Next stop Preachyville

One of the few meager joys I manage to squeeze, blood like, from the arid stone that is my life, is watching the Games Industry adjust to radical market shifts (exiting I know). It reminds me of that old show, Harry and the Hendersons. You know… the one where the average American family (stupid husband, homely wife and sarcastic kids) ends up living with bigfoot. I knew when I was watching the show, that Harry just wants to make the Hendersons happy, but I also knew that no matter what he tries to do, be it vacuuming the carpet or making us a nice cake, he’s going to find an incredibly destructive way to fuck it all up.
The games industry is Harry.

“Hey Harry! When is Duke Nukem Forever coming out? Also, the new Diablo game is way too bright. Sort that shit out!”

One such market shift came just after a small Derby based developer discovered (or rediscovered) that adding a pair of triangles to a cuboid made not only one of the crudest representations of a pair of tits to grace our culture since we stopped painting on cave walls in Woolly Mammoth blood, but also a huge fuck-off pile of money. Gold watches all round!

Although I was too young to appreciate it at the time, having just mastered the art of turning on the telly without jamming my slimy fingers into the plug sockets, the industry’s response to Tomb Raider and it’s polygonally busty heroine, Lara Croft was nothing short of downright hilarious… providing you happened to be male.
Seeing Croft’s bizarrely angled head adorning the front page of then popular fashion-cum-smut-rag ‘The Face’ was amusing enough, especially considering that the technical restraints of the time meant that even a full blown pre-rendered image of the buxom grave robber looked more like the Master Control Program from Tron than the sultry acrobat the art team had in mind. But it was the industry’s reaction to the big pile of money Tomb Raider brought in (which was somewhere between a fat marketer screaming “KACHING” in a crowded church and Golum leaping into the volcano after the ring in Lord of the Rings) that really tickled, and continues to tickle, my funny bone.

“I heard if you complete the game without saving you get to see her naked”
Now I’m certainly not blaming Tomb Raider for the likes of Ninja Gaiden, Heavenly Sword or even the more direct demeaning rip offs of the time (Deathtrap dungeon anybody?). In fact I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a programmer present at the unveiling of the world’s first game Tennis for Two who didn’t immediately think “You know what would be awesome? If this had tits in it” but it was Tomb Raider that tried to sell us the idea that no matter how much of a improbable sex object your character is, you can get away with it as long as she (ugh) “Kicks enough but”.

“Good show old chap! Quite the Marvel! But if I might make one small suggestion? A pair of mammaries. Yes, perhaps two pairs… right there… in front of the net”

This is where the Industry goes all Harry on us. After the rip roaring success of Tomb Raider, Harry tried desperately to give us a similar experience without really understanding what was drawing us (or at least some of us) to the game in the first place. That’s Harry’s biggest flaw. He always wants to give us what he thinks we want. He just wanted to give us a nice cake, but instead he took a great big steaming sasquatch shit on the carpet.

A swarm of marketers chase Gabe Newell in an attempt to make him put more breasts in Portal 2.

Now we’ve entered another age of gaming. An age where your girlfriend has a level 70 druid in World of Warcraft and your mom spends her time playing animal Crossing on her DS. There’s been another market shift and it’s safe to say new gamers, like your mom for example, don’t really want to play Deathtrap Dungeon.

“So is the type of game you like to play Grey?”
“No Mom I-”
“It’s no wonder you don’t have a girlfriend. Tsk tsk”

The industry’s reaction so far has been typically Harry like. They’re too terrified of releasing their King Kong grip on the male gamer market to make major games towards both sexes, despite the fact developers like Valve have shown that games that don’t show women as base sexual objects can be just as successful as those that do, and they’re equally scared that this new market, as lucrative a market as it is, is eventually going to dry up, so the money they sink into female friendly game development is just enough to churn out steaming piles of condescending shit.

What Harry has failed to realize is that it’s his desperation to please the lowest common denominator for fear of not being able to find a new market that’s driving away female gamers in the first place.
Thankfully the girls haven’t taken this lying down (hoho). So while the male gamer population seems content to let their wallets and bitchy forum posts speak for them female gamers seem more intent on speaking directly for themselves, usually in very loud voices to shell shocked developers who really don’t know what misogyny actually means but they sure as hell don’t want their company associated with it.

“I… I… Oh god Dave. I met a real one… what? What? No they’re nothing like Aeris. Nothing at all.”

It isn’t limited to the gender revolution either. Want another example of Harry fucking things up? Look at his reaction to casual games. What does he do when he realises there’s a market for accessable, easy to understand but fun games? Does he start working on new ways to make games more accessible while still providing the same amount of depth? No. He just shovels a big pile of shit right on top of us.

So what’s the moral of this drawn out story? Simple. Things are going to change, eventually for the better, but before that can happen we have to face up to our own role in this farce. If the games industry is Harry then we’re the Hendersons. And it’s about time we showed that hairy bastard who’s boss.

Doctorpus M.D: “All the world’s stage 1, and all the men and women merely goombas”

Like many other Xbox live users with few spare gamer points in their pockets I spent most of the weekend pouring over the latest bit of eye candy-cum game-art Braid and came away from the experience with a largely positive impression. It’s a beautiful piece of work and it’s sold amazingly well for a game so at odds with mainstream game marketing (although not well enough to spare us the occasional livejournal-esque whine from unfortunately named game creator Jonathan Blow)
Before the game decided it was time to start melting my brain with a furious barrage of time fuckery I initially mistook the game for a Mario clone filtered through a Monet painting, a concept that filled me with pretentious art-wanker glee. I was actually just a little bit disappointed when the whole ‘Sands of Time’ style stuff kicked in, but not much. It was these first few minutes of arse-on-head baddie stomping that got me thinking about how we treat the games that are so important to our history and what we’re leaving behind for the generations that may not innately understand our love for plumbers and oddly colored hedgehogs.

Braid. Gorgeous. Go play it.

As any technology evolves it becomes increasingly user friendly, even if the complexity of that technology is growing exponentially. Game design tools are no exception. When the PC turned from the very definition of avarice into something remotely affordable the public’s demand for the tools to create our own game content began popping up on crude message boards the world over. Developers began supplying aspiring game creators with a game’s source code, then a simple level editor and then when the amateur game creator’s demanded even more, developers starting releasing the very tools used to create their games to the public. Some developers even saw a market for products with game production specifically in mind and they’ve been a staple of PC software ever since. With these tools and with no training or instruction save what they could scrounge off the internet amateur games designers have created not only extra content but they’ve made game modifications that grew to ecclipse the original game completely. It’s not hard to imagine then that sometime in the future we’re going to see a Video game creation suite so robust and user friendly it completely revolutionizes the industry. The Macromedia FLASH of game design.

While every game fan out of their early teens is crying out for something new and creative FLASH based games are taking the internet by storm. These games although lacking the budget and manpower of full fledged releases are way ahead in terms of originality, creativity and downright good design.
That’s right. A format designed originally for developing porn ads and informing people they can win an IPod if they punch a monkey in the face three times is home to more original, clever and downright great games than any of the three gaming consoles combined. Why? Because FLASH takes away the biggest barrier to entry in the game development market. The need for programming knowledge.

A first person shooter from the future.

Although hardly straightforward game development in FLASH is a breeze compared to the complexities of a language such as C++. By taking away the programming barrier you remove a problem that dogs the development process. Current game development plays out more like a game of Chinese whispers with the design staff passing on information to the programmers who then have to pass it on to the game engine. How much of the message is lost when it’s passed along from designer to programmer and so forth? How much of an idea do we lose when an idea is ‘translated’ by someone who might not understand it? Wouldn’t it be better if the designer could pass on the message to the computer directly?

That’s what a user friendly game development format would offer. The chance for artists to deliver a game without it being filtered through the minds of other people.

This shift in the development process would spill over into the amateur community as well. Anyone with a computer and an idea could pick up a copy of this game creation suite and compete on level footing with a well funded development team. The quality of the game will be decided not by who has the most expensive technology or who head hunts the best programmers but by whose design is better. It’d be a battle of ideas instead of money.

In this picture you can see how the EA designer on the left has beaten the amateur designer on the right.

I believe we’d end up with a Games community as opposed to a Games industry. With set up costs being so low perhaps the community could take a few steps away from the profit orientated movie like market it currently inhabits and perhaps takes a cue (heh) from the theatre. I’d like to see a games market where the classic games that shaped gaming history are treat and cared for as publicly owned pieces of art rather than corporate assets to be strip mined and slung on a lunch box every few years. This is all sounding a bit ‘Red Dawn’ I know and I’m sure the marketers and lawyers most developers keep in their respective dungeons would start flagelating themselves in public before letting this happen but I would like for any game creator to be free and able to make his own version of Super Mario or his own Pacman. He should be able to take Tomb Raider and reinvent it, remake it, make it relevant or make it irrelevant, he should be able to take an idea and add a little bit of himself to it. Just like a theatre director would with Shakespeare. Games could be art if we just started treating them as such.

“To Pac or not to Pac. That is the question.
Waka Waka Waka”

Developers would be free to re imagine a license as they saw fit so while some people may love the classic version of Silent Hill 2 others may enjoy the absurdist take where James is chased around ‘Disney Hill’ by a terrifying mascot called ‘Goofy Head’. Didn’t like Grand Theft Auto? How about a version that’s set in Feudal Japan? The idea that any one developer knows the only ‘right’ way to do a game is absurd and I think we’d all be better off by trying versions that offer different points of view.

Rockstar’s 2023 take on ‘The Legend of Zelda’ did not sit well with fans of the classic.

Not only would this offer a greater degree of choice, female gamers for example might appreciate Gears of War more if it had an all female cast, but it could also allow developers to create games that raise issues but still remain fun or they could question the very nature of games themselves. How about a game where you spend your time carefully putting gold coins in question marked boxes only to watch helplessly as a maraudering plumber jumps on them?
If want video games to be accepted as a valid art form then we need games that makes us think, make us consider, and above all, challenge us and I don’t think the current market is capable of giving us those games.

If you’re interesting in Braid read a sterling review of it here

Procedurally generated offense

Procedural generation (Hereby PG), now one of the industry’s buzzwords of choice since it became apparent that Will Wright’s Spore will be using it to generate a universe stuffed to the brim with sentient dicks, is a process by which level designers admit they have no clue what they’re doing and just let a computer take over. Worms is probably the most easy to understand example of PG, instead of designing each level individually what the developers implemented was a system by which a string of numbers would determine the terrain of a particular level, essentially making the possible level variations close to infinite.
Now back when games came on foppy disks, cassettes, stone tablets and what have you, PG was pretty much mandatory. Early games developers had to work within memory constraints so brutal that adding predefined levels proved impossible. Instead the programmers used algorythms to generate the levels on the user end meaning that while yes, ‘The Sentinel’ did technically have ten god damn thousand levels, after the first one most of them were created by randomly mashing the number keys.

The sentinel. An early example of button mashing always works. Even when it comes to game design.

As media storage space increased developers found they could add levels as actual game assets rather than just strings of code giving them unprecidented freedom when it came to detail and design. Of course this backfired wonderfully because we, that is the gaming public, started demanding a lot more from our games. Gone were the days of random surrealist mazes in space and in their place came more detailed and logical environments. Unlike a pacman maze you can’t just pull a decent video game level out of your ass, you have to have some degree of aptitude for it meaning all of a sudden developers had to start hiring level designers.

Now of course a level designed with a specific purpose in mind is always going to be a better than a level made by having your computer eat a bunch of digits then vomit them back out, but there’s still the odd developer who uses PG when it comes to game design. Diablo is one of the better examples of random level generation done well. Sure the dungeons all look a bit alike but the layout changes were just enough to keep the grinding for loot from getting stale. At least for a while. On the other hand Hellgate London took random dungeon generation and complete fucked it up. Ensuring that in most quests the Super important Macguffin that’s supposedly guarded by the most vicious of hell’s denizens spawns right next to the dungeon entrance which makes the game’s antagonists look retarded.

But as technology moves on, female character’s breasts get bigger, and we continue on the inevitable march towards a game with a four barreled rocket launching shot gun, procedurally generated content seems to be on the up and up again.

Spore uses PG in a particularly innovative way.

If there’s one part of a game design team that could easily be replaced with a computer it’d be the writers. Ever noticed how video games seem to follow a standard plot with very little deviation save the colour of the main character’s trenchcoat and how many guns he can fire at once? So have EA and right now they’re busy eyeing up the design department considering how many bearded English majors they can fire and replace with a robots. Next step, the development team.

Actually this isn’t as bad as it seems. Imagine if we had a game that could tailor itself to your tastes? You could literally define what kind of game you want to play and it could generate it on the fly. You get to choose the protagonist, the setting, the message, what kind of game it is, how hard it is, when and where it’s set, and then your games console would generate a game that I guarantee would be better than half the shit on the market today.
Now that I’ve got you all excited, there is however one little caveat. How exactly would the ESRB (or whatever they’ve replaced it with by then, probably the inquistition) give a rating to a game like that? How can you recommend an age group for a game that changes itself according to the player’s demands? I’m sure there’d be age restrictions but how long would it take for someone to crack the protection and start generating games about throwing puppies off cliffs or eating children? I mean sure I might want to play a game with a well rounded, intelligent protagonist and female characters that don’t dress like they’re auditioning for a position at an escort agency but is that what little twelve year old Jimmy wants? Probably not, and therein lies the problem.
The biggest problem with a computer designing our entertainment, and this sounds stupid I know, is that they’re not human. But even marketers were human at one point and they’re at least constrained by the need to look at least remotely decent and respectable so the public doesn’t burn them out of their nests and lynch them, but a computer isn’t restrained by social opinion.

A swarm of marketers attack an IGN reviewer.

The computer will give us whatever we want without considering if it’s what we need or if it’s even remotely good for us. Case in point: Little Jimmy’s parents buy him a copy of the game and he sticks it in his xbox 720 and fires it up. The computer asks him a quick survey, checks out his internet searches and maybe does fancy shit with electrodes and eventually comes out with little Jimmy’s idea of a perfect game which is probably going to end up being something like this.

An awesome idea to be sure but not exactly what Jimmy’s parents had in mind when they bought that computer to help him with his homework.

The opposite end of the spectrum is just as bad. It’s well documented in films like Terminator and Wargames that the more intelligent a computer gets the more likely it is to stop running minesweeper and finding porn for us and start hating us with every silicon inch of its flawless electronic being. A computer running this game would spend every hour of every day learning about you, your habits, your likes, dislikes, aversions, and crushes. It’ll trawl through the internet till it finds that geocities site you created back when you were 12 and it will store your teenage ramblings for later use. It’ll rummage through your Ebay receipts and web history, it will record your msn conversations, it will take note of which friends you talk to and which ones you lie to so you don’t have to deal with them. Let’s be honest. It’s only a matter of time before this machine absolute loathes you. Which is when you wake up to a game like this.

Three gaming jobs that suck in real life

As I talked about earlier this week Escapism is the little white rabbit that leads Alice down the gaming hole and turns her into a human meatslab that lives on cheetos and posts ten thousand word JRPG plot summaries on IGN FAQS. In short Escapism is gaming. So it shouldn’t surprise you then that not only are game characters designed to satisfy our demands for escapism but so are the worlds they inhabit.
Designers quickly realized that not only could the characters that populated their made up worlds be completely detached from reality so could their profession. Take Crazy Taxi for example. They took a job known mostly for uncomfortable working conditions, horrific levels of tedium and racism, and made it into something awesome. So what else have they lied to us about?

3: “Oh God there’s shit everywhere” – Plumbing

Before I started my career in not getting paid to write about games on the internet I actually tried my hand at being a plumber’s apprentice. Lured in by promises of hefty paychecks and nubile big busted housewives who needed their pipes servicing I approached the job with the bright eyed, cheerful attitude people posses right up until they have to spend a day up to their knees in someone else’s shit. Needless to say the job wasn’t for me.

Super Mario would have you believe that plumbing is in fact a mystical adventure complete with princesses, rainbows and drugs that give you magical powers but the unfortunate truth is that yes, you’ll be mooching around (quite often green) pipes but usually with the intention of removing what’s blocking them and let you tell you, it’s not often piles of floating gold coins. There’s money to be made for sure if you don’t mind defrauding vulnerable old ladies but the anything else the game tries to pass off on your is pure bullshit. You’ll probably encounter some turtles but not the kind you expect and the only mushrooms you’ll find are those growing on the inside of your lungs after you accidentally inhale a big chestful of human waste.

Unfortunately. No. Not like this.

You don’t even get to fight giant alligators because rumors of giant fire breathing lizards roaming the sewers of New York are unfortunately entirely false and the only princess your likely to come across is ‘Princess’ an aging hooker whose decapitated head was blocking some Yuppie’s kitchen sink.

What Mario promises you: Hot chicks who want to make cakes for you, gold coins, drugs, adventure.

What you get: Human waste. Salmonella.

2: “CHARGE!” – Soldier

It’s unusual how games are the only form of media that get away with trying to tell us that the second world war, which killed 72 million people (47 million of which were civilians), was in fact, totally awesome. If a movie tried to show WW2 as anything but a series of tragic death scenes with a haunting ethereal soundtrack it’d be bounced out of the theaters by angry critics before you could say “Spielberg” But if video games are to believed the Normandy landings were like a 1940’s Thunder Mountain with allied soldiers lining up to experience it ‘just one more time’ before they had to go back home. If there’s still any veterans alive by the time the next generation grows up they’re going to find themselves answering a whole different set of questions. Gone are the innocent days of “What was it really like Grandpa?” and instead kids will be asking questions like ” Did you ever headshot any n00bs with the springfield Gramps?”

I… wait… what?

Getting shot in real life is a deeply traumatizing event that causes you, in most cases, to shit yourself instantly, but in games it’s barely more than an inconvenience often easily solved by walking over the next medpak you see or by simply waiting a few seconds for your wounds to heal via magic. As for mental side effects like say, horrifying flashbacks of your friends being roasted alive by flame throwers aren’t really an issue either. The only flashback you’ll be having is playing the game again in ‘Hardcore’ mode.

Even if you do bite the bullet, and by bullet I mean about 400 of them, your ‘death’ is barely even a setback as a quick tap of the quickload key brings you back Jesus Christ style to unleash some groundhog day-esque whupass on your Nazi murderers. Forget rigorous training and harsh assault courses, Boot camp lasts at most about five minutes, just long enough for a guy doing a bad impression of Tom Sizemore to teach you how to throw a grenade before you’re dumped into a firefight in the middle of France.

What Call of Duty promises you: Honour, glory, invincibility, the ability to drive any vehicle and fire any weapon without training, the occasional zombie.

What you get: Shot in the face, shot in the throat, shot in the back, shot in the ass, shot in the legs, shot in the eye, shot in the balls, blown up by tanks, blown up by planes, blown up by blimps, post traumatic stress disorder, dysentery.

1: “So I was on the toilet last night and…” – Doctor

Med school is an 8 year nightmare of constant work and study which can reduce even the most hardy student into a sniveling prescription abusing wreck. It doesn’t get any better when you qualify either. Not only must you know the illnesses and intricacies of the human body so intimately that everyone you love seems only a few heart murmurs away from instant death you also have to practice being nice to obese women so they don’t sue you when you accidentally leave a thermometer stuck up their rectum at the end of a 28 hour shift at the clinic. Games often show the best part of Medicine, that is, the part about making people not die an gloss over all the hard work, research and above all, the piles of paperwork, that come with it. This is true of just about every game ever made. When was the last time you saw Gordon Freeman crack open one of those medkits and use the supplied tweezers to pull a manhack out of his forehead? How exactly do green herbs cure zombie bites? Do you eat them or what? In gaming the medical profession has generally been reduced to leaving medical kits scattered around the place so the wounded can just walk over them and heal instantly. No need for expensive and difficult to perform procedures. No need for the slow process of actually extracting bullets and stituring wounds. Hell, most fps characters don’t even bother removing the enormous amounts of lead their bodies are riddled with which presents a whole boat load of problems when it comes to airport security. Old school games take this even further. In pretty much every brawler ever made no one ever uses medical supplies to treat their broken ribs and torn muscles, they just eat some god roast turkey or chug a soda they found in a dumpster.

“Lung Cancer? Please, step into my office”

Games like Trauma Centre tell us that surgery lasts closer to 2 minutes than 8 hours and that you’ll spend most of your medical career defusing bombs and using lasers to fight intelligent mutating bacteria instead of treating the usual assortment of skin sores, genitals legions, and extracting foreign objects from people’s rectums and none of it’s true, not one tiny little bit of it. These games would have us believe being good at ‘operation’ the board game makes us all excellent doctors.
But by far there’s no better example of Medical escapism than Team fortress 2. You never see a medic putting a heavy’s torn off hand on ice so he can sew it back on later or trying to hold a scouts guts in while performing vital surgery and you sure as hell never see him applying topical cream to the Sniper’s haemorrhoids. Instead he shoots his team mates with a healing gun. If that doesn’t sum up video games entirely, I don’t know what does.

What they promise you: Life saving techniques at your fingertips, magical powers that let you slow down time to perform medical procedures, exciting cases in volving helocopter accidents, a gun that makes people invincible.

What you get: Old women with anal prolapses, bodily discretions, close contact with all kind of wonderful contagious diseases, shit loads of paper work, student loans up your arsehole

On Escapism

Chances are you’ve seen that new Machima video that’s floating around the net, the one where the ‘World of Warcraft’ characters take a break from slaying dragons and the general humdrum of Azeroth life to kill some time playing the amusingly mundane ‘World of Workcraft’ This isn’t a particularly new joke, I’m pretty sure Pratchett did it pretty early in the Diskworld series but it was well made and managed to squeeze a few chuckles out of me but more importantly, it got me thinking.
Escapism is a big part of what draws us to video games and for the past two decades considering the average gamer it’s understandable. It’s not hard to imagine that fat, neckbearded guy with the B.O and dragon shirt who seems to follow you around Electronics Boutique wanting to pretend to be a muscled barbarian or demon slaying ladies man. Since the advent of the playstation things seem to have shifted, gaming was no longer a niche hobby, or at least that’s what the marketing told us and all of a sudden the cool guys at school were talking to you about Gran Turismo.

When the PS1 came out. Gamers started actually looking like the people in the adverts. Which is pretty horrifying in it’s own right.

The wii pushed it even further, stretching the term gamer till it covered everyone from Oprah to your grandmother and MMORPG’s are now appealing more to your average Joe than your average gamer. In China, after a hard days work in the office, middle aged professionals are dropping into their local PCBANG (a very popular chain of cyber cafe there’s even one here in Kelowna.) to spend their free time grinding and questing for loot in Fantasy Westward Journey and they’re paying through the god damn nose for it. What’s worse is they’re playing so much they’re putting hardcore gamers to shame.
So as more and more of us pile into MMORPG’s, worlds where success is inevitable providing you invest enough time, we’re seeing more and more pressure to succeed in these virtual worlds. As their importance to our social lives grows as will the amount of work we need to put in to maintain our social standing. While your dad worked every day god sent to buy a car bigger than the guy next door’s you’ll be spending every hour god sends murdering Yetis to get your hand on that sword of Ice because you’re damned if you’re going to be the only person in your guild who doesn’t have one.
We’ve made our haven, the place we go to relax even worse than real life so when the player needs a break from all the pressure, all the stress and all the demands of online gaming, where is he/she going to go? I think we’re going to go full circle. Oh yes. We’re going to play sports.
Imagine two teenagers. They’re outcasts, loners, no guild to speak of and they both feel abandoned by a level up system that doesn’t care. They’d turn to drugs but no one sells them anymore because they’re too busy farming for force gems on the latest Star Wars MMO. They take to the parks, spending hours moping and talking about how ‘TR4GIK M4RTYR’ from the server next door was born with a silver warhammer in his mouth.
“Hell” they’ll say “I don’t even like Universe of Warcraft”

It’s at that moment that they discover a round disk, or perhaps it’s given to them by an old man, who dissapears soon after. They stare at it stupidly, like the monkey holding the bone in 2001 while the Monolith looms in the background. Then one of them draws back his arm and throws it with all his mouse clicking might.

It flies.

They have rediscovered the frisbee.

A gamer attempts to rediscover tennis.

Those terrible TV movies they make to encourage housewives and the unemployed to develop Zoloft addictions would take on an entirely new slant. Instead of films that show us the real life horrors of internet porn addictions (apparently clicking on the image search in google is the first step in a bloody journey that ends with you murdering your family) we’d have films about virile young men who fight back against adversity and online gamer elitism.

Jerry is a special young man, he lacks higher brain functions and can barely string two words together but he was born with huge rippling muscles and a thick cranium. The bullies in his virtual school are merciless, mocking him for his badly equipped level 2 shaman and lack of macro skills. His parents don’t understand him, his dad just wants him to go into the family necomancy class and his mother is too stoned on gold farming to care. But Jerry has found something. Something that completes him. Something that only he can do. Jerry has found football.

“Heartwarming” – The New York Times.

They threaten to send him away, they threaten to have him commited. But Jerry fights the power. He joins an underground “Football league’ and begins learning all he can from a grizzled old black man who makes him wash his car and catch flies out of the air by body slamming them. In the films gripping finale Jerry must face off not only against the New York Manglers the most evil team on the illegal NFL circuit but he must also deal with his entire hometown coming to hurl bottles and heckle him. But as they watch Jerry as he plays valliantly despite the fact he’s had both of his arms broken by cheating, steroid abusing Yankees. They begin to see and respect his sportsman spirit. They begin to see the hero inside.

“I love you son. But I can’t let you do this. Football aint’ no thing for a man to play. My pa was a Necrogamcner and his Pa was a Necromancer.”
“I know you only want the best for me Pa. But I got’s to this. The footballs in my blood. Even if it ain’t in yours.”
“If you do this son. You do it alone”
“If I have to Pa. If I have to.”

With only one second to go on the clock Jerry calls a timeout (his coach was killed by a yankee sniper) and delivers a heartwarming Oscar winning speech.
“I jus’ want people to accept me for what I am. I want ya’ to see you don’t have to be level 70 ta be a man, ya don’t have to do what ya parents did.I ain’t ever goin’ ta be a good Necromancer Pa. I aint got the heart for it. I can’t read too good and I aint’ ever gonna’ spec prop for pally but what I can do is crush a man’s motherfuckin’ spine”

and then he does.

And he wins the game.

Jerry’s parents, the people of his town and even the bullies who used to mock him, go crazy carry a triumphant Jerry off as the credits roll.

Then they’re all crushed under his bodyweight because their bodies have atrophied after years of no exercise and poor diet.

Three Mini-games that will improve gaming

Videogames, unlike real life games like Jenga and sexual intercourse, can all be broken down into a series of simple games no matter how complex the end result may be. Every game is made up of dozens if not thousands of these sub games that add up, in some cases, to a great whole.

What game design actually looks like.

As an example I offer up the humble First person shooter. The purpose of the shooter is, of course, to shoot things such as Nazi’s, aliens and Arabs but there are times when, unfortunately, the player will find themselves without anything to shoot. It’s during these times that some of the smaller games that make up said shooter come to the fore. So while waiting for the ’shooter’ part to kick in again players will find themselves enjoying old school classics such as ‘virtual medpack scavenger’ (now abandonware unfortunately), ‘red key finding simulator’ or the ever popular ‘Mother fucking jumping puzzle Adventure’. Now while not all of these sub-games are that good and some do in fact take away from the end experience some sub-games add a much needed respite from the main game mechanics. The best example of sub-game design can be found in Epic’s Gears of War. No… wait… sure Gears of War had it’s faults, a monochromatic colour scheme and terrible characters being the most prominent but even someone as jaded as I has to admit that Epic did a great job of turning the simple act of reloading into a satisfying experience. No longer was ducking behind a wall to reload your Warhammer rip off machine gun a chore, you could still achieve something pertinent to the game even though you doing something that was essentially the opposite of shooting. That, my friends, is good game design.

Now there are plenty of other games out there that could benefit from better sub game design. Allow me to show you a few of my ideas.

1: Manual tit jiggling

If there’s one thing we’ve established in the last twenty years, it’s that gamers, a largely male demographic, really like tits. We like looking at tits, we like talking about tits and if the ESRB weren’t such tight asses we’d probably already be playing games that are entirely about tits. In fact I think we might already have those. But one of the issues with current game design is that while bust size is increasing exponentially, so is cutscene length. Now sitting still and watching an animated cutscene is fine the first time through, it grows stale quickly on the second or third viewing. Since most developers seem to think that unskippable cutscenes are the future, the garden variety player often finds himself wandering off to make a sandwich and returning just in time to see his character get raped to death by orcs so the whole cutscene begins again. It’s a vicious cycle. Developers have tried to counter player boredom in a variety ways, although none of them have thought of making the dialogue more succinct. Instead they’ve opted for quick time events in an attempt to force the players to pay attention for fear of having their character crushed to death by a boulder while they were out taking a dump. So why don’t we just take this concept a little further?

Every time a female character turns, shifts her weight or breathes in, the player using the left and right analogue sticks or waggle on the wii mote, must ensure her breasts bounce and sway with just enough force to be entirely ridiculous. Players are awarded bonus points and weapons for pulling off ‘tit-tricks’ such as the ‘to and fro’, the ‘Mexican wave’ and ‘around the world’ . A player too inept to make her tits bounce correctly will have their character killed by a boulder, any player that doesn’t bounce them at all will have his character killed and his game save erased.

2: Teabagging simulator

Teabagging is more than just crouching over a dead combatant’s face like an armoured German porn star. For some it is a way of life. A ritual that gives meaning to an otherwise vapid and pointless existence. Players must be sharp and quick on their feet for teabagging opportunities are hard to come by. Not only must they defeat their opponent in battle but they must do in such a way that their corpse lands face up and in a secluded area so they won’t be easy pickings for bigger more skilled teabaggers as they approach their prone victim. Once they reach their target however Teabaggers quickly find that the actual act of teabagging isn’t well implemented in games. How is it done? By hammering the crouch button. BORING! How could we liven that up?
With a mini-game!

When you’ve reached the optimal position for nutsack to eyeball contact the game’s ‘teabagging engine’ will load allowing the player much more control over his lower body. Players, using the left and right analogue sticks or by waggling the wii mote, must ensure their avatar remains balanced while lowering their junk in a smooth, rhythmic fashion. No one likes a clumsy teabagger!

New players should be warned however that some unscrupulous people have resorted to using automatic teabagging programs. These programs, called ‘Bagbots’ by seasoned players, give the hacking player a great advantage when it comes to mid battle teabagging. If you suspect someone is using a bagbot please report them to the server admin immediately.

3: Grind solitaire

Massively multi-player Online Role playing games are not named ‘Massively multi-player clicking simulators’ and I for one think the games should reflect this. People play MMORPG’s to give their lives, which are unfufilling and boring, purpose and to achieve something, like slaying a dragon or talking to other people, which is very hard to do in real life. Unfortunately big MMORGP developers like Blizzard seem to have misunderstood their target demographic which is why they bog the poor players down with an unnecessarily arduous game play element they call ‘Combat’. To be honest it would be best if they got rid of this tired concept, which never worked in the first place and simply allowed players to access the best armour and equipment by paying a small fee. Or if they’re feeling in need of a challenge, why not simply have an on-screen counter that counts down from 50 hours then levels up the player’s character when it reaches zero? At least then the player can go and learn how to tango or something.

But if developers are going to insist on including tired, click heavy combat, into their games why not freshen it up with some mini-games? Nothing takes the ‘oh god I wish I was dead’ feeling out of killing 50,000 boars for XP than a nice game of solitaire! Or maybe space invaders? Or maybe the player could be forced into a game of trivial pursuit with a deranged mass murderer who decapitates one of their loved ones each time they get an answer wrong. Anything would be better than this grind shit.

Bonus: Metal Gear Solid 4 Death theme Hero

Instead of sitting through a 30 minute death scene for each character the player has to play an awesome solo on their Metal Gear Solid 4 violin peripheral.

4 Reasons why I thought Metal Gear Solid 4’s story sucked

So the few rockstars among us with enough disposable income to splurge on Sony’s big bad black box have finally had the opportunity to have one last series ending romp as old fan favourite Solid Snake. The game delivers, by most accounts, a fantastic ending to a great series and has sold very well despite the PS3’s lagging market penetration. There’s few complaints on the gameplay front, aside from the fact there just ‘isn’t enough of it’ and the story seems to be getting just short of universal acclaim so surely I’d be hard pressed to find fault in this wonderful example of human endeavor? Wrong. How long have you been on the internet?
Now before you load up your email client and flex your fingers in anticipation of a ten thousand word email that explains both exactly why I happen to be wrong about Metal Gear Solid 4 and that I also happen to fuck pigs, hear me out. MGS4 is good yes, and the story is better than most games that centre on grizzled soldiers murdering people but it’s not ‘that’ good. And I intend to tell you why.

1: Oh woe is Snake!

One of the reasons the fans have stuck with MGS so long, even when it seems the developers hate us, is that Snake just happens to be a profoundly likable character. He’s tough yes, grizzled in a medium rare kind of way but he’s also rather well educated and erudite for a man who’s essentially a state sponsored serial murderer. He’s also sporting a quirky sense of humour so it’s not unusual to hear him throwing out the odd one liner inbetween sessions of intense philosophical debates and stealthy neck breaking.
Now from the very first screenshot of MGS4 it was rather obvious that Konami were going for a rather tragic slant. One look at Snake who now looks more like a high school math teacher than the enstubbled hero of old and it was clear that things were perhaps not going to end entirely well for our razor shy protagonist.
What we didn’t expect however was for Konami to express a kind of pathalogical hatred of Snake ensuring the entire game centre around him being miserable.

This picture essentially sums up the whole game.

Now having Snake contract vague clone disease-itis was a good idea. It adds a layer of pathos to the game. Snakes deteriating health means that even if he wins, he still loses. But Konami begin pushing the whole melodramatic misery thing very hard very quickly. Just as we’re warming up to the fact Snake is going the way of your great grandmother it’s also revealed that even if old age doesn’t get him he’s going to have pop himself anyway thanks to a dubious bit of pseudo science involving nanomachine death viruses. Then he accidentally kills his mum. The game reaches a retarded fever pitch of melodramatic misery however during the scene where Snake finds himself being mother fucking microwaved while his girlfriend is stolen by a character known most for shitting himself.
One of these tradgedies or perhaps a combination of two would have had quite an effect but the part where Snake is turned into an elderly hot pocket just made me feel like I was being manipulated. Like they were poking Snake with pins just to make me cry. Worse is, the story never really explains why Snake has crawl his way through the tunnel of burning pain. I mean snakes survives the whole ordeal and even goes on to go 12 rocky style rounds with brother on top of a nuclear submarine and win so why exactly couldn’t we have sent Raiden through there? In fact that would make perfect sense, I mean not only does Raiden not feel pain so he wouldn’t have to crawl the last 100 meters at a glacial pace while he bursts into flames but you’d also get to watch the blonde little bastard cook like poptart which would make the whole thing worthwhile.

2: Sad death scenes for everyone

One of the best scenes in Metal Gear Solid was the death of Sniper Wolf. It was interesting counter point to the rest of the game and it’s the first I recall in gaming where I’ve been presented with the idea that killing another human being is actually a bad thing. The scene worked because it was such a suprise, a few hours earlier you saw Sniper Wolf go all Full Metal Jacket on Meryl and you’re thinking she’s a complete bitch but when you do finally put a stinger on her rectum she responds with a well written monologue that explains why she did what she did and it was very moving. It’s good to see Konami has learnt from this but I’m thinking perhaps they missed the point as nearly every character in Metal Gear Solid 4 gets their own drawn out tragic death scene regardless of whether they were particularly tragic or not.
All of the bosses in the game just happen to be hot chicks with super tragic pasts. There’s supposed to be a serious point in there about how war has terrible effects on everyone who encounters it but it’s kind of lost in a clumsy competition to see who can come up with the most ridiculously tragic backstory and the whole thing just comes off as cheap and manipulative.
The worst example of this is of course the fact Vamp gets his own tragic death. Yes. Vamp. The guy mostly known for murdering Otacon’s teenage sister in Metal Gear Solid 2, dies very slowly and we’re expected to feel sorry for him because he’s immortal. It’s madness. Kind of like playing through Wolfenstein 3d only to find once you’ve killed Hitler you have to listen to him tell you about how he ‘only wanted to be loved’
It’s worth noting however that the only character in the game who actually isn’t as much of an asshole as he appeared to be, good old Revolver Ocelot, does not get his own tragic death scene. Perhaps they ran out of violin solos.

3: Meet the new character, same as the old character

The Metal Gear universe is populated by a diverse and intriguing cast of characters but is not apparently populated by a decent pension scheme because those fuckers keep on coming back year after year no matter how god damn old they get.
Meryl was conspicously missing from MGS2 so her return is welcome but bringing back Mei Ling as the captain of a WW2 battleship pushes coincidence to uncomfortable extremes. It’s only slightly short of having a scene where Snake needs to take a bus and finding out the driver just happens to be Vulcan Raven.
Konami’s refusal to introduce new characters reaches epic levels when it’s finally revealed who the mysterious Patriots are and the whole thing stinks to high haven. Big Boss’ turning into a kind of bad guy we can handle. But when did Paramedic turn from a Japanophile who knows more than a healthy ammount about the taste of frogs into a comic book mad scientist? And how exactly does Major Zero turn into the MGS equivalent of the Emperor from star wars?
The worst offender is of course the inevitable return of big boss who’s remarkably well preserved for a man Snake has killed twice.

The worst part is he pops out just when you think “Hey they really showed some restraint” during the credits.

4: Like a Hollywood block buster, in the worst way

When a game is touted as ‘Like a Hollywood blockbuster’ it can mean a few things. If it means high production values and good voice acting. Great. If it means retarded plot elements and cop out endings. Not so great.
In true Hollywood style most of the game takes place genericsville. Sure there’s a reason why the opening mission is set in the ‘middle east’ instead of say ‘Iraq’ and it’s the same reason Call of Duty 4 is set in generic middle eastern country-istan but it’s kind of silly when Snake is told to look for the remains of big boss in ‘Eastern Europe’. Oh there’s only 10 countries in Eastern Europe. I suppose I’ll start with the Ukraine and work my way up.
I can actually mark the exact moment where the game made the jump from over the top to retarded. It was when Snake, the snarky english Babe cum scientist, the black token character and his pet monkey took part in a thrilling car chase involving backflipping robots and mother fucking zombies.

A large portion of the game looks like this.

The game is also fond of trying to use one scientific principle to explain all the weird shit that happens. Nanomachines become less of a radical technology advancement and more of a kind of magical device that can let people do anything, kind of like how the internet was presented in 90’s movies.
The ending takes a pure unadulterated dose of Hollywood cheese too. One of the games most powerful visual metaphors was Snake’s rapidly depleting cigarettes and how they tied into how much time he had left. You just knew when Snake knocked back that last cancer stick it was probably about time for his mouth and that .45 to have a meeting. Then, in one of the clumsiest bits of symbolism ever Snake decides to quit smoking, doesn’t pop himself in the mouth and instead goes off to ‘live as a beast’ with his bestest buddy Otacon.

Personally I would have sucked on the .45.