Congratulations Crossword King!

Of all the men on the Jersey Shore you’re special. It’s not your lack of mob connections or your genuine love for your spouse which make you so exceptional, although these are rare qualities. In your case it’s your nigh mystical proficiency at crossword puzzles.

You don’t really use it for any nefarious end. In fact you’re such a good husband that you actually buy your wife a second paper just so she can do the crossword without you ruining it for her. You consider yourself blessed with a pointless skill that many people would lord over their brethren but thanks to your enormous penis and healthy upbringing you haven’t let it get to your head.

But in this economy no resource can really be left unexploited if one wants to survive, and your incredible crossword skills are going to fall under the wheel of necessity soon.

Thanks to your lack of mafia contacts you’re going to be laid off from your job in a paper mill next week. You’ll get a decent severance but work is so tight all over nowadays that prospects will be grim and by the end of the week you’ll be panicking about how you’ll be able to keep making mortgage payments over the next year.

That’s when your wife will find the ad in the classifieds. It’ll seem absurdly fortuitous, but there it will be: Wealthy widow seeks crossword tutor. Will pay six hundred weekly for guaranteed crossword success.

You’ll phone the number and reach the butler of one Maryanne Corningsworth of the Textile and Firearms Corningsworths, who will set up an interview time the next day. You’ll put on your favorite blazer, grab a copy of the New York Times and head on over.

When you arrive the butler will greet you coldly. He’ll be a traditionalist butler with a black cumberbund and a pencil thin moustache, and he’ll refuse to make physical contact during your entire exchange. He’ll simply ask that you sit down in a room with him and proceed to watch hawkishly as you complete the crossword, stop watch poised in his hand.

When you finish it in fifteen minutes and hand it off to him he’ll look shocked. You’ll be a little disappointed that his cumberbund doesn’t pop and flip up in a hilarious fashion, but when he returns with your first check that disappointment will be overwhelmed by the joy of solvency.

When you arrive home your wife will be overjoyed. She was convinced you were just being hired to sleep with a bored widow who could afford to throw money around. Over the coming weeks she’ll be proven correct as you comically avoid Widow Corningsworthy’s attempts to seduce you while teaching her about the Way of the Up and Across. There will be a montage where you teach her what love really is and she almost finds it with her poolboy before finding out that he has a girlfriend and is actually a scumbag. Soon thereafter, however, she’ll break down and sleep with her butler in a moment of desperation and things will really click between the two of them.

She’ll be so pleased not only with your crossword lessons but with your general life lessons that she’ll establish a trust in your name so you can keep banging your hot wife, avoiding the mob and doing your crosswords in peace until the day you die or the day that someone decides to hire an English major in a position of relevance again.

She’ll also pull some strings and have a resolution pushed through the state senate declaring you Crossword King of New Jersey. Wear this crown wisely. Hubris in this matter may prove costly indeed.

Congratulations Crossword King!

Congratulations on Getting Halfway Through Rehab!

You want to recover, kind of. It’s just that the pills and the endless sessions of talking seem like a lot more work than just accepting that you’re a young woman who enjoys using her Fred Meyer Rewards Card a bit too much.

But just try telling that to your parents! Your mother weeps when she thinks of your relentless pursuit of bargains, your endless search for clearance items and meaningless free food. And your father took your plastic devil, his words not ours, and snapped it over his knee just to make sure you knew what was up. It was less over his knee and more in his hands, and we all know you can just score a new one at any FM you feel like hitting up for a quick fix, but you get the point.

You’re not going to find any support from those Regan-naut twats (Reagotwats?). And Shady Acres' steady pressure on you to stay in the middle is making you feel dead inside. So tonight it’s time to make a bedsheet rope, perform oral sex on your hot heroin addicted roomie one last time in the confines of the room where your love was born and hop out the window, over the picket fence and to freedom.

Three weeks will already have been far too long for you to be away from your precious savings, no matter how hot and desperate the trim was. And with your new girlfriend you’re going to need those savings since keeping your lady love in heroin is going to eat up a lot of cash.

Congratulations on Getting Halfway Through Rehab!

Congratulations on Soiling the Bed!

You won’t know what day it is or what time it is, only that that interminable bastard the sun has decided to rear his hideous riticus in your direction and force you into the waking world.

Rise and shine, motherfucker! he’ll cry.

“Fuck off,” you’ll say, waving your hand. He’ll ignore you but at least he’ll stop talking. That’s when you’ll realize that you’re not in your room. You’ll feel around cautiously, doing your best to make it seem like you’re groping for whatever strange flesh you might’ve found last night, but you won’t find anything. If you ended up with anyone they’re long gone now.

You won’t want to move any part of your body you don’t have to. Every muscle will cry out in agony, every inch of your skull will be filled with a horrible tension, as if some sort of burly craftsman had fastened a thick band of constantly constricting iron on the inside of your skull. You’ll pray for water to materialize near the bed, but nothing will come.

You’ll lay that was for a full five minutes, flexing your muscles to test for permanent injury before you reach down to your crotch and decide to see if you found some strange last night. The moment your hand gets down there, though, you’re going to pull it back.

You’ll be met not with the sticky slickness of sex but the horrible, amorphous sensation of a mix of shit and piss which has pooled around you in the sheets. Your eyes will fly open for the first time and you’ll carefully, very carefully, shift your weight out of the bed, taking care to stop dripping before you step completely away from the sheets.

You’ll do your best to wipe yourself clean with the comforter, taking in your surroundings as you do so. You’ll be thankful that you don’t recognize any of the decorations or photographs. At least you didn’t void your bowels in the bed of a close friend or co-worker, or a boy you’d hoped to take home and ruin.

You’ll dress yourself in the same careful fashion, guessing at whose parents you’re looking at, struggling to find even one memory of the previous night. Nothing will come to you, of course, and even as you scrawl your hasty goodbye/apology note you’ll pen it “to whom it may concern.” You’ll hope that that doesn’t sting worse than the soiled sheets as you slip ten dollars for the cost of a laundromat under the pen. The whos and wheres of your awakenings are something you’ve long since stopped trying to keep track of.

Congratulations on Soiling the Bed!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Bungie's Mumbo Jumbo!

Just a brief disclaimer. This review drops some heavy handed hints as to how ODST ends. As such I wanted to warn anyone who wanted to experience the game fresh to avoid reading any further than the first sentence. All others, read on knowing that spoilers are to come.

Gaming’s first detective story has arrived.

I received my copy of ODST from Amazon almost a week after release, the same day my parents came to town. My weekend, normally spent devouring electronic media wholesale, was to be co-opted. I managed to get an hour or two of play time in, enough to get the basics of the game down, and then I had to deal with family matters.

Sunday, when I planned to play, my roommate and his girlfriend pulled a passive-aggressive television control ploy which I, in my infinite superiority, was too passive-aggressive to say anything about. At ten PM, after they went upstairs to have loud sex, I sat down to play some more ODST. At around two in the morning I remembered that I had work the next day and stopped.

Critics have been hard on ODST, and for many good reasons. It’s a brief offering at $60 (which makes me glad that Amazon has dropped the price twice for me now, making the net purchase price $45 with a discount which has made Assassin Creed 2, a game I plan to play to an unhealthy degree, $45 as well) and it has some truly atrocious music. I get why they want to play soft jazz. It’s right there at the start of the essay. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be subtle about it. It’s like I’m watching softcore porn for fuck’s sake. And there are, as others have mentioned previously, some cringe worthy guitar riffs which seem to come straight out of some dude’s parent’s basement. But this is Bungie, and of all their lovely design choices music has never been the strong suit. Yes, sure, it’s impressive that they have a full orchestra, and there’s nothing wrong with their music per sec, but it’s obvious. It’s like the soundtrack for The Watchmen. There’s no subtly there, no respect for the player, and given Bungie’s majority audience, why should there be?

But many people have been criticizing the story for lacking in that traditional “Halo flair,” never mind that Halo games have done atrocious jobs of telling stories. Moving us from one scripted fire fight to the next, demanding we care about characters who are barely developed and taking away the interesting characters halfway through the game as a tantalizing reward for continuing play? It’s sloppy, it’s poorly paced, it’s just good enough to accompany their exquisite design which, let’s be honest, is what makes the Halo games such solid entries into the pantheon of gaming in the first place.

Halo ODST doesn’t have these problems, at least at first. It drops players into an optional tutorial familiarizing them with the new elements of the game. It assumes that you’ll know the basics of first-person-shooting at this point, which is fair. It assumes that you understand Halo’s enemies. But it doesn’t assume familiarity with the topography of Halo’s world, with the layout city of New Mombasa, and that’s where it breaks off from other Halo games and becomes something much more interesting.

Halo games are all about moving from place to place. Shit, most stories are. There are relatively few stories which don’t focus on some kind of physical or emotional journey. It’s the personality that each of these places holds and the personality of the people inhabiting these places that make these stories interesting. Halo is pretty lacking in this department. The Ring is uninhabited. We know the inhabitants of Earth already, and they’re given only the most generic of treatments when we get to see them. They’re the generic “oo-rah”-ing grunts, totally interchangeable, who follow us from fire fight to fire fight. And our enemies are irrationally evil religious zealots who could just as easily be used as a metaphor for the Bush administration or the Ahmadinejad in their unthinking pursuit of manifest destiny and power. The cast, and ergo the places they inhabit, are entirely generic.

The most interesting stories in the Halo-verse have come between games, in places like I Love Bees or the text missives about the end of the world in Halo 3. These stories give us powerful senses of people, real characters, who are exposed to the horrors of war and of the future and are struggling just to deal with it. ILB’s Earthlings tell a more compelling story in their attempt to find a job or get the girl than the Master Chief does while trying to save the world, and I Love Bees was a fucking marketing campaign.

Being a duty bound, badass cyborg doesn’t preclude you from having a personality. But that’s essentially what we’re given: an inoffensive, personality free protagonist. He’s not even a tabula rasa. He’s the most generic future soldier you could imagine, a hero through and through. He’s not angry at the government that indoctrinated him as a child or killed many of his best friends. He doesn’t defy them in the least. He’s a sycophant, just as much a zealot as the brutes he wades through. He’s a zealot with a sense of honor and duty, but without his war, what would the Master Chief be doing?

The same criticism could be levied at the generic cast of marines in ODST, a group of “specialized” troops who receive most of their personality from the excellent voice acting provided by one third of the cast of Firefly and a hot Cylon. It’s hard to care about any of the troops, even the dying Romeo, who I’ve got admit is Bungie’s best marine yet. He’s kind of a wacky sociopath, and it’s easy for me to relate to him while I play, killing anything that moves, begrudgingly following orders and sighing at the incompetence of my squad mates. But we never get a chance to know him, or any of the supporting characters for that matter, partly because of the brevity of the game and party because Bungie doesn’t seem to want to give up any of Buck’s thunder. Understandably so: you don’t hire Nathan Fillion to let him take the back seat. In fact, if history is any judge it’s sort of hard to take the focus off of Fillion unless you pair him with someone just as charismatic (see Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog), but it would’ve been nice to see a little more banter between Alan Tudyk and Adam Baldwin and to get a sense of the history between them.

The game commits some pretty serious narrative offenses in the flashbacks where these characters are treated, but I believe it makes up for them in two ways. First the ILB like audio diaries which, while not as well-written as ILB’s are certainly more concise and flowing and possessed of all the heart and character which ILB offered up. Second, by putting us in control of one of the smartest narrators in game history: the Rookie.

Bear with me.

The Rookie is the player. I’m not saying you control him. I’m saying he’s you. He’s you in every single game you’ve ever played. He’s exploring an environment piecing together a narrative while dealing with violence and aid doled out by an inscrutable God figure we glimpse only briefly. The way the Rookie interacts with the story, the way his movement through the city is hemmed and the way he’s given control of how he interacts with objects inside the city is evocative of the power games give us over their narratives. He’s an active figure without a voice, shaping the plot without speaking a word. When he’s finally paired up with other characters everyone except the author of this story seems to pretend he isn’t there. He’s a gamer, through and through, ignored by the passionate kissing couples until things get awkward, following orders reticently and willing to skulk around in dark places picking up discarded bits of narrative so he can figure out just what the fuck is going on.

He engages games the way we do, given scraps of stories and help from the people who originally crafted those stories. He embodies the way all gamers function as detectives. And he does it by moving through a city with real personality.

ODST does what previous Halo games have failed at: it gives each of its locales personality. Because it’s all the same cityscape they can’t use new pallets or doodad placements in order to make us feel like we’re in a different place. They have to get down to the nitty gritty and make a place feel fundamentally different in its design, layout and purpose. Even when their characters lack feeling their locales never seem to (with exception to the opening flashback sequence with Buck, which seemed almost purposefully generic) and it keeps things bearable between the necessary gaps in the city-exploring actions which forms the core of the game.

That the city itself has such personality is a huge boon as well. I’m not sure quite how they pull it off, but the interchangeable set pieces you’re forced to navigate are surprisingly compelling, perhaps because of the scarcity of resources or the way they shift as you uncover more and more of the story around the city. In fact my biggest issue with the game wasn’t that it eventually forced you into a series of generic Halo firefights, an obvious move to anyone who’s ever played a Halo game. It was that I didn’t get to spend more time in the open-world city finding more artifacts. Another three or four would’ve done it, and the stories could’ve been shorter for each of them. I just wanted some direction in how I wandered the city.

The audio logs offer up a little bit of that, sure, but it’s so hard to remember just where you’ve found them. If the game had a better hint system, or any hint system at all, it might not be so bad. As it stands I have no desire to poke around in various city corners in the hope of finding new bits of story. Maybe that will change when I get some good old gritty noir firefight joneses, but for now I don’t feel compelled to trudge through the streets of New Mombasa without a carrot. That’ll probably change tomorrow, though, when I’m rested and I have some distance from the ugh highway segment which closed the game.

For now I’m mostly left with good memories, though, of how Bungie seemed to get what was wrong with their game and improve it. I’m also pleased with the feeling that I was, for a little while, a detective strolling the streets of a foreign city in a foreign time, piecing together a puzzle and fighting to survive. And I’m glad that, for the first time in what seems like an eternity, people managed to make a game about war which was legitimately funny. Watching a crew of hardass marines drag an unwilling space-squid into a grav lift is one of the best comedic images I’ve experienced in a game this year, intentional or unintentional.

Congratulations to the Female Billy Jack!

You’re a girl. That means there are a lot of things people think you can’t do, like vote and drive stick. But you’ve proved them wrong and you’re going to prove them wrong on another count too come tomorrow.

You’re going to show them girls can kick some seirous ass too.

First you’re going to find a local gang of toughs. Try to make sure it’s a theme gang for maximum effect. Beating up a bunch of dudes in hoodies will do, but beating up a bunch of guys with skeleton facepaint in hoodies will be that much more demonstrative of your badassness.

Second, take a few weeks of Muai Thai. We know this prediction specifically references Billy Jack, a movie about a white hapkido fighter, but hapkido? That shit isn’t going to cut it. Watch some Youtube videos of Muai Thai and tell us we're wrong.

Third, be sure to get into at least one fight before you actually try to take on any gangs. Nothing will kill this faster than you running into a situation all willy nilly and getting your ass handed to you. Try to fight someone you think you can take, or fight with some backup to make sure you don’t get hurt too bad if you lose.

After following these steps our future experts show a 75% chance of success for you taking down a local gang and become a local myth for vigilantes. So try your best, kick some ass and you’ll hear us cry Congratulations to the Female Billy Jack!

Congratulations Tween Gang Leader!

When The Fall came no one thought Detroit would be there in the morning. But no one wanted to risk harming Toronto so they were spared bombs and fire and terrible, terrible light. Instead they were left to their own devices, left to die the slow death of their own unraveling. Entrenched gangs began campaigns of open warfare and citizens found themselves pressed into service for factions they had never had to deal with.

Half of the adult population of Detroit was dead in a matter of months, and before long orphans started to rule the streets. Like some science fiction novel they formed their own social order and established a sociopolitical system with the end goal of preparing them for the harsh reality of gang life in their dying city.

You were one of the best of the best as an orphan. You knew how not to be seen, how to run fast when you’d taken something and were seen, how to kill an adult with a loose brick or a golf club. But tomorrow you’re turning 13, and that means you’re going to be cut loose to make your way into the heart of a gang’s territory and try to prove yourself.

Most people have pretty inauspicious plans for their 13th birthday. They hope to show up on a doorstep and just be asked to recover some simple thing or kill a rival gang member. Young women rarely have it so easy, but that is simply the way of things in Detroit.

You, though, you’re sick of the new status quo, of living bullet to bullet and kill to kill. You don’t want to take it anymore, and you think you’ve found a way out.

The Windsor Boys control the border to Canada. Blessed, blessed Canada, where your little brothers and sisters could still be children. The Windsor Boys, though, don’t want anyone to get out of Detroit. They know they wouldn’t have it nearly as easy if the Canadian authorities were to come in and try to clean up the city, but they also know that the Canadian military is spread so thin keeping order that there’s no way they could do it without help from inside the city.

You know this, and you decided what you wanted to do with your birthday long ago. You’re going to become a member of the Windsor Boys.

You’ll begin this process by climbing up the five story apartment building they use as a headquarters. You’ll do it without rope, with nothing on you except for a rusting machete the clothes on your back. You’ll find hand holds that an adult would never be able to use, scrambling from balcony to balcony like a spider. If anyone were to watch you it’s doubtful that they’d believe what they were seeing. But before long you’ll be on the penthouse balcony, machete in your hand, sweat beading your body.

You’ll creep into the gang leader’s antechamber, doing your best not to look at the young women scattered about like broken dolls. You won’t want to see someone you knew and lose your nerve. You’ll want to do this right.

You’ll slip through his unlocked door without making a single sound and find him on a soiled mattress, alone. He’ll be the oldest man you’ve ever seen, in his mid thirties by the look of things. He’ll have a patchy beard and a sawed off shotgun within reach of his outflung arm. You’ll pause as you look at him, wondering if he’s really sleeping.

Then he’ll snore, like an owl’s hoot breaking the night’s spell, and you’ll explode forward with your machete and take it to his neck.

It will take six cuts. It will be over after the second.

The next morning you’ll be seated on his “throne,” an overstuffed armchair. The former concubines will be arrayed around you, pensive and hopeful and you’ll clutch the sawed off shotgun in your hand, the symbol of your new leadership. The peons who were bringing the leader’s breakfast will be shocked to see you there with his gun, but they’ll know what it means. This is The Windsor Boys way, after all.


They’ll assemble the elder gang members, a few of whom you recognize. They won’t have aged well out in the streets, but few people do. You’ll announce that you plan to dominate the future populace of Detroit by bringing several orphan groups under your protective fold. From there you’ll only have a brief period where you build your power base and ensure that the gang is loyal to you before you lead them marching across the river into Windsor and into healthcare and safety.

Congratulations Tween Gang Leader!

Congratulations Community College Student!

You attend Suffolk Community College, located in delightful Selden, Long Island. It’s a delightful place, where you can find literally anything given enough time and money. In fact, if it wasn’t for your enrollment at Suffolk Community it’s fair to say that your dad wouldn’t have that new kidney and that your mom wouldn’t have that Asian houseboy.

But of late you’ve been having trouble. Your job at King Kullen has been distracting you, your girlfriend has been pressuring you into pursuing professional growth and your mom has been dying of cancer. But Suffolk Community takes care of its own.

Tomorrow you’re going to enter your academic advisor’s “office,” the back of a custom van detailed with a unicorn fighting a Cylon from the original Battlestar Gallactica. When you open the door a cloud of pot smoke will spill forth and momentarily disorient you. It’ll take your professor’s kindly call of “Come on in, dude,” to bring you back to your senses and into his home-office.

He’ll be sitting on a pile of pillows with a hookah and a woman who apparently hasn’t changed her clothes since 1971 and has aged fantastically for the effort. He’ll be in one of his best suits with copies of Foucalt and Sartre splayed face down in front of him.

“What’s got you down, broseph?” he’ll ask in his genial way.

“Professor Chuggsworth,” you’ll begin, hands clasped before you, “I’ve been having some trouble lately. Everyone around me wants me to try and make my life into something more. Also, my mom is dying.”

He’ll listen carefully and sit perfectly still in his at-one-time-six-hundred-dollar suit for a full five minutes before he nods in response.

“I think I got you, man.” He’ll put on a pair of aviator glasses and stumble out of the van with his hippy-chick of indeterminate relationship on his arm. Even through the glasses the light will cause him physical pain. “Harsh,” he’ll mutter as he points towards the bad part of campus and the two of you begin your journey.

After a short trip you’ll meet some Puerto Rican students of his who, in exchange for some tutoring, will knee cap your boss to make sure he gives you a good recommendation, get you a job in a corrupt temp agency with an excellent record of placing people in perm positions over time and find some seemingly magical drugs for your mom which purportedly come from the Amazon basin.

And it’s all because you spend several hours a week at one of the most magical places on earth, where different ages, cultures and creeds can come together for the sake of education and free text books.

Congratulations Community College Student!