Hollywood’s Bitch

Avatar, the most sensationalised movie in history, a glorified fireworks display, a master-class in (unoriginal) style over substance. Techniques of manipulation were used ad nauseam to draw viewers from their worthless totality – Adorno must be spinning. At about the same time this catastrophic train crash happened another equally traumatic event occurred, ‘James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game’. I’m not going to go into the morbid details of Jay-C’s game, suffice to say it’s abysmal, but this trend is enraging. Is it really too complicated for movie studios to understand that if they actually made a good game, combined with the IP’s selling power, they might have a violently powerful money-making franchise at the forefront of the top two entrainment industries? It seems it is.

I bring this up because last weekend the Tron Legacy trailer dawned on the world and with it the inevitable videogame comes – Tron Evolution.

The trailer looks… You just know the end product is going to be just a little shit, and that’s optimistic. It’s painful to think that an IP with this much potential to be a videogame will ultimately be slapped together and look like crap. What the Hell happened to the Tron 2.0 anyway? Now that was an excellent game (on the PC).

Oh great, it’s the PS-Wii

Sony’s shock move into the sex toy market means we can now loathe and despise all those motion-controller kiddy-games on a whole new platform.  Bets are off for how soon someone will check into hospital to have it removed from somewhere intimate, such as their tonsils.

Talk about too little too late to take on the Wii – but of course it’s obviously just a stop-gap, like the Eye-Natal-Toy, while the Big Three fail to work out where the future of gaming lies.  Could it be in consoles, or online, or up in the clouds?  Give you a clue, guys: it’ll be all three.

While those executives dither, could someone remind us why all they’re paid so much?  Oh yeah: for their “vision” and “leadership”.  Like the captains of big fucking boats.  Who don’t have a clue where they’re going.

Well, we know where they can shove it.

Spacemen Can’t Jump: Mass Effect 2

That man Shepard is back to save the universe, one monologue at a time.

We gamers live in mildly interesting times, if you know where to look.  Whole swathes of long-established genres are going extinct, and exotic new species are evolving in their place: Uncharted 2, Heavy Rain and even Assassin’s Creed 2 are, perhaps, the harbingers of the new type of game, that brazenly mix together different kinds of gameplay from wildly diverse genres, all in the manner of some kind of GTA.  Others are evolving more slowly: even that old dinosaur Square has made an attempt (albeit failed) to reinvent the JRPG with Final Fantasy XIII, and if they’re at it, you can be sure that the old rules are going out of style.

Unless, that is, you’re BioWare, who have let every innovation of the last five years completely pass them by.  Apparently lost in their own bizarro little time-warp, they’re still making games that were fashionable a decade ago, and only now are cautiously introducing novelties that, to the rest of us, were old when the Pope was still in the SS.

Oddly enough, Mass Effect 2 isn’t really a game.  It’s a massive, phone-book-sized science fiction novel, with a 1980s Fighting Fantasy multiple-choice gimmick tacked on to it.  Choice is illusory, of course, since all roads inevitably lead to the same old hell, which is an ocean of soul-suckingly tedious dialogue, and a combat system that likes prawn cocktails and the music of Neil Sedaka.  Like those old-fashioned doorstop sci-fi epics from which it’s derived, it has a cast so gigantic that it would give Cecil B de Mille a clutcher, and a plot both more complex and more boring than the Bible.

And, just like the Bible, you only get to the good stuff right at the end, in the Book of Revelation of St John the Shepard – by which time you are so suffocated by its leaden gameplay that you’re cheering on the Devil, at least if that means you won’t have to endure another five-hour sermon on xenobiotic epidemiology or the legendary war between the Big Lizard People and the Science-Aliens Who Look a Bit Like Beaker Out of the Muppets and Not in a Good Way.

Safe to say, then, that it’s not a very good game.

Game Score Suckology

What an outpouring of almost pornographic verbiage the gaming press has served us this week.  But about what?  Why, all those reviews of Final Fantasy XIII, of course.

Noteworthy not just for their mass effect (q.v.), those reviews also pull off a remarkable new trick.  For all the gush and slobber, most of them tell the truth: that the game is linear, the story is an embarrassment, and the whole thing is a massive pile of shonk.

And then they still give it a perfect score.  What, you might ask, the fuck?

Well, to save you ploughing through all that gonorrhoeal fuck-sewage, we donned our hazmat gear and skimmed our very own gloss on some of the worst of that mouth-bubbled filth.  (Some vestigial, unloved ethic tells us to warn you that the rest of this is probably about as unsafe for work as the above, but it’s too late for that).  Anyway, first up:

Games Radar: “The first 25 hours of the game are totally linear” they say, and even suffers from “2D side-scroller levels of linearity”.  But wait – they protest – you’re wrong to call it linear.  It’s not that at all.  It’s… streamlined.

Let’s just repeat that.  It’s not fuck-boring linear: it’s… streamlined.

Every snivelling little m*rketing cunt up and down the land must be wanking themselves dry over that gift.  As Orwellian-lite, euphemistic doublethink goes, it’s a peach.

The rest reads curiously like special pleading.  Exploration, we learn, is made “obsolete” by this amazing new structure called a corridor.  Linearity makes “perfect sense” because of the story – which, by sheer good fortune, is all about a person walking down a corridor.  (They also use the word “impactful”.  For that alone, we hope they die of Al Qa’ida.)  On the downside, they say, it’s linear “streamlined”, the summons system “falters”, the story is “squandered”, the characters are “one-dimensional and boring, especially [the heroine].”

Final score?  They love it longtime.  They sucky sucky.  They cup ball and work shaft.  Ten dolla.

Next on the shitlist is…

REVIEW: Final Fantasy XIII

Score: 3/10

Hey, just because we (sort of) predicted it more than a year ago doesn’t make it any less true.

Survival of the Shittest: Left 4 Dead 2

Zombie movies tell two kinds of stories.  The first is from the 1970s, and tells us that Nixon is a crook, the capitalist, consumerist country has gone insane, and we’re all fucked: that’s the territory staked out by George Romero with the groundbreaking Living Dead films and by everyone who copied him afterwards.

The other kind of story sits right at the other end of the political spectrum, and tells us that the world’s gone crazy (drugs, hippies, communist viruses) and the only one who’ll survive is the regular guy with the pickup, the shotgun and an inveterate distrust of federal government.  His most recent incarnation was Woody Harrelson’s goofy take on Rambo-meets-Josey-Wales in Zombieland, but the underlying story is all about survivalism: be prepared, it says, the Apocalypse is coming.  No prizes for guessing the origins of that particular fairy-tale.

(Incidentally, Shaun of the Dead falls into neither category because it was made by the rom-com shithouse Working Title and should have been called Four Weddings and a Fucking Zombie.)

Being mere videogames, of course, the Left 4 Dead series couldn’t hope to offer anything more than a gloss on all that high art, but before all that, here’s an in-depth review of Left 4 Dead 2:

Deckchair, Popcorn, Bloodbath

If you believe everything in an American lawsuit, there’s some grim reading in the legal broadside fired yesterday by the Infinity Two at their former bosses at Activision.  In it, they accuse Activision of “threatening” and “Orwellian” tactics, including this charming episode:

“West and Zampella were interrogated for over six hours in a windowless conference room; Activision investigators brought other Infinity Ward employees to tears in their questioning and accusations and threatened West and Zampella with “insubordination” if they attempted to console them.”

Now, to a bunch of grunts like us, anyone who makes themselves boss of the company deserves everything they get, but ripping into more junior employees is cuntery of an entirely different stripe.  While West and Zampella were hardly waterboarded and shipped to Guantanamo, if these allegations are true, Activision, and by extension Bobby “O’Brien” Kotick, have been exposed as a bunch of Stalinist sociopaths.

Remember that next time you’re presented with a “good conduct” clause in your employment contract.

More interesting facts emerge from the rest of the document, however.  The Infinity Two are seeking unpaid earnings “in excess of $36 million”, which may seem a pretty penny to those of us who don’t earn footballer salaries, but in the context of $1 billion in revenue, and whatever vast oceans of green that Mr. Kotick shovels into his own pants, that kind of cash is piss in the wind, especially if Kotick were serious about keeping major talent from defecting to the enemy.

If it’s not $36 million, on which most of the reportage has concentrated, then what?  It turns out that Activision, in an apparent moment of weakness,

Schadenfreude Newsflash

What a week it’s been for nasty little bastards like us who derive enormous pleasure from the misfortunes of others (cunts that we are).  Best of all? It’s only Wednesday.  Here’s a round-up of the week in hilarious pain so far:

ROUND 1 – Fat Monday.  Sony Computer Intrafuckment score a massive own goal by bricking every single PS3 Fat in the whole wide world.  Cue fanboy outrage, inscrutable silence from Sony – presumably because they were too humiliated to admit that they all looked like fucking retards (or were just following Toyota’s unapologetic example) and, we imagine, howls of laughter from the Red Anus of Death Department at Microsoft.  Unfortunately, the PS3 Fat spoilt our fun by magically fixing itself overnight.  Sony still remained silent, perhaps praying that some terrorist atrocity or outbelch of yet more tabloid celebrity sleaze would make everyone look the other way, leaving them to cry themselves to sleep.  And their luck was in, because:

ROUND 2 – Gunfight at the Kotick Corral.  The bad blood between Fucktivision and Infinity Turd finally exploded all over the rumoursphere, as Jason West and that other bloke got the boot for the cardinal sin, apparently, of Not Doing What Bobby Wanted. Yowls of “They’ve ruined COD!” belied the fact that none of the parties involved seem particularly likeable: comment-du-jour appeared on Kuntaku, in which La Diva West was described as a “fucking douche” who acted like a condescending Elvis.  Add the fact that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is making everyone realise that MW2 was an overhyped piece of shit (Remedial Waste said it first, people), and our happiness is complete. A plague on both their houses, we say.

ROUND 3 – Lucky Thirteen.  Fresh on the heels of Square Enix’s evisceration of their tunes department, their Great Shite Hope that is Final Fantasy XIII leaked all over the interwebs a week early, with over fifty thousand downloads in the first few hours alone. That might be a drop in the ocean for a title that’ll sell millions of units to blinkered fan-whores who ignore our advice, but since our sources tell us that the notorious four out of ten review was “about right”, we reckon that [serious face] piracy is illegal, but laughing at it isn’t.

What fresh calamities will the rest of the week throw up?  Truthfully, if XBox Live were destroyed by a security hole and the Daily Mail were to scream that Wii Fit gives you cancer, we would literally die of happiness…

The Remedial Lexicon, Part the Third

Back in spite of popular protest, and offered as a humble service to you, the gaming public, for the continued engorgement of your depraved and frankly fucking disgusting vocabulary. Remember to wash your mouth after use, and say sorry to little baby Jesus:

Saying sorry to little baby Jesus: not a euphemism for sucking a priest’s cock. I mean… fuck. What the fuck is wrong with you people? See also: Christian Gaming, Tom Benyon.

Militainment: 1. war, when seen from a safe distance, such as on telly; 2. a vile neologism that describes the insidious use of military-fetishist videogames by a krypto-fascist conspiracy within the military industrial complex to indoctrinate millions of young men (and some gurls) into thinking that war is fucking cool.

War: fucking cool, at least in all videogames except Modern Warfare 2, which was a retarded sack of psychopathic shit orchestrated by demented right-wing cunts. Which, come to think of it, is a bit like war. QEFD.

QEFD:

Twinkies or death, motherfucker? Easy choice.

We love casual stereotypes as much as the next obese, pizza-skinned, proto-adolescent, shouty, gamerzoidal fucking care-case, but this guy – who has posted a two minute, foul-mouthed rant (disgusting potty-mouth that he is) about the PS3 Fat’s Black Monday – is kind of beyond the pale.

Props for the apoplexy, but Jesus fucking wept.  Talk about living the cliché…