Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

This is what Borderlands should have been – chapter after chapter of this. The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned could have been released as a standalone on PSN of XBLA, no problem. It’s short, sharp and pretty much a must for anyone who still hasn’t managed to grind their way to level 50 – and if you have, it’s probably still worth a purchase.

If you hadn’t guessed, zombies are on the menu. It’s all a bit Left4Dead with the undead clawing at and vomiting on you. There’s a welcome change to the game’s dynamics due to the absence of armed enemies and with the enemy levelling to match your own there’s no time to slack. The story is adequate, which is an improvement on the main game’s. It would have been nice to see areas within the main game given dedicated story chapters in the way Jacob’s Creek was. Hopefully this is something Gearbox will look into when the inevitable sequel hits.

Critter Crunch

The above picture is of a biggsliocaucus feeding its son mathematical rainbow juice; regurgitated crystals that crittacocephalus drop when they are fed to each other by the daddy biggsliocaucus. Critter Crunch is a world of ‘What the Hell?’ but it’s so gosh darn cute, and it really is, that you’re not sure whether your fragile little mind is being violated or not.

Bitter Review: Assassin’s Creed II

Assassin’s Creed II is poor. It’s a linear game hidden in an open world. It ignored everything that made its crusade lurking predecessor so endearing and lathered itself in the self-congratulating miasma with which Rockstar suffocated GTAIV – “a game that requires no patience to play” according to Eurogamer. Altaïr’s outing back in 2007 was a breath of fresh air. In a year where Mass Effect made you play as a Ken doll Commander Shepard – blandness personified then lobotomised – Assassin’s Creed came along with Altaïr, who had poise and finesse. Granted, it all went wrong when he opened his mouth, but the character had a realised weight to him that was unparalleled at the time.

Oh great, it’s another bullshit military suckjob

Just what we need: on the back of Modern Whorefare’s demonstration of the huge gamer appetite for loud, self-pitying military shooters, those Johnny-come-latelies at fucking EA have taken the defibrillator to their wrinkled old Medal of Honor franchise in the hope of cashing in on all that real-life killing, or at least a simulation of it.  Bottomless jokes about simulacra apart, they claim to be bringing us “the most authentic modern war experience”, because war is now officially entertainment, baby.

“Most authentic”, eh? So you spend 98% of the game sitting around, bored out of your skull, or tweaking on meth or barely-legal uppers, and the remaining 2% shitting yourself in liquid-gutted terror because some dogma-cunted maniac is cracking rounds over your fucking head.

But of course not.  Instead, you’ll play a type of mythogenic special forces psychopath called a “Tier 1″, who is “expert in the application of violence” as the official copy boasts.  With not even a trace of irony – or even an iota of awareness – some suit says in the press release, “We felt it was important to tell the story of today’s war and today’s elite soldiers via today’s most relevant medium – videogames.”

Come back, Benigni, all is forgiven.

Perhaps, then, it’s too much to hope that it won’t be just another shrivel-dicked, lazyboy-militarist cockslime of a fucking game, seeping off the bellend of some fat cunt dev who wouldn’t know “authentic” if it came into his fucking house and smart-bombed his scaly fucking ballsack.

Jesus fucking Christ.  Where the fuck are the terrorists when you need them?

The Remedial Lexicon (Part 2)

After the microscopically fucking tiny succès de scandale that our last edition caused by pricking the vanity of a certain academic (who, it should be noted, is not only offender in the abstrusity department, nor by any means the worst, cough, Dinehart), we bring you yet another compilation of shorthand bullshit that we made up elsewhere to describe our least favourite but most-addicted form of entertainment.

Should-Be-Niners: zomgroflers (q.v.) who whinge about their favourite games being given a lowly 7 or 8 score, usually by Edge, and often about some fucking rancid PS3 exclusive.  Should-Be-Niners are the same people who see no connection between their noisy clamour and the mass effect (ibid., op. cit., etc.), which means that, for instance, a major Japanese game due out next year is guaranteed a 9 or 10, and pass the earplugs if it gets a 6.

CRV: civil rights violation, of an offensively immaterial sort.  Being a bunch of Limeys, we don’t actually have any civil rights, and what few Labour-chiselled human rights we still have will be blown away by the absolutist fuckscum in the Tory party when they next cross the floor.  But in Gameland, where the real world doesn’t happen, a CRV is a difficulty spike of such vicious depravity that it must surely be proscribed by the Geneva Convention, or at least the Trade Descriptions Act.  The hands-down Pol Pot of all CRVs is, of course, the flying school section of GTA San Andreas, but the Cortana chapter of Halo 3 caused much bleeding of little gamer hearts, too.

Betamax 3: proof that our Cassandrine predictions about the decline of the PS3 were somewhat inexact – or, to put it more honestly, complete bollocks.

Pachterite: nuggets of crystallised piss, which defy augury; kidney stones for scrying, mediated to us bloodily by the gaming press from the ragged urethra of their very own pet Nostradamus; proof that our predictions about the decline of the PS3 were actually more accurate than Michael “Robespierre” Pachter’s dribblesomely off-beam prophesies.  He’d have better luck as a telephone psychic, or sniping with his eyes shut.

Squaidos: (pron. skwy-doss) an inexplicable marriage, or any other kind of bizarre merger; named after the incomprehensible, Mengelesque, and possibly sado-sexual corporate experiment that conjoined a dull, floundering and soon-to-be failing games-co, which has been shovelling the same old knackered IPs for fucking ever, with another dull, floundering…  Oh.

Vaz-bait: a self-harming video – to pick a random example – posted on YouTube by someone in serious need of psychiatric help, proper parenting, or a hefty slap (delete according to the decade you were born in); grist to the mill of obese and corrupt politicians who have a hard-on for red ink and Australian videogame censorship.

Games publisher: a glorified box-stuffer.

M*rketing: a disgusting and depraved activity, engaged in by consenting adults or games publishers, in public, and with complete impunity; a frequently-sexualised assault on the English language; an argument for eugenics; the only obscenity whose name we will never print in full.

Wifebeater’s boycott: a failure to kick the habit by a community of gamers who, outraged by a price-hike or other rip-off involving a forthcoming game, proceed to orchestrate a Geoffrey, but then – as soon as the game is released – go crawling back to their abusers like the doormats they are.  For details, see any of the gutless dickwittedness surrounding the release of Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2; hard to believe that they belong to the same species that suffered and died to get the vote.

Entrophy: that law of universal degradation when applied to a trophy-tart’s pursuit of the Platinum Grail or the GP Grand; the phenomenon by which the application of gaming work actually produces more disorder in a system, with specific respect to one’s credibility.  See also: completist fucknut.

 

Irrelevant Review: Halo 3 ODST

Back in the good old days, about six months after Microborg started trying to assimilate the then indie dev-heroes that were Bungie (hard to believe they used to be indie, but it’s true), they released a third-person action-adventure beat-’em-up called Oni.  It was a fairly pale rip-off of Ghost in the Shell, and it gained a certain notoriety for sending its heroine, Konoko, on a long, tedious shlep through a dark grey, largely featureless, quasi-futuristic landscape of skyscrapers, occasionally beating the shit out of baddies along the way.

Basically, there was an awful lot of grey, and an awful lot of plodding.

Eight years later – a gaming aeon – this lumpen horror has come back to haunt us with nothing less than Halo 3: ODST.  In this iteration of the Halozilla franchise, our silent hero, known only as “Rookie”, trudges through a grey, largely featureless quasi-futuristic landscape of skyscrapers, occasionally… you get the idea.

The trailer lied.  There isn’t even a Gestapo dude.

Worse still, it isn’t a coincidence.  “Rookie” can collect episodic recordings from around the city that tell some kind of give-a-shit backstory about a plucky girl called Sadie who wants to join up with the jolly greens to give those bally Covenant what for.  (The whole thing sounds a bit Radio 4, making it something like a War of the Worlds episode of The Archers.)  If that isn’t enough to make you want to vote for the Prophet, or just hurl your breakfast, she keeps saying, “I have to get to the ONI building.”  So, Office of Naval Intelligence apart, it’s entirely deliberate: as if to say, hardihar, we’ve created the same tedious environment – but this time it’s IRONIC.  Yeah.

Make no mistake: inflicting that kind of semi-sado-masochistic torture on the Bungie fanfolk is

All Our Reviews Are Fucking Irrelevant

Doug Creutz must be a happy man: his state-of-the-gamer-nation survey for Cowen and Co., which has been reported just about every fucking where, has created a minor stir.  His declaration that the Wii bubble has burst is old news around here because we predicted that when God was still on the tit, but the fun part is all about game-buying decisions, and throws some amusing light on why critics don’t matter.  Better still, it also explains why most big games are the same old shit.  Here are the gamers’ reasons-for-purchasing, averaged out of five:

The game’s genre – 4.20
Enjoyed previous games in the series – 4.06
Price – 3.82
Word-of-mouth – 3.70
Box art, online, adverts – 3.55
Publisher’s previous titles – 3.33
Critics’ reviews – 3.19
Aggregated scores – 3.11

The headlines focused on the two lowest-scoring items, which indicate that reviews and their aggregates don’t matter all that much to gamers.  Of course, the gaming press didn’t give the story an honest headline, such as “All Our Reviews Are Fucking Irrelevant” but pointed the finger, as Edge did, at the games trade upon which they feed: “Publishers Overrating The Importance Of Reviews” they sneered, while others discreetly skirted the point.

Low-scoring scores might also be news to all the Should-Be-Niners who gripe about the

The Remedial Lexicon (Part 1a)

Some breaking lexical news (try not to yawn):

vituperation sans cleverness: Bogostese (from the man himself, bless him) for the foul-mouthed, po-faced and gutter-trash bullshit that appears on Remedial Waste.

We’re taking that as a high compliment indeed.

The Remedial Lexicon (Part 1)

Which is to say a list of etymologically unsound videogame terminology; compiled ad hoc or when we feel like it (whichever the lazier); used by us, and probably about us by our mothers.  In no particular order:

PSI: Palm Sweat Index.  A measure of how pant-shittingly scary or shot-at stressful a game is.  Or maybe you’re just soft of palm and clammy of handshake, like a sex-pest.

ATI: Ash on T-shirt Index. Like the PSI but for the tarry-lunged and probably slightly crusty gamer; measures how infrequently you remove your fag from your cancerous lip while playing a particularly invigorating level of Custer’s Revenge or RapeLay.  See also that long-ash Ripley moment in Aliens, except with an unstiff upper lip.

fag: cigarette, you homophobic cunt.

cunt: a gamer; a fanboy; a fangirl; a person who works in the games trade, their spouse, children, extended family, pets, friends, neighbours, and everyone they fucking know.

mass effect: a phenomenon by which the gaming press give a piss-awful game a swooning critical suckjob.  Rumours that game critics are regularly bribed or coerced by powerful industry shitcunts into giving fucking rubbish triple-A games 9 out of 10 scores are absolutely false, you hear?

Kobayashi Maru: (v.) to cheat at a game, because the game itself is cheating.  “Crushing on Uncharted 2?  Fuck that for a game of old cock.  I Kobayashi Maru’d at the first fucking respawn.”

black finger: like white finger, but for gamers who have had too much of the vibrate function; named for the colour of all that yummy stuff under their fingernails.

Baudrillard: the patron saint of videogames in general and Remedial Waste in the exact.  Or rather the simulacrum of a patron saint.  Or of Baudrillard.  Or both.

spunk-haired manga tosspot: any male JRPG character.

knock-kneed manga shitwench: any female, etc.

mirror’s edge: (n.) the metaphysical point at which contemplation of possibility of the divine becomes impossible (in other words, a Nietzschean disproof of God); the worst of all possible worlds; the Hookean limit of plausibility and patience.
(v.) the compulsively repeated act of flinging the player-character to their death out of sheer fucking exasperation and lung-shitting disbelief.  “Fucking Tomb Raider.  I mirror’s edged that pointless tart for half a fucking hour last night.”

Bogostese: (pron. Bog-ost-eez) po-faced highbrow bullshit, beloved by Gamasutra, and invented by soi-disant videogame “academics” to describe parts of games that could be understood perfectly well by a six year-old: “narratology”, for example means “plot” (or studying it), and “procedural rhetoric” means “making your point using a videogame”.  Named after the arch-obscurantist ludo-philosophe Ian Bogost, who is gaming’s answer to Jacques fucking Derrida.

zomgroflers: malignant, illiterate arsefucks who post histrionic bollocks in suxxspeak in the toilet cubicles of the internet, which are, as any fule kno, forums and blogs.  Which includes us, obviously.

Blezinsky Paradox: a theory that attempts in vain to describe the runaway success of the fucking shittish and cunt-woeful Gears of War franchise.

Gran Turismo 5: Beckett’s unfinished sequel to Waiting for Godot.  “When’s the next train?  It’s arriving ten minutes after GT5.”

Natal: what happens when some R&D dickheads take the shit ideas of science fiction so seriously that they fulfil the fucking prophecy, as in all that Minority Report fucking semaphore; not that there’s the slightest chance that they’d hurry the fuck up with those replicants.

gruntosaurus: an absurdly macho game character who ticks any of these boxes: space marine, actual Marine, muscle mary knucklehead, knuckledragger, jock, footballist, Spartan, any kind of testosteroidal cunt, any kind of Dwayne Johnson.

Scrappy-Do motherfucker: irritating sidekick whom you are prevented from killing by the sadist pricksniff who designed the little shit; sends you off on bullshit missions, or screeches at you, or just gets in your fucking way.  Recent offenders: Petruccio in Assassin’s Creed 2, Elena in Uncharted 2, and that shrieking fucking harridan in Infamous.  Honourable mention: Short Round in Lego Indy, whom you could smack into the lava to your evil heart’s content.

Review: Assassin’s Creed 2

Here’s a thing: at its core, Assassin’s Creed 2 is pretty much identical to the original.  You climb towers and death-leap off them.  You spend ages slicing your sword off other guards’ swords, waiting for that killer blow to fell them.  You hide in those rooftop four-posters.  You run about the place going SCHIINNG-NECKSTAB on a bunch of fat, powerful men with evil designs on the world.  Desmond Miles is still a fucking idiot.

Also, if you only play the first two hours, you’d be convinced that nothing has improved on the first one.  If you only play the first five hours, you’d be wondering when the game is going to start.  But if you played it for ten hours, you’d forget the crushingly clumsy opening, the terrible dialogue, the awful cut-scenes, the nebbishly Californian Leonardo da Vinci, the ridiculous cameos from every famous cinquecento personage, as well as the fact that the combat is still 90% rubbish and the hero is a pig to control, and you’d play the fucker right through to the end.

Why?  Because…