Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Congratulations Fingerless Frank!



One by one, joints indicated by black magic marker will be taken, the knife slipping into each one, removing the tendon, then, twisting, flesh sloughing off, fibrous and terrible, like a system of fluid filled wires, until bone is separated from bone and your fingers, after seven agonizing hours, are no longer attached to your hand.

We'd like to say that this is a horror or a tragedy or undeserved, but it's none of those things.  You're a mobster named Fingerless Frank, and you're losing your fingers because you wouldn't tell some other mobsters where a bunch of money you stole from a children's charity is stashed.  While what's going to happen to you today is truly terrible, and will haunt you until the end of your life (which, luck you, will be in just a few days, after you break and finally tell those mobsters where that 14 grand that should've gone to little Billy's dialysis got off to) you wholly deserve it.  We'd usually say no one deserves it, but you really, really do.

Shame on you, Fingerless Frank.  Also, it's ironic that you chose that nickname before having your fingers removed one by one.  Just goes to show you that life has a way of making fools of us all.  Also, the actual story behind that nickname is somehow even worse than what's being done to you, so we really don't feel bad for you.

Congratulations Fingerless Frank!

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Congratulations Mountain Widow!



After your husband died yesterday, you did what any faithful wife would do: you climbed down into the abyss to recover his corpse so that you could bury it.  It irked you that he jumped, irked you the same way his apparent inability to put the toilet seat down or stop talking about how hot he thought your sister was irked you, but in death he became something less than he was and yet, at the same time, more: he became not only the man you married, but also the symbol of the man you married: he became not only the person who snored and sometimes burned potatoes while cooking dinner, but the person who you'd chosen to spend your life with, the man who was, in a sense, the sum of all your hopes and dreams.

So we get it: even though you were sort of annoyed by him towards the end, you thought it was super important to get him out of that ravine.  Important enough that you dropped gear so that you could carry his body up on a dead-line.  But now that he's with you, and you've been walking around for most of a day trying to find some way off this god damn mountain, you're pretty hungry.  And about fourteen hours ago you realized that the bag you left so you could carry your husband's frozen corpse around had all your food in it.

This is going to leave you in a difficult situation.  You could potentially just die with your husband, the way you would've been expected to in days of yore.  In fact, this is the easier option: if you just stop moving and wait for death to come, it's just a few hours away in the inhospitable clime of the mountain where you find yourself now.  But if you want to live, and let's face it, you really want to live, you're going to have to face some hard truths.

First, you never really loved your husband.  You loved the idea of him, as represented by the frozen corpse you have wrapped up and sitting next to your camp fire right now.  You've always wanted a strong partner to accompany you through life, and at times, silent times in particular, you could construct your husband as such a strong partner.  But now, reflecting on the last year of living together, you know he was not, in fact, such a strong man and that you are, in fact, probably better off without him.  You'll also know, deep down, that he isn't worth dying for and will decide, with relatively little prompting, that you could eat your husband under the current circumstances.  With that in mind, you'll remove one of his legs, place it over the fire, and eat it, charcoal black and covered in the meager hot sauce you saved from your last MRE, ravenously.

He'll taste pretty lackluster, but the knowledge that you'll be able to survive thanks largely to your dead husband will give you solace.  Because of your choice to eat part of your husband, you'll be able to successfully carry him down from this mountain, thanks, in part, to the fact that he'll be considerably lighter after you've eaten a fifth of his body mass.

Congratulations Mountain Widow!

Monday, April 28, 2014

Congratulations Mountaineer!



It is known that at high altitudes some people hallucinate things.  Sometimes, they'll hallucinate stuff like sexy cartoon animals, or weirdly elaborate cakes.  Sometimes they'll hallucinate loved ones reaching out to them, calling them to come and visit the great beyond, where they can be together forever.

Today, while climbing through the beautiful and deadly Himalayas, you're going to hallucinate a rope bridge.

"Check it out," you'll shout to your wife.  "Bridge!"

She'll stare at you like you're crazy, and shout "Wait, don't, it's a - " but before she can get to the overlong phrase, "Mountain mirage," you'll already have leapt on to the rope bridge with both feet and, having hit nothing but air, you'll begin your rapid and certain descent into a crevasse, where you'll break both your legs and die of blood loss in a matter of minutes.

If it's any solace, your case will be used for years to come as a cautionary tale, effectively educating thousands of climbers in proper mountain-safety, and lending credency to a seemingly fake phenomena.  Also, it'll free your wife from a loveless marriage that was figuratively sucking the life out of her, which is good, because no one should have to live without love.

Congratulations Mountaineer!

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: My Time as a Space-Monster-Janitor!



I'm sliding up to the airlock, but before I get there I'm already dreading what I'll see inside: bodies twisted into horrible shapes, glimmering tendrils and jagged limbs shaped from protruding, malformed bone in cruel approximation of appendage, closer to a spear, really, all matched to dead faces, frozen in rictus.  And then there's me, ponying up to this space ship.  But I'm not afraid of those horrid, twisted creatures.  I'm actually bored by them.  They're filling up the ship, and I'm the guy who's going to have to clean this mess up.

Oh well.  It's a living.

The first Dead Space game was an impressive work of horror gamesmanship, one of the rare horror games that delivered first rate gore and really made you feel desperate and powerless as you moved through its blood-stained corridors.  From your draining sanity, as you slowly realized that you were being led around by the hallucinated ghost of your dead ex-girlfriend, to the terse, frenetic combat, mired in the knowledge that you, as a protagonist, were not particularly strong or well suited to the fight at hand, produced a lot of horrifying moments, and some very epic failures.  Many's the time I watched myself die horribly in Dead Space, gave a quick shiver, then desperately tried to sleep.  Emphasis on tried.

Dead Space 2 kicked it up a notch, doing all it could to make the game feel more actiony without losing that horror edge, but in kicking everything up a notch, something was lost.  Dead Space 2 employed a great deal of horror schlock, and in doing so it compromised a lot of the legitimate tension that the original Dead Space delivered: when the game opens up with you literally getting a needle jammed in your eye and everyone dying around you, the stakes can only go down.  The first Dead Space game revolved around slowly uncovering a series of terrible events.  It built up tension and, when the game finally resolved, it did so in a way that earned its payoff.  Dead Space 2 established rules of engagement from the get-go and stuck to them throughout, asking you to engage in what was effectively a slog, rather than a horror show.  It put players through its paces and, really, could it do any more?  After the first game, would the slow boil horror have still worked?

I say this so you'll understand me when I say that even though Dead Space 3 makes the violence of the previous games seem pabulum and chore-like, I don't actually think that's a negative thing.  Right from the get-go, where you guide an ancient soldier through a suicide mission in the prelude, the central concept of the game is apparent: you're the guy that they've hired to do a very unpleasant job, a sort of "monster janitor" who will be going through areas filled with horrific creatures, twisted by science and mysticism.  The expectation is that you're going to die, which is okay.  Dying isn't terribly bad in a video game.  It's kind of what you're supposed to do in a game like Dead Space 3.

When you're hired to literally clean up after the figurative mess that your ex-girlfriend from the previous game is stuck in, it's actually sort of funny.  The world's least professional soldier leads you through a series of obstacles as future-Scientologists attack you with guns - a first for the Dead Space series.  But once that's over with, the game settles into its comfortable pattern: you enter a poorly lit spaceship, you shoot the limbs off some monstrosities, stomp some corpses to get some items, retrieve an especially important item highlighted by your magic HUD, and then head on to the next area.  You are, in a very real sense, treading through areas that other characters in the game world are apparently unwilling or incapable of traversing, but you're doing so with such ease and immediacy that it feels like this is just a very particular kind of menial job.  The effect is not entirely unpleasant.

The Dead Space fiction is so overwrought that it's impossible for me to take seriously, from the hilariously scripted love-triangle between Isaac and Ellie and soldier-man to the constant rising stakes to the emo soliloquies that Isaac occasionally opines to absolutely no one or, if anyone is still around, someone who is almost definitely going to die soon.  When faced with such bombast, you can either roll your eyes, or laugh at (and to some extent with) it.  I choose the latter: it's easy to find enjoyment in just how calculatedly overwrought the Dead Space series is, and while horror fans might be disappointed by the relative levity this kind of writing presents, that's okay.  This game doesn't have to be for them.  In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't.  Dead Space 3, played on normal, is just a very well crafted action game.

And it is well-crafted, through and through, from its smooth as silk UI to its easy-breezy controls, Dead Space 3 wants you to be comfortable in your space-suit.  It's here for you to drape around yourself, like an entrail soaked blanket, while you tear your way through room after room of unspeakable horrors from beyond.  Is this at odds with the horror aspects of the game?  Absolutely.  Is this necessarily a problem?  Fuck no.  Dead Space 3 is fun, and it's fun because it's a well designed shooter with original ideas that executes on nearly all of them.

I say nearly all of them because the crafting system introduced in Dead Space 3, apparently intended to replace the currency system of previous Dead Space games, is clunky as all getout.  While it presents a laudable variety of toys and a depth of ways to tweak them, there are some major issues.  There's no way to test out how certain attachments will work after they've been made and assigned, which is a big deal considering how parsimonious the game is with certain types of resources, and the fact that not every attachment you replace can be re-used (my first attempt at crafting ended with me permanently removing an upgrade from a special item I received for completing other games, a crippling blow considering the item is just "better than" the other available items in the game).  It took a great deal of work to figure that out though, because Dead Space 3 has no easy comparison system for looking at available equipment.  Individual components can be compared, sure, and during the crafting phase you can compare different crafting options, but there doesn't seem to be any direct comparison system for the weapons themselves once they've been produced.  That's a big deal, considering how many options are available to me, how many of the items appear to be minor upgrades of other items, and how many weapons I have in my bank already.

And I haven't even gotten to the intrusive DLC system yet, which literally hangs out underneath each transaction, proudly announcing that I could, for just two dollars, acquire a bunch of resources I'd usually have to grind or explore for.  I understand that EA has to make money, and that Dead Space doesn't really lend itself to micro-expansions the way that Mass Effect does, but the whole thing feels a little absurd.  I play free-to-play games with less obtrusive marketing mechanisms guiding their transaction frameworks.  The DLC messages proliferate every aspect of the crafting system, which Visceral clearly want to make a crucial part of my game experience.  Can I ignore them?  Sure.  Do I feel like I should have to in a product I've spent sixty dollars on?  Absolutely not.

Of course, it's worth noting that these issues, such as they are, would be non-issues in a game less superlatively aware of its own mechanics than Dead Space 3.  For the most part, this is the cleanest entry in the series, gameplay wise, and the feel of the crafting system on the actual play-end is great.  Given how slapdash the weapons of Dead Space have always been, it only makes sense to let us duct tape guns to other guns to make double guns - indeed, this mechanic makes some of the extremely conditional guns in the game, invaluable by allowing players to account for apparent weaknesses with each weapon.  It's also just cool to be able to play with equipment in new ways - Dead Space 3 is all about variety, and it seems to be open to just about any ideas I might have about how I'd like to play.

So I'll keep working as a space-monster-janitor, that is to say a janitor who deals with space monsters, not a space monster who is a janitor.  Though that could be a fun game, too.  Visceral Games should take a stab at designing it - they manage to make pabulum, hum-drum things like removing limbs from monsters, stomping corpses and spiralling silently through space feel like plain old good fun, instead of the sort of boring hum-drum work those tasks usually feel like.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Congratulations Morbid Life Coach!



After she finishes telling you about her incredibly fucking stupid problems, you'll roll your eyes and sigh.

"Well," you'll tell her, "life really is little more than a sequence of embarrassing events chained together that eventually terminate in one final disappointment."  You'll pause to see if she'll respond.  When she doesn't, you'll punctuate your sentence by saying: "Death."

She'll nod.

"So what do I do about that?"

You'll shake your head.

"You shouldn't be asking me for advice."

She'll nod.

"You should be killing yourself."

She'll smile up at you and nod.

"Thanks."  She'll get out of her chair and start for the door.  "I think I already knew that.  I just needed to hear it from somebody else."  As she slips through and out into the world she'll keep her head just inside to leave you with one last parting expulsion of mouth gas: "I'll be killing myself by driving into incoming traffic on the 10.  Watch for me on the evening news."

You'll wave goodbye to her.

"Die on fire, cunt."

Her tinny laugh will echo down the hallway.  As she leaves the building you'll begin quietly masturbating, thinking about her death, her corpse, and the panic her death will evoke in the public.  You'll orgasm as you imagine the anchor on the evening news mouthing the name of your life-coachee.  The whole sensation will remind you why you get up every morning and do this instead of a real job.

Congratulations Morbid Life Coach!