Congratulations on Driving Her Away Once and For All!

You and your girlfriend have a lot of stress in your lives. Normally you deal with that stress by having lots of sex and smoking weed and watching movies sent to your home by Netflix, but it’s a losing battle and the walls are slowly closing in on you. Bit by bit you’re slipping towards breakupsville, and neither of you really want to be there.

That’s why you’re going to make a big gesture today by welcoming her home with one hundred white lab mice. You thought it would be a cute way to show her you cared about her work and a way to maybe help her save some money around the office.

It will backfire completely. She’ll start screaming and won’t stop until you’ve either collected every single one of the fuckers or smashed their skulls in with a phone book. By the time all is done she’ll refuse to speak with you. She’ll put your ass on the couch and spend an hour pulling your shit out of the bedroom and leaving it in cardboard boxes that the two of you keep around for recycling.

After she finishes, after you’re sitting on the couch with a lamp on staring at the ceiling mumbling to yourself, you’ll notice one of the mice running across the floor. You’ll have missed one and he’ll be out of the cage, running around, his little pink eyes taking in the big new world he’s been forced into.

You’ll know that she’d want him caught, that she wants everything in her life to be contained and secured so that she can have a few occasional moments of peace, but you won’t be able to bring yourself to move from the couch. You’ll just sit there and watch as the creature scurries to and fro, exploring this wondrous new place you’ll soon be leaving.

Congratulations on Driving Her Away Once and For All!

Congratulations on Figuring Out What Was Making All That Noise Under the Floorboards!

At first you’ll be super excited. Pulling back that board to reveal a makeshift city of cardboard boxes and crudely formed tiny bricks will make you remember just what it felt like to be a kid, to believe, or even know, that there were tiny worlds all around you teeming with unseen life.

The mice will flee at the sight of you. At first you’ll feel kind of guilty, sighing as they skitter away on their cute little legs. But then you’ll recognize missing boxes of cereal and flour and you’ll realize that these fuckers have been stealing from you for months, maybe even years to build there little communist paradise under the floor. These freeloaders have been taking as they please and leaving you naught but mouse shit. You’ll want to strike the little fuckers, to let them know that you are not to be trifled with, but then one of them will emerge from his mouse-house clutching something.

He’ll offer it up to you in what you’ll take to be supplication, chitterring and nervously glancing at you, clearly fearful that a long, direct look might warrant some sort of wrath. Startled, you’ll examine the item.

It’ll appear to be some sort of parchment, delicately folded, with tiny tiny writing on it. You’ll take out your jewelers tools and examine it with the looking glass, shocked to see what appear to be flowing letters. You’ll struggle to identify them for what seems like an eternity before you just google them and realize that they’re Sumerian characters. With a sigh you’ll cast the parchment back to the mice people and open up the phone book to F, working backwards, trying to find an exterminator with a funny sounding name.

Congratulations on Figuring Out What Was Making All That Noise Under the Floorboards!

Congratulations on Making Yourself a New Friend!

You’ve been lonely since Margaret left. Her companionship, her assistance, her wisdom, all these things made her more than just a lab assistant for you. They made her a companion, a life partner. Sure you would sometimes yell at her and strike her and you once referred to her as “the single most revolting cunt that the world has ever seen” but that was no reason for her to fly all off the handle and request a new assignment from The Guild.

But that’s just what she did and your death fortress has been all but still since then. You’ve done your best to fill your waking hours with various projects, but it just hasn’t been the same. The quiet has been getting to you more and more of late. Why, just the other day you were crying in the shower just thinking of her voice, informing you that the bacteriophage had finished processing. That’s why you’ll be filled to the brim with joy when you check your Outlook calendar and see that today is the day you can finally release your latest creation from its incubation tank.

Bruno, who began her life as a female albino mouse you ordered from a testing supplier, will have grown since you started work on her months ago. Her body will ripple with barely concealed muscle, her form now filling the massive tank you constructed for her development. The only traits visible from her past existence will be her white fur, matted and gray in the fluid of the tank, and her vicious looking claws and teeth which will have increased proportionally with the rest of her body.

When you approach the tank she’ll put a claw up near your face, looking at you with sympathy and loyalty. She’ll have constantly bombarded with aural and subliminal stimulation while in her tank, all of it aimed at imprinting her with loyalty towards you, as well as a set of basic technical skills which you normally require your genetically engineered mouse people to have in order for them to constitute “good company.” She’ll be aware, dimly, of a world outside the tank, but mostly she’ll know only your face, your voice. As the fluid drains she’ll panic, smashing her fists against the sides of the tank with a force that will cause a latticework of cracks to appear in the glass. You’ll back away, remembering how Dr. Lasercut once nearly lost an arm to a particularly clumsy creation with no ill-will towards him.

Once the fluid has finished draining the tube will slowly rise over Bruno’s head. Bruno won’t wait for it to finish, however. She’ll claw at the base of the tank, struggling to ram her muscular body through the widening opening. She’ll be out and on her feet before the tank is even halfway up, rushing towards you.

You’ll panic, reaching for the taser next to you keep handy for just such occasions, but you’ll never have the chance to pick it up. Bruno will be on you in seconds, clutching you to her, screeching wordlessly. You’ll expect to feel her claws rip into your flesh and rend your skin at any moment but instead you’ll feel her hot breath on the side of your neck, her tube’s fluids soaking your white lab coat.

You’ll realize, after a moment, that she’s embracing you, showing her thanks for your act of giving her life, sentience. You’ll hug her back tentatively, hoping that she doesn’t break any ribs with her display of affection. As you stroke the fur on the back of her head you’ll smile, thinking of the good times the two of you have ahead, a long stream of days assembling death cannons and teaching her basic English language skills.

Congratulations on Making Yourself a New Friend!

Congratulations on Putting on a Rendition of Cats Using Tiny Albino Mice!

If you lived anywhere but Toronto you’d have been laughed out of that meeting. But because you live in Toronto, home or artists and pretentious buttfucks from all walks of life, you’ll be calmly listened to right up until you get to the pun that actually makes up the entirety of your idea. Once you hit the pun the case worker assessing your show will burst out laughing and start adjusting his papers while nodding. So when the terrible reviews start coming in just remember, a lot of it has to do with the fact that your show was pretty much entirely conceived of as an elaborate prank on the Canadian government.

Congratulations on Putting on a Rendition of Cats Using Tiny Albino Mice!

Congratulations on Kicking Off Mistakes Made With Albino Mice Week!

This one’s pretty tame. You and your boyfriend will be engaging in some good old American sodomy when he inserts a mouse up your asshole. Poor thing will freak out up there and die and clog your colon and eventually a proctologist who deals with this sort of thing all the time, though usually not from out homosexuals who are normally a lot smarter and more careful, will ram his KY soaked fist up there and remove the putrid, reeking corpse of the mouse. Your boyfriend will leave you a week later, citing the incident in detail as his primary reason for doing so.

Congratulations on Kicking Off Mistakes Made With Albino Mice Week!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Not So Final Fantasy!

My relationship with Final Fantasy has gone through a lot of changes over time. As a young man I fell into the fictional worlds earlier final Fantasy games with a passion and rapacity that many more recent games have had difficulty matching. All of that seemed to change with Final Fantasy X. Suddenly the stories and worlds I’d been so devoted to became overly dense and overwrought. The exploration and character progression that the series had offered in previous iterations was gone, replaced with the tedious, repetitious combat system and a cast of character I desperately wanted to see die in a fire XII did little to improve the situation. Even though it finally built a coherent world into the game again and offered up characters I actually enjoyed being around there was still something missing, the openness or epic-ness of the previous stories.

From the first battle of Final Fantasy VII the game is afoot. Even though the stakes still grow over the course of the game they start out high and readily recognizable – the world is at war and I’m a part of that war, an underdog fighting impossible odds with mysterious motivations. Final Fantasy VII sold me on its world, its characters and its stakes without ever really trying to. By the time X rolled around it was difficult to care. Why should I give a shit about a water polo player from an alternate universe which is actually kind of a dream, sort of, but not completely? Why was Yuna’s struggle important? Things I remember clearly a decade after playing Final Fantasy VII into the ground, the names of minor characters, places I visited in passing, cutscenes I saw to introduce bosses and cool touches of art, are completely absent from Final Fantasy X. I can’t even remember if Auron lives or dies off the top of my head right now, or what the name of the mystical water polo game Tidus is so fond of is. I want to call it Spheda, but I think that’s just the Italian word for ball.

Even XII’s turn towards wacky romance, with a particularly non-Final Fantasy relationship between Cid and Frieda highlighting the experience for me, was a welcome bit of character development after X’s bland and plodding execution, and that still left a bad taste in my mouth in a way no former Final Fantasy game ever had. So it’s fair to say that I began Final Fantasy XIII with a bit of trepidation. But at least it tried to lose its heritage, opening with a well executed action sequence and doling out bits of world and backstory with plenty of care. But after twenty hours and plenty of world and character development it still doesn’t feel like a Final Fantasy game. There’s no exploration, no civilization. I get the distinct feeling that I will never be in a place that isn’t beset by war, never wander through a city like Midgar or Treno. At this rate I’d be shocked if I was given a chance to engage in a series of drawn out late game sidequests that allow me to find extra special gear and summons.

But I’m still playing Final Fantasy XIII, and not just because I have obsessive compulsive disorder and nothing better to do. Despite gameplay that I started off hating, gameplay with can literally be boiled down to “press the a button occasionally,” I’m still enjoying myself, sort of. But why? It’s not the exploration. Of the areas I’ve visited only Palumpolum has evoked any feeling from me at all. Most of the places I’ve seen are retreads of landscapes I saw in X and XII, and even then they’ve had any personality stripped out of them. In fact it feels like the entire development cycle was spent removing personality from various areas, smoothing out rough edges and designing various variations of the “wolf” design from Final Fantasy VI which has stayed so iconic throughout the series.

And it certainly isn’t the art design. Sazh’s character design makes me want to punch a Japanese man in the face and tell him to stop with the racism, Snow looks like an asshole and I thank christ that Hope isn’t the main character so I don’t have to see his dumb fucking face all the time. I smile when supporting characters die in combat because it’s the only vengeance I can take against the developers. If there’s a chance to emotionally scar these douches I am so going after it. The enemies are, as I said, rote derivations of the enemies of previous Final Fantasies, dolled up with a new pallet and a few new themes, and the few that do evoke any sort of response seem to only generate laughter (Although I’ll admit, the Flanitors are hilarious. I hope to see a Flanitation Engineer later in the game). I’ll offer up the caveat that the female characters all look good, although I’m not sure if Panelo II (I’m sorry, Vanille) is supposed to make me feel like a pedophile or if she’s supposed to portray a developed young woman of legal age. That’s sort of just how Japanese culture weighs in sometimes, though.

Another major issue plaguing Final Fantasy XIII is that the dialogue isn’t particularly well translated or, from what I can tell, well written in the first place. I laughed out loud at the repetition of “moms are tough,” and I’ve actually spoken character’s mistranslated lines in turn with them as they grow upset over the same issue for the umpteenth time in the last fifteen minutes, I feel like I can predict where each character’s arc will lead them from the moment of setup to conclusion, and when surprises do come (anyone with an Australian accent is really from Pulse?) they seem arbitrary. Sazh having a son, Hope’s mother being the only casualty on the bridge, despite Snow falling down immediately after her, from the same spot? Snow being taken by an agency that helps l’Cie after a series of unwinnable battles? It’s the worst parts of soap opera story wrapped in overly expressive dialogue and set in the uncanny valley.

The only elements of the story I find fascinating come from, again, the three female characters. Jokes about her parallels of Penelo aside I’m very interested in how Vanille will develop. Underneath the bumbling sex appeal and lesbian implications there seems to be something developing that I can’t put my finger on. Her relationship with Fang, Lightning and the relationship the three of them have with the government of Cocoon is something I’m excited to see more of. If I didn’t have to sit through segments with Snow and Hope I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Final Fantasy XIII to veteran fans. As it stands I’d say that fans of the later games are the least likely to be upset over the various transgressions XIII makes against both form and story.

But what’s really keeping me play is the subtle honesty of its gameplay. It was frustrating to not be able to acquire experience points for the first eight hours of the game. In fact it was infuriating. I’d go so far as to call it downright retarded. Role playing games are fundamentally about presenting players with character arcs, and freezing those arcs for any reason is simply going to frustrate players. Doing so during the game’s infancy can snuff out all interest.

But as the game continued the systems began to develop and I began to see that the automation it aspired to was less an act of aggression against what I had seen as making the series great and more a streamlining of the fundamental concepts it used to operate under. Choosing larger strategic roles for characters and then automating those functions really just reduces the time I spend wading through menus and increases the time I watch characters do the cool shit that animators made up for them to do. And it’s telling that I rarely step outside of the automated system’s suggestions. Occasionally I’ll force a character’s hand to insure that they attack weak spots or properly capitalize on strengths, but the AI is surprisingly competent compared to previous iterations of the game. I sort of like the generalized strategic gameplay method FFXIII offers up, if only as a counterpoint to FFXII’s incredibly finicky system of slippery MMO style maneuvers.

In a way Final Fantasy XIII is like comfort food with fewer calories, a video game equivalent to Smartfood. It’s a more interactive and flashier version of ProgressQuest, an experience I can sit back and absorb or fine tune for greater results. Even if I find myself watching copious amounts of Buffy while I wade through artificial wilderness I don’t see myself stopping before the game ends, nor am I fast growing tired. While I don’t see this iteration as a return to the greatness Final Fantasy lost in its tenth game (eleventh if we count Tactics, which we should) I do find it satisfying. It’s not a great game, but I don’t think it has to be in this case. One day Final Fantasy might make a game that wows me, but it’s unlikely that it will happen before 2020. So one day, as we hear the news that Osama Bin Laden has been captured and peace has erupted in Iraq like some sort of awesome geyser, maybe there will be an announcement about a Final Fantasy game that hits all the notes the series used to, back when there were technical and budgetary limitations to force creativity. But until then I’ve got games like FFXIII to play, games that fundamentally get what the series purpose without trying to innovate it or challenge what its best entries offered. And sometimes, after a three year lull, that’s enough.

Congratulations on Reading a Fucking Book for a Change!

Today you’re going to be actress Megan Fox, and you’re going to try reading a fucking book for a change.

“I don’t like this,” you’ll whine, throwing your Caesar salad (minus the dressing, cheese and croutons) at your assistant as he tells you it’s not his decision.

“This is hard,” you’ll tell your latest boyfriend as he does his best to pretend you’re not there, playing the latest video game on his Box Station: Movement Plus.

“Why do I have to do this?” you’ll ask your agent as she shouts her lungs out at Michael Bay, trying to convince him to expand your role in the next terrible Transformers movie.

“Aggh!” you’ll shout at your empty Hollywood town home, hurling the book at the wall. “Who writes these things?” you’ll scream at no one in particuular.

If the book could answer it would. It would tell you that it is a copy of The Giver, written by Lois Lowry. It would tell you that while reading is more difficult than, say, doing cocaine and yelling at poor people, it is also a good deal more rewarding. It will want to tell you all these things, but it will only be a book, and it will not be able to speak with you.

Congratulations on Reading a Fucking Book for a Change!

Congratulations on Your Delicious Encounter with Fish and Chips!

You’ll have been in the desert for five days when he comes to you. He’ll float a few feet above the ground on beating wings, a smile splitting his triangle face from side to side, naked teeth dull against the bleaching sun. He won’t say anything at first, just flit about you as you stumble forward. You’ll feel his eyes upon you, measuring you, deciding if you’re worth his time. After a few moments he’ll speak.

“Wha ye gotten to be harr, lad?” he’ll droll out in a thick Scottish accent. He’ll hang in front of your face as he says it, trying to make you stop but dragging himself forward at the same pace you’re limping.

“What?” you’ll say. You’ll not have heard a person in days by this point, and his thick accent will have made him incomprehensible.

“Is there something you’d like?” he’ll say, taking care to enunciate each syllable. You’ll take in his words like the water that left you early that morning. It’ll make you pause for the first time in days. This, after all, is why you’ll be there, walking for days on end.

“A moment to think,” you’ll say.

He’ll smile wide. “Done.”

You’ll wince, lips cracking with the gesture. You should’ve known better, you’ll think to yourself, than to let a slip of the tongue cost you something so valuable. You’ll lick your mouth and taste your own blood before smiling at him. This time the pain will be worth it.

“A way home when we are finished here,” you’ll say, blinking and swaying with the effort of speech.

He’ll nod, still smiling. “Done,” he’ll say, opening and glancing at his pocket watch as he does so. “And your last?”

You’ll rack your brain for the most important of your two previous wishes, but you won’t be able to remember either of them. The combination of “reefer addiction” and the five days without sleep will have ruined your capacity for memory. All you’ll be able to think about is food and student loans. You’ll be like a new college graduate. After nearly a full minute standing still, feeling the blood pool in your muscles, you’ll stumble upon a phrase that sound right.

“The object of my greatest desire,” you’ll say, falling to your knees as you do so.

“Done.” he’ll say, eyes flaring for a moment in his skull and then fading into the background of your one bedroom apartment. It will be just as you left it months ago, tattered couch and expensive TV offsetting the beige carpet and white plaster walls. The only new thing will be a few orders of fish and chips. They’ll be packaged in white paper bags and tinfoil, clearly from a Scottish market in some small town somewhere where they still cook and sell the local catch on a daily basis.

You’ll feel a little annoyed until your stomach grumbles and hunger sets in. Then you’ll fill a glass of water, pound it down, fill another and sit down at the table. What follows will be the single most profound fish and chips based experience of your life. When you finish you’ll feel a little sick, but it will be a good sort of nausea, the kind that reminds you of the wonder you just held in your mouth. Two orders of fish and chips will remain.

You’ll stumble up from the table, wondering if they’ll taste as good once they’ve been reheated as you walk to the phone to call the record store and tell them that your vacation is going to take a day longer than you expected. You hope your manager will understand.

Congratulations on Your Delicious Encounter With Fish and Chips!

Congratulations on Attending a Taping of Ellen!

You’ve done a lot for your girlfriend. You’ve taken it up the ass from her without lube, picked her up really early and really late from the airport and you once ate a live rat to save her from a group of mafioso (singular mafiosa) intent on killing her over a trifling debt. There’s even this one time when you totally could’ve fucked her sister and kind of wanted to because her sister has a lot of the qualities you like in her and she never would’ve found out or anything because you’re both great at secrets and you didn’t because you love her that much. But even that Herculean feat will pale compared to what you do today as you endure the taping of an episode of Ellen by her side.

It will begin with an overweight woman in a pants suit emerges from stage right and begins gyrating her hips.

“How’s everybody doing?” she’ll ask, clapping her hands and shaking her ‘thang.’

“Okay!” you’ll shout back down at her. Some of the audience members will laugh when you say that and the overweight woman will smile.

“Well, let’s see if we can do better. Everyone on their feet!” She’ll increase the volume of her clapping and do her best to get the audience members up and at it, gesturing up with her hands. A surprisingly large number of them will assent easily, regular attendees of the Ellen show almost all. Only a few stalwarts and the infrequent newbie will hold out. You’ll be among them.

The overweight woman will notice you almost immediately, turning her Draconian, clap-happy attention to you with a slow, purposeful kind of intimidation normally utilized by South American interrogators. She’ll point at you, crook her finger and issue a single call. “You,” she’ll say, gesturing without breaking her clapping rhythm, “Dance.”

You’ll look to your girlfriend, who will already be rising to her feet, with pain in your eyes, but she won’t see it, already under this walrus of a woman’s thumb. “C’mon, honey,” she’ll say. “It’ll be fun.”

You’ll bite your lip as you rise and stand next to her, shaking your hips back and forth as the massive lesbian directing the crowd smiles and laughs at your clear pain.

“Yes!” she’ll cry. “Good!”

A single tear will issue from your eyes and you’ll do your best to imagine you're far, far away, thinking of the time you watched The Brave Little Toaster with your girlfriend and you cried while she held you and then jerked you off later to make you happier. You’ll try to take solace in that purest of memories but it won’t be enough. You’ll still know, somewhere in your mind, that you’re in a studio being directed by a horrible woman with horrible purpose to do something vile to your very nature as a human being.

Congratulations Attending a Taping of Ellen!

Congratulations on Getting Her Just What She Wanted!

“Honey!” you’ll call to her up the stairs. She’ll wander down tentatively, clearly hung over from the night before, her socked feet dragging a little over the hardwood. When she reaches the landing she’ll chew her lip and look around, confused.

“What?” she’ll say, her voice cracked and hoarse. You won’t notice.

“Look what I got!” you’ll shout at her, pulling on a velvet rope. The rope will in turn open a cage, the door of which will tear the sheet off the cage and reveal the contents.

The gila monsters will respond to the light almost immediately, slinking out of their cage towards the bowl full of raw meat that you’ll have left in the center of the living room. She’ll have her hand up to her mouth and she’ll be visibly shaking a little. You’ll step over and embrace her from behind

“Happy birthday,” you’ll whisper into her ear before you kiss her on the neck. She’ll turn around and kiss you on the mouth, her eyes now clear. Her arms will fly over your neck and you’ll know for the first time that you’ve done good on her.

Congratulations on Getting Her Just What She Wanted!

Congratulations on Living Your Dream for a Weekend!

She’ll rise smiling from your bed and grab the crumpled bills from your bedstand, stuffing them into her purse as she bounces to the bathroom. She’ll sway like an angel, the momentum of her hips forcing your brain to mirror their stagger. Her ass will be a perfect little flat thing, gorgeous and unselfconscious, and her smile as she catches you staring at it will be what you’d always dreamed of seeing over a pretty woman’s shoulder as she went to relieve herself after ruining you for all other comers.

You’ll lay in bed and stare up at the ceiling as she does her business, retracing the steps that brought you to this point. That unchecked bit of stock growth, the rush to sell your shares, the purchase of a gorgeous studio apartment in Los Angeles’ least douchey district. And then the follow-ups: the new investments, not so dramatic as to overtax your newfound savings, the new televisions and the Netflix subscription, the back rent payments to your mom. Your life became a life again. You stopped temping. You started enjoying yourself, reading again. And after that it was only a matter of time before your sex drive returned.

You were excited when you heard that Dollhouse was cancelled, not out of any ire towards the show but because you knew it would give you a chance to fix your newfound problem. With Dollhouse’s cancellation Eliza Dushku would be looking for looking for work. As Joss Whedon himself once wrote, any job would do.

Her agent knew what you wanted after less than a minute on the phone with you. “You want her to basically pretend she’s the character she played on Dollhouse, pretending she’s someone else sleeping with someone who hired her to pretend to be that person?” he’ll say as you struggle to explain the details of your fantasy.

“Which person?” you’ll ask, a little confused.

“The third one. The character’s character,” he’ll say. From the tone of his voice it’ll be clear he has this conversation frequently.

“Oh. Yeah. Totally,” you’ll stumble. He’ll quote you a five figure sum for one weekend and you’ll assent immediately. He’ll take down your information, facilitate the transfer and let you know the date that Ms. Dushku will be arriving.

She’ll have arrived at 9 AM sharp, a smile on her face, and she’ll have pushed you inside your house and mumbled “Let’s get started” into your ear as she groped your crotch.

But now she’ll be emerging from your bathroom, still smiling. You’ll wonder if she was crying in there, if she sometimes gets sad that the shows she works on all seem to fail so quickly and completely. You’ll wonder if she even thinks about it anymore, the chances she takes not working out. As she lays down in bed next to you and asks what’s on your mind you’ll decide that she’s okay, even if she isn’t necessarily happy.

Congratulations on Living Your Dream for a Weekend!

Congratulations on Not Sucking Dick for Meth!

You don’t have a whole lot of money and you love meth, so not sucking dick for meth is kind of a big deal for you. Unfortunately it’ll come at great cost. You’ll have to take it up the ass for meth. You’ll have trouble really saying which one is less pleasant. In the end you think it’ll have a lot to do with the guy and how violent he is. You’ll think about this for a little while before you take a huge hit of meth and trip balls for a few hours.

Congratulations on Not Sucking Dick for Meth!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Why I Bother With Consoles!

I’ve hit more technical issues with my computer lately, which has been a little frustrating. I’ve realized now that continuing to operate a power supply using a load that you know for a fact taxes it beyond safe measure is a bad idea after my third catastrophic system failure in under a year. Mostly I’m angry at ASUS’ tech support, which insisted that I perform all sorts of zany tests to be sure that my motherboard was the malfunctioning part, responsible douchebags that they are. As one of the rare members of the old guard of PC gamers this leaves me in an awkward position. I no longer have a machine capable of running titles like Modern Warfare II. Hell, my only operational PC can barely run Heroes of Newerth. The original Bioshock looks like a slideshow and even X-Com has some technical issues on it.

But since I’m a gamer this hasn’t stopped me from playing games. I’ve spent the last week leaving my house in order to play them, which is incredibly fucking weird. I’ve journeyed deep into a friend’s parent’s basement to play D&D, a sentence I’d avoided until this point in my life and hoped to never have to utter at the ripe old age of 25. I even went out into the harsh glare of the sun and played a sort of ball based game which involved kicking and running. I understand it’s called “kick the ball” and that it is often engaged in by a children aged six to forty, assuming those children aren’t social pariahs killing time in a town which is actually called Fish Hoek in South Africa. But the biggest sort of replacement gaming that I’ve been involved with lately has been on my consoles.

Non-gamers might not see much of a difference between the two activities. I’m sitting in the same chair, pissing away time doing very similar things. Hell, some of the games are even the same. But for some reason I have a very different experience sitting and playing console games. Part of it is the physical distance, sure. And the larger TV and the sound system that isn’t a pair of duct taped headphones. But a bigger part is the actual experience of playing the games.

The most obvious (and physical) part of that experience is how I input commands. While I can use an X-Box controller to input information on my PC I never ever do it. Instead I’m bound to the keyboard and mouse, my old, precise stalwarts. Doing anything else seems wrong. Console controls always feel slippery to me, forcing me to motion dramatically when I’d shift my reticule slightly in a PC game. A brute I’d normally headshot mid-charge is dealt with with a quick sidestep and a melee attack on my 360. I miss easy shots with sniper rifles in Mass Effect 2 and sweep assault rifle fire I’d meticulously squeeze off with a keyboard. I’m not a neophyte with a controller, and there are certain games I feel considerably more comfortable playing with a controller, but for many of the console exclusives I find myself roped into I feel uncomfortable with a controller in hand.

Of course I’d feel far, far worse trying to use a keyboard to leap from platform to platform or to cut through hordes of baddies using chain blades. And while I know I’m the only person who feels this way, Force Unleashed was a game entirely made by the X-Box’s controller for me. Sure the controls were clumsy, but that tricky double fisted obfuscation that the X-Box offered up made me feel just like a neophyte of the force, using my hands while I struggle to grasp objects with my mind. It’s all too easy to shit all over the console controller but there is a certain elegance to designing a game to suit its many buttons, and it makes me think of the good old days when I’d map joystick buttons for flight sims. It’s just that the controller makes for such a different experience, its physicality and manual nature changing the way I immerse myself in a game. And it’s much, much less prominent than the other major factor in how I experience console games.

Far more prominent is the manner in which consoles force me to focus on a single activity. Normally when I play games I’m hopping from action to action. I’ll speak with a friend while searching Wikipedia before I play a card in Spectromancer. I’ll window my HoN game and watch Funny or Die clips while the game loads. I’ll skip in and out of conversations with friends on Steam in the midst of a Modern Warfare firefight, cursing them out when I die. I’ll talk shit and alt tab to research bands while playing Sins of a Solar Empire with an open Skype channel. On my PC it takes an effort to be bored as I leap from task to task and thought to thought. There is always something to be doing.

Consoles, on the other hand, lock my attention down. If I play certain games I can do things like watch TV shows or movies while I’m in-game. As I’ve said before, I think this is the best way to play Mass Effect 2, a game which demands roughly the same amount of attention and intellect as most episodes of 24 in the first place, sprinkling violence and diplomacy in wherever it seems to build the best degree of dramatic tension without any real sense for story. But for the most part consoles want all of my attention. Brutal Legend, a game completely native to the console, demands constant attention, building up a nuanced and complicated world that I always want to be watching and experiencing. Halo: ODST crafts an entire city for me to play inside, filled with invading aliens and mysterious clues. It even has a neat little noir story about growing up and falling for a girl and all that crazy Phillip Marlowe stuff video games have so much trouble grasping.

This immersion can be a powerful thing when the virtual experience using it is nuanced and developed enough. Many of my sessions in Assassin’s Creed only ended when my controller stopped responding in my hand, its battery drained. Even Prince of Persia, for all the problems I had with it, did an excellent job of creating an evocative and immersive world that I actually wanted to spend time in. But when the world doesn’t hold up to full immersion the experience can be incredibly poor.

The best example I can imagine comes from the abysmal Alone in the Dark reboot. Amidst a host of almost unforgivable technological issues, Alone in the Dark, a game which ostensibly aspired to immersion, completely failed at making players feel like they were part of any sort of world at all. They had so much to build off of: a real city, a well established and beloved property and a set of mechanics which should have made players feel like they were set dead in the middle of the action. Instead it was a frustrating collection of fail states and glitches that reeked of a rushed release date and an underfunded team. And because I played it on a console I was completely immersed in every single shitty design decision and bug. An experience that might’ve been passable was instead miserable. In the grand scheme of things Alone in the Dark wasn’t really much worse than Overlord II, a game I played to completion and even enjoyed a little, but because I played it on a console Alone in the Dark remains a black eye for me as a gamer, even after I played it to completion.

This immersion certainly isn’t something the PC loses. I can just as easily remove all the distractions from my PC gaming experience, but it is something that consoles almost seem to force on players. In some cases this can be a powerful choice. ODST, for example, might not be nearly as effective if I could swap out music for the moody beats Bungie has already attached to the game. Brutal Legend also takes advantage of this, using sound and music to greater effect than any other game I’ve played on a console in recent memory. But it is something developers need to be more aware of when they’re designing games for consoles. Ideally developers would be doing their all to make every single game world they create a wholly functioning fictional entity unto itself, but that’s never going to happen as long as games like Mass Effect 2 and Modern Warfare 2 sell appallingly large numbers of copies. But when developers are trying to push consumers to purchase these games on consoles their ability to immerse me becomes much more important. The best console games, the games that sell consoles, are games that operate on this principle of immersion.

Factors like these aren’t necessarily what makes consoles significant for everyone. But they are the elements that consoles offer me as a gamer that are exclusive to them as a platform. And by working with their ability to strictly regulate my ability to input commands and focus on tasks while I’m playing instead of against these factors console games become a great deal more effective, at times, than even their PC counterparts.

Congratulations on Earning Your New Name!

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Congratulations on Not Figuring Out the Riddle!

After the man finishes you’ll bite your lip for a few minutes. You’ll chew it, gnaw it, and use another verb and indicates mastication on it. Then you’ll give your best answer.

“Pants?”

The scythe will remove your head in seconds and your last moments will consist of you staring at your parents as your mother hides her face. You’ll wonder if it’s in horror or in shame or if it’s just out of a wish that she’d chosen a somewhat less orthodox Bar Mitzvah venue.

Congratulations on Not Figuring Out the Riddle!

Congratulations on Your First Foursome!

Dave will pitch you the idea at work. You’ll tell him that you’re interested but that you have to run it by your wife. Your wife will be incredibly excited by it.

“Rain Man doesn’t accurately portray people with autism,” she’ll say while dicing carrots. “I’d love to be finger cuffed by you and another man.”

You’ll nod. “And I’ve always had a fantasy about receiving oral from two women at once,” you’ll say as you caramelize some onions. “Iran’s statements about the holocaust were so inappropriate.”

She’ll smile and kiss you on the mouth. “Can you even imagine what it would be like to be hung by a crane?” she’ll whisper into your ear while she gropes your crotch.

Then two of you will have some great “it’s okay” sex and you’ll tell Dave the next day that you’d love to stop by their house and have some really freaky sex.

The two of you will show up around seven on Thursday, dressed in casual clothes. Your wife will be wearing a spring dress, your favorite one, the one she had when you proposed to her. You’ll come inside and find Dave and his wife, already fairly drunk, waiting for you.

“Let’s do this,” Dave’s wife will say, kissing your wife on the mouth.

“I love your blouse,” your wife will say, returning Dave’s wife’s kisses. You’ll stand next to Dave and watch the two of them caress one another, becoming uncomfortably aroused.

“Are we supposed to do that too?” you’ll ask, pointing between the two of them. Dave will shrug.

“It’s your call. I’m fine just enjoying this,” he’ll say, handing you a beer.

You’ll nod and gulp some of it. “I think I need new pants,” you’ll say, prompting a snicker from Dave.

Things will escalate rapidly from there, with your wife performing oral on Dave’s wife and poles flying in and out of holes and someone getting burned on a radiator. About halfway through you and your wife will be eye to eye, you wedged inside of Dave’s wife, thrusting erratically into her, your wife with a strap-on, pinning Dave to his wife’s shoulder with a pained expression on his face.

“I’m so glad we’re doing this,” you’ll whisper into her ear, kissing the side of her neck as you lean in over Dave and his wife’s huddled bodies.

“I’m so glad we elected a black president,” your wife will say, returning your kiss. The two of you will break apart, locking eyes as you do so. In that instant you’ll know that marrying this woman was the right choice. You won’t think it then but when you look back, long after your son has blossomed into a hilariously awkward young man you’ll remember this moment, pinning a moaning married couple together as they writhe and arch their backs for you, as the point where your life truly changed.

Congratulations on Your First Foursome!

Congratulations on Eating All the Potato Pancakes!

You and your wife are miserable at dinner conversation. Just appallingly bad at it. So when you’re invited out it’s kind of a big deal, and it usually means the person likes you and doesn’t mind how socially inept the two of you are. And sometimes it’s just because they know you’re a bumbling asshat who’s going to misstep in some hilarious ways.

That’s why your friend Dave invited you to be here tonight at his “way past Passover” dinner, which combines drinking of weeknights with delicious Jewish food, two of your favorite things. See, Dave genuinely likes you and he loves it when you start talking about the laws government rape and their variance from state to state and the way it makes his guests uncomfortable. He especially likes it when you discuss the disciplinary hearings at the University of Arizona from years ago like they’re news and people get appalled like you’re the one that beat and raped a young woman and then counted on the administration to cover it up so you wouldn’t lose your scholarship. It’s almost as good as when your wife starts in with the holocaust jokes to “lighten things up.”

So while Dave and his wife counted on your almost Dadaist conversation to make their evening entertaining for them rather than just their mooching, assaholic guests, they didn’t count on the various other things you’d do as a result of being in front of a large crowd. Things like eating all their fucking potato pancakes.

You’ll hand Dave’s wife your coat and follow Dave into the kitchen, where he’ll hand you a beer and tell you to have some food. You’ll nod sullenly, looking about as if you expect to be set upon by unseen combatants at any moment, before settling down and eating a bite of potato pancake. The food will instantly relax you, its delicious savory flavor and crisp, delicate texture making you think of a better version of hashbrowns.

“Is there anything Jews aren’t good at?” you’ll mumble to yourself as you pick up an entire pancake and start munching on it. When you finish that one you’ll start another, then another, then another until you look around and there aren’t any latkes left. You’ll panic. While you know Dave loves your inability to be normal for five god damn minutes you’ll worry that he’ll be upset over you eating all of his food. But since you have no idea how to make more potato pancakes you’ll be at an impasse.

You’ll rip through his kitchen, leaving a trail of destruction in your wake as you desperately search for some appropriate substitute. You’ll consider throwing some potato chips into a pan but then you’ll remember that those probably don’t have real potatoes. Your perceived salvation will come in the form of a ten pound sack of russets, already open, underneath Dave’s sink.

You’ll pull the russets out one by one and place them inside of Dave’s oven, heating it to 450 degrees. Then you’ll pound your beer, along with two others, just for good measure, and go out and mingle. As you depart Dave will come into the kitchen to check on you, having grown tired of your wife’s tirade about Mumia Abu Jamal.

“How’s it going, bud?” he’ll ask, surveying the kitchen.

“Good,” you’ll say, your breath reeking of latke. He’ll wave his hand in front of his face.

“Jesus. You enjoyed the pancakes, eh?” he’ll say, wandering over to survey the kitchen. You’ll look around for something heavy to hit him with but there won’t be anything hand. You’ll consider stabbing him, but stabbing normally causes death, not short term memory loss, so you’ll decide against it.

After a moment he’ll turn to you. “Did you eat all of the latkes?” he’ll ask, incredulously.

“I can explain,” you’ll shout. Dave will look at you, perplexed. You’ll quickly slap together a tale of a gun wielding madman who forced you, upon pain of death, to devour every single delicious potato pancake in the kitchen. You’ll then show him your ingenious solution: non-pancaked potatoes, enough for all the party guests. About halfway through Dave will just burst out laughing uncontrollably. He’ll call his wife in and have you tell her the story too, removing the potatoes from the oven and shredding them into a bowl to prepare more pancakes. His wife, drunk beyond belief, won’t be able to stand up when you get to the part where the gunman told you about his childhood. She’ll fall to the floor, laughing, occasionally sipping her wine as she looks between you and her husband and shakes her head.

It will be at this moment that she decides she wants to have a foursome with you and your wife.

Congratulations on Eating All the Potato Pancakes!

Congratulatiions on Lactating!

It’s been a long hard haul. First they told you you couldn’t do it because you were a boy. Then they told you that even for a girl lactating at fifteen was unlikely unless teen pregnancy was involved. And then the activists became involved.

The legal battle that has consumed the last three months has been nothing short of epic. You’ve fought your parents for liberation, the state for the right to be who you want to be and doctors for the right to treat your body as you want to. But in the end you’ll accomplish your goal at three fifteen PM this Tuesday. Your bruises will have healed and you’ll be able to take your first dose of hormones to make your exquisitely crafted breasts lactate.

You’ll immediately collect the milk in a small bottle and suck it down, smacking your lips rudely as you do so. It’ll taste strange, and you’ll wonder if this is what drinking your own pee is like. You’ll wonder if your mom ever did this, if she ever tried her own milk before she left and took it away from you for good.

Congratulations on Lactating!

Congratulations on Convincing Everyone You Know That You're a Fucking Drunk!

When you show up at work with a freshly made canoe they’ll consider that the first “warning sign.” You’ll respond by shouting “Warning sign of what?! That I’m awesome?!” Then you’ll hurl the canoe through a plate glass window and taking a swig from a hip flask filled with Hawaiian punch. When you catch the horrified expressions on your co-workers’ faces you’ll laugh and pour a little bit of the liquid out shouting “It’s only juice!”

Twenty minutes later your boss will ask if you’d like to go home and clean yourself up, maybe just enjoy a day off. You love time off so you’ll leap to your feet, nodding furiously, and rush out the door, knocking a bunch of shit down while you do so. You’ll grab the canoe on the way out and prop it up in the lobby, attaching a scrawled post-it note to it that reads “Free Too Good Home.” Your boss will be watching you the whole time from his fourth story office, carefully noting the weaving pattern of your step and the erratic way you approach people on the street, knowing nothing of your Tourettes.

When you arrive home your roommates will all be there, clustered around the TV watching Planet Earth on your PS3. They’ll turn and look as you enter, then ignore you as you fade into the kitchen to make yourself a quick “day off drink.” When you come back in, sixteen ounce gin and tonic in hand, and ask them how they’re doing while referring to them as “fuckers” they’ll start to look uncomfortable.

“We’re great, Jack. How are you?”

You’ll shake your head. “Got sent home from work today because they thought I was drunk. Can you believe it?” You’ll laugh an exceptionally crazy laugh because you haven’t been taking your meds. “As if they’d even notice!”

Your roommates will look at one another uncomfortably. They also have trouble discerning when you’re drunk and when you’re just having a bad day, and since they’ve all spent the entirety of a weekday drunk at this point they’ll assume that everyone else’s odd behavior is a product of alcohol.

“You might be,” Kim, the roommate who constantly fakes genuine concern for other people, will say.

You’ll shake your head at her and flip her the bird while you pound your giant gin and tonic. “Would an alcoholic do that?” you’ll scream at them. They’ll nod at one another, having reached the consensus that that is exactly the sort of thing that an alcoholic would do, but you won’t notice. You’ll have flounced off to your room to get ready for book club later tonight.

When you arrive at book club you’ll be really stressed, which will make the Tourettes even worse. You’ll show up in disarray, clutching your juice flask and your copy of Slaughterhouse Five. You’ll be so stressed out that you’ll stand up before the group even gets down to brass tacks and start yowling about how profound you found Vonnegut’s prose and the hope you found in his bleak message, all the while sipping off your juice flask.

This will in turn lead to each of them going around the circle and discussing their alcoholism. When they get back to you it’ll be clear that your entire book group is actually a bunch of people who didn’t want to do AA and decided to cover up their drinking by discussing books that Oprah picked seemingly at random instead. You’ll stammer and back away from your seat.

“I really don’t drink that much,” you’ll say, gathering your things to go. But Mary, the hot member of your book club, will grab you and hold you in place, smoothing your unruly hair.

“Shhh,” she’ll say. “Let me drive you home.”

Since Mary is super hot you’ll let her do it even though you’ll be convinced that she’s a little bit wasted. When you get to your door you’ll squeeze her hand and ask her to keep you from drinking tonight. She’ll smile and say “No promises” before she drops the car into park and gets out with you, stumbling a little on her way to the door.

Congratulations on Convincing Everyone You Know That You’re a Fucking Drunk!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Cooperation and Story!

Co-op is a standard line item on game boxes nowadays with dramatically varying degrees of meaning. Some games, like Borderlands and Left4Dead, rely on it to define their gaming experiences while others, like Modern Warfare 2 and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, use it enhance existing experiences. Some, like Dawn of War II, introduce co-op options that change the way the game is played with seemingly minimal benefit and maximum increase to frustration. But for better or worse co-op is something of a standard feature in many of the latest generation of games. And while it provides for some interesting storytelling experiences when a game is devoted to it, what impact does it have on storytelling in games where it is not the focus, where it is but a footnote on the greater experience that is the game?

I recently began playing the Spec Ops missions with a friend of mine. I’d previously spent time with them alone, the achievement hound in me desperately seeking out stars like some sort of star-starved stellar fiend. I was like a way less cool Galacticus, engaging in the most rote activities of Modern Warfare 2 (a game already steeped in repetition) in order to gain more “kudos” from a computer. The addition of another person to the mix, however, changed the game entirely. Something I’d done that previously made me a little bit sad for just how limited it was was suddenly special. It could’ve just been Ops before.

The Special Ops functions aren’t all necessarily made for two people. Two of them are, and the addition of another body makes them much, much more pleasant, but most of them work just fine alone. In fact some of the sniper missions work even better with just one person. But adding another person added dynamism to a series of stagnant set pieces. It added narrative. Moving under the cover of an AC-130 gunner and sniping with a friend led to some unexpected and frankly enjoyable events that the robots of single player would never have provided. A great deal of that, however, comes from the fact that Special Ops completely removes any traces of narrative from its filthy bones before it even begins.

It is, in a way, a greatest hits collection of levels that exist within the larger game. It is not a new experience, not in the truest sense. Instead it is a way to interact with Call of Duty 6 in such a fashion that the incredibly shitty story missions are stripped down to why people actually enjoy them in the first place: the gun play. You can even bring a friend, something the Modern Warfare games are very purposeful about preventing during their single player campaigns. You can’t feel like an action hero when you’re right next to another action hero, after all. The way they attempt to tell a story, the way so many games try to tell stories, would be completely destroyed by co-op.

To see a much better example let’s take a look back at Halo. The first Halo game featured complete co-op, which made for a great drinking activity with a handful of friends and a terrible storytelling experience which ripped the tendons out of the already weak legs of Halo’s story. But, unlike Modern Warfare 2, Halo’s story could actually stand on its own. None would mistake it for its literary or filmic counterparts but it had a rich backstory and plenty of subtext. The problem is that adding another person can easily distract from that. When you’re managing situations and exploring alone the surroundings take on prime importance to gamers. When you’re doing so with other people suddenly the dynamic changes.

Suddenly it’s less about the ancient writings or the hidden passage where you’ll find signs of battles fought in the past and more about the resources the two of you are consuming, the enemies you have to fight and the approach you have to take if you want to survive. It’s less a matter of finding hidden doodads and more one of finding points where your friend can respawn after they’ve been splattered by a Banshee. It made for a fun experience at times, but I’d be hard pressed to recite the story from the original Halo. Halo 2, a game I experienced exclusively through co-op, didn’t even have a story as far as I’m concerned. I think there was some shit about Earth in there at the beginning but after that there was a psychic plant and another ring and some space pope with a death ray and I don’t fucking know what. The competent, if somewhat dry, storytelling the Halo series offered up was completely annihilated by its co-op portion, something the developers were at best vaguely aware of. They’ve since attempted to correct it in slight ways with games like Halo 3, ODST and, potentially, Reach, but co-op remains a crippling factor in a game which attempts to tell a story with a conventional narrative.

Games have different ways of solving this problem. Command and Conquer: Red Alert III, for example, sets the story entirely outside of the game, offering it up in delightful little cutscenes. It also does the player the service of building the missions around the concept of co-op, something I’d love to discuss at length but can’t, having voted with my wallet, as Julian Murdoch might say, and not having played RA 3 in favor of reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. It was lose-lose. Regardless, my point remains that in RA3, a game with co-op listed on the box as a selling point, concessions were made to make sure that the game would be okay with co-op, that the story and gameplay would not just make sense but would be fun. While I can’t speak to the success of their efforts the intent was certainly there, and I think that alone is admirable.

The Left4Dead series does a much better job, completely excising conventional story in favor of building an iterative engine around generating stories for players to experience on the fly. The Left4Dead series is built from the ground up to generate unique play experiences while passing through the same levels time and time again, and it acknowledges and even relies upon its players to make as many mistakes as possible during the game’s play in order to make it more interesting. It offers up neat little statements when someone dies or falls down or need’s special help. When everything goes right, Left4Dead is quiet. When things go wrong the story unfolds. You aren’t just people walking down the street, you’re survivors desperate escaping an endless and unique siege.

These games are where co-op truly finds its legs. Not just because they don’t attempt to tell a formalized story. If that was the case Borderlands could’ve been a success instead of an ambitious (and entirely worthwhile) narrative flop. Rather because they rely on the players to make the story, providing them with tools instead of scripts, they allow for a degree of freedom normally reserved for the creators of games. Since play experiences are intended to be buried under additional iterations Left4Dead is built to generate the core instances of storytelling in games, instances of “that time” that most games rely on you only seeing once. By being unafraid of making the game bug out Left4Dead gladly allows you to fall off the side of that building or flee, leaving your friends to the zombie horde as you leap into the back of the plane and wildly unload your M-16 into the encroaching horde. They grasp the core of what games really have to offer as a narrative format and distill it into something you can enjoy with a friend.

That moment of realization, that constant pursuit and occasionally attainment of cool, is something that single player games have to accomplish through a different set of merits by their very nature. They can’t rely on you and your friend turning to one another and saying “fuck yes!” when you kill the tank. They have to make Sarah Lyons inspect her remaining troops, nod solemnly and trudge inside of the Galaxy Radio building. These scripted experiences which exist in order to drive narrative run contrary to what makes co-op great by their very nature. And understanding this duality of game, the fact that what is profound alone is silly when heard in a group, and that an experience is only as good as the characters you share it with, is key to understanding just how to tell a story in games. And until more games start to get this basic concept they’ll continue to miss out on the storytelling potential that co-op game play can offer to traditionally single player games. And that’s kind of a shame.

Congratulations on Visiting Bath Like a Giant Homo!

When you get off the plane at Heathrow you’ll be almost too excited for words.

“Pardon, sirrah!” you’ll ask a towering black man smoking outside the airport exit. “Whence could I find a ticket for yonder lorry to the steppes of Bath?”

The man will lazily swat his hand at you. “Fuck off,” he’ll say, and walk away. Undaunted you’ll head over to the information desk and put your fruity ass speech to good use. The young woman there will roll her eyes and direct you to another kiosk nearby which sells bus tickets. This kiosk will, in turn, direct you to a bus where you can board with your ticket where you’ll sit in the back of the bus and make a tremendous douche of yourself to everyone who has the misfortune to speak with you.

After what seems like an eternity for everyone else on the bus you’ll arrive in the famed town of Bath.

“Cor blimey!” you’ll exclaim to yourself as an elderly man walks by, looking at you like he wants to kick your ass.

You’ll take a glance at the postcard she sent and scurry off to the hotel she mentioned, hoping to catch her there. Sure enough she’ll be sitting by the pool reading while her father swims. Her dad won’t notice you come up so there won’t be any commotion.

“Hail and well met, my love!” you’ll exclaim.

“Oh shit,” she’ll say, flipping her book over. “How did you find me?”

“Love finds a way!” you’ll exclaim at her, spitting on her a little while you talk.

“Great,” she’ll say, hunching forward so that her breasts hang firmly in front of her in a way that makes you uncomfortable.

“Cover thyself, madam.” You’ll throw a towel on her, knocking her book into some water puddled by the edge of the pool. Sighing, she’ll bend to pick it up.

“I’ve got to go back to my room,” she’ll say, striding off from the pool.

“I’ll wait for you!” you’ll shout after her, but it’ll be hard to see if she notices.

Congratulations on Visiting Bath Like a Giant Homo!

Congratulations on Your Amazing Radio Program!

You run the world’s most amazing radio program. It’s a magical adventure with a talking eagle and a marmoset that tells awful jokes and an unemployed dragon who mostly just heckles people who call you. It would actually be a much better television program (like a morning talk show or something) but you’re really really ugly and not that funny so people don’t generally want to see you when you’re speaking.

Your ratings are okay and you never want for calls. Your advertisers actually prize your time, mostly because its a great way to get to a lot of easily influence twenty somethings who are either already on drugs or are excited to be on more drugs. You’d have the perfect gig if it wasn’t for the evil spirit trapped inside a monkey’s body who does your intro and outro.

Zanzabar has been key in your successes ever since he entered your life when you were a young body. He had just murdered your father, a successful priest, when you picked up the holy tome your father had been chanting over and said the final incantation and locked Zanzabar away for all eternity. It was a pretty big get for you as a kid and Zanzabar, despite his rage, was forced to do your bidding. He mostly gave you investment tips and helped you make scads and scads of money while doing very little. He also gave you the crazed, irrational confidence which is the only requirement for having your own radio show.

Zanzabar has been getting a little fresh on air as the spells binding him weaken with age. It’s partially your fault. Your fame will have kept you from renewing the bonds that tie him to his simian from with your own life essence, simply because of time constraints. Unfortunately the FCC won’t accept “my demon monkey was acting up” as an excuse when he tells everyone in the tri-state area fuckers and tells them to lick pus oozing cunts with their shriveled dick tongues until they all burn in a fire with their whore mothers. The studio will be fined nearly into oblivion and your show will be instantaneously dropped.

You’ll be promptly removed from the studio by some sort of ogre or ogre like creature and be left sitting on a corner with your menagerie of mythical beasts, pondering what to do next.

“Maybe a book?” the marmoset will say. He’ll have been trying to get you to write a book for years now. The eagle will shake his stately head.

“I doubt that would work. Especially after what Zanzi just pulled.”

The eagle is totally aware of Zanzabar’s power, since he’s your best friend and knows all your secrets, but he isn’t afraid of him because he’s actually already dead and therefore beyond Zanzabar’s reach.

“FOOLS! I WILL FIX THIS!” Zanzabar will cry, hopping up and down on your shoulders in a rage. The dragon will rise up and tromp over to him, clearly annoyed.

“This isn’t something you can fix with a stock tip or a murder, Zanzi. You just-“

The dragon will be cut short when a man in a suit approaches you.

“I’m from Fox,” he’ll say. “We heard your monkey swear on the radio and we think you’d be perfect for daytime television. Want a show?”

You’ll turn and nod at your friends, then jump in the air.

“Golly yes!”

“Good to hear, faggot,” he’ll reply, pulling a contract out of his shirt. You’ll sign it and then turn and high five your friends. This is the moment you’ll recall years from now when your fame has long since faded and you’ve passed from glory into rehab.

Congratulations on Your Amazing Radio Program!

Congratulations on Totally Blowing It!

This evening, after doing several dozen shots and purchasing a bag of “pork rinds” from a local bodega you’ll decide, as you’re about to walk out the door, to purchase several scratch tickets. You’ll start scratching them without paying for them, over the Hindu store proprietor’s protests, until you win ten dollars. Then you’ll just slide him the card and ask him for five more tickets. It will go this way for thirty minutes until you finally lose a set of tickets, making yourself look incredibly foolish and missing out on the twenty thousand dollar ticket that was next up on the roll because you were too shitty at gambling to know any better.

Congratulations on Totally Blowing It! Loser!

Congratulations on Being Flush With Rage!

When he brakes the car too hard water will splash into your face from your water bottle and get into your nose and eyes and make you feel angry and ridiculous and stupid and clumsy and a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t like feeling. You’ll turn to him full of fury and won’t say anything. You’ll just sit there and look at him like you could burn him alive with your eyes.

He’ll do his best not to notice, but everyone walking by will be. It won’t be because your rage is particularly profound or interesting. It won’t even be because you’re that angry. It’ll be because you are radiantly and profoundly beautiful while angry.

Your cheeks will puff up and blush cherry, your eyes suddenly vibrantly attentive and slitted to accentuate your rage. Your lips will puff out in a facsimile of a frown which is actually more a pout than anything else and your fold your arms so they push your breasts up for all the world to admire.

It’ll be good that he doesn’t turn and look, because a driver distracted by your beauty at this moment might well end up in an accident. So the relationship defense mechanism that forces his eyes forward and his mouth closed for the next three blocks will do more than just save your relationship. It’ll save your lives.

And you get that look all the time. This was just a chance for everyone to enjoy it.

Congratulations on Being Flush With Rage!

Congratulations on Doing the Math!

You’ll be doing it in your office on a blackboard while wearing a lab coat. You’ll be in the middle of a particularly difficult equation trying to remember just what FOIL stands for when your implausibly attractive assistant bursts in to give you the bad news.

“Telescopes have spotted an asteroid,” she’ll say, her heaving bosom barely contained by the combined efforts of her tank-top and her lab coat. She’ll be leaning forward when she says it, searching for something among the scattered papers of your desk, which will make doing math really really hard.

“Collision course?” you’ll say, your social dysfunction and assistant’s breasts combining to remove most of your capacity for language in the face of certain crisis. She’ll nod tersely in response and suddenly you’ll be able to do math again. “Go to Starbucks,” you’ll shout at your assistant, tossing a crumpled five at her. She’ll pick it up off the floor with a look of shock on her face and then run out of your office to smell the dollar bill and ram it into her underpants because she’s super aroused when men in positions of authority mistreat her.

With your assistant gone you’ll remember how to FOIL and get past the tough part of the asteroid destroying equation you’ll be working on. You’ll make all kinds of crazy numbers and symbols and shit using chalk and at one point you’ll have the stick of chalk in your mouth and your assistant will walk in with coffee and put it on your desk and just sit and watch you for a while. She’ll strongly consider touching herself while she watches you do math but she’ll be worried that it would distract you so she’ll contain herself just barely and just stare at your back while you scribble on the board.

After almost an hour of her watching you while you occasionally sip coffee and talk under your breath like Jeff Goldblum you’ll have finished most of the equations, but you’ll find yourself stuck on an equation which should be incredibly easy. You’ll be so stressed and horny that you won’t be able to do it at all, though.

Lucky for you your assistant will want to prove herself to you so she’ll step up to the board and solve the shit out of that equation, coming up with the exact angle of approach needed for the missile filled with astronauts to succeed at its implausible mission. You’ll also discover, through the equation, that the two of you need to be on that missile for the mission to succeed.

“We might not make it back,” you’ll tell your assistant gruffly, and she’ll nod in response before unzipping your pants and fellating you for between seven and twelve minutes. After that you’ll sweep all your papers off your desk and have rough, cathartic sex on it for twenty-three minutes before showering together and calling the pentagon to let them know you have a plan.

Congratulations on Doing the Math!

Congratulations on Finishing Your Script!

After months of other’s nay-saying and nagging, three relationships, hundreds of dollars of coffee, cocaine and whiskey, you’ll do it this evening. You’ll finish the first draft of your script about what it really means to be an American Apparel model. It will consist almost entirely of lesbian sex scenes and depictions of drug use, although there will be one really touching scene where lesbians have sex together after one of them has been crying for a while and the weeping lesbian will end up feeling way better as a result.

It will be picked up by Universal and released this summer.

Congratulations on Finishing Your Script!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: I Wasn't Aware of That!

As a young man I used to play a lot of flight sims. I would spend hours and hours memorizing keystrokes and craft details in Janes before settling in for a four hour session of escorting C-130s to supply drops and rationing my missiles, praying that my Pheonixes would connect with incoming MIGs. When games like X-Wing and Wing Commander entered my sphere of awareness I was blown away. Flight sims were cool, sure, but space sims? The coolest.

Why fly a boring old F-14 Tomcat when I could hop in my A-Wing and dogfight in a way cooler interceptor? What was the point in spending thirty minutes dogging one MIG so I could get a missile lock in cloud cover when I could blast through streams of TIE fighters and drop the shields on an Imperial Star Destroyer so that my B-Wing allies could drop torpedoes on it. This is to say nothing of the excitement of running the Death Star’s trench or weaving in and out of the gun fire of a Kilrathi corvette’s batteries while grooving to the voice of Mark Hamill. By the time Descent: Freespace came out I was a space sim vet. If it flew in vacuum I knew how to handle it. I could eyeball my radar while dog fighting and rebalancing my power configurations even though I couldn’t drive or talk to girls and damned if I wasn’t the last best hope for the universe when the Shivans rolled around. I knew which way was up, where my carrier was, where the nearest jump node was, the bearing of those incoming fighters and just where that missile making alarms go off all over my cockpit was coming from. I was constantly aware, twitching and sputtering, a paranoid little pilot too young for caffeine.

This isn’t an essay about the death of the space sim genre. There are better essays by people much better at researching topics like that than myself, and a quick google search will no doubt turn up a gamut of them. Likewise this isn’t an in memoriam of a storied and awesome genre that used to captivate and capture my attention as a gamer and a person. This is an essay about the skills those games bred, skills that come in handy in more recent games but have, of late, become less and less of a focus and, as gamers become lazier, less and less of a perceived ability. This is an essay about situational awareness.

Situational awareness is something most people use in their daily life. They use it when driving, when reading, when looking for objects in the super market. Games rely heavily upon it, your ability to monitor changing situations based on visual or aural cues. Some games, like Left4Dead, are keenly aware of its impact and attempt to simulate certain elements of the way our actual situational awareness functions. Real time strategy games make situational awareness key by making it something of a resource. The way you focus your attention in most real time strategy games has a tremendous impact on the way the game plays, and decisions about where and how you direct your attention are every bit as important in a game of Starcraft as how you choose to spend your Vespene gas.

But no genre of games has ever made situational as important, as key to your success as a player, as flight and space sims. In sims you would live or die by your situational awareness. An inexperienced pilot in a Janes game could easily stall their engine by attempting to ascend at too great an angle mid dogfight or crash their plane into the sea because they hadn’t paid attention to their altimeter, instead relying on the primitive horizon for guidance. And in the X-Wing series it was all too easy to lose track of the greater battle in combat and allow a critical objective to fall to enemies or be overwhelmed by an approaching wave. Freespace was especially unforgiving in this respect, with space rendered with painful accuracy and your insignificance as a pilot reinforced by the sheer scale of both the capital ships engaging in battle by your side and the number of enemies attacking you.

These titles, which defined a generation of gamers the same way adventure games and JRPGs did, instilled skills in the gamers who came into the medium through them. Just the way that Counter-Strike players assess resources at the drop of a pin and exercise caution and boldness in equal turn in order to wage psychological warfare against their enemies flight sim gamers came to regard situational awareness as a sort of holy grail, a reason to take speed and pound coffee aside from the wonderful impact of drug product on our minds.

Some of us still carry the scars of this situational awareness training to this day. Left4Dead, with its aforementioned shifting perceptions and insistence on constant vigilance, is as close as mainstream gaming comes to the old school reinforcement of these principles that flight sims insisted on. And the new generation’s lack thereof shows in contemporary game development. The radar of Halo and Modern Warfare is a holdover of these flight sims, neutered to a single panel and reduced in importance by a combination of visuals intended to draw the eye and hacks in equal turn. Haze, a game few people probably remember at this point despite its hype, went so far as to make situational awareness a game mechanic and to control it through simulated drug use. Portal is built around reshaping the situational awareness of player so that they examine areas they normally ignore. So both developers and players clearly recognize the importance of situational awareness in games.

But its no longer considered the personal responsibility it once was. In a Heroes of Newerth game it is considered the most egregious of offenses to fail to call a missing hero from one’s lane, despite the prominent mini-map which displays such information. Being shot from behind in Call of Duty warrants cries of bullshit, and melee attack to the back of the head in Halo receive much the same treatment, despite the fact that, when you come down to it, it’s mostly the fault of the person who isn’t paying attention. In a way the death of flight sims has had the strange corollary effect of reducing the importance of punishing players for not paying attention. I could never have watched movies while playing games previous, but with current generation titles I have little trouble. Mass Effect 2 takes it a little farther, making their game a little bit boring if I don’t pop a DVD into my laptop while I play it.

And in the end this bleeds into the way games tell stories. Half-Life wanted us to pay attention to minutia so that they could tell their stories. Wing Commander and X-Wing both insisted on it. Myth required this attention to get the “most complete” picture of the story. Old games, the best of them, relied on players keenly paying attention in order to tell their stories. As a result their stories were difficult things, things that baffled the old and slow (Robert Ebert) and the young and dense alike. They begged a keen mind, one willing to insert and infer text to find profound things, one willing to deal with punishing conditions in order to gain something from it.

Sims were punishingly hard, and the attempts at resurrecting them show that they simply cannot co-exist with the current gaming trend of avoiding difficult games. Demon’s Souls is easily the “hardest” game published in recent memory which actually sold well, and this fact is telling. Demon’s Soul caters to an old school audience, an RPG audience already willing to commit massive amounts of time and effort to games. The fact that more mainstream genres have largely shied away from this tradition is hardly surprising. But it is a bit sad when we see dull, brainless games which force story upon their audience rather than allow them to make it like Heavy Rain hailed as the new means of telling a story in games. These games, which actually insist that situational awareness is not importance, are a direct effect of the medium’s attempt to break into the mainstream, and they’re not particularly good for games.

They’re not particularly good for games not because they divert sales from better, smarter games (The Path, for example, forces you to play a murderer without ever explicitly telling you you are doing so, and is all the better for it) but because they promote schlock and draw attention away from these smart little games at a time when they need it most. Games are budding as a medium, and the attention they are receiving as they become an acceptable means of entertainment is defining them. Things like Heavy Rain, which show none of the medium’s strength and instead show the power of a branching DVD menu, aren’t the items that show the power games have to tell immersive and engaging stories. And its because they fail to grasp the fundamental idea that games require your full attention in order to be effective, and that this is less a matter of showing you something interesting and more one of asking you to find something interesting, something flight sims grasped almost instinctively over a decade ago.

Congratulations on Taking That Magical Hobo's Advice!

He’ll be rummaging in some dumpsters outside of your stock exchange, which is a socially acceptable means of getting what people refer to as a “power lunch” in this economy, when you first meet him. You’ll see him closing in on a hot dog and you’ll have a roll of quarters ready in your hand so that you can sock him one good and claim your reward, but when he sees your eyes and the violence in them he’ll just smile a toothless grin and say “No worries, son. I’m only here for the puddin’.”

You’ll laugh out loud because that’s what you do in awkward social situations and he’ll laugh back even harder.

“You’se a good kid. I’ll give ya that there German cock for some o’ them quaties.” You’ll look at him skeptically. Negotiation, after all, is the bastion of the weak, negotiation with the homeless doubly so. He’ll spot your hesitation and, seeing an opening, present a counteroffer. “Give you some advice, too. A real pager turn.”

His folksie nonsense will sound about right to you and you’ll acquiesce, tossing him the roll of quarters. He’ll nod, pull one off the roll and bite it with his gums as if to test the nickel. You’ll wince, thinking of the places that quarter has been.

He’ll smile his big toothless grin at you and say, in his trademark folksie fashion, “Buy you’m some o’ them there bio techies, one o’ the ones in genetic member nearing. It’ll work you out real good.”

You’ll smile a big white toothed grin and say “Thank you, magical homeless man.” Then he’ll nod in response and his huge black friend will grab you from behind and run you into the ally. Then the magical homeless man will punch you in the face repeatedly with the quarters. He’ll be surprisingly strong and you’ll lose consciousness quickly.

The next two hours will consist of scattered bouts of agony as you come to and find yourself being raped in turn by the homeless man and his large African companion. When the two finally finish and abandon your prone body to the elements you’ll rest, gather your strength, devour the hot dog they discard on your body and drag yourself back into the stock market. Once inside you’ll buy around fifty thousand dollars of stock in a genetic engineering firm. In the hour and a half before closing the stock will skyrocket due to a late day bidding war between two larger firms interested in buying them out. The money you’ll make in that short time will more than cover your medical bills, and the money to come will one day still your ire and keep you from seeking revenging on that magical, advice giving, rape happy hobo who had a key part in forming the cornerstone of the investment empire that will become a major part of your life.

Congratulations on Taking That Magical Hobo’s Advice!

Congratulations on Decapitating the Owner of a Tim Horton's!

Your challenge will echo across the parking lot.

“There can be only one!”

He’ll turn, drawing his long sword and turning to fight you.

“KORGAN!” he’ll shout. You’ll snicker.

“Did you just say Korgan?”

His blade will waver as he reconsiders his words. He’ll pause for a while.

“I meant Kurg-“ he’ll begin, but you’ll already be upon him, your blade wedged in his neck. He’ll struggle to grab it for a moment before you wrench it free, ripping his skull from his spinal column and sending it spinning. Then lightning will start to shoot out of his corpse like its going out of style. You’ll spread your arms and shout.

“I KNOW EVERYTHING!”

In an instant you’ll consume his essence, all that he ever was and ever would be, including ownership of a Tim Horton’s just outside of Charlotte. It’ll bring in a little more income and you’ll be able to eat all the shitty food you want whenever you’re in the greater metro area.

Congratulations on Decapitating the Owner of a Tim Horton’s!

Congratulations on Reasoning With Your Irrational Roomie!

“THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!”

The words will emerge like a hiss from her carapace as she points her front-most claw at you. You’ll sigh and roll towards her from your perch on the couch. You’ll have been there for three days at this point, ever since your doctor told you not to leave the house until he could confirm that you didn’t have mono. Those kids at the rec center will have been making do without you and every day away from them will be breaking your heart. It’ll show on your face.

“What’s up, Sherry?” you’ll mumble, the words barely emerging over the rustle of your stubble. Sherry will be unsympathetic, her plates clicking together as she closes on you, rising up to her full height. She’ll let loose a long, whining hiss before she begins again, rhythmically running her digits along your prone form, probing for the best place to strike, should it come to that.

“ITEMS CLEARLY DESIGNATED AS MY PROPERTY HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM THE REFRIGERATOR. ICED CREAMS HAVE BEEN ACQUIRED WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION.”

You’ll sigh and sit up, letting the blanket slide off you a little.

“Are you sure you didn’t eat them while you were drunk?”

Sherry will rear up and roar at you, the hot, wet spittle of her breath splattering you.

“WE ARE CERTAIN. YOU INSULT US WITH SUCH PALTRY QUESTIONS. CONFESS AND YOUR PUNISHMENT WILL COME SWIFTLY.”

Sherry’s venom injectors will appear over each of her shoulders, ready to strike down if you make a single wrong move. She’ll have been this way ever since Big Brothers/Big Sisters let her go three months ago, and its been rough but she’s reliable with the rent and her name is still on the lease so you’ve just had to deal with it. You’ll run your hands through your unwashed hair, then look at the grease that comes off on them. Clucking your tongue at what you’ve become you’ll look her in one of her sets of eyes and try not to smile.

“Sorry, Sherry. I don’t remember doing that, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll pick up some more ice cream this afternoon at the store. Okay?”

She’ll click her feelers against the hardwood floor as she considers your offer. After what seems like an eternity she’ll shift from in front of the television and let you get back to watching old episodes of 30 Rock.

“ACCEPTABLE,” she’ll say, slithering off the front door. A few minutes later the doorbell will ring and Sherry will answer it.

“Pizza delivery for -“ the young Brazilian man will begin, but he’ll be cut off mid sentence as Sherry strikes with her envenomed protuberances and drags him screaming back into her room where she will feast on him later. You’ll bite your tongue and keep from muttering a snarky comment which, no doubt, would’ve been picked up by her keen senses and made the whole situation even worse.

Congratulations on Reasoning With Your Irrational Roomie!