As you may already know if you've been reading this site for a while, there was once, in the mists of prehistory, a British-based videogame website called Robot Geek. In addition to being a writer there, I was part of their occasional podcast, Some Assembly Required. Robot Geek is no more, but I missed the old gang there. And so, I've been working on bringing that podcast back in some form. At last, I'm very pleased to announce the first-ever episode of Pointless Side Cast, featuring John Markley, Corey Atwood, and Jade Kimmel. Now, I should warn you that the sound is not exactly professional quality. And that we'd all been out of the saddle for a while and take some time to start firing on all cylinders again. And that it was recorded a few weeks ago- Superbowl Sunday, in fact- and wasn't exactly on the bleeding edge of the news even then. And that Corey has an utterly filthy mouth. And that some of us were drinking throughout the show. And that the subject of the conversation sometimes wanders a bit. And that I have a weird, annoying voice that sounds sort of like somebody punched the G-Man from Half-Life in the mouth and started giving him amphetamines and barbiturates simultaneously. Aside from that, though, it's a good show. You can download it here, as well as subscribe to the feed, or scroll to the bottom to play it without soiling your hard drive. Download this episode (right click and save)
So join us, if you like the sort of writing I do here at Pointless Side Quest and/or listening to three people in various stages of sobriety discussing such topics as: Exciting new games of 2013! Crysis 3's multiplayer beta, and how much I suck at it! Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky turning in his grave! (Special thanks to Musopen) SimCity's new DRM! The musical stylings of Master Chief! Devil May Cry and Max Payne 3 fashion Dos and Dont's! XCOM: Enemy Unknown! Dolph Lundgren! The cruel dramatic irony of Corey telling us about how much he's looking forward to the release of Aliens: Colonial Marines! Chrissy from Growing Pains! Watchdogs! Decades of X-Men continuity fully explained in 15 seconds! Tomb Raider! Super Bowl XLVII! Atlelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk! The episode of Star Trek that revolved around how horny Spock was! Shin Megami Tensei, cruelly taunting me once again! Our impending deaths at the hands of NFL assassins! Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance! Novel uses for your bathroom! The Walking Dead, DayZ, and some of the ~400 new zombie-themed games coming out this year! Star Wars 1313! Yours truly laboring under the misapprehension that the Superbowl occurs under the auspices of something called "Major League Football!" And much, much more.
Hey,
everybody, and welcome to another year of Pointless Side Quest!
2012
was a bit of a slow year at the blog- in large part because my
grandfather and both of my cats died, so if you have ever so much as
contemplated being annoyed by the slow pace of new content here you
are officially a horrible, horrible person- but I have higher hopes
for 2013.
I'm
also inaugurating a brand-new regular feature on Pointless Side Quest
that, at the risk of seeming hyperbolic, will be a greater and more
important development in the history of video games than Pac-Man, the
joystick, Shigeru Miyamoto, ROM cartridges, ENIAC, and the
nucleosynthesis of the first silicon atoms in the cores of dying
primordial stars, combined.
It's not far away, so don't miss it.
In accordance with the ancient Pointless Side Quest Christmas tradition passed down by my fathers before me, it's once again time for my annual post on The Star Wars Holiday Special. Please to enjoy, for a certain value of "enjoy."
It's the Christmas season once again. To celebrate, this is the time of year when this blog make a foray beyond the world of video games into the larger world of holiday entertainment. Sadly, there is a dark side to Christmas. I'm not talking about the weather, or the parents rending each other apart like rabid beasts at Toys R Us, or the built-up resentment that can explode at family gatherings, or those horrific modernized versions of Christmas carols that every place of business in the state of Illinois is apparently required by law to defile my eardrums with for the entire month of December. No, I speak of something much worse...
The Star Wars Holiday Special has appeared on American television once, in 1978, and oozed into various foreign markets to make similarly brief appearances over the next few years. It has never been rebroadcast in the US and has never been released on home video in any format. George Lucas, who would probably release a boxed set of the prequel trilogy with an added bonus DVD containing 90 minutes of footage from the parking lot security cameras of Skywalker Ranch and call it the "Star Wars Ultimate Edition" if he thought anyone would buy it, disavows it and has refused to make it available.
Scorned by legitimate society, it exists only in the form of unauthorized copies made from VCR recordings of the original. Like so many other blasphemous tomes of daemonic horror bearing unspeakable eldritch knowledge never meant for the eyes of Man- Friedrich von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon, Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy- it circulates covertly in the dark corners of the world (I think that's an entirely fair description of most file-sharing networks) where students of the grotesque and unnatural risk their very sanity to seek it out.
It was in 2006 that I acquired a copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special, complete with the original 1978 commercials. It should have been a fine year: Neal Asher, David Drake, and Stephen Baxter all had multiple new books rolling off the presses. Ace Combat Zero came out for the PlayStation 2, and the release of the PlayStation 3 paved the way for me to actually buy one three years later. Iron Maiden, Evergrey, In Flames, Norther, Strapping Young Lad, Tool, Motorhead, Blind Guardian, and Týr released new albums.
Instead, there would be only the taste of ashes.
Now, one thing I share with several of my friends is the ability to enjoy crap. From 1950's skiffy schlock, to watching a near-comatose Richard Burton mumble his way through the uncut version of The Exorcist II, to Sylvester Stallone's arm wrestling epic Over the Top, to the climactic scene of The Satanic Rites of Dracula where Christopher Lee is killed by running into a small shrubbery, to Oscar-winning actor George Kennedy and a bunch of stupid teenagers trapped on a boat where they are picked off one by one by an evil hybrid cat/rat/godawful puppet in The Uninvited, to a seemingly endless horde of Godfrey Ho "ninja" "movies" created by buying the rights to various Asian films, redubbing them, splicing them together with new footage of white guys in brightly colored and sometimes rhinestone-studded pajamas running around and doing flips in what appears to a small municipal park, and feebly attempting to tie them together and pretend that the resulting Frankensteinian abomination was a coherent story, we've seen it all. We take that sort of thing in stride.
I want you to have that context in mind when I say that my first two attempts to watch this had to be aborted within the first half hour because the guys I was watching it with couldn't stand it any longer.
The plot, such as it is, is that Chewbacca is returning to his home and family on the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk to celebrate "Life Day," one of those vague holidays characters in kids' fantasy shows would celebrate when it was snowing and they wanted to do something festively nonsectarian. But the system is in the grip of an Imperial blockade fleet commanded by recycled movie footage of Darth Vader, and... Well, basically, there's a string of largely unrelated, godawful variety showesque events set in something that resembles the Star Wars universe featuring various C-list celebrities until things finally shudder to a halt what seems like several geological epochs later.
It's got all of the heroes from the
movie making their return, plus James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader. The only major actors from Star Wars not present- unless one also counts David Prowse, who appears only in the form of reused movie footage, or Carrie Fisher, whose soul appears to have departed her body and wandered off for much of her screen time- are Alec Guinness as Ben Kenobi and Peter Cushing as Tarkin, whose characters were saved from appearances here by the sweet, merciful embrace of death.(Which makes it suddenly seem very suspicious that Kenobi and Tarkin both met their ends because they conspicuously chose not to protect themselves from imminent danger, and either possessed supernatural powers that included the ability to sense horrible, cataclysmic events or hung out with people who did.) What could possibly have gone wrong?
There are some things the human mind cannot explain, only try to describe. Some of the thrilling spectacles we're treated to include:
Over ten minutes of Chewbacca's family screaming at each in Wookie, sans subtiitles! This is what the show leads off with. Little-known fact: Lucas actually wanted the first 20 minutes of the original Star Wars to focus on R2-D2 making random beep-bloop noises while doing routine maintenance on the Tantive IV's cafeteria vending machines, but was forced to start the movie with an exciting space battle instead when the studio said that his original cut of the film was too long.
Chewbacca's elderly father Itchy groaning in ecstasy while watching virtual reality porn! You have no idea how badly I wish I was making that up. NO idea.
Ever wondered what an elderly Wookie
having an orgasm looks like? Of course not, but now you know anyway.
Reused footage from the movie!
Reused footage from the movie tinted bright green, so that a shot of the Millennium Falcon approaching Yavin can double as a shot of a bright green Millennium Falcon approaching Kashyyyk! Alternately, if you're a die-hard Star Wars fan desperately trying to escape from the implications of this monstrosity actually being a canonical part of the Star Wars universe, it could be interpreted to mean that the entire special is actually taking place inside the Matrix. In which case it's arguably a better Matrix film than Matrix Revolutions.
Several minutes of Chewbacca's repulsive son Lumpy watching miniature holographic acrobats! That's right, Chewbacca's immediate kin consists of two guys named "Itchy" and "Lumpy." Presumably, the name "Chewbacca" is a human-pronounceable approximation of the Wookie word for "Scabby" or "Oozing."
Lumpy! I've already mentioned his role in the Special's events, but the very existence of this... this thing appalls me so much that it warrants its own entry. With the possible exception of that loathsome, soulless homunculus wrought in obscene parody of a human child from Son of the Mask (the CGI baby, not Jamie Kennedy), nothing has ever filled with such instinctive horror. JEFFERSON STARSHIP!
Harvey Korman in a dress! And in two other separate parts, as an amorous Tatooine cantina patron and a cyborg instructional video announcer (a cyborg who announces in an instructional video, that is, not an announcer in an instructional video about cyborgs) who appears to be suffering from some sort of degenerative motor neuron disorder. Not since Peter Sellers in Dr. Stranglove has there been such a multi-role tour de force.
The musical stylings of Bea Arthur! This is actually the closest we get to a high point.
Harvey Korman trying to get into Bea Arthur's pants!Though anyone hoping for some actual on-screen Hedley-on-Maude action will be disappointed, sadly.
An animated segment featuring the most repellently butt-ugly animation in human history!It does have the first-ever appearance of Boba Fett, which some people may be interested in. Frankly, I've always considered Fett one of the most overrated characters in fiction. It's a damning indictment of how low our society's standards of masculinity have fallen when possessing some basic tracking abilities, dressing like the Rocketeer, flying around in a big metal shoe, and being killed by a blind man is enough of a résumé to be declared Biggest Badass Ever.
One odd thing is that the cartoon, like a number of other segments, is actually introduced as something being watched by Lumpy. Which implies that this segment depicts events that are fictional not only to us but to the characters, and that the cartoon itself actually exists within the Star Wars universe.
Which, I just realized, means that Jefferson Starship does, too.
A brief appearance by an incredibly bored-looking Harrison Ford, who doesn't even try to conceal his utter contempt for the proceedings!
Mark Hamill wearing more makeup than Queen Amidala, Bozo the Clown, and Dick Clark combined! Usually I'd be reluctant to say something nasty about this, since it's probably to conceal the injuries Hamill had suffered in a car crash the previous year, but The Star Wars Holiday Special exists on a plane where human concepts of morality and decency are not merely absent, but meaningless. If you gaze into the bellowing unsubtitled Wookie abyss, the bellowing unsubtitled Wookie abyss gazes also into you.
Carrie Fisher singing a festive Life Day carol set to the tune of the classic Star Wars theme while clearly stoned out of her mind! But you don't have to take my word for it:
She's no Bea Arthur, I'll tell you that much.
Eventually, Chewbacca makes it home for the holidays with his repellent family. To the best of my recollection, no one learns a valuable lesson about The True Meaning of Life Day, if in fact it has one. I really can't do justice to how teeth-gratingly bad it is. I have no strong personal stake in Star Wars. I liked the original movies and a few of the tie-in books, but I've never had the strong emotional attachment to Star Wars that some people do. I didn't like the prequel trilogy but never had the sort of "I have sworn a Sicilian blood oath of vengeance upon George Lucas' and his entire family line because he murdered my family, burned down my village, and deflowered my house pets" response that is often seen on the Internet. The idea of crap with the name Star Wars on it is not some sort of personal affront to me. Given that sitting through this made me want to gouge out my own eyes and just run through the streets of Chicago gibbering like a lunatic until my heart and/or lungs burst, I can only imagine how devoted Star Wars fans feel about it.
(PC)A
free-to-play first-person online shooter set in a near-future war
between Russia and the United States fought in the Arctic region.
Must
we fight the Russians yet again? Admittedly, this really isn't the
game I should single out for this, since in Arctic Combat making the
main belligerents the United States and Russia is actually neccessary
for the whole “combat in the Arctic” premise. Geographically and
politically speaking, there aren't a whole lot of countries that
would be at least semi-plausible leaders
in a war against the United States in the Arctic region, and a game
where the United States had to fight Unspecified Middle Eastern State
#76-B's invasion of Alaska or struggle for dominance of the Arctic
Circle against the mighty war machine of the tyrannical
Norwego-Canadian Empire would be sort of silly. (Than
again, Homefrontactually
got made.)
Screenshot
from early beta version of Arctic Warfare, final release may differ
Still,
it's getting a bit repetitive. At this point I'm pretty sure there've
been more video games about Americans fighting Russians released in
the past decade than there were during the era when they were
actually directly hostile to each other. It's like modern videogame
development takes place in some mirror universe where, instead of
dissolving in 1991, the Soviet Union embraced the even more
oppressive and anti-Western ideology of Supercommunism and became
more hostile to the United States than ever.
Vampire
Slayer FPS
(Xbox
360
Live Arcade) OK, that's
not a title.
It just isn't. Maybe something like this would fly in the 70s, when
it was perfectly acceptable for a game's title to be a dry summary of
its premise and games like Boxing and Air-Sea Battle filled the
shelves, but those days are past. I picked on Killzonefor
having a title that seems like it was selected at random from a list
of military terms, but at least that's still a title and not simply a
description of the game's subgenre. This is more like releasing Gears
of War,
Europa
Universalis III, and
Dante's
Inferno,
as Burly
Man Third-Person Shooter,
Early
Modern Period Europe Strategy,
and Stuff
I Drew in My Math Notebook When I Was 12.
Look,
for all I know it's a fine game. You shouldn't judge a book by its
cover. But you shouldn't publish your book with a cover that just
says Spy
Thriller Third-Person Omniscient,
either.
A few days ago saw a grim date in
American history, one that will long be remembered as an ominous
turning point for America- nay, the entire world- and looked upon
with horror by future generations cursed to live in its cold, bleak
shadow...
'Cause it was my birthday on Wednesday!
And it was a pretty nice birthday, in spite of some sad events that
have marred the past year and contributed to the meager output of
Pointless Side Quest in 2012. If you like this place, I apologize for
that, and I hope to make 2013 a much more interesting year.
If you're reading this, thank you;
being able to write things that people actually read means a lot to
me, even if I haven't been able to do so here as much lately, and I
hope you'll keep reading here for a long time to come.
Hearthfire is another
downloadable expansion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Unlike
previous expansion Dawnguard, which added a series of new
quest and enemies, Hearthfire is about what the hero of Skyrim
gets up to during his downtime, allowing you to build and design
your own house. You can have useful facilities like alchemy labs
(presumably one used for the actual, magical sort of alchemy, as
opposed to the sort of home-based chemistry facility that about a
third of the guys I knew in high school are probably doing prison
time for by now) and greenhouses (again, presumably...), as well as
display cases to show off the exotic weapons and items you've found
in your adventures and a trophy room to display the exotic creatures
you've killed with them.
You design your new residence yourself
and can either oversee its construction personally or hire a steward
to do it for you. You can even start a family by having your spouse
move in and adopting some kids.(Biological kids are not an option,
unfortunately, since by the time the player has unlocked the ability
to build a house excessive exposure to the draconic spiritual
energies of the Thu'um shouts have already left the
protagonist sterile.)
Though unsurpassed on the field of battle and imbued with the mystical might to flense the flesh from men's bones with but a word, the Dragonborn's ignorance of proper high-altitude baking temperatures would be his undoing.
It sounds nice, and having a location
where I can show off all the cool stuff I've acquired in my
adventures is something I've long wanted in an Elder Scrolls game.
That said, it is sort of an odd man out placed alongside the premises
of prior Elder Scrolls releases and expansions. Consider:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
As a bloody civil war rages across the land, you must battle an army
of resurrected ancient dragons who have returned to wage war against
all of humanity, led by a colossal soul-eating dragon-god who's
commonly referred to with epithets like “World Eater” and has
just returned after millennia of banishment beyond time and space in
accordance with ancient prophecies about the destruction of the
cosmos. You become the Dragonborn, a legendary warrior with the blood
and soul of a dragon whose very voice has the power to lay his
enemies low.
The Elder Scrolls V: Dawnguard
To save the world from an eternity of darkness, you must battle a
monstrous host of vampires who seek to cast the world into
everlasting night through an ancient magical ritual that will
permanently BLOT OUT THE SUN. You can become a member of an ancient
order of vampire hunters, or transform into a terrifying immortal
creature of the night yourself.
The Elder Scrolls V: Hearthfire
You
need a place to keep your stuff and kill time when not busy with the
above. You can become a foster parent or an amateur gardener. An
amateur gardener with the soul of a dragon whose very voice has the
power to lay his enemies low who may or may not also be a vampire,
but still.
The following article originally appeared at Robot Geek
and is completely fictional, although if you actually need to be told
that I doubt this disclaimer will do much good.
Australia’s notoriously strict censorship of videogames has
received shocking vindication in the aftermath of the Australian’s
government’s recent decision to allow the release of R18+ games in
the country, a decision immediately followed by an eruption of
videogame-related violence and social decay that reduced the country
to a nightmarish post-apocalyptic wasteland less than a week later.
By law, every game released in Australia required a classification
from the Australian Classification Board, a government body that
regulated media content. Previously, the board refused to give any
classification to games with content that would result in an R18+
(Restricted to 18 and over) rating, preventing an official release. A
bill creating an R18+ classification for videogames was finally
passed by the Parliament of Australia on July 18th.
What happened in the immediate aftermath
remains unclear, due to the rapid collapse of Australia’s
communication infrastructure and the country’s subsequent reversion
to a preliterate culture dominated by savage nomadic warlords,
heavily armed bands of murderous neo-barbarians, and the insane
god-kings of despotic Bronze Age city-states, all struggling for
survival in the crumbling ruins of a once-advanced civilization.
However, according to the still-fragmentary reports that have
trickled out of the country, several major cities were already in
flames by early July 19th as hordes of videogame-maddened Australians
took to the streets in what one surviving observer called “an
orgiastic spasm of unimaginably savage Dark Sector-inspired
violence.” The chaos escalated into a cataclysm that laid waste to
huge swaths of the Australian countryside, destroyed most major
cities, and caused the utter dissolution of Australian society,
reducing a prosperous nation of 22 million people into what an
official United Nations report describes as “a desolate hellscape
where only the strong survive.”
June 21th: With the Australian military thrown into disarray by
the collapse of the central government and local law enforcement
incapacitated by an imported copy of Dead or Alive: Dimensions,
Perth is turned into a burning ruin as long-standing rivalries
between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners escalate into open warfare.
How the R18+ rating had such rapid effects remains a mystery,
since the bill would not have actually gone into effect until 2013.
Several possible explanations have been offered, including a sudden,
uncontrolled release of years of frustrated, pent-up hunger for
gaming violence caused by gamer excitement in the aftermath of the
bill’s passage, the hypothesis of some physicists that the social
and moral degeneration that Australia would have suffered in the
years following the decision eventually increased to such
overwhelming levels that its collapsed mass tore a hole through
space-time into the past, and anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson’s
controversial “portal to Hell” theory.
Australia’s future is uncertain. Reversing the decision allowing
R18+ games is impossible, since both Parliament and the Australian
Classification Board ceased to exist with the dissolution of the
Commonwealth of Australia as a sovereign state after the fall of the
capital city Canberra to the bloodthirsty armies of Lord Colossus the
Despoiler- formerly Duane Harris, assistant manager of a recently
closed GAME Australia location in the Canberra suburbs- on June 20th.
The entire country is now under a strict blockade maintained by an
enormous international naval task force, rumored to include the
entire US Third Fleet. In a recent press conference, US President
Barack Obama insisted that the ships are there solely to render aid
to an American ally and “have absolutely nothing to do with any
rumors involving supposed expansionist warlords, a ferocious race of
rapidly breeding radioactive mutant kangaroo-men who have already
made beachheads in New Zealand and Indonesia, or alleged battles in
the Tasman Sea that are classified and didn’t happen anyway where
one or more American nuclear aircraft carriers was destroyed by an
orbital ion cannon that doesn’t exist because the army of vaguely
Abrahamic techno-religious fanatics that controls it doesn’t exist
either. So just drop it already.”
Critics of violent or sexual content in videogames have now gained
considerable credibility. The most prominent is former New South
Wales Attorney-General Greg Smith, who had been one of the principal
opponents of allowing the release of R18+ games in Australia and
managed to escape the country via Sydney Airport just hours before
the city fell to a cannibalistic horde of New South Welshmen dressed
in cloaks of flayed human skin and The Witcher 2: Assassins of
Kings promotional T-shirts.
June 27th: In Adelaide, the new Parliament of the State of
Victoria gathers for its first legislative session since its
“reorganization” on June 24th. Issues facing the new Parliament
include the poor condition of the State’s road system, public
health problems related to widespread cannibalism, and the ongoing
controversy over whether the remains of the previous Parliament
should be displayed on pikes as a warning to outsiders or simply
devoured.
Now widely hailed as a visionary, Smith has been proposed as a
possible prime minister for an interim government-in-exile. He is
reportedly holding meetings with the government of the United
Kingdom, the United States, and the alpha males of the packs of feral
humanoids who dominate northern Queensland about a possible joint
military expedition to retake the country.
In a speech shortly after his escape, Smith said, “At last, do
you understand? People claim that censorship of games is
unjustifiable and old-fashioned. Tell that to a mother who’s lost
her child because his friends started fooling around with real guns
after playing Grand Theft Auto. Tell that to the
hundred-kilometer wall of human torsos that’s encircled Brisbane
since the city was conquered by an army of loincloth-clad barbarians
and renamed ‘South Goroshire.’ Tell that to someone whose entire
hometown was massacred by thousands of pale, bloodthirsty maniacs who
were out ‘grinding’ for human heads to build a five-story pyramid
of skulls on the Melbourne Cricket Ground honoring their dark god
Namira, Daedric Prince of insects and ancient darkness. They
understand the importance of this issue, I assure you.”
