A Weekly Rant: 11/06/10

Contains strong language and sexual references. This article is satire and does not reflect the views of TheSixthAxis or myself.

If I’m honest, apart from my nurse kindly asking me to remove her from being set as my mum on Facebook, nothing really stands out as getting on my tits this week. Sure, my wisdom tooth is still being a bitch, but finishing Prince of Persia was like pulling teeth so it kind of balanced itself out. Hot girls I can’t shag are still cruising around in their bikinis on the street, and the reflective glare of the Sun’s rays bouncing off their perfectly formed breasts and into my living room is still rendering my extraordinarily expensive TV completely useless for playing video games during daylight hours. Which is becoming a bit of a problem, because it never really gets dark at the moment in Norway.

Lesbians are still chatting me up on Facebook, and they still fall into the same tedious categories: ugly, psychopathic, sporty, on the other side of the planet or in a relationship. Usually all five. Not a single Scandinavian woman has answered my plea for attenshunz. Oh well, my PS3 loves me and he’ll never leave me *glances nervously over to check it didn’t YLoD as I said that*

My friends are all still broke and never want to go clubbing or even for dinner. My office is still as hot as Cameron from House being dipped in an acid cauldron and then dowsed off with boiling water. My ability to acquire new games is still based on short selling Credit Default Swaps.

Yes, all in all it’s a pretty standard summer, with one exception: Federer got knocked out of a grand slam. Oh how I laughed.

DJ Hero 2

Sub-ordinate 1: *pointing at map of Germany on the table* “Hip-hop and rap DJs are appearing on PlayStations in several locations. We have tried to make an advance of trance and house music but Activision are blocking us. At the current rate we estimate that no teenager will have heard of trance music by 2011.”

Me: *waving finger in the air* “Not a problem, DJ Hero 2 will fix that.”

*long pause*

Sub-ordinate 1: *sweating* “Mein Führer… DJ Hero 2…”

Sub-ordinate 2: “DJ Hero 2 will feature Metallica, Rihanna, Dr. Dre, The Chemical Brothers and the sultry sounds of Lady Gaga. There is no trance music.”

Me: *takes off glasses, my hand shaking* “All of you who do not owned Clubland Smashed, please leave the room.”

WHAT THE F*CK! In January Bob Kotick specifically came out and said, and I directly misquote: “We made a mistake with DJ Hero …. the next instalment will be more Europe-centric.” Of course, rather than hiring actual Europeans with cultural knowledge to help them with that, they just left it to their bunch of retarded American in-bred cousins to do the research, and we all know how good Americans are with European culture.

“Ow I love Europe!”

“Really, so what do you know about it?”

Yeah, fuck all, that’s what I thought.

“Ow I really want to go to Europe!”

“Really, which part? There are 39 countries in Europe last I checked”

Yeah, you really have no effing idea as long as you’re on the continent. Go to Belarus – our last remaining dictatorship – that’s in Europe, let us know if you still love it then. Or if you’re from Alabama, come to Norway and let us know your views on homosexuality, see how well that goes down (it’s safe to say that because Alabama only has dial-up internet at the moment). Actually don’t, I don’t want your fat ugly ass spoiling the view from my balcony when you’re standing at the other end of town. Next you’re going to tell us English people have bad teeth and that you loved the latest episode of Fawlty Towers in a vain attempt to be socially relevant.

So with such a geographically competence-challenged population, it’s not really any wonder that Activision thought I would appreciate Metallica. I mean, they already have it licensed so it’s cheap, right? Because I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to a nightclub with the guys at Whatstheirface Studio who developed DJ Hero, the first thing we always do is look at each other while the beats are pounding and say, “Hey, you know what would liven things up a bit? A nice bit of Metallica.” The funny thing is, they are never actually playing Metallica when we arrive. I wonder if there’s a reason for that? Perhaps Europeans, say, don’t want to f*cking listen to Metallica when they’re expecting to hear dance music.

You useless bunch of c*cks. Oh and BTW, thanks for not bothering to put the free DJ Hero 2 mix on the European PSN store yesterday. Assholes.

PSN Maintenance Timing

Speaking of blazé ineptitude, whose bright idea was it to take the PSN down for 12 hours on exactly the same day it was updated with a ton of new stuff? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve checked your calendars lately Sony, but there are 7 days in the week. Maybe 5 in yours because you’re lazy sods, but that still leaves – I think – 4 days where you can do an update that won’t interfere with my impulse-buying addiction. I got the shakes on Wednesday when I couldn’t log on to buy pointless crap I don’t want or need. What were you thinking?

SCE really are the masters of timing aren’t they? So we’re bringing out God of War 3 on 16^th March, let’s be sure to engineer a massive world-wide stock shortage to hit the same week.

Christmas is coming! Make sure the factories are closed by November.

Microsoft cut the price of the 360 two years ago and got a huge market share lead. Maybe we should cut the price of ours soon?

Apple just came out with the iPhone 3GS! Let’s release a portable device with no touch screen that also can’t make phone calls, but costs disproportionately more and has far less applications, which also cost more. Just to throw in some further insults, let’s make sure it only supports wireless b and not g, won’t work with WPA2-PSK and doesn’t have predictive texting. The PSPgo does have some things in common with the iPad though: no USB ports, no camera and no Flash support; so it’s not all bad news.

Then they cut off PSN on the same day that IGN’s highest ever rated PSN game is released (Joe Danger). Seriously, you’d think Sony wants to lose money sometimes.

Please release some rubbish games

The summer dry spell. Orly? Yes, June is a dry spell alright: with only Soldner-X 2, Joe Danger, SBK X, Green Day Rock Band, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Naughty Bear, Singularity, Demon’s Souls and Transformers: Cybertron and probably Quantum Theory shortly afterwards to tide us over, how on Earth are we going to manage?!

Now I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t got round to Super Stardust HD yet, which got me thinking. The game studios must surely be losing money by not developing more slowly and staggering the releases, and I’m sure I’m not the only one getting frustrated with the sheer volume of high quality games being released in the last year or so. When there are more blockbuster games being released than blockbuster movies, you know we’ve got a problem. The solution, of course, is to adopt the movie industry’s approach: produce more shit.

If we can’t slow down these developers, we need to tweak them to produce worse games instead. That way, we won’t have to spend so much money, and we’ll have more time to play the good titles. On top of that, the studios producing the slop will go bankrupt and we’ll prune down the number of people working on new titles as a bonus. And I just happen to have some ideas!

Modern Warfare 3: it will be set in 14^th century Italy and you will control a guy called Ezio. There will be no guns, only fists and sword play. That should hopefully kill this stupid franchise dead once and for all.

Damnation 2: get all of Infinity Ward, sorry, I meant Respawn of course, working on it. There is no need to inform them that it needs to be as bad as possible; with half of the IP missing they don’t have a hope in hell of making it any good anyway; a self-solving problem.

DJ Hero 2: for this we just need to pick some incredibly inappropriate artists for the game. I’m thinking Dr. Dre, The Chemical Brothers, Rihanna, the sultry sounds of Lady Gaga and ooh, of course.. Metallica! …. *person puts a note on my desk which I read* … *looks up* You are joking, right? … Oh.

Girl-pulling Skillz: I Haz Dem

Hm, perhaps I’ve been reading too much “Please May I Have A Cheeseburger Dot Com?” lately. But anyway, at the risk of turning my weekly rant into a personal blog, those of you who were amused by my weak escapades in GameStop and Platekompaniet the other week will deeply relish the personal hell I suffered through today. I have thinly veiled it below as in some way being vaguely relevant to video games, but really it isn’t.

We are of course talking about the girl behind the counter in Kiwi (a Norwegian grocery store chain). Who else? This girl has teased me with her cute smiles, grins and giggles ever since the innocuous little words “you’re pretty, by the way” may have inadvertently slipped out of my mouth as I was walking off with my shopping 2 months ago.

Ever since that day, going into that shop has been like playing Far Cry 2. First, reconnaissance. Patrol the area. Determine if she is on the counter while retaining the maximum possible distance from the store entrance. If so, enter Bioshock mode: turn your head in the other direction and pretend to scratch your ear when entering to avoid detection – this is like avoiding the video cameras in Rapture. I have tried hacking them before to disable them but I got arrested, so I had to knock that on the head.

I tend not to use the Uncharted 2 cover system while I’m in the grocery store because it can lead to some funny looks, especially when you vault over cover from one aisle to the next, shopping cart in tow. Who said video games affected my behaviour eh? So instead, I take the Modern Warfare 2 approach: go prone and crawl to the counter.

Today though, I didn’t have my game head on, and broke all ranks. Instead, I chatted her up with five people behind me in the queue and a bunch of people to my side, which she seemed to take well. Like all good stalkers who use video games for their training, I stood in the longer queue so I was served by the girl in question (also called “the currently selected target”, she was highlighted in pretty on my HUD, and trust me, if I had an “objective marker” it would have been pointing straight at her; as it happened I only had an extremely small spray can). I went home kicking myself as usual.

And then something different happened. An unexpected plot twist. I said, you know what? F*ck it.

So I put my boots back on and walked back to the store – I returned to the last checkpoint to retry a failed mission. Unfortunately the target had levelled up to her lunch break and I had to engage in a side quest of asking the manager for “the girl who was on the counter an hour ago”. This went down about as well as giving a dozen roses to the Helghast, so before I got mowed down with an incendiary device I meleed my way the hell out of there and looted a coffee and some cigarettes from some NPC shopkeepers to regen my stamina. The target’s lunch break was 45 minutes and let me tell you, those minutes in the park and the coffee house passed like days. It was at this point when I wished real life took as long to load each area as ModNation Racers, but unfortunately real life has been designed with background streaming, an idea blatantly stolen from Asheron’s Call. I sat re-assigning my gadgets (cellphone and PSPgo), thinking the mission was perhaps too high level for me, but after the regen and freshly buffed from coffee, I went back and re-acquired the target.

The boss fight was, to be honest, much easier than anticipated, all I had to do was hand her a low-level Slightly Chewed Pen, then endure four hours of Alpha Protocol-style SMS dialogue to which there are no right or wrong answers, only reputation points and three choices of answer: Suave, Professional or Cocky. Fortunately I worked up my reputation enough to unlock a higher level mission – coffee at about the time this will be published on some web site the name of which I’ve temporarily forgotten.

Wish me luck. It’s been four years since I unlocked a quest of this difficulty level. And no, I do not want to form a pick-up group with you to help me complete it. This one I’m doing solo.

Visit www.totalmusicgaming.com for SingStar, Lips, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and Karaoke Revolution social networking and contests. Thanks to TSA for their support! – Katy