Internet Shows

"About a million years ago, a company called DMA Design created Grand Theft Auto and discovered that the combination of controversy, wacky humor, and vehicular homicide was a lucrative one indeed. So they made a whole bunch of sequels, threw some TVs out of some hotel windows, and changed their name to "Rockstar", in a slightly over-compensatory effort to make us forget that they made Lemmings. Not that there was anything wrong with Lemmings, at least not until the franchise was rigorously milked to it's last sour lumpy dribbles."

"Once you inevitably grow tired of the sandbox mayhem and start on the mission paths, you'll find that GTA4 is initially about as fast-paced as a Jacob Bronowski documentary playing at half speed. The first hundredweight of missions are virtually all tutorials, which highlights the inherent problem with incorporating so many different gameplay elements that you need to spend half the game explaining the bloody things! You have to learn how to drive cars, how to drive trucks, how to drive geese, how to use your phone, TV, internet, how to fist fight, how to gunfight, how to shoot from cover, how to shoot from the back of a giant tyrannosaurus..."

"The weapons are a bold effort to escape the usual lineup of melee, pistol, shotgun, machine-gun, rocket-launcher, overpowered-exotic-thing-that-you-never get-ammo-for-and-only-use-in-boss-fights-anyway. The default melee weapon is the titular Painkiller, a rotating blade arrangement perfect for forecasting light showers of body parts and reenacting the lawnmower scene from the movie Braindead. (That's Dead-Alive if you're American and fat.) As for the guns, I could mention the hugely satisfying penis-extension gun that pins baddies to walls with entire trees, but all you really need to know is that there's a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. I wish I could make something like that up; it shoots shurikens and lightning! It could only be more awesome if it had tits and was on fire."

"So that's Painkiller, more proof that the best way blow off steam is to blow off someone's natches."

"A major thing that turns me off JRPGs, and a lot of games in general, is when I don't feel that I, as a player, am contributing anything to the story. All I ever seem to do is wheel the characters from one whingy boring dialogue to the next. Events are driven by their actions, not mine. All I am is a little angry id who takes over for the combat, spending the rest of the time jumping up and down in the back of the main character's mind yanking on nerve endings, trying to make him stop acting like a pillock."

"What I'm saying is that I like games where the story and gameplay go hand in hand, while in most JRPGs the story and gameplay are kept either side of a wrought-iron fence made of tigers."

"Is TWEWY a good J-RPG? I have absolutely no idea. I feel like I'm on the edge of a frightening world I don't understand, treading water on the surface of a deep, deep lake full of weird-smelling creatures with completely alien concepts of fun and a tolerance for boredom to rival the Man in the Iron Mask."

"You know me; I'm a twitchy, instant-gratification kind of gamer. The sort who isn't happy unless there's a gun the size of a motorbike in his hands and a severed alien willy bouncing off the front of his space helmet. But every now and again, the planets will align and I'll be affected by weird cosmic rays, and suddenly all I want to do is play a nice fantasy RPG. Not a J-RPG, God no; it's just space radiation, not the infinite power of Christ. But a western RPG, something with goblins and swords and men in loin clothes going on about wenches."

"In Oblivion, you start off in a dungeon in the imperial palace. You're never told what crime you committed; I guess you're supposed to fill in that blank for yourself. So I choose to believe I was in there for shagging the emperor's wife and daughter at the same time while playing a rock guitar solo on the desecrated corpse of God. Anyway, then the Emperor showed up (played by Captain Picard) and I have to say I liked him a lot. He was the only character who actually seemed to know they were in a fantasy RPG. He took one look at me, noticed the camera floating behind my head and said, "Oh, bugger. You're the protagonist; guess I have to die now." And die he did."

"For a game that is obviously trying so hard, Oblivion is one of the least immersive RPGs I've ever played. The world map is huge, granted. If you intend to walk from one end to the other, you'd better pack a few sandwiches. But frankly, take one good look around the moment you first emerge blinking into the daylight and you've pretty much seen everything. It's like they took 200 square yards of medieval English countryside, added a few wolves, then copy-pasted it until it was roughly the size of Yorkshire."

"I think it's safe to say that very few people were madly trampling babies underfoot to grab Haze on launch day - I know whatever atrophied dregs of enthusiasm I had breathed their last when I glanced at the back of the box and saw that it was an outdoor first-person shooter about space marines. "Whoop-de-fucking-doo," I thought. "I look forward to the vehicle section with horrible steering and spending half the game hiding under a table waiting for my health to regenerate." But then up popped the hateful little angel on my shoulder who spends most of his time talking me out of buying a cornetto every time I pass a 7-11. "Shame on you, Benjamin Yahtzee Sebastian Godzilla Croshaw!" spake he. "Have you forgotten Call of Duty 4 already? You should give every game a chance to surprise you or you're no better than those dipshits who never played Mass Effect but condemned it as some kind of child-corrupting boobstravaganza.""

"The overall message of Hazes story is that WAR IS BAD! And that there are no true heroes when death is on the menu. But combining that with "whiz bang shooty fun" strikes me as trying to have one's cake and eat it -- a phrase I never really understood, I mean I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to eat a cake that you have. There's not much else you can do with a cake, except maybe hide in one if you're a stripper... Sorry, lost my train of thought."

"If you have a liking for Halo, a crippling fear of trying new things, and a desperate need to get rid of all your money very fast, then you should probably think about getting yourself sectioned. But until then, you might as well buy Haze, you mad bastard."

"I'm going to recount as much of the story as I can before my brain starts to hurt: Solid Snake is a cloned mercenary who is suffering from premature aging due to a planned obsolescence scheme worthy of Microsoft. He lives with his support character (and "best friend") Otacon, and the two of them have adopted a child together. (That oozing sound you just heard was made by all the world's homoerotic fan fiction writers simultaneously emitting torrents of hot lady-spunk.) Anyway, Solid Snake is tasked with the assassination of his evil clone brother, who is dead, but lives on through his possessed arm, which was grafted onto the body of - OH CHRIST, I can't go on; this shit is bananas! Play the games themselves if you want to know what's going on, although I can't guarantee that that will be enough - to truly get into the mindset of Hideo Kojima, you'll have to do something pretty drastic, probably involving experimental brain surgery and a complete X-Files box set."

"Somebody once said that a politician is a person who can talk for hours and never actually say anything. If that's true, Hideo Kojima could run for government and be emperor of the universe by mid-afternoon."

"Drama is the mortar that holds the webcomic community together, and there are so many wonderful ways to create it. Make absolutely no effort to improve your horrible drawing style, act like a prick at a convention, respond to constructive criticism with hostility, and just generally behave like the kind of monstrous egotist that blossom like mushrooms in the darkened trough of shit that is the Internet."

"I've been ignoring the whole Lego-LucasArts coalition so far, partly because, as you'll recall from my Psychonauts review, LucasArts is run by douchebags, but mainly because it sounds utterly retarded on paper. I mean, once you accept Lego Star Wars, where does it end? Playmobil Battlestar Galactica? Duplo Firefly? Meccano Dune? Yeah, I'm done milking that joke. I guess at first I've-- Wait! I've got another one! Stickle Bricks Babylon 5?...Sorry."

"There's this undercurrent of parody about the whole experience which I find rather cathartic. I guess it's because we're taking a film series which prided itself in unexpectedly traumatizing me as a child and totally emasculating it, like if there were a puppet show version of The Ring."

"I make a policy of never reading other people's reviews because it can taint my own recollection of a game and because I'm increasingly certain that I'm the only person on earth whose brain works properly. But it's been pretty difficult to avoid the popular opinion of Alone in the Dark, what with it apparently being the latest in a long line of "worst games evaar" and responsible for the deaths of several of my correspondents' families judging by the way they tearfully e-mail me requesting that I verbally assassinate it. Well, I thought, "Fuck those bereaved bastards who think I'm some kind of sweary ninja for hire. I'm gonna play Alone in the Dark and damn well try to like it." A few days have passed since then, and you may be surprised to learn that sometimes even the majority can be totally, totally right."

"What's tragic is that the Good Ship Alone in the Dark can see Port Good Game without a telescope, but they were apparently in such a hurry to get there that they accidentally landed at the Cock-Up Peninsula. It's full of good ideas balanced by terrible execution, which I will illustrate using two hypothetical designers I'm going to call Terry and Gonad. "Hey!" said Terry. "Let's have a damage system where you actually see persistent wound decals on your character's body." "Okay!" replies Gonad. "But let's put them on the outside of his clothes so they look like someone glued slices of ham to his jumper!" "Hey again!" says Terry, "how about a dangerous gooey black floor that becomes neutralized by bright light?" "Okay again!" says Gonad. "Now let's make the flashlight incredibly ineffectual against it and make it a one-hit kill!" Then a broken and jaded Terry starts sniffing glue while Gonad goes into the fetal position and softly giggles to himself."

"As a series, Alone in the Dark has always been about subtle, claustrophobic horror, as is sort of implied by the name. Now it makes no sense, because you're not alone, and it's not even dark, because everything's on fire."

"Contrary to popular belief, I don't hate mumorpugers. I hate what they do to people, turning them into nocturnal blobs of flesh and Cheetos that communicate entirely in mouth-breathing; and I hate when I look back on my time with a mumorpuger and realize that I just flushed away months of my life that I could have spent writing a bestselling book, or raising a child, or pounding nails into my face. But I have had fun with mumorpugers at the time, or rather a mumorpuger, and since comparison is going to be inevitable, let's just get the fucker over with: Age of Conan is not World of Warcraft. Some people might say, "Ooh, maybe it's not trying to be," but those people are going to Hell for lying because all MMOs are trying to be World of Warcraft: same controls, same terminology, same arduous blocks of motherfucking grind, same interfaces right down to the quest-givers with big golden exclamations marks growing out of their heads like they just spotted Solid Snake shuffling through the undergrowth."

"There's nothing wrong with being a small part of something bigger than yourself. That's how an MMO should work -- solidarity, teamwork, joining forty friends to go stomp on a night elf's face. Age of Conan makes the same mistake as the school system by telling everyone that they're special, thus turning them into entitled twatdonkeys."

"I'd like to clarify that somewhere in the flinty pits of my petrified heart I'm open to the possibility of all these games potentially being fun (except for Final Fantasy 13 obviously). But my intention is not to troll for once but to argue that it makes the most logical sense to be pessimistic. After all, if the game's good, great! But if it's bad you've lost nothing, plus you get the satisfaction of knowing you're cleverer than fanboys, which is right up there with winning a beauty contest against Steve Buscemi but still, it's a good overall rule: never let yourself get excited by trailers, unless it's the one for the new Watchmen movie. Oh yes, I can never get enough big glowing blue men with their celestial lads hanging out!"

"But frankly, fuck you if you want a story; here's your story: demons over there, KILL THEY ASS. Among Japanese games, Ninja Gaiden II is almost unique in its immediacy. It has none of that Metal Gear Solid bullshit of cutscene dialogues that could fill a modest paperback. None of that Devil May Cry cockpiddle where the cinematics selfishly hog all the fun. None of that Zelda... erm... applesauce where you spend the first six hours on a starting island learning the subtle arts of waving a sharp stick around going Yah!"

"The one thing I hate about Sands of Time is that the combat is repetitive and boring. The weird foible of the series that it's always brushing up against perfection, but for every step towards it they take another step back. The sequel, Warrior Within, had vastly improved combat but unfortunately everything else been beaten with the angsty stick and forced to write poetry with a pen full of black eye liner. It seems that Ubisoft decided that emo culture was in, so they went around the office one morning and fired everyone who was smiling. The Prince was suddenly staring out from under a black Robert Smith fringe and growling angry threats at supercilious badass action girls showing off more flesh than a surgeon's convention. The tonal shift was so unnecessary and contemptible that a critical paddling session followed, which was a shame because the environments were still nice and the gameplay was better than ever. It just goes to show: never stick your dick in a pudding. It might still be good pudding and you can spend all afternoon explaining that but no one's going to eat it because you STUCK YOUR DICK IN IT!"

"Between them, the three Sands of Time games have the ingredients of probably the best game ever, and I don't say that lightly. The first game still very resolutely sits in my top five games of all time, but it could have been better. Like a variant of the uncanny valley effect, the closer a game gets to Portal perfection, the more glaring the flaws become, and their attempts to correct those flaws in the sequels were akin to removing flecks of dirt from a birthday cake with a shovel. But we live and learn, so let's move on and hope the new Prince of Persia will be as good as Sands of Time. And that my ass will sprout wings and fly me into space!"

"I don't really understand fighting games. I don't hate them, but I've never frosted my pants over any of them, either. I just don't get them. And whenever I mention this, people say the same thing: "What's there to get? Violence is cathartic. It's like squeezing a great big stress ball, except you're kicking it in the face and you're a skinny Japanese schoolgirl in your underpants." But if you want to relieve stress, you take a herbal bath or bang your head against a wall, neither of which cost ninety dollars at your local electronics retailer. There's got to be more to it than that."

"Frankly, I'm amazed the game even comes with a manual. All you need is a picture of the "throw" button and a big arrow pointing to it."

"And do you know who I blame for all this? You! Yes, you, the public — especially you, Adrian! (That probably isn't your name but it was worth it to mess with the heads of all the Adrians in the world.) Ye unwashed masses who ensure massive profits for the same old cookie-cutter sequels because anything that isn't safe and familiar makes you dive for your security blanket! And since you spent all Daddy's money on a next-generation console you won't even give the time of day to anything that doesn't have environment-mapped reflective surfaces and you're more interested in buying Master Chief novelty condoms than actual gameplay innovation! In fact, I don't know why I'm even talking to you. Piss off! Close the browser and fuck off back to Gears of War! Has he gone? Good, I hate that guy!"

"The unspoken goal of exploration is to make the entire planet completely boring. Life was at its most interesting back when we still thought grass huts were a bit hoity-toity and when there could have been dragons made of raisin bread over the next hill for all we knew. Nowadays, everything's mapped out. We've even spent enough time on the moon and the very bottom of the ocean to know that: firstly, there aren't any dragons there either; and secondly, we're definitely not in a hurry to go back and double-check. Now it's only the depths of space that remain unexplored and unboring, plenty of gray area where any number of interstellar sparkle dragons could be hiding. Eve Online does the impossible by making deep space boring, and demonstrates the best way to do that is to let nerds colonize it."

"I have to admit, though, the story is to be congratulated for taking the fiery, thunderous personalities of the Norse gods and somehow turning them into a bunch of boring, self-righteous, robotic twats with all the warmth and emotion of a glass of water."

"So you'll die. You'll die a lot. And by Christ does the game want you to know it. A valkyrie who is clearly in no fucking hurry slowly flies down, picks up your corpse, and ascends gently back into heaven as if to say, "There there, baby, it doesn't matter that you're a ten-thumbed cripple who literally can't fight to save their lives; let's get you tucked into beddy-byes." Then you respawn fifty feet away with no penalties, scratching your head in bewilderment. And this happens every time you die! You can't skip it! No one could look at this and think, "Yep, this will never get old!" The only remaining explanation is that this is some kind of test - maybe if anyone defends this on a forum, they automatically get added to the government depopulation list because their minds are clearly deviant and must be purged!"

"If there's one thing history has taught us (besides not to piss off people called Genghis, or put lead in your water pipes), it's that if you're going to make something incredibly good that becomes frighteningly popular, make sure it's the last thing you ever make in your entire life. Because otherwise you get to spend the rest of your creative career struggling under the weight of high expectations and bricks."

"You also get to design your own buildings and vehicles further down the line; so if all you're after is some kind of 3D art program for eight-year-olds, Spore is definitely for you. If you're holding out for an actual game, then you get to eat shit. But never mind; you can always design a creature that looks like a huge cock and imagine it pounding you in the arse."

"(On Bionic Commando Rearmed) But the question this all raises is whether a remake should just blithely parrot the gameplay mechanics of the original, or take the opportunity to improve upon them with our enlightened future space technology? Well the second one obviously, you thick berk. There's nothing inherently sacred about game design from the olden days. They're just old, and wrinkly, and fat, and no one but the utterly depraved wants to sleep with them."

"(On Castle Crashers) While the little big-headed characters are fun to look at, in big fights with lots of similarly sized chaps, it's easy to lose sight of the one you're controlling. And this becomes doubly unfair in big boss fights when the big boss's main strategy is to conceal your character's location behind their mountainous flab. At least in Golden Axe you could play as the amazon lady and navigate by her unfeasible boobies. This is like watching midget identical twins wrestling and trying to remember which one you put money on."

"Nostalgia is a mouthful of balls. Children will like anything — the stupid, diminutive cunts — and you weren't any different. Games, or should I say the potential for games, has only gotten better as technology advances in indirect proportion to the worsening of your memory. When the gaming kids of today become the hairy, winding twenty-somethings of the future, they'll be declaring that Halo 3 was miles better than a game of Interstellar Bum Pirates on the astral thought planes of the universal overmind, and they'll be just as wrong then as you are now. I played both Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Sunshine before I played Ocarina of Time and Mario 64, and I thought the first two were better in every buggering way! Drink down that burn sauce, fatboy! Also, I think Hitler was right!"

"There's an insidious thought that frequently goes through the minds of gamers; and I'm not talking about the ones you get when Ivy from Soulcaliburs pants ride up, and which are perfectly natural for growing young men. I mean the thought that goes, "But I might need it later" — the niggling little doubt that prevents you from using all your most powerful insurance policies in case there's some kind of no-claims bonus at the end of it all. So we have scenarios where you're sitting on a nuclear stockpile to shame North Korea and are throwing peas at a giant robot crab on the off-chance that there might be a bigger giant robot crab just around the corner. No game illustrates this phenomenon better than Mercenaries 2 or, as I like to call it, "Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes.""

"Actually this is something I've been meaning to bring up, miss: Why does the C.E.O. of our private military company have to do all the missions personally with no backup except for an Irish chopper pilot who abandons his mission when the enemy chuck anything larger than a scone at him? Actually, working alone might be for the best. The A.I. is so thick, it might as well be living in a cave. On one occasion, I called down a platoon of soldiers from a friendly faction to help me take over an enemy base. Every single one of them stepped right off the edge of the helipad, fell six feet and died. Unhelpful, but fucking funny!"

"Apparently the plot is supposed to tie the Star Wars prequel trilogy to the original series, which raises the obvious question: WHY WOULD WE WANT TO DO THIS TERRIBLE THING? It's like tying your breakfast to a plague rat. The grubby fingerprints of George Lucas are all over the story in that none of the characters are in the slightest bit relatable. That, however, could be because of the Wii graphics limitations making them all look like Gerry Anderson puppets of stroke victims."

"The Force Unleashed on the Wii did not endear itself to me. I don't blame the developers, and I'm not just saying that because they're based in this city and might kill me. I blame the Wii for being tightfisted with its hardware upgrades; I blame myself for failing to research the different versions; I blame Michael Atkinson, the attorney general of South Australia, for quite a few unrelated things; but most of all I blame George Lucas, that hirsute chinless git, pummeling his own franchises with such ham-handedness you could put a piece of bread around each of his mitts and call them BLTs!"

"I don’t think I would do very well in a real-world combat scenario. I hate being shouted at and I can’t run very fast while wearing a backpack the size of a cow. Before I would willingly enter a gunfight, the enemy are going to have to strap big glowing red arrows to their heads and promise to stand next to windows, loudly vocalizing every thought that crosses their minds. And by the time my comrades have persuaded them to do that, I’ll have remembered that I’m a massive coward and legged it."

"You know how in most FPSs you're some kind of hybrid of man and refrigerator who can take an entire munitions dump to the face while the enemy all have armor made of whipped crème and skulls made of cake? Well it seems going in to this game everyone got their character sheets mixed up. The player can't survive more than a measly handful of bullets ripping through their flesh while the armored enemies can take so many rounds to the torso you'd think there'd be nothing left but a spinal column and the cornflakes they had for breakfast. They can spot you in pitch darkness even with your flashlight off, and they can shoot you from halfway to neverland because their guns have magic accuracy that evaporates the instant you get your hands on them."

"The trademark sense of isolation is another point the game misses like a champ, when you are given a spunky female sidekick. This is another peculiarly American habit that seems to always go unchallenged: why does a love interest subplot have to be shoehorned into everything? Imagine if there was some kind of parallel universe where every game and movie, regardless of genre, was required to incorporate at least one line dancing competition. We'd think they were all raving lunatics! And yet here's us forcing in an out-of-place, cheesy romance scene that's more agonizingly painful to watch than any of the actual horror the game is supposed to be about."

"It's like they had some kind of generic Hollywood movie checklist to fill in. Which makes sense, because the game borrows heavily from the similarly overdone Silent Hill movie, to the point that I half-expected there to be a level where you play as Sean Bean doing something totally fucking irrelevant."

"Maybe if the original creators of something don't want to continue it then you should listen to them, because otherwise you're only making it to please the fans. And why would you want to do anything for fans? I mean, I'm a Silent Hill fan and I've just spent the whole review whining like a broken motor. Fans are clingy, complaining dipshits who will never ever be grateful for any concession you make. The moment you shut out their shrill, tremulous voices, the happier you'll be for it. Incidentally, why not buy a Zero Punctuation t-shirt?"

"It just struck me that whenever there's a sandbox crime game, it's always the same gangs: Italians, Yakuza, or street gangsters. You're always either going on about respect, honor, or wearing your belt around your thighs. Y'know what there needs to be? A sandbox crime game where you play a Batman villain! You run around doing dastardly crime equipped with freeze rays and jetpacks, completing story missions that lead up to you building a giant brightly colored doomsday machine shaped like a top hat or something. Then Batman comes along and beats you up because you forgot to strap him into your overly-elaborate, slow-moving death trap, then you mysteriously evade capture in order to come back and do it all again next week. Sadly mankind has yet to recognize my genius, which is incidentally the title I have mind for this project."

"Saints Row 2 shows a much better understanding of its audience: it is fully aware that most gamers are dickheads and if you give them any kind of freedom, their first instinct will be to abuse it. If you give them guns, they will shoot old ladies. If you give them cars, they will run over old ladies. If you give them aircraft, they will ascend to the highest possible heights and hurl themselves out onto an old lady. And if you give them customizable outfits, their first instinct will be to take off their clothes and run around the streets hip thrusting in the faces of old ladies. If you try to stop them doing all this, they'll hate you for it. Not only does Saints Row 2 not stop you, but it keeps score."

"Just for once, I'd like to see a spaceship in a horror game that actually seems like it might have been a nice place to live. You know, tasteful light fittings, elegant laquered wood panels, or at the very least, throw a fucking carpet down now and again. At least that way, it would almost be a surprise when it gets invaded by a horde of flesh-eating mutants. Frankly, if you paint your spaceship gunmetal-gray and fit it with about half as many flickery-ass fluorescent lights as are necessary, then you might as well rename it the USS Kill Beast Buffet!"