Congratulations Juniper Jackson!

Juniper Jackson got a few stories to tell.

Juniper Jackson ain’t never known no failure. He ain’t never known no chains of any kind. One day his daddy told him to sit in the corner quiet like and wait ‘til he was told to come back and what did Juniper Jackson do? He stood up lickity split and left that chair sittin’ in the corner by isself afore he went off into the big world to find his fortune.

Juniper Jackson took his first purse at the age of five, a week after he left his daddy’s home. He did it so quick and so calm everyone thought he was holdin’ it for his momma, and he ate for a month off of what he found in there.

Juniper Jackson took his first bank at the age of fifteen, bandana tied around his head and no gun or nothin’, just his hand in his pocket and his swingin’ balls. First time he ever did it he felt such a rush like you wouldn’t believe walkin’ away from that place. He knew he’d found his callin’ and that sure as shit he’d be doin’ it for years to come.

You be Juniper Jackson, and you’ve got yourself a few stories to tell from years gone by. You been runnin’ all around the world and seen all kinds of banks, taken all kinds of paper. And in all your forty years and hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs you pulled you ain’t never shot nobody.

All that changes today.

You’ll be pullin’ a quick in and out at a Wells Fargo in the southern part of Wisconsin, in some small town you wouldn’t be able to name if you saw it on a map. You’ll have your gun in the bank of a teller’s neck while she’s counting out the money, whispering to her that it’s all gonna be okay.

And it will be, for her. But a security guard, a young white boy who musta grown up no more’n a mile from that bank, will come up off the floor holding his gun and you’ll slide your weapon right towards him and pow. Right in the chest, he’ll go down with a spin and a clatter as the gun hits the floor and not a peep elsewise.

The way he’ll be layin’, it won’t look right, but you won’t look overlong. You’ll take the money, that as which you’ve gotten from the teller, step out the door and nod at the people inside.

“Sorry,” you’ll tell them afore you start your way outside, walking down the street, across the main drag and towards the parking lot you’ll have stashed the car you stole in.

As you drive away to the movie theater where your real car is parked, two hours north in another town without a name as far as you know, you’ll feel a pang of regret.

“Didn’t want to,” you’ll tell the empty car, looking at the money. “Just had to.”

You’ll sit there and drive and calculate from the weight of the sack how much that young man’s life was worth. Won’t be more than a few thousand dollars, you’ll guess. Ain’t no life worth that little.

Congratulations Juniper Jackson!

Congratulations Rainstorm!

You’re a rainstorm, and today you’re going to ruin everything.

“Agh, my wedding!” the bride will cry, shaking her fist at the sky while her goth little sister shrugs and eyes the groom, wondering how he feels about marrying her sister now that she’s shown him who she really is under all the makeup.


“Hm,” the retired investment banker will declare from inside his Lexus as the first droplets of what will soon be your torrential downpour scar his windshield and make him rethink the nine holes he planned to get. He’ll weigh the possibility of a DUI after a few drinks at the Nineteenth Hole against the chore of seeing his wife sober so soon after storming out, both of them grisly prospects.

“Agh,” the homeless man will mumble as he turns over and tries to put a piece of cardboard between the part of him that lays exposed from under the loading dock where he’s taken shelter and you. He knows it won’t hold up long, but if he can even get a few hours of rest in before walking to a park to find a better place to spend the night it won’t be so bad.

Every one of these people will be upset today, and it’s going to be entirely your fault. The only people who won’t be pissed at you are all the couples, roommates and co-workers who decide to take your cue and spend the day inside fucking one another. Those people will be pretty psyched to see you show up. But everyone else is just going to be rat pissed at you for fucking up all their plans, however loosely formed they may have been.

Congratulations Rainstorm!

Congratulations Persian Douchebag!

Polish up your golden chains and put on that t-shirt that doesn’t actually fit you that Jersey Shore made you think was a good idea, because tonight you’re a Persian douchebag. You’re going out on the town and you’re going to dress that way even though you, like every other person alive today, should know better.

You’re going to go to “da club,” which is what you call your friend Greg’s parent’s basement in their house in the Bronx. You’re going to get way too drunk and you’re going to end up sucking Greg’s dick in a bathroom while a bunch of girls peek through an open door and giggle uncontrollably.

You’re going to wake up the next morning in Greg’s arms, dazed and confused and feeling strangely fulfilled at first. This feeling will rapidly translate into a sort of disgust you’ve always reserved for gay dudes you see on the train – the sort of creeping disgust that always comes from trying to look at something you simply cannot bear to see, a truth you cannot bear to face.

As you leave Greg’s parent’s house, stepping over unconscious men and women alike, you’ll feel dizzy. Finding your footing will be a chore. And as you reach the door you’ll want, desperately, to look back and see if Greg is watching you, to see if he’s looking at you as you go. You’ll want to see if he’s turned over after waking up a little. You’ll want to see if he acknowledges just what has passed between the two of you.

But you won’t turn to look. You’ll step outside, put on a pair of oversized sunglasses, and use your i-phone to find the nearest subway stop that can get you back to Manhattan, where you can hold off on taking a shower as long as possible while you and your roommates lie about hooking up with various women last night.

Congratulations Persian Douchebag!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Deus Ex Comes Again!

It’s a bit late, sure, but I couldn’t call myself a video game blogger if I didn’t write about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and it took me this long to finish it, damnit. There’s been a pretty accurate and appropriate critical consensus about the latest installment of Deus Ex, which I’m pleased to see. Some of the reviews have been incoherent, some fawning in ways I’m not sure I agree with. And I’m absolutely puzzled by the fact that people haven’t compared it to Alpha Protocol, which kind of addressed a lot of the problems that Deus Ex has and did a better job of telling a story, allowing players to develop their own story and letting players develop their character than Deus Ex does, though it does so at the cost of Deus Ex’s frenetic capacity for action and impressive polish.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution plays like an homage to the first Deus Ex, a tremendous improvement over the ambitious mess that was Deus Ex: Invisible War (a brief aside: why is this series so averse to numbering its sequels and so fond of offering up nearly incoherent subtitles in their place?). The touted “four pillars of game play” which guide character development provide players with an impressively customizable experience, especially at the beginning of the game. I spoke with a friend of mine who normally plays FPSes in a “kill ‘em all” style who took an unexpectedly peaceful approach which still differed from my own totally non-lethal approach to the game. Everyone he’d spoken with had a totally different approach to each mission as well, from a guns blazing shootout with the DPD to a stealthy takedown of local gang members. I’m now playing as a ruthless killing machine armed with a revolver in the tradition of Count Zero’s street samurai and the experience is very, very different from my first playthrough, though even with the difficulty cranked up to 11 the shooting approach still smacks of playing the game on easy mode for me.

This touted diversity of play is achieved mostly by making its levels chock full of stuff to interact with and giving players a lot of options on how to move through this stuff and interact with this stuff in order to find other stuff and achieve stuff. There are some skill trees that determine how you can move stuff around or hack stuff and there’s a skill that makes you invisible so you can grab stuff if you want to. There are other skill trees that allow you to take less damage while you kill stuff or recharge your energy faster when you knock stuff out. But it’s not just the wealth of options available to you that make Deus Ex work: a great deal of what makes these various methods of play so great and infinitely usable is that the developers have taken pains to offer many different routes to accomplish each objective, each fitting some sort of skill set or play style, none of which is “better” than any other.

But this also leads to a problem: because the success of their system hinges not only on a painstakingly designed skill system but also on the design of each individual level there are some pacing issues. The most notable pacing problem emerges during the game’s horribly designed boss fights. Each “boss fight” feels like something an executive at Eidos forced into the game, a totally incongruous progress marker crammed into an otherwise fluid experience. Unofficial “boss fights” are wonderfully brief experiences against named enemies and their cohorts, and they suit the plot just fine, but each actual “boss fight” consists of a drag out match against a super-powered enemy with erratic movement and shitloads of health in an arena made by a level designer in twenty minutes. Sometimes the boss fights will occur against enemies who cloak themselves, which is just infuriating in and of itself. But the real crime is that there’s no non-violent solution to any of these arenas.

The original Deus Ex never forced you to fight anyone. In fact you could famously make your way through the entire game without ever fighting an enemy – you could evade even the most challenging opponent through stealth and intrigue. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution wants you to sit down and fight three mercenaries three times. It wants you to associate these mercenaries with an artificial difficulty curve which is absent from the rest of the game and it wants you to care about killing these mercenaries based on their appearance in a brief cutscene at the beginning of the game. It’s a huge problem, one addressed in a handful of amazingly developed “unofficial boss fights” that take place on actual levels and have actual non-violent solutions. If the mercenary fights had been more like these “non-boss fights” they could’ve served as incredible set pieces that players could discuss their approach to and use to shape their overall experiences. But instead they’re just levels with only one solution at hand in them, poorly constructed pieces of level design that lay bare the underlying principles behind Deus Ex.

They’re sort of the real price of admission here: Deus Ex is unquestionably worth the hefty price tag of a new video game. Given how high this bar is becoming for me as my life goes on, that’s saying quite a bit. But the boss fights are tremendous speed bumps. They make me want to stop playing. They were the single biggest contributor to the feeling I had at game’s end that the whole experience was becoming a chore. But they are the only real black mark in the game. Late game level design is a little meh compared to the vibrant settings and meticulously structured areas you’ll encounter in the first few places you wander through, and the developers re-use city hubs a bit too often for my taste. I would’ve liked to see a third hub somewhere along the line, and one or two more new areas that would’ve rewarded exploration and given me some new chances to interact with the world around me in a situation where my choices weren’t limited “run and gun” or “turn invisible and run.”

But how long would it have taken Deus Ex: Human Revolution to emerge as this perfect project? The game already took nearly four years to develop, a fact illustrated in the game’s strangely poignant end-sequence and credits (an aside, I’d say that Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a set of credits worth watching if you care at all how your games are made: a deeply human tribute to the time and effort that Eidos put into making this title) and these rushed bits of game seem less like a failure of design and more like the end result of a hostile development environment becoming more and more of the norm in video games.

Deus Ex is wonderful. It is well crafted, intelligent and provides players with lots of tools to engage lots of interesting puzzles. It has some great fan service, which you can miss if you aren’t watching. It has a bit of a weak overall story (if you don’t catch the plot twist within the first five minutes of the game then you might be asleep) but it’s not really a game that wants to tell you a story: it’s a game that wants to give you an awesome framework to play around in. The story gives you just enough context to let you have fun with the whole thing, gives you a few characters to care about and some forced backstory to “motivate” you.

But never forget: the play is the real motivator. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of those rare titles that evokes joy in its players simply through its mechanics. It allows them to make choices, gives them a framework to make those choices meaningful from a game play perspective, and gives you enough options that you simply cannot use all of them during the course of play. While its boss fights are chores and its ending is a bit of a design nightmare the core game is so much fun, the joy of exploration and exploitation so wonderfully sustained throughout, that it is well worth the time and money it asks of you.

Given Alpha Protocol’s middling critical response and poor sales we’re unlikely to ever see a sequel to it. So if you’re like me and you loved Alpha Protocol I’d double down on my recommendation for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s not perfect, but it provides that wonderful sensation that you are truly changing the world as you play, the sensation that you are influencing the environment around you. The choices you make develop in unexpected ways that never feel trite or unexpected, and while a handful of story issues and scripting bugs persist in the final product Deus Ex is so evocative and well crafted that it’s hard to approach it with anything but love.

Congratulations on Getting Out of Gitmo!

This week has been a roller coaster ride for you. It started off with you fingering the First Lady, then getting the shit kicked out of you by our surprisingly bad-ass President. Since then you’ve spent most of your week learning basic Spanish along with the operational procedures of Guantanamo Bay. Your natural hotness has been kept under wraps due to your relatively heavy bruising and the fact that most of your days are spent in isolation, where no one can see your face or know that you have feelings, family members who care about you or memories of any kind.

The end result will be a super introspective week where you’ll have learned a lot about who you really are, what you really want and just how far you can be pushed. You’ll have learned that you have a very low threshold for pain, and that you don’t really deal with it well when people don’t give you food or water for an entire day. But don’t despair! Today things are going to get way better.

Today instead of just kicking the shit out of you first thing in the morning the guards will burst into your cell with a set of manacles and a hood. They’ll hold you down while they fit you with the restraints and then lead you out, occasionally bumping you into walls.

“Oops,” they’ll mumble sarcastically each time they do so, laughing under their breath as they push you on. The walk will last for around fifteen minutes, and it will come as a tremendous relief to your atrophied muscles, bundled from hours spent shackled, prone in your cell.

The walk will end with you being shoved into a loud place with a metal floor. The sensation of dramatic movement paired with the rhythm of the noises surrounding you will eventually let you figure out that you’re on a helicopter. A very fast helicopter, by the way it makes you feel.

You’ll remain hooded for the entire flight. Not until you’re back on the ground and you’ve been lead through several halls will the hood be removed, revealing a doctor’s office with a tired old man in a lab coat standing in it. He’ll give you a brief physical, occasionally making marks on a clipboard, speaking to you only about your medical history. When the entire process is done he’ll knock on the door and a pair of Secret Service agents, including the one that caught you on Monday, will burst into the room.

“Come with us sir,” he’ll say in a forceful tone, not a whit of familiarity in his voice.

You’ll follow them through incredibly decadent, vaguely familiar winding halls. After a minute of walking around you’ll realize just why they’re so familiar: you’ll be in the White House. And you’ll be heading towards the Lincoln Bedroom, where you once banged Susan Rice.

When you reach the doors the Secret Service agent who caught you will open it for you, holding it open with a grin on his face.

“They’re waiting for you,” he’ll inform you tonelessly as his compatriot gently pushes you through the opening.

Inside the Lincoln Bedroom you’ll find Michelle Obama waiting for you in a nightgown with the biggest of grins on her face.

“Welcome back,” she’ll purr at you.

Your first reaction will be panic.

“Your husband,” you’ll begin, sweating pouring from your pores, stinging in your still-open cuts. But then a hand will come down on your shoulder, strong and reassuring.

“Let’s do this,” Barack Obama will tell you, grabbing your belt from behind as the First Lady advances on you, propelling you into the annals of history.

Congratulations on Getting Out of Gitmo!

Congratulations Vampire Fucker!

You’re not actually very interesting, and not nearly as unique as you think you are. The fact that you frequent clubs filled with people who are dressed exactly like you should’ve given that away by now. But you still get out there and twitch arthymically on the dance floor until some cute boy is sufficiently relaxed by your total inability to move your body to work up the courage to ask you to come home.

Tonight you’re not even going to make it out on the dance floor. While you’re downing your third appletini, checking your fishnets to make sure they’re torn in all the right places, a young man will walk up to you. He’ll place his hand on your shoulder, put his lips by your ear, and speak.

“Let’s go. Now.”

You won’t be able to resist.

You’ll follow him home through alleys and side roads, winding footpaths through concrete jungles that you later won’t be able to recall or even describe aside from the inordinate length of the shadows and the whispers that seemed to emerge from them. When you reach his apartment you won’t notice walking up stairs or opening any doors – you’ll simply be inside of his apartment suddenly, sprawled across his couch with his hand between your legs and his mouth on your neck.

What passes in the night will be in a fog as well, a mist of passion, pleasant sensations accompanied by shocking intensity that will plague your dreams for weeks to come. The only thing you’ll remember is waking up on an unfamiliar stoop, wrapped in a blanket. Your neck will feel sore, and when you touch it you’ll notice a pair of red marks, conspicuously spaced dots, adorning your neck. You’ll feel along your body, checking to see if you’re dressed, making sure you still have your purse. After a few minutes of fumbling you’ll find a small note, hastily scrawled.

“That was fun,” it will read. “You should get tested.”

You’ll crush the note in your hand, stand up and walk home, cursing under your breath for the loss of your perfect record.

Congratulations Vampire Fucker!

Congratulations on Avoiding a Lengthy, Unpleasant Conversation With Your Ex!

When you show up to see your ex at the hospital you won’t come bearing flowers. You won’t even come bearing a smile, just a computer bag and a weight on your shoulders like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll spend the entire elevator ride up to his floor chewing your lip and wishing you were better at avoiding consequences, or at the very least better at drinking yourself into a constant state of oblivion like Shelly, your crazy bitch of a roommate.

But you always try to do the right thing, even if you try to do the right thing by yourself first and everyone else second. So it’ll be kind of a relief when you show up in his room and he’s passed out in a traction harness, his face twisted in an expression of agony. This means you won’t have to talk to him. You’ll just leave your note to him filled with your list of reasons for leaving him on his bed stand and head back to the elevator.

As you ride down you’ll feel lighter, the knowledge that you did the right thing shining in your mind. And as you make eyes at the male nurse in the elevator with you, tracing the outline of your aerieola through your shirt and pressing your tongue into the side of your mouth to give him the impression there’s something in it, you’ll know that deep down you’re a giver, and you just gave your ex the greatest gift of all: closure.

Congratulations on Avoiding a Lengthy, Unpleasant Conversation With Your Ex!