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22/11/04:
Half-Life 2 Can Suck My Monkey
| Hey,
I've got a great idea, internet: let's
STOP talking about fucking Half-Life 2. I
know all you big-name gaming review and
humour sites have got your hands on it
and are enjoying the fuck out of it, but
I, like a lot of people, have no money,
no income, and a computer that has
difficulty running anything more advanced
than the original Zork trilogy, so
although Half-life is my favouritest game
ever and Half-Life 2 is a game I feel I
must play before I die, it might as well
be on the fucking moon. So let's all stop
talking about the fantastic physics
engine and the incredible gameplay and
all the little bells and whistles that
hop up and down singing too ra lilly,
because frankly if it goes on for much
longer I am going to throw myself down a
fucking well. Hopefully I can live off
moss and converse with spiders who have
never even heard of revolutionary
graphics engines.
|
 |
I
know I can't be the only person in the world who
dearly wants to be a gamer but sadly lives in
some kind of alternate universe where computers
cost a lot of money and most of their income goes
to paying rent and utilities. How the fuck does
everyone else manage it? Even when I was working
I barely had enough savings left over from
necessities to buy myself some sweeties at the
end of the week. Maybe that's just because the
Australian government are servants of the dark
lord who take a quarter of my paycheck in tax.
This is because they hate me, and because they
need to pay off their sheep whores.
Well, I've come
to a decision. I've decided I hate the entire
gaming industry and want them all to die and be
replaced with people who release freeware games
on the internet that don't require a computer
forged from the iron of Thor's hammer to run. My
hatred of Lucasarts is already well documented, and I hate them even
more since I received the restraining order. I'm
not even sure why they sent me a restraining
order. I telephoned their legal department, and
they said something about me standing in the
middle of their car park screaming death threats.
Okay, first of
all, 'I want to piss on your graves' is not a
death threat. There's no mention of death
anywhere there. You don't have to be dead to have
a grave. It's quite common for terminally ill
people to get their plots sorted out while
they're still alive. Not that anyone at Lucasarts
is terminally ill, of course. Or at least, they
weren't until yesterday afternoon.
I did consult a
law firm first, and I'm very sure of my ground
legally. It's not my fault if the employees of
Lucasarts never got around to getting themselves
immunised from all known diseases. It was
Lucasarts' own shoddy maintenance men who left
that crack in the car park surface for someone to
trip over. And as I explained to the officer,
there were a million good reasons I could have
had for walking around holding a test tube full
of the Ebola virus. It was just a total freak
accident that it happened to fly out of my hands
and fall into the building's ventilation system.
Fuck Half-Life 2
and its minimum system requirements so
astronomical that they can only be seen with a
high-powered telescope. Fuck it and its advanced
physics engine. I've got a much better physics
engine here at home. Look, I knock a pen off the
table, and it falls to the floor and rolls for a
little bit! And look, I can throw a beer bottle
at someone wearing a Lucasarts uniform and it
shatters against their skull and knocks them
dead! And I didn't even have to blow two thousand
dollars on a new PC. Come to think of it, I could
make my very own Half-Life 2. All I need to do is
grow a beard, put on a suit of armour, and get
hold of two tonnes of high-powered futuristic
weaponry.
It'd be too hard
to move to a totalitarian Eastern European
country, so I'll just move to France. And instead
of killing aliens, I'll kill English tourists.
Then I will be hailed as the people's hero and be
knighted by the King of France.
And as long as
I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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19/11/04:
Funny Papers
In case you
haven't noticed the continual changing of title
at the top of the page, Chris & Trilby is still updating
regularly, and it is becoming increasingly
apparent that I am making all this shit up as I
go along.
On the same
topic, there's a guest strip by me up at one of
my favourite webcomics, Dinosaur Comics. Surprisingly, the
author, Ryan North, knew who I was already
through my games. That really brightened up my
day, I tell ye that.
My comic's on
the fanart archive, right at the bottom of
the list. Here's a direct link if you are a lazy bum.
- Yahtzee
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15/11/04:
Everyone Please Kill Yourselves
I'm sure, over
all the years I've been writing on this site,
I've quite casually said that a lot of people
should be killed. I vowed death upon Kevin
Warwick and the Honey Monster in the first few
weeks alone. But whenever I do this, it's rarely
because of a personal hatred of the person and
desire to want them suffer. Hell, I think the
entire human race should be killed, including
myself, so we can just get it over with and put a
stop to religious disagreements. Like I said in
that barrel of laughs Jeffrey Dahmer article, death is still an
inadequate punishment when we still don't know
what death is. When I wish someone dead, it's
nothing personal, it's generally because I think
the world would be a lot better off without them.
For example, the
minority I've been coming to despise lately are
people who admit their own flaws but believe that
the mere act of admission excuses it. I'll use an
example to explain this better:
ME:
Hey, fat lady, eating that box of cake will
do your body no favours.
FAT LADY: Oh, I know, I'm
such a fat pig! (eats box of cake)
ME: Now you are even more
fat and knocked another decade off your
lifespan.
FAT LADY: Oh, I know, I'm so
fucking fat! (eats the world)
This is made
even more irritating when you are trying to give
the person good advice, but they refuse to follow
it and continue seeing their admission of guilt
as absolution in itself. The first step in
getting over a problem is admitting that you have
one - but it isn't the ONLY step. On the
Underdogs forum, where I hang around sometimes,
there's this guy - mentioning no names - who
occasionally posts long whining topics about some
vaguely negative development in their
comparatively luxurious middle-class life,
seeking advice, but then fails to heed it with
exchanges such as the following:
MAN:
Oh, this hot girl is coming on to me but I'm
so torn because I still have feelings about
this other hot girl who lives far away, and I
really want to call her and see how she's
doing one of these days, oh, what to do, what
to do.
ME:
Sex them up! Go on my son! Woof woof!
SOMEONE
MORE SENSIBLE: Just give girl B a
call!
MAN:
Oh, but I can't, I'm too much of a coward.
SOMEONE
MORE SENSIBLE: Then why the hell are
you asking us for advice?
MAN:
Because I'm a big stupid twat, oh, how I stew
in my angst.
ME:
Hey, you're assuming confession equals
absolution! Go eat a bag of hell!
MAN:
Yes, I am, aren't I? Oh, I am such a twat.
And it's
impossible to insult these people. They'll just
agree with everything you say, because doing so
evaporates the guilt they feel for being such
tossers. So that's why I want all these people to
die.
With one
exception.
Now, I don't
know if Paris Hilton uses the confession
technique to justify herself, but I have a pretty
good feeling that she does, because she damn well
doesn't do anything else and there's a hell of a
lot about her that needs justifying. So I don't
want her dead. I want her to live until she has
suffered and absolved her sins.
DISCLAIMER:
For the sake of your hand and monitor, please
print out the following image before attempting
to punch it.
 |
It's
rare that I devote space to a long
diatribe against an individual for wholly
unspecific reasons, but with Paris
Hilton's continued domination of the
media while moguls and fashion magazines
are spending delightful weekend breaks up
her matchstick-thin rectum, I could
remain silent no longer. I am absolutely
staggered by her character. I'm always
one to concentrate on a person's good
qualities - I've spoken up for Jeffrey
Dahmer, for fuck's sake - but here I am
at a loss. I cannot perceive a single
redeeming feature in Paris Hilton, and I
do not understand how anyone can possibly
feel any degree of affection for her at
all, least of all enough to sing her
praises in newspaper columns and give her
and her teaspoon-shallow mates their own
fucking TV shows. |
She's
not even particularly good looking. She looks
like a bald eagle attempting to swallow a breeze
block. She is already the most overprivileged
person on Earth. She is due to inherit a sum
roughly similar to the gross national product of
New Zealand. And she struts around in tart's
clothing that could pay my rent until I'm
thirty-seven.
It was that
Simple Life TV show that confirmed everything to
me, in particular those sequences where she and
that blonde push-broom she uses as a friend were
given regular jobs for a day and they
deliberately ballsed them up spectacularly,
rolling their eyes at each other when they were
expected to do something other than prat around
like giggling ninnies. They probably intended the
scenes to showcase their kooky, happy-go-lucky
attitudes. But I saw it all then. I saw a pair of
idiotic cunts with more money than God pissing
all over the people who have to struggle to make
it in life. I saw two guffawing socialites
skipping idly through their bleak existences,
taking up space in the universe that could have
contained someone more worthwhile, such as a man
who spends his entire life sealed in a wooden
box.
I just... I just
don't understand how this sort of person can be
tolerated to exist. Everything she does seems
calculated to flaunt her wealth and tits. I've
never seen a photo of her where she wasn't
wearing an expression of utter unforgivable
disdain and smugness. The amount she spends on a
week's clothes shopping could lift fifty people
from desperate poverty. The only possibility that
seems to fit is that she is an evil
extra-terrestrial from some alien culture where
this kind of behaviour is acceptable, who, upon
landing on Earth, made the same kind of mistake
as Ford Prefect and named herself after a French
hotel.
So I don't want
her dead. I just want her destroyed. I want to
look into her eyes and see her spirit crushed. I
want to take away all she has and then take even
more. I want to attach her naked to a winch and
lower her into a crowd of drunken burly sailors
who have just come back from a two year tour. I
want to stick a foot pump up her arse and inflate
her stomach until it bursts, showering the room
with gristle and duck paté. I want her to
understand that there is no escape, and that
no-one is coming to save her. I want to give her
life meaning by showing her the agony of the
average human life.
There are a lot
of things on my 'things to do when I get a time
machine' list, and now I have another one. I'm
going to kidnap baby Paris and leave her on the
doorstep of an orphanage in Sarajevo. And I'm not
going to tell anyone the truth until she's
thirty. Then perhaps she'd become someone who
uses their money for great humanitarian deeds,
rather than just blowing it all on shoes that
cost about fifty cents to make, five of which go
to the half-dead Malaysian woman who stitched
them together.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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09/11/04:
Search For The Hero Inside Yourself
Time once again
to dredge up another long-forgotten feature of
this and about fourteen thousand other humour
sites on the internet! Yes, we're going to once
again be looking at what sorts of things people
have been searching for that have led them to
this little island of taste and decency! Search
strings, ho!
"7
days a stranger"
No... no, you
almost got it, it's 5 Days a Stranger and 7 Days a SKEPTIC. Well tried, though. For
future reference, here's a little method to help
you remember. 5 Days a Stranger starred Trilby,
right? And 'Stranger' contains the letters 'TR',
which also occur in Trilby. 7 Days A Skeptic,
meanwhile, was set in space, the second letter of
which is 'P', which occurs in 'Skeptic'.
Alternatively, just use this little rhyme:
5 Days A
Stranger,
7 Days A Skeptic,
I'm a stupid twat.
"jackson
is to be president and you will be hanged
cartoon"
Well, if that
doesn't sound like some kind of Orwellian
nightmare society, I don't know what does. I know
exactly how Michael Jackson would hang people,
too. He'd dress them up in romper suits and bibs,
then dangle them off his balcony rail. And then
he would FUCK THEM UP THE ARSE.
"oh
noes"
No use crying,
little boy! RIGHT UP THE ARSE!
"aloe
vera life cycle picture view labelled"
I'm not making
fun of this person for searching for this,
because he or she is clearly just some kind of
botanical researcher looking for something that
would make his or her day. What I am mocking them
for, however, is coming to this website thinking
I'd have just the thing they wanted, based on a
few oblique references to aloe vera scattered
here and there. Unless, of course, they became
bored with the whole research thing and decided
to waste an afternoon on me. I laugh now, but
some day a rosy-cheeked little blonde girl will
die as a consequence of insufficient aloe vera
research, and it'll be all my fault.
"orgasm
face"
The lesser-known
Dick Tracy villain. So called because he can't
open his eyes and he keeps drooling this curious
white foam.
"cries
her eyes out spanking"
It's disturbing
to me how some people still find women in torment
arousing. This reminds me of a spam mail I
received a while back. The subject line was
something like "SHE WILL LEAVE YOU IF YOU
DON'T GET A PENIS EXTENSION". I remember
wondering how they had that kind of insider
knowledge, but then I opened it and the text of
the mail read "DON'T YOU WISH YOU COULD MAKE
HER BEG YOU TO STOP?" Er, no. No, I don't.
Because then I would be a rapist. And I would go
to prison. And prison is where karma catches up
with rapists. Rape is WRONG.
"being
invisible for a day what would you do"
Well, I suppose
I would find Paris Hilton and rape - hey! Mind
your own business!
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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05/11/04:
Interlude
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Last Week On
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02/11/04:
The Silence of the Yams
Okay, here's how
it works. Me write. You read. You laugh. Ho ho
ho. You send me money. I spend money on sweets.
Ho ho ho. There've been a few more donators added
to the list, but I confess I can't
be arsed to go double-check the names right now.
Yes, I know, I'm going to hell.
With the rules
of the website declared, allow me to present
another edition of:
Unappreciated
Computer
Console Game Character Of The Week!
Recently, I had
the dubious joy of playing the original Resident
Evil on the PS1 for the first time ever. Maybe
it's just because it's old and wrinkly now and
technology has advanced since then, but I am
flabberghasted that they squeezed fourteen
sequels and two movies out of what is without a
doubt the most boring, frustrating and
unintuitive survival horror game I have ever
played. Ammunition is scarce. Puzzles make little
to no sense. There is no indication of where you
have to go and when. Long animations of doors
opening and going up stairs are completely
pointless. And as for the FMV sections, if they
had simply dropped the script into a big toilet
with three big smelly floaters, it would have
been a much more competent and better-acted
production.
No doubt you're
asking yourself how I was able to find a single
character in Resident Evil worthy of the Fully
Ramblomatic UCGCOTW award. Well, quite simply, I
didn't. Today's UCGCOTW is Harry Mason from
Silent Hill.
 |
Harry
Mason from Silent Hill! |
No
matter what I think of it, Resident Evil
evidently left its legacy on all future survival
horror games. It is almost unheard of to play
survival horror that doesn't have one of those
extremely unhelpful traffic light health systems.
The puzzles are always stupid, usually involving
decoding some cryptic verse to deduce that a
sword must be placed in the hand of a statue in
order to acquire the Angry Lion key, when a much
more sensible and considerate householder would
have just stuck all the keys in a glass cabinet
in the lobby. And, of course, none of the living
humans you encounter will want to team up with
you for some reason, when all past evidence has
shown that NPCs who go off on their own get
murdered with absolutely breathtaking violence.
Silent Hill goes
along with all that. Why on earth does a silver
medallion fall off a shelf when you press piano
keys in a certain order? Couldn't I have just
knocked it off with a broom? And why does that
nurse chick cry mournfully about being left on
her own in a scary place and then, in the same
sentence, refuse to tag along with you for
inadequately explained reasons?
Harry Mason,
Silent Hill's protagonist, just couldn't give a
shit. He doesn't seem to find it at all unusual
that skinless pteradactyls keep flying down and
trying to bite his earlobes off. When the whole
world transforms into a bloodstained nightmare
version of itself full of crucified corpses, he
passes the scenery by with nary a disdainful
glance. And why is every meaningful object and
text covered in blood splats? Is there someone
forever fifty yards in front of him with an
extremely bad nosebleed? Whatever, Harry doesn't
care. He stomps right over corpses and blood
pools with the same confident, measured walk that
he uses to go over zebra crossings.
Harry was,
apparently, a writer before he came to Silent
Hill. Obviously he wrote for the special militant
version of the Fortean Times or something,
because when he calmly draws his gun and blows
two holes in a zombie dog mid-pounce, it's with
the same effortless nonchalance that you or I
would use when swiping flies away from our Coco
Pops.
And then, when
he has seriously wounded the creature and it's
lying on the ground attempting to whimper while
its lungs slowly fill with foaming zombie blood,
Harry isn't the kind of loser protagonist who
would run for his life, or attempt to examine the
creature while it still lived to learn something
about the zombie condition. No, he just walks
straight over to see if the zombie has any plans
to depart this vale of tears any time soon.
And if it
doesn't
he
STOMPS.
ON ITS.
FUCKING.
HEAD.
| He
brings his sensible heel down upon its
twitching skull with a nauseating wet
squeaking, cracking noise, then marches
on with a little strand of pink brain
meat trailing from the back of his shoe,
leaving the corpse to lie motionless, a
greyish tongue lolling from what looks
like the result of dropping a moist,
freshly-baked meat pie fourteen storeys.
I don't care if your job involves
subduing grizzly bears with your teeth -
you are nowhere near as hardcore as Harry
Mason. |
 |
When
I first saw this phenomenon, I instantly knew who
Harry Mason was. He was Clint Eastwood. He was
Clint Eastwood in a film where Clint Eastwood's
entire family have been killed by zombie dogs and
he's on his steel-jawed, no-shit-taking quest for
revenge. He's Indiana Jones when some villain is
trying to impress him with swordplay, giving his
opinion on the performance with a review from Mr.
Colt. He's Ash Williams, who, having had quite
enough of the deadites' shit, unfearingly
transforms a flying demon's head into an
expanding cloud of buckshot and gluey brain
sauce.
Harry Mason is
the kind of person they make survival horror
games about in Hell. After a hard day of
torturing the damned, all the demons retire home
in the evening to their little bungalows, boot up
their Playstations, and attempt once again to get
past level 3 of Invasion of the Harry Mason,
their mandibles quivering with shame and fear
whenever their demonic avatar turns a corner and
finds an emergency fire axe coming down with
astonishing force on their misshapen skull.
Unless it's a cutscene.
If my only
impression of Harry Mason was what I saw of him
in cutscenes, I'd think of him as the usual
personality deficient slack-jawed wanker survival
horror seems to depend on. It's during the action
sequences that Harry really comes into his own.
I'm tempted to believe that the people who wrote
the in-game script and the people who wrote the
cutscenes were given two entirely different
profiles of the main character. I certainly hope
so, because otherwise we have to believe that a
man who has just defeated a giant lizard vagina
monster by introducing Mister Shotgun Shell to
Mistress Roof of Mouth could be completely thrown
by seeing some woman appearing, then disappearing
again.
For some bizarre
reason, about half the lines of dialogue in
Silent Hill are accompanied by voice acting, and
the other half are accompanied by silence, the
words shown only in subtitle. I have a theory
that Harry has two personalities, Twat Harry and
Dirty Harry, and whichever one is in control is
indicated by whether Harry's voice is audible or
not. Twat Harry, the audible one, voiced by some
justly underpaid voice actor, is one of the most
clueless fuckers to grace this earth, whose only
contributions to conversations are variations on
'What?' and 'I don't understand!' and 'Where's my
daughter?'. But as soon as his voice falls mute,
he's Dirty Harry once more, the stone-faced
harbinger of shooty death, dignifying his prey
with nothing more than a cold sneer as they slump
down at his feet with hamburger instead of face.
So, Harry Mason,
the sultan of soggy stomp, the fearless fighter
with a flat-top, you are Unappreciated Computer
Game Character Of The Week!
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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Hey,
kids! Sick of me not updating often enough for
your refined tastes? Read news posts by me, Chefelf and Heccubus pretty much every day on the Lockergnome.com Game Invasion Channel!
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