Number of PC games I’ve burned through over the last year: 65. Number of console titles (including the Nintendo DS) I’ve bedded down in the same amount of time: 5. And not for the reasons you might think. Naturally, since Game Central is founded on the principles and bricks of a PC gaming stage, I’ll always gravitate towards my native platform. Goes without saying, really. Everyone has a favorite.

Difference is: my beloved favorite is also my most oppressive prison. At the risk of a hefty face-punching—I like console games. I really do. In fact, if you trace the deep and buried roots of my gaming heritage, you’ll unearth a rather surprising facet: my gaming DNA consists of about 75% console genes. Before switching teams, I owned 7 different iterations of various brand selections, from the original NES up to the PS1 (before Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem 3D showed me new heavenly heights).

You released on the wrong platform sweetheart. Otherwise? We totally coulda tied the knot.

To this day, even in comparison to my absolute PC faves, the ol’ console games of yore hold lofty statuses in my gamer heart.  Of course, back in 1997, my playtime between the consoles and my ‘puter teetered around 50/50. Somewhere between now and then, that symbiotic and rather illustrious relationship disintegrated like a stationary body at the business end of a pointblank quad-rocket.

No I will not go out with you! (But I will bang you.)

And it’s a shame. There’s no reason I can’t enjoy the best of both worlds. There’s no reason I shouldn’t. Yeah, I’ve been guilty as O.J.’s bloody gloves on perpetrating and exacerbating the war between the PC and the “other” gaming machines. I’ll recognize a touch of personal hypocrisy when I see it. Still, I bought a PS3 with every intention of actively engaging it for far more than Blu-ray movie consumption. And you can bet the family farm I’d own an X-Box 360 and Nintendo Wii if financially feasible. And yet, the $50 DualShock Sixaxis lays abandoned on my living room shelf, a homeless peripheral hooker begging for my gaming change.

But why? Why do I neglect my (rather expensive) investment? Despite critical misinterpretation and undeserved malice, there are some goddamned sexy PS3 games out there. Heavy Rain, Metal Gear Solid, Brütal Legend, Uncharted. (I don’t talk about Dante’s Inferno anymore. Hey—mistakes were made!) I want to play these games! (Not Dante’s Inferno.) Shit, out of the 7 PS3 games I own, other than Metal Gear Solid 4, I haven’t even halfway completed any of them. And it’s because of the guilt. (But not with Dante’s Inferno).

But yeah: guilt. Positive, unarguable, raw, non-filtered, serious guilt. Each time I pick up the Sixaxis—rare as it is—I wonder if my PC will suddenly walk in on me, sobbing uncontrollably, with a loaded and cocked revolver trembling in its hands.  Every time a PC game crashes, or a beta video card driver blue-screens, I imagine karmatic restitution for my loose and cheating eyes. It’s like I took a vow with my computer, sealed under the sanctity of a gaming god, and I’m willfully breaking it.

Yeah I know your twin sister lives on the PC, but I like you better baby. Honest!

Of course, this is all ludicrous. My PC doesn’t love me, much as I wish it would. We hold no tangible marital bonds, and we’ve never got hitched in a glittery Vegas tabernacle (that I know of). My gaming affairs are all strictly casual-agnostic. But the shadow of guilt remains nonetheless.  Each second that falls off the clock in Mega Man 10 is a second not spent in Deus Ex. Every minute invested in Street Fighter IV is a minute lost forever from Torchlight.

I shouldn’t view cross-sampled gaming in this rather adulterous manner, and neither should you. And luckily, from perusing the forums and gathering Google feedback, it appears I’m kind of a glitch. Very few seem to share this freakishly bizarre set of singular platform-bonded morals. I’m rather relieved to see that. But this doesn’t help me with my dilemma. As great as it for you guys to be all comfy with your flirty and promiscuous dispositions, this doesn’t suddenly switch my train tracks to a more liberal view of console gaming.

Seems like a decent lay at first, but gives you herpes after.

Perhaps the most frustrating angle stems from a failure to track my behavior to a beginning catalyst. Most of the time, undesirable habits can be better attacked and treated if the source cause is located. An alcoholic can better cope (and heal) if he or she understands that the reason they began tipping back the feisty-sauce in the first place came from a stiff and sudden employment layoff. For me, there’s no such revelation. There’s no thundering epiphany. And there’s no indication that my Amish gaming-relationship morays will metamorphose into console polygamy any time soon.

I’m not ready to throw away the PS3 condoms yet though. Maybe if I cheat on the PC long enough it’ll all just numb over; I’ll justify my actions by telling myself that if the PC won’t put out in the form of Alan Wake, well, she had it coming then. I mean I ain’t made of steel!  A guy needs his freedom! What choice do I have? I got needs! Right? Damn right. Hell yeah.

Sighhh. Never mind—I’ll be home in a minute honey; yeah… we’ll watch Quake together.  Need anything from the store while I’m out?

Sure, you could take one of those “physiologically accurate” online quizzes to decipher your inner workings, but rational science demands better! No, we as PC gamers balk at such abstract and menial notions. We judge ourselves by the in-game actions we make, not by some random grouping of “well researched and factually articulated” questions. But how do you know where to categorize your misfiring neurons or homicidal-inspired tendencies? Easy! Buy S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, play it, and then refer to our patented and 100% authentic* quick-reference chart below for insta-catharsis! Absolutely Stupendous!
*May not be patented or 100% authentic.

In-Game Action: Rather than repairing and selling your hard-fought booty, you instead routinely collect and horde every useless rusted-out piece of spider-infested crap, even if it means crawling slower than old people screw across the entire game map to do so—over and over and over, until you no longer believe in humanity.

Diagnoses: If you’re just starting the game, you don’t have any other choice. If this is the case, you’re what we in the field call “masochistically abhorrent.” You cherish pain and agony, and you chase  peaks of ecstasy in self-applied flagellation. This is probably why you bought  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in the first place. What’s that? We told you to the buy the game in our introduction? Okay, fine: you’re a pathetic hopeless follower and a filthy masochist. There. Happy?

In-Game Action: You find yourself emptying cheap cans of beer at staggering rates and eating powerful doses of controlled prescription drugs during the loading screens, all to  avoid smashing your face through your monitor in irritation.

Diagnoses: You have the patience of 4-year-old English princess in a Barbie depot. What—you can’t enjoy those 10 minute interludes of staunch nothingness in-between constant map changes and frequent, frequent deaths? (Frequent.) Don’t you find those little looping gameplay tips like: “eat food to avoid starvation” positively charming? Even on the 78th viewing? No? You’re probably also the type of person that expects your  Big Mac and French fries delivered in less than 2 hours, Mr. Fastie Fast. We had people like you in World War II. We called them “Delawareans.”

In-Game Action: You swear and cuss like a salty grizzled lobster-boat fisherman when your weapons and armor jam and fall apart after 5 or 6 shots, and you punt solid objects—such as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game box—when bad guys plug your noggin from 7 miles away, and when comically small chemically- malformed antagonistic hamsters incapacitate you with one bite.

Diagnoses: You’re a textbook personality example for misplaced aggression and elevated anger through adverse stimuli. Clearly, you’ve never seen a real-life “between-the-eyes” from a low-caliber .22 pistol with 10,000 feet of distance between a shooter and his target. Actually, this perhaps makes sense, as it’s  impossible. In actuality, on a deeper level, your violent tendencies find their root cause in the prior-inspected impatience dynamic. This is because you know that if that little rat-fuck of a tiny hamster does ever so slightly nudge your steel-coated, adamantium-reinforced body armor, you get to agonize through another infernal 10 minute load screen.

In-Game Action: You find yourself slaughtering enough animals and mutants that PETA files for a multi-species class-action lawsuit as a direct result of your tasteless in-game genocide.

Diagnoses: Your personality is a twisted and evil mother earth hating middle-finger-giver-outer to Native Americans. And FYI, “Yeah, but 90% of the quests make you do it, and animals and mutants are basically all that you can kill in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, because nobody ever shoots at you except for those goddamned annoying zombies that somehow know how to aim and reload their perfectly intact bullshit dangerous shotguns,” is an unacceptable scapegoat for your tactless demeanor. That’s no excuse for your terrifying anti-bestial personal habits. Hey, know what? Instead of murdering all those poor and cuddly, uh, mutated and hideous boar-monsters? You could just avoid offing all those innocent little cuties by not playing the game. You sick bastard you.

In-Game Action: You repeatedly ask random wayward folks the same two awkwardly formulated questions to start each and every conversation piece. No matter how out of context and bizarre “Listen, I have a question for you,” may sometimes seem, you still say the words with ardent redundancy.

Diagnoses: This personality type is often found within lethargic persons of a rudimentary multi-lingual talent. You prefer ease and comfort over complexity, occasionally falling asleep mid-thought. This sometimes results in the option menu, of, say: P.U.R.S.U.E.R. : Yell of Stalin, mislabeling “low-crouch” as “always run.” The diagnosed condition is commonly classified as: “Sure, stiffly and haphazardly translating all that Russian text into direct English may result in chaotic verbal nonsense, but at least this way I’ll retain the time to make my daily coffee break, Sergei.”  Now and then, this rather longish title may also be heard in industry-slang as, “Get  back to work, Vladimir, or we’ll burn your house down.”

In-Game Action: NPCs you stumble across in the middle of the irradiated and treacherous nuclear wasteland consistently warn: “If you wanna talk, holster that smoke-wagon, comrade!” all whilst simultaneously shoving their own enormous hand-cannons directly into your trachea, even after you do put yours away.

Diagnoses: “Hostilus What-the-Fuckus” defines this particular behavioral nuance. While even a kindergartner with a corked pop-gun can ace your ass lightning quick in the Pripyat zone, your frail and timid personality and meak mannerisms nevertheless elicit (apparently) distinct fear and trepidation in your fellow man. This also explains why every other lowlife scum-crusted character in the bars and shops are allowed to openly pack some monster heat, but if you even so much as drop a cracked fingernail on the compass of your  combat knife, your chest cavity turns into a lead-injected slab of reddish Swiss cheese.

Diagnoses: Still beats the ass out of Halo 3.

We touched on the issue of finishing games before, if not briefly. During Captain Sir Mr. Logan Decker’s appearance on the longest (and arguably, bestest) Game Central podcast ever, I countered his seemingly bold assertions that a PC game must be fully completed to be 100% authentically enjoyed.

I debated that a level of personal gaming delight and contentment is not equivocal to a potential gameplay-related conclusion. Some players, it seems, are perfectly happy to interact with a small segment of a title, if only to disregard it soon after.

You gotta be psycho not to finish it. And yet…

Who am I to deem this behavior inappropriate or lacking? Surely, one cannot verifiably measure another’s gaming spirits without significant error in judgment. Or so I thought.

Ever since that podcast, something inside stirred and swirled in a storm of discontent. Whether through stark argumentative brilliance or insidious Stygian black-magic, Mr. Decker’s words haunted me.

The more I pondered the non-completion dynamic, the more I started to question my rather hasty prior-stated conclusions.

I started to put the topic into other contexts as a means of comparative experimentation. Do I typically read only half a novel and feel satisfied? Nope. Do I consistently appreciate half-finished daily workouts? No way. Do I routinely turn off one of my cherished TV shows in favor of half-watching another?

Negative. Hell, do I only partially drink a delicious glass of frosty iced-tea and feel altogether satiated? No! Of course not.

Un-commanded, non-conquered.

And why? Because if such events or actions are left unconcluded, no matter how seemingly minute or trivial, something noticeable is undeniably lost. Tasks, hobbies, jobs, events: these things have a natural beginning, middle and end. A built-in life-cycle inherent to the mediums intended for fulfillment. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cigar or a football game, it’s meant to be finished.

Know what? PC gaming is no different. By leaving enjoyable games incomplete, I broke the natural life-cycle, and by doing that, I sacrificed gratification and maximized delight.

There used to be a time where I  finished every damn game I owned. And folks, lemme tell ya: it felt good. It presented a sense of peace. Beating a game resulted in a noted and worthy accomplishment; a respectable filled and rounded belly, so to speak.

Back in the days of yore, when Duke Nukem 3D and Command & Conquer ruled the hard drive platters,  months elapsed in-between my gaming purchases. Months! All that time in the middle invested in the achievement of total victory per each respective title.

But now, it seems that a puny week or two without a new installation or Steam download is an eternity. I’ve got about 10 to 14 days to beat a game. And if those days expire? The executioner’s ax falls swiftly and mercilessly into the exposed neck of the falsely imprisoned.

Extinguished before completion.

I used to look forward to the next day of gaming, each sun’s setting a resurrected gateway for dedicated and ecstatic continuation of a singular engagement. But now, each and every elapsed stroke of the clock’s hands results in my nervousness of gaming abandonment by replacement of the temporary newest fad. Tick tick. Tick tick. Tick tick…

In a last-stand attempt to defend myself from my own inner conflict, I tallied up the games I failed to finish, comparing them to those that I actually have.

Surely, I’d only regret a few never seen to the end. The rather frightening results did little to calm my already waning spirits.

Half Life, Torchlight, Plants vs. Zombies, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Deus Ex, Red Alert 3, World in Conflict, Dawn of Discovery, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Psychonauts, Shadowgrounds, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Brothers in Arms, Company of Heroes, Dungeon Siege, Earth 2150 – all of them but a paltry sampling of the total casualties from an unnamed invisible battle. And make no mistake friends, this is indeed a conflict. And I’m losing it. Bad.

The heart-sinking revelation really slammed me in the solar plexuses I when I read through that seemingly endless list of bereft games. Worse, upon further honest analysis, the only titles I seem to finish at all anymore are the ones I review. The ones I have to. So that’s gotta be the cause, right? It’s not my fault. These things are beyond my control.

Non-Perfectus

We all have deadlines in this business, and sacrifices must be made. But that’s too easy a scapegoat to claim as the undeniable root factor, and in my heart, I know it’s a misfire. My gut says there’s more to it than this. I can’t just pawn it all off on some “unavoidable exterior influences” piss-ass excuse.  It’s too important for that.

So here it is, for right or wrong: there are too many PC games being released at once. Yeah. I said it. Odd, I know, especially since we’re in a dark time where the PC’s platform is consistently questioned as a legitimate contender to the monopoly of Console-vania.

Surely, the more games we have at once, the better the chances of species survival, yes? A fully loaded clip? Power in numbers? Something like that?

I’m starting to doubt it. I’m beginning to wonder if the wave after proverbial crushing wave of newly released PC games is actually—and ironically—destroying us.

Search yourself deep here. Tally and examine your own tabulation of games that fell beneath the bullets of the “New Big Title.” Go ahead – do it. Do what most of us won’t. I bet the results will scare you. The corrosive dynamic of the PC gamer “latest and greatest” culture grows like a gasoline fire over dusty hay.

We’re creating an ideology that finishing an ongoing yet somewhat older game is far less important than actively participating in the most recently released title. We’re playing the newest games simply so we can jaw it up with our like-minded friends at the watercoolers of Vent, Skype, forums, and podcasts.

This behavior loops back onto itself, multiplying exponentially, until, at some point, you begin to realize that completing a game in its entirety becomes the exception, not the rule.

Half-played.

Tell me this sits well with you. Tell me that you’d feel wholly complete if you routinely turned off Lost 10 minutes in to watch Fringe for a little bit only to quit out and behold Caprica just because it’s the most recent iteration of broadcast television.

Bet you wouldn’t. Bet you’d rather absorb Lost to its natural conclusion before flipping the channel permanently to the next show.

Well, I’m tired of leaving my comrades behind, their mangled bodies bleeding and forgotten on a deserted pock-marked battlefield.

From today onward, if I love a game I’m currently playing? I’m taking part of it until it’s done. And if a new game I simply must play rolls out of the factory assembly lines? It’ll wait its turn in the garage.

Will I lapse back into the seemingly inevitable mode of gratification-desertion in favor of the hottest, freshest popular title instead?  Maybe. But, for me, it’s an uphill endeavor well worth the “out-of-touch” sweat and blisters.

Since the earth’s sulfurous noxious beginnings, there’ve been two eternal constants: PC gaming, and the paper-bound wisdom-filled tomes that accompany them. Together, the game and the manual have enjoyed an uninterrupted bout of world domination. But the days of loading up Doom II via a gnarled branch and a satchel of pebbles is over.

While agreeably magnificent services like Steam and Impulse are yanking in the first light of the digital distribution age, the abandonment of physical media in favor of direct desktop-delivered game packages is eroding the once inseparable union of instructive pamphlet to respective gaming title.

Before the royal lines of the king and his tactile queen sail away like Gandalf with the Elves, we thought it fitting to bust open the binoculars, gaze into the past, and review a handful of notable gaming manuals, highlighting the victories, virtues, and vices of each iteration. Extinction may be inevitable, but their memories shall reverberate and echo throughout eternity! Mostly.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

Genre/Released: RPG/1994

The Down and Dirty: Ahh, 1994. A blissful time in the history of PC gaming. A time when butchering an entire forest for a single game manual was not only expected, but celebrated. Sure, Bethesda had to relocate 17 indigenous native tribes in South America to clear the wood needed for all the distributed copies, but it was worth it (or so their lawyers say). Inside Arena’s worthy specimen of a lofty document rests 88 thick, glossy pages of tasty informative prose.

Categorical and intricate histories of Argonians, Wood Elves, Nords, Redguards as well as a dissertation-level synopsis of classes and sub-classes—like  Acrobats, Bards, Warriors, and Spellswords—they’re all here for the intake.

From your peripheral vision, you might even mistake the printed weapon tables and armor class bonuses as direct rip-offs from Dungeons & Dragons. But as the saying goes, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” In this case, The Elder Scrolls: Arena robbed poor old D&D completely blind.

And yeah, its interior’s completely black & white (or more accurately: brown & browner), but we’ll forgive this little smudge-on-the-collar in favor of the absolutely terrifying RPG complexities that inflate the inside of it like an over-gorged hot-air balloon. You just won’t find manuals of this caliber anymore folks, which, if you’re fond of sustained agriculture and trees, might be a good thing.

Good For: Deforesting small countries if ever reprinted; rendering quantum physicists inconsequential.

Grade: A

Quake II

Genre/Released: FPS/1997

The Down and Dirty: Weighing in at a feeble 36 pages, you’d think this pale example of a codex might sputter out and collapse before the starting gun.

And you’d be semi-right. Sure, this thing’s got some fancy theoretical mechanical drawings that pepper the text, and it’s printed in fabulously futuristic “color,” but that’s really all this poor girl has going for her. That and she puts out; at least in the sense of providing a basic overview of such tantalizing and  interesting activities as walking, swimming, running, shooting, and—no joke—ducking. (Unfortunately, no Duck Hunting.)

The armaments grid hints at a taste of pizazz with mini-expositions of shotguns and hyper-blasters. And the booklet’s outer soft-cover casing is undeniably sexy in a sort of perverse post-industrial type of motif.

But sadly, no amount of skin-deep beauty or leaps in design can make up for the 7 total sentences of plot that call 1/4 of page 6 home. And one of those sentences literally reads, “Damn again.”

Yowza.

Good For: Tracing the cover’s logo for the placement a supremely God-like tattoo on one’s right outer shoulder.

Grade: C+

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

Genre/Released: RTS/1999

The Down and Dirty: One of the few ever “widescreen” edition manuals released, when opened, this little baby sits in your hands like a gigantic greased banana. For ease of possible     drop-related disaster, we recommend never reading this manual whilst crapping. However, once the cover and backing are planted firmly on a table (or horizontal equal), there’s some chewy delicious goodness to be masticated from within.

From the very start, you’re treated with over-the-top bios for Jame’s Earl Jones’ General Solomon and Commander Michael McNeil, complete with photo of tired out-of-work actor Michael Biehn’s rubbery Hollywood-hatred-filled face. Actually, Biehn’s burned-out hopeless grill is the perfect metaphor for the game itself, which after attempting to play, you’ll completely understand why he appears so miserable.

Still, every nuance, nook, and seemingly trivial gameplay dynamic of this unforgivably awful Command & Conquer RTS is dissected and portrayed, even if they’ll never be actualized. Plus, every odd-numbered page has lotsa detailed background pictures! Mostly of Kane’s bald head.

Good For: Hilarious practical jokes when placed in bathrooms; studying every perfect smooth contour of Kane’s bald head.

Grade: B-

Undying

Genre/Released: FPS-RPG/2001

The Down and Dirty: Undying contains some of the most spooky underwear-staining moments you’ll ever partake on the PC platform. So much, in fact, that you’ll need a pile of spare boxer shorts within arm’s reach for maximum cleanliness. Even scarier than the actual game? Just how pitifully repulsive the manual is. As thick as a playing card and about as info-packed, this proverbial piece of literary ass screams to be tossed in the trash.

Luckily, the full-color ancillary journal—describing, in minutia, the diabolic thoughts and actions of every twisted main character—more than makes up for its compatriot’s sins. Scrawled in ornate calligraphic-cursive, stained with mock bloodied fingerprints, you’ll brandish your Undying journal with pride and joy, quoting out loud at your boss’s kid’s birthday party such salary raise-guaranteeing lines as: “Keisinger carried Bethany’s corpse into the drawing room… How is it come to pass that he should be the one to carry her lifeless body home?”

Good For: Manual: using as tinder to start a small fire. Journal: reading and terrifying small children by the fire.

Grade: C

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Genre/Released: RPG/2001

The Down and Dirty: Obliterator of all other paper-bound gaming volumes, Arcanum’s 189-page Goliath of an instruction booklet stabs you in the eyes with a spear of blazing erudite fabulousness. Every spell and tech is exhaustively studied and relayed; every race and culture explained, and every skill, trait, and potential action cataloged. Hundreds of handy screen caps? Yes sir. Easily-readable period-inspired fonts? Indeed. Steamy Dwarf-on-Ogre porno pics? Hell no.

Plus, the tone and voice in the descriptions of the technological disciplines are comic genius. Take, for example, this choice excerpt from the Clockwork Decoy: “This mechanical wonder is equipped with a powerful spring mechanism, and is perfect for creating diversions and confounding the most dangerous of foes! Brain them at your leisure while their attentions are turned!”

And as if this beast of an in-game authoritative bibliography isn’t enough, there’s also a separate fold-out hand-drawn world map. The manual’s even got a drool-inducing (and actually makeable) 3-bowl “Halfling” bread recipe on the last page. Which is fitting, as Arcanum’s game booklet downright bakes the competition, past or present.

Good For: Bringing to pretentious elitist book-clubs; plagiarizing lines as your own material and acting smug.

Grade: A

Civilization III

Genre/Released: Strategy/2001

The Down and Dirty: Got a spare 17 hours burning a hole in your brain? Well, Civ III’s manual has a solution for that. Building off The Elder Scrolls: Arena’s arboreal genocidal tendencies, the fine folks at Firaxis Games exacted the practice of cutting down and skinning a crap-ton of trees to new, dizzying heights. PhD-textbook sized, the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of instruction booklets, this nasty mother-humper towers over your sanity at a staggering 235 pages of raw, unfiltered gaming detail.

In all honesty, you’ll probably learn more from this manual than you’ll ever retain from a standard collegiate history lesson. World economics, commerce, industrial production, mutual protection pacts, trade embargoes, international diplomacy, maximization of natural resources— these are but a microscopic revelatory splinter of the complete topics covered. The goddamn index is 12 pages long. 12. Pages. Long. Front and back.  We’ve seen pocket dictionaries of lesser girth.

As a gamer new to the Civilization series, you simply can’t ask for a better lesson in gameplay mechanics. And for the advanced practitioner, expert advice and strategy accompany the basics. If not for the hideous blemish in the form of a .99 cent a minute “1-900″ hint-line on the final page, it’d be damned flawless.

Good For: Acting as a barrier to stop a charging rhinoceros.

Grade: A++

Icewind Dale II

Genre/Released: RPG/2002

The Down and Dirty: Every staunch RPGer shuddered and gasped as a shard of their PC gamer spirits detached forever with the painful loss of Black Isle Studios.  However, as adept as Black Isle was at conjuring up unforgettable titles like Fallout and Planescape Torment, their Icewind Dale II manual is the anabolic steroids of the instruction booklet playing field.

See, rather than stealing ideas and content and making them their own—as The Elder Scrolls: Arena unabashedly did—the selfish, dirty, shame-ridden cheating cheater that’s Icewind Dale II’s manual goes all Mark McGuire on us. It trounces the competition not through natural talent or creative catharsis, but rather through minimizing and inserting an actual Dungeons & Dragons master rule book in place of their own. That’s just not fair.

Naturally, this meaty and gleefully complex 152-page collection of special abilities and skills will keep you entertained for eons. Hell, even without the PC game that bears its name, this booklet is handy for refereeing all those spontaneous D&D matches that could no doubt erupt at any moment in a typical nerd’s daily life.

So sure – you can poke your schnoz into all sorts of sweet details like the level, range, casting time, duration, saving throw and area of effect for every single spell (all 59 blasted pages of them), but wouldn’t you rather knock a homer out the park without the abuse and aid of auxiliary chemicals? If you’re name’s Icewind Dale II, nope!

Good For: 9 hour plane trips across the pond; using as definitive ammunition against rival geeks.

Grade: A+ (with a bolded asterisk.)

Beyond Divinity

Genre/Released: Action-RPG/2004

The Down and Dirty: In a strange and refreshing departure from source material—that being the stench-soaked crap-sponge of the actual game—this informative manual proves inspiration often arrives in multiple avenues of delivery. Tagging along in shotgun sits a mini-novel, Child of Chaos, authored by miss Rhianna Pratchett (Terry Pratchett’s daughter). This 56-page romp provides the reader with multiple layers of literary preamble, fantasy flavor, and character examination in the Divinity series mythos.

Adjoining a game-specific piece of narrative fiction in book-format is more than a simple rarity, it’s a certifiable milestone. And if not for the continuity-evaporating Elvis reference near the end of novella, it would have been a shining example of supplemental perfection.

The manual’s no slouch either. Published on high-grade photo-stock paper, your fleshy tender digits will sing songs of praise and reverence to the smooth and welcoming surface that rests atop them. The info presented ain’t so bad either.

All important items and gameplay nuances—such as manipulating the teleporter stones, choosing magic types, and initial hints to character creation—are broadcast and deconstructed with expert tutelage. A single session reviewing the material will arm you with all essential knowledge required for successful play. Of course, all this glowing praise is likely mute, as Divinity II is about the gaming equivalent of chugging vinegar, slipping on the resulting vomit, and shattering a femur.

Good For: Dual wielding as preposterously effective fly swatters.

Grade: B

Guild Wars: Game of the Year Edition

Genre/Released: MMO/2005

The Down and Dirty: There’s a quick-reference card as an extra insert, but the “manual” is a single piece of paper…

Good For: It’s a single piece of paper.

Grade: Z-

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Genre/Released: Action-Adventure/2005

The Down and Dirty: A unique hybrid of exemplary innovation, the manual for GTA: San Andreas is actually the game box. The DVD rests safely behind the final page in this bright and colorful hard-cover masterpiece, cushioned by a small foam insert, protecting the disc from your grimy Mountain Dew-laminated desk’s harmful debris. The concept of melding a game box to its manual is so provocative, you’ll be duly bound to write your senator demanding legislature to make the practice lawfully binding (punishable by a healthy, savage beating if defied).

Adding to the overall packaging shininess, a poster-sized double-sided map of San Andreas awaits your clammy mitts before you even leaf past the first page. More than just a visual gimmick, if stuck nearby your monitor, it serves as a great transportation way-finder. Brainstorming the best route from Los Santos to San Fierro, icing all the areas of interest along the way, is bucket-loads less cumbersome than constantly opening and closing the in-game alternate overlay.

As for the instruction booklet’s details, there’s some decent horsepower grumbling under the hood. San Andreas’s buildings and eateries, such as The Well-Stacked Pizza Companies and the Ammu-Nations, are each summarized and described with a humorous slant, rooted in stark social commentary. All crucial avenues of curiosity are annotated and classified, including every song and artist on each of the 11 tunable radio stations. This, dear readers, is a manual the big boys wield; carry it with honor.

Good For: Putting in the attic when you go to college, leaving for 20 years, and then losing your mind after realizing your Mom tossed it in the curbside dumpster in your absence.

Grade: A

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Genre/Released: FPS/2007

The Down and Dirty: This abhorrent travesty of a gaming (un)manual serves as a stark signpost of the PDF age. Little more than a piece of standard letter-sized paper, cut up into equal sections, and affixed in the middle by 2 cheap staples (with some faded Vietnam-quality ink blotted in for good measure), this paltry and harrowing example practically screams “We hate you!” to the battle-worn connoisseur of the legacy instruction booklet.

There’s really little here to be considered content. 3 of the astonishing 9 total pages consist of the software license agreement. The remaining essential info is equally compelling: 3 pointless screenshots, a 2-sentence thesis of the checkpoint save system, and a reality-decompiling section on your health situation explaining that if you absorb too many bullets, you’ll kick the can. Now that’s depth.

So, while page 6 does explode our literary senses with its reasoning that an ammo counter “Shows your ammo count,” there’s just no reason this manual should even exist. Just put us out of our misery Infinity Ward; releasing a published document such as this only personifies your disdain of physical reading materials. Poor. Just… poor.

Good For: Nothing.

Grade: D- (see me after class.)

Divinity II: Ego Draconis

Genre/Released: Action-RPG/2010

The Down and Dirty: When deplorable societal facets manifest into government violence and widespread oppression, there are those that kneel and bow to the tyrants, and there are those that rise to their feet and fight. Under the heavy iron fist of the growing anti-manual PC gaming regime, Larian Studios pulls a good ol’ fashioned George Washington. Only instead of gunpowder and muskets, Larian’s weapons of choice are substance and compositional talent.

Spitting keenly in the eye of such insulting gestures as COD4:MW’s entry, Divinity II packs a manual that you’ll write home to your folks about. A hearkening back to the golden years, you’ll be instantaneously greeted (well, instantaneously after the epilepsy warnings, at least) by an introduction from Larian’s founder, Swen Vincke. He thanks you personally for purchasing the game, which stands out, as most first impressions nowadays come in the form of an ugly DRM pop-up, basically assuming you’re a thieving bastard of a peg-legged pirate.

Emblazoned within this hefty specimen of a magnum opus is a 4-page prelude of the Divinity story so far, intricate presentations of every spell and potion, an appropriately heavy study on the functions and devices riveted to the Battle Tower, and much, much more.

If pitted into a grudge match against the likes of Civ III’s manual, on the stakes of winner stays / loser’s filleted, Divinity II would probably end up as fresh fish. But come on, compared to everything else in the contemporary world? This bad boy pulls their pants down, whips ‘em stupid, and curb-stomps their heads. It’s devs like Larian that keep us huddled masses burning with a glimmer of hope. For this: a basket of delicious cookies.

Good For: Righteously smothering your other modern-day instruction booklets to death, and then peeing on their shallow, treasonous graves.

Grade: B+

Paragon or Renegade, Jedi or Sith, Angel or Demon… are great PC titles truly so morally polarizing? The ongoing trend seems to suggest so. For a while, I never questioned this dynamic. Seemed natural. You blast kindly old ladies in the abdomens with quadruple-barreled napalm-missile guns, you get a slight nudge in the ol’ evil dial. Makes sense. At first, at least.

But shouldn’t a given action speak for itself? Why do we need a right & wrong thermostat in our inventory to affirm our in-game activities and dispositions? Good and evil meters are an artificially imposed visual teddy bear – something to comfortably latch onto to verify a set of imposed assumptions. Utilizing such a rigidly judgmental barometer is fatally formulaic. As the protagonist (or possibly, antagonist), I want to do what I think is right or wrong, not what the developer thinks is right or wrong. There’s no need for a concrete confirmation of either option. And know what? Gamers are smarter than that, and we could prove it, if only allowed a benefit of the doubt.

Rescue the chick in the tower, or let her burn. Insult the bartender’s heritage, or give him a verbal pat on the back. Nuke-a-blast a peaceful town, or arrest the man in black – all with on-screen discernible tallies of “You barkin’ up the bad guy tree par’ner!” or, ” You playin’ an encore of some good guy jazz, son!” Is everlasting redundancy in ethical execution really the best a game can do? Far too often, we choose a path (The Dark Side of the Force, for example) and our choices become a narrative and pictorial version of iambic pentameter: droning and numbing all along the way. And for the most part, we’re comfortable with this (and occasionally praising).

Until a thunderclap wakes us from our catatonic slumbers. The explosion of awareness jolted me earlier today, while I re-watched the Battlestar Galactica mini-series. Lee Adama warns the President that a Cylon attack is imminent on the remaining fleet. Problem is, only two thirds of the ships can escape to safety via an FTL jump (which is really just BSG-speak for: “Get the crap out of there really really quickly.”). The other spacecraft don’t have the engineering guts required for the jump process, and there’s no time to ferry the passengers to the ships that do. President Roslin has to make a hasty decision. She elects to leave the others behind to save the rest. She chooses safety over risk.

So, for sake of argument, let’s say that this exact same situation presents itself to us in Mass Effect 7: Shepard’s Bad Back. Precisely where would Roslin’s course of action fall under the inflexible Paragon / Renegade scale? Is leaving behind a third of the fleet in fear of complete annihilation an evil act? Or is noble? Is it *gasp* something in-between? As a viewer to Battlestar Galactica, it’s up to you to decide. And that’s the way it should be. It’s time PC games took a hint.

See, the best villains and heroes are the ones that identify themselves with the audience, or in the vehicle of PC gaming, the operators. And what’s a tangible and identifiable human feature? It’s blurring the lines between a typical societal assumption of right and wrong; it’s permitting the individual beholder to exercise their own conclusions based off their own perceptions. It’s freeing the players’ minds to conclude for themselves that which is ethically objectionable or behaviorally appropriate.

Indeed, the most rewarding moral choices are the ones that border on inconclusive. And here and there, we’ve seen some notable attempted deviations from the binary blueprint. Divinity II contained a sprinkling of hope early on, but utilized the bad choice / good choice selections far too frequently thereafter to really shine.

Hey devs? We’re grownups now. We’re big boys and girls. We don’t need  training wheels for selective conduct causality. Let us judge for ourselves which courses of action merit which moral labels. Keep making your awesome games, yes; but let’s allow the deeds to unfold without the plastic good and evil gauges, ‘kay? Movies don’t have them, books don’t have them, and neither should games. Here’s to hoping this becomes an axiom.

But yeah, all that being said, if you consider dancing on defenseless monkeys’ faces with soccer cleats as a moral gray area, please seek professional help.

It’s our sad and bitter nature to abuse and neglect that which was once hallowed or unique. PC gaming expressions are, by far, no exception. What was once priceless and witty becomes strip-mined, overindulged, and mass produced to nausea. PC gamers often become the belching consuming industries to the forests of phraseology. But it’s never too late for reclamation and atonement. Let us learn from our past and prevent extended proliferation of that which used to be hilarious and/or clever, but is now terrible! Together, through tutelage, we’ll make a better PC gaming world. But in the honor of literary semi-succinctness, let’s keep the analysis and education to the top four contemporary atrocities. And here they are.

There was a time where this was a sharp and impressive term, and when aptly activated, devastating to the unfortunate recipient. No longer. I now positively hate this maxim.  If ‘Epic Fail’ were a living breathing entity, I’d gladly place upon its fleshy tender head a baseball bat of hefty swinging.  No vile gaming pop-culture utterance has become more clichéd  and utterly expended than the Epic Fail. Worse yet, the Epic Fail’s vile subversive influences have leaked and entrenched itself into the standard world’s day-to-day vernacular. It’s become totally fine and proper to head into the local Ace Hardware store only to stumble across a couple of grandmas accidentally dropping a hammer onto a sack of light bulbs and hearing one of them say, “Oh my goodness! Epic Fail Gladys!”

For crap’s sakes fellow gamers, is this where the hands on the clock have come to rest? I’m imploring you all— say anything except these godforsaken stale words when a notable foul-up occurs. Make filthy love to a thesaurus or something; anything to prevent further use. I mean yeah, I realize that neglecting to include dedicated server support in Modern Warfare 2 was a bad, bad move. But why can’t we call it a monumental catastrophe, or perhaps a gargantuan error, or even a debacle of biblical proportions?  Oh and its grating antonym “Great Success” needs to go the hell away also.  Repeat after me brethren, “There is no Epic Fail, only Zuel.”

This adage was never funny, nor was it ever particularly compelling—two very good reasons to retire the phrase outright. And don’t even get me started on the nonsensical “Pwned.” Furthermore, it’s  past tense people!! I’ll capitulate that upon first irritable glance, it looks okay in all-chat after the scoreboard reads 105 – 0. But consider it in the actual context of the delivery. You used to own something and/or someone, indicating you don’t own it/them anymore. Ohhh sick burn!

Not sinking in? Okay here, maybe the below conversation between Joe and Bill will prove more palpable.

“Wow Bill. I totally owned that hot rod.”

“Really, you did?”

“Yep. Owned it big time.”

“Yeah? That’s cool. But, uh… what happened?”

“Well, I quit my part-time job at McDonald’s as a burger jockey and applied for welfare so I could sleep in everyday until 3pm, but then I couldn’t make the payments anymore, and the bank repossessed it. So I don’t own it anymore. But I used to own it! Yeah that was great, but not as great as the concept of still owning it.”

“Bummer.”

How is this dinosaur of diction still walking the earth? Gamers have hunted this damned term to extinction, and yet again and again this poor specimen of a creature finds a way to survive, and even mutate.  This defies logic, and more frustratingly, sanity. Can we as the PC gaming community truly be so creatively shallow? Have we not concocted anything to take its place after 278 years of online usage? Multitudes of 4chan memes, buckets of technological IRC advances, Ventrilo, and still the “Noob” placeholder thrives? Pathetic. The absolute travesty is that some folks still find this phrase comical and appropriate in application, all the while severely lacking any tangible qualities of social and societal existence themselves.

Example: “hahaa hey SuX0r90, checck out this dummie who sliyghtly mistimed tha rocketjump. Hes such a NOOB!!1!1 Lol Uur such a noob.”

Ho hoooo you got me good you bastard! Man that stings. Well, the Noob part doesn’t hurt, but rather the “I’m a 23 year-old legacy unemployed North American native, I don’t understand the English language, and ‘Noob’ is the ultimate fresh online insult because I’m verifiably brain-damaged, and humanity is officially un-savable” dynamic.  Yeah. That part stings.

It takes a big man to admit to his mistakes, which is probably why I never admit to my mistakes (Oh I’m sorry, probably why I never get Pwned on my Epic Fails). But under the GL HF category, I shall make an allowance: in my Team Fortress 2 days of yore, I typed out these five cursed characters with astonishing regularity. Why? Because I’m boring and unimaginative, and I find it entirely too difficult and exhausting to extend my famished fingers across the vast, vast frontier of my keyboard and spell out the goddamn words. Is it so much to ask? Apparently, yes. Yes it is. Because this stupid stump of a non-coherent sentence permeates the PC gaming multiplayer wilds like ants over sugared-honey.

Stop it! Look, it’s pretty spectacular you want me to Gather Linen and Handle Figurines, but can’t you grant me the kind favor of articulating just a bit? See, when you type out a GL HF that quick and hit enter? It tells me you really don’t wish me “good luck and have fun.” It tells me you consider the paltry abbreviation an annoying yet mandatory task, and rather than extend the letters into actual words, you’d just as soon spend those extra gained 17 seconds scratching your testicles instead. You might as well just send me a picture of a middle finger. No more GL HF! Just tell me good luck, or have fun, or when you’re feeling truly bold: both. It’s not hard. Got it? No? Newb.

To start, I desire a game that absolutely refuses all forms of peripheral manipulation besides a standard mouse and keyboard. Something totally inflexible to alternative methods of internal direction. I want a game that’s built and fabricated exclusively around a singular native control device. Better yet, I want every single button on the keyboard to do something, even Pause Break and the asterisk on the number pad. Like ArmA II and the MechWarrior series, only I want the keys easily and instantaneously bound to my own assignments should the need arise, without ever having to access a main menu. I also request the option to bind all feasible actions to a single keystroke. Somehow. See? This is a pretty respectable request. Isn’t it? Okay let’s dig deeper now.

I want, no demand flat-out brilliant lifelike graphics, but I want them stylized and beautiful and gritty. With the option to go from first person to top-down overhead seamlessly. All at once. I want a Crysis-Borderlands-World of WarCraft-Monkey Island blend of fantastic super killer awesomeness. Oh and I also want all of that to run silky buttery smooth on single 8800 GTS. Also, while we’re there, I decree a need for a minimalistic yet insanely complex on-screen GUI. It needs to display all the important vitals and stats, but at the same time, it needs to be integrated into the context of the game’s continuity without ever appearing gimmicky. It needs to be exactly like Far Cry 2 only different, presenting as much info-related minutia as Civilization IV. “How in the hell do we that,” you say? Doesn’t matter how. Not my problem. Make it work. Pour Dr. Pepper onto the code or something. Be more brilliant.

Red Alert contains non-interactive cut scenes.
Therefore, it is a terrible game.

For gameplay, the perfect title must be an RPG/FPS/Brawler/Turn-Based/Real-Time/Adventure hybrid, and by golly it’d better incorporate all those styles without a hitch. It’ll be like a combination of Command & Conquer: Renegade and Savage and Street Fighter IV, only good. Clive Barker, Tom Clancy, Chet Faliszek, and Tim Schafer will pen the plot. And of course, it’ll need top-notch voice acting to accommodate the rest of its aforementioned impeccable attributes. Nothing less than Mark Hamill, Patrick Stewart, and Joe Kucan will suffice. Actually, know what? Screw all that. This game obligates nothing less than the entire cast of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. In conjunction with all of the above, the perfect game is mandated to be totally glitch and bug-free (this will no doubt necessitate 17 crazy in-depth beta tests, but these tests need to be finished a week ago so the game can come out tomorrow).

Oh and back to the story: it abso-freaking-lutely must be 100% interactive at all possible times, even when it’s technically impossible or seemingly retarded to do so in the first place. Because we all know: if we can’t manipulate the on-screen narrative as it progressively unfolds, the game cannot be considered perfect. Common sense here people. It’s your job as game creators to see through all my ostensibly abstract genius suggestions and manipulate them into rock-solid concrete realities.

Or, on second thought, maybe we could preemptively attack mass stupidity and just agree that certain games can be perfect on their own, even if they don’t necessarily fill the needs of every single opinion on the planet. Oh hi, Machinarium!

Too bad there’s not a spell for
“Stop Magnus from pointlessly braining me.”

No doubt about it, Arcanum managed to kick some serious ass. Unfortunately, not all asses were kicked, and the amount of rear-ends left un-booted were directly proportional to the amount of sanity-crushing existence-questioning bugs that crawled through the game’s innards like maggots in road kill. To put it short: it coulda been a contenda. Instead, upon initial release, players found themselves suddenly missing crucial story-driven items from their inventories, numerous broken quests, ridiculously frequent and save-corrupting crashes, inaccessible treasure areas, and even friendly party-based NPCs that would suddenly attack your character for no specific reason (maybe they didn’t approve of your tunic choice?).  And while many of these issues have since been rectified via a gigantic independent 3^rd party patch, that’s simply an unacceptable solution to numerous potential game-ending problems. In the end, Troika still smashed  together a great title, but  they probably should have used some better glue between the seams. Because without the 3^rd party mending kit, it might as well read as Arcanum: Of Bitter Frustrations and Desk-a-Puncha.

You know something’s amiss when battling skeletons
is potentially less risky then combining hay stacks.

It’s hard to fault a game that lets you collect hay off a barn floor, combine it together, form a makeshift bed, and then carry around the finished result as a portable cot to restore mana and health on the fly… unless by forming said improvised sleeping mat the game freezes, sends an ear-shattering noise through your brain like a lightning bolt, and then boots you to the desktop, a single tear falling from your eye in the aftermath. Yep, Divine Divinity employed some brilliant genre-bending maneuvers, but God help you if you ever accidentally accomplished quest actions ahead of time. The amount of freedom Larian Studios granted the player was impressive, but perhaps ill-thought out. For example, if you decided to savagely butcher both Yoram and Otho (always a tempting option), the game was rendered unbeatable, since no hints for Goemoe remained. Woops! The good news is that since the game’s launch, Divine Divinity has enjoyed a metric-ton’s worth of patches addressing the most heinous of the worst issues. The bad news: they had to release a metric-ton’s worth of patches just to make the game semi-playable. Woops!

“Shouldn’t we play-test this thing Carl?”
“Nah- it’s fine.”

With a name that somehow exceeds 10 syllables, what could possibly go wrong? Well, everything, apparently. Pool of Radiance, an RPG in the tradition of the Baldur’s Gate series, was one of the most anticipated PC games of 2001. And then, on the flip of a dime, it quickly became one of the most despised games of all time. Not sure why though; so what if uninstalling the game nuked your Windows system files? And yeah, constant 1 fps stuttering and bog-downs may have crippled all semblances of playability, and sure: often times the game was outright unresponsive immediately after booting, but these are the little nuances that make niche titles so special. Don’t people get it? Psh. Wusses. But in reality, this game was so horribly crippled, so unbelievably tarnished, that within a paltry week’s time a stupidly inflated patch was shoved through the gates like a battering ram to quell the rioting masses. But that’s like trying to diffuse an atom bomb with a thread and a needle after it’s already exploded.  Sorry SSI, maybe next time you oughta, you know, TEST THE DAMN TITLE before releasing it into the wild.  Brilliant!

If only our protagonist’s weapon was a
can of Raid, he might actually stand a chance.

More astonishing than the needlessly incomprehensible acronym of a moniker is just how damned artificially difficult this game could be. Unfortunately for the player, in keeping with historical and scientific accuracy, only the bugs survived the Russian nuclear meltdown. And boooooy did they. Perhaps in keeping with the context of the plot’s continuity, the bugs actually mutated and increased after the first patch. That’s right: “fixing” the game outright added screw ups rather than vaporizing them. One of the more powerfully mind-boggling glitches involved an instance where the blast-door to the main trader (the only guy that could progress the story, naturally) would inexplicably close, blocking all access. Only way to fix it was to hope to hell it was cracked open enough to toss a grenade just right (this could take hours), relying on the resulting explosion to jar the iron slab back open. Yeah, comrade, that’s WAY more intuitive than making  the door reply to the goddamned “use” button. And the code gremlins didn’t stop there. Audio errors, quests that completed themselves without any user interaction, inescapable holes and rooms, this game had everything… everything except a revolver in the game box to shoot yourself with. A.w.e.s.o.m.e.!

Nudge that lamp post and you’re a goner.

By an Alabama mile, nothing even comes close to this one. SkyNET, one of Bethesda’s earliest forays into poignant masochism, is perhaps the most bipolar PC game ever made. Or kind of made… the whole “finished” nuance is actually tough to prove here. See, on one hand, SkyNET perfectly adapted every awesome detail from the Terminator lore, putting you smack dab into the best part of the series: the future war. But on the other hand, it killed you for no reason. And often.  So often in fact, that the quick-save key became more utilized than the forward key. Most of the adventure consisted of “Step. Save. Step. Save. Strafe. Save. St… SHIT! Reload.” Jumped on the wrong nook? Dead. Fell 2 inches off a single step? Dead. Lightly brushed your shoulder on a piece of overhanging debris? Dead. And sometimes, even by avoiding all obstacles altogether (not easy, since the game was freakin’ littered with ‘em), you’d get “Mission failed, soldier!” for absolutely nothing. Yep. Nothing. You’d just die. Just because. Best part? This was all before patches and internet were widely available. Under most circumstances, you were stuck with the stock gameplay. The real tragedy here is that underneath all that psychotically homicidal digital mess is a game that could have rocked even to this day. Just don’t touch any rocks, or else you’re dead.  “Game tossed in the garbage disposal, soldier!”

Greetings, future PC game console porter. Prior to being accepted to any accredited platform transitional university, you will be required to complete the following test and score within the top 25th percentile.  Please answer the following multiple choice questions in numerical sequential order. You will be timed from start to finish. Certain questions may contain more than one correct answer. Leaving a question blank is not acceptable. Once finished, please turn in your completed exam to the nearest refuse bin. Thank you, and have a pleasant tomorrow!

1) When describing a ported PC game as “the most PC-centric game of the entire series,” which pieces of the below presented evidence are factually accurate?

a) The game accepts basic mouse and keyboard inputs, and is therefore a milestone.

b) The game sometimes accepts basic mouse and keyboard inputs, but only to piss you off enough to the point of utter insanity.

c) The game connects to the Internet. Sort of.

d) The letters “PC” are somewhere on the game packaging. But probably not in order.

e) The game is an outright criminal slack-assed console port of a once fantastic series, and its makers should be drowned in a pile of African elephant feces.

2) “Gamepads” are to “PC gaming” as:

a) “Heart attacks” are to “awesome.”

b) “Darkest of Days” is to “a soothing peach-scented back massage.”

c) “Microsoft Games for Windows initiative” is to “compelling think tank of amazing.”

d) “Keenan Weaver TF2 7000 pings” are to “unusual.”

e) “Torchlight pets” are to “not adorable and fiscally conscious.”

3) Finish the following statement.

“Even though we were supposedly a once exclusive PC developer, we dumped 98.7% of all our available resources into the console version and then produced a hefty steaming PC turd-pile because­­­ ___________________________________.”

a) We work for Chris Taylor.

b) We secretly hate you.

c)  Carl from the janitorial department needed a new mop handle and a fresh urinal cake, which depleted our creative team’s entire PC budget.

d) Everyone knows those Mac ads are accurately researched and completely forthright, and thus the PC is dead.

e) Piracy is ruining our company, even though we use 100 dollar bills to wipe our asses and often bathe in steaming gold bullion.

Figure A.

4) Who is this legendary man? (See Figure A.)

a) Super Mario.

b) Your father-in-law’s financial securities accountant.

c) Uh… Barack Obama?

d) Irrelevant; he doesn’t make Wii games, so he can’t be that important.

e) Hideo Kojima.

5) Borderlands leaves the house at 5pm traveling at 50mph. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 leaves the train station at 70mph after 12:30am. Conversely, Batman: Arkham Asylum accelerates away from Borderlands and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at a rate of 40mph at 4:30am.  If all three continue onward at their above prescribed constant speeds, at what time will exclusive PC games cease to exist?

a) PC games? I thought we were designing a port for the Nintendo DS…

b) Noon tomorrow.

c) Unknown: I’m not intelligent enough to tell time.

d) I don’t care. Give me my paycheck.

e) Yes.

6) A certain unnamed RTS PC game designer once commented on how the analog sticks on a gamepad are far more in-tune than a mouse and keyboard for controlling multiple units and zooming in and out of the battlefield. Why would the above referenced person say this?

a) Because he drank two quarts of double-strength liquid Drano just prior to the interview, with a chaser of fresh-squeezed retarded juice.

b) Because everyone already knows that the mouse and keyboard are terrible instruments for RTS games; the NES Advantage is a far better option.

c) Because unadulterated PC gamer betrayal is more fun than a trip to meet Captain America.

d) Because analog pads can vibrate, and that’s, like, uh – pretty neat.

e) Because what the PC gaming really needs is to be MORE like a portable chemical toilet for big-name self-inflated industry prima donnas.

7) Transitioning a big-name title to a different platform is sensitive and tricky business. As such, what is the most important aspect when porting a console game over to the PC? (Use scrap paper as needed.)

a) To phone-in the entire effort and infuriate as many diehard PC gamers as much as possible.

b) To purposefully exclude crucial and expected features such as quick saving and dedicated servers (nobody nowadays uses crap like that anyway).

c) To ensure you remove as many copies of the game disc itself and instead vomit into numerous game boxes prior to shipping.

d) To mask the God-forsaken digital monstrosity you just coughed up by employing genius marketing tag lines such as, “Multiplayer available! Play with MORE than one person… ONLINE!” Or, “Comes with free DVD sleeve! And complimentary PDF instruction manual!”

e) To release the game 9 months later than the consoles, after everyone’s already forgotten about it.

8) Match the below jumbled images to the correct names and/or titles.

a) Darth Poop-Stain	1)
b) Shining proof that console players are more talented at first person shooters than PC gamers.	2)
c) Obsolete clunky control mechanism.	3)
d) PC.	4)
e) Where all our ported games should rightfully be placed. Without being opened.	5)

1) Read Keenan’s Machinarium review.
2) Buy Machinarium.
3) Play Machinarium immediately.
4) Weep in its brilliance.

It’s okay, don’t worry – I’ll wait here patiently for you. Seriously, go get crackin’. I’ll grab a ham sandwich or something.

Back already? Hmmm. Well, I’ll take your word for it. You wouldn’t lie to me would you? Because if you haven’t interacted with Machinarium yet, you’re not just missing out on the game of the year, you’re also missing out on the best game of the last five years.

Bold words? Audacious assertion? Fanboyish dogmatic claim? Not really. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone who’s actively engaged this game would even have the guts to argue otherwise. See: it’s like my old half-balding gruffly-bearded college literature instructor used to say, “Sometimes folks, when you open up a book, start to turn the pages, you begin to feel the weight of it. The importance of the novel becomes heavy in your fingers. This is rare. And yet we all know it when it happens. You begin to realize the book that you’re holding is far more than a simple collection of bound papers; it’s a force. It has gravity. Its weight becomes paramount.”

To quote Marty McFly, “This is getting heavy.”

If weight is indeed a measure of a projected medium’s sheer significance, then it’d take an industrial 10-ton forklift to hold Machinarium steady.  This isn’t just a game dear readers, it’s a bona-fide phenomenon. Machinarium does more within the supposed confines of a 2D semi-animated adventure than most 3D games even dream of. Put starkly: Machinarium is the stuff that gaming revolutions are made of.

First case in point- there’s no spoken or written dialogue. That’s right: none. Zip. Zero. Machinarium does enjoy a musical orchestral score and numerous sound effects, but other than that, you’ll never hear or read a coherent recognizable word from any of the characters. And yet, Machinarium elicits a sentimental passionate response almost instantly via  its visual storytelling. How? Through the exact lens that every other PC game developer seems to somehow ignore: imaginative expressionism. But that’s over-simplifying. Perhaps more accurately, Machinarium encapsulates your eyes and ears simultaneously through a daft and precise manipulation of an expertly comprised artistic style. It does this so well, you’ll start to question whether or not conversation and literature truly are the best forms of articulate communication.

This foreign robot has more personality and emotional depth than 10 Batmans put together.

Here’s just a minor example: your robotic protagonist encounters a fellow mechanized automaton with his back resting against a rusted metallic house’s twisted siding. In his hands rests a pair of makeshift  twisted drum sticks, but the actual drum is absent between his legs. His face, although riveted, cold, and plain, expresses a noticeable frown. You’re naturally inquisitive by now. Where’s the drum? Who took it? Did he lose the drum?

You click the character, and a mid-sized bubble opens up above him. Inside the bubble, a duo of hand-scribbled black and white ruffians approach our once happily drumming robot. One of the bullies grabs the drum and smashes it over his compatriot’s head. He lets out a hearty metallurgic chuckle as he surveys his destructive handiwork. The drummer’s eyes begin to wilt as he witnesses this, his mouth quivers. His arms continue their drumming motions, albeit more out of shattered hope than actual intention.

The secondary brow-beater removes the punctured instrument from his own noggin and, in cruel reciprocation, shoves the percussion oval down his chuckling buddy’s throat, the drum landing inside the oily bloated depths of his leaden stomach. The two buffoons then throw back their heads and chortle together, marching out of the bubble’s view frame. The motorized yet sentient drummer taps his drum sticks a few more times on the concrete, slower and slower, until both cease movement altogether. His eyes drift to the floor. He hangs his head and sighs lowly. The background music accentuates the action, peaking and spiking at just the right intervals, a perfect complement to the brief snippet’s subtle narrative complexities.

Inside this single screen, there’s enough narrative acuity to fill an entire chapter of a written novel.

And that’s the real difference here: Machinarium shows you, it doesn’t tell you.  No clunky dialogue trees, no repetitive voice actors’ monotone phoned-in dribble, no in-your-face obnoxious cut scenes. Just pure fluidic correlation of situational allegory at its most majestically fabricated forms. An entire cohesive narration is successfully conveyed to the player without ever leaving the confines of the game’s established “limited” parameters. Machinarium takes Half Life’s attempt at immersion and beats it to death with its own crowbar.

During Game Central’s interview with Big Finish Games, we discussed the possibilities and potential realities of creating visceral emotional responses from stories in games. I voiced my longings to be so totally overwhelmed by an invested attachment that I’d bear tears of joy and sorrow from the choices and actions partaken onscreen. A mere day later, my wishes were answered. Turns out, Machinarium was the genie.

There’s just no way around it; as the years trickle by, Machinarium will be studied and dissected as an absolute masterpiece of PC gaming; a keystone of the arch. And rightfully so.

Do you really want to admit that you never had the chance to partake of this digital miracle during its initial public inception? Get out there and play it guys and gals, and realize that Machinarium rests so damn far above its respective peers, it deserves a shelf all to itself.

And yet, despite all the exploding chaos of tangled emotions, heartbreak, and frustrating confusion, all I can think about are the good times. And coincidentally, the good times are synonymous with PC gaming. And Bri did love him some gaming, lemme tell ya. You may have known him as Dr. Hate on Steam. You may have even played a game or two with him. I grew up playing games with him. And PC gaming, as bizarre as it sounds, was the cement between the bricks of our fraternal attachments. So much in fact, that his departure from the public sector (and my life in general), has left a deep pit where my gaming soul used to reside. The bricks are still there, but the cement has crumbled.

We had a tradition of sharing our gaming experiences together. Whether a game was good or bad, laughable or life-altering, Bri was the initial one to hear about it. The first time I opened the dungeon doors and witnessed, in astonishment, the majesty of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s sprawling landscapes, I remember thinking: I can’t wait to show this to Brian. Oh my God he’s gonna go nuts. I vividly recall walking with him on a brisk Vermont summer afternoon next to the West branch river, pointing up to Mount Mansfield through the distant faded clouds and saying, “Dude, you know how if we kept walking, we’d eventually hit Mansfield and explore it? That’s how Oblivion works. The game’s mountains in the distance? You can climb them.You have to play this game.”

A deeper connection developed through digital events like these.

A few days later he was hooked. We had to fight each other for keyboard-time on my old-ass Alienware tower. We’d purposely avoid bathroom breaks due to immediate high-jacked computer chairs and alternate loaded save games. More often than not, he won this battle. But frankly? Watching him trudge through the digital wilderness while I chugged the Mountain Dew and tossed down the Cheetos, witnessing his guttural emotions and animated responses from the game’s multiple stimuli, cheering him on during the tense arena duels: these were almost as fun as actually playing the damn game.

See, for me? PC gaming has long been a symbiotic brotherly relationship. Sure, at times Brian and I were hundreds of miles apart, but we were sharing the same medium, reminiscing from the same materials, partaking of the same art. Playing our games and expressing our verbal opinions to each other was a method of staying in touch. A way to mend the loneliness. For me and Brian, PC gaming was our baseball outings, our gradation parties, our spring breaks. PC gaming was what connected us socially and spiritually. PC gaming is what separated us from those who just. Didn’t. Get it.

PC gaming made us whole.

All those LAN death matches in Duke 3D, our cacophonous tirades from getting Mammoth tank-rushed in C&C (still bullcrap, by the way), our mutual amusement as each of us obliterated all those cocky fools in competitive Quake 1 scrims, our mixed howls of frustration and cackling glee from getting a ‘nade to the face in Ghost Recon… this is what PC gaming is truly about: the memories. The camaraderie. The unspoken and  heartfelt connections between us and our fellow kindred spirits. PC gaming is so much more than a method of simply passing the time. PC gaming is not a cup of coffee. PC gaming is not a freakin’ sitcom. It’s a passion, and a passion that’s best shared with others.

And above all else, the worst aspect for Brian, in my opinion, is the nuance that he’ll no longer share with me these gaming experiences. Not for a long time. And that, dear readers, is a tragedy.  The true power of gaming lays not within the games themselves, but rather in the potential emotional power that sits beneath them.

I’m sorry I’ve lost this from you Bri. Looks like we’ll have some catching up to do.

Once upon a time in 2002, a little miracle of an action RPG was brought forth into the world under the bewildering name of Divine Divinity. Although rumors and speculation swirled around its involvement with the U.S. Department of Redundancy Department, the game was actually developed and wrought from the chocolaty-rich nether-regions of Belgium by a little company called Larian Studios. Stealing Combining the frantic finger-numbing mouse clicks from Diablo along with the lighter elements of fantasy staples such as Baldur’s Gate, it was a freeform multi-class barbarian magic castin’ awesome-fest of awesome. Wizards could wield crossbows and broadswords, and rogues could summon gigantic fiery demons. If you even remotely consider yourself a veteran RPGer and you’ve never heard of this game, a shard of your soul has now been  permanently lost from not playing it.

And then the semi pseudo-follow up Beyond Divinity came out a wee bit later. And booooy was it terrible. The entire game centered on one unspectacular environment, the “optional” randomized dungeons were directly proportional to an afternoon stroll into the 7th circle of hell, and upgrading your characters was needlessly complex and agonizing. Not only that, if one of your two avatars perished (which, due to abysmal NPC A.I., happened often) his counterpart would kick the bucket as well. Fun.  Not surprisingly, the Divinity franchise soon limped off the playing field, cradling its wounds, bandaging its ankles. And like that… it was gone.

Queue to 2009. What’s happened since the fall of the once magnificent Divine Divinity? As it turns out: quite a bit. At this year’s Penny Arcade Expo, Game Central bumped heads with Swen Vincke, Larian Studio’s CEO, and got some good old fashioned hot preview action with the full-fledged sequel, Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (or Divine Divinity Squared Divinely, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing). And from the looks of things to date, it appears that Larian has successfully rectified the powerful stinky that was Beyond Divinity. Unlike the first two games, Divinity 2 is multi-platform. But fear not: we witnessed both versions side by side, and rest assured, the PC is still the master and commander. Graphics were almost twice as good compared to the Xbox 360, and the character inventory is unrecognizable when put next to the consoles. This is not a lazy port posing as a PC exclusive, this is a game made by people who understand the strengths and inherent advantages of our cherished hardware.

Story-wise, Divinity 2 takes place 90 years after the events of the first game. Damian, the prime antagonist to the hero from Divine Divinity, has managed to escape his hellish shackles and hijack the Dragon Knights (stupid-powerful dragon-morphing badasses who wear comically gigantic shoulder pads in human form). By controlling these hybrid warriors, he succeeds in curb-stomping the hero that once banished him. Rivellon’s dragons, once so benevolent, peaceful, and generally lovely smelling, are now the hated enemy. The population is pissed. The more motivated of the masses have decided to dust off the armor, grab some nasty weapons, double up on the cod-pieces, and enlist in the dragon-bashing business. This is where you come in.

To get it out of the way, this is not an MMO. It’s not even multiplayer. And frankly, all the better; Larian has focused 100% of their efforts on making the single player element polished and vibrant. There’s been some serious control redesign as well. No longer do you manipulate your character through a top-down point-and-click perspective. It’s WASD and mouse to move and interact, viewed from a standard 3rd person camera angle. While the new scheme does function well, I was a bit disappointed to see the old Fallout-esque POV get the executioner’s axe. The benefit of the new controls, however, is that physical combat doesn’t grow stale and repetitive. You can roll, jump, and unleash devastating spell and melee combos on wayward foes. You can even pause the fracas and commotion to issue commands. Plus, now you won’t have to amputate an index finger or toss your mouse in the trash after a hectic battle.

Perhaps the most unique new feature witnessed was the “mind-read” nuance. Basically, through the spirit of the dragon, your character has the ability to see through other people’s lies, cover-ups, and deceits. Any time you converse with an NPC, you’ll be given the option to mind-read each and every response. This allows you to get info you’d normally never have access to, and the way a quest or plot may or may not progress can often hinge upon the usage of this undertone. But naturally, activating this trait ain’t exactly free. It costs experience points to instigate, and depending on the difficulty of the mark, it can be damned expensive. The concept seems interesting, but spending XP rather than rechargeable skill points is a somewhat questionable avenue; generally, sacrificing experience in an RPG just plain sucks, regardless of the cause. I’ll also be curious to see if the trait’s visual layout and amalgamation gets tweaked before the final release, because as is, the usage of a recurring and unintuitive mind-read button in every dialogue tree is rather clunky. I would much prefer a more seamless and organic integration.

But of course, the main sell of the game is the ability to transform your character at will into a huge-normous flame-belching dragon. According to Swen, it’ll take some time to unleash this power (you have to become a dragon knight first), but once you have it, you can expect to play at least 50% of the time as your new scaly doppelganger. There’s no health penalty for morphing back into a homosapien mid-flight and falling 200 feet to the rocks below, and there’s no time limit or restrictions when you spread your leathery greenish wings and take airborne. But certain quests that propel the main story arc must be completed while in your human form. You can expect quite a few puzzles that will revolve around switching embodiments back and forth as well.

As character development goes, Divinity 2 wisely stuck with its roots. Wanna dual wield some long swords but conversely cast healing and recovery spells? Go for it. Fancy stealing folk’s wallets while swinging a club with the strength of an ox? Sure thing. Divinity is all about personal play choice, not one-dimensional class restrictions like your typical hack n’ slasher.

Does Divinity 2 look like it’ll manage to top the original? Probably not. Will it be a crap-ton of fun to play? Unless something changes drastically, hell yes. Look for it on shelves in December of this year. As for me, I’m already setting aside the hard drive space.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 4. The PC gaming kingdom has long been ruled by these emperors of machismo and testosterone; benefactors of ultra-violence and garish gore, perpetrators of everything that’s typically considered sweaty, salty, and staunchly masculine. If PC gaming product content creation has been a crosshair, we hairy men have been the target. But something is changing in the realm of the maleness; a wind has shifted. The fest of sausage is finally receding, and left in its wake is a little bitty MMO package called Faunasphere, published by Big Fish games. It’s marketed unabashedly and specifically to women aged 18 – 35, it’s cute and cuddly, and it’s pastel. And the real scary part fellas? It’s pretty damn addicting.

I know what you’re thinking. You can admit it. I was thinking it to. “A chick-based game that’s mostly comprised of Moms with kids? A casual MMO? 2D sprites? Yeah. It’ll be crap in digital form.” Then I chatted with the devs, started playing, and something weird happened. I wasn’t bludgeoning anything with baseball bats and crow bars. I wasn’t swearing at teammates and pumping myself full of med-kits. And I wasn’t breaking any alien necks with my bare calloused hands. And yet, I was having fun. What the hell? How did that happen? Well, dear readers, let me break it down for you.

For one, this isn’t a commodity designed on a whim to make some quick dough by cashing in on a trendy new demographic. This is a labor of love concocted and molded by such MMO talents as Toby Ragaini and Ryan O’Rourke. These guys are no slouches in the industry. Ragaini was a lead designer on Asheron’s Call and a creative contributor to The Matrix Online. O’Rourke did time with Monolith and Sony before saddling up and taking Faunasphere out of the stable.

The basic concept of the game is simple: a 100% free web-based cartoonish MMO that’s easily accessible, wholly non-violent, and subtly captivating. There’s no installation required. If you’ve got Flash, internet, and a browser, you can play it (even on a Mac). Using a top-down point and click perspective, you assume the starting role of a mighty horse, a cheerful dog, or a speedy turtle, with handfuls of visual variations of each. After selecting your ridiculously (and awesomely) adorable Fauna, you venture forth into Tranquility Plateau to begin your journey.

The main tasks you and your Fauna will likely run into are menial but entertaining. You’ll learn how to feed and keep your energy up, check your inventory for goodies, and go through the process of exploring and digging up loot, as well as making and adding friends. You’ll also discover how to spot and zap ugly spouts of pollution, which after elimination grant you in-game currency (called Lux), experience, and other nifty trifles. Every player gets their own unique home base from the beginning as well. You can travel there at any time by clicking on your Fauna and selecting an icon. Once home, you can pay minor amounts of Lux to build, add, and terra-form the parcel of land with any materials you’ve traded or collected. Think of it like your own personal ecosystem playground with a minor tollbooth for manipulation. And should the unfortunate happen where you exhaust your Fauna’s energy while out in the wild, rather than death, you’re transported back to your home to begin anew.

After you’ve accumulated enough experience (gained by completing quests or clearing spoliation), you’ll level up and produce an egg. You can then pawn off the egg to another player, or incubate and hatch an extra critter to keep for yourself. There’s a large emphasis on trading and cooperation in the community, as many of the materials and trinkets you’ll pine after can only be procured or obtained by other players. And from my experiences there are plenty of players out there taking this game in. New Faunas popped up at all hours of day, ranging from early morning to midnight, and none of the lands were ever barren or ghostly.

Perhaps the cleverest beauty lies in the inner complexities masked by a sparse interface and non-scary HUD. Should a crafty player wish to extrapolate gene pools and splice chromosomes to attain preferred traits in their hatchlings, it’s all there for the toying. You can even trace other Fauna’s family trees and study their collected attributes, and study how they got them. And like any other MMO, the higher level characters will naturally have far more to delve into than their lowly furry counterparts. The level cap currently rests at 20, but it takes significant play time to get there.

The environments traversed are pleasantly varied and stylized. You can traipse chilly ice-covered snow plains, sniffing for rare material drops, or you can bask in the tropical sunlight and bump palm trees and dive into waterfalls for pleasant surprises. And while the art and animations are admittedly unelaborate, Faunasphere maintains a certain level of charm and panache that never seems to dissipate. Worse yet (for my hardy mannish ego at least), I found myself seeping back into the game more and more in favor of such titles as Plants vs. Zombies.

Oh well. If a female gamer marketing revolution is actually upon us, I figure I might as well embrace it rather than become a casualty. Expect a review of Faunasphere soon.

A small sampling of new tools by which to bash the living shit out of Louisiana-fed zombies: a Katana sword sharp enough to make Hanzo Hattori grin with glee, a cumbersome but ridiculously powerful fire axe lifted straight from TF2’s Pyro class, and a… heavy metal electric guitar leftover from an Ozzy concert? Better believe it. Oh – and that’s just three of the nine available extra melee weapons. You can also get your clammy, sweaty mitts on Aunty Anne’s greasy frying pan, a pock-marked cricket bat (cheeky!), a hefty Louie-ville slugger, and a rusty machete, amongst others. The catch? Picking up these weapons now relieves you of your pistols, unless you’re incapacitated, in which case you whip out a shooter from your back pocket much like Call of Duty 4’s “Last Stand” perk.

This sir, is not your daddy’s Left 4 Dead.

During this year’s PAX, Game Central got some behind-the-scenes play time with Valve’s Lead Writer, Chet Faliszek. But don’t let Chet’s seemingly singular title fool you: he’s actually been involved with damn near every facet of the game’s development cycle. He sits in the rooms with the level makers, and he openly admits that, “We shy away from the title ‘Designer,’ because everyone at Valve is really a designer.”

And despite the heinous semi-unforgivable atrocity of yet another playable demo manipulated by the clunky monstrosity that’s the X-Box 360 controller, Left 4 Dead 2 looks to be shaping up well. The gameplay is largely unchanged from the first iteration. Four survivors start at the beginning of a map, and have to reach a safe room at the end of the map. Between this seemingly rudimentary goal waits lots and lots of zombies, and boat-loads of friendly fire and swearing (in a good way).  Honestly, I commend Valve for not fixing what isn’t inherently broken.

Best of all, the main exploits and overall annoyances that somewhat mired the original (corner-stacking survivors during crescendo and finale events, only 2 playable coop levels, etc.) appear to have been rectified. In response to how Valve addressed the pacing and stacking of the first game, “We wanted to mix it up some more, definitely. We added other things to the maps to kind of encourage (breaking up) as well… partially how we spread the maps out and how the world works. It’s very much more open than Left 4 Dead 1 was. You actually have a couple of paths in the beginning that you can go around. Big obstacles can come up over the top or down the road, so we wanted to give you those kinds of options.” There are also 5 playable co-op campaigns this time around, with each one correspondingly available in survival. There’s also another new game mode to be announced in October, which Chet was machine-like tight lipped about (probably because I bragged about how Keenan and I’s clan beat him in TF2. Bummer.)

The natural environments, where all the bloodspillin’ and infected killin’ will physically take place, have equally spent some time in refurbishment. “One of our goals has been to have each campaign be really different. And it’s different in the architecture and (it’s also different) in the layouts, lighting… being inside or outside. They all play very different, and definitely the infected can you attack you in very different ways. Like in Savannah, it’s a city that’s evacuating, and you evacuate as well, and you run into a traffic jam. Then you go through “Dark Carnival”, “Whispering Oaks”, and you end up someplace else in the start of “The Swamps”.”

Similar to the fresh coats of paint covering the maps and director A.I., every character model has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. Each resounding blow to an enemy results in an appropriately gruesome and satisfying effect. This was a main focus while developing the sequel. According to Chet, “It’s really unsatisfying to hit (the infected) and just see them go ‘bonk.’ You want to see what you did. And so we re-did the entire gore system. And so all these different characters have these different points that can be knocked off and destroyed.”

I personally encountered a fairly interesting dynamic concerning the location-based degradation midway through a rather heavily infested level. I trained my shotgun barrel over a rushing zombie’s chest and squeezed off a blast. The impact nailed ‘em dead-center mass. But to my surprise and Nerdish glee: he was still shuffling after me with a fresh, gigantic gaping hole in his newly tattered baseball shirt. On a whim, I thought I’d get clever and cheat the hit-box by putting another spread of buckshot through the same wound. No such luck folks, Valve has been busy. The blast did precisely jack squat, the pellets passed harmlessly through the empty jagged cavity, just like they should. I had to frantically whip out my pistol and cap the poor sod in the kisser to put him down instead. Brilliant.

The new ranged weapons, however, are not quite as awe-inspiring as their up-close counterparts. The minor aesthetical details are nice, such as a flashlight that’s messily duct-taped to a silenced Uzi (take that, Doom 3!), and battle-damaged outer gun casings sporting deep scratches and prominent grime are refreshing. But the fresh armaments felt more like a subtle balancing act rather than an outright overhaul, and Chet more or less verified this. “The main weapons now have a ton of variety, such as the grenade launcher and the AK-47… it’s way more powerful up close, but way less accurate at a distance. There are a lot of tradeoffs, and we let people play the way they want to play.”

There are a few other additional guns added as well, including a Dirty Harry-esque .44 Magnum, which has to be wielded with both hands. It’s got a slow rate of fire and a pathetic ammo count, but it’ll take out a skyscraper with a single slug if aimed right. There’s also an upgraded sniper rifle (with the old hunting rifle remaining available for those three people that actually used it).

But what about the new boss infected? Do they ruin the razor-thin symmetry of the initial four? From what I experienced: absolutely not. While the new bad-boy zombies weren’t playable, I had the misfortune and yet parallel twisted masochism of being on the business end of their new attacks and strategies. The Jockey was the stand-out star of the freshman class. Built similar to the Hunter, he lunges at you when you’re separated from the team and latches onto your back like hideous deformed book-bag. Once he gets his infested filthy meat hooks dug deep into your tender flesh, you lose part of your directional control, but not all of it. You can attempt to counteract his puppet-like mechanisms on your avatar, but the effect of your efforts is random and sporadic. More often than not, if you’re not on top of your game, a pro Jockey will lead you haphazardly into sizzling fires, happily walk you off of cliffs, and force you into otherwise dormant witches, cackling all the way.

Oh and good luck getting the Jockey off your buddies without spraying them with lead or baseball-batting their ribs in the process. And that’s just ONE of the boss infected rookies; the Spitter belches out noxious pools of shoe-level toxic waste that prevents survivors from remaining still for too long, and the Charger acts like a mini battering ram on Nitrous, chucking bodies out of tight nit seasoned formations like anti-grav Ken dolls with his giant festering crab-like arm. “… It’s great to watch when someone picks up a grenade launcher and watches as his friend gets Jockied, and they’re like ‘Um- oh shit! What do I do!’ And then they have to go run up and melee ‘em and stuff.”

It’s a griefer’s paradise, revisited with brand-new biological vehicles of mischievous malcontent.

And for those huddled ardent masses that totally refuse to let go of the first game (out of my cold, dead hands!), fear not. In response to a question about ongoing support for Left 4 Dead 1: “We have (the campaign) Crash Course coming out in late September, and we’re gonna continue updating. It’s one of those things where I think people look at companies and they say, ‘Oh they stopped. Now they’re going on to this and going onto this.’ Um: we just released an update for Counter-Strike Source the other week. We’re a little schizophrenic, we don’t like to let things die, and we’re not worried about that. Left 4 Dead sold over 3 million copies. There’s more than 6 million gamers in the world, so we’re not worried about those 3 million who are gonna be like: ‘Oh we have to stop playing Left 4 Dead 1 and play Left 4 Dead 2!’ We can just keep going… if you want to stay in Left 4 Dead 1? Hey, that’s great. We’re not worried about that.”

Words to the wise dear readers. As for myself, I can’t wait to start wrapping my fleshy arms around lost survivors, leading them to utter and outright audible insanity. Mr. Faliszek? You appear to have a winner on your hands. Game on.

During this year’s PAX, Borderlands was widely considered by many as game of the show.  The lines to play it snaked around multiple walls, and the wait times often teetered on a cool 3 hours. The 2K exhibitors were swarmed with ravenous compliments and numerous begged replays. Lucky for us, we had a chance to chat about the game with Mikey Neumann, Gearbox Software’s creative director. (Also, after the interview, Mikey commented on how I looked just like Colin Farrell. Beats being compared to Steve Buscemi!)

GC: So you’ve been working on Borderlands, have you been working on cross development for the PC, Xbox and PS3?

MN: Yep, all three.

GC: Okay, so Game Central is a PC-centered site, and we were wondering what the main differences are, if any, between the PC version and the console counterparts?

MN: It depends on what hardware you’re running, for the most part the PC will look about the same, but if you have a pretty killer rig, you can crank up the settings to make it look really, really awesome.

GC: I’m kind of a story guy myself, and I was talking with Chet at Valve yesterday about Left 4 Dead and how story in games seems to be an afterthought, so with Borderlands, is this the case? Was there an active effort to develop the story separate from the game play?

MN: It’s definitely different than out previous efforts; not sure if you’ve played our Brothers in Arms games, in which I was actually the writer and cinematic director on three of those…

GC: I did. Good work.

MN: Thank you; that was definitely a different monster, like we really wanted to tell a specific story. (With) Borderlands, I think it’s more about the stories you tell about your experience. It’s a cop-out answer, but it’s about the smaller stories as well: we have a lot of side quests where like, a specific type of person will tell you and give you quests relevant to them. Like TK Baja: this guy’s had a pretty rough life, a Skag actually ate his wife, his leg, and his eyeballs.

GC: I hate it when that happens.

MN: Yeah, so he’s blind, he just sits in a chair all day, and all his quests are like: just go murder the crap out of every Skag you can find. There’s actually a boss quest he gives you to go find his leg from the Skag that ate it.

GC: Wow. Okay, so when you say “Skag,” is this like the native alien that inhabitants the planet?

MN: Yeah, a Skag is sort of like a dog-like creature that roams around on Pandora (the game word), they’re not overly dangerous if you just kinda leave them alone and walk around, but there are a lot of missions to kill them, and there are some bigger ones that will definitely come after you.

GC: Is this more of a single player experience? Or when you guys were developing, was there an active effort to make it co-op and multiplayer friendly?

MN:  Yeah it was definitely coop from, like, build 1. Like when it was just gray with sticks running around. Like 4 sticks right? That was definitely where we wanted to focus the game; you can play it with your friends, it’s a game you can play split-screen, you can do whatever you want to do. That’s not to say that the single player got neglected- it is a really strong single player game. And we balanced everything to anywhere from 1 to 4 players, and we did a lot of focus testing. This is new with this game at Gearbox. We have an internal focus team that pulls people in from colleges and department stores; wherever we can find them… the thing about gamers is they’ll pretty much tell you what sucks. They’re not gonna bullshit you. They’ll just tell you straight up, “This is bad, and this is bad.” But we’re tweaking it over time to make it better.

GC: How many focus group tests has it gone through?  A lot of people have said, “Well, focus groups are great. But if you overuse them, you have so many opinions coming into one area that it’s sort of hard because how do you tweak and satisfy everybody’s needs while still maintaining your original vision?”

MN:  Definitely hundreds and hundreds of people (were used). And we trend data; you look at the overall score. We started focus testing up until now, so about a year. And the overall score of everything has gone up steadily, which is definitely showing us that we’re making people happy… a good example was we knew that our jumping wasn’t working, like about 6 or 7 months ago, it didn’t quite feel right and we really didn’t know how to explain it.

GC: Like jumping in general?

MN: Yeah- (it felt) floaty or something. I guess it’s hard to put into words. We focus tested it, and people were like, “I love this game! But your jumping sucks.” And everybody kept saying, “Your jumping sucks!” and we finally said, “Okay, guys, you’re right: our jumping sucks.” That’s not something we can just set aside… we actively worked on that until it was something we were comfortable with, it went back into focus testing, and it never came up again. And I think it’s examples like that where you normally just shove it aside and not attack (the issue) right away, but for us it became really relevant and helped us make the game more fun overall.

GC:  So what did you actually do to fix that? To make it so that the jumping wasn’t a problem?

MN: Well, you adjust the gravity, the height, the speed. It’s all subtle stuff. The thing is, (it’s even in) movement- you put a millisecond lag on the right (analog) stick or something and your aim is just off, people will say your aim sucks, but they won’t be able to tell you why… and then you dig in and figure why it sucks in any case like that.

GC: So, this is gonna be a little bit of a loaded question, so bare with me-

MN: A loaded question? (Laughs) Okay.

GC: Is there any cross-play between PC and console?

MN: Noooo.

GC: Because back in the day, Shadow Run did it for a little while, when Games for Windows live was still applicable.

MN: Right, right.

GC: No plans to do that at all?

MN: Nahhh, hopefully we’ll sell so many on each console and PC that it won’t matter.

GC: Yeah, I had to ask, but I was hoping the answer would be no. So what are the main differences between co-op and single player? Did you design all the quests differently around co-op and single player?

NM: Everything’s the same; all the quests are the same, all the source stuff is the same. We do level up the creatures with more health and stuff and we have more creatures when you do play coop. So if you have 1, or 2, or 3, or 4 we actually balance the game actively at that time. So if you’re playing 2 people, and a third one comes in, a little message comes in and says, “The creatures of Pandora have grown stronger,” and it’s automatically balanced. If there’s 4 people, it rebalances again, on the fly, all the time. You can drop in, drop out. If you have a single player character, and you get all the way to level 10, start playing with your friends, that character goes everywhere you go.

GC: So I hate to keep using Valve, but it’s not like Left 4 Dead where you have 2 people drop out and 2 AI characters show up to take their place?

MN: No, (in Borderland’s case) they’re gone.

GC: So what are you guys looking at for a release date right now?

MN: October 20^th.

GC: Is that cross-platform? For everything?

MN: Yeah- same launch.

GC: Are you doing anything with Steam, or is it boxed copies only?

MN: We’re trying to figure that out right now, but I can’t talk about it since we haven’t announced anything. But we are actively pursuing it.

The third and final day of the raw collected awesomeness that’s QuakeCon went out with a bang. or more accurately, a post-apocalyptic RC car bomb explosion.  That and a bunch of decidedly non-athletic dudes chucking wobbly dodge balls at each other.

And actually, the dodge ball came first. Teams composed of QuakeCon attendees huddled in sprint formations on opposite sides of the BYOC waiting room, 4 textured rubber spheres delicately balanced in the middle of the duct-taped bordered floor. Whistles went off, and nerds charged. Obviously, no one was hurt. In fact, very little contact was made altogether. Dear readers, it’s my bereft duty to inform you: the clinical gamer seems ill-equipped for actual physical exertion and precision. Despite Jack Thompson’s evidence-challenged arguments, these players were not trained by games to be killers. Quite the opposite, in fact. More than one of them underhanded their shots like crippled grannies. Sad.

Unfortunately, our noble dodge ballers’ 5 minutes of fame was rudely interrupted by a little avalanche of digital glory called Rage, id’s first brand new IP since the late 90’s (every other id game to this point has been either a sequel or an alternate iteration of an existing piece of media). The line to the bolted doors of the main stage just outside the dodge ball area was a pulsing human anaconda of salivating not-so-patient denizens of the PC gaming world. And when the gates opened, the masses stormed the proverbial castle.

After being seated, the crowd was antsy, and we were treated to a brief synopsis of the project as a whole by the boldly pony-tailed Todd Hollenshead while thousands of LED lights flashed behind his iconic visage. After a few minutes passed, he handed off the mic to creative director Sir Tim Willits, and lead designer Sir Matt Hooper (if they’re not actually knighted, they damn well should be).

As anticipations started to crescendo, the duo began to describe the details of Rage’s plot and setting. As the continuity goes, a killer asteroid slammed the earth hundreds of years ago. But, just before the global catastrophe, the governments of the world managed to tuck away certain members of society in cryo-statis chambers named “arks.” You, as the protagonist, are the last surviving member of your ark. You crawl out of the shell and see the planet for the first time since the destruction.

And then, after another painstaking 5 minutes of rather bland synopsis and prologue, the lights finally went dim, and the screens started to flicker. And then Tim picked up his… Xbox 360 controller?! Shame on you id! Typically, at an predominantly PC gaming-populated convent, you don’t whip out a damn console crutch to showcase an A-list title, I don’t care how convenient it is.

However, despite the unabashed kick to the nads in the PC gamer’s controller peripherals department, the world’s first ever look at live-action in-game Rage hit the public like a nuke to the face at 3:43pm, central standard time.  Mouths dropped open, and hushed whispers of amazement floated through the hall like wayward butterflies. Sitting on the two giant jumbo-LCDs hanging over the stage was a scorched desert vista so impressive, even I had to gawk for a moment. These graphics made Crysis look jagged and old school. Photorealism, it seems, is almost close enough to touch. Of course, this is really little to be surprised about; id commonly pushes the graphical reaches of every game they release. But let me tell ya folks, this one’s a beaut.   Never before have I partaken of such an enthralling game engine in the works.

The first detail we watched was a mock interaction with an old prospector-like character inside a crumbling shack on top of the cliff. Carmack had mentioned a few days ago that the devs were hitting the midnight coffee hard to truly create realistic human representations, and from what I could see, he was spot on. The old prospector’s jerky and sporadic mannerisms (such as a nervous tick in his jaw and a huddled stature) added believable nuances rarely seen in games these days. The voice acting was exceptional as well.

After the brief dialogue with the prospector, Willits exited the hovel and promptly decapitated a distant mutant with a boomerang / throwing star weapon called a “wing stick.” He then jumped into a gussied-up dune buggy on steroids and peeled out  towards Wellspring, a nearby settlement. Naturally, he was attacked along the way by some irritable likewise-wheeled bandits. From what I could discern, the vehicle combat pays homage to such classics as Twisted Metal (that’s a good thing). There’s lots of  space to maneuver, but not so much as to allow for complete exploration.

The whole concept of vehicular travel as a major focus in a post-apocalyptic world is enticing.  And unlike games such as Auto Assault, this one’s skill is twitch-based, not mathematical. Also, the developers were quick to point out that this isn’t a GTA rip-off. You can’t just drive any car you see, you have to earn them over time. Vehicles are luxuries in this game, and you have to constantly fight to improve and maintain them.

Anyways, after Willits banged up his adversaries with his roll-bar mounted machine guns, he parked the buggy at the entrance of Wellspring and hopped out. For all those Firefly fans out there, you won’t be disappointed with the design of Rage’s setting and general atmosphere. Rather than go for the much-copied  Fallout series or Mad Max motifs, id went with a more futuristic old west approach. Lots of litter, dirt, and dirty neon lights, and lots of old caricatures, complete with Western twangs in the bystander’s accents. The interior of the Sheriff’s office was adorned with fancy stitched bright fabrics, and intricate carpets along the floors.

As the demo progressed, I watched Willits as he guided RC car bombs into bandit hideouts, built strategic turrets while simultaneously releasing deadly spider-like automatons, and shot through items like wooden boxes and rubber-tired barriers to assail his foes, the materials deteriorating as he did so, but still allowing him cover from fire as well.  I saw a quick  race session (these are necessary for many of the vehicular upgrades and add-ons), a violent jaunt through a mutant-infested fun-house broadcast to the desert’s populace, and a final stand-off between the main character and tentacle-clad imposing behemoth that resembled a Hell knight more than a little bit. Best of all, all this next-gen graphical tech ran silky smooth on a 2.6 dual core and a GTX 285.

In the end, Rage was certainly a sight to behold. There’s no co-op or multiplayer planned at this time (which honestly, I’m perfectly fine with), and Willits confirmed that there won’t be any outdoors fast-travel system, which I’m sure just made Game Central’s Samy choke with… well, rage.

So there you have it. The world’s first look at what appears to be a pretty kick-ass game in the making. in true id form, no word on a release date yet, but Maximum PC’s Will Smith and I both hypothesized it’s likely 2 years out. Here’s hoping for the fast track! QuakeCon ‘09: it was nice knowin’ ya. ‘Till next year!

The second day of QuakeCon seemed eerily reminiscent of the first – tons of rabid fans clawing at each other in small collected groups for free schwag, spent energy drinks collecting along the LAN tables like glistening moss, and more neon lights than you could shake a keyboard at. And it was loud. Very, very loud. But as so commonly happens on day 2, there were some awesome moments to behold between the madness of the mobs. For one, I finally got my grubby mitts on some serious Wolfenstein single player action.

My first impression of the game was, admittedly, rather “meh.” Sure, the graphics are damn gorgeous, and the stylized presentation of the precursor cinematics are noteworthy, but so much of the initial gameplay practically screamed “retread!” For one, the basic player armament is a carbon copy of Call of Duty 1: bolt-action KAR98s, heavy-ass BARs, MP4 grease guns, and tiny Walther P38s. And of course, you have to aim down the sites to maintain accuracy. *Yawn.*

Also, the arms upgrade process, while handy for avoiding battlement repetition weariness, is unabashedly stolen from Metal Gear Solid 4 and Far Cry 2. Basically, you can buff your lackluster standard issue side-arms by locating conveniently placed black market dealers and spending collected gold coins (really guys? Gold coins?) on enhancements like silencers, high capacity drum mags, and improved firing rate coils. Not exactly what I’d call a thunderous innovation in the realm of imagination. When you’re injured, you don’t lose life via a stamina gauge, but rather, the sides of your screen begin to fill in with blood spatters and deep crimson until you keel over like a riddled rotten tree.  Again, this somehow seems oddly familiar…

Oh, and you also have ancient supernatural powers at your disposal via a mystical and mysterious pendant that stays with the protagonist at all times. These plasmids… I mean “powers,” range from the dear-God-not-again-are-you-kidding-me slow-mo bullet time effect to freezing the screen while you’re free to roam and blast away, your unfortunate foes left perforated and none the wiser. While the supernatural elements provide an obvious story platform that id games so commonly excel at, it just feels woefully over-used and out of place here. After all, the original Wolfenstein didn’t have force push and anti-grav bombs, it had Hitler dual-weilding freakin’ chain guns.

And yet, despite quite a few blemishes in the digital polish, the game (at least the first fraction of it) is still marginally entertaining. There’s a large focus on group tactics, the sound is phenomenal, and the level design, naturally, is crazy good. Speaking of level design, the main part of the stage I played was almost identical to TF2 Train Yard, a custom map created by GC’s very own Shaun Rykiss. Of course, Shaun’s map didn’t have a gigantic undead juggernaut breaking up through the floor tiles like wet Klennex, but still.

The above mentioned monstrosity that shot up under the trains like a pillar of death was the one boss I eventually engaged. He resembled an unholy crossbreed between a Big Daddy and Thor, armed with an arcing particle cannon.  But for such a giant and imposing visage, he went down like chump, felled by just a few clips of my grease gun and a couple of strafes thrown in for good measure. The good news was I got to pick up the experimental weapon he dropped, and I hastily started disintegrating Nazis with bluish chains of snarly electricity shortly after, each ribbon traveling from one goose-stepping shame of a human to another. Can’t argue with good times like that.

But as big as QuakeCon is, Wolfenstein wasn’t all that peppered the convention building’s sticky cement floors today. Some other items of note I witnessed: Global Agenda, a 3rd person sci-fi MMO brawler / shooter which focuses strongly on coherent teamwork and a marathon-like quest pace; Left 4 Dead and Quake III competitions with people heaving mice and bottles in frustration; and Fatal1ty (who now wears a Mohawk, for some reason) pwning the pubbies like a linebacker tackles nerds.

As for me, it’s quittin’ time. I’m off to grab some much-needed chow and rack-time. Tune in tomorrow for coverage on id’s unveiling of the first ever in-game footage of Rage, and the results of the 2009 Quake Live championships.

QuakeCon is just one of those events that seems to bring out the nerdiest best in people. This year was no exception. Even though the event was moved from the semi-vanilla Hilton in downtown Dallas to the far more posh albeit comically named “Gaylord Texan” in north Dallas, the nerds found their way. And did they ever.

Maybe it’s just the grandiose cathedral ceilings or the endless droves of hustling laptop-carrying bodies, all seemingly late for some breaking Quake Live news or new contest announcement, but this year seemed twice as big as last year. The hallways and event floors were filled with swarming masses folks looking to whet their appetites with some serious geeky joy. I doubt they went away disappointed.

Of course, being the first day, the real target was the legendary John Carmack keynote. The same keynote where people have died from old age during the course of his insanely descriptive yet somewhat maniacal passionate speeches of rocket science, coding, and Diet Coke. Okay okay, he talked about actual games quite a bit as well. And honestly, this year’s keynote bore some rather interesting comments. Check out a few of Carmacks tidbits covered below.

On Rage (id’s upcoming post apocalyptic racer/shooter):

“We avoided making people look believable (in previous id games), it was okay they looked stupid. And who cares, their brains were usually damaged. But for Rage, making realistic humans is crucial. We’re putting a large focus on human design.”

“… we saved the first level as the last one built, which will make testing more difficult, but the player’s first interaction with the world far more contemporary.”

On other topics:

“(Personnel) Management is not my forte. But Doom 4 is taking the most tightly managed approach ever.”

“id will become a 3 Team company (only three games at development at any given time).”

“The number of people playing Quake Live is phenomenal. Initially [about creating the entire game], I admit to saying, ‘We can do this in 6 months!’ It didn’t quite work out that way.”

“Cloud computing is a wonderful thing… [but for gaming] latency is an issue.”

“All your electronic devices, such as your phones and even your PC cores, are 90% unutilized.”

“For iPhone apps, I can work really really hard and then, a product simply pops out. For game development, it’s simply not done this way.”

So yeah, a lot of good stuff. Of course, it just wouldn’t be a typical John Carmack keynote unless it lasted a solid 3 and a half hours. He did little to break the tradition. Wes, our photographer, even snagged a pic of one dude passed the hell out in his chair after nary the first hour eked by. He probably didn’t buy 2 cases of Bawl’s as everyone else seemed to do. Can’t say I really blame him (for sleeping or for negating the Bawl’s).

The rest of the convention more or less revolves around the absolutely gargantuan BYOC (bring your own computer) center, and all the vendors that populate it. And I’m not entirely sure why, but QuakeCon ‘09 has generated some of the most ridiculous peripheral pitches ever. One of the best ones I encountered was a cumbersome and outright hilarious mock kevlar helmet that had built in headsets and a microphone (think the TF2 scout’s headgear but with a giant metal can on his noggin instead of a hat). I mean who comes up with this stuff? I actually felt sort of bad for the booth workers, but naturally, that didn’t stop me from trying one on and having Wes snap a picture. I mean come on now, it had to be done.

So for now the show is just gathering steam. Custom modded PCs keep rolling in, and empty Mountain Dew cans litter the floors like a neon green landfill. Basically, it’s your standard fare for any mass gaming gathering. And that’s just the way we like it, dammit.

So stay tuned tomorrow for another more detailed set of updates. In the mean time, anyone wanna take bets on if Carmack’s still talking?

QuakeCon, Day 1 Gallery

But not humans in modern PC games. No sir. People in PC games these days are the Victorian white knights of the prim and proper acceptable vernacular. They’re the Ned Flanders of the digital world. So rare is it to hear a character in a PC game curse, that you’ll often do a double take when once in every ten thousand years a single choice cuss word does somehow slip through.

This makes little sense. Especially when juxtaposed in concert with such a concept as chaotic violence. Violence and swearing go together like Mexican tap water and volatile diarrhea. It’s human nature I guess – when one gets shot, one screams “F*ck!” When a grenade lands next to one’s ankles and wobbles lazily over to one’s toe-tips, one typically does not mutter “Awww fiddlesticks!” No my friends, the reality is clear: when bad things happen, bad words typically follow.

“Gosh darn it; they got Frank! Heavens to Betsy!”"

So why the hell do PC games seem to avoid this little tidbit of realistic continuity? Well, probably because we as an American culture think that blasting organic stuff in half is giggle-inducing, but potty-mouth is evil. Or maybe publishers surmise that Hillary Clinton won’t trash a game quite so much if it only contains raped hookers and savagely beaten old people. Or maybe all game writers are foppish prudes. Doesn’t matter to me, because really, excuses are like ass cracks: everyone’s got one, and they all stink.

I want swearing, goddammit. I want to be immersed in the foul gameplay 100%, not jarred out of my dark fantasy when Crysis’s Nomad gets his kneecaps forcibly removed and remarks as, “Uh-oh, I’m in trouble now!” Or when my commanding officer in Red Alert 3 gets half his forces obliterated and simply replies with woefully ridiculous, “Dang it! That stinks!” Know what? It’s okay to f*cking swear (but of course I won’t, because I’m a hypocrite and I know it’ll offend readers if I do it too much).

Still, despite my admittedly paper-tiger approach in this particular piece of a periodical (alliteration makes up for being a epistolary wuss, right?), I’ll admit a handful of semi-recent games have got it right. Among the hallowed few: F.E.A.R., Rainbow Six Vegas, GTA, Far Cry 2, Minesweeper. (Ha. Ha.) Among those notables that have failed miserably:  Fallout 3 and UT3. Anyone who’s played Fallout 1 or 2 knows how grimy and sewage-like the language used to be in the apocalyptic wastelands (and appropriately so). But apparently, 100 years later, the savages of the nuclear winter decided that cursing was a terrible, terrible idea. But killin’ and stealin’ is still awesome! Yep, makes perfect sense to me.

“Golly!”

In UT3, characters abbreviate spoken swears with letters. Some even bellow, “Eff YEAH!” after a frag. Are you kidding me? “Eff?” What?! What does that even stand for? Fig Newtons? “Fig Newtons YEAH!” Hmmm. Maybe Epic was onto something though, because I actually feel more insulted that they choose to leave out an F-bomb in favor of a single goddamned letter.

And yes, some games would make little sense with rampant cursing. Dawn of Discovery wouldn’t really benefit, for example. Although, actually, your 15^th century regal advisor producing such delightful morsels as, “One of your plants has halted its f*cking production, asshole,” would be damn hilarious.

Anyways, look – I’m not saying that all games should have scripts mirrored off an episode of Deadwood, just the games that respectively fit the setting and context of the action at hand. Want a great example? Go play Kingpin. Perfect language for the setting.

And is tossing around dirty word really so bad? Has profanity become that taboo, while artistically-rendered promiscuous sex and rampant bloodshed are actively accepted instead? Seriously, next time you bash the living shit out of your pinky with a weighted ball-peen hammer, try not to swear. Go ahead; give it the ol’ college try. But I’m willing to wager your primal instincts will usurp your delicate fancies  and you’ll let fly a vile utterance that’d make Joe Pesci proud.

PC developers, take note: from personal experience, a combat infantry squad getting actively suppressed by a tank-mounted .50 cal and sixteen armed irregulars usually don’t emote their frustrations on the situation like kindergarten Sunday-schoolers talking to adults. Just a heads up there.

Maybe Bethesda, Epic, and 2K need to hire Christian Bale as a writing correspondent… I hear he’s done some fantastic things with obscenities.

But wait… maybe we need to reevaluate our strategies. For too long, the PC gamer soldiers have fought on the same terms as the opposition. We’ve copied their tactics and called them our own. In our own desperate strife to surpass the adversary, we’ve started losing that which made us so glorious and righteously sovereign in the first place. We’ve been destroying paradise to save it. But no more. Today we foster a return to the classic methods of PC gaming conventional warfare. And here are 3 simple ways we’ll do it.

1) Arrest and banish traitorous DLC

That’s right troops, the secret is out— downloadable content (DLC) is evil propaganda disguised as a sweet honey-soaked warm embrace, spun from nothing but the corrupt webs of the consolites’ deceitful lips. Remember patches? Remember when an extra episode and a double-barreled shotgun were actually included with the original game? These are all now cleverly disguised in the paid DLC form of “additional accessories.”

A shotgun with a tin can duct-taped to it.
Definitely worth 10 bucks

The sad truth, my dear elite, is this: in the land of the console there’s no such thing as a full-fledged “expansion,” nor is there such a thing as a “free” patch. The freedom-hating publishers have usurped the civilians’ permissions to stack on any extra features or needed repairs without purchasing a whole new medium outright.

And now this ridiculous behavior has infected our sacred populace? No sir. Not on my watch. We’re going to extricate this weed from the root and set it ablaze. With this stain on our souls lifted permanently, we’ll raise our PC flag proud and high. We’ll gain back our polished and finished games. We’ll regain our honor through quality over quantity. We won’t have to wait a month for content that should have been rightfully delivered from the start. And if we get our hands on any ancillary booty, it’ll be in the form of an entire bona fide expansion pack. And if our games are bugged? We’ll have them mended at no extra cost, just like or PC forefathers would have had it.

2) Assassinate checkpoint save systems

Comrades, in any given conflict, you must know your enemy.

Stand at attention and repeat after me, “Check point saves ARE the enemy!!” Say it louder! Say it again! Good. Because mark my words, checkpoint saves go against everything that the PC gamer patriot stands for.

Checkpoint saves are the ultimate oppressor, the ultimate freedom remover. In the land of the consolite, the brainwashed citizens lack the rights to simply hit F5, quit out, and go to dinner. They’re mandated to start anew and replay tough encounters over and over should they choose to end prematurely. They’re subjected to repeat 1 hour cut scenes prior to a main boss battles dozens of times. The console player’s only solace comes in the menu screen, where the action is briefly paused.  It has been rumored that in the country of the console, games have been left on pause for entire work days to avoid losing one’s progress. All of this can be alleviated with a simple feature the PC has retained since its birth, but slowly lost as the war has trudged onward.

“Hey Bill, does this battle seem familiar?”
“Sure does Jim; we’ve played this checkpoint
17 times already.”

If a single particular dynamic of advantage exists to lure out the huddled masses over to the One True Platform, then it must be in the shape of the quick-save. Imagine the catharsis once a poor starving consolite realizes he may save his game during ANY moment, of ANY given time. What will the un-handcuffed patron do with all his new opportunity and privilege? Why, play more PC games of course. For after the chains and whips of the checkpoint save are demolished and discarded, the more he can save a current game, immediately partake of another title, and then just as quickly leap back into another.

It is your duty as a citizen soldier to educate your countrymen with this powerful facet. For often times, the power of the spoken word may serve the function of a thousand fired bullets and missiles. Let us not murder our opposition’s conscripts, but rather humiliate the tyrants by converting their most faithful servants to our side instead.

3) Unleash the true power of the mouse and keyboard

Answer me this my kinsmen— why, in a war where the PC is so well equipped, so technologically advanced, so versatile and flexible, have we consistently been bested in the arena of peripheral combat?

Your silence is understandable, for this is a question with no logical correct answer. The PC warrior dual-wields his mighty effects, an agile and precise threat form all sides, while the consolite must hold his singular clumsy weapon with two hands, swinging it awkwardly to and fro. And yet we lose.

Why? Because we cripple ourselves by employing our enemies’ weaker limitations into our formations. We fail to utilize 80% of our keyboard real estate because our arms manufacturers feel the need to configure an in-game control scheme around a total of 8 buttons, just as our console counterparts would have it. Sometimes, in such given avenues as Rainbow Six Vegas, we’re informed to hold down a key for secondary actions. Is this bad comedy? No, it’s  preposterous nonsense. I have within my close and ample reach 30 keys of functionality, so why would I ever handicap my fighting style by removing this advantage altogether? How this cantankerous concept has gone uncontested within our hallowed ranks for so long is a dangerous mystery.

The consolite’s worst nightmare, if configured appropriately

Hearken my words and heed my call, let us demand from our good benefactors the vigor and potential from the instruments of interaction that we already carry. Why issue an automatic rifle and weld the firing mode to single-shot? Why release a cluster bomb and deactivate over half the scattered pellets? Issuing a mouse and keyboard, while simultaneously restricting their immeasurable configuration options formulates about as much plausible sense as filling a 30-round clip with a mere dozen projectiles.

We’ve already made significant progress in this field of research. Look no further than ARMA II as solid evidence of this. All praise the creators of ARMA II, for they are wise. Let ALL PC games’ control schemes follow suit accordingly, for they shall be our saviors.

And there you have it. Simple. Put DLC, check point saves, and artificially hampered controls up against the walls and fire. Once the word filters through the opposition’s ranks that their adversaries no longer fight upon equal terms, the enemy will lay down their arms and  begin deserting and defecting from the land of the console to the PC in no time. Because, after all, a victory through capture rather than death is truly the sweetest victory of all.

Games for Windows

Once upon a time, shiny tape recorder in hand, tie firmly knotted to collar, slacks cleanly starched and pressed, a gutsy rookie gaming journalist ventured forth to Microsoft’s headquarters to inquire about the much maligned Games for Windows initiative. When he asked about the seemingly imploding nature of the abominable program, the GFW official rep casually replied, “That’s a typo. The real name of the project is ‘Throw your PC games out of your windows.’” The young reporter then responded, “Hmm. That makes a lot more sense, actually.”

The reporter was then shot.

Richard Garriott

In certain enlightened cultures of the world, the name “Richard” is often abbreviated as “Dick.” Richard Garriott is a Dick.

While it’s true that Sir Lord Admiral His Highness British (who’s a native of Texas, not Britain, by the way), once generated some fantastic PC gaming titles, it was later in his life when he rolled out of his 28-foot long bed one bright sunny morning and said, “Know what? Good games are fun and all, but I’m gonna start making some crap.”

He’s smiling only because he hates you.

And boy did he. His final turd mountain was erected in the stinky form of Tabula Rasa, which is Latin for: “My creator is an egomaniacal talentless jerk who stores preserved human fetuses in his mock dungeon.”

And then Lord Dick quit and went to space. Seriously.

Nowadays, this self-proclaimed “pioneer” of PC gaming lavishes our eyes with such Twitter gems as “Joe jumped from the top of the atmosphere… now researching space dive issues – speeds, attitude control, transonic human flight, temps.”

My complaint isn’t that Richard Garriott went to space; my complaint is that he came back.

GPU

If you’re gaming with one of these,
then you are probably grumpy.

Contrary to popular belief, this acronym does NOT stand for Grumpy People United. In actuality, it stands for Graphical Processor Unit. However, in a strange sort of coincidence, Grumpy People United and Graphical Processor Units are often found within close proximity of each other.

GPU also stands for “Go Poop in a Urinal.” But sadly, this has little to do with PC gaming (or does it?).

Oregon Trail

The best PC game ever made. You get to blast buffalo with musket balls that travel at a cool 6mph and your party often succumbs to painful deaths from dysentery. Also, it put Oregon on the map. Like seriously, what the hell else has Oregon ever done for the USA? Nothing. That’s what.

The sequel, Oregon Fail, was not well received.

Minesweeper

Why is the smiley face blind? What the hell?

Mentioning this title at any LAN party or gaming event will result in a justifiable summary public execution. It is, however, a perfect way to weed out and effectively eliminate embedded console spies and general gaming idiots.

“Dude! Ever heard of Minesweeper? I just conquered that shit!”

“Dude! We’re going to murder you!”

id

FYI: It’s pronounced “ID,” in the sense that it rhymes with “Squid.” It is not verbalized as “Eye-dee.” Thanks to the good people at QuakeCon ’08 for mentioning this little tidbit after I asked Todd Hollenshead, “Hey Todd, when did you first start at “Eye-Dee?”

Good times.

Also, id was recently bought out by Zenimax, an invading alien race bent on destroying fun.

RTS Games

“Hi! I’m an RTS Game! Chris Taylor, one of my floundering founding fathers, says that I’m better suited for the Xbox 360 and PS3 because the PC sucks! Thanks Dad! I never really considered you my father anyway. Also, I stole a wad of money from your wallet a few years ago so I could catch a train to Uncle Stardock’s. I’m not sorry. Enjoy your new endeavors at monumental catastrophes!”

Derek Smart

No he isn’t.

WASD

Rhymes with “Yahtzee.” Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. Doesn’t everyone use right mouse to move forward and A to jump? They damn well should.

Oh, and contrary to unpopular belief, I don’t use Pause Break to reload. I use Num Lock!

Blizzard

This is not a company; it’s a towering financial Godzilla that bashes down rival MMO skyscrapers like they were made of toothpicks and Legos and then stomps on them, laughing all the while like a twisted little kid lasering ants with a magnifying glass.

Fun fact: Blizzard owns your soul and all its subsidiary rights. Could be worse – your soul could rather be owned by Sir Dick Garriott. Or Steve Jobs.

When a non-gamer views my Quake tattoo for the first time, their response is usually along the lines of: “Oh! Hey, that’s great! Wait, err…  it’s a tattoo of what?”And then they walk away with a confused distant smile rapidly fading off their stunned face.

Some of the responses from fellow PC gamers have been  similar. I guess it’s nothing to be shocked about. After all, a Harley-Davidson tattoo, to me, is really kind of a head-scratcher. And yet to some, that Harley-Davidson ink might mean the world on a golden plate. This is why I think my astute choice to have someone poke a rather painful needle covered in hot black ink into my virgin shoulder’s flesh bears some explanation.

It was no easy decision, lemme tell ya. I pondered the idea of a tattoo for something along the lines of a decade. I teetered back and forth like a bobbing ship upon troubled waters between various symbols and icons. It wasn’t until late in my glacial thought processes that I considered a gaming tag. And even when I did, my mind bounced back and forth contemplating the various myriad options available. I finally reeled in my listing imagination and selected two venerable possibilities: the GDI Eagle, from Command & Conquer, and the monolithic Quake I logo. Both enjoyed a rather geeky lasting appeal when Photoshopped onto my pasty white deltoid.

Here it is, a mere hour after getting inked.

Still, it didn’t take long to elect the winner. Some of you may have heard me wax poetic on the Game Central Podcast about the digital shockwaves that Quake has impacted on my life. If crossing over from consoles to PCs is a journey, then Quake served as my bridge. It was the first game I ever ventured into online (beyond the LAN setting), and it was the first PC game where I dominated others like a wrathful god of furious pain (play me on House of Cthon. I dare you).

It was because of this quaint little shooter that I initially stumbled upon Team Fortress; no, not Team Fortress Classic, with all the grenades and pyrotechnic acrobatics, I’m talking about the original. The one where you had to stand completely still to fire the Heavy’s mini-gun, and the one where the Medic bashed you with an axe to heal you.

But the whole interpretation of Quake goes well beyond just hammering away at an interactive piece of visual media. Quake represents a time in my existence of pure exuberant freedom; a time of total PC gaming nirvana. A period completely unrestricted by any of life’s usual distractions. When the game was released, I’d just graduated high school and joined the USAF on the delayed enlistment program (something our comrade Kirill is now experiencing first hand). Although I signed the dotted line in May, my departure date for basic training was December 10^th. This left 8 precious months of personal uncompressed gaming abandon, and I filled the proverbial mug with everything Quake until it overflowed. Then I chugged it down and filled it again.

The mighty GDI eagle. Runner up to the “become a
permanent resident on Chris’s shoulder” contest.

My safari with Quake goes far beyond just an enjoyable diversion that once encapsulated a small moment in my lifespan. When I think of Quake, it reminds me of that long chilly walk I took right after I beat the second act for the first time, the clanking background noises and monster’s muffled grunts still echoing through my head; it reminds me of the crisp Vermont autumn air that filled my lungs while I traipsed along the dirt road that meandered past my house; it reminds me of casting my eyes to the darkened sky as it dropped a few wayward flakes of snow down from above like floating whitened ashes, the icy crystals melting away on my brow while I wondered if perhaps one day I might understand where inspirations to create masterpieces such as Quake might stem from.

Quake, for me, is synonymous with joy. It’s intermingled with otherwise separate cherished memories that occurred in tandem with its magnetic grip over my consciousness. I recall getting lost in Quake one final time the night before boot camp, my limbs and digits brimming with a bizarre mixture of anxiety and excitement. I remember clacking away on my keyboard and palming my mouse nervously while I watched enraged thunderstorms ravish the hilly landside in a beautiful deluged destruction. I remember squeezing in just 5 more minutes on E1M2 before my family shuffled off into the rusty ol’ Chevy Lumina minivan for Thanksgiving at my grandparent’s.

My internal reflection and retrospection of Quake, ultimately, is why I opted to emblazon a permanent impression on myself of a game once so actively engaged. It’s a reminder to me of a life that once was, of a personal golden age now expended. Quake is much more than just a game; it’s a portal to my past, a best friend nearly lost to the teeth of the daily grind. And now, it will always be with me, and it will never be forgotten.

But what about the obligatory cliché? Will I regret the tattoo in 40 years? Will I look back and curse my misguided youth? Not a snowball’s chance in hell, friends.

There are perhaps 16 games I should be playing right now. Probably more like 25, if you include games released over six months ago that I still haven’t beaten (Fallout 3, Red Alert 3, to name a paltry few). And here I am playing the original Max Payne instead, in all its noirish allegory-permeated glory. I’m completely overlooking Demigod and Plants vs. Zombies. I’ve even put my trusty Braid in the holding pattern. So what bizarre illicit infectious behavior has Mr. Payne cast upon my fragile psyche, causing me to ignore everything else and invest 100% of my free time into an interactive digital yarn spun almost 9 years ago?

I feel like I’ve been mugged and sacked by a thuggish shadow (in a strangely good way). It’s time to get to the bottom of this little caper. It’s time to gather up and handcuff the game’s main characteristics, stuff ‘em into the petty wagon, and and hold each of the proposed perpetrators under the interrogator’s 100 watt bulb and see if they sing. One of ‘em is bound to crack.

Graphics: Max Payne, from a visual standpoint, was considered the Crysis of 2001. It was a bona fide graphical battering ram, primed to bash down even the mightiest of GPUs. Some publications even went so far as to assert that after the release of Max Payne, we were now waist-deep in the luscious waters of yummy photorealism.

The publications were wrong. Very wrong. Not sure about you, but I don’t remember any of my friends’ faces never changing expressions no matter what, unless they died from a shotgun blast to the sternum (although, from an objective perspective, this never actually happened to any of my friends). I also don’t recall folk’s clothes and accessories being plastered to their bodies like super-glue with precisely zero depth when viewed from the side. And I might be mistaken, but I’m not so sure police cruisers and semi-trucks contained pointy octagonal tread-less wheels at that point in history. And was everything in real life so blocky, sparse, and fuzzy back then? Those Max Payne subway trains look more like hardened Twinkies than a true representation of a railed mass transit container.

If this is photo realism, then I really need glasses.

Sure: the dirty, cramped, scrawled urban environments are still discernibly functional and notably authentic, but let’s face it: compared to even the most rudimentary of today’s in-game standing graphics, Max Payne looks like Max Shit.

So, it appears that graphics are off the hook in the hidden motivation factor of Chris’s abandonment of newer gaming titles. Whatever nuance has hijacked my mind and forced me to neglect my latest library, it sure ain’t this game’s looks. Max Payne’s graphics: you are released from custody. You may go. Please never come back.

Every gun sounds unique.

Sound: Unlike rendered digital illustrations, which seem go from infant to elderly overnight, the sound arena seems to enjoy a far longer youth… or at least an extended mid-adulthood. Max Payne’s sound effects and music, simply put, are nothing short of iconic. From the opening menu’s over-the-top edgy theme song to the eerie ambient noises of archaic buildings settling on paper-thin bricks somewhere in the distance while you traverse the crumbling alleyways, this game is an auditory tour de force. Max Payne was one of 5.1 sound’s early champions, and the reverberating tones’ encoded positioning remains seamless and fluidic. If you implement a slow-mo diving pirouette around a furnace, the clanking innards of the heated metal housing will follow your ears appropriately, yet the cacophony of your haphazard shotgun blasts always stays anchored to the center. TVs’ static and goons’ banter are refreshingly muffled if listened to through a wall or door, but the moment you remove the barrier via an opening, their sounds become crisp and bright. Great stuff.

The musical score is sparse, and mostly limited to boss encounters, ultra high-tension shoot-outs, and static graphical cut-scenes. While I will normally chastise limited usage of music in modern games (I’m an orchestral reactionary. Get over it.) in Max Payne, it seems perfectly suited to the John Woo-esque action-charged overtures. Really, now that I ponder it, the main menu theme is equally as memorable as Red Alert’s Hell March or Duke 3D’s grab bag. And the foreboding beat-heavy melody that plays while you direct Max through a hallucinogenic drug-induced nightmare is nothing short of masterful.

Hmmm. It looks like Max Payne’s exceptional sound might very well be a strong suspect in the abrupt case of my sudden gaming monogamy. And yet, as captivating as the game’s concocted resonances are, I get the feeling the sonority is not the mastermind here. Let’s keep Mr. Payne’s sound overnight for additional questioning.

Bullet time used to be inspiring. Now it’s annoying.

Gameplay: Believe it or not, at one point in PC gaming history, bullet-time wasn’t clichéd. I know: it’s tough to imagine. But it’s true. Unfortunately, years of clinical abuse and needless over-indulgence have deformed a once magical innovative element into a twisted and rotten heap of shame. It’s particularly tough when an oldie like Max Payne centers its entire action round this singular dynamic. Yeah, it’s interesting to see where the concept all started, but the sad hard truth is that bullet-time is a broken record.  Max Payne’s stick-rigid game play of: “get ammo, get guns, engage bullet-time, kill, and repeat” sure as hell ain’t guilty of anything except repetition. And mindless redundancy, unless I’m some type of digital masochist, is not the reason I’m happily watching my copy of Red Alert 3 weep in solitude while I cuddle with mistress Payne instead.

The rest of the manipulated maneuvering is standard 3^rd person shooter fare; wander from location to location, make a few jumps, find a few keys, dispatch a few baddies. Max Payne did employ some uncommon choices for the time of its release in the HUD department. Rather than a numbered health meter or an armor gauge, Max’s life is a smallish silhouette of himself that fills up with maroon when damaged  until he croaks (which, due to the insane difficulty at times, he does often). To decrease the agony, you eat painkillers scattered throughout the levels like red skittles. Simple and effective, but it’s hardly mesmerizing.

Max Payne’s sound: not only are you flagrantly innocent of any gaming entrapment crime, you’re also literally incapable of any type of seduction thanks to a decade’s worth of immoral bullet-time cloning. I’d suggest a lawsuit, but since you’ll probably be dead tomorrow anyways, I guess it really doesn’t matter. The officer will show you out.

Story: You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. And usually, that first impression is as accurate as a veteran British SAS sniper. In this case, Max Payne’s story appears in the room as a mustachioed sneering western villain wearing a black top hat and wringing his gloved hands to boot. And now that we have the suspect in the hot-seat, he’s sweatin’ it like a crowded Swedish bath-house. Max Payne’s writing will either make you want to apply upon the authors a savage beating, or it’ll cause you to escort the game box to bed with you naked. There’s no in-between.

You can skip these interludes; or you could buy champagne and just throw it away.

Well, I guess you can call me tickled pink, because Max Payne’s story and I have made sweet, sweet love. From the opening gritty words to the final narrative vowel, I was beguiled. The noir underpinnings (femme fatal, crass antihero, over-the-top dialogue, dark theme); the hilarious background sub-plots (Captain Baseballbat Boy, Lords and Ladies); and the psychological analogous setting situated inside a NYC blizzard… all of these are just small pieces of what makes Max Payne such a unique avenue of PC Gaming expositional exploration. If you fancy yourself a classic film buff, you simply cannot miss this title.

Yes, there are plenty of jackals that have lambasted Max Payne’s plot as empty literary fluff: a failed chronicle packed with laughable metaphors and groan-inducing attempted drama. Of course, these are probably the same educated folk that consider Blood Sport and Minesweeper works of art, so these criticisms are hardly surprising. As for me, I think I’ll stick with the likes of Memento and Max Payne. I guess I’m just a sucker for talent and depth.

The game’s story is shocking from the start: before you’re 5 minutes in, you get to helplessly witness the immediate aftermath of the slaughter of Max’s wife and infant child. And it only gets gleefully murkier from there. As you progress through the narrative (or regress, depending on your interpretation of Max’s fall) the characters’ numerous discourses crackle with wit and sharpness. Each static graphical interlude (which pepper Max’s dark crusade liberally) accentuates the overall turmoil of a man consumed by hatred and confusion. This is the stuff legends are made of, and Max Payne should rightfully be considered on the highest pedestals from the written standpoint.

As for me: I’m smitten. So, it looks like we’ve nailed our criminal. Guilty as charged. Full confession. Hardly even put up a fight. The sentence: life on my hard drive without the possibility of parole.

But naturally, conjugal visits are always a welcome possibility.

In the spirit of the recent double-decker Spy/Sniper Team Fortress 2 class “updates,” I have decided to put forth a list of future requested unlocks for certain classes. I will be sending the letter directly to Robin Walker. For your viewing pleasure, I have attached a copy of it below, which I will be mailing shortly.

Dear Mr. Walker,

I would like to thank you and your talented creative team for your continuous efforts to give every Team Fortress 2 class (except the Heavy) stupidly strong and balance-crushing unlockable weapons. However, I think we can all agree these new weapons aren’t overpowered enough. I hereby suggest, no: mandate the following upgrades for the next Team Fortress 2 update. (Please send all lucrative royalty checks care of Havoc; Game-Central.org.)

The Macro-oni and Cheese

This new weapon for the Pyro may look like a simple bowl of macaroni and cheese, but when tossed at an enemy soldier, its powdered orange pasta innards clog your adversary’s barrel and totally removes their L337 rocket-jumping macros. Permanently. Not only that; whenever the afflicted Soldier attempts to re-bind his keyboard with another rocket-macro, the Macro-oni and Cheese pops up from the background and uninstalls the game while simultaneously over-volting the user’s power supply thus setting their computer on fire, just as the Pyro would have it. Those cheap-ass Soldiers will think twice about replacing twitch-based skill with algorithmic horse-crap now!

The Terminator

Sure, the Spy is now basically invincible with his new bag of crazy unlocks, but why stop there? Utilizing future technologies and advanced scientific breakthroughs, The Terminator, when equipped, will infuse the Spy’s skeletal structure with pure steel alloy, and replace his muscles with hydraulic pistons producing unparalleled herculean strength. The Terminator will, in reality, not only render the Spy completely indestructible, but also grant him never-ending revolver critical hits, regardless of the shots’ locational-based damage. Forever. The Spy will literally become a certifiably unfair invulnerable bullshit class, just as Valve obviously intended.

The People’s Burden

This new unlock, which replaces all the weapons for the Heavy class, will take the shape and form of a giant iron ball and chain attached to the character’s left ankle, simulating the physical strife his people have endured over the countless years due to endless bureaucratic corruption and oppression. True: this new weapon isn’t actually a weapon at all, and it has absolutely no use whatsoever except to cripple the Heavy’s already glacial movement speed, but maybe when your enemies see how gimped the class has truly become, they’ll take pity and spare you, leaving you free to limp to the flag or capture point mostly unmolested. But look out for those callous and remorseless huntsman arrows, because they’ve now been upgraded to boomerang and register insta-death headshots even when aimed at a victim’s feet! Oh those wacky Snipers!

The Poop Soccer

Why should the Sniper have all the fun with his new-found airborne urine-casting abilities? The Scout needs some toilet-love also! This brilliant unlock upgrades the Sandman’s puny baseball to an over-inflated soccer ball filled with 5 pounds of fresh human feces. When struck with the Scout’s bat and sent skyward, the Poop Soccer enjoys a built-in homing device that will find its target regardless of things like aiming or practice. Just fire and forget! Once the improvised crap-missile hits its unfortunate target, The Poop Soccer explodes, covering the receiver in a thick layer of filthy waste that causes all nearby teammates to take 600% more damage than normal… for the entire match. This weapon will have infinite ammo, as the Scout has (apparently) taken up as steady diet of prunes, watermelon and 5-alarm chili. Refill at will!

The Ass Magnet

If there’s anything that certain already self-sustained talented Demomen need, it’s MORE medics leashed to their proverbial rectums. The Ass Magnet successfully fixes this long-standing inadequacy. And it’s just that: a gigantic magnet that the Demoman stuffs into his Scottish ass. The mega-increased polarity then draws all friendly Medics’ medi-guns straight to the rear of the user, regardless of who they were already healing. No Medics around? Not a problem! The Ass Magnet will query every TF2 server world-wide and yank those Heavy-attached healing bastards from their nice comfy backseat rides to YOUR ass instead. It will then ban those players’ IP addresses from any destination except for the ones you join. It’s the perfect Demo addendum! Best of all: The Ass Magnet won’t replace any existing weapons. You’ll just get it for free. Screw those Heavies, they don’t need medics, YOU do!

The Hook Line And/Or Sinker

This is a fishing pole. For all classes. You can sit down on CP_Well and fish with it. For no reason. Hell, TF2 is more or less an MMO already, let’s just complete the circle! Equip The Hook Line And/Or Sinker, park yourself next to some water, stop shooting stuff, and start NOT having fun ASAP!! Let’s bring on the astounding mediocrity: online team-based FPSs are overrated anyways.

Sincerely,

Chris Comiskey, AKA Havoc

But does this mean that PC gaming causes this behavior? If my past destructive adventures in other hobbies are any indicator here, I’d put my money on inherent personal tendencies over the old fashioned gaming scapegoat. For utter simplicity, let me elaborate: when I get frustrated with anything I tend to throw stuff. Sometimes I throw fragile items, sometimes heavy items. The fact is, when Chris gets angry, shit gets thrown.

But does this dynamic totally pardon the vehicle of the device that the perpetrator’s behavior surrounds? It’s a sticky situation. The argument falls around the old adage: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Well, yeah, in part that’s true. But any logical human being can quickly deduce that it’s easier to perforate people with an M-249 SAW then it is with a pair of brass knuckles. The instrument of the deed, while not a sentient practitioner of the act, is nevertheless designed for that act.

But subjects such as weapons have an obvious defined purpose. They have a singular use. And certainly, it’s beneficial to limit psychologically unstable persons from gaining access to them. So, along these lines of reasoning, should we do the same for gamers? Should a guy like me with a track record of incendiary projectile-propelling anger be prevented from partaking of PC games simply because the option exists that I might one day toss a hard-cover copy of Watchmen through my office window?

I’m not so sure. And if that circumstantial statute was enacted, wouldn’t it more or less encompass 99% of the known population? And while I’m sure that Gandhi, if he were still alive, would love to kick back and relax with some Demigod every now and then, I think it’s rather unfair to deny the rest of us the same opportunity for enjoyment simply because we “might” lose our tempers.

Sure, certain potent stimuli naturally motivate a more visceral response from those engaged. Getting myself splashed by cold dirty water from some jerk who rams his Hummer through a sidewalk puddle at 50mph will create a different response than some dude walking up and teeing off into my groin with a 5-iron. My instinctive human reaction from soaked clothing might be to extend a solitary middle finger aimed towards the perpetrator. My instinctive reaction from receiving a blow to the junk with a metal pole would be a bit more violent (after the recovery of course).

Consequently, based off an enormous variety of potential personality structures, a frustrating game of Braid will evoke contrasting physical expressions of rage compared to an unnerving gaming affair of Team Fortress 2. In my case, I’ll leave it up to you on which would result in more velocity-related property destruction than the other. (Hint: Team Fortress 2).

I’ve actually done this before. Clearly, it’s PC gaming’s fault.

So here’s the real question: based off observed results of a combined interaction between user and media, should we deem gaming “possibly harmful” as a whole? Or should we rather suggest that people like yours truly might profit from some rather intensive anger management classes? If you take away my PC gaming, it’s not going to magically remove my sometimes inherent berserk dispositions. Wanna see some real objects find their way into the ionosphere? You should play a game of golf with me; I think the shaft of my driver is still in orbit. Look: bottom line here? If it isn’t PC gaming that I’m going bat-crap insane over, it’ll just be something else.

So yes, gaming can often act as the catalyst in my enraged endeavors, but in the end, it’s my response that should be examined and analyzed, not the means by which the response was produced.

All that being said, I’m not sure even Gandhi could play through Bionic Commando Rearmed without smashing his head through a brick wall; that game is literally impossible.

Ahhh the gamer tag. Literary lithograph of an online avatar? Descriptive dissertation of a PC gamer subculture built on brevity? Sticker on a cardboard box denoting respective media’s suggested retail purchase price? Sure!

But why do we choose our gamer tags? What do they mean? What motives stimulate us to self-apply such prophetically poetic labels as: “Lieutenant Ass-Master,” or “K1llerDestr0yerdeathdeathdeath23?” Does the gamer tag define the gamer, or rather: does the gamer fashion and mold an alter ego in the form of the gamer tag, representative of a hidden desire to match the underlying philosophical revelations tucked inside? And why with all the question marks? Sadly, some of these answers (specifically the question mark one), we may never know.

And yet, the very basis of the neural sciences demands (timidly suggests?) a complex well-researched study of the phenomenon. For our studies, and for the sake of candor, we’ll base our gamer tag dissections off the Game Central Podcast control group, minus myself; mostly because I can’t very well sacrifice my scientific integrity with personal bias, and also because my dinner is getting cold. So, shall we? We shall. Without further ado, let us delve into the dutiful deconstruction of these curious lab specimens.

Name: Tom
Gamer Tag: Frost
Etymology of the Idiom: Substance once derived from an obese moose’s frozen phallus.
Humorous Anecdotal Gamer Tag Synonyms: The Fridge, Frosting, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.

This is Robert Frost. He was not a PC gamer, but like
Tom, he’s extremly white. And his name is Frost.

Upon close study, it is evaluated that Tom bases his gamer tag off a doomed space marine in the movie Aliens who bears the same name. This is curious, as that guy was all sorts of a black dude, and Tom traces his heritage back to Maine, home of the semi-annual Caucasian invasion. Perhaps Tom has chosen this brisk identifier to represent his calm, cool, calculated collectiveness under fire in TF2 while launching woefully over-powered stickies at you with 4 medics jammed so far up his ass he looks like a mutated one-eyed lollipop. Or maybe he just really enjoys a nice cold Coke every now and then, and he wishes to share that sentiment publicly. With thousands upon thousands of irritable strangers.

Comparatively, Frost will often “break the ice” in online matches with: “Wowz- 82 kills and 2 deaths? Man I suck tonight. Lawlzz. Need to practice.” And then everyone quits, creating a type of server-emptying gaming Ice Age; thus personifying his gamer tag in the most potent of senses. Well played Mr. Frost, well played indeed sir!

Name: Keenan
Gamer Tag: Vagabond
Etymology of the Idiom: Largely underwhelming 1990’s Metallica song.
Humorous Anecdotal Gamer Tag Synonyms: Lagabond, Dragabond, Gagabond, Nagabond, Flagabond, Sagabond, The Duke of Rage-Quit.

This is a vagabond. Keenan got his online name
from this guy. Which explains a lot, really.

Every town has one: the vagabond. The drifter. The nomad. The hopeless hippie bum that enjoys stale pita bread and female armpit hair. And now PC gaming has a distinctiveness unique to its medium. The Vagabond. An interesting examination in a case study. His behavior is certainly indicative of the term. Vagabond can often be spotted running and gunning along as the lone wolf in online shooters, often to the detriment of the entire team… on purpose. He floats lazily from game to game, usually accepting any free hand out he can get. He’s not above begging, and he’s broke as shit. Yes, Vagabond is an obvious example of an individual built around a literal interpretation of a gamer tag’s core definition.

His gamer tag is even more appropriate when his server ping hovers around a cool 650, thus leaving him behind the rest of the group, stuck in an eternal downward spiral, the rebel of the high bandwidth age. You can take the Vagabond out of the 56k, but you can’t take the 56k out of the Vagabond.

I have no idea what that even means.

Name: Shaun
Gamer Tag: HojoTheGreat
Etymology of the Idiom: Name of rejected offensive Canadian cereal mascot
Humorous Anecdotal Gamer Tag Synonyms: Hojo the Terrible, El Hojo Muy Caliente, Captain Craptacular

“Hojo” is a term used to paraphrase
“Howard Johnson” hotels.
However, they are typically not great.

Every gaming kingdom must have a king, and that king certainly isn’t HojoTheGreat. In fact, many question the outright validity of his title. Nevertheless, it is clear that Sir Hojo has manufactured a tag worthy of the highest of regal aristocracies. Only problem is, there aren’t any PC gaming aristocracies. Does Hojo’s label hide some type of dormant royal developer blood? Was CTF_Trainyard the worst map in TF2 history? Is he related to Warren Spector? Should Canadians even be allowed to game? To all of this Hojo replies with a staunch: “kinda!”

Shaun’s gamer tag choice flies straight in the face of the usual Canuck’s fervent socialist agenda. This dynamic asserts a rather large middle finger to his native land, and while perhaps a stretch, suggests a yearning for a renaissance of Victorian PC gaming dictatorship brutalism.

Or maybe Hojo just really is great. But probably not…

Name: Kirill
Gamer Tag: Kirill
Etymology of the Idiom: A cacophony of vowels and consonants originating from Ivan Drago’s mouth piece in Rocky IV
Humorous Anecdotal Gamer Tag Synonyms: Boris the Blade, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Bill.

This is Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
He is not the Kirill we are talking about.

It can never be said that gamer tags in the PC gaming precedent do not broadcast a wide range of rich cultural diversity. Sure, we don’t have chicks or old people, but we do have communists! Kirill is a communist. From Russia. With love. Just like his red compatriots would have it, Kirill elicits precisely zero imagination or creative incentive. His gamer tag is his actual first name.

Seriously.

Kirill conforms to the glorious motherland’s radical leftisit ideals, proudly marching with his Lenin-awarded nomenclature into the world of interactive digital media with an iron fist raised high and mighty. Friends: this is a gamer tag to be feared and respected, for it carries behind it the combined weight of the people’s KGB. The stark and utter simplicity of the two-syllable codification demands the attention of all around him, and it may be said that the People’s Gamer does embody the epitome of the redistribution of wealth… even though he pretty much just redistributes it back into the hands of a plethora of JRPG imperialist developers. And while the handle “Kirill” might not be as flashy as “Iceman” or as amazing as “Slider,” it does suit the wearer well… so long as “Kirill” is Russian for: “can drink an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of vodka and still manage a coherent game of Eve Online.” Which I’m pretty sure it is.

Name: Kurzon
Gamer Tag: Vorian Atreides
Etymology of the Idiom: 1980’s David Lynch film with astonishingly terrible special effects
Humorous Anecdotal Synonyms: Abulurd Harkonnen, Lord Liverpool, The Longest Name Ever in the History of the Entirety of PC Gaming as We Know It.

This is the first image result you get
when you google “Vorian Atreides.” What the hell?

Kurzon is not a student to the school of abridged gamer tags. Rather, this curious PC gaming exemplification jams a mouth-crushing 6 syllables into one single online name. Why does he so painfully elongate this digital epithet? Simple: he’s British. Very, very British. And if there’s one thing those damned redcoats appreciate, it’s sticking it to us yanks. His UK gamer tag is probably “Id,” or “Hi.”

Try calling out “Spy behind you as Vorian Atredies!!” Go ahead. You won’t make it past Vorian before your TF2 medic gets a knife lodged deep between his collarbones, and Kurzon likes it this way. Sure, we could take the more obvious route and attempt to investigate the behavioral gaming connections and connotations from the obvious Dune influences and then connect the patterns to his online social pseudonym, but then we couldn’t insult him. And what fun would that be? None. It would be none fun.

And there you have it. The definitive edition. The coup de grace. You are now armed with all the knowledge and acumen needed to begin deconstructing your own friends’ gamer tags. Just remember: if the result of your endeavors does not elicit personal disrespect or some form of gamer tag behavioral mockery on your scrutinized subject, then you’re doing it wrong. Either that or you’re like Kirill and a communist.

But you’re probably just doing it wrong. (Dummy.)

Read the rest of our 3D Realms retrospectives here.

Another monolithic PC developer falls from the rafters of the heavens, smashing down to the ground below, its once angelic wings severed at the root by the sheers of callousness and intolerance. 3D Realms was once a juggernaut of the PC gaming industry, but now all that survives are tenuous fragments of a shattered team, unwillingly wedged apart into unknown imperceptible directions.

Over the past few days, I’ve struggled to cope. I’ve tried to view the disbanded group’s hollow nature in some sort of optimistic light. After all, when Black Isle was ousted, Troika was formed from the ashes of the fallout. And from Troika the world was given Arcanum, one of the best PC games ever devised. Would Arcanum have ever been born into fruition if Black Isle had stayed cohesive and intact? Hard to tell, but I comfort myself thinking otherwise.

I’d like to dream that the key players in the now scattered 3D Realms will pick up where they left off, form a new, and continue the creativity and brilliance they once projected. Of course there’s one small problem here: Duke Nukem Forever is no longer within the grasps of their control; Duke was ripped from their hands like an armed mugger would snatch a hapless victim’s wallet. And there are no signs that Duke Nukem Forever will go anywhere but into the silent void of the unjustly abandoned. Even if the game was eventually released, it just wouldn’t be the same without the direct influence of 3D Realms sitting in the driver’s seat.

I’ve heard the complaints: that 3D Realms hadn’t developed an important game in years; that their developer status was morphed into a publisher only type of device. But I say this: So what? The games they helped produce were some of the most influential the industry has ever partaken, including Max Payne 1 and 2. Yes, Duke Nukem Forever was in development for a literal decade. And yes, it was subjugated to numerous engine changes. But you’re telling me this behavior is worthy of judge, jury, and execution? You’re telling me that a potential masterpiece of the medium must have a concrete kill-date? Last I recall the Sistine Chapel was not mandated to be painted in a day.

So why is it that 3D Realms was condemned but Valve wasn’t? Why is it that when Blizzard says: “when it’s done,” we gleefully accept, even if seven years slide by like a shadow in the night? But no, when 3D Realms duplicated the quality over quantity dynamic, they get shackled, court-martialed, and exiled. And while I try to reassure myself that a brave new developer will eventually rise from 3D Realms’ haphazardly discarded pieces, I can’t help but wonder what magic could have been composed had the team been permitted to stay together.

But alas, all I can do now is drop a single tattered rose onto the blackened casket, bow my head, and mutter my final respects to a once grand persona that defined the epitome of everything that was wonderful about PC gaming.

Goodbye 3D Realms. You went before your time. You are gone, but you are not forgotten.

There was a time where the RTS game boxes stood proud atop my old beaten-up oak desk, gracefully sharing the dusty upper pedestals with the classic FPS and RPG cardboard containers. There was a time when the RTS category dominated my rusty PC’s archaic single-platter hard drive, occupying roughly three quarters of my precious storage real-estate. RTS games, at one time, were my devoted and enamored passion. But now? These days? My fondness for the RTS is a browned autumn leaf, drifting away on the last waves of the chilled season’s wind, gliding towards an inevitable and inexorable decomposition on the frozen earth below.

Not so long ago, I made a personal and public covenant to acquire Red Alert 3, and amazingly, I made good on that promise. I fired up Steam, punched in my credit card number, and downloaded every last drop of it. Everyone said Red Alert 3 was a blast to the past. They said it was a retro homage to the olden days of drawing big squares over tanks and infantry and left-clicking to charge. They said the camera was simple and straightforward. I was assured that Red Alert 3 would reinvigorate the empty space in my gaming soul where the RTS realm used to comfortably reside. And everyone was right, except on the last part; nothing filled the niche. There was no revelatory rebirth. The cobwebs in the empty space remain. Red Alert 3 means nothing to me. And it breaks my heart to admit it.

What’s the most frustrating dynamic here? I long for the eagerness to cuddle and cherish RTS games again. That’s the honest truth. Back before Duke3D and Quake, there was Command & Conquer and Red Alert. Before Unreal, there was Earth 2150. Before Ghost Recon, there was Total Annihilation. And then my interests fizzled like a struggling lit candlewick that’s run out of wax. But why did it come to this? I wish I had an easy answer.

There was a time where I counted the days for this game’s release.

The basic ideas pop in as usual, mainly nuances surrounding assertions that I just flat out suck at modern RTS games, or that I don’t have the massive allotments of time I once enjoyed concerning the devotion to improvement. Or maybe it’s because I feel obligated to play RTS games online with friends, which typically results in fragile items being launched at my walls and keyboard trays suffering early demises. Or maybe it’s just because there have been so many amazing FPS games released over the last few years, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Unreal Tournament 2004, that the RTS just got shoved aside like a snot-nosed little brother. But none of these excuses really seem to stick, especially when my old favs of yore just did so much right.

My top PC gaming music tracks all derive from the DNA of the RTS genus, the most notable being Klepacki’s “Act on Instinct” and Soule’s multiple tracks from Total Annihilation. And the voice acting for the old gems was always the pinnacle of perfection; I can still remember the gruff macho overtone of the Commando in Command & Conquer when he chuckled and warned: “I got a present for ya!” or the panicked high-pitched “Ohhhh nooo…” from the fairies when you sent them to battle in Lords of Magic.

And graphical innovations? There was always a new discovery. I remember experimenting in Earth 2150 and finding that I could turn my units’ lights on and off at night, offering a new tactical depth to ambushes and stealth. And the snow in that game… my God it was mesmerizing. I’d go sledding at my parent’s house during my Christmas break and see mirages of UCS walkers and EDS tanks in the distant drifts through the visor of my frosted goggles.

Where once a passion existed, nothingness now permeates.

Earth 2150 also kick started some of greatest RTS camera control ever: hold down right-mouse to adjust your viewing angle and then ratchet the mouse wheel up and down to zoom in and out. Gorgeous functional simplicity at its consummate finest. Warcraft III staggered my senses with the attachment I retained to my hero units, and its story of high betrayal and royal corruption had me exclusively entranced during the cut scenes. Back then: if you asked me what my favorite gaming moments were? 75% of them would have stemmed from RTS territory alone.

No new experiences surmount the old; all I have are fading memories. I barely managed the willpower to beat the Soviet campaign in Red Alert 3. I tried desperately to force myself into enjoying it, but nothing worked. I’d inevitably fall off the wagon and crawl back to Far Cry 2, Team Fortress 2, or Fallout 3. I feel like a hopeless first-person shooter addict. I want to love the RTS again. I want to so bad it hurts. So why the hell can’t I? Am I all alone here? Has anyone else lost their RTS yearnings? I endure everlasting self-doubt and lingering guilt as I stare with hollowness in my eyes at the dormant shelved copies of World in Conflict and Company of Heroes, their packages slowly evolving into nothing but ambient dust filters.

Viewing this screen shot elicits no tangible heightened anticipation.

I should be craving Demigod. I should be lusting after Dawn of War II like a crush-smitten teenager. My heart should be pounding for StarCraft II. And yet the numbed sensation remains. The once immense RTS attraction has all but evaporated like a solitary rain drop upon a hot summer’s sidewalk. I feel lost, dear readers. I stand before you an empty vessel. I am a man that has lost his RTS religion, and I fear there’s little hope of getting it back.

I’m going to make this easy: if you’ve played Far Cry 2, but you’ve dropped it like yesterday’s garbage after traipsing through the bile-injected comments on various public forums, you haven’t really played Far Cry 2. The popular misconceptions are misinformed and ill-conceived, and it seems that the public is succumbing to pretentious falsehoods in droves before truly judging the game for themselves. So, dear readers, it’s time to dispel the errors by one logical broken notion at a time. So fasten your seatbelts folks, cause we’re goin’ for a ride.

Fallacy #1: “Far Cry 2 is repetitive.”

Let me flip this one from the get-go: the actual game isn’t repetitive, the overuse of the term by the gaming masses is. The monotony angle seems to stem from Far Cry 2’s extended use of vehicular travel and character foot traffic. That, for some reason, an amazing living world begging to be explored and witnessed in its full entirety is a negative aspect contrary to the continued enjoyment of a respective player’s in-game journey.

And yet, most that punch the repetition card never said a word about the same aspect that’s so ever-present in games like Oblivion and GTA. Why is that? The first response is typical, and sounds something like this: “Oblivion had instantaneous fast-travel, thus easing the burden of forced repeated treks through the boring and routine.” No, not really. Oblivion had a similar fast-travel aspect as Far Cry 2. Yet in Oblivion, you couldn’t fast-travel just anywhere, you could only go from one found location to another. In this avenue, Far Cry 2 is more forgiving, allowing the protagonist freedom to hop a bus to just about any portion of the map, previously undiscovered or not. GTA: Vice City and San Andreas were brutal compared to Far Cry 2 in the fast-travel realm. And yet it’s Far Cry 2 that gets the hatred? This makes little sense.

Fallacy #2: “Far Cry 2 is artificially difficult.”

Yes, I am overtly aware that the native enemies respawn at guard posts over and over, believe me. I am also aware that charging into a group of five RPG-armed irregulars like Rambo on crystal meth brandishing a pistol and a single Molotov will get you obliterated. And yeah: your weapons rust and jam pretty damn quick. And yes, the game makes you *gasp* plot out minor strategies to avoid combat-related disaster. And your character can die from Malaria. But how is this unreasonable? That’s like saying Splinter Cell is unfair if you try and beat it by abandoning stealth completely and just going nuts, guns blazing. That’s like saying Command & Conquer 3 is unfair because NOD doesn’t warn you 5 hours prior to an attack.

Hey! That plane’s tail number isn’t real! I quit.

Far Cry 2 establishes an obvious a set of rules from early on. In fact, it might as well emblazon these rules across your field of view in big, blocky letters. They’re kinda hard to miss. Remember that part of the tutorial that states you should exchange weapons often, otherwise they’ll breakdown and sometimes explode? That wasn’t an in-game advertisement for Walmart-brand rifles, it was a hint. A hint that, inside Far Cry 2’s continuity, you have to pay attention to your weapon’s condition. And you know that little 15 minute impossible to skip aside that mentioned studying an encampment’s hostile positions before chucking grenades blindly into the open? That wasn’t a humorous anecdote either. Far Cry 2 goes above and beyond to inform the user how the game functions and behaves, and yet the masses bitch because they can’t play it like Crysis. Hey guys? This isn’t that game. And it’s not trying to be.

Fallacy #3: “Far Cry 2 tries to be realistic, but, in the end, fails miserably.”

No… Far Cry 2 tries to be immersive, not realistic. “But immersion and realism are the same thing!” No. They’re not. Immersion and realism are wholly separate entities, non-dependant of each other for overall success or failure. Let me elaborate with a few examples. ArmA: Armed Assault is realistic. Why? Because every weapon, vehicle, round of specialized ammo, and uniform perfectly mimic their real-world counterparts. You get tagged by an errant bullet to the kisser in ArmA, you take a dirt-nap. Boom. End of story. Game over. Like real life. And yet in ArmA, despite this realism, you don’t watch your character clumsily stumble into an M-60 tank or watch helplessly as he scrambles to pry a couple of white-hot armor shards from his shins with a rusty Leatherman. Will resetting a dislocated elbow in real life gain you 25% more stamina? Of course not. But is it less jarring to the immersive cohesion then picking up a Quake-style mega-health in the middle of an African grassland? I’d say so.

This gun might jam at some point. Clearly, this game sucks.

No, you’ll rarely go down from an Uzi spray to the sternum in Far Cry 2, and yes: you can stick yourself immediately after your body gets perforated with an atropine auto-injector to recover all your life. There’s no argument: this is not realistic. But the unbroken sequence of events that leads to the eventual completed actions are immersive. Why? Because you never leave the continuity of the imagined world to perform these responses. Each decision, whether it’s limping out and popping the hood of your steaming Jeep to tighten a gasket, or mashing the reload button until your character visibly smashes out the jammed shells from his auto 12 Gauge, all occur in a single fluid continuous motion. It is this fluidity that pole-vaults Far Cry 2 miles over the competition. Sure, watching your avatar’s grimy arms twist a ratchet a few dozen times to un-crack an engine block ain’t quite the real deal, but I’ll take that any day over a minutely modeled helicopter cockpit that I have no damn idea how to operate, forcing me to navigate umpteen thousand engrossment-breaking visual pop-ups before I can take her to the sky.

At the end of the day, after the rumors are laid to rest, Far Cry 2 is a masterpiece of the art form. If you’ve succumbed to the popularity of the flame-fest and abandoned the game prematurely, I encourage you to take a trip back into Far Cry 2’s vibrant digital domain a second time, with a fresh and open mind. I guarantee: you won’t regret it.

FPS soundtracks are forgotten souls, left behind enemy lines to rot in the jungle, impaled by the disease-ridden pongee sticks of an auditory void. We used to love our music. We used to cherish our shooter’s choral scores like defiant guardians of paradise. Now we happily sit through an entire session of Crysis oblivious to the ghostly absent pieces that make the medium whole. What did we do to deserve this? What happened??

It’s a curious phenomenon. All the classics had soundtracks integral to the experience. Amputating the music would have severed the interactive content’s contiguous genius. Duke3D and Doom II pumped pure MIDI awesomeness in sequential rhythmic overtures, never letting up to take a breather. Unreal’s neo-tech blitz-like score accentuated the frantic pace and alien atmosphere that surrounded the player’s every strafe and practiced leap.

And then the music was stifled, seemingly overnight. RPGs have Jeremy Soule. The RTS has its Frank Klepacki. What do we have? What champion composer of soulful harmony strolls through the blackened charred valleys of the shooter’s realm? All that remains are dim specters of the ancient past… their voices haunting the genre with muffled moans of monotone interlude when our protagonist stumbles upon a scripted event or a sudden surprise. And that’s it. The once powerful melodies of the FPS are all but extinct. Or are they?

There seem to be rebels that dare to defy. There seem to be some that reject the notion that music cranked during a shooter somehow detracts from the player’s immersion in the action. They are few and far between, singular entities condensed inside the huddled masses, but if you look closely, they’re there. Yearning for us to embrace them with open arms. Painkiller brought us back from the depths of the disenfranchised musical destitute. If only briefly. Sure, Painkiller had its numerous moments of bereft orchestration, but the music played when it was most important: when the legions of enemies swarmed like locusts from every direction; their hellish war cries only semi-audible under the power of the blasting heavy metal that ripped through your speaker’s tweeters, jamming your heart into overdrive as the crescendo peaked into a furious calibration of bass and wanton percussion.

Painkiller hit you like a musically choreographed bulldozer on nitrous, and it liked it that way. But as time eroded, so did Painkiller’s magic, and no brave souls elected to fill its place. The bloodline was eradicated, and the land of the FPS lapsed back into the nothingness of an aural vacuum. The throne stands cobwebbed and empty, a mute empire deprived of its one true king. Will nobody resist the despotic mandate that the first person shooter must never again resort to an unfaltering steadfast soundtrack?

Will no one rise up and fend against the deathly oppressed? If only a single contemporary game would gather the starving populous and rally the militia, we could once again storm the developer’s castle gates, demanding our PC shooters to be freed from the shackles of musical taciturnity. It only takes a spark to start a fire, and I, for one, will be there to ignite the torches.

Will you?

Why?

For perceived eons of accrued pain and mental anguish, I didn’t have an answer. People would ask me this question of purpose, but I never said a thing. I’d change the subject, or I’d ask myself the same and feel deeply troubled by the lack of any internal response. Why do we do it? Why do I do it?

I was never an athletic competitor in early school or college. I played JV Soccer for 7 weeks during my sophomore year at Stowe High, Vermont. I played T-Ball when I was a 5th grader for a month (tops). Organized team-based events just never held an appeal for me.

And yet, when it comes to Team Fortress 2, I’m the guy that beats his desk with reddened hammered fists when a spy’s knife just clips my shoulders, killing me instantly. I’m the guy that screams indecipherable profanities into the microphone after every failed minigun critical that misses my target. I’m the one that hangs his head in tattered disgrace, covering his eyes with creased knuckles, a troubled line along his brow when the other team scores a single. Winning. Cap.

The question remains.

Through all of the surmounted yet failed practices, throughout the grievances of understandably enraged members after crucial losses, I struggled for a stunning catharsis, a Grand Revelation of why we punish ourselves for an unknown phantom cause. Why am I doing this when I could be playing a multitude of other games? Why am I letting my cherished free time erode to futility though poorly executed matches?

The more I played and managed a faltering clan, and the more I lost players as casualties of competitive disagreement, the more I lost my faith. My drive and motivation teetered on a rusted fulcrum’s edge, ready to plunge into the black abyss of permanent failure looming so close beneath.

Know what? It’s funny: the minute I stopped looking for an answer, the minute I stopped seeking a concrete justification for my masochistic TF2 habits, was the same minute I received an answer.

And it turns out, it’s pretty simple: why do we fight? We fight because when everything miraculously comes together for that impossible perfect win, when everyone on the team finally ebbs and flows like a fluid body of crystal clear water, it’s worth it. Nothing compares to the ecstatic exultation gleaned from a last-second point-capture in over time. Nothing causes your heart to pound faster, ready to squeeze past your ribs and explode out of your chest in excitement, than watching a teammate leap over the scrambling soldiers and medics snagging victory from under their hanging jaws. And once you feel it, everything makes sense. The pieces fit.

Our team got crushed the other night. No: we got pulverized into particles. The fluid body of water hit a concrete dam. The miracle evaporated. You’d think I’d lapse back into panic mode, begin questioning my competitive faith all over again. Full circle. But I haven’t. Now that I know the feeling of aged perfection, now that I’ve sipped from the golden chalice, if only briefly, it’s worth waiting an eternity for it all over again.

It’s worth fighting for.

Just replace “safe-haven” with “ Windows XP,” and I think we’re getting closer to the truth here.

But unlike Grandma’s real-life house, which is at least filled with tender love and care (most of the time) Vista is not. Grandma Vista’s home is a joke. A bad joke. Worse: Vista is a bad practical joke. Vista is like an old episode of Punked. You laugh- until it happens to you; then you get pissed.

I got punked by Vista. Twice. You’d think I’d learn to see it coming, but I seem to be a gluttonous never-ending chasm for digital punishment. You’ve been punked by Grandma too; you just don’t realize it yet. Ever heard of Windows 7? Yeah: It’s Vista. Only it works. And it’s not free. It’s the “upgrade” everyone has been demanding, and they finally got it. Only problem is, suckers like me have already coughed up the cash for its feeble DX10 predecessor, and I only visit it randomly at best. And now you’re telling me the only way I can get the “upgrade” to Windows 7 is to empty my wallet ? Since when did a second helping of Grandma’s cookies come with a price tag and an interest rate?

Stay out of Grandma’s kitchen. She’s secretly evil.

That’s extortion, Granny.

So you know what, Mom and Dad Windows XP? I’m not visiting with Grandma anymore. I don’t care how good a baker she is, her new DX10.1 brownies just aren’t worth my hard-earned 120 bucks. I’ll play games and write articles in stale store-bought DX9. That’s perfectly fine by me. I’m staying put where it’s familiar and functional. I’m locking myself in my room and eating cheap Cheetos and Ring-Dings until the fire department comes sirens screaming to break down my bedroom door with a fire axe. Sure, you might force me to Grandma’s house eventually, even if it’s through starvation and attrition, but you’re delusional if you think I’m going without a fight.

Hope you’re wearing pads.

I say we start making games about novels that were written from movies about novels about movies. Might as well. “Portrait of a Lady of a Portrait of a Lady of a Portrait. Part II.” Gripping huh? Better yet, hell: let’s just eliminate the middle man. Let’s make games ABOUT games on gaming! Hear me out on this one. “From the makers of the game that taught the basics of making games, comes another game! Game Master Gamer! Starring Marky Mark Wahlberg. And Tone Loc.”

Why not? We can already note certifiable instances of this phenomenon. Maybe not so much on the PC, but if the Atari Jaguar of yore had gems like: “Street Fighter II: The Movie The Game,” why should the PC miss out? Let’s get with the times! I want games that have literally ZERO original intellectual property. No, scratch that. I want a game that’s so convoluted in over-used thoughtless repetition that it can’t even spell originality without risk of hemorrhaging. I want a game so unbelievably contrived that when you install the app it simply does nothing. At all. You buy the game and then throw it in the garbage. Without ever opening it.

Is this so much to ask? Really? I’m sick of innovation. I’m sick of small developers and their wacky ideas about product risk and pushing the imaginative spectrums of the digital medium. I don’t want another Portal. I want a game that screams anti-creative atrociousness so much that it shatters glass when released. I want GI Joe: The Movie Based off the Cartoon Based of The Movie: The Game. Chances are good I’ll get it. You can keep your Half- Life. Your Audiosurf. Your Arcanum. Even S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was based off a novel, which was based off a real life event. Think you’re receiving imagination? Think again; you’re purchasing thrice recycled cardboard. 10% original material intact.

We’re half way there. My dream is almost fulfilled. We’ve already abandoned fresh ideas for never-ending sequels and constant add-ons. I mean even Peggle has a sequel now. Downloadable content takes the place of new releases and responsible quality assurance. Patches aren’t patches anymore. They’re “free application upgrades available to the faithful community on a steady basis.” See? And you say there’s no progress. Ha.

Look for a game based on this article that talks about games based on movies and games in stores soon. I highly recommend it (after the free downloadable content has “enhanced” all those in-game crashes of course). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. Cheers!

Poor Turn-Based PC RPG, we hardly knew thee.

We are gathered here today in a sorrowful yet joyful remembrance of our dearly departed friend’s finest accomplishments: tactical depth and PC gamer patience.

Ol’ Turn-Based, as his friends often called him, is survived only by his younger step-brother: Mr. Optional and Never-Used Tacked-On Turn-Based Menu Item, who despite multiple recent attacks on his life, still generates the ardent muster to soldier onward, despite outward misguided pleas from the incessant masses for his untimely dismissal.

Turn-Based was the greatest of friends with Mr. Real-Time PC RPG, right up until the moment they met. It must be said: Turn-Based’s life was drastically ended by an overwhelming propensity of new enemies. Despite a beautiful exterior, a forthright demeanor, and a deep, complex personality, he was a sad and often neglected being. Many ostracized and belittled Ol’ Turn-Based to the point of clinical abuse, and it appears that these scars never truly healed.

But while this is indeed a time of mourning, it is also a time of celebration, and a time to rejoice. It is with great pride that I stand here before you today, as Turn-Based has been born to eternal life, and may still be witnessed and partaken through our divine and revenant Good Ol’ Games.com heavenly monastery.

Mr. Turn-Based was a kind soul, and a person of cultured taste. He was a calculated negotiator, and he never jumped directly into a potent situation, and even if he did, chances are he could generate enough action points to run away and hide. He savored every moment of his life, which was exceptionally long, especially when waiting for his other now deceased turn-based brethren to decide their method of movement and combat resolution. Often, it would seem that even a single turn would last a lifetime.

It can be said, without fail, that Turn-Based enjoyed a full and rich life of meaningful complexity. Sure, he may have been a little slow getting off the starting line, and some might argue that chasing a single rat step-by-step with an automatic shotgun for 10 minutes is tedious and fun-crushing, but as the old adage goes: slow and steady wins the race. Unless that race is governed by heartless brainless instant-gratification anti-tacticians who value speed over rational thought. In that case, “slow and steady” will be subjectively inoculated with liquid digital cyanide and left to rot on the very streets he use to rule.

I would like to thank all of you for attending this ceremony today. And if you have it in your hearts, please approach the coffin and whisper your final respects; I can tell you with earnest conviction, that Mr. Turn-Based PC RPG would greatly appreciate any sentiments given.

Then go buy Fallout 2, dammit.

Peace be with you.

And those handy setup progress bars you see nowadays? Those things used to measure hours, not minutes. This was all back when 320×200 was considered HD. This was back when you had to smash your face into the deepest innards of the manuals to figure out, with little direction, that “CD/C: <enter> C:/Conan <enter>” from a DOS prompt was the game’s “shortcut” to play. Back then, things were tough; tough like a veteran cowboy’s chapped jean-covered ass. You’d be lucky to make it to the start menu, much less make it beyond. And if the game just so happened to crash? Pound salt, partner. No Internet meant no patches. Unless you started dredging through mounds upon mounds of thick and tedious directory files to search for corrupted entries and stray registry imprints, you might as well have just thrown down those 17 shiny new Syndicate floppies as fancy flat-black beer coasters.

I remember the first time I graduated an install. Sim City. It was on my family’s very first PC: a bad-ass name-taking 386, fresh off the IBM fab line. Still had that new PC smell. Came bundled with Word Perfect. And a customized personal DOS menu. In color! It was a monster. Even had a sweet HP dot-matrix printer riding shotgun with a parallel port. It was only fitting to break her in with my favorite new game. I remember taking the loose disk out of the crisp cellophane packaging. I remember my hands shaking like I was standing naked in an arctic midnight blizzard. My fingers danced as the red rectangular validation code sheet slipped into my lap like a wayward autumn leaf freshly detached from it’s arboreal custodian. like a frightened child, I remember eying the porous paper that detailed the steep system requirements with a trembling lip. The text of the document practically sneered at me with the needed data: 286 6MHz proc, 2 megs of hard disk space. Just squeaked by. I anxiously inserted the floppy into the thin metal recesses and dropped the plastic retaining clasp to the down and locked position (even disk drives had character back then). I typed “A:”, the drive’s green LED went off like a Christmas tree jacked into a 220 line. The belly of the beast began to groan and rumble. I held my breath.

An eternity of five minutes crawled by before the cursor revealed that “A:” was successfully read. No fancy GUI’s laced with hideous neon advertising; no popups asking if I wanted to install a useless and invasive multiplayer client; no obnoxious warnings telling me that I was probably a criminal because one of the 46 characters out of my CD key just happened to be mistyped. No my friends, things were different in the golden age. You didn’t have to worry about people pirating the material en mass because for the most part, the games were outright inaccessible without the right sets of finely tuned individual expertise. But when the games did run? It was a wave of pleasure unknown to the new PC gaming generation. Sure, it took me four days to eventually get Sim City past the start screen, and another 2 before I could figure out how to exit without yanking the PC’s power plug, but I earned the reward. I was elite. A king amongst mortals. I felt honored to have unlocked the secrets of entry reserved for the favored few. I was the omnipotent Zen master.

I used to know what the hell this all meant.

Today I feel like a serf. A disenfranchised hollow vessel rusting under the seams. Now you just double click a .exe and drool, let the spittle trail down your sleeves and collect on your thighs as you watch the latest episode of House while Red Alert 3 downloads and installs itself. No help required, or wanted. Games have grown soft. They’ve gone pansy. Ask a gamer of yore how they used to run a game and they’ll start regaling you with tales of elusive command line codes, wiped and accidentally formatted setup files, and tightly rubber-banded towers of alphabetized floppies that would kill small pets if toppled over by accident. Ask a gamer today how to play a PC game and they’ll tell you to download it. Hit “start.” Go eat a waffle. Most gamers don’t even retain disks anymore. What happened to physical accountability? What happened to sharpening the mind through technical trial and error? What happened to personal accomplishment through perseverance and self-education? What happened to the PC gamer’s subculture?

And then Keenan introduces me to DOSBox. Ahhh: now that’s more like it. There’s that cursor! There’s that monotone drab color and that blocky jagged text! And there’s that… absolute lack of any understanding on how to use it. And I don’t even have the patience to try. I cheat and make Keenan tell me. No exploration. No realization. No adventure. No digital catharsis. I fire up Duke Nukem 3D in under 30 seconds. I make it past the intro screen. The sound works. The menu fits the screen. It doesn’t crash. The game’s ready to go. I play it.

And I feel empty; my soul is a canyon. My mind drifts like an abandoned battered row boat upon a troubled ocean. My eyes glaze. No shivers dance down my skin as I hit “enter” and wait in rabid anticipation for the “success” text that may or may not follow. I just stare as my fingers hit the keys out of reflex, instead of passion; and after 20 minutes drag by, I shut it off. DOSBox collects dust. DOSbox corrodes. A golden relic now abandoned by a former champion’s withered accrual of unintended gaming lethargy.

Something has been lost as the PC game has evolved, dear readers. Its DNA has been tampered with. They’ve taken something away from us in this age of instant-gratification and automated digital control… and I fear we may never get it back.