Skylanders: Swap Force

Three years after its initial iteration, Skylanders shows no sign of slowing down, cannabilizing entire store aisles with cartoon bits of plastic and innovation. The first real adaptation of NFC technology in video games has been a wild success, nailing a vulnerable target market (children) with consumer capitalist dream toys: little devices that a video game requires in order to function. A game that takes all of the best elements of grindy lootfests aimed at older players and combines them with a compulsive and coherent marketing structure doesn’t merely suggest purchasing as many toys as you can but demands that you acquire them or face a drop in euphoric hormones.  

There are 80 Skylanders characters now, 10 each categorized across eight basic elements. Swap Force, the latest iteration, adds in an additional eight movement types spread across its unique mix/match figures while Giants, the previous iteration, had 8 larger than normal figures required for play. In optimal configuration, players only need about eight figures (one of each element, or in the case of Swap Force, one of each element and one of each movement type. These two requirements do coincide, a small mercy) in order to unlock every area in each game and collect all the secrets. This optimization is obscured, however, by both the game’s target market (5-12 year old boys) and features in the game itself. Throughout the game world you’ll find “soul gems” that unlock new powers and feature a promotional video for skylanders you don’t have. They’re toy commercials dolled up as super-secret rewards. On top of that there’s an extensive collection screen that encourages you to seek out and complete the full collection of little dudes with little fluff details and links to the in-game advertisements.  Even the mechanics of the game encourage you to collect more. Beyond the gates that bar entry to all but specific kinds of skylanders, the number of available lives you have for a certain level is hard limited by the number of skylanders you have. The more skylanders, the more lives you have to play with.

It’s brilliant, from top to bottom, and the game would be so easy to condemn if not for the fact that it’s well made and well designed. Attacks have an appropriate amount of friction, enemies are smartly varied, the level design is engaging. All told this game plays as a thoughtful Diablo variant for children.

But that’s just a physical description of the game. If you’re wondering if it’s worth picking up, wonder no more. A bunch of outlets have given Swap Force (the most recent iteration) perfect scores. The game is indubitably fun. What’s more interesting is the questions that the game itself and its runaway success bring up. Why do we sell these things to children? What is it about kids that make marketing a consumerist wet dream to them so much more lucrative than selling to adults? A cynic might suggest that adults are too jaded for this kind of thing to work on them, that kids with their inherently more trusting nature are more likely to buy bald marketing pushes such as these. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer, as I’ve watched plenty of adults buy and collect plenty of stupid things in my life. I think it has more to do with what we consider childish in America. Collecting things just for the sake of collecting things has simply never been in the stable of sane activities for mature adults to do. Instead we describe adult collecting as a somewhat strange and shameful hobby, to be kept secret and gently mocked when it sees the light of day. At the extreme we consider it a form of hoarding and we put these folks on trial on television, a warning to the rest of us to become anxious about our personal lives. This attitude is slowly and somewhat changing, though. We’re learning to understand and appreciate the collection impulse through things like mobile games, which feature more and more “get this thing to complete your virtual collection” hooks. Maybe in the future there’ll be a more adult oriented form of skylanders, with sexy women and hooded, goateed bald dudes. Or ideally games will have gotten over that impulse too and truly become something transcendent and imaginative. A game with an NFC pass-along mechanic, say, where you send one object from person to person to accrue social power, each person leaving a small stamp on the figure in game terms. A game that works in conjunction with a 3d printer to, rather than put a physical object in the game, uses the game to produce a physical object. Lots of interesting places for this tech to go.

One thing would be missing in a more adult oriented version of skylanders: sheer whimsy. The game is silly as all get out, from the ultra-serious announcement of silly enemy characters (“Grumblebum Blunderbuss”) to the goofy hat options to the characters quipping lines throughout play. It’s cutesy and mostly charming, at least until the cutscenes. The plot of Swap Force is utterly ridiculous and ridiculous in the worst “talking down to children” sort of way, featuring “evilizer” devices powered by solidified evil and cartoony, unbelievable villains. The only saving grace is Patrick Warburton doing his Kronk voice as a self-important airship pilot. The game is aggressively kid oriented, even to the point of rendering its powerups as a variety of foods that kids would find appealing, hot dogs, hamburgers, even a Kid Cuisine tv dinner. Marketing for the game is tailored to the inevitable adult purchasing the $75(!) starter set, extolling it’s value and virtues as unequivocally providing a fun experience to children that provides some sort of nebulous real-world benefit.

It’s gross, really. Reading marketers selling kid stuff always gives me the heebie jeebies. These children aren’t old enough to work or drive or technically sign the 63 page EULA(!) that innocuously appears under a button push on the title screen (the EULA of course states that by playing the game and not returning it to the store immediately, you agree to these terms. Contract lawyers are the devil) yet here we are, marketers playing on unexamined personal wants to inspire them to pester their parents into buy the stuff. I’m never sympathetic to the argument that parents should just be the dividing line between advertisers and their children because these advertisers are well aware that they’re creating conflict within a family, palpable interpersonal drama that can be resolved (if only for the moment) by purchasing a thing. It’s bald emotional manipulation and It’s gross. It’s such a dishonest way to make money.

I was asked to write this

A long time ago in the hoary old ages of time when I still shaved regularly and wore even stranger outfits and personally communicated with as few people as I could get away with (colloquially known as “the years I had to move my mid-tower from room to room searching for a wifi signal I could airsnort into”) I got involved in local politics. Mostly I did it out of some residual respect I had for Michael Moore’s blue collar liberalism and a desire to follow through on Moore’s suggestion that every individual should try to get on every ballot they’re eligible for. I still don’t think this is a terrible idea, if only to drive home the weight of the forces guarding that particular gate for those without means. The first campaign kickoff party I ever went to was a by-donation affair ($30), and I agreed at the door to spend some time canvassing for the candidate: a man whose name I can’t remember (Jeff something) but who looked remarkably like Mark Hamill and had a phone number that was super easy to remember (4, followed by 4 fives, followed by a 7 for the total amount of numbers, followed by a fifth five).

This was my whirlwind introduction to (local) politics, a hugely thankless affair where the minimal amount of work I had to do was to hand out cutesy brochures shaped like a cowboy hat (Jeff, the white hat, opponent, the evil greenbelt violating black hat) still lead a ton of people (who had previously agreed for me to visit, apparently) to believe I was there to sell them something or talk about Jesus.

Last week I went to the most recent campaign kickoff I’ve been to and I managed this time to duck both financial and canvassing obligations. Ernest “eddy-baby Freddy” Charbonnet held a pretty ritzy-doo high class affair at the top of the Basin Street Station, a sort of quasi-museum/office building/meeting space at the foot of the particular I-10 overpass exit that gets you to the French Quarter. The party was on the fourth floor overlooking a ton of landmarks, from the Mahalia Jackson Theater to the police station to one of the cemeteries to the old Iberville projects (the new projects down Orleans are obscured by the one windowless facing). The banquet room was marvelous and understated and ultimately a bit small, the six-odd indoor tables occupied by the time I arrived (punctually). There’s some really marvy skylights and an interesting series of paintings with a silhouetted black woman wearing dresses inspired by various famous paintings (mostly van gogh). The open bar was friendly, if a little oddly stocked, and they poured to rival a christmas party. Asking for mixer was a formality, just a willful attempt at deceiving your true beverage from yourself.

I biked to this event wearing black jeans and a Zephyr’s t-shirt along with sandals and my ratty old Goorin bros’ sorta army hat with some serious holes in the brim fabric. Most of my tattoos are covered, anyway. Still have glittery red and silver polish and three fingers of black and the yellow I impulsively put on half of two of my toenails, though. As usual I have no idea if anyone notices, but I’m by far the most casually dressed person there. At some point a few young-ish couples (relatives of other attendees, as far as I gleaned) come in with the guys wearing the bare minimum of a button-up and slacks, but I’m the only t-shirted individual. One guy did have a blazer and what appeared to be a track suit underneath. Professor Chervenak, inexplicably oft-interviewed political science professor at UNO, was wearing exactly the same thing he does every day thereby meeting the obligate monowear standards of professorhood (it’s in their tenure agreements). I had a lot of time to reflect on this and decide whether or not to be embarrassed. By the second drink I decided to simply be serene.

As far as substance, I don’t remember much. I came to this kickoff largely because I still follow a candidate from a previous race who is still heavily involved despite having lost his bid. Oddly enough, he actually remembered my name, despite my only personal interaction with him being a somewhat rude question about his age shouted in a crowded hall. I blame facebook, but I’m at least in part frightened by the prospect of anyone of any importance remembering who I am. It’s jarring, even though it’s something I’ve been interested in for quite some time. Funny enough, Eric Strachan ended up being the only person who knew even remotely who I was (it didn’t help that I botched the nametag) with the man of the hour Eddy Charbonnet very much not paying any attention to me. Which I must emphasize is totally fine, since I was still variegating on whether or not to be embarrassed and by the time I chose to be serene I was wholly uninterested in further human interaction. The point here is that this is all filtered through my head because it was a fairly alienating interaction that I had to stare at through my skull instead of getting lost in interpersonality.

I did spend a little bit of time chatting with a wife of a lawyerly looking guy and some time apologizing to Ed Chernevak for doing so badly in his course, but that was pretty much it. I couldn’t convince anyone else to come and I didn’t have any real strong ties to anyone involved in the campaign. A campaign which, if the short series of speeches was any indication, has about as much substance as my presence did. Strachan got on stage to look a little like a short Aaron Sorkin displaying his endorsement and introducing further endorsements from people I don’t know. Charbonnet got on stage to announce some really broad statements about his belief in the strength of city council as a balance to the executive office, some kind of statement about the two consent decrees concerning OPP and NOPD, and a very clear and strong statement that he’s not running against Stacy Head (who Strachan was the head of legislation for) but for the other at-large seat up for grabs on the council. He then introduced his kids and wife and got off the stage. I don’t want to say the speech lacked substance. Nothing really lacks substance, especially not the appearance of a lack of substance. What the speech did do was tell me very very little about why I should support Charbonnet. He passably hit a few popular beats he knew the crowd would react to and then got off stage. It’s a shame.

Platforms are contentious at best in politics and most major parties specifically write platforms that can be reinterpreted in some way (except of course the green party, which actually has some gonads) because nothing in politics is more dangerous than making a strong political statement. It’s even worse in local politics when nearly all of the players are dependent on a network of already existing players and a system of basic agreements with one another that there’s a certain way things are going to be done. Without Gary Landrieu’s hulking figure stalking about parties and crushing hands how can you expect to get the attention of the rest of the moneyed elite? Ideas are for idealists, the game is already locked up, etc etc. Louisiana is rife with this stuff. We practically revel in how corrupt our system is and our politicians are. It makes for books and great “character.”

It’s not really that democracy is a sham or anything. The system still works and even still produces upsets from time to time. The problem is that the people who’re most heavily invested in that democracy are simultaneously the least interested in it, which is why a person can start a campaign without a single platform or promise, just a party and a plea for yard signage. It’s going through the motions in case anyone is looking real hard but recognizing that the majority of your support is going to be won through back room deals and premeditated political alliances rather than strong popular support of an opinionated stance. That’s why everyone at a free party is in a suit, and why I’m not.

I’m not going to make some conceit about how I remember Huey Long and how awesome he was. That was some 80 years ago and I certainly wasn’t alive then. I will say this, though: for every memory that people in New Orleans have of a corrupt and inefficient government of foppish old-money lawyers and politicians, there’s a memory of a time when Louisiana was the bluest of the blue states, a haven for all the poor southerners and a beacon of public infrastructure in the south. We live in the highest tech city environment since Venice, why do we put up with cracked and broken roads and shoddy streetlight coverage? Why do we let our politicians spend millions on a streetcar line that travels less than a mile from a glut of hotels to the superdome? Why do we sit idly by while our noble leaders pretend to have moral convictions as the city crumbles around us?

We’re New Orleanais; we don’t have to put up with this shabby crap. If we can organize a fucking daiquiri festival because we’re frightened by a few provisos, we can run and elect a few candidates that don’t fucking suck.

Porn Review Special Report: Various Paraphilia

When I first decided to do these reviews, I only had one particular work in mind for a review. That work is the Unending Breast Expansion Add-venture, a collaborative choose-your-own-adventure style interactive erotic fiction document (whew) that debuted in 1998 as a paraphilia-themed version of other popular collaborative fiction projects. As the name would indicate, the primary paraphilia on display was breast expansion, which we covered in the last report. This is by far not the only paraphilia contained in the beaddventure, and I felt it would be disingenuous to introduce the work without a broader picture of some of the paraphilia at play.
  
(Trigger warning: Some transphobia, pathologization, what could be considered a form of bestiality, pervasive objectification of women)

How to do Things with Video Games review

A few weeks back I read and reviewed a book by Dylan Holmes called “A Mind Forever Voyaging,” which billed itself as a history of narrative storytelling in video games. The book has a particular political bent, which is legitimizing the study and cultural importance of video games as a whole. Ian Bogost here in his book “How to do Things with Video Games” has the same political bent, but the difference in tact is night and day. Where Holmes is cloying and earnest, Bogost is meticulous and lofty. Where Holmes relies on personal parables Bogost relies on the work of his own studio to make points.

It’s an unfair comparison, really. Holmes is a few years younger than I am and has barely established himself as a blogger in some extremely interesting but still relatively obscure websites. Bogost, on the other hand, is a forty something professor of media studies who also founded a reasonably successful games company and has written several books before this one. I remember reading his writing seven and eight years ago in fairly mainstream gaming blogs and I’ve played a number of his games. Bogost, in many respects, is where Holmes wants to be. In this political movement, however, it’s a comparison that’s gonna get made.

Bogost’s book is part of a series called “Electronic Mediations,” which is a typically self-serving series of academic liberal arts books designed to explore the appreciation and usage of the digital in a discursive cultural context, essentially the sort of legitimacy that Holmes is looking for.

But that’s academia, not the real world. In the real world we’re on the cusp of yet another console generation, $500 machines designed to take what a game is and make them yet bigger and yet better in a march of technological innovation. At the same time we’re watching a medium on the cusp of breaking free from its antiquated industry and reach a broader audience on more platforms than ever before. New models of payment have proven wildly successful and new forms of funding doubly so. Change is in the air, but it’s not quite clear what that change is as 2006’s console war starts anew with a fresh crop of corporate devotees eager to defend the honour of their favorite computer and its associated iconography and handful of exclusive titles.

Cynicism aside, Bogost’s book is actually very refreshing in its approach. The book is divided into chapters based on an answer to the question “what can video games be,” ultimately building an argument not for simple cultural consideration, but for creativity, making the final point that games will achieve the sort of social status they’ve recently been yearning for once they find themselves encompassing a breadth of human expression rather than simply as entertainment products or “timewasters.” He describes examples of each expression, from pranks to drills to relaxation, and advocates for new and more varied ways games can be used in those categories. One of the strongest arguments he makes is that the inevitable taming of gaming’s wilderness, the appreciation of gaming as a medium and not a particular entertainment vehicle, will inevitably lead to the destruction of the “gamer.” Once we reach the point that the average person has some modicum of gaming literacy under their belt and games are used in a variety of contexts for a variety of purposes, the notion of “gamer” will lose its relevance. All people will know how to game, so all people will be gamers.

This idea isn’t new. It’s actually along the lines of what Bogost and a few others have been writing for years. This idea is, however, novel. The games industry as it exists today is very much focused on one thing: making a ton of money for everyone involved. They do that of course by creating focus-tested entertainment products that have a massive overhead and ergo can’t risk innovation or creative expression beyond those expressions that are at least fairly likely to make money. The traditional concept of the industry is in a bad way. Over the last console generation development costs for an average run of the mill game ballooned from 5 million to twenty million plus, meaning that even a few flops can seriously damage the financial standing of a mid-size publisher. And damage it has with the last 5 years party to more layoffs and studio closings or mergers than any time since the video game crash of the 1980s. Part of it has to do with a decrease in consumer spending (and ultimately the long decline in consumer spending power brought about by stagnant wages) and another part has to do with the rise and proliferation of mobile gaming, introducing a platform that traditional publishers were slow to embrace or understand and largely unlimited by the old deals that industry leaders have bargained amongst each other to cut newer publishers out of the big three consoles.

Anyway I’m rambling and my point is this: publishers are shit fucks at taking risks and they have a lot of good reasons for it. Where else can we go? Why, the indie market, of course! Indie games have had a number of shots to the arm in the same timeframe that old-money has had a number of shots to the gut. Stuff like humble indie bundles, the runaway success of Minecraft, Kickstarter, the proliferation of digital storefronts like Steam and Green Man Gaming et al, and most importantly a general sense of disgust, of fed-up-ness with the traditional models. So the Indie world is thriving, with more and more kickstarters for alt-consoles with open platforms and hippy philosophies.

Problem is that many (though definitely not all) of the games that are coming out of this movement bear no small resemblance to the typified entertainment product model of gaming. Games are new and interesting twists on 2d platforming or music games or shooters or 3d brawlers or whathaveyou, but they’re (frequently) not trying to say anything new in gaming. It’s a morose situation, especially when compared to the versatility of other media. In writing, for example, a person can write an instruction manual or a love letter or a novel or a doctoral thesis or a letter to the editor or a news article or a review or a stream of consciousness expression of the internal mental states of anxiety or so on. Games are just as capable of that kind of breadth but historical industrial constructions and the social understanding of games are holding them back from this.

Or so Bogost’s argument goes.

Porn Review Special Report: Breast Expansion

One of the operating assumptions of this series and of erotic materials in general is that the female body is sex. The form of a woman is designed to entice, the function of a woman is to arouse and ultimately climax the other party, male or female. Breast expansion as a paraphilia is an expression of this idea in terms of breast paraphilia. Since boobs are one of the most popularly sexualized body parts in modern western society, it should come as little surprise that the modification (specifically here the growth of breasts. Breast shrinkage or deflation is a separate and much less common paraphilia) of those parts is one of the most popular paraphilia.

Breast expansion is exactly what it sounds like, the expansion of breasts on women. This is sometimes presented in a “before and after” fashion, sometimes depicted as it happens, and occasionally is applied as a label to characters depicted with larger breasts than is canonically known. For this special report I’ve selected two comics and a handful of related gifs to discuss the impact and creation of this paraphilia, as well as elements of the community formed around it.

Surprisingly, I am not an expert in sexuality, so take what I say with whatever grains of salt you wish. I’m more of an expert in the construction of online cultures than a person who has performed significant research into the areas of human sexuality. What I’m here to do, however, Is present and critique a handful of viewpoints and use my experiences to deconstruct the paraphilia as a whole.

Trigger Warning: Nonconsensual body modification, general reduction of women into objects

Transfuture Allstars - A Porn Review

 

In this day and age, old notions of gender and sexuality are challenged daily by individuals across the country. Every day I can get up and go outside and walk a few blocks and bump into at least half a dozen proponents of queer desire. I live with a drag queen, an embodiment of an often unspoken acknowledgement that gender is a performance; if not necessarily a refutation of that performance (opinions are divided).

It’s a great time to live in and I and my blue fingernails and desire to be objectified and pursued are quite happy about it as a whole. What does this mean in the porn world, though? The queer has always been the exotic, and thus erotic, and as such “tranny” and “shemale” porn has been rampantly popular for at least the last two decades. Much of the erotic desire in this particular branch of porn comes from the unexpected and interesting juxtaposition of a penis being on a person who behaves and is arrayed as female. Much in the same way that racial porn works, the actual character or portrayal matters little. The person’s sole erotic interest is in their unusual features.

However this is only one branch of queered pornography, and one that appeals to a certain set of western straight men primarily. What I’m about to cover here takes an entirely different approach to the concept. Instead of exoticizing queer desires, Radio’s artwork normalizes those desires in a setting that emphasizes the consent and safety of all participants. It’s transgressive in the best sort of way and should be interesting to look at. I’m going to cover three of her short comix, which I believe can all be found at Slipshine for subscription money or elsewhere if you’re patient/determined. Slipshine is a great outfit in the vein of topatoco, providing another revenue source for the talented and interesting sort of people who typically write or draw webcomics. It also has a notable bent towards a progressive concept of sexuality, where it should be fun and appealing to everyone rather than a narrow group of straight men. I have more to say about the movement later.  

Trigger Warning: Literally nothing. This stuff is cute as shit.

A Mind Forever Voyaging review

Click here for the Amazon page

My Racist Neighbor - A Porn review.

To be fully honest with you I’m not sure why I downloaded this. If I recall correctly I was herpin’ and derpin’ on the pirate bay and clicked over on their top 100 drawn pornography section and the title caught my eye for being silly and whatever. Imagine my surprise when I downloaded it and found out it was some godawful nonsense No, I wasn’t surprised. Shitty crap is the norm for this stuff.

Let’s get the trigger warning here out of the way, because I want to put up the cover for this.

Trigger warning: Racism, Incest, almost certainly nonconsensual sex, more racism. Really this whole thing is just bad racial porn with incest and rape thrown in to differentiate following issues from previous ones.  

Porn Reviews: a Plan

Hey so I crowd-sourced an opinion the other day¹ and it seems like there’s some marginal audience for a review/reading of terrible pornography. As an adult person, I consume a great deal of pornography willingly or otherwise and a great deal of it is of varying quality, so I felt like it’d be interesting to try and dialogue² with that pornography in some small way.

Some ground rules about how this is going to work:

1. I am capricious. I’m not going to do a rigid review of a specific overall genre of pornography, unless I feel like it. I’m open to suggestions and submissions, but I’m doing this for fun! On my own time! The pornography won’t always be terrible. Perhaps it will just be rare and interesting.

2. Pornography can be and frequently is some of the more thoroughly offensive and demeaning constructs of art. A large part of “terrible pornography” here is going to be discussing some of the rather awful stereotypes and situations depicted in pornography. As such I will be putting trigger warnings before the jump and I pre-emptively apologize for the general horribleness of humanity.

3. That being said, I’m not in the business of judging people who consume whatever pornography. It’s a waste of time. We are all terrible in our own unique ways and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. I will happily judge the deficiencies of the authors of terrible pornography, but I’ll try to do in an expansive way that isn’t just petty name-calling. It’ll be cool, I promise.

The goal of this side project is to have an outlet for me to express my feelings about the pornography I encounter without having to rely on anonymity or whatever to have ultimately meaningless conversations with random people over the internet. The less personally motivated goal is to educate you, dear public, on the wide vagaries of human sexual expression. Frequently discussions of “freaky” pornography look sort of like this:

And that’s a paradigm I want to break. Middle stick dude should be totally able to talk about the hardcore BDSM humiliation pornography he consumes and not be afraid or ashamed or terrified to do so, even with his vanilla friends. Diverse sexual tastes are not mental illnesses and should not be social stigmata.

I want to close this introduction with a short definition of what pornography is. The law has had a lot of problems with this³ but I think we can use a pretty short and serviceable definition. Pornography is any material designed in some way to cause arousal. This is a fairly broad definition, and undoubtedly covers a great deal of advertising material and things people would consider softcore or simply window dressing sexuality. It also covers certain marginal parts of larger works whose themes might not be explicitly arousal, but feature some form of erotic material in the middle of it. What it does not cover is material that certain people find erotic, but was not designed with that audience in mind. This can get a bit fuzzy because you have to assume authorial intent and generally divine people’s feelings, but I think for a lot of things it can be clear. Diaper fetishism, for example. Diapers themselves are not pornographic, but attaching them to (usually) an adult human can be pornographic with other markers of pornography attached (nudity, titillating looks, exaggerated sexual features) but can also simply be comedic by not having those markers attached, yet still sexually appeal to a certain subset of people. So perhaps the specific intent is determined by the presence or absence of erotic markers.

This combined with society’s aggressive sexualization and objectification of the female body has created the problems in legalistic society. Do we consider all titillating images to be pornography? This suddenly includes every photograph of a woman, since the expected standard of sexuality is that men will be attracted to that photo and capable of being aroused by it. So instead of dealing with the broader implications of the fucked up headspace popular sexuality is in, we develop contextual markers to indicate when an image is designed to be used as pornography and when it’s not, and then we back those contextual markers with the force of legalism as a hopeless and futile attempt to prevent eroticism moving into or blending with the mundane. A definition using intent here is good though, since among other things I want to talk about those pornographic markers.  

I should have the first review up within the week.

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1 You should totally also get in the habit of using internet buzz-words. Saying them in casual contexts makes them sound ridiculous and destroys their business jargon power. Words are magic, by the way.

2 Seriously it’s fun.

3 Read about obscenity laws! It’s really interesting. Generally the way legalism interacts with sexuality is interesting.

Darksiders Review

THQ is a member of an old guard of publishers, names and logos of which appeared before countless titles throughout the nineties. Like other members of the old guard, the company got huge and fat and rich off of producing 5-10 games a year and selling them between $40-80 a pop to parents who bought games for their kids entirely based on the license attached to the box. “Oh hey, my reprobate overweight douchebag suburban son likes wrestling; let’s buy him the newest looking wrestling game with the longest title and latest roster.” Not kidding, that shit sold like gangbusters. 

                Then the future happened and every game had to have fancy three dee graphics and interesting mechanics and later some king of online multiplayer component or else it wouldn’t sell. Games got more expensive to make and the strength of a popular license wouldn’t go as far as it used to. So they’re all shutting down and collapsing and folding into larger companies because producing three or four games a year just isn’t instantly generating cashflow like it used to. Right now in the news 38 Studios and subsidiary developers Big Huge Games are both unilaterally collapsing after producing just one game together, a game that took three years and some unreasonable number of millions of dollars to make. Rhode Island actually lent them $75 million to bring the studio to the state because they were probably still thinking in 90s terms where games are instant money+job generators for skilled white men to flow cash into the state. Unfortunately the studio made some godawful decisions in the current gaming climate, opting to produce a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, a genre where if a game isn’t named World of Warcraft, it’s probably going to lose dicktons of money because of the sheer development size of it (World of Warcraft’s data is up to 25 GB. And this is a game made in 2004, before any of these HD-DVD things or nonsense) and the fact that you’re automatically competing with a game that’s 8 years old and still has around 10 million players. 

                So now the studio is collapsing and they can’t make payroll and it’s really not the fault of anyone in the studio. Their first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, wasn’t that bad and moved around 1.2 million copies, but in order for it to have broken even it needed something like 3 million copies sold thanks to its multiplatform nature and development cost. These numbers are astronomical, I shouldn’t need to tell you. Back in the 90s, the “golden age of gaming,” a game could sell maybe 100,000 copies and be considered a moderate success. Games were priced more reasonably to their development costs, and everything overall was cheaper to do. In the modern games era we’re tacked to the $60 new price point, just $10 more than the last generation’s price fixing scheme (you know it is) while games cost around twice as much to develop, a bump from around $8 million to $20 million on average. Games also take more time and effort to generate the high definition textures and models and 30fps animations and bug testing. What’s ironic about all this is that games themselves haven’t gotten any more complex or longer, but in fact the opposite has happened in interests of cost savings, which brings us to Darksiders.

                Darksiders is the very first step in the new direction that THQ intends to move as a publisher, away from licensed kids games that are getting too expensive and too difficult to sell (Yet they’re still making a Spongebob Squarepants game for the Wii U. Maybe they’re just reprioritizing towards their best-selling kids games) and towards original IPs wholly owned by the corporation and thus completely monetizeable. Darksiders was produced by Vigil Games, a studio founded by a pair of guys who met in college and started a bromance that has lasted over ten years and Comic Guy Joe Madureira (Portugese for “incredibly sexy”) who was the only reason I went to the first Wizard World convention here in New Orleans, but he canceled last minute because he was busy working on Darksiders 2, crushing my hopes and dreams (I still love you please call me). Also some other dude that I can’t find any info about online. 

                The game on the surface is about Prince Arthas War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and his super-manly quest for vengeance after the apocalypse happens early and everything goes wrong. There’s some background mythology on a “three kingdoms” approach to this where there’s three kingdoms of reality, man, heaven, and hell; and there’s some loosely explained third party called the charred council that created and operates the horsemen. Big props for the way the game tells the story, nothing is explained to you in didactic style, either by a magic codex or by grating, supercilious NPCs. The game actually ends with a pretty open-ended cliffhanger, as all that really gets done is War’s vengeance quest (and you beat the final boss guy). The only problem is that the story is mind-crushingly stupid. Every single character oozes testosterone from their giant, muscly pores. The dialogue reads like it was written by a WH40k fan that got C’s in high school English. The plot apparently dispenses with the concept of motive, instead simply saying “this character does this” and leaving it there. The real problem is that none of these characters feel like sentient people, much less intelligent or interested people. They feel like excuses to propel a game forward. And hey, that’s exactly what the plot here is. 

                Which actually turns out okay, because as a game it’s pretty darn great. It’s derivative as all hell, but most of the best video games are, and the game picked the right franchises to be derivative from. It’s a third person action game that plays almost identically to The Legend of Zelda, albeit with more manly and complicated combat. Sections are divided between puzzles and combat and the occasional gauntlet-of-enemies-to-be-defeated-with-special-weapon segments.  Like I said, this is not a bad thing. There are not enough legend of Zelda clones on the market, and Nintendo seems content with releasing one ever 5 years, which is awful and terrible and totally unsatisfactory. 

                Everything of course is much more gory and manly than Zelda. The game even has a mature rating, though aside from the ridiculous blood everywhere (this games versions of Zelda’s keys are actually little daggers you stab through the eyes of barriers to your progress, eliciting a huge spurt of blood) there’s nothing particularly mature about this game. The only time vulgar language is used is towards the end when the sole female character is called a “bitch” and a “whore,” both pretty jarring as the only severe insults throughout the game (other than ludicrous threats of murder from silly-looking demons) and both towards the only woman in the game. This is a boys only club, folks. Women aren’t allowed.  But hey, that’s not really out of the norm. What was the one female in Gears of War 1 again? Some woman literally half the size of the protagonist wearing a short skirt?

                Anyway, overall Darksiders is not that bad. It’s probably worth your time if you like Legend of Zelda and you can check out from the library for free like I did. Just be prepared for everything that’s wrong with modern games on this disc. We’ve got gameplay pretty down, but presentation still leaves a lot to be desired. Darksiders 2 is out this August, to star another horseman, Death. THQ is doing slightly better financially, and the success of this game is probably going to be a major factor of the publisher’s health going forward. 

                THQ is a great story, though. They had a CEO that became really adamant about producing a drawing tablet peripheral for kids to play games with, a fiscally untenable move in any case that isn’t Guitar Band or Rock Hero. The uDraw tablet underperformed massively and is the number one reason for the publisher’s stock sliding so badly at the end of last year. They fired that guy (and I’m pretty sure he wrapped a corvette around a tree afterward, as is the natural life cycle of sociopathic executive)  and a bunch of other people, but they took the smart move of leaving their dev studios intact and simply refocusing their efforts to other games. Darksiders is one of the original wholly owned IPs that THQ hopes to turn into a comic series, a cartoon, a series of novellas, a card game, maybe a movie, and so on. Viva Capitalism!