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Create Your Own Japanese RPG
Episode 2 : With No Further Obligation on Your Part

In the previous article I introduced you to the main elements of a battle system (Sparkles and Numbers) and helped you name your game. But unfortunately there’s more to an RPG than that. You have to have, among other things, some characters, a world and a story.. People to do stuff, a place to do that stuff in, and a reason that they’re doing that stuff. It’s an exact science.

White Guys with Swords

Creating characters for an RPG is easy if you just follow the patterns. There are certain “classes” that you have to fill, and then once you fill that class you’ll assign one of the few personalities as well as a name. Really, its that easy. I couldn’t make this hard if I tried.

Types of Characters:

Guy with the Sword – We’ll refer to him as GWS. He is absolutely required. His weapon must be a sword so large that there is no way, due to the laws of gravity and leverage, he could spin it in his hand or swing it any better than your average human could swing a motorcycle. But hey, we’re making a game here, not writing a physics book.

Hot Girl – We’ll refer to her as HG. This is another character class that is absolutely required. Her means of attack will either be unbelievably cool (like puling a dragon out of the sky), or dumb as hell (she throws a really sharp plate at them). There can be no middle ground. She’ll start out as mad or uninterested in the GWS but 20-60 hours later will be madly in love with him for no discernable reason.

Big Dumb Guy – Or the BDG. This is the kind of guy who could probably tear a phonebook in half but thinks that Latte means “a bunch”. This character must either wield a gun or be some sort of kick-boxing champion. He can be black, white, or bright green as long as the fundamentals stay the same: Must be strong as hell and have the IQ of a bag of gravel.

Comic Relief – The CR is an incredibly annoying character designed to make the player want to drag its ass out of the TV and beat it to death with a steel baseball bat. The weapon of choice for most CRs is some object that could never hurt someone no matter how much you hit them with it (such as a Megaphone or an empty DVD case). The characters in the game must be completely oblivious to how incredibly aggravating said character is.

There Are Some Who Call Me… Tim?

Acceptable names for main characters have to be either some every day word (Squall, Link, Cloud), or a string of letters that follow the Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel formula (Tidus, Evan, Zidane). As for the secondary characters it’s really anything that you can work out. One way is to take a game of scrabble and throw it on a homeless person. The hobo will then pick up a hand full of the letters and toss them back at you. Use these letters in any order you feel like to create your secondary characters.

But for some people, getting a hold of an angry homeless person isn’t possible, sometimes you’ll get a mildly annoyed hobo who will just swear at you and sit back down. Scrabble is expensive, so another tried-and-true formula is to take a common word and replace a few letters in it.
Examples:
Bell -B +Z = Zell
Muumuu -U +O = Momo

Note: Always make sure that you have at least one character with a Latin/Spanish name like Vincent, Cid or Rosa.

Personalities:

You can assign these in any order that you want, as long as at least 4 of them are present

A) Young and Idealistic
B) Quiet and Rough
C) Dead
D) Undead
E) Egocentric
F) A kid
G) A Robot
H) F***ing Annoying (Required for the CR)

Note: Usually A leads to C, but more on that later.

For my example RPG, here are my picks:

GWS: “Steel” – Fights with a ten foot blue sword. – Quiet and Rough.
HG: “Yantie” (from “Panties”) – Human that fights with differing sizes of lampshades. – Young and Idealistic
BDG: “Mokon” (from “Moron”) – A Human that fights with a rifle. – Egocentric
CR: “Stotip” (from “Shut up”) – Half-cat Half-Turnip that survives on marsh mellows and uses a snow cone as a weapon – F***ing Annoying

Secondary Character (Created with the Scrabble Hobo method): Xipoz

I skipped the other alternates due to space, but I think you can see how the system works. Now that you’ve completed this you should have your merry band of adventurers ready to venture out into the world and knock the sparkles out of things.

The Things That Need to Happen

Congratulations! You’ve made your characters and given them names and personalities. Now what are they going to do? If you just have your characters run around and fight people for no particular reason other than to level, that’s called Pokemon. In order to avoid that we’ll need a world and a story, and a decided lack of badges.

The most important thing in the game world are save points. You forget these and you might as well throw yourself out of a window (For the BDGs out there, make sure you get one 5 stories up or better).

Also, place them in areas that don’t make any damn sense. Why any self respecting bad guy would allow someone to put a save point on the front porch of their evil fortress is beyond me. That’s practically begging for trouble. The salesperson for “Save Point Distributions Inc” must be a millionaire. Not only is he getting them in every bad guy’s fortress, he’s sold one to every inn keeper and priest on the planet. Good job buddy, but now its time to take your sales trophy and go home.

“Save Point Distributions Inc” has a proven method to creating save points for games. First pick any random object that has nothing to do with saving, make it float and add a lighting element to it, like a glowing ball or a shiny question mark.

I picked a blinking Eat at Joe’s sign. It was on sale.

What They Say and Where They Say It

Next you’ll actually need to develop an atmosphere for your world. If you’re running short on time then the easiest way to do this is to take two time periods at least a century apart and mash them together. You could take the 1920′s and combine it with the year 2200, creating a society that has floating cities but still uses coal powered trains. Also, to complete the image of “another world” make your characters wear overly-complicated clothing like hoods with no shirts or shorts with an excessive number of straps. If you’re feeling particularly evil remember that someone somewhere is going to Cosplay your characters at some point, so feel free to have all of your characters walk around naked with their underwear on their heads sporting a purple jockstrap that reads “I’m with Stupid.”

The last thing that you need to do is to write your story and dialogue. The story must have a world-shattering human-obliterating force taking the guise of some long forgotten evil that resurrects itself just about the time that our hero ventures out into the world. The evil force will be presented in a way that allows insight into the human spirit, the nature of love, or some other mushy crap that will lead players to wish that you had taken less time reading philosophy and more time learning how to write coherent sentences.

Dialogue is the easy part. As long as you have a subject, a verb and punctuation its up to the player to decide what the hell you’re talking about. Then, have the game translated from English to Japanese and then back to English by a dope fiend who SWEARS he knows Japanese. In fact if you’re on a budget just let him write the story for a few hundred bucks. The more convoluted the story the more of a chance that you’re going to get reviewers to say things like “Deep” and “intricate” in their articles. This is because they don’t have the balls to admit they don’t understand what’s going on either.

There! You’re almost done! Now that we have the game all together all we have to do is package it and sell it.

-cjdaweasel

For those of you wondering Xipoz is worth 23 points.

Create Your Own Japanese RPG
Episode One : With Little or No Money Down

So you want to make a Japanese RPG but you aren’t Japanese. You rented an office. You gathered the semi-competent developers, and a marketing department. You hired the soda guy and the janitor. Now what? How do you make a game that people will buy? Will making the characters have big eyes and eat sushi cut it? How do you know? I know, and I am going to guide you through the process of creating a Japanese RPG that will look, feel and act authentic even if you’re not quite sure where Japan is. Also, since I’m such a nice guy I’ll be creating a game along with you to show you what you might come up with if you were as cool as me.

Oh, and Japan is in the Pacific Ocean, but that’s just details.

The Name of the Game

Some people whine that what makes or breaks an RPG is the story, or the battle system, or the characters. Pansies all of ‘em. What makes or breaks an RPG in English speaking countries is the title. Case in point: Dragon Quest vs. Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy sounds cool. Final, meaning the end, and then Fantasy adding an alliteration quality that makes the whole name come off as sounding like the game isn’t going to take any sh*t. The name Dragon Quest on the other hand simply screams “give me a wedgie please”. The most important thing that you can do for your game is to create a name that is going to stick to the public like a week old shirt to a roofer in July.

If you aren’t continuing in a series that is already established, make sure that the title of your game does not make any sense, and if possible, do not use any real words.

Examples: “Shining the Holy Ark”, “Biomotor Unitron”, “Grandia”*

Here’s a few examples of titles that wouldn’t work, and why:

Title: “Boobies”
Why: Many purchasers may be upset that they have to DO things in order to see the boobies.

Title: “Guy with a Sword hits things for forty hours”
Why: It gives away too much of the plot.

Titles: “Syphilis”
Why: Never name a game after an STD. It’s just bad form.

*Note: If you feel your title absolutely must relate to the story of your game feel free to later go back and add a colon. Then describe your game in 5 words or less, preferably in a different language than English.

For my RPG I chose:
TurfQuester Sigmo : Last of the Ultitrons

Hitting Stuff

The next thing that you’ll want to create is your battle system. The easiest way to do this is just to have the good guys line up on one side and the bad guys line up on the other. Then let them take turns beating on each other until one side isn’t standing anymore. Not very interesting, granted, but it’s tried and true.

But no matter what type of battle system that you use, you must include lots of two things: Sparkles and Numbers. This cannot be stressed enough.

Sparkles must appear every time that you hit something, and increase with each attack in a series. The more powerful the attack, the more sparkles. The player must feel as if they are literally beating the sparkles out of things.

Numbers are the building blocks on which you’ll pretend to have the “system” in “battle system” worked out. Most players will ignore 70-80% of the numbers that come up on the screen, so don’t stress their accuracy. Nobody can do math that fast. Just have a lot of them appear when ever anything happens in a battle.

Historical Note: The number system actually replaces an old system where the screen would turn different colors to communicate the status of your characters. Green for “Good”, Red for “Bad”, and Black for “Turn on your TV, stupid”.

Lastly for your battle system, you’ll have to create buzz factor. The easiest way to do this to take one thing that your system does differently (even slightly), and make it sound like you’re going to put it on your resume. To accomplish this, simply use a bunch of physics or math terms followed by “Battle System”. This words can include, but are not limited to: Active, Matrix, Real, Time, Base, etc. Not only will this make it seem like you had a purpose when you created the battle system, but it will give the poor lonely souls marketing something to write in their press releases.

For my RPG I chose:
Active-Matrix Battle System

In the next installment we’ll learn how to create comedic relief with snowcones and find out what question marks have to do with saving. If you feel the need, you can stop right now with just the battle system and title and release the game with no stories or characters. This product can be marketed as either a puzzle game in Japan, or in the US as “Every single game released for Atari Jaguar”.

20 Things That Piss Me Off

Videogames

There are lots of things that I’m generally pissed off about. Like how we elected a man as our president who, even with millions of dollars, couldn’t find oil in Texas, or that I’m still not convinced that its Chicken in the Chicken Chow Main. But in the reality of a world where people get mad at celebrities that don’t want to have babies, I have to go off and play some games to release some stress. So it really pisses me off when I can’t sit down and play a game that doesn’t do something stupid that twenty thousand games before it haven’t done as well. So here, for my viewing pleasure are 20 things that just piss me off about games:

1. The fact that any super secret soldier can have 15 lights on him, and still be “invisible” at night. Agreed, it looks cool, but unless the enemy isn’t expecting to be attacked by a Christmas tree, I think that we can leave all of the Halogens at home.

2. The first person to come up with a game that has a mascot that jumps around on mushrooms, shoots fireballs from their mouth to rescue a princess from an evil turtle is considered “a genius” not “a possible crack addict”.

3. Why is it that every soldier can carry 15 different types of guns, ammo for all of them, a PDA, a backpack, two tickets to Monday Night Football, a few keycards for doors, and still jump around like Jackie Chan? No wonder you’re the hero, you can carry the entire US arsenal on your back. Hey here’s a tip: Put all that crap down and just punch the daemons of hell to death.

4. In the advent of next generation games that can faithfully reproduce the snot flying off the nose of a German soldier with complete historical accuracy, why am I still playing Role-playing games where the good guys stand on one side, the bad guys stand on the other, and they take turns beating on each other? Imagine if wars were fought this way. Most of the soldiers would die of old age before they ever got to their turn.

5. From my own survey, the average mental age of an MMO player seems to be about 12 years old. I swear, if another matureless brat follows me around for half an hour telling me how great my Night Elf’s “obobs” are, I’m going to test my real life PVP skills on them.

6. How long is it going to take before developers realize that movie to game adaptations, well, suck. What I would suggest is that they take all the movie to game adaptations, incase them in a hard plastic, and sell them as $45 commemorative coasters. People who liked the move (which was good) will by the coasters, and they won’t feel compelled to play the game (which sucked).

7. When did the Sonic the Hedgehog game Series turn into a game Armada? In the past year there’s been, I think at least 50 Sonic games released and/or re-released. Give the poor guy a break. He runs really fast, he jumps on stuff, gets missiles, spikes and all sorts of “owie”-inducing things thrown at him. Let him have a vacation where he just sits in a lawn chair, drinks margaritas, and watches Tails work his ass of taking down Dr. Robotnik.

8. Stop turning stuff into mascots for games. It is official, every noun in the known universe has been a character in a game. Mushrooms? Check. Rat? Check. Weasel? Check. A pile of poop with corn for teeth? Check. Mark my words, one day you’ll be playing a game as a Vienna Sausage.

9. Rainbow Six 3. Shouldn’t that be Rainbow 18?

10. Why do zombies come out of rooms that I’ve already been in, that are in a car on the end of a train that’s moving. Where the hell are they coming from? Scotty beaming them in?

11. Criminals must be the source of Extra-dimensional travel. That’s the only reason I can see being able to fit 12 behind a cash register.

12. People need to stop making “Retro gaming” out to be some sort of noble cause. First of all, its not feeding Africa. Second, the only reason you’re playing Centipede instead of Halo is that the Xbox won’t make long distance calls.

13. What is it with Health Packs? They’re in every game now, even car games. The only reason you need to put an Ace Bandage on your car is if your a redneck and need something to hold your bumper on for your big date tonight.

14. Does anyone besides me not get Pro Wrestling games? Let me get this straight: You’re a person pretending to be a character that represents a person that is pretending to be a character that pretends to fight. I hope that I’m missing something.

15. NASCAR games. Really, how many times do you have to go around the track before you realize “Hey, I could be stabbing my eyes out with hot pokers right now.” Sure it’d hurt, but at least you’d have a better story for work the next morning than “I sat on my ass at home alone and drove a pretend car around a pretend track for 2 hours.”

16. What the hell is a “Realistic Damage Model”? And how would you make a car game with Unrealistic Damage Models? One car hits another car and they turn into 15,000 ping-pong balls?

17. People that insist on telling me about a gaming experience. If I wanted to know how you got the Ice Sword of Gibraltar from the Holy Fire Caverns when you were only level 12 and you forgot to restock your arrows, then I’d ask you to shoot me, because I’d never ever want to know that.

18. The main character can be beaten up, thrown around, blown up, shot, and stabbed, and somehow live, yet his girlfriend can be stabbed once, and she dies instantly.

19. When after twenty minutes of playing a new game, I realize I’ve just been swindled out of fifty dollars by an impressive Ad campaign.

20. Every soldier in every game can pitch like Nolan Ryan. Hurtling a grenade at 30 miles per hour over 300 yards? No problem! The man shouldn’t be fighting in a war, he should be pitching for the Mets.

Breaking Down the System War

We Like Buttons

The console war is here, and fan boys everywhere are getting their panties in a wad. All you hear is “Wii is a dum namb it 2 sux!” “PS3 is knot 4 teh poorR iTsuxorz” and “XbOOx iz mades bi M$ that means it sux!” And while I don’t mind idiots expressing their opinion, I would like it if I could kill whoever decided it would be a good idea to get them a computer. Nothing personal.

You see, ever since the advent of the TV, one thing about humans has become painfully clear: We like buttons. The monkey in us has to have buttons strapped to waists on phones and pagers. We have to have them in our backpacks on PDAs, and Laptops. We have them in our cars in GPSs, cruise Control and radios. The monkey in all of us is a button whore.

If you’re still not convinced of this, lets map the acquisition of buttons in an typical adult’s life:

First, we buy a house or apartment, which has breakers, light switches, faucets and other buttons that we flip, push, and even sometimes snap constantly.

But this isn’t enough buttons. We need more buttons. So we buy things to put in our domicile that have buttons themselves: Microwaves, dildos, refrigerators, electric butt-plugs, hairdryers, vibrating sex dolls, computers, or my favorite: the TV.

Now the TV, of course, doesn’t seem have enough buttons itself, so we buy more things to add to it to get EVEN MORE buttons. We buy VCRs, DVD players, Universal remotes, and the subject of today’s little talk: the gaming system.*

And then for this system, what do you have to have? A controller, a light gun, a glove, and a headset. All with TONS of buttons!

We are literally paying thousands of dollars to have these buttons. So the question arises: How do we tell which buttons to purchase CJ? Help us!

And because that’s all I’m here to do, help you, I spent almost minutes compiling data and building my ATBR (Awesomeness-To-Button-Ratio) Theorem to help you decide which console to purchase so you can get the buttons you want and need. Also I’ve added in some one-liner launch game reviews and an overview of each system. You’re welcome.

Theorem Breakdown:
The scale for the ATBR Theorem is 1-100% depending on the theoretical maximum amount of awesome that a button could potentially contain. The scale ranges between:

100% - After pressing the button it spawns a naked supermodel who cleans my house, makes me dinner, and then proceeds to give me a blowjob.

0% - When I press the button it burns down my house, reports me to the RIAA, and implants a small chip in my head that feeds a constant stream of Nora Roberts directly into my brain.

To arrive at an overall percentage, we take all the awesomeness ratings for each button, average all of the buttons together and divide by a number that I pick at random. Then that number is run through a dehydrator, sealed in a plastic bag, and shipped to NASA for further testing. Then the number is returned in an official envelope marked “RETURN TO SENDER – Please stop sending these to us CJ” where the number is compared to various fruits. Or alternately, if I have to get this posted before my connection flakes out again, I just make up a number.

The Systems:

Nintendo Wii

Overview:
The Wii, sporting an awfully goofy name, looks to be built off of Ipod technology and the “We hate lots of buttons” mentality. I haven’t actually seen a Wii (snicker) but from all the screenshots I’ve seen it looks to be about 500 ft. tall and made of porcelain. But, despite this seemingly expensive construction it’s retailing for the low price of $250 USD or about $3,867 Canadian.

Launch Games:
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Nintendo remembers that we never asked for a gay little cartoon Link.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Stars a videogame girl that doesn’t take her clothes off; bor-ring.
Wii Sports

Not to be confused with “Water Sports” (search for that in Limewire and you’ll get that joke).
Madden NFL 2007

In case you can’t get off your butt to play the real thing.
Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors

As an acronym is extremely fucking long.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz

-10 points for bad pun referring to an even worse TV show.
Elebits

Nintendo forgets that we never asked for a Pikimin clone.
SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab

Yet more proof that there isn’t a god.
Disney/Pixar’s Cars

Another movie to game adaptation that I’m sure will rock like all the others before it.

ATBR: 3% – The Wii will have to spread its thin veil of awesomeness over about 12 buttons, which doesn’t bode well for the system. If it didn’t launch with a Spongebob game, it would have scored around a 23%.

Playstation 3
Overview:
Capitalizing mostly on name, and the confusion that there are enough losers with enough free money to buy it, the PS3 will sport the super-powerful CELL processor. It’s not all rosy news about a low-low $600 (that’s 5 billion Canadian) price tag since according to my 5th grade science book, only living things have cells. This knowledge coupled with my intimate familiarity with the Terminator series leads me to the conclusion that the PS3 will become self-aware and destroy humanity as we know it. By my calculations this won’t be a big loss, though it may make tech support hold times unusually long.

Launch Games:
Resistance: Fall of Man

Some guy gets sick and goes around shooting things.
NBA 07

Now you can see the guy in the third row hurl his hotdogs and beer at 1080p.
Genji: Days of the Blade

Run around and hit things with a sword. (Not to be confused with the Final Fantasy Series)
Blazing Angels Squadrons of WWII

A completely original game that’s also available on the Xbox, Xbox 360, PC, and the Wii (snicker).
Call of Duty 3

Good thing they’re releasing another World War II first-person shooter. There just aren’t enough of them.
Fight Night Round 3

Just what you want to see: Two sweaty guys in boxers beating each other’s meat.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

About as fun as golf, but with a sword. Come to think of it, golf with a sword would be pretty damn fun.
Need For Speed Carbon

Carbon’s atomic symbol is C, which is what I give this game.
Sonic the Hedgehog

The camera will drive you bat-shit insane.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas

At least they stopped numbering these. What is Rainbow Six 2? Rainbow 12?

ATBR: 4% – While the PS3 has anywhere in the vicinity of 12-14 buttons, it has some real issues with its look. Ignoring that it looks to be impossible to stack something on top of it, it has chrome trim on the premium version. Chrome trim on your PS3 is like chrome trim on your car from Wal-Mart. You might as well cover it in Christmas lights because it looks stupid.

Xbox360
Overview:
Microsoft decided to skip 358 other iterations of Xbox and jumped straight to this one. It features an HD-DVD player add-on, a controller that you can get some great distance with, and a lot of the color green. It comes in two versions:

The Premium version, the more expensive one, which comes with a remote, a Hard Drive, a Wireless Controller, Xbox Live Silver, a Headset, Component HD AV Cable and the cure for Cancer.

The Core system, the cheaper of the two, comes with an “I.O.U. 1 Worthwhile Game System” and some dust. Oh, and a 360-themed cardboard box.

Launch Games:
Amped 3

Any game with commercials this dumb can’t be worth anyone’s time.
Kameo: Elements of Power

A game about turning into fluffy cute things.
The Outfit

Probably some sort of Barbie game.
Project Gotham Racing 3

Between Project Gotham and the Xbox, it’s becoming apparent that Microsoft doesn’t understand the phrase “Working Title”
Quake 4

A completely original game about aliens who come to earth to do mean things to us.
Ridge Racer 6

The sixth in a series of racing games that probably has ridges in it somewhere.
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland

Another Tony Hawk game that ties up some of the loose ends from the previous games.

ATBR 2%: The 360 has 13 buttons but doesn’t pack enough punch for them. In fact, the only thing that keeps the 360 from earning even less is that it has Xbox Live which allows you to get online and talk to people just as uninteresting as yourself. That aside lets hope that I don’t need 2 Service Packs and 70-something updates before my console will read my sound card.

Conclusion:
Buy a Dreamcast.

*I have it on very good authority that the first video gaming system was just a mass of buttons and levers. I believe it was called “The Saxophone”.

Master Chief is pretty cool. Along with Armitage, Killer Clowns from Outer Space, and Lacey Chabert’s underwear. In fact, I wouldn’t mind being any of those. Well, except Armitage. Robot babies from the future really isn’t my thing*.

But especially Master Chief, since that would automatically bring me the “badass” title. Being able to fly around the galaxy shooting things has a grandeur about it that is only matched by flying around the universe shooting things.

However, as awesome as it might be, it’s probably a good thing that it isn’t real. For one thing, I’m not willing to have my DNA altered just so I can wear some clunky, puke-green battle armor. Also, I’m not a big fan of getting shot at. Bullets whizzing over my head only mean one of two things:

A) I’m in a war.

B) Uncle Jim is drunk again.

Neither of which is very appealing. But this still doesn’t make me stop thinking “Damn that is cool”. I sympathize with anyone who feels the same about any number of fictional videogame characters, but this doesn’t stop me from realizing how incredibly infantile the whole process is. It also doesn’t stop me from making fun of it.

So in the interests of not keeping the peace, I give you 10 reasons why I’m glad videogames aren’t real. Enjoy or else.

10. Big Boobs

I’m not going to argue with you about the fact that big boobs turn any hot woman into an even hotter woman, or any ugly woman into an ugly woman with big boobs. I do take issue with the absurd assumption we would want this in the real world. Boobs are great and all, but when they’re so big that tiny dwarves can hide behind them, it’s a sign it’s time to get some surgery. Besides, there could be tiny dwarves stalking you right now and you wouldn’t even know it. And that’s scary.

9. Guns, Bullets, Bad

I don’t know if you know this, so I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Bullet wounds hurt. A lot. If indeed FPSs were real and we could take twenty pistol shots to the chest, we’d all still be writhing in pain for much longer than would be acceptable to kill the next room full of DeathGuards.

8. NPCs

When most of us picture ourselves in a videogame we immediately assume that we’re going to be the hero, running around saving people, shooting aliens and being a general “Ninja with a Gun”. What most fail to note is that most games are FILLED with characters whose only job is to spout one line of dialogue or sell wooden shields. So unless your idea of a dream job is one where you stand on a corner and say “WELCOME TO GOFGAVILLE ADVENTURER!” for the rest of your natural life, I think it’s better that we at least get to do other things once in a while, like selling wooden shields.

7. Ancients

If there’s one thing that game characters must get sick of, it’s having to constantly fight some “ancient” something. In battle after battle, game after game, it’s an ancient evil that’s been around for centuries, and for some reason just now decided to become p****d off. We should count our lucky stars that Abraham Lincoln doesn’t come back from the dead every hundred years just to pick a fight with some teenager and lose.

6. Clothing

If there’s one thing I think everyone who’s done any cosplay (read: loser) can appreciate is that it’s a good thing that clothing in videogames aren’t catching on. They’re always needlessly complicated with straps that don’t do anything, hoodies with no sleeves, or some other nonsense that make Snoop Dogg look like a French fashion designer. Don’t even get me started on whatever the heck Rinoa is wearing in Final Fantasy 8. Her dress is the illegitimate child of a pair of gym shorts and a sweater.

5. Super Evil Job Market

Excluding Republicans, we really don’t have to worry about any great big bad guy coming along and screwing it all up for us. There isn’t much of a market in the real world for a Mad Scientist, and giant robots are hard to hide from UN inspections. The closest we’ve ever gotten was Hitler all he did was bomb a bunch of people and kill himself in a bunker. Not quite The Covenant Armada.

4. Sequels

You don’t have to worry about Konami coming along two decades after your death, resurrecting you, and making a crappy spinoff called Your : Act Zero, and then selling overpriced copies of your pitifully remade self. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. Game Over.

3. Amnesia

I can’t count the number of characters in video games who wake up one day and don’t remember who they are. It’s a big plus that here in reality the majority of us can remember the little things like our names and that this isn’t our bed we’re peeing in. And we can accomplish this even after consuming copious amounts of alcohol the previous night. In the videogame world, amnesia has reached epidemic proportions, and nobody seems interested in curing it. This isn’t surprising since the all the scientists in games are either evil or have been eaten by zombies.

2. Boss Battles

Almost every videogame has some big bad dude that you have to kill in order to progress any further. While I’m not arguing that boss battles, say on your way to work every day, wouldn’t liven up your life, I’m just a bit skeptical that the following lawsuits would be worth the trouble. I can see it now:

Judge: You, CJ, are charged with assaulting your Shift Leader at Denny’s with a deadly weapon, first degree murder, and theft. Is this correct?

CJ: Yes, your honor.

Judge: You plead, and I quote, “He had the Archangel’s Boxer Shorts of Protection, which I needed to fight the Lich King. After I defeated him I was awarded with three dollars and twenty-five cents.”

1. Save Points

While initially this sounds like a good idea, since you can replay that night that you banged one of your sister’s friends over and over again, do realize that everyone will have it too. All humans will have the ability to do everything as many times as they want with no penalties attached. We’d all be living in a world that was about 2 days long, where nothing bad happened, and everyone simultaneously picks the winning lottery numbers. You could never really die and Shatner will be able to make as many albums as he wants, for eternity. Sounds like hell to me.

-cjdaweasel

*If you get that joke add +1 to your YOU RULE attribute.

TMI: 2 days of WoW
..or “Why I Hate Twilight Fans and Your Sword”

Everyone needs to stop giving me information I don’t ask for. For example, why do people insist on telling me how long it takes them to read a particular book? Twilight and Harry Potter fans are the WORST about this. Constantly updating me on how many days/hours/minutes/seconds it took them to read a particular volume of one of these insipidly boring series. If there’s one thing I hate more than sparkly vampires, it’s people who insist on telling me that they took two days to read about sparkly vampires.

First of all, these books are written on a seventh grade level. If it took you LONGER than two days then you either need to free up five minutes a day, or you should put the book down before you hurt someone. They’re big books and you might drop it or accidentally mistake it for an anal suppository. And just because it’s big doesn’t mean anything. Make the print large enough and slap an inch margin around it and I could turn the Nutrition Facts on a box of Oreos into a 400 page novel.

So as you can see, we don’t care, and for good reason. Read Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ in two days and and then I’ll think about acting impressed, but probably not.

Also, WOW players, you have got to stop telling us about your character’s stats and gear. We really don’t care. Have you guys actually looked at your armor? If I gave my little brother a few crayons and charged him with the task of outfitting a clown army, what you have on would come damn close to the first draft.

And your weapons are pretty silly looking too. They’re huge and impractical to the point of comedy. They’re covered with so many sparkly things they could be confused for a metal Christmas tree at a gay pride parade.

You DO realize that those items you’re so proud of, that you waste hours/days/weeks of your life collecting, don’t exist, right? Your 50-socket +3 bajillion Armour Uber-Rare Chest-plate of Total Loserness that you’re so damn proud of is just a couple of numbers in a database somewhere. We’re not impressed because it isn’t cool. Well, not as cool as reading Harry Potter in two days.

-cjdw

Added Bonus! Swearing Included for Free!

20. After reading the Gamespot Terms of Service, several Board FAQs, and Union Rules, I can now pass the Bar Exam in seven states.

19. Am I the only one that knows what a paragraph is? Does anyone else have the enter key?

18. Most Union banners suck. It looks like you have a rudimentary knowledge of MS Paint.

17. Stop constantly talking about yourself in your blog. Other people have their own boring-ass lives and as Youtube clearly shows: no one cares.

16. Bring something new to the table in your discussions. Simply restating an opinion adds exactly ZERO to the conversation and makes you look like a dummy.

15. If you do decide to bestow your wonderful opinion on everyone please improve it by doing one of the following:
a) Follow it with some meaningful insight into life, like how grapefruit can improve your love life and cure amnesia.
b) Back it up with some information (and this is key) THAT YOU DIDN’T JUST COMPLETELY MAKE UP.
c) Delete it.

14. A single paragraph with no punctuation where every other word is misspelled is not a game review. That’s a collection of letters with a score.

13. There doesn’t need to be a Union for everything. There’s only so much one can say about Yogurt.

12. The fact that there probably is a Union dedicated to Yogurt.

11. Doods uze teh spelcheker. Itz ther so I, the reeder, have a fooking clue what ur sayin. Seeriusly, it lookz like ur playin Scarbble wit haff the peeces mising.

10. If I wanted to join your union, I’d contact you.

9. Stop reporting everyone who says “ass” “bitch” or “shit”. The internet primarily for 3 things: games, pirated media, and pron. If these words offend you then fly to Florida, go to Disney World, get on the Small World ride and stay there for the rest of your life.

8. Stop lying. We don’t believe you. We’re just humoring you.

7. Don’t upload videos that suck. If your video is up more than 3 months and no one has anything good to say about it, then take it down. You’re wasting space on our internet.

6. Stop saying “Graphics Don’t Matter”. While I love that you have enough self-righteousness in your life to spread it around to videogames, I hate to be the one to break this to you: They do. If they didn’t, we would all still be playing NES.

5. Emulators don’t count. Period.

4. LOL is only for use when you actually “Laugh out Loud”. No really, I’m not making this up.

3. Don’t quote a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote.
Th
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2. The PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii all suck. The PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii all rule. The PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii all have the worst games. The PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii all the best games. All game genres rule, and all of them blow. Every reviewer sucks, and couldn’t review their way out of a paper sack. All reviewers rule and I couldn’t agree with them more. No delevoper could ever make a bad game or a good game. No company will ever be able to enter the game industry. There, I’ve covered 90% of the arguments on this site. Moving on…

1. Quit making long-ass posts that have no business being long-ass posts. All of us are getting two sentences in and deciding that a forum post that basically says “I like this game” is not worth 15 minutes of our time. We’re skipping down to the next guy who makes a funny joke about a monkey in 3 words.

Monkeys eat poo.

What’s a Zerg?

…and other Stupid Questions

Games are complicated. More complicated than even the ones that play them are willing to admit. Of course I’m not talking about how to code for linear processors, what a linear processor is, or how it differs from a food processor. I’m talking about the mythology, the characters, places and stories that create the world.

There is a LOT to know about games. Can everyone really be expected to know all the intricacies of Headcrabs, all your base, and that blue things are usually hurt by fire? And which of all knowledge is “Underground” or “Elitest” knowledge? And the most important question, especially to those of you who arrived here via Google, what does this have to do with 401(k) plans?

The answer to the third question is that it’s called “Verg” Financial Group not “Zerg”. That would just be silly.

To those of you who are still with me, we need to clear up some definitions. General gaming knowledge is anything that a person would pick up not having direct contact with said game. Such as a forum, gaming magazine, or by picking up the box, looking at it and gently rubbing it on their belly skin. But at that point the guy at EB games usually makes me buy it.

Elitest knowledge is knowledge that you would have by playing the game, or doing serious research on a game. Elitest knowledge expands to, but does not necessarily have to include anything that is considered knowledge for completing the game, and the intricacies of said game. Elitest knowledge is a broader range of information ranging from things you’d just pick up just playing a game all the way up to what can be only described as “who-gives-a-f***” *

To put it more plainly, knowing that Master Chief is the main character in Halo would be general knowledge. Being able to distinguish between Grunts and Jackals would be Elitest knowledge, as well as how to get your head stuck in the ceiling in the Halo 3 beta and Sarah Kerrigan’s bra size**.

Why bring this up I don’t hear you ask? We need to have a system by which we can berate people for not knowing information, but we have to make sure that we don’t expect them to know too much. Everyone should know who Samus is, but no one cares about her favorite color.

Below I’ve created some mock (pun not intended, but needed) scenarios, rating the question against how many posts should be used to mock the person before actually explaining what it is.

What’s a Jaguar?
Mockibility: 3 posts
Reasoning: Everyone should know two things, if ONLY two things about games:
1) Atari made the Jaguar.
2) It sucked.
Suggested Lines of Attack: Mock the price tag of this alleged powerful system, and the series of unhelpful add-ons that followed. Also you must have at least one jacka## respond: “A cat.”

Who’s James T Kirk?
Mockibility: 15 posts
Reasoning: Not only do they have to have no knowledge of gaming, they have to not been watching TV in the past 30 years.
Suggested Lines of Attack: Toupee jokes are always good.

What’s a Limit Break?
Mockibility: 236 posts
Reasoning: I think it’s safe to say that you’ll never find someone who hates FF7 as much as I do, and I know what a freakin’ limit break is.
Suggested Lines of Attack: Challenge the fact that they’ve ever even been to earth.

What’s a BFG?
Mockibility: Err: Overflow
Reasoning: Anyone who doesn’t know what Doom is… well they should be beaten to death with a keyboard.
Suggested Lines of Attack: Compare their mother to various household appliances.

There’s a tier of mockibility related to how well known a certain fact is. This can be charted with a cross section of levels of information showing how we can better gauge the mockibility of a given question or statement.

Combining this chart with the situations from earlier we can correctly estimate how much derision we must heap on a unwitting poster for not knowing a particular fact.

Using this ballpark guess we can see if we’ve made adequate fun of a person, or if we need to continue to quote and repost to prove that they’re stupid for not knowing what should be known before they even hit the “new message” button.

Or we could just explain it to them. Whatever.

* This category of information is the upper range of Elitest knowledge that was developed by the most awesome person I know (me). I created it to clasify [sic] information that is so obscure, the only people who are interested in knowing it already know it. Sometimes confused for actual knowledge. ** C

I Found Jesus

He was Behind the Couch

I pick up a lot of bad games. In fact, I’m not ashamed to say it, I actively seek them out. I can’t tell if I just love making fun of other people’s failures, or I just hate myself so much that I have the need to remind myself what hell is going to be like when I get there. In one of my latest ventures into crap gaming I picked up The Bible Game from my local Best Buy for the now apparently over-priced sum of $5.

In case you don’t know, The Bible Game is another attempt to make God “fun”. Fun is in quotes since you can’t hear my sarcastic tone when I say it. I am happy to report that The Bible Game is just as successful at it as all the previous incarnations of Bible-based games.

It’s made by Crave Entertainment, the geniuses behind the games Bad Boys: Miami Takedown and the GBA game-version of the movie “Elf”. Crave is truly a game company that strives for excellence. But only if by excellence you mean “Things that are as fun as eating fart-flavored yogurt”.

Because I’m your friend, I’ve narrowed down the morals of the game in this article so you can get the supposedly good spiritual benefits of the game without having to actually play it.

So, in the interests of hating myself more thoroughly, I picked up this gem and took it home to play it. From the menu I selected to play a tournament, and was presented with 6 of the sorriest looking video game characters I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing. There’s a cowboy, a girl in pink, Steve Jobbs, a kid with a sideways hat (which I guess means he’s the “cool” one), the token black girl, and a Boy Scout. Since I’m not a girl (ruling out all the females), don’t own Apple (ruling out Steve), don’t own any yellow hats (can’t be the cool guy), and am not a fan of playing dress up (ruling out the cowboy), I chose to be the Boy Scout. If worse comes to worse I can always pull out my Boy Scout knife and shank the others. Dead men don’t collect prize money.

Moral: Always be prepared.

I named my Boy Scout A**, because that’s what he looked like, and proceeded into the game where I met the creepily happy Joslin. Joslin Loran (I think) is the announcer, and there really is no way to describe how incredibly sarcastic he sounds-as though his snickers and chuckles were digitally removed-in this game. Seriously, if you had said that this game was making fun of the Bible and used some clips from this Joslin guy, I’d have completely believed you. Joslin gives the impression that he just can’t believe someone is playing this game.

In any case, Joslin started the game off and we got to playing. The first game was called Tower of Babel, in which you try to make polygons in a wall to make it collapse. If I’m correct, in the Bible the Tower of Babel had people on it who were hired by some other people to erect a building to heaven. That pissed God off so he made them all speak different languages and the tower fell, and you get to take part! Who knew the deaths of thousands could be so fun?

I won that game but it didn’t matter, since I lost all my points at the end of the round by way of a random “Wrath of God” involving a plague that occurs about every round and reduces one player’s points for that round to zero. God every once in a while pops up, and without rhyme or reason, kicks the ever-loving crap out of us mere mortals.

Moral: God hates people who go last in game shows.

In round two I fared better, rocking out the quiz games like I was there with questions like “Who gave Moses his name?” (The answer is the pharaoh’s daughter, come on, I’m an atheist and I knew that), and in the Noah’s Ark game. In Noah’s Ark, the point of the game is to match pairs of like creatures together such as two monkeys, two bears, and so on. Luckily the game excluded the some 4000 species of beetles that exist on the earth that Noah had to deal with in the real flood.

But it was all for naught, since I was wiped out AGAIN at the end of this round by the “Wrath of God”. This time God pummeled me with mini Jell-O shots that dropped my points back down to zero. In theory, at least, you can get some of those points back by having an opponent land on a “Do Unto Others” square which randomly chooses an amount of points to receive from the other player. They don’t have a choice if or even how much they give to you. That’s not charity, its force. If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your wallet, you haven’t just donated to the poor. You’ve been robbed.

Moral: If you do something that looks like a good deed, even if it’s by force, that still counts.

When I received some money from the other player my Boy Scout did a little dance where he waved his hands around like he was on valium and swatting flies. But once again, you guessed it, I got Wrath of God and lost all my points. God, who I guess is sponsored by FOX, since he’s just a cloud with a bunch of searchlights, came down and threw a bunch of crickets at me. This brought me to the final game with no points and only one last chance to redeem myself.

The last game is the Tree of Life where you get to pull fruit off a tree (even fruit that doesn’t grow on trees like grapes and bananas) for points. However, if you pull the snake down, you lose all your points. Well, I’m not going to keep you in suspense: I pulled the snake down first. A one in eight chance and I lose right off the bat. I finished the game with a grand total of no points. I think God was punishing me for naming my character A**. God hates Donkeys.

I ended up playing the game a couple more times, just so I could try out all the ludicrously stupid mini-games. For the remaining games I used the girl in pink and named her “SL**” since “PARIS HILTON” wouldn’t fit in the box.

Moral: The game was five dollars for a reason.

Dear Team Sonic,

What the fuck are you doing? I’ve been a devout fan of Sonic the Hedgehog since the Genesis. I love Sonic, and I like Tails, and I will usually crush Dr. Eggman (Eggman, Egghead, Robotnik… whatever) if given the time. But I feel that the Sonic series has taken a decided turn for the crappy, and someone needs to say something. Through research, time and frustratingly boring gameplay I think I’ve narrowed down my three major complaints with the new games:

1) Please stop adding characters to my Sonic games.

Really and honestly Sega I give less than a sh!t about Peach and that stupid alligator. I don’t want to beat the game with 52,000 different characters that are just clones of the three main characters: Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. I never asked for that, and from my reasearch (see above) neither did anyone else. Please remove all of them, except for Shadow. He can stay.

2) Please stop making levels so flippin slow.

I play sonic so I can fly through a level a top-notch speed. Unless I missed a meeting, which is entirely possible, that’s what Sonic is about. I will take the time to admit that you have been pretty good about this, but there should never EVER be a time where I have to stop Sonic and line up a shot before I jump. If I wanted to play something slow and easy I’d play Mario.

3) Please stop making Final Fantasy 7 : Sonic Edition.

All of the sudden Sonic can gain levels and pull off limit breaks. Let’s stop pretending. He’s already got the spikey hair, why not just give him a sword and be done with it. I’m up to my scrotum in bad RPGs, I don’t need another one.

Seriously guys, what the h*ll are you smoking?,
CJ