Press Start!: Voice Commands Are For The Bedroom, Not Video Games.
I absolutely love Chez-Its. Nothing relaxes me more than popping down on the toilet mashing a handful of Chez-Its into my gullet while checking my Tumblr on my iPhone. One of the other things I absolutely love is the use of adverbs. Hemingway fucking hates me. On top of those two pure, unadulterated loves of mine is my unremitting love for video games.
That’s why I write this column. Press Start!, the post where I run down five things that happened in the world of video games this week. I’m covered in Chez-It crumbs and ready to vomit verbose into your eye-mind-mouths.
Let’s party, guys!
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#1: BioShock: Infinite ‘Tears’ My Ass With Rock.
It’s that game that I always bring up when I want to defend the medium. Sure you can bring up ICO or you can bring up fl0wer, or Braid. Maybe you do. That isn’t what I pull out, when I slide my slender fingers into my Bag of References. Drooling muck phalanges desperately grip onto BioShock, and I shout, “This, this is a defense of video games!” Take it or leave it, I’ll stand by it. Weak final act and all.
I imagine I’ll do the same with BioShock: Infinite. The sequel sucked, frreal. You don’t go from a rampant pillaging of Objectivism by Ken Levine and his Band of Brilliance to some free-loading offshoot without the real team. Can’t do it. Won’t do it! If anything, that sequel stoked the fires for the new Levine installment.
BioShock: Infinite! I don’t know why I’m rambling about this like its new. No, no! Pardon me. A thousand pardons and perhaps a novena. What is new is this Developer’s Diary. Levine drops a new gameplay mechanic that tickles my teats until they’re taut. Oh the glory of a taut teat. Behold “Tears”. Just watch the video. If you don’t like it, kindly proceed to the X in the upper right hand corner of your browser.
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#2: Microsoft’s NUADS is Suck Made Advertisement.
The only thing that sucks more than Microsoft’s spelling of “NUADS” is the underlying concept behind it. If you were concerned that the Kinect Wunderkind Karate Chop Project was going to ruin gaming, you can double down on your agita medicine. Through the wonder and excitement of Kinect-powered technology, Microsoft has a proposal for us. If we see an advertisement that we find palatable during our Xbox Live Entertainment System Box Viewing, we can then share it with our friends.
Wait.
This is the breakthrough? What in the name of everything jiggling and pert is going on here? Listen man, if a friend of mine tries to share an advertisement with me, there either need to be gagging and moaning or it needs to not exist. Good friends, if you think there’s a Coca-Cola ad that I’d want to see, and you share it with me, we’re going to stop seeing eye to eye. I will friend dump you.
My friend The Faux Bot has provided the Universe and perhaps even Dimension-X with a great example of how I see it working. It’s going to end in tears, folks. Tears.
Goodness me.
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#3: Cliffy B Wants Moar!
Cliffy B, whose actual last name I cannot spell and I don’t feel like cutting and pasting, wants more. He wants more! Don’t act surprised. Why shouldn’t he? He’s a virile modern American male. Raised in the churning hot factory of capitalism and consumerism, bound by the human predicament of perpetual dissatisfaction.
He wants more! More damn it! He isn’t just satisfied with having created Unreal Tournament. He isn’t satisfied with being a video gaming rock star. He isn’t satisfied with having a cute girlfriend who is also something of a celebrity on the internet fat pipes and gaming conventions. Scratch that, fiancé I think? Most importantly, he isn’t satisfied with having created perhaps this generation’s hottest console exclusive: Gears of War. Off my balls, Uncharted fans. I used that “perhaps” as a conscious cop-out.
Speaking this week, Bleszinski said he wants to leave a legacy that goes beyond the Lancer and the bro-dude homosocial circle of locust destruction:
“There is plenty of life left in Gears, but you also don’t want to beat a dead horse, right? If there was another Gears game down the line, it would have to play around in another couple of spaces…It could never just be, ‘Hey, Marcus and Cole are back [and] there’s more Locust!’ Gears is amazing and I love it, absolutely adore it, but it will not be the final legacy of this studio.”
I can definitely appreciate the dude’s desire to branch out. Expand. He doesn’t want to fall in upon himself like the bloated gaming equivalent of Lucas, endlessly milking the raw nipples of the franchise until it groans collapses under the weight of its own suck.
Now mind you, he may very well never escape the gravity of the franchise. That’s just the way the gaming scene goes. Or really, being tethered to any enormo-franchise in any medium. I can appreciate his desire to expand though. Like a mofuckah’
Should he fail? He created UT and fucking Chainsawbladeguns.
Not a bad legacy. At all.
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#4: Valve Stares At Wii U’s Groin, Grins Slightly.
There hasn’t been a downpour of rampant fanboy support for the Wii U. I’m right there with you. If there was something that could ignite the timbers of my loins with the console, it would be getting a company like Valve interested and playing with the Wii U’s Wii Paddletablet or whatever the fuck it is called. There are few studios that excite me as much as Valve, and so if they were to bring their considerable heft (that’s a pun) to the console, it would be worth appreciating. Speaking about the Wii U this week, Valve head and co-founder Gabe Newell started flirting with the Wii U. Standing in a corner of the gaming high school dance, Newell bashfully smiled and said:
Wii U seems to be a lot more powerful than the previous generation,” he told Joystiq. “It sort of fits better into the scalability in terms of graphics performance and CPU performance, so I think it’ll be a lot easier for us to fit it into our scalability model.
Now I don’t know what the fuck a scalability model is, but let’s get this done, Newell. The momentum of my techno-lust gadget-fetishism will carry me into a Day One purchase of the Wii U. It’s up to you and Miyamoto to make me feel like I’m not a douchebag for buying it.
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#5: Al Gore Realizes Games Are Hip, Tries To Glom On.
Oh shit! Everyone clear the aforementioned dance floor. Al Gore is here to rock. He’s realized that games are cool, and goddammit he wants in on the party. Easy, Al. We don’t have too much fun here in Video Gameville. When we’re not trying to send our friends Skechers Shape-Up advertisements, we’re generally jizzing into our own crusty pants and screaming into microphones. Oh, you’re still game? Sweet, step on in! This week in true politician talk, Gore dropped the line that “Games are the new ‘normal’ for hundreds of millions of users every month.”
Oh! Okay!
Wait, what does that mean?
Don’t worry about it! Just nod your head.
What caught your eyes this week, droogies? Hit me.