The Gaming Rant 14

This is an unedited, uncensored version of a previously unpublished article originally written for another site, included here so that fans can read the uncensored versions.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.

Weekly Rants are banned. Like an angry pit bull terrier, I have been muzzled and chained, my freedom to viciously attack whoever I want repealed (Bob and I actually play golf together now; his Bugatti Veyron is awesome too). I hate my job. My boss is made of evuls. WHERE ARE MY BISCUITS?

So how do we do a weekly rant in a journalisticly acceptable way when my keyboard has the freedom of speech potency equivalent to a Blackberry in Dubai? First, we have to rant about things rather than people. Luckily, Killzone 2 Psychologist Cocaine Guy can probably be classified as a thing due to his sub-human observational capacity. Then we throw in a comment like, “but otherwise, he’s a top bloke and we love him to bits”. Future Publishing taught me everything I know (this is a lie; we love Future Publishing to bits).

The second thing we’re going to do is change the title from ‘Weekly’ to ‘Whenever’. This is because my TV-watching requirements are vastly more important than my desire to entertain you with cutting-edge prose.

Finally, we are not going to actually rant anymore. Instead, we are going to muse. This is the same as ranting, but with some anti-depressants thrown in, plus it sounds politically correct.

Let’s get serious for just a moment, though. The facts are that TSA is maturing, the industry is watching us more closely, so we have to try and be a bit professional. We haven’t set our sights too high though: our editorial policy is now to compare each article against the day’s headline story in the Daily Mail, and if our article contains less inaccuracies, prejudice and misleading statements, it’s good to go. Unfortunately, in an ironic double-lie, the Daily Mail also taught me everything I know, so maintaining journalistic integrity can be trying at times.

A word of thanks: I had an unbelievable amount of PSN mails from strangers and colleagues alike asking me where the Weekly Rant had gone and when it was coming back. I was going to come up with a triple lie (after all, the Conservative Party taught me everything I know), but the truth of the matter is I have actually been rather sick. In my head, not my body. I’m not proud of it, but Peter was kind enough to give me some time off. Changing ‘Weekly’ to ‘Whenever’ is really a contingency in case I get sick again. I shall soldier on and do my best. I really appreciate all the kind messages you all sent and it inspired me to continue, and I do mean that: thank you all very much. I’m also glad you all realise that when I slag you off, what I really mean is you’re top blokes and lasses and I love you to bits.

Now, moving onto business, I trust you all thought of me when Germany plastered England that weekend. Oh how I laughed. It was, of course, as predictable as a 2011 Call of Duty subscription, but there we go. It was a well-deserved defeat naturally. How much money did I make betting on Germany all those matches instead of England? Enough to get a rather tasty HTC Desire, which, if you are for some strange reason considering an iPhone 4, I can strongly recommend as a proper phone.

Move It

You can’t spell muse without Move. I reckon. You may remember I spent some months bashing everyone’s favourite vibrating wand earlier in the year. I declared many times I was totally uninterested in it and would likely never buy one. So it was a certain amount of looking suspiciously over my shoulder that I went to collect my pre-order when it arrived. “Too big” for the postbox said the note from the postman. Okay – is it too big to fit through my front door? No, it isn’t. Don’t make me walk for 7 minutes when you could make me walk for 0. There’s a reason gamers use motion controllers rather than actual motion.

So did it perform ‘the desired function’? It’s a toss up (see what I did there?) between the Move and the HTC. Dildroid certainly has comedy value, but it is somewhat reminiscent of the Apollo 13 mission: how do you fit a square plug into a round hole? Kids, I’m talking about USB-to-mini adapters *looks around* (pretty sure they had those in the 60s)

But I digress. I wrote 20 pages of stuff about the Move just now, but for those of you with real lives to attend to, I can sum it up in one sentence. It’s as I expected: a couple of decent games in a whole lot of dross. Who’s with me?

I should imagine anyone who isn’t interested in Move or EyeToy, sorry, Kinect, must be absolutely sick and tired of all the coverage by now. I know I am. What I want is for the press to inform me when there are some good Move games actually out with high scoring reviews, and in the meantime just please, PLEASE be quiet.

Scenes From Around The Web

1. PlayStation Hacking: Breaking News

Good news everybody. The PSJailbreak has now been officially ported to a ham and cheese sandwich, and here is a in-no-way fake video to prove it:

2. Gold PlayStation 3

For just a snip at £587.44 plus presumably an extortionate amount of shipping and insurance, you can now snag your very own gold PS3, phat, 40GB – so hopefully it comes with something lower than firmware 3.41, eh, eh? 😛

http://www.goldgenie.com/gold-playstaion-p-79.html

Check it out. For an even lower bargain price, you can get your existing PS3 or 360 gold-plated. Oh how the people who pre-ordered Gran Turismo 5 Signature Edition are going to regret that when they see what they could have had for only slightly less money instead.

3. Failure

I did a Google search on “PlayStation Move A&E admissions” but sadly nothing yet. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for you guys on this one. Thank God Sony didn’t put a hamster in the orb.

The Summer Drought

You knew I had to mention this. Anyone here remember when a drought used to refer to a water shortage? This year the studios have been paranoically obsessed with preventing us from playing any games whatsoever in the months of July and August. My goodness, we live on a rotating, erm, orb, which is tilted just enough to produce seasons, big deal – but it is exactly this irritating 22.5 degree tilt that I hold directly responsible for manipulating the behaviour of the studios.

Obviously, we need to come up with a plan. I get all my ideas from video games so I reckon I have some sensible solutions at hand already. We could move everyone underwater, or destroy the Sun. Covering the sky with an opaque black dome could work – no wait, we’ll use a massive projection of some kids pretending to be dogs, Kinect does need all the help it can get after all.

OR… we could actually vote with our wallets, buy more games in the summer and less in the winter to make a point. That is pretty tricky I realise when all you’ve got to choose from is a flight simulator, an inferior 50s clone of GTA IV and a shooter which looks like it’s streaming on YouTube (can you figure out all three?!), but I think we really need to do something about this. What did I have to play over the summer? Green Day Rock Band. And there is really only so much inane spouting of random political messages I can take in my video games. Just kidding – we love Green Day to bits.

Medal of Honor Tali-banned

First let me re-assure everyone that I strung colossalblue up with nipple tongs in a public dungeon and paraded him until he promised never to write a gag line like that again (he has no chest hair, it was really humiliating for both of us).

Now. Call of Duty yada yada same old same old. We’re on the same page right? Good. So, what was the one thing I was looking forward to in Spack Ops?

The ability to play the Taliban. Be the bad guy. Why? Am I a secret terrorist extremist with an IED in my cleavage? No, it’s because, and Daily Mail readers do take careful note here: It lets me do something I would never do in real life.

Jesus Christ. In Killzone 2 I killed thousands of Helghast. How do we know they weren’t the good guys and that we were victims of anti-Helghast propaganda? In EndWar I played the Russians, and let’s note that over half of the Europeans online also chose the Russians (amusingly, nearly all US players choose to play the US, so pathetically patriotic – can you tell they’ve been brainwashed by the media much?). And in SingStar, I played Devil’s advocate. Hell, I can call my EyePet Pope Benedict if I want, and God only knows what kind of game he’d be in (I’m thinking a blend of Dante’s Inferno and Milo). No, just kidding, we love Pope Benedict to bits. Sometimes he loves Milo to bits as well. And yet, I can’t play the Taliban in a war game set in Afghanistan? If that happened in a film, everyone would turn round and say, hang on a minute, aren’t we sort of missing one of the core elements of the war in Afghanistan here? Dismal EA, dismal.

1 million free TSA points and a smooth banhammer to the person who writes “FIRST!” before anyone else. Have a good weekend 🙂