Latest Chris & Trilby comic: no. 0059 -
Ravages Of Addiction
23/12/04:
Insectual Relationship
Welcome back to
Insect Holidays, the show where we explore the
world's greatest holiday destinations for the
average annoying little chitinous fuck. Last
week, we visited some of the finer rubbish tips
of Keighley, West Yorkshire, and the gummy
eyeballs of starving Ethiopian children. This
week, we'll be reviewing and rating all the
available facilities for winged annoyances in one
of Australia's top insect resorts: Yahtzee's
Flat!
Yahtzee's
Flat
At the top of the big slopey ground
part of Brisbane
The eastern bit of the big hot continent south of
Indonesia
Yahtzee's Flat,
while hard to find amongst all the other
identical flats in the area, is well worth
devoting some time to. The flat boasts uniform
beige walls to attach yourself to and sit
unmoving for hours on end, and four uncovered
light bulbs for the modern professional moth to
enjoy pointlessly flitting around like retards.
Yahtzee's Flat is rarely cleaned, and the cracks
in the floorboards are the ideal place to store
bits of dirt and shit.
Accessibility to
Yahtzee's Flat is easy, as Yahtzee is from
England, and as such keeps all his doors and
windows open in a vain attempt to escape the
cripplingly high temperatures of eastern
Australia. If you're having trouble, you'll also
find magnificently accommodating gaps under the
door frames.
Let's take a
look at some of the fantastic amenities available
in Yahtzee's Flat!
The
Front Room
The front room
is kitted out superbly for the thrill-seeking
insect of today. Dominating the room is the
television. Feel free to sit on the screen and
bathe in the hypnotic flashing lights while
Yahtzee is trying to watch Happy Tree Friends!
For non-flying insects, the front room is also an
excellent place for games of Make Yahtzee Spaz
Out. The rules are simple - scuttle slowly all
the way across the floor without Yahtzee noticing
you, then crawl all over his foot while he's
trying to play Metroid Prime. Bonus points if you
make him leap about screaming like a girl, and if
you're really big and disgusting!
The
Kitchen
Aesthetic
crawlies are encouraged to stop and take in the
sights of Mount Dirty Crockery, which tends to
grow in size during the warmer months as Yahtzee
becomes increasingly disinclined to do any
physical labour. Then stop for a bite to eat on
Yahtzee's Kitchen Counter, which serves five star
crumbs and blobs of jam twenty-four hours a day.
For the real food enthusiast, however, come
around at noon or six in the evening, when
insects flock to the regular Yahtzee Trying To
Make His Damn Lunch display! See how often you
can land on his sandwiches before he shoos you
off with vague threatening motions.
Some of the more
adventurous ants have also found good dining in
the nearby Yahtzee's Kitchen Cupboard, and wax
lyrical on the adventures to be had by crawling
all over Yahtzee's bottle of orange cordial.
First drink deeply on the sweet congealed nectar
around the cap, then hold on tight for the ride
of your life as Yahtzee disgustedly holds the
bottle under the cold tap!
The
Bedroom
What better way
to round off a stay at Yahtzee's Flat by visiting
the serene Bedroom? By day, local wasps hold
regular competitions to see who can build the
biggest nests before Yahtzee notices them and
smashes them up with the end of a broom. No-one's
yet been able to get further than one or two
chambers, but find the right nook and who knows
where it could lead!
And, of course,
by night, any insect could enjoy an invigorating
hike across Yahtzee's sleeping body. Mosquitoes
will certainly have a good time drinking the
night away at one of the many stocked bars, such
as Abdomen, Shoulder, and the inexplicably
popular Knuckles Of Left Hand. A regular prize is
awarded to whoever can freak Yahtzee out enough
to make him abandon bed and attempt to sleep on
the beanbag in the front room. The prize is
currently held by 'an entire fucking swarm of
flying ants attracted by nearby streetlights'.
Local
Population
The locals at
Yahtzee's Flat - i.e. Yahtzee - are generally
hostile to insect tourists, so insects who are
not part of a hive mind and as such have some
sense of self-preservation are recommended to
coincide their visits with when Yahtzee is
sleeping, or distracted by porn. Big ugly insects
such as cockroaches and grasshoppers are
particularly recommended to stay away during
daylight hours, because while Yahtzee will be
totally freaked the fuck out by you, he will
eventually summon the courage to bash your head
in with a slipper. While most humans would eject
you by the cup and postcard method, Yahtzee would
rather deal with an insect that isn't going to
spring to life and sit on his face.
Having said
that, flies and bluebottles are generally safe
from Yahtzee, as his McDonalds-poisoned body is
too limp and ineffectual to successfully swat
such fast-moving creatures. Those wishing to risk
it will find that his consistently sweaty and
disgusting feet form an entertaining waterslide
park. And when you've worked up an appetite, the
real daredevils can sometimes snatch bits of
crumb from the corners of Yahtzee's mouth like
the scabby little fuckers they are.
Summary
Yahtzee's Flat
is a great place to bring a family, breeding
partner, or hive mind. You'll find something for
everyone, if everyone happens to enjoy bright
lights, lots of hiding places, and big smelly
Englishmen crying in the corner.
Our
Rating: 4 out of 5 Windscreens
Next Week:
Yahtzee's Bin: Maggot Nirvana?
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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16/12/04:
It's Getting Hot In Here
Y'know, up until
recently I really thought I was losing it. I'm
down to about one serious update a week now, and
all I can do is look back on the days back in
England, when I somehow found a way to stick up
some garbage every single fucking evening, and
wonder what part of my brain fell off since then
to make me so lazy all of a sudden.
Then I walked
into the city and sat down in the library, and to
my amazement, my brain was suddenly working
again. The big fat gooey scrotum sitting inside
my skull case that had been so sluggish and
unresponsive of late as I sat drooling before a
monitor screen was suddenly on his fat little
feet screaming like a street-corner preacher with
his bollocks trapped in a door. I assumed it was
because I had relocated to a centre of learning,
and that raw inspiration was leaking from the
stacks of books on all sides.
Then I took
another look around, and realised I was sitting
under an air conditioner.
Yes, all this
time the answer to my strange lethargy was to get
out from under the demonic being these
Australians call a sun. That's why I was able to
think properly when I was in England - 'cos I was
so fucking cold all the time! That's why so many
great thinkers and inventors and artists hail
from England - everyone's brain cells have to rub
together for warmth!
Anyway, here we
go again: I'm working on another freeware game
and it's nearly done save the testing, so that
can be your Christmas present from me. What's the
game about? Well, it's made with Adventure Game Studio, of course, and it's not
an adventure game. I'm hoping that this will
cause some kind of paradox that annihilates the
four dimensions.
- Yahtzee
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13/12/04:
Philanthropy
Y'all remember Phil Reed, right? Designer of the Larry Vales adventure games and
writer of stuff? Well, he's written an actually
really truly published short story collection,
and was kind enough to give me a copy to review. So here's the review. And yes, the entire
internet does all boil down to one big circle
jerk.
Oh yeah, and did
I mention I've started writing articles for Adventure Gamers? I have one up already, more coming. I have
been a busy little fart.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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9/12/04:
Footman Up My Arseman
I've been
reading this great book of late about Victorian
culture. It's great for reference. Apparently, Chris Quinn, being the son of an
Earl, is entitled to call himself Lord Quinn. And
if he attended a dinner party, he'd have to go
into the dining room quite early on in the
evening, leading the female guest who is his
equivalent societal rank. That's what he's
supposed to do, anyway. In practise he'd probably
just goose the hottest girl in the room, hurl
himself through a window, then run off to find a
KFC.
I know that it's
inappropriate to judge another time period with
the benefit of modern sensibilities, but I think
it is pretty fair to say that, whether you be
modern man, ancient Roman or creature from the
Black Lagoon, we can all probably agree that
Victorian society was fucking lunatic batshit
insane with cream on top.
Oh yes they
were. No other society in the history of Earth
has been so obsessed with imposing rules and
order upon even the most trivial thing for no
apparent reason. If someone in Victorian England
passed a law stating that every gentleman must
cross-dress on the fourth of each month, I'm sure
those hyper-repressed fuckwits would have been
pulling up their petticoats before the thought
would even occur to disobey. Take a look at some
of these.
- A gentleman
must always walk on the outside of the pavement
while a lady goes along the inside
- Only male servants can serve at dinner, and
guests must never talk to or about them for any
reason
- If you are intimately friendly with someone,
you can only visit their house between five and
six in the evening. Slightly less friendly people
go between three and four, and everyone else can
only visit between one and two
- Public nudity is against the law
- You must never dance with someone three times
in a row
- While riding in a coach, gentlemen must always
face backwards
- When visiting space aliens arrive on your lawn,
you must always greet them by putting a bucket on
your head and singing selected pieces from the
light opera currently in vogue
I only made up
one of those. What was wrong with the Victorians?
Were they all just social cripples who couldn't
handle any situation unless it followed a
rigidly-defined script? And how come not more
people were as fat as fucking heifers when
respectable dinners often ran up to ten courses?
I'm not sure
what the punishment was for not following every
one of Victorian's society's clearly-defined
rules. I'm guessing you got thrown to the lions.
It must have fucking sucked being a member of
Victorian high society. Arranged marriages,
corsets, and the razor teeth of hungry lions
tearing through your sensible waistcoat.
Oh Hell Yah! |
No, if
I was living in Victorian England, I know
what position I'd like to fill. I want to
be a fucking footman! Being a footman
was kind of like possessing a limited
degree of invisibility. According to my
book, footmen weren't even addressed by
their own name - usually by something
generic, like John, or James. You were
part of the furniture. Nobody was allowed
to talk to you or even notice you beyond
the time it took to take the towel you've
got hanging over your arm.
Fantastic!
People
even used to get undressed when a footman
was standing there. Whee! You can't use a
butter knife for spreading cranberry
sauce, but feel free to get naked in
front of as many footmen as you like!
Knock yourself out! Footmen aren't real
people! Footmen don't entertain thoughts
of a sexual nature! They have to use all
their brainpower for supporting those
funny white wig things!
|
Nobody
suspects the footman. I could slit the throats of
every last motherfucker in the house, and no-one
would even think to blame me! He's just the
footman! It'd be like blaming the box ottoman!
So, that's
decided then. If I ever get transported back to
Victorian England, I'm becoming a footman. I'm
not sure how you go about doing that. Best guess,
you find a way to get bitten by a radioactive
foot.
- Yahtzee
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2/12/04:
Forever And Ever And Ever
[Three guest
strips at Chris & Trilby so far! I'm going to
assume all the millions of others are still under
production.]
Gather round,
children, I'm going to continue talking about
video games for now, so if you're one of those
bored office workers who read this site for the
humour but couldn't care less about computer
stuff, this is one of those days where you're
going to have to go back to reading Dilbert
archives and discussing reality television around
the water cooler with the rest of the cogs in the
machine.
 |
Today
I'm going to talk about Duke Nukem
Forever. Now, if you are even mildly
interested in gaming news, you have
either just rolled your eyes in
exasperation or broken down upon your
keyboard bawling. For the uninitiated,
DNF is the most notorious laughing stock
in the entire history of gaming. The
development time has clocked eight years.
This beats the former record holder,
Daikatana, into a cocked hat, but the
record won't be confirmed until the game
is actually finished, and frankly if this
happens before the development time hits
a full decade, I will drop my trousers
and ride a bicycle with no saddle right
around the city. |
Let's
start with the full history. Almost a decade ago
now, Duke Nukem 3D was released, and God saw that
it was good. At the time, there was a frenzied
debate over which was better - Duke, or Id
Software's Quake, which came out the same year.
In hindsight this debate was for stupid heads,
because Quake, while technologically impressive,
was about as much fun as stirring floaters around
a toilet bowl with a stick.* Whereas Duke 3D had
character and gameplay and colour and personality
and women with no clothes on falling victim to
irresponsible levels of violence. It seemed
inevitable that a sequel would be made, and 3D
Realms started work on a full 3D romp called Duke
Nukem Forever.
* What was your
favourite single player Quake level? One of the
forty identical greenish-brown castles or one of
the forty identical brownish-green castles?
Eight years
pass, and they're still at it.
Personally, I
blame Half-Life. Coming out during Duke Nukem
Forever's development cycle and revolutionising
the world of single-player gaming, it must have
swiftly dawned on 3D Realms that the game they
were making was, by comparison, a big puddle of
leper's wee. So they canned what they had and
started working anew with a different game engine
and a different philosophy.
That's happened
about three times now to my reckoning, as the
industry moves on without them. It's like there's
this magnificent ship sailing along a coastline,
and 3D Realms are trying to build a house
opposite the ship, so they have to keep knocking
down the house and starting a new one where the
ship has moved onto. This is not a good way to
get a house built. You could continue the cycle
for twenty years and still have no houses to your
name. 3D Realms need to face facts - they can't
keep up with the ship, so they might as well stay
where they are and build their house. Maybe some
people would visit the house and complain that it
isn't near enough to the ship, but these people
you just twat with a frying pan and run.
When the
development time rolled into the third or fourth
year, it started to become annoying. Then it
became frustrating. Then it became funny. Then it
became slightly upsetting, like watching an
overweight retarded child with one leg and no
arms trying to keep up with the London marathon.
Then everyone just stopped caring, and the
overweight retarded child was left to hop alone.
The most
pathetic part of the whole debacle is that the
developers, 3D Realms, are still deluded enough
to think that (a) they're ever going to finish
the game, (b) that the game will be in the
slightest bit good enough to justify the wait,
and (c) anyone cares anymore. A company with any
sense would have just hanged the whole stupid
idea years ago and, when anyone asked, twat them
with a frying pan and run. But no, a token glance
at the 3D Realms website (still regularly
updated!) indicates that they're all still
enthusiastic about it and assuming everyone else
is, too. They've even started asking their forum
members
for ideas, which should give you some idea of how
much of the game these cack-handed fools have
actually made so far. And trust me on this - when
you ask people who post on forums for ideas,
that's the lowest of the low. That's one step
below asking your fucking dog.
I suppose you
could sort of admire their dedication, and their
never-say-die attitude, and their not wanting to
release a mediocre game. But even people with
never-say-die attitudes have to know where exists
the fine line between courage and idiocy. Right
now, 3D Realms the overweight retarded child is
still only two miles into the marathon, the
marathon ended four years ago, and he is being
repeatedly run over by European heavy goods
vehicles until he is nothing but a mass of oozing
flesh and splintered teeth dragging himself along
the tarmac with his eyebrows. Now, sports fans,
would be a pretty good time to say die.
Three things.
1. At this
point, if it doesn't want to be savagely kicked
in the kidneys by the gaming media, 3D Realms is
going to have to produce, not only the greatest
game ever devised, but also the greatest work of
art in the entire history of human endeavour.
They're going to have to come up with a piece of
software that can keep gamers occupied for
centuries, pass the Turing test, and restore
beloved dead pets to life. And if it doesn't fit
every single one of these criteria, the car park
of the 3D Realms building is going to play host
to the biggest effigy burning in history.
2. Any audience
this game could have had has whittled away to a
band of rabid fanboys blinded by faith. The
amount of people who are still on the edge of
their seats waiting for DNF could now comfortably
fit in a church hall, and there would still be
enough chairs left over to make a big modern art
sculpture of two donkeys fucking.
3. It's not even
a very good idea for a game. Gamers these days
have gotten used to a certain amount of
sophistication in their game plots, and a big
obnoxious musclebound chauvinist carrying
fourteen tonnes of weaponry single-handedly
foiling an alien invasion and being cruel to
women isn't going to fire the imaginations of
today's cynical gaming audience.
That's why I'm
starting the Please Stop Working On Duke
Nukem Forever And Get Onto Some More Worthwhile
Creative Projects campaign. It's pretty
self-explanatory. Basically, I'm going to sit
here, eat crisps, and wish that 3D Realms would
stop working on Duke Nukem Forever and get onto
some more worthwhile creative projects. If you
would like to join this campaign, please register
your name in the forums and buy a big bag of
crisps.
- Yahtzee
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Last Week On
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26/11/04:
Half-Life 2 Can Shuck My Funky
First of all,
because they asked for one nicely, here is a plug
for a website called Corporate Rock Whores. That was it just then.
Second of all, Chris and Trilby is coming up to 50
comics and I thought it might be fun to take in
some guest comics, like I did with Angular Mike and which resulted in a
great big heap of poo arriving at my inbox door.
If you'd like to do a guest comic, I'd prefer if
you uploaded them somewhere and gave me a link,
but if that's not possible then I suppose you can
email it to me. Just don't
make it too big. No bimp files; giffs, pings and
jaypegs only. And I'll only put up ones that are
funny. And please don't all just copy paste my
art. I know that's pretty much what I do, but if
you've got any artistic skill at all it would be
interesting to see other people's interpretations
of the characters.
Thirdly, I HAVE
NOW PLAYED HALF LIFE 2 BITCHES, thanks to my new
friend Gravy at Uptime Games, a nice little gaming
centre in Brisbane. I always knew this website
thing would pay off eventually, but imagine my
surprise when Gravy invited me, Siren-like, to
come down to his pad and sample Valve's unearthly
delights. So if you live in Brisbane, go and lend
them your patronage to make up for the lunch they
bought me. The rest of this article will be
devoted to discussing Half-Life 2 and
occasionally pausing to unleash a stream of rude
words.
So then,
Half-Life 2.
Piss poo dangly
shit arse fuck wee.
I have played this game. Ha ha. |
As
Gravy and I discussed today, Half-Life
Two seems like the game Valve wanted to
make when they were making Half-Life One.
They have made such a great effort to
maintain the same 'feel' as the original
- using the same sound effects and voice
actors, similar game controls and themes
- that it hardly feels like a
conventional sequel. It's kind of hard to
explain. HL2 takes the themes and
characters of HL1 and places them in a
much more advanced, living, breathing
environment, so that suddenly HL1 already
feels like a dirty little brother, like a
fan-made mission pack. |
It's
extraordinary, for a long-term fan of HL like me,
hearing all the voices of our old friends coming
from the mouths of highly advanced models.
Particularly right at the beginning, it's oddly
unsettling to zoom right up into the
Administrator's face and see every crack and pore
in his pasty skin. Barney the security guard
returns, looking less like an emaciated goon and
more like Robert Downey Jr for some reason. The
scientists are back and as useless as ever,
particularly the one who has attempted to
domesticate a headcrab, pulling out the teeth,
calling it Lamarr and playfully coercing it into
leaping onto his shiny noggin.
That's another
weird thing about HL2 - sometimes it almost feels
like it's taking the piss. Lighthearted moments
like the one mentioned above seem a million miles
from the blood-spattered horror of Black Mesa's
corridors, where soon-to-be-corpses were dragged
screaming into darkened vents by relentless
slimebeasts with big chompy teeth. There's no
longer that feeling of horrible isolation,
knowing that you, alone, are trapped deep in the
bowels of a base infested with bloodthirsty
ghouls, and that no-one is coming to your rescue.
Now we're out in the open, cheerfully passing the
time of day and giving headcrabs silly names. You
also get to meet the alien slaves, now
non-hostile, English speaking, and strangely
agreeable despite your having murdered ten
thousand of their fellows. You're not even
formally introduced to them. They just turn up
and start making jolly conversation while you
wonder why your bullets phase through them like
imaginary wasps.
Perhaps Valve
are going for a different angle this time around,
making some statement through the fact that the
cruel human soldiers are far worse monsters than
anything Xen has to offer. I'm afraid I was only
able to play up to the jetski sequence, but that
was more enough to form my horrible little
dried-up opinion.
Fuck cunt willy
willy wank piss mung.
| And
then we come to the physics engine. Oh,
the physics engine, for which so much
praise has been sung. What they say is
all true. It is fantastic the way you can
pick up boxes, the way they fall, the way
they tip over, the way they smash into
bits when you hit them. Ho yes, no more
of boxes spontaneously exploding into a
thousand splinters when you smack them
about enough times - HL2's boxes split
apart realistically, and then you can
pick up all the individual bits and hurl
them at strangers. You can even pick up a
TV as it blares the morning news, yank
the plug out of the socket, and hurl it
gleefully through a window to land on the
skull of some poor unsuspecting pleb. |
Spare some change? |
Valve
must have known that a huge amount of time would
be wasted by players picking up things and
throwing them at miserable passers-by. I just
wish they'd put that little bit more effort into
their reactions. It doesn't matter whether you
throw an empty cardboard box at their legs or lug
a fucking breeze block directly at their skulls,
all you get is a funny look and a slightly peeved
'Hey, cut it out!' I would have liked to see some
more realistic reactions when I hurled a bottle
at someone and it smashed against their temple.
And then, when I picked up the resultant shards
and hurled those, I would have liked to see them
actually become embedded in flesh while my victim
cried and begged for a merciful end to his
disease of a life.
Would you trust this man with a breeze
block? |
I
suppose we can expect some pretty fucked
up mods from the fan community with this
new 'chuck stuff like a retard' engine.
Perhaps some kind of mod based on the
films of Peter Jackson, where merely
gently flinging a piece of paper at
someone would cause their entire arm to
drop off and squirt blood everywhere. And
then you can pick up the arm and chuck it
down a well. Perhaps a multiplayer mod
set in a theatre where two players must
stand on stage and recite Shakespearean
dialogue, and if the rest of the players
in the audience don't like it, they can
hurl old fruit and shurikens. |
'Chuck
stuff like a retard' physics is the way forward
for everyone. It could finally be the outlet
everybody needs. In a world where we must be
sensible and act with respect for general
etiquette, what everyone needs is a realistic
environment where we can all throw televisions
through windows and laugh without fear of
reprisal. I firmly believe that this will
significantly slow the mental degradation of at
least three potential serial killers.
So, in
conclusion, Half-Life 2 good, you all wankers.
Wankers buy HL2. HL2 make wankers cooler.
- Yahtzee
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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!
|
