Mind Control Agent

I noticed today that my baby’s new playtoy is a secret mind control agent issued by the C.I.A. to indoctrinate him into favouring a pro-American approach to Democracy. The toy is a plush coil with two flowers on the end and two animals hanging from it. One of them is a red elephant. The other is a a blue donkey.

Combined, they make the two most un-understandable symbols for America’s two political parties. Why animals? In Canada, the Conservatives don’t use a beaver as their mascot, and the Liberals don’t use a moose. Why do Democrats want to be represented by a jackass? Why do Republicans want to be represented by an animal indigenous to Africa, when they hate all black people?

At first I thought I was just being crazy when I noticed this. I thought the one animal was a horse, but it could very easily be a donkey. Can you tell the difference between a horse and a donkey in plush cartoon form? Plus the elephant was the red Republican colour, and the donkey a blue Democratic colour. They’re tied on a line, so one can be said to be on the left, or right, depending on how you’re facing them. It seems too spot-on to be a mere coincidence. There’s also a star and a mirror hanging from the spiral, which probably represent vanity and Texas, or some other poetic shit the Chinese child labourer making the thing thought up before having his hand cut off in a prison camp for daring to dream the American dream.

I’m now worried my child will grow up to be three hundred pounds, his fat face stuffed with McDonalds fries as he tries desperately to pull on a pair of blue jeans that will never fit him, so he can drive his S.U.V. to school and fail his geography test.

Sticky

Today, at work, I had to read over four pages of documents citing seven essential steps of using a stick, and then print my name, sign, and then date a form to certify that I am qualified to use a stick. Afterwards, my acting supervisor and manager both have to sign the document, and then it has to be filed away in my company record.

Let me assure you that this was not in response to me using the stick inappropriately. This was an official company document that anyone who wishes to use a stick must sign in order to pick up the stick.

The stick in question is similar to a metal hoe about three feet long, with a hollow metal handle that it’s welded to, and painted a garish orange colour which would make it visibly stand out in any environment except the one I work in. There are no moving parts. It probably cost about five bucks to make. It’s used only for pulling pieces of lumber forward when they’re out of reach. We previously used any sturdy wooden stick we could find with a metal hook screwed on the end. They worked fine, but they were banned when some chucklehead in the States was using one to grab something at the top of a long ladder, and fell to death. The stick and lack of training was blamed for the fatality instead of the person being a clumsy dumbass. We weren’t allowed to use stick for a total of six months until they found an alternative. Any stick found were destroyed and the people found using them were disciplined. It was akin to being caught with a firearm on a plane.

The instructions for the stick use colour photos. We’re warned to inspect the stick for damage prior to every use. Any stick found lacking must be tagged as out of service with a specified official out of service tag. When using the stick, we’re told to use a “staggered stance.” Customers or persons not certified are forbidden from using the stick at all times.

This is clearly meant to be serious business. Shit can an will go down if you don’t use the stick properly. It was like reading the instruction manual for the Wii, where about twenty pages are devoted to the awesome things you should never do with the Wii-chucks, like throw it at the TV, knock over lamps, or strangle a ninja to death.

We were warned never to write on the stick or put stickers on it. Previously, we’d broken the hoe off of a stick, and I had painted in green like a Riddler cane. Then someone came along and turned it into a Rio Carnival pimp cane. When they threw that out, a part of me died inside. A part I can never get back. Apparently, I should have been fired immediately. Now I wait in fear for THEM to come, and claim me, and I shall work no more.

Droppin’ Bombs

I’m convinced that Japan exists in an alternative timeline. Their version of history seems so different from our own. In their version, for instance, they were innocent bystanders in WWII until they had to defend themselves from the evil invading round-eyes. That may seem like an unwarranted stretch of my imagination to you, but think about how much emphasis they put on their country being hit by the atomic bomb, and how little they think about Pearl Harbour; kamikaze suicide pilots; collaborating with Hitler, the Nazis and the Fascists; and everything they did in China all for the sake of getting a bigger piece of the Imperialist pie. You’d think that after being hit twice by The Bomb, they’d at least know something about the man who did it. Truman may have given the order, but FDR was the man behind the plan.

Fun fact: FDR had Polio. Like, a lot of it. When he wasn’t on crutches, he was in a wheelchair. People didn’t talk about it much back then, because they were “classy.” Those same people would tell Obama to get to the back of the bus before turning the hose on him, though, so fuck them.

When I played Nintendogs 3D this week, I was notified about a Spotpass download for FDR and his dog. They’re running a series in the game on American Presidents of the 20th Century, or something. So far they’ve done Regan and Jimmy Carter and their dogs, despite the fact that Jimmy once shot a dog. It’s kind of odd how they’re doing it. If you’re playing, you’ll occasionally come across Regan as he’s walking his dog, and you’ll go to the park together, or he’ll give you some doggie biscuits as a present. I’m assuming that the Alzheimer's kicking in. The same thing happened with FDR. The game shows him walking around on two legs, which leads me to believe that Nintendogs takes place in heaven, and everyone in the game is actually dead, including you and your dog. That’s some Sixth Sense shit right there.

Then it made me think about how video games discriminate against the handicapped. If you’re playing a game, you never get the option of selecting a wheelchair, or crutches for your avatar. You can’t show your Mii as having only one leg. The closest you can come to representing a handicap is having a pirate eyepatch, and obviously people playing the 3Ds aren’t going to have eyepatches (because of the 3D).

So in conclusion, screw elitist idealized renditions of Japanese history, fuck discrimination against the handicapped, and fuck M. Night Shama-lama-ding-dong.

In-u-end-o

Grace: the fine maker of Cock soup mix. Put some cock in your soup.

Also: today I found out someone had named their child Gaye Rider, and that child had grown into an adult. I suspect that Gaye was home schooled.

The Impossible Achievement

While playing Halo: Reach last night, I unlocked:

Which should impossible, because in order to get this achievement, I would have had to purchase and download the Noble map pack for 800MS point. I got angry afterwards and had to go through my download history, thinking either myself or my step-son had accidentally purchased it, but that wasn’t the case.

My theory is: I was so awesome that it broke the game. Usually, when playing these types of games, I always choose the jetpack loadout while the song “Fett’s Vette” plays in the background.

That wasn’t working for me this time. Every time I tried to use the jetpack to bounce over a vehicle barrelling down on me, they’d hit a hill and jump to collide with me mid-air, while the Dukes of Hazard theme plays.

So I picked up the armor lock on the next life. Next time some fucker tried to mow me down, I hit the armor lock and they ran into me like a brick wall. Chunks of futuristic machinery and shrapnel flew around me Michael Bay style as I crouched down, posed. Then I got 25 Achievement points. I then went on to die about twenty more times, and lose the game by a wide margin, but who cares after something like that.

Teh Gamez

I just saw this article, as linked through kotaku.com about game journalism:

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/xbox-360-power-not-yet-tapped-out-says-gears-designer/

It made me think about the old gaming magazines I use to read, and how they’re now basically extinct. A game magazine is essentially 100% ads, as even the articles are ads in and of themselves. The only magazines with any exclusives were the “official” magazines, like PSM, which people would frequently only buy because of the demo disc included with the mag. With there being three main competing gaming system, and two subsets of gaming handhelds at any time over the past couple of decades, it’s unlikely that any reader would prefer a “blanket” approach that covers games cross-system. If you only have a Playstation, why would you care what’s on Xbox, aside from morbid curiosity? That’s why each system had at least one main magazine devoted to it, and it was usually wholly endorsed by the company that produces those games. Any reviews inside the magazine were therefore suspect. Most trended towards how awesome the game in question was, and how you should buy it, with money. This sort of thing happens every day, in nearly every magazine. Fashion magazines aren’t going to crap all over fashion. Incidentally: print is dead.

In the modern age of video game reviews, the review is expected to be out long before the game. If you don’t have the exclusive from the latest convention or behind-the-scenes press-release for a game that won’t be released in months, if not years, then you’re left in the dust. If you’re an independent writer, and don’t have access to these scoops, there’s really no point in even trying. A single screenshot of an unreleased game can attract more attention than a 10,000 word essay on the game itself, once it’s been on the shelf. To be truly successful, you’d have to have access to every beta out there, and have played through every round. In the end, that wouldn’t even matter, because there’s only a handful of games every year out of hundreds that anyone in the world really cares about. Same with movies: no one really cares about the independent pic that got rave reviews at Sundance: they want the next Michael Bay blockbuster. These are from companies that have their own corps of PR people, who are doing your work for you. All you can really do is analyze it and regurgitate what they feed you.

Why? Because billions of dollars are on the line. Even though scoops are the lifeblood of the game journalist’s trade, if they were to publish anything without the prior consent of these companies, they’d find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit. To get these scoops, they have to agree to terms and conditions both spoken, written, and eluded at. You can’t look at a major project and tell people it’s nothing but another piece-of-shit FPS trying to compete with COD, because you’ll be blacklisted or worse.

The article above talks a lot about a code of conduct, which mainly entails not giving bad press to bad games. Reviews for games are mainly pointless. You can’t rate them on a scale. A person can play a .99 cent game on their iPhone for 24 hours, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a “good” game, if you’re using the old scale of rating that includes graphics, controls, playability, etc.. Add those up and what’s really a five star game becomes a one star bomb. It’s like judging the work of Shakespeare on his penmanship, or Michael Bay’s “talent” for his use of explosives. Angry Birds is an absolute phenomenon right now. Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it terrible? No. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s games on consoles trying to be fluid works of art with their graphics. They’re also terrible, terrible games. Final Fantasy XIII comes to mind. Does it look good? Yes. Does it play well? No. How do you rate it? And likewise, how are you not suppose to shit on it? Look at how long Duke Nukem Forever took to come out, and then look at how disappointing that game was. Is a game reviewer not allowed to crap on that? I say you should be able to smell his tears through the words.

I’ve gravitated to game sites like kotaku.com and penny-arcade.com, which aren’t necessarily review sites, but someone they’ve given me more insight into games on the market than any other source. They do it without rating the game, either. The just slap up some impressions on press-releases, and that’s it. Done. Money’s already in the bank.

That’s why to me, game journalism is a dead form of commercial art. There’s no want or need for it. I occasionally will see a review piece in the provincial paper, and it’s written about entirely random games no one could care about. I’m left with no desire to explore the game further. Meanwhile, a movie review on the next page may make me want to see a movie. How does that work? Why is one form of journalism more engaging than the other, when the two mediums are so closely related? It’s because games are meant to be experienced. You can either write a review, or write a guide with tips’n’tricks.

Garbage Day

For the second time in three weeks, the garbage man has refused to take one of my trash cans. I left out one trash can, a recycling bag, and an extra tiny bag of trash on the curb this morning. They left the full trash and slapped a form-letter sticker on it basically telling me to go and fuck myself, and also that they would only accept two trash cans per week. …Which meant that I was under the limit. I live in a basement suite, so it’s not like I’m paying the garbage collection directly, although I am paying well up the ass for my current living space. I have no idea what to do with the garbage if they don’t take it. I super don’t want to stuff it in my car and drive it to the dump. That’s what trucks are for, and I don’t have one. When I first moved here, I was stuck paying an extra month’s rent on my old place for not giving a full month’s notice, so in response to that, I would drive out there and leave all my extra garbage and recycling in their dumpster. That’s not really me being a dick. After all, I’m paying them a large, hefty sum for absolutely nothing. I had to turn in my keys and everything, so it’s not like I could go into the old place and hang out. Anyway, I don’t even want to get into a whole situation where I have to call up the garbage collection company and kindly ask them to stop being dicks, because that didn’t work out too well for Homer Simpson.

Like Jagger

Does anyone in this Generation (Generation X2: X-Men United) know who Mick Jagger is? Because they keep referencing him inappropriately. It’s like that game hipsters play with Smirnoff Ice, only with Jagger. It started with Ke$ha when she “sang” the “lyrics,” “..Kick him to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger,” insinuating that she would only ever give up her tainted meat to someone who looks like this.

…

This is one of the better photos of him. It’s not as if I spent twenty minutes on google image. All I did was type in, “Mick Jagger,” then copy-and-pasted one of the more recent photos. This is a picture of what Ke$ha is into, sexually speaking. People have their kinks, and I’m not going to disrespect that. I’m just saying he’s 100, and he looks his age. I’ve seen mummies that look better preserved than this. If you looked like this, they’d give you a closed casket ceremony. The only reason Jagger still performs with Keith Richards is so he can look younger by comparison. Even back when he was young, and had two functioning hips, he still looked bizarre. He looked like that P.T. Barnum and Bailey’s mermaid exhibit with the monkey sewn onto a fish. His mouth looks like the scene in the Pirate of the Carribean when the Kraken swallowed Jack Sparrow. Or, alternatively: Ke$ha’s girly bits. Ke$ha can almost be forgiven though, as the decisions of a person whom, “brush their teeth with a bottle of Jack,” aren’t necessarily the best.

Now there’s this damn song with the phrase, “Moves like Jagger. I’ve got the moves like Jagger. I’ve got the moo-o-o-oooves like Jagger.”

This is how Jagger moves:

Jagger moves like a hopped up coke-head with no sense of shame, and no remorse. It’s as if his every movement is designed to accentuate just how poor his choice of wardrobe is. There are many musicians that are known for their moves. Michael Jackson immediately comes to mind, and would fit perfectly into the framework of this song, but that’s probably a lawsuit waiting to happen. If you’re not sued by the Jackson estate, you’d be arrested for confessing to pedophilia.

It would seem that these… I don’t know what they are… somehow idolize the man, but care nothing for his work. Jagger has contributed a lot, and it seems like none of his lessons have rubbed off on these new musicians. There’s no correlation between the two. You can’t listen to these songs and think, “This is just a tribute.” I have no idea what to even call this modern genre, except Auto-Tune Pop, or Crap.

Jagger had to snort a lot of coke to get where he is today. I just don’t think these kids have what it takes to be that great.

What’s Old is New Again

As part of the Ambassador Program for the 3DS, (for anyone who bought the system before the price drop), I received ten free games on the 3DS. One of which I have already owned twice, in the legal sense. The Virtual Console series in the 3DS eshop offers up direct ports of existing “classic” Nintendo games, some of which are over twenty-five years old. The 10 free games are just a taste of that. The graphics and interface are all the same as the originals. This means you can play 8-Bit games on your cutting-edge, glasses-free 3D screen, in 2D. The 3DS screen is so near-magic that it’s almost impossible to explain to someone how it works, and they’re using it to play games so embarrassingly outdated that you’d have to take history lesson to learn about them.

With the free games, there’s Super Mario Bros., which I had for my Nintendo, and Super Nintendo. It’s essential to have on any Nintendo system. Except, the version I had on my SNES was better, somehow. They had updated it a little so the graphics were less blocky, and put it in a cartridge that included Super Mario Bros. 2 to 3 and a previously unreleased Japanese sequel to the first game that made more sense than America’s second. The controls for the game, as with all Virtual Console titles, make no use of the touchpad. So I was trying to figure out how to start the game, and I realized I actually had to push the Start button. Do you know how few games use the Start button in any meaningful way anymore? No one even uses it to pause these days. If you’re playing Call of Duty online, there is no pausing. You’re goddamn live. Other games, like Fallout, save so frequently that there’s no point in saving. If a Super Mutant comes up and kills you while you’re peeing, you just restart at the last doorway you went through and get back the ten seconds you lost. In the future, games like Super Mario Bros. will become unplayable because of this kind of button feature. It’d be like taking an inner-city kid and plonking him down in the woods, then expect him to know how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Not only that, but to move the cursor down to select one or two players, you have to push Select. I tapped the down button on the controller about eight times before figuring that out, and I’ve played this game about 10,000 times before in my life.

The other games included Zelda, and the sequel, as well as Donkey Kong Jr.. There was also two Gameboy Colour games, one of which was a golf game featuring Mario. I’ve played golf on handhelds before, but I had no clue what I what I was doing. I picked my club, aimed, set up the shot, hit the power swing on the dot, and still missed every single stinking time. Then there’s a couple of Nintendo games no one remembers ever having played, even if they’ve played them. One of them is Ice Climbers, and the other is Balloon Fighters. It takes about six seconds to get sick of both of them. I pity myself for ever having played games with three lives. How did I survive the 80’s? There’s three kinds of gamers: there’s your grandma (excluding the grandma from “Grandma’s Boy”) who doesn’t know how to play and only does it if you force them to or else they want to fit in, there’s your average gamer who plays recreationally, and there’s kids like the retard in the “Wizard,” who can figure out where the flute is in Super Mario Bros. 3 after having played an unreleased game for about four minutes. If you’re anyone besides the “Wizard,” you’re not going to make it through a whole game in the first sitting without having to restart at the first level by only using three lives. You can be playing conservatively for maybe eight hours, but one fireball or pit will send you back to square one. You’re being punished for playing at all. This is why gamers got this rep for being obsessive nerds in the first place: because it takes an insane amount of dedication and practice to be any good at these games. The higher your score in these games is directly related to how little you score in real life.

I don’t even remember the last time I played Zelda, and I’m running around lost on the world map trying to find the damn dungeons. I’ve died about 35 times and only have one sliver of the Triforce. Dying sets you back to square one, but with all you collectibles intact. Compare that to a modern retro-style difficulty game like Super Meat Boy. Dying sets you back to the beginning of the level, lickity split, not the WORLD.

I also received the Myths and Mavericks downloadable content pack for free on Red Dead Redemption on the 360. Red Dead Redemption is a game I would never consider trading in despite having earned 100% completion in the game. I’ve done everything that can be done, and I’ll still play it. Boycotting trading it in really seemed to pay off, though. Another publisher (Activision) might charge you $15 for the same kind of download features, like new multiplayer levels and playable characters. Rockstar previously released other downloads like this for a fee, but they included new in-game items and game-modes.

And today I beat Halo: Reach on co-op multiplayer campaign on Heroic. Heroic is their version of a “Difficult” setting. It marks the first time I’ve completed an FPS on anything other than Normal, and I had to get an assload of help. It’s not that I couldn’t finish by myself if I wanted too, but the difficulty makes it far too frustrating to be enjoyable, and constantly dying from unkillable alien assassin machines would make it take too long to do. I was paired up with another experience player today for the final level, and it still took about forty minutes more than it should. Beating it, though, meant I unlocked a new helmet in Halo: Waypoint, for use in Halo: Reach. When I play shooters, or any game, I always choose the default “Normal” setting, because to me that’s how a game should be played. If a game is designed correctly it should already be challenging enough without being frustrating. It goes back to the whole Super Mario Bros. aspect, where one too many hits will send you back to the starting gate. If you play Halo: Reach on Legendary, and die, you’re sent back to the start of the level, and the levels take about twenty to forty minutes apiece depending on how you play them. So if you get to the end and die in the final battle six times, there’s three hours of your life gone. Are they wasted? Not necessarily, or any more if you’re playing a different game. It’s all in how you enjoy spending your time.

Street Walker

I finally met someone through Street Pass on the 3DS. By my estimation, I’ve been in range of nearly 7,000 people, without any hits. Today, while having a picnic in the park, I came across another person playing Nintendogs in Street Pass Pedometer mode, which enable me to accept a free gift. I was also able to use the new Mii to play a round in each of the Street Pass games. Whoever this other person is, they’ve encountered 24 different Miis in Street Pass.

What really surprised me, though, was the range of the 3DS in Street Pass mode. If I’m right, I had to be at least 50 feet away from another human being. I was worried before that I wouldn’t be able use Street Pass unless the 3DSs were basically touching each other.

I was getting pretty desperate too. I even went to Blockbuster to see if I could bum a Mii of their 3DS display, but they had taken it down, or it was shut off.

Comic Books that killed the Comic Book Industry

Right now, DC is still rolling out it’s New 52 line of comics, after scrapping their old titles for a full reboot. Many favourite titles of mine were cancelled, like the Stephanie Brown version of Batgirl, Red Robin, Booster Gold, Power Girl, and the Justice Society of America to name a few, in favour of a fresher Jim Lee “high-collar” feel. I haven’t read enough of the new series to fully comment of whether this was a good thing, or bad thing, but I do know that it’s largely killed my interest in comics. If comic books are driven by a soap opera-esque, “What comes next?” feel to the stories, and those stories are wiped off the board, what am I left with? The suspense is completely gone. Bear in mind, that in many cases the suspense has been building over dozens of issues and decades of writing and development. It’s a lot to throw away. This is a special medium where a month will pass between the cliff-hanger and the continuation of the story. Plots can be strung along for years because of this.

This isn’t the first reboot, and it won’t be the last, but it had me thinking about ones I’ve lived through before, which made me start hating comics in general.

The worst offender was the Onslaught Saga the Marvel did back in the 90’s. It was their attempt at rebooting the Fantastic Four and Avengers comics, along with their subsidiary heroes like Captain America. It was as if the X-Men titles had grown so vast that they literally pushed the other titles into an abyss from which they would not emerge for several years. This was a time when there were no less than four Spider-Man titles in a month, and the X-men had the X-Men, the Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Wolverine, Generation X, X-Men Legacy, Deadpool and many, many more. At the comic shop I went to, I couldn’t even find new issues of the Avengers on the racks, because there was no local demand. I had to settle for West Coast Avengers. There were X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons, toys, and everything else you could want. Marvel couldn’t sell enough of the rest of their titles, so they tried reinventing them.

The Onslaught Saga was about a psychic entity that formed during a battle between Professor X and Magneto. I guess the moral of the story is to always wear your helmet. The origin story sounded suspiciously like Fan-Fic to me. These two old dudes were the father of this uber-90’s armour thing, which called itself Onslaught.

Onslaught was really into making people feel uncomfortable. Since he was half-Professor X, he had a confrontation with Jean Grey and revealed that he’s always had a sexual infatuation with her. This dated back to when she first started attending his school, when she was red headed jail bait.

Also, they’re kind of related in a Theodore Roosevelt/FDR way. So there’s this whole old pedophile/hillbilly incest thing going on. It was like if Dumbledorf told Hermione to check out his wizard staff, combined with Darth Vader telling Luke that Leia is his daughter, plus she was totally bangable. The pedo aspect of this continued as Onslaught became obsessed with Franlkin Richards, Mr.Fantastic and Invisible Woman’s son, who’s secretly the most powerful being in the world. And ten.

The story was largely nonsensical, and was dragged out across every issue of every comic they could print, at sky-high prices. Comics had never cost more than they did then. The average price of a comic was usually around $1.25, but that kept going up. The publishers said the prices were due to new inking techniques, etc., but it was a bunch of horseshit. They’d slap a gimmick on the cover like a hologram, or have a embossed foil cover, and jack the price up anywhere from $5.99 to $15.99. You could buy a hardback novel for less than a 60-page giant special comic. The comics themselves were full of ads, which should have offset the price, but it didn’t. Now, DC and Marvel are both owned by multi-billion dollar corporations and raking in millions in royalties from movies and merchandise, but the lowest cost you can get on a comic with 22 pages of print and 9 pages of ads is $2.99. That’s their bargain price.

After Onslaught, the whole comic landscape changed for Marvel. I couldn’t pick up a title for at least ten years and have the faintest clue what was going on. I know almost nothing about that time, except for this:

Everyone was given an XXX-TREME reboot, and characters were shoe-horned into an imaginary 90’s subculture point of reference. This was largely due to Image Comics being a third wheel in the Cola Wars of comics. Publisher looked at what was selling, and took things a step further than what could be considered tasteful.

TBC.

From Fee to Pay to Free to Play

The other day I download the Crimson Alliance for XBLA, and to my surprise, it was a free download. There was no trial option as with other games when I selected it, making me think that it was an error in my favour, and I’d better take full advantage of it, much like prom night. This was no the case. The game wants your money, it’s just got a new technique for doing that. You can certainly play the game, for free, but not the whole game, as it were. Free-to-play games are a concept that only cropped up about three years ago. Billions of dollars in profits later, they’re now everywhere, from facebook, to iPad, to now the notoriously stingy Xbox 360. These are games that basically market themselves inside the structure of the game, offering upgrades and perks for a fee. The Crimson Alliance is no different. When you download it, you’re essentially playing the trial version of the game, and then to unlock the full characters you play, (whatever that mean in this context, since you’re able to play as any one of three characters, but in a supposedly limited state), you either have to pay 800MS points a pop, or 1200 for all three. So right there, they already found a way to make a 1200MS point game worth 24000 points, assuming you bought each of the three characters separately, for reasons known only to you. Even then, you’re no guaranteed a full unlock of all the new bosses and levels, so you have to pay an extra 1200 for those. That’s 3200 points. Then there’s offers in the game to buy gold, using real money, converted into a points system. So you can continually pay extra for a fake currency to buy fake items in the game you can earn otherwise through play. It’s a strategy that makes financial sense for the developer, not the gamer.
The game itself isn’t that spectacular, except for the opening sequence. In it, you see a woman’s naked ass and side boob. That’s about one minute into the game. So it’s got that going for it. I doubt, though, that there’s any other nudity should you play through to the end. I’m a person who has watched many a high-art foreign film to the end credits, just because I was channel surfing and saw four seconds of nudity. I’m all for nudity in video games. With all the ultra-violence in games, it’s the last great barrier, and for some reason the most controversial. You can act out shooting up a Russian airport in one of the top selling video games of all time, but you can’t run around topless with Lara Croft without modding your game. Of course, if it becomes common place, the media will start blaming every teen pregnancy on video games just as they do school shootings.
The game’s really just an updated version of Gauntlet, with a sort of WoW look to it. Apparently, by buying all five titles in the XBLA Summer of Arcade, you can get it for free, but I don’t want even one of those titles, let alone five, and one of them requires the near-useless Kinect.

America, F**k Yeah!

I played the Xbox Live Arcade Ugly Americans “Armageddocalypse,” for about three minutes, before having to turn it off. It wasn’t because it’s a bad game, I have no idea if it is or not. All I know is that when Lenny found a minor power up, he spouted out a triumphant, “Fuck yes!” There was a six year old in the room, so that’s a no-no.
It was pretty awesome, though. When you think about it, video game character plod through their worlds gathering items with almost no fanfare. Maybe if Link finds the Triforce, he’ll hold it up above his head towards the camera for a few seconds, which is pretty weird, when you think about it. Does he know we’re there, watching him? Does he know he’s just a puppet in a video game? What kind of life is that? Maybe that’s why his interest in Zelda at the end of the game is pretty lukewarm. He just killed about a thousand monsters just to free her, and all he gets out of it is some first-base. Does he understand she’s just a collection of pixels, and he’s a soulless program with no affixed sexual presence due to a libido made of ones and zeroes? Fuck.
Anyway, I think Lenny’s approach to being in a game is a little more refreshing to what I’m use to. When Gordon Freeman gets the Gravity Gun, he doesn’t act like a kid at Christmas. He just silently starts grabbing things and throws them around. Likewise, he doesn’t tell his buddy to go fuck himself with the very same crowbar he’s being offered to defend himself against an entire invasive dimension of alien parasites. The whole first-person perspective in games really takes away any sense of joy the character might have. That’s not just a problem with the camera always being from the character’s view. In the cutscenes, the same characters show no real reaction beyond, “Grrr… I’m serious!” Master Chief spends an entire game trying to get back an AI that can win the globe-spanning war of annihilation he’s in, whom he also happens to be in love with, and all he really does is kind of nods at her.
The only kind of celebration in games usually comes at the end of a level. Maybe Sonic will flash a “V” sign at the camera. (He wants you to know he knows you’re there, and he can kill you at any time when you’re sleeping.) But strangely, he doesn’t care about the hundreds of gold rings he’s accumulated over the course of that level. If you happened across a solid gold ring spinning in the air in the middle of a grassy field, and you could magically automatically deposit it in an invisible bank by touching it, wouldn’t you freak out a little? Sonic doesn’t need a day job because of those rings. They’re just lying around everywhere, and no one has even thought of taking them. Maybe he’s the only one who can see them? It would explain his positive and upbeat attitude, despite the very real dangers of running into a wall of spike at a hundred miles an hour.
I could stand for a little more casual swearing from my game avatars. If I pick up a gattling gun, I want them searing up a streak about how awesome that is. Then I want them to give me a little, “Fuck you! *BLAM* Fuck you! *BLAM* Fuck you! *BLAM* You’re cool. Fuck you! *BLAM*” while I’m mowing down my enemies. Games are supposed to be more “realistic” these days, which is bullshit. If you want realistic, show the enemies you just shot writhing on the ground in agony for twenty minutes after you shoot them. None of this respawning shit.
Really, the thing that got me the most about those two words, was the voice acting. I was absolutely sold. How many time have you reached a major achievement in a game, and one of the characters walks up to you and gives you a, “Hey, nice work!” You just fucking wiped out the super mutants and saved the entire State’s drinking water. Show a little emotion, you ungrateful shit. Although, to be fair, to the casual observer looking at a trail of dead bodies behind you, you’re probably worried I might set off another nuke.