cjdaweasel.com

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.

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.

A Bioshock Uppercut. Pay Attention!

Picross exemplifies why I have issues with puzzle games.

Pariah

Why Sticking Your Head in a Bowl of Piranhas Would be More Fun.

First of all, let me explain how I came across this atrocity. I was intending to buy the game Advent Rising when I forgot the name of the game I wanted, and picked up Pariah instead. I took it home, and initially, thought I had found a good game. God was I wrong.

Pariah sets you up as a doctor trying to get a hold of some girl that got away when your ship went down. After that, your guess at what the hell is going on in the story is as good as mine. Apparently you have a virus that makes you really powerful, but they don’t let that get in the way of a incomprehensible story.

Monkeys With Guns

The AI is kind of like finding your significant other in bondage gear kissing the dog, its just not right. First of all, bad guys will cap each other. I’m not kidding. They will blow theirs and their buddies helmets off, and sometimes kill themselves by shooting an explosive barrel that they were hiding behind. Now, I don’t pretend to know much about military tactics, heck, I don’t pretend to know much about anything, but I guess in bad guy Boot camp they forgot to mention that you don’t take cover behind barrels of liquid marked “WARNING: FLAMMABLE”.

Speaking of baddies, where are they coming from? Its like playing Virtua Cop, where 50 bank robbers can hide behind a single cash register. Bad guys will pop out of nowhere, sometimes appearing in rooms that have only one entrance. I think their strategy is to send wave after wave of guys after me until their dead bodies are piled so high that I suffocate.

Types of Boomsticks

Another annoying factor of Pariah is the complete uselessness of some of the weapons. The plasma rifle, which you are forced to use for most of the game because there’s no ammo for anything worthwhile, just plain sucks. A rotating spaghetti gun with Tomato paste attachment would do more damage than this blinking piece of slow reloading future-crap. I personally preferred the grenade launcher or machine gun to any of the other weapons available. If you spend most of a game wishing for a gun that was perfected a century before the one that you’re currently using, something is very wrong.

The sniper rifle, while not as bad as the plasma gun, is very close to being just as useful. Instead of fighting endless hordes of generic looking bad guys, you can instead fight endless hordes of generic looking bad guys while zoomed. Later in the game you can upgrade this gun to include a heat signature mode, which makes everyone look like Jell-O under backlight. If you try really hard, you can pretend that you’re not playing the same game, but the illusion only lasts until the next baddie blows himself up.

How Not to Die

In order to heal yourself, and replenish your Dentyne Ice sponsored health bar, its required that you shoot up with an MP3 player. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is. I like that they tried to keep with reality by having the good doctor abuse his own drugs, but frankly, I don’t blame him. I mean, if the smartest person I was fighting was the one who decided NOT to try to my block bullets with his face, I’d need drugs too.

A World Inside a Garage

Included with Pariah is a level editor, that lets you create levels to play multiplayer matches in. While in theory that sounds like great fun, the editor itself is small and no fun at all. It only lets you put a certain number of objects on a map the size of a basement. The only types of matches that will be held in an arena that size are bitch slapping tournaments.

It isn’t a “level” if I can run across it in 30 seconds. The game might as well have shipped with a piece of fishing net, two toothpicks and a stress ball and exclaimed on the box that “You can create you own Volleyball WORLD!”.
Ways to (almost) Get Around

Dozer – The Dozer was originally designed as a practical joke, being hard to steer and impossible to aim. In this vehicle it is easier to kill yourself than your foes.

Dart – I tried to mount one of these after I removed the guy that was on it (not that kind of mount you sicko), but it just kept spinning me in circles. So after 15 minutes of trying to get on it, I gave up and tried to shoot it with the Dozer. After 10 shots I finally blew it up, which means that either the Dozer sucks, or that… No. The Dozer sucks.

Wasp – This is a three wheeled version of the Dart. So basically it doesn’t work, but it does so on three wheels.

Bogie – This vehicle was designed to back up, which is good because the steering is so bad that’s what you’ll be doing most of the time with it. It also supports two people, in the event you hate someone enough to make them play this game with you.

Conclusion
In the end this game feels like a five dollar hand job. It gets the job done, but there’s more fun ways to do it. And if anyone knows what the hell happened at the end, please email me and explain it.