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It seems like every update I make lately starts off with a reference to an earlier update, and for that I apologize. I swear this atavistic behavior is in no way intentional, other than perhaps being indicative of an ability to intuitively pluck long-lasting threads of discussion out of the aether, or otherwise harp on the same ten topics in an endless cycle. But in any event, sometime last year I made sure to mock the statement American McGee: If you go to the store and find American McGee's Alice or Oz or Grimm, all of those are signature titles that have to fall within the dark, twisted fairy-tale genre. They're gonna be action games, they're gonna be 3D, they're gonna be, from now on, primarily console games.
GS: What are the origins of Scrapland? How and why did you decide to make a colorful action adventure game featuring robots?
... Fuck that, the choice is up to me. Not only is American a bald faced liar, he couldn't even be bothered to ask the real creator for a proper answer, so he cribbed lead designer Enric Alvarez's response to a question from an earlier IGN interview completely verbatim. And I am pretty sure that by reprinting content without permission, Gamespot is now the legal property of IGN. Thanks a fucking lot, American. Since I'm never going to talk about this game again I'll throw in the astonishing differences I found when reading the respective Gamespy reviews for the two different platforms for which this game has been made:
Now I'm not saying that American McGee would pressure Gamespy to rate the XBox game more highly than the historically lower-selling PC version. Why would I even suggest such a thing, you ask? How and why does anyone decide to do anything? No, seriously. Answer the question.
Item! Regular readers will recall Fail Math's unproductive war against long-winded loquacious liemonger Tim Rogers. Insert Credit recently published his latest tract, which wraps up 2004 in a flurry of Japanese anecdotes and all-caps sentences. I had no desire to actually read the thing but my symbolic status as freedom fighting Erin Brockovich to Tim Rogers's evil power conglomerate demanded that I at least make an effort. Luckily Tim must have anticipated my dilemma because I had barely reached the second paragraph when I came upon the following: As this fine website has been only gaining in popularity in the past set of years, this of course meant that the article was slammed and flamed and beat to smithereens on various websites I never read and/or have never heard of. There was one guy whose name I don't remember who had an issue with my freely admitting to my killing off of my ex-girlfriend's hardcore Diablo II sorceress. I never got a chance to clear the air on that one -- you see, her password was my name. It was my name because she always made her password my name.And so forth. If Tim was trying to distract me from any potentially incriminating material buried somewhere in paragraph 542, mission accomplished. After reaching 100% interest within a minute of starting the article, the rest promised nothing but a long, banal slog, with only the prospect of reading about people who are not me. There is something to be said for aggressive editing, but Tim Rogers's patented stream-of-consciousness writing promises that any and all half-formed thoughts pouring out of his mental maw are transcribed in the order they occur to him. Being the subject of Tim Rogers's second line of thought about the entire year of 2004 does me proud, and if there was any sort of war going on between us, I would be claiming victory. Like the old saying goes, it's only vanity if they're not actually thinking about you.
From IGN: The only futuristic weapon Cortez has at his disposal at all times is the Temporal Uplink Device. This has two main functions, the first is the holographic 3D map and the second is as an anti-gravity device. Using this you can pick up any moveable prop within the level and fire it at speed into your enemies; this becomes particularly destructive with exploding barrels.
It was recently revealed that the upcoming Doom 3 expansion pack will include bullet time. This is not particularly newsworthy. Its neuron-overloadingly creative redubbing as "Hell Time" did inspire me, however, to finish up a list I've had sitting around for a few months now. If anything, this can serve as a starting point for game developers trying to determine what phrases are left that they can dub their gameplay toggle where the passage of time slows down. May I suggest "Slo-Go"?
The expansion pack will also include a gravity gun, marking the first step of what will undoubtedly be a long and arduous process as every FPS for the next three years has to come up with an original moniker for their specific incarnation of it. However, id was quick to point out that they had a similar tool in their game even before Valve ruined it for everyone: "It's one of those things that's just fun, and we've had it around in our engine," Hooper explains, "we actually used it as a tool throughout development where we'd grab physics objects and place them around the world." While there was some thought to adding the gun to DOOM 3, the team decided against it. "We talked about that quite a few times, but we had such a big arsenal of weapons, and so many other cool things going on, that it was just one of those things that never made it in."That the gravity gun was, by id's own admission, "just fun" was apparently no reason to favor its inclusion over a twenty-third level made up of poorly lit tech-base tunnels. UPDATE: Looking at the article a little closer, I think I stumbled upon something completely revolutionary in the field of Mars base photon directing solutions. 
It's a well known fact that all game reviewers consider their profession a temporary calling until their literary talents are discovered by some higher-class employer and they're whisked away into a magical lifestyle where people revere them for their ability to write sentences at a nineteenth grade level and overlook their crippling interpersonal disorders. Usually their grandiloquence is kept in check by having to run down the laundry list of the various facets of whatever game is in the docket. When reviewing Halo 2 about all a writer can do is look through a thesaurus for a Microsoft-approved list of superlatives. It's when a game has proven terrible, or at least unforgivingly mediocre, that the artiste can bring his full command of the English language to bear. In the absence of any obligation to treat a game fairly or bother devoting the review to discussing the game itself, reviewers fall prey to the belief that people want to read a review just to enjoy their writing. Hell, I'm hardly exempt. My Deus Ex 2 review falls prey to this same disorder. What does some botched academic experiment have to do with anything? Not much, beyond my attempts to show that I can rattle off inane trivia, and the ability to marginally relate it to the subject at hand. Sometimes this conceit actually ends up working, as in the Computer Gaming World review of Universal Combat: In 1982, maverick German director Werner Herzog released a film called Fitzcarraldo, which detailed a 19th-century robber baron's attempt to drag a riverboat over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle. A documentary on the making of this movie came out the same year. It revealed that Herzog, rather than relying on special effects, had actually dragged a real boat over a real mountain in the real Peru - and in the process, drove himself and everyone around him insane. The minor tragedy of the whole episode is that the documentary is a lot more entertaining than the ponderous film.There's no doubt that the reviewer is flexing his cinema-buff pecs, but the factoid is so interesting, and it ties into the main thrust of the piece so well, that it's hard to find any real fault. Sadly, that's the exception rather than the rule, which clears the way for accomplishments like this Eurogamer review of Alexander: Please remember: as you read this, Cybertron is under threat.Although it's hard to imagine that anyone would bother reading a review of the universally panned Alexander RTS other than to get a cheap thrill, protracted references to giant robots hardly fit the bill. If I wanted to wallow in 80's nostalgia there are plenty of places I could go. For shame, Eurogamer.
The idea that a couple of rogue nipples can throw an entire commercial-industrial complex into a frantic tizzy is just the sort of low-risk, high-reward venture that can give other, less drowned brown people some funny ideas. How much money is Eidos going to lose in this venture? True, it's doubtful that "The Guy Game" sold more than maybe fifty copies but still, the amount of work, stress, and bad press that accompanies a product recall is not something to be sneezed at. Osama bin Laden may have downgraded his worldly ambitions from dismantling American hegemony to pleading with Iraqi citizens to act like bigger jerks towards their conquerors, but even he can probably manage to finance the six-pack of Keystone Light necessary to get a product unintentionally labeled as child porn. Or imagine if, say, in the final days of Halo 2, some H1 contract programmer from Qatar secretly managed to sneak in a cheat code that showed a couple of freshman cheerleaders servicing each other. The chaos that would ensue would make a couple trillion tons of water look pleasantly refreshing. The very idea of child porn has some problems anyway, and here I have to put on my water wings and tread lightly. Never mind the drastic change in age-of-consent laws within the past hundred years or so; you're not going to catch me arguing that having sex with minors is a-OK. But it's the all-encompassing, infinitely self-assured attitude that our modern ideals of non kid fucking have blessed us with that make me wonder. Observe:
The oddity of this situation is only exacerbated by the entire porn industry, where the "younger is better" mentality works until an asymptotic limit of exactly eighteen solar revolutions, beyond which angels fear to tread. What is the title "Barely Legal" supposed to signify? Presumably sexual titillation rises as the age bracket trends downward, and beyond the immovable bulwark there's some enormous hypothetical bell curve of which the eighteen-plus segment is only the outward tail. What's my point in all of this? I don't know. I'll just remind everyone that it was obviously Rob Dyer's fault.
In a refreshing bit of candor, Gamespy recently leveled a tough-but-fair criticism against the haunted hotel level in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: The Ocean House is filled with every haunted house cliché you can imagine. Lights flicker on and off as you approach them. A chandelier nearly drops on you as you walk in the front door, "Get Out!" written in blood suddenly appears on a wall, a screaming woman in a nightdress runs down the hall, and when you turn the corner, there's nobody there!So naturally, it's the best level of the year.
The realization that we've now spent an entire year in this Fail Math venture is not so much shocking to the two of us as it is a benign resignation. For a brief period we harbored thoughts of massive and uncharacteristic success; a delusion we, luckily, no longer cling to. Our only really comparable counterpart, True Meaning Of Life, shut down because as the author so explicitly put it in his farewell address, the site wasn't getting enough attention. To us it seemed like an admission of defeat, but we were proven wrong when later the guy was hired to write snide video game comments for a living at Kotaku. Then, he was fired because the site wasn't getting enough attention.
Nevertheless, the rise in readership from an absolute zero to a couple of hapless web surfers misled by a Google match for "Doom 3 walkthrough" or "fag hunting" does point to an empirical rise in readership of infinity percent, and in that we have been successful. Furthermore, mired among the endless hyphens and references to gay retards are some pieces that are, in our endlessly-self-effacing-to-generate-sympathy language, pretty okay. So it hasn't been a complete waste of time. What can we expect in the coming year? John Romero will probably be mentioned, and we'll make fun of IGN, and maybe review a first person shooter or two. Beyond that, who knows? It's wide open, and the only thing that can stand in our way is getting attention. Luckily, that is something we excel at avoiding. |
