It's been a little over a year since I single-handedly designed, marketed, and became world high-score champion of my own AAA title, Final Fight: Stratego.   Although FF:S was a gargantuan success in certain foreign markets, I haven't written any games since that time.  And if the thousands of emails I've received from dedicated fans are any indication, that's fine with all of you.  And I'm a fag.   Still, it's just this kind of adversity that can prod me into action after twelve or fourteen months. 

On Monday, I decided to write a new game.  I wanted it to include some strategy, of course, while not sacrificing any action - a hallmark of games by me.  But this time I wanted it to take place in a multiplayer persistent online fantasy world.  The game I envisioned was a cross between the best part of Final Fight: Stratego (a tie between the fighting and the strategy) and Everquest.   On a piece of paper I wrote down "Everquest".  I stared at the word.   After a while, I drew an arrow from it.  At the pointy tip of the arrow, I wrote "1 million times better!!!"  And that's when lightning struck:   I would make a game like Everquest, but with a very significant difference: It's one million times better.

I sat down, rolled up my sleeves, sharpened a pencil, and got to work.  It quickly became apparent that I have absolutely no idea how to make an online multiplayer persistent world game.  I decided that my design document needed to be altered to accomodate this new information.  I scratched out "1 million" and wrote "1 hundred".  But even the result of this drastic narrowing of the game's scope proved to be too ambitious.  I realized that not only did I not know how to make a game like Everquest, I didn't even know how to go about learning how to make a game like Everquest.  I did some quick calculations using these two facts, and deduced that, with my current staff, the development time for my top-secret Everquest killer would be infinity.

So - and I know it's an industry truism you've heard a million times before - the product you'll soon be playing is merely a shadow of what it could have been had I not been under certain time constraints imposed by my publisher and biology. 

What I came up with was a modified version of FF:S called Alien versus Child Predator.  Instead of stealing characters from Capcom's Final Fight, I stole the game's antagonists from North Carolina's Sex Offender & Public Protection Registry.   Each of your enemies is an actual registered sex offender, one of the few groups more reviled than either aliens or Nazis.  FF:S's Counseler Dog is back to give you advice.  As I've stated before, you might not always understand what he's telling you, but listen harder!  He knows a lot about the eerie, Blade-Runner-ish world of Alien versus Child Predator. 

AvCP also includes a Pokemon-esque collecting feature.  There are currently over 80 sex offenders in the game and each one has a unique set of characteristics (which you can read about in the game's HUD).  These attributes help determine whether Alien should leap at the molester or utilize Thief-style stealth and lay an egg in him.  Every time you kill a sex offender, the molester is saved in your trophy room.  Can you stand it knowing you haven't collected them all?  The game also features a high-score table that records the top 10 Child Predator hunters - of all time! 

Note to Fox:  I was going to ask for your permission to use the Alien character, but then I realized that any objection you might have would be an implicit endorsement of child molesting.  Obviously, I know you don't support harming children, so for me to even ask would have been offensive.  I understand that I have your blessing without having to request it.  Alien versus Child Predator has already been named the official game of the U.S. Government, the state of North Carolina, and every U.S. Olympic Team (both regular and special), so you're in good company.  Come to think of it, that means that if you object to our use of your copyright, not only are you pro-child molesting, you're anti-Special Olympics!  But that's crazy-talk - you're good people.

Play Alien versus Child Predator!