(Holy Shit a) Review: Toy Story 3

This game rocks. This movie game rocks. A game, based on a movie, rocks.  It’s actually well made. I’m choking on my words here. This whole thing is a bit of a shock. The visuals are worthy of Pixar, well almost. It’s funny, colourful and made for those 10 and under. I love it.

Xbox Kinect – An Important Apology

Maintaining our one-hundred percent record of correcting our mistakes perfectly voluntarily, and long before anyone else notices them (or can be fucking bothered to tell us), we – the non-synecdoche that is Remedial Waste – offer you, dear loyal readers, an abject and almost completely sincere apology for the information that appeared in the Kinect Factsheet a few weeks back on this grotesque, repellent, not-nearly-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is, bile-drenched fucking cuntsite.

It was, and still is, wrong.  It was inaccurate and misleading.  Sorry.

Its error lay in the suggestion that the moving images captured by Kinect are of a washed-out, blurry, slightly pixellated nature, and also that it would fail to distinguish your arse from your elbow.

Having now done the proper research that we should have in the first place, but which we couldn’t be fucking arsed to undertake, we can now present the fully revised and corrected image that should have gone with the original Factsheet:

Your base is under attack, in case you give a shit.

It’s 1999 all over again.

Oh God.  Here we go again.  Starcraft is back.  Fresh from its total domination of, er, South Korea, where it’s practically the national gaming religion (and you thought North Korea was weird) here comes the fucking sequel, a mere twelve years later.

Blizzard might have added some new stuff, but we’re fucked if we can tell what it is.  There’s a campaign that doesn’t even pretend not to be a tutorial for its entire fucking duration.  There’s a story in which some stuff happens and about which no one with functioning genitals will care.  There’s a multiplayer if you like that kind of thing and therefore have a face like a prolapsed arse.  And there there’s some other stuff in the game that’s conspicuously shit.  Here’s the worst of it:

Firstly, it’s an RTS.  We all know that every single RTS is fucked in its chromosomes, because the whole genre is simply one massive design flaw.  The premise of any RTS is to build more stuff than the other guy and swamp him with it.  That’s it.  Obvious and easy, so in order to make things less fucking dull, they have to add all manner of shit to divert you from your darker purpose.

Multitasking (a myth), spinning plates (a twat’s cliché), firefighting (a management twat’s cliché) or whatever: the entire – and only – gameplay system in an RTS is distraction.  That’s the difficulty curve.  Fight these guys over here – but oh no, suddenly (yawn) your base is under attack too.  There’s no hand-eye skill here like there is in platformers or shooters: the core task is to deal with multiple distractions.  There’s another way to describe that: fucking irritating.

Anyone who’s ever had to deal simultaneously with ten workmails and three phone calls from fucking numbskulls who don’t know left from right, with five dickheads trying to messenger you in case you actually give a fuck this week, and all the while trying to get on with your own job knows what this is like.  It’s called an office.  We don’t like offices because they’re full of people who distract you from either doing work or pretending to.  Either way, they’re irritating fucking cunts.

So all RTS games are – both deliberately and on purpose – absolutely fucking irritating, just like work.  Starcraft 2 is no different.  It’s not a game.  It’s a training progamme for being a white-collar shitslave in a viewless corporate bogolith that will drain your most productive years like a vile fucking parasite and spit you out at the other end, aged sixtysomething, as a hollowed out husk, a papery fucking gall of the person you used to be, and convince you until then that you’re engaged in the worthwhile pursuit of some arbitrary and vapid “goal” whose circular and empty logic is that its purpose is its purpose, because it says so.

Starcraft 2 teaches the manner of capitalist life like Ayn Rand sucked rich cunts’ dick. Don’t be shocked if we fail to enjoy the experience.

But the office software disorder of Starcraft 2 extends even futher

Bring Back Fox-Hunting

You’ve no doubt heard the news by now: Liam Fox, the Tory incumbent at the Department of Murdering Brown-Skinned Foreigners (But Only When America Lets Us) is the latest cunt-mouthed politician to air his idiot opinions about videogames.  But in case you haven’t heard about all this yet, here’s a quick run-down:

The videogame: EA’s reboot of the knackered old Medal of Honor franchise, this time set in Afghanishire.  In the campaign, you play the Yanks against Evil Moozlum Talibanijihadis; in the multiplayer, you alternate between the two.  The beta was absolutely horrible, so let’s hope DICE sort their act out by October, because the Bad Company 2 multiplayer was really rather not bad.

The plaintiff: Liam Fox, MP, the UK Defence Secretary.  In the UK (like the US), “Defence” is a euphemism for killing people.  “Liam Fox”, meanwhile, is a euphemism for “political liability”.

The soundbite: “I am disgusted and angry. It’s hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game. I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product.”

The Thick of It “Nutter” Moment: The Department of Culture, Media and Sport Fun promptly distances itself from Liam “Nutter” Fucks, saying his remarks were “a personal view”.  Translation: “Liam Fuckstain has gone way off-message, has made himself look like a total fucking embarrassment.  And, er… sorry… Liam who?  Never heard of him.  Nice weather we’re having lately…  And we’re really excited about the #LondonOlympics!!@!LOL!!”

But Liam Fuckstick seems to be forgetting several things about the way the UK works. 

Doctor Freud will see you all now

Not that we give a flying cuntfart about such such commercialised bumfuckery as SEO or even how many of you sick bastards actually enjoy this vile shit – especially the gazillion of you who hoped for a picture of a distended fucking arsehole on the KinectickektciktKUNT factsheet – but the actual, real-life search terms that bring you here have long been the subject of idle curiosity for us, mostly out of some dreg-swirling, pub-based amateur psychology.

The list – whose obscene highlights we provide here in no particular order – makes for some strange reading, although the hit-count for the Greatest Word in the English Language™, which is cunt, is hardly a surprise given how liberally we use it.  More poetic, in a slightly Baudelairean way, is cunt flower, which is still far less revolting than the biomorphism of Kotick cunt, and all variants thereon.  Resident evil 52, of course, suggests an equally horrific nightmare future of terminal sequelitis, while resadent evial 5 implies either booze-typing or total fucking illiteracy.

In answer to the question why is stabbing cunts on battlefield bad, we can reply quite simply that it isn’t.  jesus loves u but every1 else thinks ur a sounds like a multiple choice question in the best exam ever, while lonely flower probably shouldn’t come around these parts in case we kick you in the cuntbollocks and steal your lunch money, you twee fuck.  Anti casual games deserves a pint, while the implied transsexualism of fucking pussy dicks probably does too, unless they mean something entirely more mundane, in which case say hi to your mum and tell her to get to the clinic.

I think your a cunt is a sentiment we with which we can’t help agreeing, possessively or otherwise.  The fact that multiple people searched for sex wee makes us wonder whether they were too embarrassed to search for “great yellow ropes of tramp spunk” like normal people do. To whomsoever googled “fucking powerpoint presentation” (quotation marks and all): get a new job.  Candy samples monster cock porn probably wasn’t someone interested in said vintage porn star’s relationship with Richard Feynman, but what a cunt, punching mirror, youre a cunt and cunt bitch suggest that someone ought to call the police because them next-door are at it again.  We hope the lack of hentai around these parts proved a bitter disappointment to rose street fighter fuck and that whatever peach cunt was after might never materialise in this reality.

Still with the lonely hearts, fat cock great sense humor should get in touch with disabled cunt and film the results for money.  Our belief is beggared by jesus cunt, and shut the fuck up cunt is a sentiment with which we find it hard to comply.  Whoever wanted tearful anal fuck videos should seek help immediately or, alternatively, go to iwanttobeavideogamejournalist.com for a wide variety masturbatory aids.

Bravo to assassin’s creed 2 terrible lip sync for actually having eyes and ears connected to the same spinal cord.  Still on actual fucking games (and what does that have to do with Remedial Waste?) haters gonna hate modern warfare takes the prize for bleeding fucking obviousness, and is left 4 dead 2 co op fun with stranger really should try alternative dating methods, such as going to prison.

Why are you such a cunt, is, of course, exactly what our mothers have been wondering about us for literally decades.  We have no idea what Google thought high heels had to do with us, while apple bashing suggests a new euphemism for self-abuse.  Fuck you cunt leads us lastly but neatly to the unexpected but absolutely marvellous odst nazi.

To which we can only say that you’re all fucking weird…

Your Handy, Wipe-Clean Kinect Fact Sheet

You’re probably as bored as we are with those endless, dreary arguments in the pub toilet about how the Xbox KinecktikckZOMGcunt will/won’t revolutionise gaming forever and blah blah.

So in that very 21st century spirit of outsourcing proper human contact to a piece of impersonal paper, we proudly present the Remedial Waste Fact Sheet about a certain accessory, in such a size that you can print a copy and hand it to any cunt who even looks like the next word out of their flaccid fucking jowls will begin with the letter K.

Or even better, just screw it up and use it to gag them while you drive them out to the desert with a fucking shovel on the passenger seat.

Disclaimer: the image after the link (which is basically the rest of the above) is COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY SAFE FOR WORK.  Honest.  So with that warning, don’t start whining if your mother catches you fapping your rancid bollocks off over it.  And if it gets you fired, don’t bother thanking us.  You didn’t want to work for those cunts anyway.

Calm down dear, it’s only anarchy

Right now, the entire games trade is suffering from what might be politely called “a transitional period”, or what might otherwise be called “a state of user-behavioural flux”

More accurately, it’s enduring “a period of rudderless chaos in which some gamers have found alternative casual-hardcore-social ways to waste their lives, thus causing great confusion amongst games trade execs who, having crawled their way to the top by sticking their tongues up their bosses’ arseholes in lieu of possessing any talent, imagination, or strategic expertise whatsoever, became fat and complacent, and now find themselves in a sweating shit-panic because they don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on, or how to make money in this brave new world that they don’t understand, and who are now exposed as stinking, over-promoted fucking mediocrities who would do better selling double-glazing or more properly belong in a cattle-cart bound for fucking Poland like the pointless, gamma-minus cunts they are.”

The games meeja-whores haven’t done much better, largely parroting verbatim the latest contradictory, confused and desperate blather from whichever producer, COO, or VP of M*rketing they managed to get on the blower this week.

In that cess-pit of FUD, however, Edge magazine have made themselves into the prize floater, gleefully paddling up the creek of zero credibility by turning themselves into little more than a brazen promotion for the Xbox KinetictectictZOMGcunt.  Here’s a sample of their latest top features: “Joy Ride: BigPark senior producer, David Seymour on bringing the kart racer to Kinect.”  “The CTO of Blitz Games Studios on why developers will have to be creative if they want to get the most out of Kinect.” “Blitz: Kinect Haters “don’t have a vision”.” “Interview: David Braben – The man in charge of developing Kinectimals on why Kinect is more hardcore than you think.”

Up to you to judge quite how much Microsoft semen is currently swilling around in Edge Suck My Kinect magazine’s stomach.

Back in reality, meanwhile, several facts have emerged, all of which are hilarious, and a cause for great cheerfulness and lashings of schadenfreude.  The gaming community can stop worrying right now because everything will be fine, apart from all the stuff that will continue to be terrible or even worse.  The even better news is that games trade can carry on shitting itself in utter, clueless terror.  We can’t see what’s not to celebrate about that – especially this:

Three things that will fuck up gaming for good

…which is actually numero deux in our ongoing series of Fuck Social Games in the Arse With a Shotgun: a charming sentiment with which you’ll all agree unless you’re a fucking dick, or that species of human crotch-fungus known as a games trade CEO.

Sufficient cuntshit has sprayed from their ovine mouths in recent weeks for us to deduce, beyond even the most unreasonable doubt, where they think the games trade is heading, and the news ain’t good.

Whether or not the games trade actually heads their way is another matter, of course, what with hidden currents of PEOPLE WITH FUCKING TASTE and squalls of gamers WHO HATE FUCKING SOCIAL GAMES.  But the course is clearly set, and it’s for three things that will fuck up our shit for good.  Oh joy.

Thing 1: Social Games

No surprise at all: scumware, mugware, whatever you want to call it, has seen one interesting (if you’re a masochist) development of late, because Disney – they of that fucking rat fame – have bought social games outfit Playdom for more money ($763m) than the entire social games market earned last year ($639m) – hilariously, only two days after Playdom’s own chief said that social game acquisitions were “slowing down”. But why so much for so little?

Obviously, it’s because the social games market is the new Dutch tulip, the new bubble of the South Seas, and the new dot-com boom, which has been sedulously inflated with gales of hype by every fucking industry whore from games journalists to chief execs for more than a year.  It’s going to be worth more than a billion, you know.

Wow.  Hollywood must be shitting itself.

But social games are fucking stupid, brightly-coloured and for fucking retards, and that’s also a market in which Disney excels – in its own white-picket-fenced, morality-claused, fairy-tale looting way.  And Disney are clever, more’s the pity.  They know that social games can’t be sold on their merits as games, because they are CUNT and NOT EVEN GAMES.  They’re also fucking mugware, and not even games. Did we say they’re not even games?  Because they’re not.

But Disney-branded mugware will sell not because they’re games, but because Disney have been committing Jesuitical practices on children all over the world for the last seventy fucking years.  No, not fucking them with their penises, you fucking sicko, but taking the child of seven and all the rest à la Loyola.  Disney characters sell stuff.  Even Kingdom Fucking Hearts, for chrissakes.

So the game’s merits as a game are irrelevant.  Those social gaming millions will flock to Disney’s super-respectable brand like flies to shit.  And millions of hitherto not-retarded social gaming noobs will as well.

And instead of flogging real-world toys, they’ll probably be “monetising” Pocahontas and Dumbo in some shitware bollocks that lets you buy all kinds of dressy-uppy bullshit beloved of thumb-sucking adult dolts who will never know that so much sing-song fluffiness simply marks them out as sexually immature fucking sociopaths.

Imagine being choked to death in a candy-floss factory, with all those silicate skeins of spun fucking sugar lacerating your fucking windpipe until you drown in your own syrupy blood.  That’s what the inside of their heads is like, along with goo-goo noises because they’ve just seen a new Disney avatar made out of a drawing on a fucking computer screen.

It’s a shame those characters will all be virtual, too, because with real-world toys you could make Pocahontas and Dumbo do some really kinky shit.

Anyhow. With Disney on board, social games will boom, because millions of people are fucking thick cunts.  And after Disney raises social games’ reputation from the sewer, how long before DC and Marvel, and every other fucker with an established cartoon brand muscles in on the act?

While we’re on the subject of M&A, videogame retailers GameStop have smelled which way the shit will fall once digital delivery becomes practical (sometime after we’re all dead and rotting), and so have bought Kongregate, that renowned repository of about a dozen good Flash games, and a vast ocean of dire, amateurish poo.  GameStop, you see, are manoeuvring to become a digital distributor of… what, casual workplace timewasters, or is this perhaps their first step to take on Steam?  Try not to laugh, and instead say, “Bless them,” as patronisingly as possible.

And speaking of tits, we come to – oh look:

Anti-Social Games Forever

We’ve probably said this before, but since Games Industry Dot Biz is the only respectable and even vaguely credible videogame news website out there, they probably don’t like being called respectable and vaguely credible by nasty fucking shitscum like us.

Notwithstanding that little obeisance, much idle belching, rubbing of eyes, yawning of gobs and shrugging of shoulders went on in the games room of Remedial Towers when the Grunt (GI? Gettit? Oh fuck off) informed a cold and indifferent universe of a prediction by Screen Digest (who?) that the scamware social games market would go kerching to the revolting tune of a billion dollar bills by the time 2012 rolls around.

By a mild coincidence, a few days earlier, a Friend of Waste emailed us a rant on the very same subject – that of scumware – in which he or she (we protect our sources better than Wikileaks) bemoaned and bewailed the Death of Hardcore Gaming As We Know It, that it will all be replaced by fucking social networking tools masquerading as games in which you have to kill six orcs in a row just to unlock your real-world toilet and take a real-world dump.

In a world of social gaming, what about anti-social gaming?  And what about anti-social gamers?  Whither now the real, hardcore gamers: arseholes like us?

As it turns out, we protect our sources so well that none of us can remember who the fuck our source was.  We also appear to have deleted the original email by accident, so we can’t even prove it ever happened at all. Like in one of those bullshit conspiracy movies, albeit one invented by fucking dunces.

Nor did we even bother to reply.  Or if we did, we probably got the wrong email amidst the shitheap of spam, and a phisher landed a fucking confusing, probably stoned and definitely drunken catch made out of some words in a pseudo-random arrangement that if you let your eyes diverge and look at it upside down will turn into a picture of a gaping fucking arsehole, or if you’re Michael Gove, a mirror.

So, acting heroically against type, we’ve decided unanimously to make amends, and publish what we would have said in private if we could have been bothered, or weren’t such lazy, anti-social cunts.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Good.  Here we go:

The Truth That Everyone Knows, But Which No One Ever Talks About

As usual, since everyone else is too chickenshit, too self-interested or just too well-bribed to tell the truth, it falls to Remedial fucking Waste to say the unsayable about the State of the Gaming Nation. Here are a few unpleasant actualités about children, videogames, and censorship.

You might not like them. Especially if you have kids.

For a start, videogame ratings don’t exist to “protect children” or any of that bullshit. Videogame ratings exist only to cover the videogames industry’s arse. PEGI (in Europe), the ESRB (in the States), and similar systems elsewhere in the world, are all government-ratified games industry bodies whose entire raison d’être is that the games trade can hold up self-regulation as proof that they’re responsible corporate citizens, and so disarm whichever dickmouthed politician or tabloid shit-whipper is trying to demonize videogames this week. We have a ratings system, they say, and it works: we don’t sell adult games to kids, end of story.  We’re a respectable, God-fearing, family-values industry, so leave us alone.

And for once, they’re telling the truth. In the old days, PEGI’s censor-crew used to be content with a self-assessment form and some samples of the game; these days, they exert much tighter control and demand to see the entire game, presumably also to maintain their status as the One True Church of Censorship. The system exists because mistakes can be catastrophic: the game might have to be recalled, which is cripplingly expensive, or even banned, which is even worse. In really extreme cases there may even be criminal penalties, since PEGI is legally enforceable in seven countries, including – next year – the UK. In any of those events, shit will fly from the CEO downwards, and even politicians will sometimes try to shove their noses into it (Hot Coffee, anyone?). No game publisher wants that. Ever.

Rockstar’s run-ins with the censors are therefore an anomaly: the whole games industry wants to conform to the ratings system, because it’s in their interest to do so. A censorship scandal is almost always a financial and PR disaster, and it also fucks it up for everyone else. But underneath it all lies that other critical desire: apart from mega-selling games, what the whole industry craves more than anything else is respectability, and not just because it hurts their pride not to be taken seriously as Art.

So that’s the nice, cosy setup: the games trade is sober and responsible and respectable, regulates itself like the grown-up industry it is, and wishes sincerely to avoid age-ratings scandals at all costs.

Fine.

Now go and play Modern Warfare 2. Play it online, in any mode – Team Deathmatch, Domination, Sabotage, whatever. Bear in mind that it’s a game which is rated 18 in the UK and M for Mature in the US. Play online for a couple of hours, and count the number of voices that are clearly – and I mean absolutely incontrovertibly – under the age of 14. Child voices: boys. Schoolboys.

When we did that experiment, of the first hundred players we counted about thirty had headsets. The majority of them, nearly twenty or so players, were clearly and incontrovertibly children – all of them boys, who could sing treble in a fucking choir.

To which, so what. It isn’t shocking, except to Daily Heil readers who have also only just discovered that you can find porn on the internet. I’d be more bothered about the fact that youngsters were being fed insane, right-wing, Teabag propaganda from an early age than the fact that they’re playing a gun-happy military shooter that glorifies violence.  But that’s the truth that every gamer knows, but which no one wants to talk about:

Children play 18-rated games.

Anyone who’s had to mute the squeaky little bastards on any multiplayer, ever, knows this. And that means the industry knows this. Which means that everybody knows this. But here’s another fact that no one wants to talk about:

There are fucking millions of them.

Nobody knows this for absolute certain, of course, because no one has ever done a scientific head-count, but then again, do we really need to? Think of all the multiplayer games you’ve ever played – all of the ones with a random selection of players. Now think of how many of them didn’t feature some Squeaky Little Bastard, humming to himself, shrieking, taunting, playing fucking shitpop in the background, or even pretending to be all big and clever by calling you “cunt” and “faggot”. Fifty-fifty? A minority? Have you ever wished that all other players were muted by default?

Then you know what we mean. The next blindingly fucking obvious question is this: how the fuck are all these thousands or millions of brats getting hold of grown-up games?