Congratulations on Re-Enacting Part of the Movie Ghost!

You love love LOVE the movie Ghost. You’ve put a shitload of time into trying to re-enact parts of it: you’ve tried to foster a relationship with Whoopi Goldberg in the hope that she might one day sleep with you. You’ve done pottery with literally every person you’ve dated just in case you die while dating them so that you’ll have an excuse to share that experience with them posthumously. But it’s never worked out. Not until today. Today’s gonna be your lucky day.

Because today you’re going to be buying some heroin at a construction site filled with broken glass and discarded condoms and you’re going to pick a fight with your dealer.

“What the fuck, man?!” he’ll shout at you, pulling out his gun and turning it sideways as he prepares to shoot you.

“Wait wait wait!” you’ll scream at him, holding up your hands. He’ll look at you like you’re an idiot and cock the gun, then you’ll back up against the shell of a window, where some shards of glass will be hanging above you. You’ll point up, drawing the dealer’s attention to said bits of hanging glass.

“Shoot those out,” you’ll beg him. “It’ll look so much cooler.”

He’ll give you another look of disbelief before shrugging and pointing his gun upwards. He’ll loose two rounds into the top of the window. One of them will crack the glass and liberate a particularly nasty shard of glass, sending it cascading down into your body. It’ll strike you in the neck, which won’t be just like Ghost, but it’ll be close enough to make you happy, if only for a moment.

Unfortunately your happiness will rapidly subside as you lay there, impaled and bleeding out. You’ll begin to wonder how realistic the movie Ghost was when you don’t notice any tiny black specters coming out of the floor to collect your soul. As the world goes dark you’ll wonder if this was the best trajectory for you to follow with the last decade of your life, but the thought won’t last long. Blood loss will strip the thought from your mind, dwindling out all the others until your body even forgets to breathe.

Congratulations on Re-Enacting Part of the Movie Ghost!

Congratulations Ego Booster!

Today you’re going going to be jet skiing on Lake Michigan, an activity that only an idiot of the highest conceivable caliber would engage in in mid-February. You’re going to be wearing a beer hat and carrying an assault rifle on your back hooting and hollering at the top of your lungs.

After around an hour and a half of doing that you’ll notice a ferry puttering its away across this, your Great Lake du Jour. You’ll also notice a patch of ice that, in your head, will look like a totally sweet ramp. Revving your engine, you’ll drag your jet ski in a languid loop around the side of the lake until you turn in and angle towards the ferry, manipulating your jet ski so that your path will cross the ice along the way.

“WOOOOO!” you’ll scream at the top of your lungs as you gun the engine and floor it, speeding towards the ferry as fast as your little engine can carry you.

You’ll holler like a madman as you speed along, hair slicked back. In your mind you’ll see yourself hitting the ice and turning it into a ramp with the weight of your jet ski, propelling yourself into the air and over the ferry.

In reality you’ll hit the ice and lose control of your jet ski, flipping it end over end and casting you into the water. The force of your impact on to the surface of the water will knock you unconscious, and the cold will start to kill you almost instantly. The crew of the ferry will scramble to rescue you from the freezing water, pulling you out as the passengers chortle at your plight.

Their otherwise miserable commute across the lake will have been lightened by your ridiculous misfortune. Your retardation will have lifted their spirits. And in the end, your brain damage from the cold and lack of oxygen will be minor, so no one will have to feel too bad about it.

Congratulations Ego Booster!

Congratulations on Capturing Leslie Feist in a Crystal!

It’ll begin, as all things pertaining to Leslie Feist do, with an incantation.

We’d print the incantation here, but we’d prefer it doesn’t get out, because it not only contains within it the framework by which any creature can be contained, bound into service most foul and infinitely fair, but also references Leslie Feist’s true name, necessary to bind her into service. We would be remiss to reproduce such information, as it would make grievous oversteps of mortal authority such as yours commonplace. Even though we could certainly use the hits, we’re not going to subject a being as magnificent as Leslie Feist to that ilk of bullshit.

Once the incantation is completed Leslie Feist will be standing before you within the circle of sealing. Stripped of her glamour she will stand before you as she truly is: twelve feet tall, skin glowing magnificently. Her wings will long to stretch outside the circle, but its limits will force them into a sphere’s containment until she manages to furl them and wrap them around herself. She’ll shiver, naked, the heat of her own inner fire rendered distant by your efforts.

“What do you wish?” she’ll rasp, voice also severed by the circle.

“Get in this crystal for my girlfriend!” you’ll shout at her. She’ll wince, leaning her body away as if she would do anything she could to escape her fate. But she won’t be able to, and like sand in the breeze she’ll shift rapidly, molecule by molecule, towards the crystal, tapering down and filtering into it. When the process is done the circle will be obliterated, the salt woven into her being, into the crystal. Her face will not appear within its facets, her voice will not echo from its depths. The only hint at what it contains will be an unearthly glow, the glow that is all that this world will be able to see of Leslie Feist so long as she remains contained within that crystal.

You’ll pick up the stone, which will be warm to the touch, and pocket it. You’ll leave the windowless study room on the fourth floor of Macalester College’s library whistling to yourself, imagining how psyched your girlfriend will be to have a stone containing the essence of Leslie Feist. You won’t be able to imagine her staying angry at you for cheating on her with her roommate.

Turns out you’ll be totally wrong about the anger allaying effects of a crystal containing Leslie Feist, and your girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, really) will freak out and throw the stone to the ground, cracking it and allowing Leslie Feist to escape from it in a glittering cavalcade of light. She’ll emerge full of rage, not only for what you’ve done to her but what you’ve done to your girlfriend.

By the end, you will beg for death, but your ex-girlfriend will have Leslie Feist’s autograph and an awesome story of bonding with her over your slow, painful end, so that’ll be pretty boss for her.

Congratulations on Capturing Leslie Feist in a Crystal!

Congratulations on Watching All Your Plans Go Up In Smoke!

After the robbery, after the guns go quiet and you’re sitting back in your hideout you’ll be sitting perfectly still on your stool, looking at the chaos arrayed on the table in front of you: bills, thrown about on the table, pistol with its barrel still cooling, dye bomb stained bags. You’ll look at your team: the driver, the heavy, the nerd, the chick. All of them will be fine because, TWIST, your entire plan went off without a hitch!

You robbed a Wells Fargo branch in central Indiana in a green Subaru outback you stole from a stranger two towns over without a word or a shot. You did it quick and clean, like you’d all done it before, but you hadn’t. Really, you just watched the movie Heat a bunch and sorted out what they did wrong. They:

A) Didn’t have any ladies along for good luck.

B) Robbed a bank in the middle of a major city.

C) Brought a bunch of assault rifles along for some reason.

D) Used highly recognizable actors to rob a bank.

Based on all these mistakes you robbed a bank with a small, charismatic but unrecognizable group of community theater actors from Northern Wisconsin and, sure enough, it worked out. It helped that they all shared the practical skills that were normally associated with their heist-role archetype. The nerd knew a lot of stuff and had some practical skills as a result of growing up in the Midwest. The chick had boobs, which distracted and comforted a number of bank patrons during the entire affair. The heavy was a pretty big guy who looked scary but was actually quite nice and the driver could drive stick.

You also Googled “how to rob a bank” before doing the whole thing, so you knew to watch for dye bombs, to pack money yourselves and to avoid killing anyone if it was at all possible. You came through on all of those, though it was impossible to resist firing your guns in the air in celebration after you finished packing the money, which did damage the bank’s ceiling and made dust fall all over the bank patrons.

All that’s left is for you to burn the original bank plans and go your separate ways. You won’t ask anyone where they’re headed. That’d break the rules. But you will wish them all good luck and share a beer with them, stepping out of your shed to sit in deck chairs in the backyard and watch your plans literally go up in smoke as they burn in the barbecue pit you dug yourself, ages ago, back before you knew you’d never have to work again.

Congratulations on Watching All Your Plans Go Up In Smoke!

Congratulations on Accidentally Blinding Yourself!

Remember when you fucked with the eye wash stations in your lab so that they’d fire gouts of sulfuric acid instead of water into whoever used them? Yeah, we didn’t think you did. Well, today you’re going to wish you had, because following a particularly nasty incident where another prank you were working on (monkey urine in a spray bottle) backfires and ends up spraying gross monkey pee all over your face you’re going to head to one of the aforementioned eye wash stations and try to get the crud out of your face.

You’ll bend down, pull the lever and gouts of acid will spray right into your peepers.

“Agggh!” you’ll scream. “This prank is a lot less funny than I thought it would be!”

You’ll thrash around on the ground for a while as your eyes burn out of your skull, wishing you could cry. But you won’t be able to: your tear ducts will be totally annihilated within seconds. After what seems like an eternity of pain the reaction will stop: the acid will have run its course, and you’ll be left on the ground with a ruined face and a newfound respect for the limitations that need to be in place for workplace pranks to be both funny and appropriate.

This will result in an entire week without any of your retarded pranks ruining shit for your co-workers until you forget all the lessons that your scarred face has taught you and decide to train your seeing-eye dog to attack white people, forgetting (since you’re blind) that you’re white and getting yourself pretty badly mauled along the way.

Congratulations on Accidentally Blinding Yourself!

Congratulations on Winning the Underground Super Bowl!

We rarely hear about it, but every year after the regular, above ground Super Bowl a second, far more interesting Super Bowl is played beneath the streets of America’s filthiest metropolises. Everything from were-bats to people who have been turned into bats after being exposed to radioactive materials gather in a series of subterranean arenas to determine who is truly the best football player in the seedy underworld of America.

We should mention, underground football has far fewer rules than regular American football. It’s like Aussie rules football, but slightly less brutal: players can carry blunt and edged weapons on to the field and use them to hack and slash at one another until a player is incapacitated, at which point all other players on the field are encouraged to fall upon the downed player and devour them.

This year your team, the Cleveland Mutants, will be up against the Brooklyn CHUDs. It’ll be a grudge match, since the Mutants used to be in Brooklyn back in the day, but as we all know moved to Cleveland when Brooklyn got kinda racist and Ohio threw enough money in the right direction. Both teams will have been hard pressed to get as far as they have so far, but the CHUDs will have put quite a bit of money into getting to the title match: they’ll have attracted more impressive freaks of nature and they’ll have bribed a lot of refs, which is slightly more legal in underground football than it is in regular football.

So tomorrow all bets will be off. It’ll be you: a scrappy group of mutants with no families to speak of, morals to claim or scruples about committing acts of terrible violence against an endless, sniggering horde of cannibalistic humanoids, most of them pretty tiny, a handful of them incredibly large.

Your team will wade into the game wielding bats with nails hammered into them, machetes attached to the end of brooms and fire axes that weren’t carefully secured in the city. A few of your more interesting teammates will also have blades where arms should be on their bodies. The CHUDs will have nothing but teeth, claws, and a lot of money to get their way out of various fouls.

But that money will run out quick, and before you know it the head basket that hangs in your end zone will be full and their head basket will contain only the head of Gary, the insufferable team captain who sought to inspire all of you to succeed. Everyone will be happy, everything will be great and you’ll have won the Underground Super Bowl! Enjoy the brief period of increased adulation and pay before people go back to shitting all over you for being from Cleveland again!

Congratulations on Winning the Underground Super Bowl!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Me and My M-4!

This is my M-4. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

And I don’t just mean there are a lot of M-4s out there. There most certainly are. But there are also guns that are an awful lot like the M-4 in how they play: the G-36c, the CM901, and the ACR all play an awful lot like the M-4, with nice, quiet, controlled fire and middling power and range backing them up. But I’ve got a soft spot for the M-4, for both its cultural cache, its contemporary significance and its general well roundedness, so when it unlocks it becomes my gun. I’m here to plumb its depths.

Modern Warfare 3 really wants you to do this. It has its unlockable system set up so that you acquire attachments, exchangeable upgrades, weapon skins and even cosmetic changes for your gunsights based on using weapons so that you can unlock these fancy little features. It really makes you want to sit down with a gun, get to know it and carry it around with you for a few hundred hours. Unfortunately the ability to actually create a class with your weapon of choice, along with the ability to invest time and effort in that weapon, is cordoned off until level 4, which takes around an hour and a half of playing to reach.

Immediately after paying my dues this way I hastily created a class while under severe duress from the constantly ticking clock that counts down the time until the next round. I picked my perks all but at random – something called Stalker, which apparently lets me actually move around while looking down my sights (a savvy balancing move considering the heavy favoritism that Modern Warfare usually gives to perks that eliminate the need for silly things like the ironsights they put the time into balancing in the game), something called Recon, which encourages me to throw grenades at random, and something called Quickdraw, which I think I recall from another Modern Warfare game. This is supposed to help me switch between weapons a little faster, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do that. The clock hits zero before I have a chance to pick anything else, like killstreak or deathstreak items, but since I’m just starting out I don’t really have any options to play with in those arenas just yet, so there’s no biggy.

And I am suddenly and violently transported into a dusty, grey-brown realm, surrounded by gunfire and some kid who won’t stop chanting “gay” into his headset mic. A grenade goes off a short distance away, hurled by some invisible foe, and I’m prompted to sprint forward – it’s an old dance, a familiar dance.

I twirl around aimlessly, painfully aware of how out of practice I am. Dual wielded sub-machine guns have apparently come into fashion, and I’m repeatedly cut down by sustained fire from not one but two barrels as I round corners time and time again. Eventually I see someone just before they see me and open fire, barely (just barely) cutting them down. Red tinges my vision, but I’m back in the swing of things. I’m okay running around, aiming down ironsights and pulling my trigger without flinching. The number to the far right is a lot bigger than the number to its left, but I do my best not to get discouraged – I used to be good at this, and becoming decent at it again can be a meta-game all its own for me.

But after the third or fourth kill something unexpected happens – I’ve been told not only that I leveled up (I’m used to seeing that, thanks) but that my weapon has leveled up. My M-4 is apparently now level 2.

After I endure the rest of the match, which I finish with a kills to deaths ratio that would embarrass any sensible person, I decide to step out of the game for a minute to customize my classes. I see that, to my surprise, something new has been unlocked under my assault rifle tree. Usually I only get a notice about this sort of thing when I’ve got a new weapon to play with or when, in Modern Warfares of old, I racked up enough kills to unlock the latest attachment. But now I learn that I’ve acquired a red dot sight for my M-4, and with it a new “Challenge,” which is what Modern Warfare games like to call their quests in the MMO sense.

Apparently if I shoot sixty people while I’m looking through my fancy new red dot sight, I’ll get additional experience. And, judging by the locks next to all the other rows in this “weapon challenges” display, this experience will go towards leveling up my gun so I can get more stuff to slap on to it to fulfill these other challenges.

With this in mind, I go back to the Create Class menu, make four more classes, and then decide that I’m going to ignore them and pursue unlocking every last element of my M-4 with dogged determination into the night. I last another forty minutes before I log off for the night, a paltry dozen or so kills into my gun-quest’s progress.

The next day I blow through it. I also acquire a silencer, a grenade launcher, an ACOG scope, some holographic sights and a few weird little symbols that modify my gun’s performance slightly, but don’t have any quests associated with them. Although one of them does let me attach two upgrades to one gun, effectively doubly the rate at which I can complete my gun quests, which is pretty nice. And I’ve got to say, I do enjoy using most of the attachments. Even the ACOG sight, worst of the worst in previous Modern Warfare games, is fun and well suited to its purpose in this iteration. And it’s really hard to feel anything but joy with a silencer strapped to the front of your gun.

But of course, it all can’t be joy. The next day, after I blow through a few more gun quests pleasantly enough and unlock a few new toys I end up with something called a “shotgun attachment.” Apparently my gun isn’t gunny enough, so I’ve duct taped a shotgun barrel to it and I am now being encouraged to shoot forty people with it. Forty!

I set to work immediately.

Two days later I hate the M-4. The shotgun attachment is terrible, and having to struggle through it is like pulling teeth. I put round after round into assholes, and it just won’t kill them – a point blank blast won’t a kill make, and I rarely have time for more. I want the M-4 to fucking die. My psyche is so shattered by the experience that I’m tempted to step away from the M-4 altogether and start seeing other guns, but I persevere. I move on to my quest to murder people while using hybrid sights, my modest K-D in tatters, my love of the M-4 eroded.

By the time I finish with hybrid sights and extended mags to wrap up the gun-quest cycle by using the thermal scope, my love of the M-4 is restored. I think the thermal scope is a little ridiculous, sure, but I go through it all the same. People make fun of me for doing it, but in the end I’ve got all of my little M-4 achievements achieved, and I’m happier for it. And a bunch of other guns unlocked in the mean time, guns I can put myself to work unlocking gun quests for. I shelve my completed M-4 for a CM901, which looks enough like an M-4 to keep me from feeling uncomfortable when I use it. I give my monitor a little kiss as I finish the process – it’s been a wild ride.

There’s a downside to this, of course. Now that I’m done with my M-4, it’s unlikely that I’ll come back to it. As enjoyable as Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer is, some of its problems (the aforementioned clutter I brought up in the last essay which, while somewhat reduced, remains an issue, for example) will keep me from ever playing it in the ravenous, compulsive way I played the original Modern Warfare. I reserve that kind of play for games that traditionally fall into an e-sports model, and I think there has to be a sort of essentialism for an e-sports game to work – an essentialism that Modern Warfare 2 and 3 lacked.

But this feedback loop remains compelling – I spent a month of my life letting it distract me from the also very compelling Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the end it leaves you with a list of things you’ve earned and a nice, pretty, full progress bar in the Barracks sub-menu. And it really does make you feel attached to a weapon and make you feel like you know it. For instance, even though they feel very similar I know my CM901 shoots a little harder and a little slower than my M-4 now, which is a really fine distinction considering how fast guns seem to shoot in Modern Warfare 3 as a rule. Still, the M-4 will always have a special place in my heart as my first fully unlocked weapon in Modern Warfare 3.