Sun Tzu, the turn-based wargame nerd's Yoda, once said "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."  At one time or another, we've been enemies of both the Gamefan Network and Voodoo Extreme.   Erik went through a phase where he agitated Voodoo Extreme's head imaginary seller of women, Billy "Wicked" Wilson, by tirelessly pretending to think Billy's nickname was "Stupid".  Later, he invented a word association game based on taking a Voodoo Extreme staff member's "street" name and seeing how few steps it would take to arrive at a derogatory term for homosexuals.  A typical round might go like this:  Erik'd say "Outlaw" and then I'd say "Burglar" and then Erik would yell "Turd Burglar!  I win!"  The thing is, though, he won with an assist from me, meaning we both really won.  There are no losers in Voodoo Extreme Gay Word Association, which is what makes it such a great game for kids.   We don't remember anymore what we did to Gamefan, but both Erik and I have fuzzy memories of it being bad.  Now Gamefan and Voodoo Exteme are enemies.  According to Sun Tzu, that makes both of them our friends.  As per usual, it took a tragedy to finally bring us all together.

Back when we were at war with Voodoo Extreme, we struck what we thought was the killing blow when Marvin created Marvin Sedate, a service for our beloved community that reported all of VE's news but stripped out the pimp talk.  Unfortunately, it broke after a few weeks, and Erik and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.  It's ironic that current events, science, and geography have now forced us to assist the community by putting the pimp talk back into your daily news.  Aside from being the only gaming website to be both officially endorsed by the U.S. Government and under investigation for wanting to violently overthrow the U.S. Government, we continue to be the only media outlet of any type that cares about you.  With that in mind, if you feel the need to have your link to some Monkey Island 4 screenshots supplemented with statements regarding the impressive width and potency of the link transcriber's manmeat, simply click here.  It's not perfect, but it'll have to do for now.   (The previous filter died - this is a new one - you must click on the Dialectize button to see the VE Backup)

It took me a week of crying to get over it.  Actually the crying didn't help but when Erik sent me this "Hang in There" Motivational Ecard it turned my life around.  If this dog can hang in there for a few more minutes, you know the fun is going to start.  They will probably cut him down - give him a treat - maybe play football with him in the backyard.  The lucky lives dogs lead.*   If this fun loving pup can hang in there,  I can keep going.  To honor this lucky dog, here are some other inspired folks who are just  "Hanging in There":

• The guys from 4D Rulers for keeping at their Prey like release schedule for Gore.
• Ion for bothering to release a new patch for Daikatana that doesn't involve installing a new game not named Daikatana.
• DailyRadar - who won't let the lack of news stop them. Last week's news?  Online Games are going to be big!   Hopefully next week they will cover this thing I heard about called First Person Shooters.
• Companies that just keep giving it away.  Net2Phone - totally free PC to phone long distance calls anywhere in the USA.  If you have a fat pipe the quality is not that bad.  Good enough to call up Erik and let him know I may be uncool but he is still the biggest fag at OMM.
  

-Ed: Please don't tell Chet the real story behind the pic, it will start the crying again.

the best writing in computer action, adventure, and role-playing games can't compare to the quality of writing found in even the average film or TV show.

I think Rich's point is that games are not TV shows.  Here's a scoop that may inspire him to grind out his next untitled article:  If you lay a piece of bread on games, they won't turn it into toast.

And I'm not saying that I enjoy the stories in games, because I don't.  I'm just not convinced that stories are that important.  Grim Fandango (which, for some reason, Carlson doesn't include on his short list of well-plotted games) has a great story.  If it was a movie, I'd watch it.  Unfortunately, the excellent plot grinds to a halt every few minutes so that the game can force you to deal with its tedious adventure mechanism. 

Boy lovers don't write lengthy think pieces decrying the lack of boys in modern games, because they're smart enough to realize that God met their requirements when he invented real boys.  Likewise, story lovers should just accept the fact that non-interactive media such as books, television, movies, and, in case all of those somehow disappear, plays, have stories and dialogue pretty much covered.  Games are something else altogether.  They require a new and as yet unformed way of creative thinking.   Note to super-smart adventure gamers who never fail to mention that they're too smart to for TV but will gladly spend two hundred excruciating hours wringing any itty-bitty bit of plot out of Jane Jensen's latest crappy opus:  Watch some televison, they put stories on there now.

Carlson's piece is actually directed at current and aspiring game creators.  His advice to them?

study the M.A.S.H. or Northern Exposure TV show scripts ... for some real inspiration and dialog-writing chops.

I think I should stop my analysis right here and speak directly to all the enthusiastic young newcomers to the game industry:  If you're about to sink two years of your life and your entire savings into a game project, DO NOT MAKE A M.A.S.H. GAME!   Richard Carlson is an industry veteran, he's your competition, and he'd like nothing more than to see you fail.  If at any point in the design process, thanks to tricky Dick Carlson, you feel as if maybe you should make the game more like Northern Exposure, you should stop, take a deep breath, then scratch out the words "Northern Exposure" and write either of the phrases "Add Snowboarding" or "More like Virtua Tennis!"  If you need some dialog inspiration, trust me when I tell you you can't go wrong with something like this:

Screaming crusty old veteran such as Robert De Niro: "Why are you even here?"

Cuba Gooding Jr. as the tearful, determined rookie: "I just want to be the best!"

Speaking of that, Carlson inevitably incorporates the following old chestnut into his litany of complaints:

And that reminds me. Where is the opposite camp in all of this? Where is the feminine point of view?

What does this mean?  Nobody knows.  This exact statement eventually gets trotted out to impugn everything from hockey to the manufacture and distribution of feminine hygiene products.  If I had to guess, certain men will work these words into every argument because they simply can't stop angling for pussy long enough to complete an entire, unrelated thought.  In this case, however, the "egalitarian gambit" gives Richard Carlson all the excuse he needs to run this funny picture of Roberta Williams:

"Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one."

Good one, Rich. 

In closing, I'd like to point out that Richard Carlson and I are not completely at odds.  We both apparently feel that games have terrible plots, painful dialog, and that all games suck.  He says:

amateur voice acting only pronounces the bad dialog in recent computer games.

I hate bad acting too.  On the other hand, I like really bad acting.  For instance, the new HellBoy demo is merely regular awful in terms of gameplay and graphics, but it does contain this inspired line delivery (34K), seemingly straight out of a John Waters movie.  The demo also includes what may be the worst line reading (8K) in gaming history.  The HellBoy team should give up the game part and just make it into a non-interactive cartoon.

• I read on Blue's News that the second part of the BIOS optimization guide at Adrian's Rojak Pot has finally been published.

• In other news, a new version of Counterstrike was released, which is significant because I've never played Counterstrike.  I lost my copy of Half-Life before Counterstrike was invented.  If anyone wants to give me a copy for free, send me some mail.  If Chet wants to admit that he took my copy of Half-Life, then never gave it back, he can also feel free to mail me.  Or you could mail Chet and ask him if he didn't steal Erik's Half-Life, why did Erik see it in a photo of Chet's new den when Chet was showing him pictures of his new house?  Point out to him that either (a.) he has it or (b.) he better call a priest because he bought some kind of Amityville Horror house haunted by Erik's missing copy of Half-Life.

• On Sunday, a reader sent me mail saying she had a picture of a magazine that managed to fetishize the smell of burning human flesh.  She gave me three guesses as to who published it.  Japan was my first guess.  Just to be safe, I chose Japan as my second and third guesses as well.  In a shocker that I can only describe in terms of all the shocking things that happened in Planet of the Apes plus, right after you discover the Statue of Liberty, you trip over an ancient copy of the New York Times whose headline reads: Lucky Wal-Mart Shopper Purchases 100 millionth copy of John Romero's Daikatana, here is the photo of that magazine:

click image to enlarge it or click here to make it smaller

I don't know what to say - it's American.  In the fifties, you could walk into whatever they called 7-11 back then and buy magazines that contained articles called "Smell The Flesh of Roasting Japs!"  I apologize to Japan, though I don't doubt that this same topic will appear as the central theme of some Japanese guy's website on POE next week.

• Like Something Awful's Lowtax, we've got chronic money troubles.  Over the weekend, things got so bad that we decided to flip a coin to figure out who would go get a job.  Things got worse when we realized that we didn't even have a coin to flip.  Chet suggested that we punch each other, and whoever turned out to be the weakest would have to seek employment.   To me, this didn't sound like a good idea, so I looked Chet right in the eye and quite slowly and clearly said "No. I will go get a job."  I guess he must have misunderstood me because he punched me really hard right on my temple.  Once I could see something other than static, Chet said "Let's make it two out of three," and hit me again.

It turned out the joke - along with some blood that squirted out of my eye - was on Chet, because I got the world's best job: web-operating an armed security robot in Bangkok.  My beat was a triangular area between the Hua Lum Pong Railway Station, Lumpinee Park, and the National Stadium on Rama 1 Road.  At first, I was overly cautious and not very effective.  I operated the mouse with both hands and barely shot at anyone.  But after a few minutes, I blossomed into a seasoned pro - three days from retirement, and getting too old for this shit.  I discovered I could stop crime with just one hand, which left the other one free for guiding circus peanuts into my mouth.  A combination of my inability to speak Thai and my incredibly healthy self-image led me to believe that the things the crusty old sergeant kept screaming at me were meant to be encouragement.  With his apparent blessing, my methods of law enforcement became much stricter.  Soon, I was a cross between Robocop and a machine gun whose trigger is stuck in the shoot position.  Within fifteen minutes, my robot had run out of bullets.  Acting on the Bangkok Armed Security Robot Cop's best friend - a hunch - I discovered that I could use the machine's metal claws to scale suspected lawbreakers and rip chunks of skin from their heads.  Not long after I invented this crime fighting technique, a super-criminal, who must have stolen an F5A Freedom Fighter from the Royal Thai Air Force, flew overhead and shot a missile at my robot, destroying it. When I re-logged on to requisition a new robot with more bullets this time, I found out that I'd been shitcanned and also put on some kind of most-wanted list.  Buddhism is the world's most tolerant religion, but I guess they do have a breaking point, because they put a bounty of ten billion Thai bahts on my head.   Luckily, Thailand is so far away that nobody I asked even knows for sure where it is.

• On Saturday, 3DHardware.net examined the Asus A7V Socket-A mainboard.

Today he published an interview with American McGee in which they discuss American McGee's "American McGee's Alice".  Redwood starts with an easy question whose answer is seemingly obvious, "How did you first come up with the idea behind Alice?"   McGee begins to ramble and in the process manages to mention Doom, Doom 2, Quake, the freeway, American McGee, the band Crystal Method, his other big idea "a game where you fought bugs from the future", and Quake 2.   After a few hundred words, he stops.  You can't tell from the way the interview is written, but I imagine there was a thirty or forty second pause while Redwood waited for him to catch his breath and say something about Lewis Carroll.  At the point where it must have become uncomfortably clear that McGee was done answering, Redwood says for him:

Obviously the original Lewis Carroll stories (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) were your basic source for Alice...

Which reminds McGee to thank Tim Burton and Edward Gorey.  I gotta give Redwood credit, that was a classy way to inject an editorial jab into the interview.

I just went back to check something in the interview, and I noticed that it wasn't written by Redwood, but by someone called JCal.  I'm not going to to rewrite this whole thing at this point, so congratulations to Redwood.

"Have you seen my pen?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

<stare>

<stare>

<rubs head as if it hurts> "Has American McGee seen American McGee's my pen?"

 
"He has not!"