the big boys. It’s not perfect (it really shows when a new healer fails miserably mid-fight, or when an operative or a sorcerer doesn’t use an interrupting or stunning ability you’d expect them to have bound to their primary task-bar by late-game) but it’s better than new players simply being railroaded by veterans who have had a great deal more time to build their characters into fearsome engines of death and destruction. That still happens, a lot, but the law of averages means that your brand new smuggler who just selected his specialized class will still be able to do some hurt to his enemies, even if he’s less impressive than his capped out, tricked out vanguard ally.

But the real revolution heralded by Warzones is that they’re not tied to a specific geographic location. There are still specific areas reserved for PvP combat and PvP combat in faction shared areas for consenting adults, but for Warzone play players simply choose to enter a server-wide queue, regardless of where they are, and then get a chance to duke it out with one another once enough people have queued up. Clearing out trash mobs, running dailies for commendations and grinding cash is all very do-able while queued for PvP, so participating in PvP action doesn’t necessarily mean taking a break from your day-to-day activities. Paired with a series of daily and weekly quests with humbly generous rewards, especially when you consider the PvP systems of other games, SW:TOR takes PvP in an impressive new direction, attempting to trim out most of the dross that keeps even somewhat casual players out of it.

It’s telling, then, that PvP is still an all too often grueling experience, despite all these wondrous iterations.

See, the main problem with MMOs for me is people. People are fucking awful. Give them anonymity in a fantasy environment and they get much, much worse. MMOs are a case study plumbing the depths of this misery, a sounding test of just how shitty people can become. To be fair, SW:TOR is actually a great deal more moderate in its asshole content than most games, but PvP, by its very nature, seems to be a lightning rod to the various internet people who I normally go out of my way to avoid. When they aren’t just incompetent, they’re usually a balance of incompetent and antisocial, screaming epithets at strangers, excoriating their teammate’s performance without a single redemptive or edifying comment and generally just acting like douchebags. A friendly face is an unusual occurrence in a PvP match, and a competent randomly arranged team is so unusual that the weekly quest to acquire nine wins almost always takes me nearly a full week. It can take a even longer if I’m particularly unlucky.

Still, even if the increased dickhead quotient does make PvP an unpleasant endeavor, it’s telling that I’m still lining up to play matches night after night. Because, as awful as people are, PvP in SW:TOR is fucking amazing.

Alongside all of the incredible, devastating abilities you develop while you build your character to meticulously dismantle enemies, there are skills that seem almost totally useless. The Bounty Hunter’s stealth reveal, the Sith Warrior’s anti-healing debuff and movement slow, these are just the powers I’m familiar with from maxing out two characters, but they’re absolutely useless outside of PvP. Within PvP they’re absolutely critical. Good luck winning a ground of Huttball if your team doesn’t know how to slow properly, and good luck defending Civil War control points if you can’t detect the Sith Assassin creeping up right behind you. A specialized infrastructure, parallel and applicable to the one you develop for general combat, exists only seemingly only to serve PvP, and there’s at least one skill tree (the Sith Warrior’s shared Rage tree) seems specifically suited to PvP combat.

And then there’s the chaos and action at work in PvP. It’s a spectacle to behold. Even when it devolves into a fearsome, fucked up scrum for a Huttball or a disorganized clusterfuck surrounding a turret control point, there’s something magical about watching lightsabers swish, force powers glitter and blaster bolts fly. Even with the pervasive balance issues specific to PvP and the strange PvP ecology/economy at work thanks to the somewhat obtuse Expertise system (which seems to plateau rapidly, but still prove absolutely necessary to gear up if you want to participate in PvP combat), it’s still a great way to spend an hour or two blowing off steam.

And the progression is wonderfully paced. Warzone commendations stack up fast: I’ve been playing for less than a month, and I’m now missing only two pieces from my Battlemaster gear set, the standard late-game casual PvP equipment set. I expect to have those in hand within a week play. Then I’ll move on to the War Hero gear, which is a great deal more challenging to acquire (though it does rival Rakata gear in effectiveness).

So… I guess what I’m really saying is that I like SW:TOR’s PvP system. A lot. Enough that I plan to keep playing it for the foreseeable future, racking up as many ranked commendations as I can until I’ve got all the War Hero gear I want. Which, given the impressive cost of most of the choicest pieces, could take quite a while. Which is an endorsement, in a twisted way: SW:TOR has found a way to make me endure the worst part of an MMO (people) by making its most ephemeral element (PvP) a structurally significant part of the game which is both fun (even when I lose) and rewarding (even when I lose?!) to play. It’s kind of an incredible accomplishment, rooted in a game that is racing to adapt its business model to an uncertain future where MMOs shift from subscriber based models to free-to-play. But that’s a whole other story, though I will say that I see PvP as an integral factor in SW:TOR’s survival.

Congratulations Special Needs Police Officer!

One man will drive your car, while another sits in the front seat next to him, cleaning a loaded gun. You’ll sit in the back with an air tube hanging just below your chest, strapped into your chair which will in turn be strapped into a heavily modified police cruiser’s back seat. The men will both, as per your request, be white.

“NO JEWS!” you’ll shout at them from the back seat. The driver will sigh. The man cleaning the gun won’t respond at all.

Just then a call will crackle over the radio. The dispatcher’s voice will announce a reported disturbance at family grocery store in northern Philadelphia.

“MAKE CAH GO!” you’ll shout, blowing into your air-tube and making your chair rock against its restraints. The driver will ask the dispatcher for a location repeat and put the pedal to the floor.

“WEEE!” you’ll drool as the concrete races past you outside. Your driver will have you there in record time, and you’ll barely even have time to realize the car has stopped before he and the man with the gun have you unstrapped and outside the car.

“Yayyyyy,” you’ll mumble as you move your chair back and forth, taking in your surroundings. You’ll see a black man in an apron standing in front of the store. He’ll be visibly agitated, yelling down the street at a white man with a tremendous beard. The white man will be shoving strangers out of his way and cursing loudly, so loudly that you’ll be able to hear him despite the distance and your underdeveloped ears and language processing center.

Normally, this is where police work would come in. But you’ll fix your gaze on the storekeeper, crook your twisted paw towards him and shout:

“SUSPECT SPOTTED! HOSSILE! OPAN FAH!”

Your gun-holder will know what this means. He’ll take aim and quickly fire two rounds into the shopkeep. The man will fall to the ground, injured but alive, while the homeless man he called you to deal with traipses down the street with his dick out.

“GOO WAK!” you’ll shout at your tenders as they look at one another and shake their heads. Your work done, you’ll gesticulate wildly until your tenders load you back into the car. Then you’ll be driven back to the station, where your paperwork assistant begin filling out the mountainous amounts of paperwork that you are required to file each time one of your tenders injures or kills a civilian. He’ll be a very tired man by this point in his career.

Thus will begin one of the most interesting court cases in American history, delving into issues of the actual capability of handicapped people, the corruption of the Philadelphia police force and potential for failure inherent in the current system of Affirmative Action.

Congratulations Special Needs Police Officer!

Congratulations Thin Obese Person!

“No one understand how severe my obesity is!” you’ll whine to your doctor. He’ll nod sympathetically.

“That’s because your fat is densely compacted inside your body. Even though you do have a lot of weird sores and skin growths from diabetes.”

“It’s not fair! Most obese people get to look fat, so they still get all that hot chubby chaser sex. And they get to do all that feeder gainer stuff. Who’s going to want to get into a feeder-gainer lifestyle relationship with a skinny two-hundred seventy pound man who can’t stop eating? And just smells awful all the time?”

Your doctor will shrug.

“You probably should’ve thought about that before you walked into that particle acceleration chamber without any protective equipment,” he’ll say while he marks a few boxes off on your chart.

You won’t have a very good answer for that.

Congratulations Thin Obese Person!

Congratulations Closeted Straight Person!

It’s tough to be straight in America today. You can barely make one slanderous, ignorant comment about how you don’t think gay people have the right to be together without enduring a brief, ineffectual public outcry that is responded to by an outcry from obese people of similar volume and ineffectiveness.

But this is old news to you. You’ve been living for years in the belly of the beast: San Francisco, where to be straight is to be an outcast of the first order. In the eighties it wasn’t so bad, but then gay people started to murder straight folk amidst the AIDS scare (the majority of people with AIDS are heterosexual men and women, turns out) and they just never stopped.

You guys did your best to endure it, taking your straightness underground. You started meetings and public demonstrations to show how proud you were, wearing khaki pants and polo shirts in public and openly declaring that you listen to Howard Stern with bumper stickers and license plates. But fringe elements made the majority of Americans see you as outlandish weirdos, and so the gays have been able to pursue violence with relative carte blanche against you, with gay cops ignoring gay-on-straight violence whenever it remains, more or less, out of the public eye.

What has followed was a systematic effort to annihilate straight people in the Bay area. One by one you’ve been picked off, usually through violent public beatings after refusing invitations to watch The L-Word with co-workers. You’ve found ways to adapt, pinning tickets to a performance of Wicked to your cubicle wall and watching as much Bravo as possible so that you’re familiar with all the shit your co-workers talk about. You blend pretty effortlessly, but every once in a while you try to fuck a woman you find pretty and then you catch hell for it.

Case in point: today you’re going to read a five hundred word story about a man being beaten to death with a variety of paint cans in the famed “Meat Unpacking District” of downtown SF. You’ll recognize his name immediately: he was the last surviving attendee of the old “straight pride” rallies that you yourself used to attend back in college, when you still had hope.

They’ll believe that he was at a part, trying to coerce a woman into heterosexual sex with liquor and conversation. There will no mention of suspects or any sort of ongoing investigation, just some quotes from his parents, who still live in Los Angeles, about how violence against straight people is a shame, but that they didn’t know that their son wasn’t gay, and they’d prefer he be remembered as a good, God fearing homosexual America.

You’ll hold your tears back until you reach the bathroom: you won’t want to give yourself away to co-workers. You’ll make four trips to sob during the day, each time wondering why you had to be cursed with heterosexuality. Oh, for a pill that would make me like dicks, you’ll silently cry. That would make my life a lot easier.

Later you’ll go home and masturbate to internet porn, listed in the “straight” fetish section of your preferred tube aggregator website. Then you’ll cry a little more before going to bed.

Congratulations Closeted Straight Person!

Congratulations World War II Denialist!

Plenty of people deny the holocaust ever happened, and frankly it’s starting to wear on itself. It’s getting to be sort of old hat at this point. Everybody and their Iranian grandfather has stood on a soap box at some point and accused Jews of killing millions of their own people so they could rise to international supremacy by taking over a very small chunk of land and fucking over everyone who used to live there with horrid human rights violations and egregiously bad, self-serious magicians. Which is why, even though you’re the sort of person we’d applaud to see die in a movie, we’re going to nod with approval today when you revolutionize denial today by announcing, in a public place, that you don’t think World War II ever happened.

Your justification will be weak, which in this case will actually sort of be a value add. The more coherent the explanation, the more asinine the denial attempt (since most things have actually happened and can be denied in certain contexts, usually through willful ignorance). And the fact that you’re offending way more people than a holocaust denier would? Also pretty impressive. I mean, the holocaust effected a lot of people, but it’s tough to find anyone who wasn’t personally affected by World War II in some way, whether they had an elderly relative who died or someone who covered up their vagina to work in a steel mill or whatever.

Today your website will go live, and within a few hours hateful comments and direct death threats aimed at you will flood your poorly constructed forums. By the end of the first day you’ll have over ten million hits, and tomorrow the number will double.

Within a few weeks you’ll be on NBC, CNN, Fox News, ABC and CBS. You’ll give nearly identical interviews at each of these stations, which will consist mostly of you leaning your head slightly to one side, staring at the camera and making a low groaning sound. Then, at the end of the interview you’ll return to normal and depart genially.

The world will be puzzled at your seeming madness, right up until you reveal that you’re absolutely riddled with brain cancer and, as a result, have only a few months to live and sow chaos and disorder among mortals here on earth. Following this revelation your website’s popularity will plummet, because cancer is a huge bummer and no one likes to think about it, especially not as much as they like to think about how historical events might not have happened.

Congratulations World War II Denialist!

Congratulations Well Invested Swamp Hag!

You began life as just a simple swamp hag, casting curses on handsome men who wandered nearby or past your swamp as the situation warranted and screaming at children whenever they approached your property. It was a rich life, a life full of bustle and activity, but it’s also been a lonely one. And there are only two ways to counter that kind of deep seeded loneliness, the kind that creeps into your heart and mind and makes the world seem like a bleak, terrible place.

You can find someone you love, someone you really truly love, and dedicate your life to that person, giving yourself over completely to them and making their happiness your own. Or you can get lots and lots of money.

You went with the latter.

You invested. You invested in tech start-ups, mostly, weathered the dot-com boom-bash with nary a scratch and diversified your holdings with some commodity futures. What the fuck does any of this means?

It means that you’re incredibly rich, just not from a liquid perspective. But today you’re going to sell roughly one third of your total holdings. And what does that mean?

That means you’re going to be so rich you can buy the entire swamp you live in!

“THIS IS MAAAAAAAAAH SWAHMP!” you’ll scream at people from the top of the tower you’ll build at the center of your property, using a voice amplification device to be sure that your rantings and ramblings reach them.

“GIT ADDA HURRRR!” you’ll add as they look around, baffled by the sounds they hear.

Later you’ll put a hex upon them for not leaving your land quickly enough, cursing them to birth only children with flippers instead of limbs. It’ll be kind of extreme, considering the circumstances, but hey. It’s your swamp!

Congratulations Well Invested Swamp Hag!

Congratulations Romantic Grizzly Bear!

Grizzlies wander into inhabited areas more often and more brazenly each year. It’s become a really serious problem, especially as those country bears, used to simple country ways, enter our most populous cities and start looking for love.

You are one of these grizzly bears, and today you’re going to arrive in New York City, ostensibly looking for work on the docks so you can make ends meet and live in one of the most bustling and interesting cities in the world. But what you’re really interested in is finding a relationship and then relying entirely on said relationship to define your existence.

And today, after arriving in New York, you’re going to see a woman in a long flowing fur coat, mistake her for a were-bear, and begin the bear mating dance, which will consist mostly of you making some grinding dance moves and advancing towards her indelicately. You’ll also slap your massive bear dick on and around her thighs in the hopes of arousing her.

Normally, this would repulse a human woman. But in New York, it’s actually considered a totally appropriate way to interact with other people. Instead of repulsing her, you’re going to quite thoroughly entice her. She’ll take you back to a hotel room and fuck you silly (until you start bear laughing, we mean) at which point she’ll call animal control and have you taken away to a holding facility where you’ll await execution.

But hey, at least you had some regrettable sex and briefly justified your lifestyle!

Congratulations Romantic Grizzly Bear!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Legend of Grimrock is a Nostalgic Crawl!

There’s a lot to recommend Legend of Grimrock, and it’s tempting to say out the bat that originality isn’t one of those things. But there’s a problem with saying that.

It’s not actually true.

Legend of Grimrock isn’t an original design for a game. It doesn’t claim to be: it’s a celebration of old school game concepts from way, way back in the olden days, in the age when first person shooters were just coming into focus. Grimrock is a first person dungeon crawler, a member of a venerable genre that went out of fashion nearly a decade ago, in the days of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. And even in those days, there was a trend leaning strongly away from the dungeon crawler: sure, the DND license on consoles heavily favored dungeon crawling elements, but even games like Warriors of the Eternal sun, which prominently featured dungeon crawling elements, relied heavily on tactical elements throughout most of play. And the Gold Box games on the PC, many of which used dungeon crawling mechanics to navigate all enclosed spaces, immediately cut to a tactical setting each time combat began.

And who can blame them, really? The dungeon crawler can be a nasty thing. It’s the showcase for some of the most punishing games in recent memory, games like Pathways Into Darkness which, let’s face it, would be tough sells to gamers now. Hell, Legend of Grimrock is a tough enough sell as it is, with its decidedly limiting style of gameplay and its constrictive, weaving corridors filled with things that, especially at the beginning of the game, have absolutely zero trouble killing you. It’s a marvelous throwback to games like Eye of the Beholder, where you’d regularly die in combat and, if you choose to do so, you can make it even more like Eye of the Beholder, removing automapping from the game and cranking the difficulty up to 1992 “pound my ass” levels.

It revels in its derivative nature, even as its easter eggs smirk at contemporary gaming trends and the constant slough of food you have to micromanage weighs down your inventory (along with the incredibly worthless treasure that you will, I assure you, collect for an achievement). There are no stores, no NPCs, no friendly towns, no plot twists. There are simply monsters to fight, puzzles to solve and corridors to navigate, corridors filled with deadly hazards just aching to destroy your party.

But that’s actually where the derivative nature of the game ends, more or less. Aside from ogres, skeletons, spiders and slimes, there aren’t really a lot of traditional fantasy creatures in Legend of Grimrock. Instead you’re treated to a menagerie of fiends making up a dungeon ecosystem that includes snails and terminates just above an enemy I’d describe most accurately as an “ice dinosaur.” It’s refreshing to see such creativity centrally oriented in a game so derivative of the past, and it carries through right to the end. I was laughing hysterically at the winking, fascinating final boss that Almost Human chose to pit players against, and its witty dialogue as it endures its death throes is spot on given the challenge and the pure absurdity of the fight.

And along with this new collection of baddies to hunt and kill (many of whom will drop delicious, delicious food for your party to eat – food you’re going to need quite badly) there’s a relatively functional physics engine which factors into many of the puzzles and a granularity to physical objects that is in equal turn remarkable and frustrating. It’s far, far more satisfying to sort these puzzles out than the more conventional dungeon crawler brain teasers, which are usually tied to poorly written un-descriptive poems that guide players through a set of obstacles that will, more often than not, prove infuriating. I spent almost an hour on a single puzzle that involved walking down a hallway because I selected the starting square incorrectly. It was not enjoyable, and the nature of the puzzle was such that it was difficult (especially as I grew more fatigued) to notice when a mistake had been made.

But that all ties back into the old schooliness of the game, the nature of Legend of Grimrock. It’s a love letter to a simpler time, a time before the internet and GameFAQs. It’s a game that plays on the excitement of discovering something new, but it’s also a game that exists in the era of Achievements where the expectation is that players will be able to find each and every item in the game and where they’re made quite aware of every item that they miss. That’s a problem in a game like Grimrock, where players without a guide are really, really unlikely to find every single item in the game.

But it’s not a problem of design: it’s a problem of mentality. It’s a problem of releasing a retro game in the world today. Retro games are punishing investigative enterprises disinterested in holding player’s hands, and most people are conditioned to expect constant feedback that will guide and inform their process as the game continues. The end result is a throwback experiences that blends modern sensibilities with an old school feel. It has enough of a feedback loop to engage players and enough frustrating puzzles to challenge and infuriate them. It’s got some original bits in a familiar, eeirily familiar in fact, package. And it’s got a basic character creation system with a total of twelve possible permutations that can then nuance their way into hundreds of possible skill/party configurations.

It’s a balancing act as much as it’s a game, and while it’s not an unpolished experience it is, in every intentional way, unrefined. If you think you can handle that, if you can bear to deal with old school challenges with a quick-save function mitigating their hurt… Give it a shot. At worst, you’ll quit after four floors in frustration.

That’s at worst. At best you’ll finish some puzzles and feel absolutely fucking brilliant for a few minutes. Then you’ll move on to the next puzzle, waiting for your smile to turn to a grimace.