Danger Dance

A lot has changed in the videogame industry between Cliff Bleszinski’s work on Jazz Jackrabbit, a game about a large jackrabbit in space shooting things with a giant gun, and his current work on Gears of War 2, a game about a large man in space shooting things with a giant gun. The demographic of the game playing public has expanded and CliffyB (his hip-hop name from the mean streets of Usenet) plans to exploit that.

In an interview with Wired he revealed that one of the goals of the newest Gears of War is to “make it more girlfriend-friendly.” However, earlier, in the same interview, when asked what was new and exciting about the sequel, Bleszinski replied, “It’s being able to chainsaw Locusts from behind. In the taint.”

Asked to elaborate, he said, “You actually flip the chainsaw over and you go taint to throat, and you cut them in half that way.”

When considering this detail in light of making the game more “girlfriend-friendly”, two thoughts come to mind; first, CliffyB has been designing games for a long time. Obviously, he knows a lot of things I don’t about game development. For example, where do I go to buy a Ferrari when I’m filthy rich from my hit game? I have no idea. I’d have to ask CliffyB.

My lack of knowledge also explains why, when he states in the interview that the “actual human story” of space marines in Gears of War 2 will attract the attention of a broader audience, I have no idea what he’s talking about. It might as well be Swahili or a Chinese person speaking English. It’s completely incomprehensible.

The second thought was that CliffyB has never actually talked to a girl before. When an exciting new feature of your game is that you can saw someone in the taint — in fairness, a known alien weak spot — then maybe you’re not really in touch with what the “girlfriend” crowd is interested in. It might be best to just stop the whole insane idea of pursuing them in the first place. Since the main characters of Gears of War look like hormone-fueled teenage power fantasies, why not try to further your reach into the teenagers-addicted-to-Internet-porn market instead? There’s some obvious crossover potential between the two markets, which you’ve only scratched the spunk covered surface of.

As a general note, any product or service that can, in any way, be accurately described with the phrase “taint to throat” is probably not that girlfriend-friendly.

Since the days of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, videogame developers have tried and failed to bring the sweet science of punching cartoon men and woman directly in the face to reality. EA is working on the latest attempt called Facebreaker, which could only be a worse name if they put two exclamation points after it. Facebreaker!! See? Worse. Utilizing chaos theory, I can accurately say that the addition of those two exclamation points just killed a butterfly in China, which landed directly on an old man’s sleeping face and suffocated him to death. So, in a roundabout way, Facebreaker has officially already broken one face before even being released. We will keep a wary eye on the rising death/face breaking toll.

To manufacture excitement over the game, EA has produced vignettes introducing the game’s many colorful characters, which as usual means stereotypical and ethnic characters, just like in Punch-Out!!. It’s a good thing, too, because what keeps Punch-Out!! relevant today are things like being able to punch that turban wearing guy right in the face. Who doesn’t like beating up a terrorist?

It’s a lot like the Team Fortress 2 shorts, if an EA employee tried turning up the comedy knob but, unsure of how the comedy apparatus worked, instead turned the comedy knob all the way down to zero. Confused by why Facebreaker wasn’t getting funnier, they kept turning the knob until it came off in their hands and the viscous liquid that the comedy apparatus ran on spilled all over their pants, irrevocably destroying comedy forever. The fact that the EA employee looked like they had peed their pants was the funniest part of the whole situation.

In their zeal to add quirky and hilarious characters to Facebreaker, they forgot to do the prerequisite research that would have informed them that there is no kicking in boxing. Apparently, this small fact was overlooked. It was more important to make fun of fat nerds than actually know what the hell happens in boxing, like punching or spitting into a bucket or, if you’re famous and crazy enough to be the title character of an NES boxing game, raping Miss Black Rhode Island. To EA’s credit, having a fat nerd character likely saved them a few dollars on motion capturing, since they just used someone from the Facebreaker programming team.

The parade of GTA IV updates on Danger Dance continues unimpeded, like a parade of quadriplegics parading under their own power, dragging themselves along using only their teeth against the pavement; in other words, it’s been a slow parade. Mostly, we’ve been playing GTA IV, which has been distracting us from doing anything particularly productive. For example, my collection of vintage stamps allegedly licked by Marilyn Monroe has gone tragically neglected, as have the ten Cambodian children I’ve adopted for tax purposes.

If you weren’t quite sure that a lot of people were playing the latest GTA, according to Xbox Live’s Major Nelson, presumably named after a devastating wrestling move, two million achievements were unlocked in a 24-hour period. It was also last week’s top game played via Xbox Live, overtaking Halo 3. So, that’s independent verification that GTA IV is really popular. More independent verification can be garnered from a small experiment we performed for junior college credit.

The experiment was simple; we found a group of kids so ravaged by poverty that they could never actually afford GTA IV or a console capable of playing it. Gathering these kids together, we threw an empty GTA IV box in the middle of them. Several pints of blood loss and a few broken bones later, we’ve confirmed it: GTA is very popular. Look for our full report in the next issue of Scientific American.

Having played a decent portion of the game, I can confidently say that it’s much better than Kane and Lynch. I guess the main thing that GTA IV got right that Kane and Lynch didn’t is that after playing GTA IV for a few hours I never felt like someone stole $60 out of my wallet and replaced my currency with an aborted possum fetus. Congratulations to the Rockstar team on that. Our A+, 10-out-of-10, five-star review is on the way.

Joystiq ran a series of GTA IV impression posts, where their crew took a captivating look back at their first experiences with the game, from their first in-game car theft to the first time they picked up a digital hooker and beat her to death with a baseball bat. It’s really charming stuff and almost as awesome as playing the game yourself, which you can probably do since nearly everyone already owns it. Inspired, I’ve decided to bring you my own thoughts on the game you’ll play regardless of what I say.

What are my impressions? As I type this with my one good arm, it’s hard to say. I previously mentioned my brilliant and clever plan for getting a hold of GTA IV, entitled “Beat Up A Child and Take Their Copy”. In this sad moment of forced humility, I confess that, while the plan was both brilliant and clever, the execution of said plan was an abject failure. Everything was great when I initially snatched GTA out of a particularly sickly urchin’s hands, but I didn’t account for one thing: the swift blow to my left shoulder at the chubby hands of what appeared to be Martin Lawrence dressed as Big Momma, star of the unfinished thrillogy Big Momma’s House, part one and two. If only I hadn’t picked a child buying GTA IV with his parents or, possibly, Martin Lawrence in a sweaty fat suit.

I honestly didn’t get a look at the woman who brutally attacked me. I was too busy sobbing on the ground to get a good description for the police. I guess I’m just another helpless victim of GTA-inspired violence.

As a result of this criminal act, I can now reach behind my back with my left arm and tap myself on the opposite shoulder. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do that before, but here I am with a new skill that will help me if I ever join the circus or have to escape from a straitjacket.

I did eventually get the game by just walking into Target and buying a copy, but, unfortunately, my entire left arm was in too much pain to actually play the game with the my left hand. So, my main impression of GTA IV is that it’s really hard to play with only one hand.

First of all, there are too many buttons. It’s pretty much impossible to press all of the buttons and move both analogue sticks with a single hand. This made me realize that if I was having this much trouble with one hand, how would a casual gamer possibly grasp the complexities of getting in and out of a car to run over civilians?

So, while I played a game of Wii Tennis with my good arm, I thought really hard about how the joys of the murder simulator could be brought to a casual audience. The only idea that I could come up with was to get rid of the extraneous other activities in murder simulators and just get straight to the mass murder part. Maybe a conveyor belt with people coming directly at the player, with death triggered by wildly swinging the controller around. Casual gamers would love that. Plus, it’s very accessible! Hopefully, a major developer gets on this idea immediately. I’m willing to help. Clearly, I’m an expert on casual gamers, so if you can get me health insurance or some powerful painkillers, I’ll be there.

I had some big plans involving the release of GTA IV. I wanted to jump on the hype bandwagon and start counting down the days to release. Each day closer to April 29th would have been another occasion for me to express how amazing the game would be, with certain and undeniable knowledge, based on solid and completely believable conjecture. Well, that plan went right out the goddamn window when I realized that GTA IV comes out tonight at midnight. I’ll just add this to the list of my life’s missed opportunities, sandwiched somewhere between using a time machine to kill Adolf Hitler and using a time machine to get the GTA IV countdown started a week ago. So, I guess the real root problem here is my procrastination in building a functional time machine.

Tomorrow should definitely be an exciting day, especially since I made no effort whatsoever to secure myself a copy. Despite the fact that this is the most anticipated game of the year — at least since when it was the most anticipated game of last year — and is being watched by the Guinness World Records as a candidate for the biggest launch in entertainment history, I have no doubt that I will secure a copy. It’s an elaborate plan I like to call “Beat Up A Child and Take Their Copy”. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because once I do everyone will mimic my carefully crafted plan, but I will say that it starts with a lot of finesse and ends with a brutal outburst of violence. Just to easy your mind, I would never hit a child, unless it was holding my copy of GTA IV, where “my copy” is defined as the one being held by the weakest looking kid. To further ease your mind, I do not discriminate based on gender. I’m no sexist. I’ll take out any child holding my copy of GTA IV.