Congratulations Afro-Centric Murderer!

Some people fight for liberty. Some people fight for justice. Some people fight for their right to party.

You fight for your right to wear a giant afro.

You walk the streets, crowbar in hand, smashing skulls and picking your fro until it looks as amazing as is physically possible. Then you smash some more skulls.

Turns out the cops don’t take kindly to the fact that you brutalize people’s faces, though. They’re totally unconcerned with the fro, but you’re really self-conscious about your hair so you interpret any criticism at all as criticism of your hair, and that means that instead of recognizing that, yes, you are a murderer, you’re going to flip out and say “FUCK YOU PIGS, I AIN’T GONNA STOP WEARING MY FRO!”

You’ll be incarcerated sooner than later, where you will be allowed to retain your fro, but will not have access to any heavy objects or really the outside world. You’ll interpret this as an attempt to both shame you and excise your wonderful, wonderful hair from the world, an injustice which cannot stand.

The rest of the world will disagree, except for one crazy white lady who lives in New York. She’ll fight really, really hard to get you released. But as one of the few people in Philadelphia who belongs in jail, it’ll be a terribly misdirected campaign which will do more to tarnish the notion of activism than it will do to service any kind of justice.

You won’t really care about that. All you’ll care about is your sweet, sweet Fro. We’d say we hope you’re happy with yourself, but we really don’t, and we already know you are. So instead we’ll just say: we hope you acquire the capacity for shame sooner than later.

Congratulations Afro-Centric Murderer!

Congratulations on Being Drunk in Public!

You didn’t marry rich and loveless to drag your heels and shield your eyes every time a young and pretty man looked at you. And you certainly didn’t outlive your sham husband to pretend, even after his death, that you loved him. So you don’t see a problem with going out to bars and getting into cars and slamming back drinks until you can’t think. But Johnny Law does, and he’s not much for your tomfoolery, so tonight you’re gonna have a run in with him.

You’ll have it, as so many do, on Boylston Street, just outside of Candy Heaven. You’ll be sitting out there with your just barely legal companion, drinking from a bottle of Stolichnaya you brought from home. Occasionally each of you will pop skittles into your craw, to cut the bite of the vodka. You’ll talk about growing up poor in southern Russia and fighting to get everything you’ve ever had in life, and he’ll talk about how hard it is to be a student at BU when your parents are always riding you to get Bs or better.

There won’t be a lot of overlap. You’ll mostly just talk in circles around one another, just as oblivious that your companion is a living, thinking human being as he is of your vast life experience and the hideousness of life outside of the protective bubble of the world he has been raised in. Eventually you’ll get frustrated that he’s not attentive enough or affectionate enough or both, really, and you’ll just start screaming at him. You’ll swipe your purse, claw at his face and kick at him with your spiked heels, an impressive achievement given their bizarre, nigh non-Euclidian construction.

He’ll give as good as he gets, or close to it: tearing at your clothing, getting a handful of your hair out of your scalp, leaving you bloody-faced with one tit all but falling out. And since your English is speckled, your breath stained with liquor and your companion young and handsome and very, very white in the American sense of the word, where white means of the cultural norm, when the police arrive, as they inevitably will, you’ll be the one who’s considered in the wrong.

And so, kicking and screaming, you’ll be the one dragged into the back of a police cruiser. You’ll be the one who punches a cop in the face on your way into the car. You’ll be the one who weeps uncontrollably and wordlessly all the way back to booking and then becomes a model citizen the moment you’re placed behind in a chair in the booking room. It’ll be like you were transported back to your first border crossing, where you were told to be as quiet and cooperative as possible and to avoid drawing attention to yourself at all costs.

And this cooperation will draw the attention of the officer who you punched in the face earlier. And that night he’ll watch you as you sleep off your vodka and skittle induced rage. He’ll make sure your blankets cover you. And the next day he’ll smile at you. And you, you’ll thank him for being so kind. You won’t notice he’s slipped you his number until you’ve been at home a good long while, but when you do see it you won’t hesitate. You’ll call him immediately, ringing to voicemail. At this point, things become indistinct, but we still have high hopes.

Congratulations on Being Drunk in Public!

Congratulations Confederacy of Actual Dunces!

“For too long the stupid have been dismissed as dumb or whatever by other people!” you’ll shout, pounding your fist on the piece of wood resting atop concrete cinderblocks that passes for a table. “No more!”

Your comrades will mumble to one another in vague approval.

“I like biscuits,” one will announce.

“Ed Hardy shirts,” another will utter.

“Special sauce,” a third will concur.

“Okay!” you’ll shout, pounding the “table” again. This time you’ll strike it right in its middle, shattering the plywood and sending all the crackers you and your friends had carefully stacked on the table tumbling to the ground.

“Fuckin’ blacks!” you’ll shout at the ceiling.

Your friends will again mumble their concurrence. You’ll pick up your guns and march out into the street, where you’ll begin shooting around at random. The police will arrive within ten minutes of the disturbance emerging and suppress it rapidly, killing all but a handful of your friends and capturing you to stand trial for what will be known in the years to come as “the Retard Rebellion of 2012.”

Congratulations Confederacy of Actual Dunces!

Congratulations Spectral Politician!

“There is no call to fear what lies ahead,” you’ll croon into the microphone horribly. “For what lies ahead cannot undo our existence. America has become the first nation to look beyond the grave for its leadership, and as such it will be survive all others by redefining survival.”

The crowd will collectively look at one another uncomfortably. One guy in the back will cheer.

“Hail Satan!”

You’ll laugh into the microphone, a horrible sound, like a record scratch moving around the room sporadically, constantly shifting sources.

“Also, I’ll fix the economy and end the war in Afghanistan.”

The crowd will applaud uneasily while the lone shouter throws up the horns from the back row. Thus will begin arguably the most productive presidency in American history, one that will lead to an amendment which specifically details that candidates must be alive in order to be elected to the office of president.

Congratulations Spectral Politician!

Congratulations Insanely Dangerous Bird!

When you awake from your slumber, just beneath the blasting zone for the foundation of a new Arby’s, you won’t feel rage. Not really rage, at least. Simply the dull throbbing that comes from eons of uneasy slumber. As your talons and blunted digging claws scrabble through the thick, ancient dirt surrounding you it will slowly turn to rage, however. You’ll recall moments in time: a flash of light, the rush of air, the darkness surrounding you, the puzzling sense of floating within a moment, a voice whispering to you: wait.

The time for waiting, however, is now past.

You’ll emerge from the earth just outside of Madison, Wisconsin, next to a well appointed neo Victorian home. Inside a family will be screaming, horrified at the trembling ground and at your visage as you burst forth from the ground: a raptor multiplied a thousand fold, tremendous in scale and potency, your mouth open, tongue lolling, feathers pointed outwards in a gesture of profound anger. In one sweeping gesture you’ll tear into the house, your digging claws hooking one of the family mid shriek, ending their cry and letting you pull them towards you on wingtip and begin eviscerating them with your beak.

It will be the first meat you’ve tasted since your entombment.

It will be delicious.

Once you finish your meal you’ll shake the spent husk of human from your wingtip and spread your span wide, letting loose a long, triumphant cry. Then you’ll begin running along the ground, feet tearing up chunks of concrete and lawn until you alight, balancing just so on the tides of wind that feel unfamiliar, wrong somehow, as hot air currents move in strange pockets over slats of blackened earth.

When you finally begin moving comfortably in the sky you’ll survey the new landscape, your eyes catching the sheer heat of it more than anything else. So much life will be teeming below, so much warmth and motion. So much prey, the coarsest sketch of a thought will emerge. So little time.

Congratulations Insanely Dangerous Bird!

Congratulations Visitor from the Stars!

Remember how Highlander 2 ruined Highlander by making it a bunch of aliens instead of inexplicable immortals born to every age, reborn upon their violent death in battle? Well, that’s kind of like what you’re going to do today, when your space-pod crashes in the middle of Los Angeles and you emerge, covered in leatherite armor, wielding your nanoforged daikatanza (which coincidentally looks almost exactly like a katana). You’ll then proceed to go on a killing spree throughout the city of sun and fun, murdering dozens of people before you’re suppressed by a police officer with a tazer.

As you lay thrashing on the ground, covered in blood from the various civilians you cut down, the cops will look at one another, pondering for a moment whether or not they should do the usual thing that the LAPD does with illegal aliens (merciless beatings) when a black SUV pulls up. Men will spill out from the SUV, men in suits with glasses and scowls. They’ll flash badges that don’t actually have anything in them at cops who turn pale at the sight and then they’ll load you into the back of one of said SUVs and haul you off to Cheyenne Mountain.

Once you arrive (following a horrible, twenty hour drive) you’ll be hooded and dragged into the mountain itself, where you’ll be shoved into an elevator by two huge Secret Service Agents. Once you reach the bottom of the elevator shaft those agents will shove you out of the elevator and into the arms of another pair of Secret Service Agents. Those agents will in turn drag you to a room where the hood will be ripped off, exposing an imposing host of Earth’s greatest generals.

Colin Powell, Cyber-Rommel, Burt Reynolds circa 1977 and some dude with a robotic eye will be seated around a round table, flanking none other than President Barack Obama. There will be one open seat at the table, directly across from Obama. He’ll gesture for you to sit down.

“Hello, visitor from across the stars,” he’ll announce more than say to you in his most presidenty voice. “What can you bring to our little organization?”

Since you don’t speak English, you won’t so much respond to his question as try to slip your bonds and jump over the table to choke him. In response, Burt Reynolds circa 1977 will shoot you in the chest with a double barrel shotgun, obliterating your alien physiology.

Congratulations Visitor from the Stars!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Holy Shit, The Walking Dead Episode 2 Came Out!

The Walking Dead Episode 2 came out last Friday at around noon. I started playing it after I finished up the last of my weekly business, at around four or five. I finished at about two in the morning, heart pounding, mouth dry, a little drunk but mostly stone cold sober for the story it told.

For the uninitiated, The Walking Dead is a comic book started in 2003 by Robert Kirkman, previously known for his work on Battle Pope. It’s quite good, far better than it has any business being, honestly, mostly because of its unflinching portrayal of humanity and a bleak willingness to kill off characters regardless of how important they are to the story itself. That is to say, it tells a story about humanity looking at its own end and does so fearlessly, rarely turning away from the horrors that populate our world, horrors that enter our own sheltered lives when circumstances become particularly dire. It tells a story where shit happens, and we just have to keep going because if we stop, if we shut down, we die.

The Walking Dead has also been adapted as a TV show that had no fucking clue that the comic book was about any sort of universal humanity and instead thought it was about action setpieces that involved people in heavy make-up and a bunch of guns.

It has also been adapted as a video game, which gets exactly what makes the comics great: sometimes shit happens and you just have to deal with the consequences. You make decisions about who lives and dies in haste and that is really the crux of the challenge: the immutable permanence of the choices you make, not the challenge of overcoming a given hurdle, forms the body contiguous of the game. The first episode of the game guided you through a budding zombocalypse, forcing you to do unpleasant things to survive, occasionally asking you to make really tough choices, neither of which were wholly right or wrong. In the end you were in a sort of perilous safety, and a “on the next installment of” video promised that this safety would not last and that the central issues of The Walking Dead (specifically a lack of food) would rear their head in the next episode.

The first episode was the most Walking Dead thing I’d seen outside of the comics, and it had some truly awesome moments in it that made it tense and nerve wracking, despite a lack of fail states and puzzles that were less like puzzles and more like “click the right icon” bouts.

The second episode completely outstripped the first.

It’s fair to say that gameplay is sort of anemic in episode 2. There aren’t a lot of areas to explore, nor are there a lot of the urgent, challenging puzzles that usually populate adventure games. Instead there are plodding moments of uncertainty, where you’re forced to do really unpleasant things. The opening scene is basically a barrage of difficult choices which culminate in a brief action sequence, and even after going through the opening once I’m not sure there are any “right” choices to be made. I leave it feeling frustrated and a little bit hopeless, which seems to be exactly what Telltale is going for in this chapter. Because as you continue to play you’re going to be asked time and time again to do horrible shit. You’ll have to choose which wrong choice to make in front of the people you’re continuing to live with and then you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

The first episode centered around a parking lot puzzle which had players sort out just how to clear a motel complex of the undead. This was the overall tenor of the first game: carve out a safe haven and choose the allies you want with you in said safe haven. The second episode accounts for the strains that went into forging and defining those alliances and then forces those alliances into circumstances of humanity at its worst. It’s tough to discuss the episode as a whole without spoiling it (though I’m willing to bet most players will figure out the twist relatively quickly – I saw it coming the moment I set foot on the farm) but it’s important to note just how distinct the episode is from the first one. Episode 2 opens with you sinking your axe into a zombie’s head. Killing the undead is something you’re good at now. You’re practiced at using your axe and you have two functional legs. You’re not struggling to overcome babysitters anymore. But keeping your starving cadre of allies together? That’s another story. And the learning curve is steep, the conditions punishing.

By the end of the episode I wasn’t struck with a profound sense of awe for how the game rendered this environment and put me in the shoes of this character. I was horrified and revolted by the things I’d seen and done, and concerned for how these characters, who I was becoming attached to at breakneck speed, were going to fare in episode 3. The trailer for episode 3 had a considerably more upbeat air to it, but it didn’t really do much to alleviate the tension of the finale. Telltale’s embracing of the stakes of The Walking Dead’s world has made me deeply concerned for these new characters inhabiting it at every turn. I’ve gone from confidently believing that nothing will harm any of the vulnerable characters in the first episode to wondering who’s going to die next, and how the other characters are going to respond. Aside from Lee and Clementine, I’m not sure anyone’s really safe. And even there…

I found myself doing something while playing episode 2, something that never would’ve occurred to me during episode 1. I rewound my progress in the chapters occasionally to recast some of my decisions which, in retrospect, weren’t really in line with whom I wanted Lee to be. Sometimes it was to engage with content I’d missed which, in retrospect, became very apparent, sure. But more often it was in response to how a character acted following my actions. Clementine, specifically. I’m not sure that Telltale will let anything happen to her in the main story at this point – the parallel between Rick and Carl from the comics and Lee and Clementine in the game is quite strong. But I’m thinking more and more after this episode about how my actions actually impact Clem, and how regardless of the circumstances I’m teaching this young woman how to survive in this horrible new world. I’m feeling responsible for a virtual pre-teen girl. I’m seeing my actions through her eyes, not from my jaded twenty-something perspective, but from the perspective of a little girl who is totally reliant on me for her safety and well being. That’s really changing the way I see my actions in the game. Hell, it’s even changing the way I see myself as a gamer.

If you’re holding off on getting The Walking Dead games until the episodes are all laid out, I’d advise against it. Buzz generates fast for games like these, and spoilers will circulate and likely find their way into your eyes if you frequent the sites that report gaming news. And there’s something delicious in the tension of waiting for the next episode, that delightful, nervous waiting period that cereals evoke that makes playing each fresh episode as it emerges that much sweeter. It’s something any comic book nerd knows and loves, and it’s another element of the comics that The Walking Dead game manages wonderfully. If you love The Walking Dead, even if you don’t necessarily like adventure games, grab The Walking Dead game. It’s getting Walking Deadier in each iteration, and I mean that in the best possible way.