The Gaming Rant 7

This is an unedited, uncensored re-print of an article originally posted on another site, included here so that fans can read the uncensored versions.

WARNING! This article is intended as a piece of satirical diatribe. Some readers may find the language and themes within extremely offensive.

Contains strong language and sexual references. This article is satire and does not reflect the views of TheSixthAxis or myself. It actually represents the views of Infinity Ward’s lawyers.

Strangely, I didn’t really feel like ranting this week. I think I’m all ranted out, but I’ll give it a go, just to humour you, like. I think I got burned out from all the iPad, DRM, OtherOS, consumer rights, abusive DLC, FirstPlay and ModNation Racers ranting I did the last few days. My nurse did warn me I should only skip my pills on Thursdays to make sure I could rant effectively ready for Friday, but did I listen?

April was supposed to be quiet

I had assured my girlfriend whore that things would calm down after God of War 3 and Just Cause 2, that there were only two compelling releases for me in April (Nier and FIFA 2010 World Cup) and that I would have more time to waste on MSN giving her meaningless and unfulfilling cybersex.

Yeah, right.

It all started one day when I logged into my bank account to see if I had enough money to pay for both food and my web server this month, only to find a 4-figure medical refund had been deposited from the lovely Norwegian government. That same day I opened my mail and found my first sick pay cheque – a sum of money so ridiculously large that you could buy a small Pacific island with it. I already have my own island though, so clearly a trip to GameStop was in order instead. I bolted to town immediately.

I picked up a few pre-owned games (it was so much money I couldn’t afford to buy them new): GTA IV, Saints Row 2, DiRT 2, Sacred 2, X-Men: Wolverine, Lord of The Rings Conquest and Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena. Then I thought out of the goodness of my heart I better write a review of Dead To Rights: Retribution for TSA, along the lines of “well, someone’s got to do it”, so I picked that up. I may have inadvertently pre-ordered Red Dead Redemption at the same time.

As I perused the store I was checking reviews on my normalPhone (who would’ve imagined that you didn’t need an iPhone to get a quality mobile web browsing experience eh?) and thinking, God what a cock I would look like if I was doing this on an iPantyliner right now. James May-style. I thanked the gods that iPads cost more than the £100,000 welfare subsidy I’d been given so that I couldn’t cave into the purchase. I will, of course, because I’m hopeless.

I rushed home and didn’t play any of them because FIFA obviously took priority (I epic failed to qualify Norway, of course, because I suck). But, before that, a top-up of my 3 regional PSN wallets was a necessity, naturally. I won’t bother listing all the purchases as it may make you want to stab me repeatedly in the face over the internets, suffice to say that I probably don’t ever need to buy a video game ever again. I will, of course, because I’m hopeless.

I’m trying really hard to find a way to rant about having acquired a lot of great games at no personal expense, but I’m failing. IT’S ANNOYING! There, I said it. Still, at least I didn’t buy the Stimulus Pack – I’m not made of money, sheesh! I will, of course, because I’m hopeless.

Which brings us conveniently to the first of several conundrums.

Conundrum 1: eBay PSN codes

Those motherf… When I moved to Norway I sold pretty much the entire contents of my house on eBay, however I still consider myself to be an eBay n00b. It continually amazes me that some people can buy stuff on eBay and they actually managed to get it delivered, that it matches the product description and actually works and isn’t damaged. How do you guys do that?!

I’m naturally suspicious of eBay. It is like a combination of Poundland prices and Iceland quality. I love how sellers are rated “A++++++++”. Why only 8 plusses? Why not 9? Or 15? The number of plusses is key to my purchasing decision you know. When a buyer rates with too many plusses, I think, it’s an insider deal. They’re banging each other, it must be a hoax.

ShopTo.net decided that my Norwegian credit card had to be registered for 30 days before they would deliver instant UK PSN codes to me, and the other online stores seemed overpriced, so with great reticence I resorted to trying to find a code on eBay.

Don’t do this. Ever.

I was lucky. It only cost me a pound. Though saying that I could’ve bought 1/30^th of a pizza with that money in Norway. Damn those bastards.

So I get my code. Which is actually not a PSN code, it’s a promo code for some web site that you enter to get a discount to buy some other code that you enter into another web site to get a PSN code. Or something like that. However you cut it, it was bollocks. Ultimately, not only did the store in question only send codes in the postal mail, but they would also only send them to the UK, and the eBay promo code didn’t work anyway without a minimum purchase of £60. I felt betrayed by mankind.

Just as a final kick in the teeth to my misguided use of a full one hundred British pennies, the very next day somebody sent me the very same code in a PSN mail. Cheers for that.

Conundrum 2: Disk space

I have an original 40GB PS3 which I promptly upgraded to 250GB shortly after purchase when I realised that 40GB really means 36GB minus firmware updates minus game installs minus downloaded trailers minus downloaded demos minus patches. Minus 10GB for Linux – but, let’s not talk about that *crushes her ceramic coffee cup in her hand* Whoops, where was I.

When I upgraded, I had one PSN game: Echochrome. I backed up, restored, and lo and behold the game crashed with an error and I had to re-download it. It still gives a weird error but it loads and plays ok now. Today I have, oh I don’t know, a billion PSN downloads, say, just as an approximation. It has reached a point where I deleted all trailers, music, demos, Qore and FirstPlay episodes, game data for games I traded in and now can’t install anything unless I delete game data for games I’m still actually playing. This is bad. The fact the SingStar beta uses 23GB doesn’t help.

I’ll admit, I was naïve. When I got the machine I thought, what on Earth does anyone need 40GB in a console for? And sure, 2 USB ports? Well who needs 4 anyway? Glory days my friends. Little did I know that PS3 games load like old ZX Spectrum tape games the first time you run them. Who knew that in the days of 50GB Bluray disks that you would for some bizarre reason have to install the game? Why did I stop playing PC games again? Oh yes, that’s right, it’s because I didn’t want to faff around setting them up.

I remember not-so-fondly the day I carried my bloody heavy as f*ck PS3 home from the post office. A 10 minute walk took me 45 minutes and a hernia that day. It was the GT5 Prologue bundle. I slammed that sucker into the Bluray drive and proceeded to wait over an hour as it installed 6GB of data then downloaded a series of patches so enormous that it made a Windows Vista install feel as fast and satisfying as a teenage boy jerking off. Satisfying for the boy I mean, not me. Jesus you people, control yourselves.

So, what’s a geek girl to do? The obvious answer lay in the form of a 640GB drive on Amazon. Unfortunately, I have nothing large enough to back up on that also has a USB cable coming out of it, and well, do I really want to download 250GB of games, patches, add-ons, themes, demos, 400 SingStar songs and all the other gunk on 3 accounts all over again? Do I? Really? Thought not.

So I’m struggling on, regularly beating down unnecessarily used disk space like a Turkish wife-beater. Except for that 10GB I used for Linux of course, which can’t be recovered without reformatting – but, let’s not talk about that *stubs her cigarette out in the eye of a random passer by*

Conundrum 3: What is the iPad actually for?

I alluded earlier to the imaginary twat-like appearance that would arise were I found sitting on the floor in GameStop using an iPad. In reality, I have purple and orange hair so I look like a twat anyway, but this is besides the point. A silver iPad wouldn’t help, I’m pretty sure of that. Especially if I put it in my underwear (as I have become accustomed to doing with pads) and waddled around like Donald Duck with a severe case of constipation going “Quaaack!”.

The iPad hype is really getting on my tits. Not literally, fortunately, or I’d have to burn them off without anesthetic as part of a soul-cleansing ritual. Partly it’s getting on my tits because like all gadget freaks, I want one. Moreso, it’s getting on my tits because the world now thinks Apple is God’s gift to tablet PCs. Next they’ll tell us their company is named after the fact that it was actually Steve Jobs who discovered gravity, then improved it to make it more convenient and a better user experience (the iFall).

Do you feel tired in the mornings? Don’t worry – there’s an app for that.

Do you have problems getting laid? Well, there’s an app for that too. I always thought it was the bogs behind the train station, but apparently I was mistaken.

I have some questions though. Is there an app that lets me run Flash applets? I believe there was, it was called Adobe Creative Suite 5, and Apple banned it due to fear of sub-standard applications. Well, if you want to talk about sub-standard Steve-o, let’s talk about an $800 slate that doesn’t multi-task, can’t take photos and has no USB ports. There’s really only one reason to own an iPad: compensation for having an exceedingly small nob. I’m excluding nofi of course, his nob is huge obviously – trust me, I of all people should know – and just has one to be smug. You could do with cleaning it a bit more often though nofi or it gets nasty flecks on it. The iPad I mean. Obviously.

“But it looks so cool!” – yeah, so does clamydia, on paper. It has no symptoms except making me infertile. A win-win situation surely. Still don’t think I’d want to acquire it though.

Also, the tablet PC I have now has this futuristic thing called buttons. Which turn out to be pretty important.

Overall, I think The Sun summed it up best (perhaps the first time they have ever summed up anything accurately) in this classic commercial:

FirstPlay: Epilogue

After receiving an almost unanimous bashing from the readers of this esteemed organ for my derisory 5/10 rating of FirstPlay, I did as promised give it a fair chance. I’ve now seen 7 episodes. What do I think of it?

*Yawn*

Yes, it’s good for casual gamers who won’t spend 99p on something they know nothing about anyway and probably don’t check the store often. Yes, it’s good to sit and watch it on the sofa as you wait an hour for it to download and wonder why you’re using 2.5% of your disk space for the pleasure when it would have been much more plausible as a streaming service. Yes, it’s wonderful to pay for ads. I certainly have had a huge amount of enjoyment watching ads for Final Fantasy XIII, Just Cause 2 and Sky for 7 weeks in a row. Final Fantasy XIII is coming in March by the way, just in case you missed it – not long to wait now!

So, everything is peachy for casual gamers then. But what about the more hobbyist-oriented souls among us?

Well, I’m pleased to report that as of now the content is bang up-to date. There is tons of exclusive footage, no repetition and the featured downloads are updated regularly. Luckily the issues with the FIFA goals only using up 25% of the screen so you can’t actually see the ball, and similar problems with PSP reviews have been fixed, and the presenter has been changed to one without an annoying voice. Also the script-writing has improved dramatically. So as we can see, Future has taken all the user feedback on-board and made sweeping changes where needed.

Sorry, wait. Scratch that last paragraph, I was thinking of GameSpot. FirstPlay is still a space-guzzling abyss of mediocrity. Which at least makes it marginally better than Edge – although to be fair Edge does have an excellent pen touch interface built-in. I’m looking forward to FirstPlay’s relaunch as FirstPr0n, because let’s face it, only porn can save it now. Hence, Lucy Porter should be visible on-screen at all times.

Marc Whitten – Natal Supports Your (Football) Team

Whichever one that is. Well thank goodness for that, the world is saved.

For those of you who missed it, Microsoft VP of Genius Unfounded Speculation – Marc Whitten – announced that Natal can now sit on your sofa, analyse your t-shirt and know from that which football team you support.

Awesomesauce. Or maybe, just maybe, he’s talking bollocks. As you know I do love a good session of mocking the PlayStation Move, but I will have even less compunction in slamming down baseless claims about a piece of vapourware coming out for an unfinished product. So I’m sitting watching porn from my amazing lesbian porn server, wearing my customary white nurse’s uniform. In the voice of Stephen Hawking, Natal informs me that I’m watching a Plymouth Argyle away match and that the pitch condition is poor, with a lot of sand cover and mud in patches. I try to turn it off but it has become a sentient being hooked up to SkyNet. It jeers at me knowing full well that if I had bought a Move I could’ve used it as an integral part of my educational viewing.

Yes, Natal team support: just what I always wanted.

Enjoy your weekend my chickens; if you don’t hear from me again, it’s because by the time you read this the Conservatives have won and I’ve hung myself with piano wire.