Congratulations on Screaming Fuck You in a Mostly Empty Theater!

We understand that you dislike it when movies have bullshitty romantic subplots. And we understand that you firmly believe in your right to speak freely regardless of where you are and who is around you.

But even if screaming “fuck you” for five solid minutes at the screen during a dollar screening of the Goofy Movie does qualify as protected speech it still seems like an unnecessarily dickish thing to do. Even if you did have a somewhat valid point to make (and we’re not conceding that yet) you probably could’ve done it in a way that didn’t make so many kids cry.

Regardless of whether or not it was the right thing to do we look forward to the outcome of the court decision regarding your controversial and spirited choice of words to use to describe your feelings towards a children’s film. We’d love to look into the future and just tell you, but that would ruin the surprise for everyone.

Congratulations on Screaming Fuck You in a Mostly Empty Theater!

Congratulations on Bucking the System!

Highschool sucks. No one can ever overemphasize this fact. It sucks if you think it’s good and it sucks even worse if you think it sucks. But that will never keep people like you from trying to make it a little less horrific. That’s what makes you so brave and special.

Your feelings towards Kim Kashewitz (Cashew Kim, as the more vulgar class members call her, because she “loves nuts”) are case in point. Kim is your better socially, physically and financially. But you see through her apparent vanity and classism to the vulnerable, loveless girl underneath it all. A girl who needs someone genuine and caring to offer her succor. Someone like you.

So today you’ll approach her in the hallway and try to reach out to her.

“Hey, Kim,” you’ll say, your books clutched in your hands as if it was Sadie Hawkins all over again and you were waiting to be pranked by some girl you harbor a secret crush for.

“Huh?” she’ll respond, snapping her gum. You’ll take this as a good sign and keep going in headlong.

“So I’ve noticed you’re kind of mean and-” you’ll start, but she’ll cut you off.

“What are you talking about?” she’ll say, making a cutting gesture as she does so to indicate that you should stop speaking.

“Just...I like-“

“Cha! I bet you do, perv!” she’ll say, dropping her books to the floor. You’ll drop down to your knees and pick them up for her while she stands above you and looks bored. It’ll be as close as you’ve ever been to sex with a woman, and you’ll understand, somewhere in your adolescent brain, that this is basically what sex will be like for you the first dozen or so times.

When you stand up to hand her the books she’ll have the same contempt on her face that she had before. She’ll seem reluctant to accept them at first, but after you hold them in front of her for a full minute and a half she’ll finally acquiesce and take them. Once they’re in her arms she’ll give you a quick one armed shove backwards, tucking something into your pocket with the gesture.

“Fuck off,” she’ll say, turning around and walking down the hall, away from you.

You’ll unfold the piece of paper and read it. The script will be hastily scrawled, as if she’d written it standing up in the endless seconds while you were on the ground. It will read:

Leave your bedroom light on and a ladder in the bushes nearby. I’ll stop by.

You’ll scratch your head as she walks away, things to shout after her racing through your head, but none of them will really seem appropriate. In the end you’ll resolve to head home and turn your light on that night, firm in your knowledge that Kim is a crazy bitch with some serious problems who needs help.

When you have your hand firmly wedged up Kim’s shirt while she smiles and listens to you talk about the original Star Trek series you’ll reconsider your opinion. You’ll realize that maybe Kim isn’t that crazy. She’s just trying to survive and, in her own way, to have it all. Which will work out pretty well for you since you don’t really care about being publicly abused while you’re in high school by a super hot girl. It won’t seem like much of a price to pay with your hand wrapped around her B-cup, watching her smile.

Congratulations on Bucking the System!

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife to Be!

The Store 24 will be abandoned when you stumble in, drunk, at 3:00 AM, but then it always seems abandoned. The Store 24 kind of exists outside of time and space that way, a swirling nebula of twenty-four hour convenience, forever bereft of customers with the same microwave burritos and potato chip bags existing in quantum synchronicity throughout the Store 24 multiverse.

Normally this unique physical state of existence causes customers to instinctively shy away from eating Store 24’s dangerously ill-kept foods. But you’ll be drunk and hungry and warm food will sound too good to pass up so you’ll order, through a series of gestures, a heat lamp hot dog from Store 24 and eat it in four large bites.

You’ll walk out feeling alright, the time from within the store temporarily clinging to you as you re-enter the real world. But it won’t last long. Time, as these things go, never lasts long and you won’t be more than a block or two before the hot dog hits you in full force.

First the nausea will come. It will not come in waves, it will not come slowly. It will strike like a wave, turning your bowels to jelly and leaving you mired in an empty, ready to pop feeling. You’ll all but have to turtle walk back home to keep from shitting yourself, limping and dragging one foot behind you from a feeling that, if you were to make a full stride you might suddenly give in and shit yourself.

When you reach your apartment your roommate will already be asleep, but the sounds you make in the bathroom will wake him up ere long. Moaning, vomiting and the explosive sounds of liquefied feces being propelled from your asshole will all mix together and bring his light tapping to the door, his voice full of concern.

When you finally tell him what you’ve done he’ll nod and calmly drive you to the hospital. He’ll have to pull over every few miles to let you throw up again but the roads will be quiet and you’ll get there in one piece, more or less. The E.R. will have a short waiting list but you’ll be in a bed within an hour and a young nurse will be negotiating an I.V. into the back of your hand to feed fluids that your body would otherwise reject.

“Time gets us all,” she’ll say, drawing your eyes to her face. She’ll be the single prettiest girl you’ll have ever seen. We’d go into greater detail but we don’t want to ruin the surprise. Suffice it to say you wouldn’t believe us if we told you. And as she holds you while you violently heave your dry stomach into a bedpan you’ll feel as if you’ve finally found your true home, voiding your bowels wrapped in her arms

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife to Be!

Congratulations on Using Archaic Weights and Measures to Communicate!

Today you’re going to wake up and decide to act like a royal douchebag. But unlike most run of the mill douchebags, who would be satisfied with just acting racist or saying a bunch of stupid, uninformed political stuff, you’re going to try and kick it up a notch. You’re going to insist on using arcane weights and measures from bygone eras in order to communicate with people just going about their daily business.

It’ll kick off at the used car lot, where you’ll ask a salesman in detail how many rods his automobile gets to the hogshead. It’ll be an easy one, a Simpson’s reference even, but he still won’t get it.

“You askin’ about chicks, bro?” he’ll say, mopping his brow with his tie. “This thing will get you mad chicks.”

Then you’ll proceed to the gas station, where a young hispanic man will be working. Not being a racist, you’ll treat him just as you would any other fucker you’d meet in your daily life.

“Thirty-two quarts to my tank, goodman! Post-haste!” You’ll hurl your keys at him from across the lot and strike him in the face. He’ll rub his nose and shake his head.

“Fill her up super, si?” he’ll mumble in broken English, opening up your gas tank and slamming the hose in with little to no concern for your wishes. You’ll simultaneously feel kind of heattbroken that he ignored your hilarious antics and kind of impressed that he has integrated so well into American society without the benefit of a functional grasp of the English language.

Your last stop will be White Castle. When you arrive the be-pimpled cashier will ask you through the crackling speaker what the fuck your stupid ass wants.

“A gross lot of hammed burgers and three imperial pints of your finest cola,” you’ll say, maintaining a foppish British accent the whole time.

“Fucking order like a straight person,” the cashier will drawl back at you. You’ll repeat the first part of your order and replace the second part with “a large coke” and he’ll quote an exorbitant price into the speaker. You’ll drive around, pay it, and receive all one hundred and forty four of your burgers.

You won’t even drive home to eat them. You’ll just sit in the parking lot staring at the cars that drive by, wondering why you can’t even fuck other people’s days up right.

Congratulations on Using Archaic Weights and Measures to Communicate!

Congratulations on Comically Misplacing Your Tube of Lubricant!

You’re going to leave it on the floor of your shower and slip on it and die by hanging yourself with the shower curtain. It’ll be tragic for you because you wanted to finish at least four chapters of this bullshit novel you’ve been “writing” or more aptly “talking about writing” since junior high school, but honestly the world is probably better off without another book about someone who is skilled at textual analysis solving crimes and fucking implausibly attractive young women.

But the police are going to have a huge laugh because they’ll be able to assume all kinds of embarrassing shit about your life and easily determine that your death was a terrible, hilarious accident. They’ll also infer that you masturbated in the shower, that you used lube for this fact, that you were single, probably a little depressed and that you had a latex allergy.

They’ll also link you to a series of completely unrelated murders and rapes, but that won’t be part of the fun and games of your crime scene investigation. That’s just something police do when they have a convenient body around.

Congratulations on Comically Misplacing Your Tube of Lubricant!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Inconsequential Player!

Mass Effect 2 is a weird game. I’ve committed a stunning amount of time to it and and yet I would never recommend it to other gamers. It’s stodgy, dull, uneven, and while there is value to be found it’s buried under a mess of a design mired with a non-sense story which does everything it can to hit every note possible and leave the player feeling like the hero of...well, everything. But there are some interesting moments, moments worth watching. Some of them are the product of long, intense relationships and will make you say “Well done, Bioware!” and feel pleased. Some of them are the payoff for story missions and will make you say “What the fuck, Bioware?” and feel sort of angry. And many of them are throwaways, obvious giggles tossed in for good measure that will just make you feel tired.

One of the latter variety is a game salesman, a three pronged jab at the comic book guy from the Simpsons, Bioware’s own design team and many of their consumers. He’s a character who simply spouts off dialogue when you interact with him, adding “atmosphere” to the Citadel. For the most part he’s just kind of dull, but one of his comments, about how games have come to center around epic stories instead of forcing immersion, is sort of an unintentional indictment of Mass Effect 2’s design. Mass Effect 2’s obsession with big decisions and epic action is crippled by a desire to hold the player’s hand, to make sure that no matter what they do they get to feel like the hero. And this obsession with making the player feel good is, for me at least, one of the things crippling storytelling in contemporary games.

Games aren’t willing to force players to fiddle with minutia, to engage seemingly unimportant things for great rewards, or to offer player real power in how they shape the world they play in. They want to coddle their consumers, to insure repeat business and appeal to the broadest possible market set of gamers. They’re cowardly offerings, their weakness exposed by the few great games that still stand against the tide, the exceptions which illustrate just how harmful this trend is.

The first game Mass Effect 2’s shortcomings brings to mind is the original Baldur’s Gate. A rogue data point in the history of Bioware and Black Isle, Baldur’s Gate was punishingly difficult, open almost to a fault, and incredibly demanding. Very few games in this day and age would let you start out with two hit points just because you built your character that way. Petrification could kill your main character in an instant, death meant the end of the game and autosaving was, at best, a luxury, never something to be relied on. A bear or a wolf could defeat your entire party early in the game and while cheats were both readily available and essentially a game feature in multiplayer mode there was something incredibly rewarding about dragging yourself through the trials and tribulations of the early game to perform such broken feats as murdering Drizzt Do’Urden with poison arrows, boots of speed and your wits or dropping Sarevok without taking a single point of damage, and doing so (mostly) without cheating. If Baldur’s Gate hadn’t been so incredibly hard it wouldn’t had had such an impressive impact on me.

What’s more is that the desperation Baldur’s Gate served the story wonderfully. No game has ever made me feel more powerless and vulnerable from the start. Watching Gorion die, knowing that I could barely battle a band of hobgoblins let alone avenge his murder, established a sense of place and vulnerability and character and purpose that no game I’ve played since has ever equaled. Hell, Mass Effect 2 tried to kill me and it couldn’t even manage a fraction of the emotional impact Baldur’s Gate delivered years before. All the slaughtered villages and murdered starship crews I’ve encountered over the decades have been naught compared to that one encounter, late at night with that faceless man who killed my foster father, and it was all because of the powerlessness I had pressed upon me. Most games, regardless of genre, still equip you to deal with the threats you’ll encounter before doling them out politely, sequentially. Baldur’s Gate was fearless in its choice to punish those who rushed ahead, those who did not plan. The stakes in Baldur’s Gate were high, and they were high all the time. And, as such, it was impossible for me to keep playing and not care about what happened.

But Baldur’s Gate was almost completely linear. Certain choices could be made but for all its vaunted difficulty it was a game about passing through the same set pieces each time. While it was hard it suffered from the same issue of linearity Mass Effect 2 has despite its ostensibly high stakes. More recent games, however, have done wonders with the capacity for choice and its unforgiving nature. Bioshock as a series has offered up some stark ass choices with serious gameplay ramifications. Even Mass Effect had some serious ramifications for the decisions you’d made, eliminating characters if you chose poorly and allowing you to easily skip certain party members, even if Mass Effect 2 did its all to make these choices inconsequential. But the game that truly stands out in my mind has to be Fallout 3.

While the karma system in Fallout 3 is, at best, weak tea, the choices you make do have a remarkable impact on the shape of the D.C. wastes. Solving situations with violence will really eliminate characters, and certain situations simply lack clearly positive outcomes. The Antagonizer and the Mechanist’s plotline, for example, was a morally gray mire, and even if you could convince both heroes to cease their crusade the resolution was bittersweet. Convincing a mentally ill woman to wander off and die alone or convincing a mentally unstable repairman of his clear imbalance both lack the traditional “sunshine and bunnies” feeling that the “good” path normally offers up in RPGs. Paired with decisions like just what to do with Harold, ways to impact the murderous goth vampire troupe and how best to assist wasteland junkies, Fallout 3 was never afraid of putting the player in uncomfortable situations and forcing them to make a choice which lacked a clear outcome.

What’s more is that these choices had a serious impact on the shape of the world. The first and obvious example, the ability to destroy Megaton, was a brilliant twist. I cannot think of a single other game which would not only allow players to destroy an entire city but to visit its smoking ruins and trade with the lone, ghoulish survivor as well. But other, less prominent decisions could have similar results. Allowing the ghouls to take over Tenpenny Tower, dealing with the cannibalistic inhabitants of the waste and wiping out the slavers of Paradise Falls were all possibilities in Fallout 3 that not only presented “moral choices” but also changed the shape of the game world. Opting to remove any of these groups would eliminate one of the few remaining settlements of humanity and oftentimes with them the potential for trade. Even if some of these choices were black and white, such as just what to do with the Lincoln Memorial, each of them still changed the way the world looked as you explored it.

Even advancing along the main plot would accomplish this. After the Enclave arrived the Wastes became a very different place. Supermutants took a backseat to Enclave drones as the primary threat, and the weapons players could use shifted with them. Suddenly my Chinese assault rifle was replaced by a plasma rifle, my ranger battle armor falling into disrepair as mercenaries fell away to power armor clad government men. Although Fallout 3 more or less pushed players towards the same ending the freedom it presented in changing its game world was nothing short of exceptional, and it feels as if developers have missed out on many of the lessons it taught with all too cavalier an attitude.

There are glimmers of hope, however. Dragon Age: Origins: Awakenings: The Re-Origination, for example, allows you to destroy large segments of the countryside during play and, even though many of the choices are brought to light after the game ends it still impresses upon you the idea that the choices you made had a real and lasting impact on your little slice of Fereldin. And Bioshock 2 seamlessly wove the consequences of its choices into the game’s ending. Finding the fault lines which your moral choices generate is difficult from a single playthrough, and while you can guess at what lessons Eleanor might take from you if you’d chosen another path you can never know for certain. Even Far Cry 2 managed to make me feel like I could change the world around me by something so simple as destroying a bridge or flooding a diamond mine or shooting a large number of people in the face.

But even if these games do offer choices the high price of making games and the wantonness with which players will abandon actual challenges make for a difficult climate to create games which still offer up real consequences. Some games, such as Demon’s Souls, remain scions of the tradition of making wonderfully challenging and unforgiving games with real stakes, but the rest of them, it seems, can only offer up choices, choices which are becoming more and more prominent and which, assuming sales are not a metric for influence on design, could generate some very interesting shifts in the way we play games. As it stands, however, these choices are all too often inconsequential.

Congratulations on Becoming a Successful Cartoonist!

Today it’s going to happen. It’s going to be a wondrous thing, more wondrous than anything most people get to see during their brief, furious lives, and the only tragedy is that you’ll never be able to tell anyone about it.

Today a small group of mostly sentient mice from Korea will arrive at your apartment looking for a better life. The two of you will enter negotiations and, after a brief debate, establish an agreement, the terms of which dictate that you offer them room and board and they, in turn, act as animators for your ground breaking erotic cartoon show. It will be a tremendous success and you’ll be selling DVDs of Cherry the Cuntthirsty Cockatrice in bushels.

Bushels, man.

Congratulations on Becoming a Successful Cartoonist!