Congratulations Frostbite Survivor!

Some people get frostbite on their toes or their fingers, valuable digits crucial in getting off most contemporary sexual partners. Compared to you those people are getting off incredibly, incredibly easy. That’s an amazing double entendre, and you’re about to see why. See, you have a unique fetish – a desire to fuck a woman buried completely inside of a snow drift until you reach simultaneous orgasm.

Somehow, impossibly (you’re a state senator) you’ll have managed to find a willing partner, a partner who is so GGG that she won’t bat an eyelash at risking her health so that you can get your rocks off inside her through a shell of snow during a blizzard (she’ll have severe daddy issues, which will make the whole thing awesome). As you thrust away you’ll be so occupied in your own motion, the powerful feeling of fulfillment as you finally get what you’ve wanted for so long, that you’ll lose track of your partner.

First you’ll lose track of her movements against you, muffled already by the snow. Eventually they’ll seem like part of your own motions, divine in their synchronicity. Then her cries will vanish from your mind, because, due to the aforementioned daddy issues, she’ll be really quiet in bed. It won’t be until you reach your moment of ecstasy and don’t hear her shriek opposition to the fact that you just came inside her that you’ll realize something is very very wrong.

You’ll reach inside of the snowman and pull out her body, bleached white by the cold and fastened firmly to your now frigid penis. Panicking, you’ll tumble back into a snowdrift with a young woman on top of you.

You’ll crawl, dragging the two of you slowly along the ground to your pants, where you’ll dial 9-1-1. An emergency response team will be there in seconds. They’ll leap out of their ambulance, assess the situation and pull you and the young woman whose name you’ll just now be realizing you never learned into the back of their truck with a series of knowing glances.

They’ll rush you to the hospital, and you’ll become unfastened from your now obviously dead partner in the process. But the feeling won’t return to your pinkies or almost all of the shaft of your penis. It’ll make you a little worried, especially since this is election year and sexual deviants who don’t have pinkies don’t traditionally get re-elected to public office year after year.

Eventually you’ll start crashing, and they’ll remove the penis. You’ll learn that it had already died and if it stayed attached it would just become infected and eventually ruin the rest of your body. So while you’ll be discharged from the hospital by a smiling nurse with no idea that you just ruined your political career and lost the vast majority of your penis a few days later and life will still be pretty grim we just want to say Congratulations Frostbite Survivor!

Congratulations Stabwound Kid!

Today you’re the Stabwound Kid. It’s not that you’re particularly good with a knife, or that you did anything too embarrassing that people gave you the nickname for, like slipping and falling on a knife. You just asked people to call you that and they accommodated you.

It’s a bit of clever branding that’ll come in handy during a bank robbery today when a pair of guards say “He’s just got a knife! We’re safe here!” and point at you. Then you’ll pull out a revolver and shoot them both in the chest.

“Tell ‘em all the Stabwound Kid was here! Tell it to ‘em loud!” you’ll shout as you menace the bank staff with a pistol, watching carefully as they pack your new money into a burlap sack. Then you’ll nod at them as you leave because manners are important, and anyone who thinks they’re not is a real asshole.

Congratulations Stabwound Kid!

Congratulations Cop Out Kid!

“Hey, lend me a dollar!” the madman will cry at you as you walk by, but you won’t pay him no heed. That one won’t even need a cop out, it’ll just be forgone. Who’d ask the cop out kid for a dollar, after all? No one but a crazy old fool. Thinking this will, in fact, constitute a cop out for not giving him a cop out, but you won’t realize this. You’ll just keep on walking right into your mom and pops place.

“I need a kidney!” you’re dad will say to you. He’ll have like a week left to live without one, and you’ll have two perfectly good ones, one of which could potentially save his life. But you’ll just smile and tell him, “I’ve grown rather attached to these.” He’ll look like he wants to hit you, but he won’t. He’ll bite his lip and tell you to get the fuck out of his house, which you will.

Outside your sister will be waiting with a lit cigarette. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” she’ll mumble at you. “Been busy,” you’ll lie, thinking all the while about your ever-growing list of X-Box achievements and your carefully arranged collection of antique Russian figurines. She’ll give you the finger and you’ll get back into your car under the homeless man’s watchful eye.

He’ll be muttering curses at you all the while, staring daggers as you get ready to take your white privilege ass away from your sad ass daddy’s house to a strip club, where you’ll refuse to tip women who have had it dealt to them so rough by life that they have to let assholes like you stare at them naked just so they can make ends meet. You’ll have a cop out all ready for that one too (hand cramp) but you’ll never get a chance to use it.

You won’t get a chance to use it because your car will refuse to start. You’ll have avoided putting gas into it for far too long, and it’ll be bone dry. You’ll wait for the car to offer you a cop out, one to rival your lamest, but it won’t say anything. It’ll just sit there silently, mocking you with its steady refusal to engage in your only real trait – being a huge douche.

Congratulations Cop Out Kid!

Congratulations on Having the World's Worst Out of Body Experience!

Today you’re going to have an out of body experience where it just feels like you’re taking a nap completely disconnected from the state of your body at present. So basically it’ll just feel like you’re taking a nap. You’ll ask the bible church that gave it to you for your money back, but they’ll have a strict no refunds policy. When you try to press the issue you’ll be chased from their tent by a large man with a bat filled with hammered nails, all the way back to your job at Blockbuster video.

Congratulations on Having the World’s Worst Out of Body Experience!

Congratulations Thousands of Monkeys!

This one is actually directed to the thousands of monkeys who will eat you tomorrow after you topple into their enclosure, having spent the last week at the zoo harassing them with your ample food and freedom ceaselessly. They’ll tear you limb from limb and swallow your flesh chunks at a time, hooking at one another and masturbating the whole time. You’d be upset about it all, but you’ll be dead so you won’t really get a say.

We’d like to talk to the monkeys now.

Hey, monkeys. Thanks for killing that asshole.

Congratulations Thousands of Monkeys!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Music We Heard and the Music We Didn't Hear!

Music is a funny thing in games. It’s critical in games, all games, not just music games. And outside of music games it’s a tough balance to strike. The wrong music can ruin a game. Too mild and it’ll be completely missed, too heavy and it can overwhelm the surrounding action. Striking the right balance can be difficult, and when it happens it’s a rare and beautiful thing.

This year was particularly bad for overwhelming music. One of the biggest titles (certainly the biggest in terms of sales) Call of Duty: Black Ops, had arguably the shittiest music of any major title last year. Overbearing, rote, it’s bad at its best and, at its worst, it makes it difficult to even hear what’s going on. In a game punctuated by gunshots Call of Duty’s music somehow rises above, blacking out dialogue and removing audio cues that are usually critically to hearing enemy approaches. It’s emblematic of the manner in which Treyarch ignored all the fundamentals of design in creating their single player game, and it adds one more piece of shit on the flaming heap that was Black Ops single player.

Of course, if Treyarch embodies the potent, overwhelming shittiness of many mainstream scoring choices as far as going for bigger rather than better when you’re trying to sell a lot of units there are some great examples on the other end of the spectrum that exemplify just how to make a game with music that’s too neutral. Eufloria, a game that many people would cry havok about despite its incredibly relaxed attitude, is the perfect example.

Eufloria is a game where not a whole lot happens. Seedlings grow, they spread, you structure their growth. It’s a chill game, a game where you make tiny changes bit by bit until you dominate a map. As an example of flow based gameplay, where fundamentally simple systems with layered complexities unfold through play, Eufloria is great. As an example of an engaging, interesting game it fails pretty hard, however. It’s kind of like a thesis that someone made for a class – intellectually well crafted and praise worthy, but a bit of a dull slog if you’re not interested in investing in the theoretical concepts it explores. I spend most of my time playing with a window open on Netflix or a movie running. I actually watched Patton while steamrolling levels in Eufloria, puzzling over just what the game underneath its exploration of concept was and why anyone who doesn’t love theory would play it.

A big part of what makes Eufloria so boring and banal to play is the music. Conceptually simple games like Zen Bound can work wonders for making their games immersive experiences by making clever use of atmospheric music that draws players in and makes the game a cathartic experience rather than a conventional problem solving endeavor. But Eufloria’s music is, at best, haunting and, at worst, completely divorce from its gameplay. If Eufloria was a little less concerned with having players take their time and wait between every action, if it was less puzzling and easier to control in time sensitive situations, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But in a game with such big ideas in such a small package, music is a huge part of what can make or break an experience, and in Eufloria’s case it could’ve been something great if not for its simpering tones. It could’ve been an experience.

It’s something Puzzle Agent did as well. Puzzle Agent was a passable, in a way, if you didn’t mind the total lack of hints and its failure as an object of humor. But like Eufloria it had this bargain bin haunting music cutting through it. It’s not as flagrant or intrusive as the shitty music in, let’s say, a Call of Duty, but it’s still something that draws me out of a game, a game that’s supposed to be about immersing myself in a series of puzzles. Instead of coaxing me towards solutions it just makes me want to grab a cup of tea and take a break. It counteracts any sort of catharthisis the game might provide.

But for every indie title that uses music wrong there are dozens of others that do it right. Really, really right. Zen Bound 2, for example, has some of the finest music of any game I’ve played, and you’d never notice if you weren’t looking for it. It fits the game just right, relaxing you and coaxing you through each of the witty, original little puzzles and adding to an overall feeling of peace as you progress through its stages. It balances minimalism and structure perfectly.

Fallout: New Vegas shows that blockbusters can nail the concept just as well, although one would expect nothing less from industry veterans like Obsidian. For all the problems they’ve had as a studio, making music an excellent part of their games has not been one of them, and Fallout: New Vegas, from its occasional ambient tones and battle music to its excellent Wayne Newton centered radio programming, is a very satisfying sonic experiencee.

I could rattle off more sonic experiences here, but I’m already tired of it. Instead I’d just like to invite readers to consider the manner in which music and its design impacts their play. Its a force we ignore all too often when it’s not causing problems with our experience. Like sound design in anything else, music design in games is something that doesn’t stand out when it’s playing its cards right. It’s not something you consider, it’s not something that companies put a lot of money into and it’s something key to the experience of playing a game. The same way that multiplayer games feel like less of an experience once you turn off their music to get that edge, the same way that wildly cresendoing tones can try way too hard to make you care about an experience, music shapes our games at its best without us realizing it. So consider the way music is designed in the games you love, and think about just why it works. I’m sure some poor composer out there will appreciate your love.

Congratulations Poop Transplant Recipient!

Today you’re going to be one of those hilariously unlucky people who gets a super stomach virus and has to have their shit switched out by a medical professional. The doctor will be more than a little amused.

“Normally this comes out of people,” he’ll chuckle, injecting shit into your anus as you writhe in agony, slowly dying as your stomach dissolves itself under the onslaught of a virus so virulent that modern medical science’s normal, less ridiculous measures are of no use against it.

All of his doctor friends will be in the room around him to “observe the procedure,” but they’ll all just sit there laughing hysterically.

“I hate you all,” you’ll gurgle as they poke and prod you, snorting with laughter as they withdraw the colonoscopy lead and start opening PBR tallboys, talking aboutt the various weird diseases they’ve seen people die from. Your nurse, at least, will be polite and super attractive, but she’ll also have just seen you get poop crammed up your ass, so that’s probably not going to happen to be completely honest with you.

Congratulations Poop Transplant Recipient!

Congratulations on Deconstructing the Painting!

Today you’re going to look at Renée Magritte’s famous “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” painting and slap yourself on the forehead before exclaiming “FUCK” as loud as you can.

Everyone in your art history class is going to turn and look at you, but you won’t notice. You’ll be so deep in the grip of your epiphany that you won’t be able to look away from the reproduction of Magritte’s pretentious, pointlessly pointed work of obviousness in your text book.

“I FUCKING GET IT MAN!” you’ll scream, waving your hands at the textbook. “FUCKING OUTTA SIGHT!”

Your professor will walk up to you and grab you by the shoulder, but you’ll shrug him off and start laughing. Laughing and laughing and laughing. You’ll be that way when campus security drags you off and locks you in a closet until you come down from the shrooms you took earlier in the day, which really didn’t make you a better art student at all.

Congratulations on Deconstructing the Painting!

Congratulations on Passing Through the Flaming Ring!

She’ll be standing on the sidelines, your scarf in her hand. You’ll be worried about her, worried about the thoughts running through her pretty head, but not as worried as you’ll be for yourself. You’ll be staring at a giant twenty foot tall hoop lit on fire, because that’s how your uncle taught you how to solve your problems.

Her ex-boyfriend will be in the rat rod next to you. He’ll look scared, like this is the first time he’s driven a crudely thrown together piece of shit car through a flaming hoop or something.

“This seems like a really bad idea!” he’ll shout at you over the rumble of your engines.

“It’s how it has to be!” you’ll shout back.

Then you’ll gun your engine and take off up the jump, soaring across the divide and safely through the ring of fire. Your car will land on the other side with a thump and a squeal as the tires groan with the car’s weight. When you come to a stop you’ll lurch forward a little in your seat, but you’ll have fastened your safety belt so you’ll be fine.

“This is how men solve things!” you’ll shout back at her ex-boyfriend, who probably won’t be able to hear you.

He’ll respond by gunning his engine, starting up the ramp and careening headlong into the ring. His car will collide with the bottom of the frame, collapsing up to the driver’s compartment and bursting into flames before it tumbles to the ground. The fire will spread to the engine fast, faster than anyone can see, and the car will explode in a fireball, casting auto parts all around the high school football field.

But for her part, she’ll just drop her ex-boyfriend’s token. You won’t know if she feels bad about sleeping with him or if she’s really happy with you. You won’t even know if this is what she wanted, and you really won’t care. The ring will have spoken.

It will occur to you as you honk your horn that there might be a more productive way to solve your differences than driving home-made cars through a ring of fire until someone dies, but the thought will vanish before it has time to take root. Things in life are usually best left unchanged. The ring has proven this before.

Congratulations on Passing Through the Flaming Ring!

Congratulations on Fooling Tivo!

You have embarrassingly bad taste in television. Just atrocious. Your taste is so bad that, were it to become public knowledge you would be placed in a database whose sole business is making sure people with taste like yours never get laid again. But you can’t stop yourself, even though you know this horrible fate awaits. You just have to keep watching Glee and The Mentalist and all that other shit. It’s like some horrible inner demon compels you.

While there’s really no curing that, there is a way for you to avoid being ostracized for your unmitigated douchebaggery.

See, while the shadowy Organization of Good Taste prevents people like you from procreating by hacking and analyzing your Tivos it takes them a little while to actually acquire the data they need to prove that you didn’t Tivo Maury Povich by accident.

That’s where your hacker buddy Derek comes in. See, Derek is a nice guy. Derek doesn’t judge you. Derek’s kind of a pussy, sure, but he’s good at heart. And he’s willing to help, in exchange for ten thousand dollars.

So one kidney later your Tivo will label all your shows as Charlie Rose, and be completely inaccessible from outside your home, as god intended. Derek will have a sweet new Toyota Camry (2011 model, paid for in cash) and that Russian diplomat’s daughter will be able to live another day. And do more coke, which will help small businesses, specifically your local cocaine dealer.

Congratulations on Fooling Tivo!

Congratulations on Spending Some Time With Your Personal Trainer!

Today at work you’ll feel like a real slob. Some fat bitch in a sweater cape will holler at you “Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays!” and you’ll hold yourself back from hitting her, but the desire to hit her, the burning aggression, will still be there. So when you get out of work you’ll skip your normal “drink into oblivion” routine and head to the gym

Once you get there you’ll sit down with your personal trainer, a pretty young woman with a blonde ponytail named Shelly who you’re almost positive doesn’t wear underwear. She’ll do a session with you, which will be awesome, but you’ll occasionally hurl weights at her at scream for almost the entire time so even though she only has a GED she’ll catch on that something’s wrong.

“What’s wrong?” she’ll ask at the end of the session. “You seemed tense.”

“My life is a constant series of horrible annoyances, and I desperately need to move on or I’ll die here,” you’ll tell her, holding her shoulders and looking into her eyes in a way that makes her super uncomfortable. But this happens a lot, and she’ll be used to this by now. She’ll pat you on the shoulder, nod, and hand you a note.

It will read: meet me in my miyata.

All lowercase, just like that.

You’ll shrug and head out to the parking lot, where Shelly will be sitting in her Miyata, twiddling her thumbs. She’ll wave you in and then hold out her hand.

“Five hundred dollars, just the downstairs,” she’ll say, looking around to make sure no gym members who haven’t previously paid her are watching.

You’ll nod and open your wallet to withdraw the precise sum of cash she asked for. Then Shelly will strip off her tights and, sadly, her underwear, and hop on your already erect penis, bouncing up and down mechanically.

“This is erotic but kind of unpleasant,” you’ll announce, but Shelly won’t hear you, because Shelly will be super into it. See, Shelly was considered attractive in high school, so this is what Shelly thinks sex is supposed to be like.

When the whole thing is over Shelly will kick you out of her Miyata, pants around your ankles, and drive around the block. You’ll be getting into your car when she comes back. She’ll wave at you like nothing’s happened, and you’ll feel kind of sorry for her, which will be weird because you just paid her for sex.

Congratulations on Spending Some Time With Your Personal Trainer!

Congratulations on Fixing Your Car!

Remember when you hit that last homeless guy and your windshield was all fucked up? Well today your cousin Reggie is going to stop by your house, and Reggie knows how to fix cars.

“Hey man,” he’ll say, pounding on your door. “Hey, I need a place to lay low for a while.” He’ll be looking around like he expects the cops to roll up on him at any second. You’ll let him in, wringing your hands and shaking your head.

“Reggie, what did you do this time?” He’ll be sitting on your couch when you ask, lighting up a crack pipe.

“Misunderstanding,” he’ll cough out. “They thought I was selling crack, but I was actually hiding a body.”

You’ll nod, understandingly. T’was Reggie, after all, who helped you ditch the homeless guy’s corpse after that fateful night. But Reggie, even though he knows how to work on cars, refused to help you out by fixing your ride. But now the ball will be in your court.

“Fuck you, man,” you’ll say. “Fix my car.”

Reggie will throw down his crack pipe and stand up in your face. “Fuck you man! I helped you get rid of that body!”

You’ll sigh. He’ll have a point.

“You have a point,” you’ll say. He’ll nod and scratch his chin, covered in half beard.

“Actually, there’s one thing. Do it and I’ll help you out, bro.”

You’ll want to correct him about his use of the term bro to refer to someone who is clearly his cousin, but it’ll seem out of turn, so instead you’ll nod and say “Tell me more.”

He’ll lay out the plan. If you sell crack for him so that he can afford to pay off some crooked cops so that they’ll stop looking for him for selling crack when he was really hiding a body he’ll help fix your car, even though he sees the two of you as even because he already helped you hide that body that time he fixed your car before.

“This is complicated,” you’ll say.

He’ll nod in response and stand there tapping his foot.

“Alright, I’ll help you,” you’ll finally shout, throwing up your hands and grabbing his backpack full of crack. You’ll carry it out to the wrong side of the tracks and walk back and forth holding a cardboard sign listing a number of crack varieties and their prices. It won’t be great, but it’ll get your car fixed, assuming you aren’t picked up by the cops and ass raped in prison for seven years due to zero tolerance laws.

Congratulations on Fixing Your Car!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Indie for the Holidays!

As the time ramps up for year in review pieces to start rearing their ugly heads, I realize that I haven’t played too many games that actually, definitively came out this year. Life has been more distracting than usual and with life’s distractions I’ve played less during this boom season than I’d like. I want, for example, to sit down with Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood in the near future (which I’ve named Ass2Bros in the manner that PvP recommends). I didn’t play Halo: Reach, which is kind of unfortunate given how much I love the story of Halo and how story-heavy Reach is supposed to be. I didn’t try the new Medal of Honor, the new Civ, and dozens and dozens of other games I just didn’t have the money to grab. Hell, I haven’t even beaten games I bought over the last year like Final Fantasy XIII, a game that kind of makes me angry given how long it’s been in my disk drive. I’ve been a bad gamer.

But for all the laziness I’ve experienced as a gamer and all the disappointment I’ve caused in myself there have been some amazing titles that I’ve been privileged enough to play over the last year, games I’ve bought in droves of late while Steam rolls out sale after amazing sale. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be another essay fawning over how great Steam’s sale system is. This essay is going to be all about how awesome Indie titles, the majority of the titles I’ve actually bought over the last year, are.

The recent indie sale on Steam made me jump up and grab a huge number of arthouse games I’d been sitting on my hands about for the last few months. Some of them, like Puzzle Agent, were kind of disappointing but kind of fun. Some of them, like Gish and Amnesia, are exciting little tidbits I haven’t had the chance to play yet. Still others, like Flotilla, are old favorites that the sale made me sit down and play again. Most of them are weird little games I probably won’t have a chance to sit down with until mid January at best, when graduate applications are finished for better or worse and I can work on creative projects again rather than trying to convince people to let me work exclusively on creative projects for a few hectic months out of the year.

But I digress. I want to talk about indie games, and how even though I’m not necessarily playing all the neat little games I bought I’m still playing a few and loving them. I’m still spending hours on end solving puzzles and colonizing planets and thinking about just what it means to be a game. I’m enjoying playing, and sometimes replaying, neat little bits of indie love that came out over the last year in a flood of indie titles. And I’m looking more and more to small studios for new ideas, ideas that impress me and make me care about games again.

Because lately I’ve had trouble. Many of the games that I’ve been playing are totally excellent examples of more of the same. Starcraft 2, for example, is an update of Starcraft with very little changed in terms of actual gameplay. It’s streamlined, rebalanced and rethought, but really Starcraft 2 isn’t anything new under the sun. Nor is Call of Duty: Black Ops, unless you consider incredibly bad playtesting and optimizing to be something new under the sun, which would make you a fucking idiot, in which case you’re not only playing this game but have probably also figured out how to use its art tools to make a swastika. These are, all joking aside, great games, but they’re games that are well trodden ground. They’re old hat, and while I enjoy playing them sometimes I get a little bummed out at the feeling that I’ve been to these places before. I get the sense that games are stagnant as a medium.

Enter Zen Bound 2. This is a game I picked up incidentally to the entire sale atmosphere, a game a friend told me to buy so I’d relax after playing it. I thought my friend was full of shit. I thought it sounded like a stupid concept for a game, winding string around wooden carvings of animals so I could cover them with an allotted amount of string. I thought the title conjured up images of some sort of serial-rapist cum philosopher, and I can’t say it out loud. I wasn’t even aware there was a Zen Bound 1, but after playing Zen Bound 2 I really don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit because after playing Zen Bound 2 for fifteen minutes I’m pretty sure I’ve smoked marijuana earlier in my day and have now reached a state of peace in my evening.

See, Zen Bound is a small, un-ambitious game. It’s a game that does things no big game could ever do or would ever want to do. It’s a game about interacting with items in a space and changing those items in weird, relaxing ways. It could be that I went into the game wanting to de-stress or it could be that the hippies at my organic grocery store put some hash in the tea I bought. Or it could be that a tiny indie studio totally hit the nail on the head and developed a game about chilling out with wooden toys and string. Whatever the fuck happened I feel incredibly relaxed writing this, even though I still went to my terrible job and had a shitty, exhausting day today.

And this feeling, beyond just being great, makes me happy because it shows that games are doing more than offering me worlds to explore or means by which to compete. There are games out there that aren’t trying to sell themselves to the hordes of bunnyhopping fucksticks with silenced shotguns and insignias that are variations on attempting to give me the finger. Those people can all fuck themselves, because indie developers are making games about doing their own thing, games like Zen Bound, games like Flotilla, games like Eufloria. And the ignorance of the majority public, the greed of the industry at large and the relative lack of money these games receive and make isn’t really hurting their ability to make games seem cool and capable of incredible things once again.

Congratulations on Saving the Cheerleader!

Today, following the message of Heroes, you’re going to save a cheerleader in a small Texas town from her gang rape at the hands of a football team. It’ll all be going down after a big game where they lost against Rival School, and they’ll be all pissy, claiming they didn’t get the cheers they needed to win. In their minds vengeance against women is the only possible solution (they’re from Texas).

You’ll show up and step out of your dusty and beleaguered Toyota Camry, hammer in hand, just where and when that gypsy told you to be. You’ll tighten your grip as you see the men closing around the terrified girl and you’ll charge in without a word as you see them undoing their pants and masturbating while staring at each other.

Your arrival will trigger a combination of homosexual panic and confusion in them that will lead to them “turtling” both physically and emotionally, leaving you to wail on them with that hammer. The few who stand will be pummeled first, their skulls ruptured by the hammer’s head. They won’t know how to fight against someone who isn’t in pads and is actually trying to kill them, so most team members will just curl up in a ball on the ground and hope for you to leave.

But you’ll kill every last kinda-gay one of them. And when you hold out your hand to the cheerleader, covered in blood and brains and other vile, vile fluids that the body releases upon being beaten with a hammer, she’ll scream. She’ll scream at you and run away, just like every other girl you’ve ever known. But you know you did right by her and that she’s just kind of a bitch, so you’ll muster the courage that you never have with other women and shout after her sarcastically.

“You’re welcome!”

Congratulations on Saving the Cheerleader!

Congratulations on Eating the Entire Package!

Today you’re going to be a family of mice.

You spend most of your time scurrying from place to place and desperately trying to survive despite being plagued by all number of dangers, not the least of which is filthy, filthy people who lay their cunning, cunning traps (That cheese on wood looks too good to be true? It probably is.). You also occasionally have mouse sex, which is brief and, shockingly, not very cute.

You live simple, hard lives, but today it’s all going to pay off. Today, during a routine raid on a suburban home populated by college students one of them, the one who was at home, will be doing heroin. You’ll know this, having learned to speak English as a result of some experiments performed by a crazy German scientist who was obsessed with the American victory in World War II, and you’ll have chosen this time to strike out of a belief that the human will be sedate.

You’ll be spot on about that. The tardbus will boot so much H into his veins that he’ll seize up in his bed and die foaming at the mouth, whimpering softly as the gasses leave his body. You’ll squeal in glee and scamper freely through the kitchen, free for the first time in this new home. You’ll gather up all the food you can and drag it back to your hidey hole, all the food you want spare one critical bit: an untouched packet of Oreo cookies stored on a high shelf.

It’ll be out of your reach, even with your amazing climbing abilities. You’ll scree in frustration, cursing the inventor of the high cabinet in mousespeak. You’ll skitter and squeal and romp about in the empty house, trying to work some of the angry out, when one of you has an idea: by burrowing into the dead drug addict’s brain you could theoretically control his body. From his body you could gather up all the Oreos in the house and bring them back to your nest, where the packaging would give you shelter and the Oreos themselves would provide you with delicious delicious sustenance.

You’ll agree to work as a team and set about your labor immediately, boring a hole through his soft upper palate right into the junkie’s brain. From there the nerdy mouse, the one with glasses, will control the junkie’s body using nerve endings. He’ll fail at getting the junkie safely down the stairs to the pantry but he’ll succeed at getting his shattered limbs to stand, grab the cookies and carry them back the nest.

Once there you’ll leave his corpse to the elements. Inside your delightful hidey hole you’ll devour cookies and squeal in delight. For one night, at least, life will be good for you.

Congratulations on Eating the Entire Package!

Congratulations on Getting Out of the Wedding!

There are three ways to traditionally get out of a wedding at the last minute: reveal you’re gay, reveal you’re Jewish or have a jilted ex-lover stand during the ceremony and loudly declare that they love you and then run off with said jilted ex-lover until shit goes belly up a few months later when they remember why they left you.

Well you’re an original, and today you’re going to prove that by coming up with a whole new way to fuck up your life and the life of someone you claimed to love. During the ceremony, after the priest says the whole “or forever hold their peace” bit a bunch of Yakuza in suits are going to burst out of the audience firing wildly at you. You’ll push your bride to the ground and shoot a gun at them, sideways so it looks extra cool. Then you’ll run out of the room shouting “I have to flee or they’ll kill us both” back at her.

Later at a remote warehouse you’ll meet up with your Yakuza buddies (actually your alma mater’s current economics club) and pay them off with beer and vodka, but in the mean time you’ll be gloriously free and your ex-wife to be will forever see you as a glorified hero rather than a guy who came too soon way too often.

Congratulations on Getting Out of the Wedding!

Congratulations on Getting the Fuck Out of There!

“NOOOO!” you’ll scream as you leap behind a car. You’ll be in mid-air as the building explodes behind you, destroying all the evidence, all spare the data disk you managed to steal, and ruining the car you’ve taken cover behind in a rain of shrapnel.

You’ll get up and let out a long sigh as you take in the car, its invalid status and hear the helicopter zeroing in on you.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” you’ll mutter as you run off to find a new car to steal, one that will get you to your safe house where your crazy uncle will broadcast your disc to the work, finally informing everyone of just what is in Spaghettios with Meatballs.

Congratulations on Getting the Fuck Out of There!

Congratulations Russian Jew!

You’re a Russian Jew. That means most of what you have going for you is a cultural history of being able to survive regardless of the circumstances surrounding you. You’re not funny. You’re not good with money. You’re not great at war. Hell, you’re even kind of bad at circumsizing people in accordance with the creed of your own culture.

It’s a tough life, but it’s the one you were born to, and all that survival instinct has kept you alive and in decent food shelter throughout your stay in New York. Plus your cultural disposition has surrounded you with awkwardly sexually aggressive, deprived and attractive women who look at their mothers and feel their all too rapidly approaching middle age stealing upon them. It’s a life of shame, self-hate and copious, mediocre sex.

You usually just tell people that you’re Russian and skip the Jewish part during introductions. After all, why should they care that your mom guilted you into doing some new and deeply regrettable thing during every Thanksgiving in your life, or that you engaged in a bachannal feast of Chinese food every Christmas day? All they need to know is that you seem sad all the time and keep to yourself.

All this will change tomorrow when you find out that Regina Spektor is a Russian Jew. Overnight you’ll go from being a quiet, assuming dude to being the loudest prick in your office.

“DID YOU KNOW SHE’S PLAYED IN ISRAEL?” you’ll shout at whoever is nearby. People will start going out of their way to avoid contact with you.

“SHE’S SO TALENTED AND ATTRACTIVE!” you’ll tell them homeless man on the subway who, in a moment of lucidity, will ask you to please leave him alone.

When you get home you’ll just scream at the walls of your apartment about how great she is at the top of your lungs. You’ll scream until a knock comes at your front door.

Regina Spektor will be standing there in all her splendor. You’ll think that she’s there to thank you for singing her praises and maybe have some awkward, guilty sex with you. But as it turns out, no, she’s not.

She’ll just punch you in the face, knocking you flat out on the floor, where you’ll lay and massage your lip, wondering if you’re swallowing too much blood.

“Please stop talking about me,” she’ll sigh at you before turning around and leaving you there alone in your home, hopefully to grow a personality.

Congratulations Russian Jew!

Congratulations on Donating Your Hair!

When most people donate their hair to Locks of Love it’s half an excuse to let themselves go for a few months and half an incredibly misguided attempt to get laid. If they’re lucky they look like Silent Bob from Mallrats during the process, and most people look worse. Also, Locks of Love does not accept mullets, so stop asking.

But you’re Sampson. Like, from the bible. So when you donate your hair to Locks of Love you’re going to give a kid with leukemia super strength. The super strength he needs to beat both cancer, and his parents into submission whenever they refuse him a new toy. May god help us all.

Congratulations on Donating Your Hair!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: I Left My Spectacles at Home!

Michael Bay is an asshole. He’s a high grossing asshole who is deeply tapped into our collective intellect and who knows just how to play on our expectations. He knows how to play the notes we expect, to make a song we all know already and make us think it’s something new. He’s a very smart asshole, who isn’t really original, but his unoriginality is scaled and constructed in such a fashion that we’re never supposed to notice just how dull it is. It’s a kind of magic, a kind of magic that has been translated to games expertly.

It dawned on me just how well the medium leant itself to this sort of mindless, dazzling action when I was arguing with a friend of mine during a game of Left4Dead. We were both drunk. Extremely drunk, which is when the best thinking usually occurs, at least for me. He raised the point that Call of Duty: Black Ops was an excellent single player game. I raised the point that it did a terrible job of telling a story, failed at level design, scope and utilizing its few original themes. But he returned, time and time again, to the production values, the spectacle of the action. It was enough for him that the explosions were cool, the set pieces big and dynamic. Even when they didn’t really relate to the gameplay itself, he did have a point. The explosions were big and explodey. There were a lot of neat, big battles that were ambitious and, from an objective standpoint, original. And while the level design was terrible, the story was poorly written and Sam Worthington’s voice acting was deserving of a high school play at best, the shit that went down was always pretty cool.

And that’s enough for some. Excellent production values, neat explosions, and visual spectacle. Which is fair. Watching cool shit go down can be a lot of fun, and when it’s well executed all the better. But it’s also worrisome that this is enough to convince an intelligent, articulate gamer that a game is good. And it’s kind of a bummer that it seems to be enough to sell copies, en masse.

Original, well executed ideas that lack spectacle, games like Brutal Legend and Assassin’s Creed, might do okay, or even great, but they never seem to reach the blockbuster level that games like Call of Duty: Black Ops manage. And while I’m sure this is due to a variety of factors, well beyond the span of a thousand word essay, it’s certainly worth saying that Black Ops has very little going for it aside from punchy visuals. The game is a chore to play, a full on chore. The action is so jumpy, the set pieces so transparently tied together, the gimmicks so clumsily executed that without stunning visuals to tie them together there really is nothing to come back to.

And it’s saying a lot that I’m not playing the game again, but that I still recall fondly some of the stranger visual punches – running downhill into a pitcher gun fight with Cuban partisans, walking the streets of a Russian prison with a minigun, driving a boat upstream and unleashing hell while I did so. I think Black Ops is a total failure as a game, but it’s gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, and it has terrific visual sense, perhaps an even better sense than Modern Warfare 2.

But spectacle isn’t enough to draw me back to a game, and I don’t think it’s enough to sustain a game, especially one like Black Ops, where you’re constantly immersed in the game play. If it wasn’t for the multi I’d feel terribly cheated by Black Ops, but because of the fantastic mulitplayer, which, by the way, maintains the awesome grasp of visual punch that made the game bearable, I would safely recommend the game to nearly anyone who wants a good multiplayer first person shooter experience. And the spectacle in all the game modes is a big part of that.

But I still don’t think spectacle is a good reason to buy a game. And I don’t think it’s what games do best. I think films are great for it. When control of a camera is what you focus on you can do some incredible shit with it, and games aren’t really about that. They’re about generating a world for that camera to exist in. The best games don’t rely on things like visual punch, they rely on a sense of immersion, a sense of being part of a world, even an abstracted one.

Even though I’m an eye in the sky when I’m playing Starcraft I still feel immersed in it. The manner in which my inputs are interpreted, the beautiful consistency of the game and the manner in which it plays, the fact that I can examine any given unit and its functions and find perfect realization of its purpose. When I play Assassin’s Creed the Animus and its intuitive controls and interface make me fall in love with the game, with its kinetic motion and beautiful, occasionally clumsy combat. When I drive around in Brutal Legend I feel pride in my car, joy in the impact of each blow as my axe rings against Tainted Coil flesh and focus as I rattle off a solo, tongue caught in my teeth.

Spectacle is good and well, but my dollars, my efforts, go in a different direction. They go towards games that change the way I think about play, games that make me feel like I’m in a different place. Sometimes these games are fucking gorgeous. Sometimes they’re games like Far Cry 2 or Assassin Creed, with their glorious rendering of place. Sometimes they’re games that are ugly as sin, games like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, where a sense of place is established using graphics that could charitably called harsh. Sometimes they’re beyond understated, like Flotilla, the best game no one ever played where all the ships are a set of colored geometric shapes. While people will keep making games that trade on and, all too woefully often, rely on visuals there will always be games that are satisfied being ugly. There will always be games with something different to offer, so the haters can keep their pretty explosions and expository dialogue. I’ll be over here playing Arcanum, spinning my pistol and taking in the world.

Congratulations on Learning to Hang Glide!

Today you’re going to learn to hang glide just before you crash into the ground while trying to ride on a children’s kite. You’ll die horribly, in a mess of broken bones and punctured internal organs and, to be totally honest, you had this shit coming.

Congratulations on Learning to Hang Glide!

Congratulations on Removing the Bezoar!

You’ve got a sick daughter, and you’d do anything to help her get better. So when that doctor/gypsy tells you the one sure fire way you’ll nod to her grimly, put on a bandana like a headband and run out to an army surplus store in a filthy tanktop. You’ll slam a twenty dollar bill down on the counter and shout at the clerk.

“KNIFE!”

He’ll stab a knife into the counter, real badass like. It’ll be one of those Rambo deals, perfect for what you have in mind. You’ll flag down a bus, in the middle of the street as is custom, and fill the driver in on your situation. He’ll nod solemnly, and announce his plan to the bus

“This gentleman’s daughter has cancer.” He’ll look at them all disapporvingly in the rearview mirror. “Children’s cancer.” They’ll gasp. “To save her he has to head to the local branch of AIG and cut a steaming bezoar out of the stomach of the CEO there.” They’ll cheer and slap you on the back, signing your knife with clever little slogans like “fuck you” and “rot in hell, fuckface.”

The driver will deposit you in front of whatever giant structure is filled with douchebags in your town and have you sign a waiver stating that he helped you with your quest. Then he’ll tug on his hat and return to his normal route, frowning like someone shit in his cheerios all over again.

Once inside the building you’ll march right past that fat fuck security guard clutching a bowie knife in a stained tanktop, wearing your old service jacket from Nam and you’ll hop right on that elevator. One or two suits will give you the eye, but for the most part they won’t know what the fuck is up. No one, you see, reads the fine print.

When you get to the tippy toppiest floor of the building you’ll hop out of the elevator and start jogging. You’ll jog right through the double glass doors and into the office itself, ignoring the hangdog looks and hidden middle fingers that everyone in the office flashes one another. You’ll trudge along the outside of the building until you find the iggest, most windowed conference room in the entire place. Then you’ll kick in that door and stand there, bowie knife drawn, staring at the biggest asshole in the room.

He’ll be overweight. Not morbidly so, more like the average build of someone from Scotland. You’ll stare at him and he’ll look right back at you and he’ll know, in that instant, what you’re here for.

“Shit,” he’ll say.

Grinning you’ll rush towards him, tackling with him your shoulder, knocking the air out of his lungs and crashing him to the ground. Then you’ll stab him in the stomach, holding his neck up to make sure the wound is clean. You’ll pull the knife down to his groin as he squirms, but he’ll be weak from hours of meetings and staring at spreadsheets and when you finish your work he’ll finally lay still. He’ll have a grimace on his face and his undersized penis will be exposed to the office. You’ll ignore the glowers from the various people in the conference room, the muted catcalls of “how rude,” as you ram your hand into his abdomen and feel around. You’ll feel around for nearly thirty seconds, picking through half digested meals and bits of paper with numbers scrawled on them until you feel it: a hard thing. Perfectly round. Cold to touch, despite its presence in a body.

You’ll grasp it and yank as hard as you can, pulling it free. It will be small, the size of a baseball, and jet black. You’ll kiss and run out of the conference room. You’ll double back through the office to the elevators, getting a dirty look from the receptionist as you leave. She’ll tap the sign in book and grimace at your lack of manners as your bring your prize back to the doctor and your beautiful, innocent daughter.

Congratulations on Removing the Bezoar!

Congratulations Remembering How to Swallow Food!

Tonight while eating a big plate of chicken parm your retardo instincts will kick in and you’ll start to choke. You’ll have skipped a step, one you should’ve remembered, and as a result food will be lodged in your esophagus. You’ll find your airway blocked and before you know it your Dukes of Hazard commemorative plate will be knocked to the floor as you tumble down. Your chicken parm will sit there, just out of reach, teasing you with its goodness as the light fades from your eyes. Sputtering you’ll reach out, take hold and cram the sandwich into your mouth. In your last moments you’ll remember that crucial step and properly chew the chicken parm, but when you try to swallow it down your throat will still be clogged. You’ll lose consciousness as your pit bull sits on the floor and watches you, wagging its tail in delight at the thought of eating your chicken parm.

Congratulations on Remembering How to Swallow Food!

Congratulations on Finding Your Flash Drive!

After the spies only orgy you’re going to feel empty, which is normal. This time it’ll be because Kriselda, the Russian spy who killed your first partner and gave you a wicked scar over your left eye, wouldn’t let you blow your load inside her. She insisted that you shoot off on her tits which, as all spies know, means that she thinks you’re going to die in the next few months and doesn’t want to wonder if she could’ve borne your child. It’ll be a heavy blow.

So when you reach into your pocket you’ll be looking for a smooth refreshing Chesterfield which will take your mind off of Kriselda’s fear of commitment. And while you’ll find the cigarettes there you’ll realize instantly, because you’re a spy, that something is missing. A USB drive containing super secret research data or missile codes. Maybe both. You don’t label them, so it’ll be kind of a crap shoot.

You’ll panic at first. Losing that data could cost you your life, and living is more or less all you do at this point. Also, it might kill thousands and thousands of “civilians,” not that there are any civilians left in the war on terror. And this is your third strike at the agency, which means you won’t even get a sexy female assassin sent after you this time, you’ll just get an overweight one who never fails but really doesn’t like his job so he stress eats all the time.

You’ll moon for a moment about how sad you are and how right Kriselda was to doubt you. You couldn’t even keep your thumb drive safe, let alone her satin skin. You really won’t deserve her in your mind. But then you’ll remember that the flash drive had a track device in it, since tracking devices are tiny and in pretty much everything you own.

You’ll whip out your i-Phone and turn on the Tracking Device App that you downloaded for free the other week and start yourself a trackin’.

You’ll run through the Moscow streets, beating up several members of the Russian mafia and a few corrupt cops before you finally find the location of your flash drive: your apartment.

Furious at yourself for not looking there first you’ll run halfway across the city to get back home, arriving covered in sweat with your dress shirt’s top three buttons open. When you step in the front door you’ll immediately know that you’re not alone. For one thing, there will be subtle finger prints on the door and the hair you pasted across it will be gone. For another thing, there will be a pile of women’s clothes on the floor.

Puzzled you’ll check your i-Phone and see that the signal is actually coming from your bedroom. You’ll enter cautiously, pistol in hand, ready to fight any number of shady operatives.

Inside you’ll find Kriselda showing all of her alabaster skin. She’ll be on top of your blankets, her legs crossed. She’ll look bored, like she’s been waiting there for a while.

“Fancy meeting you here,” you’ll say, eying her up like a prize. She’ll smirk back at you.

“I thought you’d never arrive. I assume you have come for the data?” She’ll spread her legs and point at her hoo-ha, smiling. “You’ll have to take it from me.”

You’ll fake a grimace and take off your clothes before fisting Kriselda to get the drive out of her vagina. Then you’ll have sex, and while she won’t let you come in her vagina this time either she will let you come in her mouth, which means she likes you at least a little bit. Take some comfort in that next time your nipples are being electrocuted, secret agent man.

Congratulations on Finding Your Flash Drive!

Congratulations on Winning the Pageant!

Today is the day! The day of the Weirdest Fucking Monstrosity pageant! You’re going to load up in a pickup with your roommate, the minotaur, and drive him on over there, sticking around to watch the festivities.

The convention center will be awash with weird creatures from all walks of life: chimera, hydra, Noh monsters. Totoro, from that one movie, will even be there. And they’ll all be there to enter the pageants which you, as a human woman, will not be attempting to enter.

Unbeknownst to you, however, your roommate, knowing that minotaurs rarely win because they’re quite common (see Steve Sherrill’s excellent book on the topic for additional information) will have put your name on the list. He’ll have mentioned that you play video games. Lots of video games.

The judges will read your entry and toss out all the other applications. They’ll call you to the center stage and announce that you’ve won. As a girl who plays video games you’re the strangest mythological creature of all!

Like, eighty hideous asocial monsters will ask you for your phone number on your way out, but aside from that it’ll be a pretty good day. You’ll have won some sweet prize money and gotten a significant self-esteem boost at a time when you really felt down on yourself.

Congratulations on Winning the Pageant!

Congratulations on Cracking the Code!

You’ll have spent an hour and a half reading the back of that cereal box that morning. Normally you just glance at it idly and kept on eating whatever the fuck is in that frosted shit you cram down your cram hole with reckless abandon. But today, while reading over a fascinating article on the back about how the maze at the bottom contains hidden treasure deviously concealed somewhere within, you’ll catch a tidbit at the end about how you should really solve the word search. It’ll address you by name.

Puzzled, you’ll read the area beneath it. It’ll inform you:

Solve the word search and you’ll uncover a fun secret, Craig!

You’ll read on:

Fucking do it, pussy!

Incensed, you’ll call in sick to work, pick up a pad of note paper and start scribbling away. You’ll discern, after finding a set of key words in the search, that the entire thing is actually an adjustment cipher keyed to a pattern illustrated in a deck of cards. You’ll grab a brand new deck from the Walgreens near your house and get to work testiing and teasing out solutions.

You’ll spend nearly two hours deriving the cipher from various hints and links left in the messages you’ve circled, two hours putting all that time you spent in the CIA as a “copy clerk” to good use. By the time you figure out just what the code is it’ll be long past lunch, but you won’t care.

You’ll feel no hunger, spare a burning one for solving puzzles, one you’ll pursue rapaciously. It won’t be long before you sit with a brief message written on your paper, so engaged in the decoding of the individual letters that you won’t know just what the message is until it sits completed before you. It will be short and to the point.

I’m fucking your ex-wife, asshole!

You’ll let out a sigh. You should’ve remembered that your bitch of an ex-wife had started sleeping with a guy who edited the backs of cereal boxes just before she left you, but in your rush to solve a personalized puzzle you forgot. Chewing your lip you’ll look at the clock realizing that you wasted half your day. You’ll have wasted half your day thinking about her again, and that’ll make you sad.

Congratulations on Cracking the Code!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: How Puzzle Agent Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Just Love the Setting!

I’m in a stand in for Fargo, which is a lot less like Fargo and more like a mix between Bemidji and Northfield. But the developers of this game, with their loose grasp of directions and infantile understanding of what hot dish is and how Minnesotans relate to hot dish (which is basically just casserole, assholes), wouldn’t know about that. I doubt they’ve even been to the Midwest, and their manner of humor smacks of people whose primary understanding of Midwestern culture comes from L.A.’s vision of the Midwest – as a podunk trapped in the fifties, a place of conservative values and button down people. It couldn’t possibly be more removed from my experience of the Midwest, the time I spent in Minnesota digging in record shops, going to shows at First Ave and building giant penises out of snow whenever I had the chance. But that’s not unforgivable. I’m not playing Puzzle Agent for its realistic portrayal of culture. I’m playing it for two reasons – the puzzles and the humor.

The humor works in Puzzle Agent. It doesn’t work exceptionally well, but it’s alright. Occasionally there will be chuckle worthy moments, like when a character’s compulsive love of puzzles forces them to chase after a puzzle book instead of shooting you in the face or when a weird red faced gnome helps you by throwing a button up to you. It doesn’t always hit, sure (the aforementioned hot dish joke isn’t funny – if you get it you think it’s kind of dumb, if you don’t then you’re just going to be confused) but it tries. Some of the puzzles themselves are pretty good as far as jokes go. Smuggling with ducks? Kinda funny. A football team’s passive aggressive relationship with a glass-store manager? Okay. Nothing to write home about, no real payoff, but it’s a four hour game I got for a little less than a dollar. I really didn’t expect much from it in the story department. I just wanted some nice, clever little puzzles.

What I found was just that. Sort of.

Many of the puzzles in Puzzle Agent are literal puzzles. Like, the kind you’ve assembled with your grandmother, or while your grandmother watches and sips brandy, occasionally calling you “a queer” for putting a puzzle together. They’re less intellectual exercises and more a set of drag and drop challenges. Some of the more complicated ones lock in place when you start inching towards a solution, so the “puzzle” is little more than a matter of waiting until your selection moves as one group when you fit it all together. Sometimes the pieces won’t lock, but when this is the case the puzzle will usually have a set of pretty distinct visual cues that you can rely on to show you when you’re right and when you’re wrong. It’s not intellectually stimulating, nor is it particularly fun, challenging, or rewarding. These puzzles smack of filler rather than intelligent problem solving. They’re pretty meh.

The other subset of Puzzle Agent’s puzzles are the abstract ones, where you’re given a picture and asked to manipulate it in some way. Sometimes this works perfectly. For example the bug wrangling puzzles are great: smart, have a clearly established set of rules that they follow to the letter and ask you to find a solution with those rules in mind. A handful of other puzzles fit this criteria as well (including one of my personal favorites – a puzzle that involves finding fish inside of other fish) but they’re stand outs, exceptions rather than the rule. And that’s where the big problem with Puzzle Agent lies.

I’ll give you a great, spoiler-ific example. One of the early, story central puzzles in Puzzle Agent involves decoding your room number. The image you’re presented with involves a series of squiggles on a piece of paper which are clearly supposed to represent something. Hints tell you that it’s a way of writing a number that isn’t the arabic numeric system, that the spaces between the squiggles are significant, and then shows you a red block that looks a little like an N and tells you that “this is the first part of the solution.” None of these hints are wrong, per-sec, but they’re not really helpful. The first one is obvious, the second misleading, and the final one just irritating. I sort of guessed the first part would be at the beginning of the apparently two digit number that I’m looking for. How do I solve for the other digit, though? And what does that even mean? These are the questions that plagued me until I wussed out and checked a walkthrough. Turns out the answer was nine.

See, nine was written on the piece of paper as displayed by the various spaces in the statement. Get it? All those statements about alternate numeric systems were hinting at just writing a number down. And the “code” was actually just a number written out as a word. Ha! Pretty clever, right? Unless you assumed the puzzle was an actual puzzle and not an optical illusion. If only the directions had been at all clear, the puzzle would’ve been just as easy as they wanted it to be.

But they aren’t. And most of the time they won’t be. Most of the time they’ll be infuriatingly vague. Unclear or incomplete directions make simple puzzles way more difficult than they need to be. Violable rules will be completely unstated, making seemingly valid solutions into failures time and time again. It’ll make you want to tear your hair out, and not because the puzzle itself is challenging. The puzzles are just so nebulous at times that the actual challenge isn’t figuring out the puzzle, it’s figuring out what the puzzle is supposed to be.

This would all be well and good, but Telltale does nothing but develop puzzle games. To boot, the testing department in Puzzle Agent had around ten bodies in it. Did not a one of them find the directions vague? Did none of them have girlfriends or boyfriends or life partners they could ask about puzzles to get some outside input in there? Asking someone outside the production team, or just hiring a god damn copy editor, of which there are dozens unemployed in your neighborhood I’m sure, would’ve fixed the issue before it became one. But for whatever reason the puzzles themselves are so unclear that Puzzle Agent is less the smart, funny game it could be and more of an exercise in occasional frustration with little nuggets of goodness tucked in there.

So I’d categorize Puzzle Agent as a failure. It’s not even a noble failure – it’s just kind of a lazy failure. But it’s not a total bust, because it got me wondering, what makes a great puzzle game? If a lack of directions and a structure that punishes experimenting makes Puzzle Agent frustrating what makes relatively directionless classics like Monkey Island Full Throttle are so good? It’s obviously not just the humor, since Puzzle Agent has enough of that for the game that’s there. And it’s not a lack of stakes, because while I like getting a great rank as much as the next guy I never really felt compelled to excel at Puzzle Agent’s ranking system, and the game has fuck all stakes besides that. It’s the way that you move towards a solution, the way a game addresses failure.

See, even though Full Throttle and Monkey Island were tough and often obtuse they’d present cute little jokes for each failure. They’d treat being stuck in the game as a chance to enjoy the world around you. Every time you got stuck you could talk to the colorful characters you ran into every five minutes or play around with the various set pieces. Sure, you’d usually do it quite futilely, but it was hard to care when losing an insult swordfight was just as fun (and in a way, necessary) as winning it. In Puzzle Agent I get an annoying beeping noise and the game tells me that I’m dumb. Then I’m sent back to the puzzle with nary a thing to do in the meantime.

If I talk to the townspeople I get the same crappy dialogue bits, and there’s no feeling that the people themselves actually live in the same world. They might as well be in completely different games from one another. It’s boring and meh and I hate it. But in a way it’s good to discover this way, because by playing a puzzle game that fails I can see just what makes a great puzzle game great. Not the puzzles themselves, not the story or the jokes surrounding the puzzles, but the sense of place the puzzles are fixed in, the world around them. Puzzle games, in that respect, aren’t so different from games in general. It’s all about being somewhere, immersing yourself in an experience, and losing yourself in the game’s world. And when it works, boy does it ever work.

Congratulations Grease Monster!

You’re a grease monster and today you’ll form in the fry-o-lator at McDonalds when a young man named Reggie (short for Reginald) doesn’t clean out the grease trap. You’ll bubble up from the depths of the machine and reach your arm out, destroying Reggie’s face in a swell of hot grease.

“AHHH!” Reggie will scream.

You’ll wordlessly gargle as you roll through the store slightly more quickly than the obese patrons, roiling over them one by one. They’ll blister and burn before becoming part of you, adding to your filthy, staining mass. You’ll rumble with joy as you roll throughout the shop, finding new hideous items to add to your mass.

This will be the start of a great adventure across America as you terrorize her many obese citizens. That is, until President Obama resolves this whole situation when he gets back to work on Monday.

Congratulations Grease Monster!

Congratulations Street Magician!

You’re the kind of man who lives without fear, striving to entertain and amuse his audience day to day. You live without a thought of the future, for your future is today. And your past is tomorrow. And yesterday is your present. Or something.

Look, we’re usually more articulate around people, but you just do this to us. You make us all baffled, make us think we’re seeing one thing when in fact we’re seeing something completely different. It makes us confused, makes some of us a little horny, some of us feel dumb and some of us just feel for the first time in years. That’s why we’re happy to give you this prediction:

Today you’re going to be in Spain running from the bulls. You’ll feel kinetic and young for the first time in years, the way you used to feel before your wife left you and took that ungrateful shit you call your son and moved to Palo Alto with the man your son now calls “better dad.” Fleeing the bulls you’ll be free for the first time in years.

That is until the bull charges you, piercing your colon with his horn and hurling you upwards. You’ll stare at the bull’s compatriots, charging towards you, and you’ll know fear for the first time since your bitch wife had your best friend serve you papers just because he was the only process server in town. She didn’t even have the courage to show up herself.

You’ll spend your last few seconds of life cursing her name and formulating elaborate revenge plots, and as the bulls near your face you’ll close your eyes, only to be whisked away in a rush of motion, pulled out from under their hooves and hurled bodily into the cheering crowd. There a team of paramedics will rush to assist you, patching your new asshole and assuring you that everything will be alright, except your ass.

You won’t hear them, though. You’ll be taken by the young woman, the street magician, who saved your life as she sashays into the crowd. In that instant you’ll feel her pull, her magnetism, and you’ll know that you have to be like her. The choice will be made for you. There will be no turning back.

Ilea iacta est.

Congratulations Street Magician!

Congratulations on Making a Very Bad Movie!

Today you’re the guy who made When In Rome and your movie just went number twelve thousand on Netflix, which is about as well as it’s going to do. You threw together a bunch of incredible actors and actresses and a few decent jokes and managed to make a real shitter of a movie. Just an absolute stinker, in kind of an incredible train-wreck way. Don Johnson? Who the fuck puts Don Johnson in a fucking movie? Just terrible.

Well today you’re going to look at those numbers and decide that you’ve done well enough and you’re going to stop defaming Kristen Bell. You’re going to ask the good people at Netflix to take your movie off their queue and they’re going to ask your name several times before they finally acquiesce because Netflix is all about giving customer service to people who shout for it long enough.

Congratulations on Making a Very Bad Movie!

Congratulations on Surviving the Fire!

Today you’re going to get your just desserts. You’re going to be set on fire by a group of angry midgets thanks largely to some things you published involving their family members in the midget porn community. You’ll have successfully avoided litigation for months by hiding out in the Cayman Islands.

But your propensity for midget whores and cruelty will make laying low difficult. You’ll have an island wide reputation in a few days, and after you exhaust the very limited supply of midget hookers on the Caymans you’ll gain an international reputation once again as people are forced to ship them in from off the island.

The midgets, who will be just incredibly well connected, will find you in a matter of days. They’ll lure you to a hotel room with the promise of some submissive midget whores and then they’ll tie you to a bed and douse you in gasoline. You’ll writhe there, bound to the frame and mattress as he heats up and you’ll scream and beg for mercy. Well, you won’t really bed so much as you’ll shout wordlessly hoping for they get the idea.

You’ll writhe and writhe until the spectacle becomes too much for their wee hearts to bear and those little midgets with their organized crime backgrounds and their desire for rage will feel sated by the horrors they’ve visited upon you. And they’ll turn and leave you to die there, alone and unknown in that room.

But you won’t! See as it turns out midgets will be really bad at choosing rope, just as a general rule. So the rope they selected will burn through before you die from a combination of smoke inhalation (it was basically twine). Then you’ll roll off the bed and on to a carpet where you’ll twist and turn on the ground until the flames finally leave your deformed body, surviving the fire to enjoy a life of ceaseless agony as your dead nerve endings scream endlessly until you take your own life three months from now.

Congratulations on Surviving the Fire!