Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Congratulations on Finding Someone Who Really Appreciates You!

Today you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when you’re abducted by small but tenacious group of giant sapient ants. They’ll burst into your suburban home and load you into a windowless van, spiriting you far, far away to the warehouse district of your closest metropolitan area.

Once they have you there they’ll speak to you about how they’ve watched you toiling for your unappreciative husband for years, eagerly awaiting the day when they’ll be able to spirit you away and make you their “fleshy queen.” Then they’ll make with the foot rubs and Baskin Robins, which is apparently all women give a shit about.

It’ll all seem perfect until your husband bursts in with a shotgun and starts firing at random. He’ll hit you, seriously injuring your left arm and sending you into shock, but no worries. Since he sees you as a valuable piece of property he’ll have you whisked off to the hospital in no time, where the doctors will “fix his god damn property” as he puts it, to make sure you can take care of his house again without ever having to worry about giant ants kidnapping you and taking you to a life of luxury ever again.

Congratulations on Finding Someone Who Really Appreciates You!

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Congratulations on Giving Her One Too Many Back Massages!

We understand that Shelly has low self esteem and that you want to try to fix her if at all possible. We understand that you’re a virgin and that, since you’re also a college student, this makes you deeply uncomfortable and more than a little awkward. And we understand that deep down you really mean well.

But come Tuesday night, when you give Shelly a “stress relieving back rub” and end up rubbing the sides of her tits for like, two hours with a giant erection pressing into her spine she’ll be totally justified in turning around and popping you one right in the dick.

When you fall to the ground gasping for air we’ll feel a little bit sorry for you, sure. But not very. We’ll feel much worse for Shelly who is still going through a really difficult breakup thank you very much and really just needed a friend, not some douche bag trying to get into her pants.

And so your muffled sorry will not suffice, will not win over her affections, nor will it curry ours. Instead it’ll just make us a little angry that we invested time in predicting your future at all, since really anyone could’ve seen this coming.

Congratulations on Giving Her One Too Many Back Massages!

Monday, March 29, 2010

Congratulations on Burning This Fucker to the Ground!

You’ll be there in front of her on one knee, palm extended upward, the nearly empty box like a promise. You won’t be able to meet her eyes, your face turned down. You’ll chew your lip a little for a minute or two before you look up at her. She’ll be smiling, a frail frightened and shocked thing, and there will be tears in her eyes. When she answers it will come as a whisper.

“Yes.”

You’ll leap up to your feet, hefting the bottle of Cuervo Gold into the air and shouting.

“WOOOOO!”

She’ll leap up and wrap her arms around you.

“WOOOOO!” she’ll shout as you split apart to open the tequila.

You won’t bother with glasses, gulping off the mouth of the bottle like men dying of thirst in a desert. It won’t take long, no more than a handful of gulps before liquor begins to run its course through your body, seeping into your hands and crawling gently up your spine into the base of your brain.

It won’t be long before the evening turns to frenzied, drunken lovemaking on the floor of your apartment. This will, in turn, lead to premature ejaculation which will lead to more tequila. Then the two of you, hugging and smiling and drunk as a pair of Irish Mexicans, will decide to commemorate this great event in a way that the entire neighborhood will never forget. You’ll torch the place for insurance money.

Even drunk you’ll be smart about it. You’ll pack up your laptops and put an iron into a pile of gas soaked rags in your kitchen. Then you’ll spray acetylene all over the walls and plug the coffee maker in, making sure that there are some matches pressed up against the heating surface of the iron for good measure. You’ll also fashion a makeshift fuse out of a piece of string, also soaked in gas, and lead it towards the pile of rags. Then you’ll turn the iron on and stumble to a 24 hour coffee shop to “work on your novels together.” Mostly you’ll just make out while bored baristas watch.

It’ll be a foolproof plan. Six months later you’ll be rich as fuck with a bunch of new shit in a way swanker apartment in a much better neighborhood. Also you’ll have a kid (part of one, anyhow, growing within your wife) and a real job, no longer doing “contract computer repair work,” whatever that is. And no one will ever be the wiser.

Congratulations on Burning This Fucker to the Ground!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Selling Me on DLC!

The concept of episodic content is hardly new to video games. Half-Life 2 popularized the concept with their incredibly spread out six hour experiences which took as long to develop as an Infinity Ward game (which totally showed in their exceptional storytelling, pacing, and tech). Downloadable content has now expanded the concept of iterative development and release cycles, although glorious failures such as Sins: Episodes have proven that it is a method best left to already successful properties In a very real way episodic content is changing boht the way we buy and release games.

Borderlands is an excellent example. Downloadable content for that game can now potentially cost more than the original game did, assuming you bought it at a package price. What’s more it contains features that, by all rights, should’ve been in the original product. Things like item storage, PVP arenas and small, self-contained narratives that might keep casual players interested in the game until the end have all been inserted by the many various DLC packages offered up by Gearbox so far. And who knows how many more they’ll release? Much love to Gearbox, but they way they’ve attempted to monetize their well deserved success has been nothing short of blatant. Still, at least their content is packaged and delivered in a convenient way for their customers and is clearly advertised.

Compare this to Mass Effect 2, a game that launched with DLC in the box. As someone who played Mass Effect 2 on the X-Box (almost entirely so that I could carry over the many playthroughs I’d earned in the previous Mass Effect) in order to use content that I’d purchased with the game I would have to hook up my X-Box Live subscription, which involves generating a new identity since I can’t use my existing Live ID to sign in, since it was created on a computer, download content to my normally offline X-Box and then hook it up to the internet for verification each time I played. All this so I could explore one extra area, get a few scraps of armor, a shitty gun and a lackluster character.

The real goal behind this procedure is to make sure I’ve done the legwork of establishing a conncetion to Mass Effect 2’s virtual storefront when additional content launches later on this year. Bring Down the Sky’s lackluster sales (which likely contributed to Bioware’s decision to stop producing new content for the first Mass Effect) have probably put Bioware into damage control mode as they attempt to find a way to successful sell work they’ve spent a lot of time and effort on to people they know want it, but I find this particular pretty frustrating. In order to access content I’ve already purchased I need to engage a virtual storefront which punishes me for being a PC gamer first and an X-Box gamer second. I understand that they want brand exclusivity but everything on my gaming rig is already stamped with Microsoft’s brand of corporate approval.

Perhaps I’d have the same complaints about Dragon Age if I’d purchased it on the X-Box. But, as with most games I can do so with, I chose to play Dragon Age on the PC, and my DLC experience has, as a result, been considerably less painful. Sure, I once had my install drop all of my downloaded content from a sixty hour experience and refuse to reload it, preventing me from talking to my favorite character and removing all of the epic armor that I’d sunk so much time and money into, but at least it never made me drunkenly slog through menu screens for an hour and a half before informing me that I couldn’t link my X-Box Live account to my Games for Windows Live account, or even to the email which my GFWL account was created under.

Instead I used Steam’s shell to access all of the content and, for the most part, had a chance to enjoy it as intended. While this didn’t inure me enough of their systems to try purchasing the Return to Ostagar expansion, worth 400 Bioware points where each Bioware point is a piece of your soul to be revalued at a later date of Bioware’s choosing, it did make me perk up when the Awakening expansion emerged from Steam’s wondrous bowels. Sure, it cost as much as some full price games (four times as much as my beloved Flotilla!) but Dragon Age: Origins was an iincredible experience, and damnit I’m willing to throw down money to encourage people to make more of them, especially when I do so through a service that remembers my credit card information.

I’ve had precious little time to spend with Awakenings so far. It has been a busy week and social and literary commitments have kept me from spending my requisite 80 hours a week playing games. But three hours in I have to say that it is everything I enjoy in Dragon Age. It features a nice mix of new and old characters, a nice reboot that establishes the stakes of Dragon Age’s world and the sort of people it encapsulates quickly and deftly. Instead of bringing out a “best of” of Dragon Age it offers some nods to previous decisions you’ve had to make. I’ve already seen the fruits of my labor in Origins appear in this game when an old friend paid me a visit and let me know how he was doing.

What’s more impressive is that Awakenings has come so soon after Dragon Age: Origins, and promises so much content. While I haven’t seen an hour count I’d imagine a forty dollar expansion promises at least an additional sixty hours of content, using math derived from the fiirst game. The timing, in fact, is almost perfect. The rush of the new year has ended and I just now feel ready for more Dragon Age. I’d forgotten the quiet catharthis of chopping my way through hordes of Darkspawn with my badass close combat specialized rogue.

What I’m trying to spit out is that Awakenings seems to be the best piece of DLC I’ve seen to date, even better than Half Life’s incredible episodes. Tonally it has hit all the right marks so far, and while its price tag is a bit high I’ve spent enough time with Bioware to know that this is a promise that the game will not fail to deliver. Bioware has never asked for my money without good reason (I assume they needed drugs or something when they released Jade Empire, which is a good enough reason in my mind) and a forty dollar game from them will usually have more content than a sixty dollar game from most developers.

DLC has been a bit of a four letter word of late. Companies have been using it to try and squeeze already tight dollars out of consumers for seemingly asinine pieces of products that would make their gaming experience “more complete.” EA in particular has been bad about this, selling products that impact the balance of multiplayer experiences with a seemingly total lack of concern for their consumers. But Dragon Age’s quasi-expansion has given me hope. While it is clearly an addition and not a standalone product it is, in the tradition of Half-Life’s episodes, more of what made the game released, sooner and for less money. And while my opinion of the product may change as I delve deeper into it, so far it seems to be exactly what I’ve wanted: a larger version of the episodic expansions that let me keep enjoying Half-Life 2 despite the absence of any sort of Half-Life 3.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Congratulations on Running Away from Andrew W.K.!

Today, following the two month anniversary of your graduation from college, you’re going to finally up and run away from your comfortable home in the well appointed Oklahoma ranch of music legend Andrew W.K.. You’ve lived there ever since he kidnapped you in an attempt to improve your relationship with your dad, decades earlier. He decided to keep you after briefly meeting your father and the two of you never looked back.

But times must change, and today you’ll leave his home with nothing but his cell phone number, all your shit, a 2006 Mazda Miyata, twenty thousand dollars in a Wells Fargo account and the clothes on your back. He’ll wave as you go, trying not to cry. You’ll try to do the same as you hold up your hand and say to him, in a whisper, goodbye Andrew W.K..

Congratulations on Running Away from Andrew W.K.!

Friday, March 26, 2010

Congratulations on Riding in a Bentley!

You’ll be waiting on the corner with the money in a satchel tucked under your arm. It will be raining, just as you expected.

You’ll be alone, as directed. You’ll be dressed in a blue windbreaker, as directed. It will be doing very little against the rain, which will be seeping through the thin mylar and into the flannel shirt and cotton undershirt you are wearing underneath, purely of your own volition.

You’ll be there for thirty minutes, which is what you were told to expect, before a stylish automobile pulls up in front of you and rolls down its windows. You’ll try to remember what its called briefly, but once the script you have memorized begins you’ll forget all about models and makes and focus on getting your daughter back safely.

“Are you ready?” a voice will ask from inside. The light of dusk and the natural shadow of the car will combine to make the speaker invisible, but the voice, gruff and masculine, will sound vaguely familiar.

“Ready to party,” you’ll say flatly, just as you rehearsed.

The door will open and you’ll step inside, ducking awkwardly in. The car will heave forward before you’ve had a chance to secure your seat belt and the money will go flying across the floor of the car. You’ll curse and try to pick it up but the figure sitting next to you will push you back into your seat.

“Buckle up,” he’ll say, his face unsmiling.

It’ll take a moment before you recognize him. He won’t be wearing a stained white t-shirt or ripped jeans, his typical vestments abandoned for a casual suit, but it’ll be him, un-aged after all these years of obscurity. Andrew W.K. will be sitting next to you, pushing you back into your chair, carefully examining you for some sign of betrayal or anxiety. You’ll be completely floored.

“You’re Andrew W.K.,” you’ll say, mouth agape.

“Your daughter is fine,” he’ll respond. “Very safe. I need you to understand that.”

You’ll nod, dumbly. “Is it true you hit yourself in the face with a brick for that album photo?” You’ll blurt out, interrupting him as he details just where your daughter is being kept.

“Is that really what’s foremost on your mind here?” he’ll say, pressing his fingers against his temples as if he is stifling some sort of pain. You’ll look at him, confused for a moment, before you nod.

“Oh, right. My daughter. Good. Yeah. Good. That she’s good.”

Andrew W.K. will look at you. He’ll look at the admiration in your eyes, the complete lack of anxiety over your daughter’s kidnapping or her safe return and he’ll shake his head.

“Take the money back,” he’ll say.

“Huh?” you’ll ask, still staring at him, a million questions about his beard running through your head.

“Take it back. I’m keeping your daughter.”

“What?” you’ll say, your heart dropping a little. “Why?”

He’ll look you up and down and start collecting the money from the floor and stuffing it back into the briefcase.

“I no longer believe you’re fit to be a parent,” he’ll say, stuffing the briefcase into your arms.

You’ll want to ask him more questions, like is there any way you can convince him you are and is his house as cool as he is and what has he been up to lately, you’ve missed his songs about partying, but you won’t get a chance. He’ll signal the driver and the car will slow. Then the door will open and you’ll be dragged by a be-suited man back out into the rain.

Andrew W.K. will drive away then, without further contact or gesture, and you’ll be left on another corner, far from the neighborhoods you know, clutching a briefcase filled with money and secure in the knowledge that your daughter has finally found a good home.

Congratulations on Riding in a Bentley!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Congratulations on Trashing Your Hotel Room!

Today you and your boyfriend are going to fuck in a hotel room in Tucson. It’ll be a shitty place to start with but the two of you will have unprotected anal sex without any sort of dietary or rectal preparation. The entire room will be stained with unintentional slips of shit and blood all over the carpet and the sheets. Your boyfriend will joke about smearing some on the walls, just to fuck with the conservative cleaning lady but you’ll tell him that the cleaning lady is probably some poor immigrant who doesn’t care about the two of you and wouldn’t even look twice if you walked out of a Starbucks holding hands. He’ll be angry and refuse to hold you or even talk to you in bed. After a while it’ll get old and you’ll hop out of bed to take a shower and wonder why you didn’t start to leave Arizona sooner.

Congratulations on Trashing Your Hotel Room!