Press Start!: Bomb Iran! With Nintendos!
Come, literate ones. Fuck, come illiterate ones. Follow the trail of candy into my haven of polygons and cel-shading. This is Press Start!, the column where I spit five fucking happenings in the video game world from the past week into your welcoming mouth. Your job, true believers, is to thenby (thenby should really be a word) spit your five into my mouth. Liquids will be exchanged. Lives altered. Or you can just continue to the next post. I wouldn’t fucking blame you.
Drink deep your infinity juice, and let’s rock.
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#1: US Air Force Tethers Together 1,760 To Create Supercomputer.
Almost a year ago, it was announced that the US Air Force purchased a shit load of PlayStation 3s. While it wasn’t openly acknowledged by many people at the time, I knew something right there, that day. The US Air Force had clearly never seen one of the multitude of movies nor read any of the endless books that depict one thing: the great robotic uprising of year 20XX. This week, we got a look at some of the specifications at this huge motherfuckin’ Franke-Computer that the Air Force has created. I mean, Christ, these people clearly haven’t even read Frankenstein. Get cultured, yo.
This Monstrous Plasti-Vomit Pile of Computing Power is the thirty-third largest computer in the world. The son of a bitch contains “168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers.” That’s a lot. The Air Force is also calling it the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department.
Well then! Tax payer money at work. I’m all for it. If the robotic uprising has gone beyond conjecture, why not go out by tethering a bunch of PlayStation 3s together? Once their sentience becomes obvious, I can be found in my basement, strung out and waiting for death.
So pretty much like any other night.
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#2: Gaming Villain Billy Mitchell, Gets Honored In New Game.
If I had Billy Mitchell’s mullet, or his beard, or his gaming prowess, it wouldn’t have taken me twenty-five years to lose my virginity. But alas. I was borne from a barren womb, into a cold world. Inculcated with only the desire to consume grease-flesh and play video games. And so unlike Billy Mitchell, I plod the tedious life of another middle class white American. Not the worst, but certainly not the best.
More important this week, if I was Billy Mitchell, I would be celebrating getting honored in a fucking video game. If you don’t know who Billy Mitchell is, let me help you. Ultimate bad ass gaming villain, who often but not always holds the world record in the original Donkey Kong arcade game. Currently he has been felled by do-gooder and decent guy Steve Wiebe. But Stevey don’t got something Billy does.
An appearance in the recently released Donkey Kong Country Returns. Yessir, Billy got a shout-out in the new DK game for the Wii. Should you be rocking out all simian and shit in world 3-2, keep an eye on the rubble. Smashed rather gloriously into it is the pattern of Billy Mitchell’s righteous American Flag tie.
A true moment of awesomeness, which pays homage to a man who is clearly an American hero.
Oh Billy Mitchell, if I were only you.
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#3: Xbox Modder Facing Trial Gets Unlikely Support. From The Judge.
Do you roll with a posse? ‘Cause if you don’t, you sure need to. You say you’re just a geek? Naw son, a posse can still come in handy. What if you’re at Gamestop, and you come across a near mint (condition) copy of Final Fantasy Tactics? And while you’re busy tweeting about how fucking awesome! it is to find, someone else ganks it? That’s where your boy Wheezy F. WoW rolls up and pops them with a bag full of Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers across the grill.
Matthew Crippen can speak to all the importance of having a posse. Crippen was on trial this week for the illegal modification of Xboxes, when he found himself being defended by an unlikely source: the fucking judge presiding over the case. That’s a legit b-boy.
U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez opened up the hearing (is it a hearing? I’m an ignorant asshole when it comes to the law) by lighting up the prosecution for a variety of things. Most prominently? Two key prosecution witnesses had broken the law:
One is Entertainment Software Association investigator Tony Rosario, who secretly video-recorded defendant Matthew Crippen allegedly performing the Xbox mod in Crippen’s Los Angeles suburban house. The defense argues that making the recording violates California privacy law. The other witness is Microsoft security employee Ken McGrail, who analyzed the two consoles Crippen allegedly altered. McGrail admitted that he himself had modded Xboxes in college.
Well good god damn! After the prosecution took a thirty minute verbal DDT from the judge, the court recessed. And today? Today the case was dismissed. Behold the power of the posse.
#4: Dolph Lundgren And Uwe Boll Team Up. ‘Nuff Said.
Every once in a while a collaboration comes along that makes your asshole rocket excited shits off the all too close confines of your underwear. Superman and Batman. Macho Man and Hulk Hogan. JFK and Fidel Castro. This week, the latest megapower was unveiled before the gaming public. Dolph Lundgren is going to be in Uwe Boll’s sequel to his first Dungeon Siege movie. Based off of the series I never gave a fuck about and haven’t played, I didn’t see the first movie. Even though Uwe Boll is something of an amazing figure to me. So awful that I want to high-five him before socking him in the mushy parts and rolling him down the hill. A true idiot savant.
But it looks like I’m going to see the sequel. If you aren’t drawn to the lusty chest and glowing locks of Dolph Lundgren, I’m express shipping my sympathy to your home, covered in my vomit. Merry Christmas.
The ludicrous nature of this affair doesn’t just extent to the collaboration. As expected, the plot is equally amazing. Lundgren explains that he is “basically sent into the future, he’s the son of Jason Statham, and he was sent into the future, brought up in an orphanage, because the parents felt that they would all die.”
How did he get jettisoned into the future? He was attacked by ninjas one night, and that sent him through a vortex in time.
Naturally.
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#5: Salman Rushdie Recommends Bombing Iran With Nintendos
I really enjoy Salman Rushdie. His Satanic Verses didn’t just earn him a fatwa, it’s also a mind-warping post modern romp through the effects of religion, colonialism, and other insanity. His A Letter to the Six-Billionth Man is an inspiring look at the possibilities present if man could free himself from the chains of archaic religion. And this week, his recommendation that we bomb Iran with Nintendo in a manner to bring about a cultural transformation had me wanting to drop several dozen high-fives upon his palms.
In short, I want Rushdie in my posse.
So what did he exactly say? In speaking about how to bring about change for the new Muslims living under archaic regimes in countries such as Iran, Rushdie dropped, “You have to look at it as a world in conflict. And what we need to do is to support, I think, that modernizing positive way of being a Muslim, which involves living in the world as it is…I often think that the best way to liberate Iran is just to drop Nintendo consoles from the air. And Big Macs.”
While I think he’s wistfully idealistic in how far reaching video games could be in such a country, I have to appreciate the dude. It’s always nice seeing people of legitimate positions taking video games serious as a medium. While it’s a chicken or the egg mentality, I think that as soon as more artists begin taking the medium seriously, the sooner it’ll become a legitimate venue for more than tits, ass, and violence. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love all of that. Obviously. But it’d be nice for more awe-inspiring, or intellectual experiences to go along with my shotgun wounds and implausibly large biceps.
A man can dream.
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What’d you guys dig on this week? Hit me.