Oh for fuck's sake...

Doubt you're feelin so hot. Maybe this'll make you feel better. Or less confused... If that's possible. Bear with me.

Social media in its entirety is just the tarted up, modern incarnation of a forum tradition that began in the early days of the internet with the BBS (a technology every geek over 40 will describe to you like they had to carve it into stone tablets. Uphill both ways. Which doesn't even make sense.)

Anyway, all I'm saying is that today's online platforms interconnect so effortlessly, they function like one giant forum. So it's a shame that the public discourse has moved here. Had to, really.

Because that move turned "The Public Discourse" into "just another forum thread." A god damn gigantic thread, true, and one that encompasses dozens of websites, but a thread nonetheless. As such, it fell victim to Ned's Internet Rule No. 4: "On a long enough timeline, every thread is a pile of shit."

Ever see what happens when a mod forgets to lock an old thread? Scroll down and watch a sane discussion about puppies or some shit become gnarled and twisted until it's just CAPS LOCK and racism and weird porn and "fuck George Lucas!" for some reason.

You try to track it; try to figure out how the comments section of a pumpkin pie recipe swap turned into some facile tirade about white supremacy. The same way you might wonder, for example, how a conversation about the complexities of contemporary human governance turned into a bunch of uneducated dipshits hurling blunt objects at minorities.

Then you spot it. Usually about half way down the thread, out of NOWHERE somebody said something so insane and shitty that it could't be ignored. Troll or not, a response was demanded. Then it was too late. From there you can watch the conversation tumble so far down the mountain that the summit becomes obscured by the curvature of the earth. If only a mod had been there to stop the discussion while it was still on point.

But they weren't. And the top-voted commenter became president. And he never even MENTIONED pumpkin pie.

Our entire conversation as a people is now one huge, uninterrupted, UNMODERATED thread. And what's worse, when we try to look up from the screen or turn it off, the thread's leaked out of the fucking Matrix. Alive and with no hard power switch.

Anyway, that's how I'm explaining... all this. But god dammit, we need to accept one thing: Since public discourse is online, we MUST get a mod... Patrick Stewart? I'm thinkin Patrick Stewart. Clear choice.

Street Fighter V Revisited: Games, Greed, and Gollum

Holy shit, I’m not dead! And I have enough free time to write something longer than a tweet! Let’s get caught up.

People on the internet were mad about many things, for a while there it was fucking hot if you lived in the northern hemisphere (still is if you live where I do), Uncharted 4 was the most amazing game I never finished (giving me some insight into how DiCaprio must feel about Victoria’s Secret models), Donald Trump’s a fat old cunt, pool water in South America turned green, No Man’s Sky was so boring it put me into fucking cryo-sleep (most realistic space travel sim ever, 10/10), summer movies were mostly shit, and Doom was the best video game to game a video in quite some time. Oh, and I’ve been building a room-scale VR game in Unreal Engine 4 with no prior experience... To answer your inevitable question: Yes, it is liberating to go completely fucking insane... 

Think that about covers it.

Speaking of a return to something long abandoned: I loaded up Street Fighter V for the first time since last spring. The reasons for this aren’t terribly important and could rabbit hole into their own posts, so I’ll ere on the side of brevity [fucking post's long enough already] and simply say it had something to do with Hardcore Mode in Mother Russia Bleeds, Tekken 7 being so far from release after so much waiting that I’m not entirely convinced it actually exists, and an inability on the part of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to keep my attention for more than 10 minutes.

So I had "nothing to play" in the same way there's "nothing to watch on Netflix," but was desperate to use this rare free time to actually play a video game for recreation. Rife with indecision, I made "The Fuck It Adjustment” and fired up Street Fighter V.

God. Dammit.

I’ve never had any truth, any heretofore nebulous concept so quickly solidify, and so ferociously kick me in the dick. Kinda like how you always academically know you're gonna die, then one day you're minding your own business and suddenly you fucking know you're going to die - like deep down, deep cuts KNOW it - and you either accept that fact and get back to whatever you were doing, or buy an embarrassing car and have a doctor yank your face up behind your ears and staple pubes to the top of your head... So, yeah. My SFV revisit was like that. I guess.

Street Fighter V's truth came with absolute clarity: It showed me, in short order, everything wrong with modern video games, and why those problems are, in fact, a big fucking deal. Not just high-pitched protests from a spoiled cavalcade of participation ribbon victims. 

Before I go any further, let’s take a crawl through the shit-trench that constituted the half-hour of my life just before I sat down to write this. Game loads; internal SFV update. Thought being able to play a game the second you wanted to was why auto-update became a thing, but whatever. Never got around to SFV’s story mode, so I figured I'd check that out. Selection was greyed out. No indication as to why or where it is, but I found it on the PS Store. For free! 8 gigs. Fucknut. Knowing that whatever tightly organized platoon of badgers Sony employs to deliver data to my console wouldn’t finish such a massive undertaking until sometime after Trump nukes Sweden, I resigned myself to the content I already had. It was time for a little training mode to shake off the cobwebs.

Fuck you, little gold icons.
[Sorry about the screencaps. All 9876 flash drives in my house fucked off and I couldn't be bothered to hunt them down.]

New stages! Locked. Surely 6 weeks of daily, 5-8 hour multiplayer sessions last spring left me enough Fight Money to unlock a few. Nope. Not even enough for one. And there's an official Capcom Pro Tour stage that I couldn't even buy with Fight Money if I had it. It's ten real dollars. Ten actual fucking dollars... For a stage in a fighting game.

If I have to absorb any more Stupid I'm gonna stroke out.

Patience was wearing thin, but I soldiered on, and loaded up an old map that I suddenly resented for its withered, plebeian inadequacy. New characters! Also locked. And they cost almost twice as much as the levels. New costumes! Each is four real dollars. Four fucking...ughrrrhhh... Could I at least set the characters I didn't have as my training dummy to learn their moves and possibly avoid having my shit completely rocked if I ran into them in multiplayer? No. Lovely.

Call 911

In the end, I just pounded on a practice dummy for fifteen minutes with all the enthusiasm of Kevin Spacey jerking off in the shower at the beginning of American Beauty (I was thinking about Tekken 7 the whole time, SFV... you need to know that), then I turned the damn thing off. There's very little chance I'll turn it back on again unless it's for couch co-op, but even that will be tainted by the sense that I don't own a full copy of Street Fighter V anymore.

For their part in the larger discussion about video games, I know these sorts of complaints are nothing new. They're a pervasive part of every nearly every AAA release, in fact. So this is hardly the first time I’ve encountered this money grubbing DLC bullshit. I'm sure you've run into it in whatever AAA title's in your rotation at the moment. This is, however, the first time I've had them fanned out in front of me all at once. All the content I don't have staring at me from little shopping carts over faded character portraits. And I'm sure it's no accident that all these "buy me!" icons look suspiciously like text message or facebook notifications.

"This incomplete character select screen bothering you, Ned? Is it? PAY UP, WAIF!

And there are just so fucking many of them. Most of which can only be purchased with real money. All told, if I wanted every bit of content on offer, I'd be out an additional NINETY-THREE FUCKING DOLLARS, for a grand total A HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE MOTHERFUCKING DOLLARS for a complete copy of SFV. And that's just to unlock all the levels, characters, and costumes. Forget about colors, titles, or profile designs. And I don't wanna hear any shit about being able to buy it all with in-game currency, cuz I've done the math on that too.

If you wanted to earn the 600,000 in "Fight Money" needed to unlock all the available characters, you'd have to compete in a minimum of 12,000 online matches. I say "minimum," because it's only 12k if you win every match. All the costumes? Another 12,800 wins for the 640k in Fight Money needed for those. Let's think positive and round every fight down to roughly 2 minutes, and you'd have to play for 826 hours ... that's THIRTY-FOUR FUCKING DAYS STRAIGHT. And that's assuming you win every match in 2 minutes, and doesn't include load times, server maintenance, sleep, etc. Yeah, fuck off Capcom.

I'd never even use half of the shit, I'd just be satiating the portion of my brain cocooned in game theory from a lifetime of positive feedback queues and satisfyingly clean notification menus.

It’s hard to notice how much additional content you’ve blindly tacked on to your initial $60 video game purchases when you’re drip feeding it cash 5 or 10 bucks at a time. Your buddy says “Hey, I got that map pack and I’m playin again. Wanna come get your ass whupped?” Fuck it. Why not, right? Five bucks to remind this bitch who runs shit? Easy to rationalize.

But loading up Street Fighter V again felt like going home to visit my loving mother only to find that she’s adopted five new kids she loves more than me, and while dinner's still free, I have to pay a utensil fee. And she converted my bedroom into an abattoir. That’s on fire for some reason...

... I'm saying SFV didn't greet me as the game I remember from last spring. Which is a far more efficient way to put things than I just did with that abused metaphor, but I haven't finished my second cup of coffee yet and my brain's tearing along at top speed but the track's all rickety. Sort of a "Donkey Kong Country mine cart" thing... I seem to have wandered a bit.

This is your brain on Ned.

I bought this game. I payed for it. I liked it. Defended it in the midst of an almost universally derided launch (against every instinct and rational thought to the contrary), and all my loyalty amounted to precisely dick. A bunch of menu screens so lousy with locked content they looked like they'd be more at home in a fucking free-to-play mobile game or a particularly well appointed demo. Does this make the core gameplay any less fun? No. Does it bother the everliving fuck out of me that my copy of SFV looks all... less than? Yes. Do a great number of games suffer the same fate? Also yes.

Again, I know this is just the way it is these days, I know I’m beleaguering the consensus, using a Port-o-John on the last day of a music festival; just another dehydrated stream of rage-piss on a sun-baked pile of taco-truck shit. But I need to draw attention to the fact that, for some reason, the very people getting fucked by this nonsense have decided that mentioning it is boring. Played out. Unpleasant.

Fuck that.

Indignation over an industry pissing down your back and calling it rain isn't a fad. It isn't outmoded. It doesn't trend for 20 hours and vanish. It's not to be discussed then filed away. It's a tumor that needs to be excised. And it doesn't matter whether the offending company provides entertainment or clean drinking water; opportunistic cash grabs at the expense of your customers is absolute shit behavior that wouldn't be tolerated by a kindergarten teacher giving five-year-olds a lesson on how money works... This angle needs a minute. We'll loop back around to it.

This “locked character” bullshit will not stand. 

Though I suppose “should not stand” would be more appropriate, because it will stand. There’s no fucking way I’m payin for this shit. To do so would sully fond childhood memories of unlocking every character in Tekken 2 for the thousandth time because I couldn’t afford a memory card, then reveling in my accomplishment as I watched all the cut scenes and pretended Tekken was a movie. I need those memories in pristine condition. They contain the pride my adulthood seems hellbent on hunting to extinction. Pride I'm trying to keep intact by not caving to the urge spend more money on SFV. A game I've already fucking paid for... Paid for part of, anyway.

Is it too much to ask that I load up a six-month-old game, say to myself “Golly! This is gonna be swell!” and not have that sentiment rendered as useless as the word “swell?” Apparently not. Apparently software update. Apparently new EULA I have to agree to and not read. Apparently “update downloaded, the game will now restart” Apparently cool content I can’t enjoy because apparently I OWE THIS GAME MONEY!

Am I the only one left who's completely enraged by this dog shit? Livid at the notion that I should "calm down bro, it's just video games?" It's not "just video games!" It's a symptom of a larger, shittier, more insidious problem. It's Comcast adding data usage caps to an unchanged internet service to grind money out of people that can't afford it. Managing to get away with their bullshit because they lobbied some floppy-faced old cunt who still thinks high-speed internet is somehow an option for a human living in 2016's America. It's paying $600 for a $60 EpiPen, or $500 for a plane ticket with a seat half the size it was 20 years ago. It's a bunch of fucking brainless, detached, millionaire musicians telling you how sorry you should feel for them because poor people downloading their music for free has damaged their art. It's the soulless, sociopathic, bottom line for a bunch of pricks so enamored with the expensive, vapid shape staring back at them through the mirror every morning, that they have no compunction about giving other human beings all the consideration a winemaker gives a barrel full of grapes as he stomps the juice out of them. Which isn't even harsh enough, because the grapes at least had quality health care right up until they were crushed under a Frenchman's foot.

It's this pricks face.

HOW CAN ONE HUMAN BEING BE SO PUNCHABLE! IT DEFIES ALL LOGIC! Oh my GOD. This is a visceral hate.

Martin Shkreli's greasy smirk. A man so obviously vile, so clearly without humanity or remorse, that if he was beaten to death by a bunch of terminal AIDS patients with nothing to lose, statues would be erected in their honor and a national holiday would be declared.

So when you feel that twinge of "Ahhgghh!! Ah! Fucking pricks!" next time a game company fucks you over, don't brush it off. Do you brush off the urge to punch 2016's Most Punchable Face Winner: Martin Shkreli? No. You don't actually do it cuz of a shitload of really good laws, but you let that feeling sit there cuz it feels right. Don't give game publishers a pass. No, they're not dooming AIDS patients to financial ruin or dumping toxic waste in the ocean, but they're complicit in a culture of greed and exploitation so pervasive and rotten as to be unsustainable if we plan on surviving as a species. Of that, they're no less guilty than Pomade Gollum over here.

Clearly, my brain did that rabbit hole thing again. I've either made some solid points or lost my mind, but I can't know for sure until I know whether I'm gonna be arrested for having publicly stated that I want to punch Martin Shkreli in the face or see him bludgeoned by his victims. #FreeTheNed

Let's wander back to the SFV discussion from whence we came: Where’s the fun in all this? Where’s the fun in just forking over cash to unlock a new character? Or grinding out so many matches for in-game currency that you’re too burnt out to enjoy the fruits of your labor? Why should we all be forced to accept having that fun sucked from something for the sake of financial viability? It's not even long-term viability, because as opposed to creating a generation of kids that fall in love with a game and pay out for years to come, they're embracing the "burn all the bridges, strip the copper out of the walls" set of business tactics that are so popular these days. Increasingly fucking ballsy too. "Yup, we're fuckin ya. Nope, nobody's gonna do shit to help you. Enjoy that cardboard box! I gotta go talk to a guy about jewel encrusting my yachts."

And I know you're out there, Spreadsheet Guy. I can smell the new, cheap carpet and Hot Pockets from here. I can hear you pounding antacid and mumbling some gibberish about quarterly earnings. I have a crazy idea for you: Sell me a quality video game at a reasonable price. By all means, lock characters, costumes, stages, whatever, but do it as an incentive to dig deeper. Let me earn them by playing the game. Not grinding, mind you. I want to defeat bosses, solve puzzles, find absurdly oblique secrets, get to know the game, have fun with the game. Do this right and I'll be hopelessly addicted. Ask those developer guys what all this stuff means. They're the dudes and dudettes with that "creative vision" thing you're constantly wiping your ass with.

Get me addicted to this quality product that was worth my money, and my excitement will burst fourth as hashtags, increasing that "social media presence" some kid in a flannel shirt told you was so important. So besotted I'll be, that you can make your big move and fleece me for all I'm worth with merch like a fancy soundtrack on vinyl that I’ll buy even though I don’t have a record player because I’m fucking stupid. Stupid for your game.

I...uhhh.... I really like Furi.

But none of this can work if you gut the game of any progression that doesn't involve quarter turn forward + credit card. If I can't earn anything on my own, my actions begin to lose their meaning. Then I'm going through the motions. Then I get bored. Then I get gone.

Fuck it. I'm shaking my fist at the sky. Spreadsheet Guy'll never listen. He doesn't care to understand that a sense of discovery and exploration is every video game's main support pillar. Not just RPGs or open world action. All games. I explore fighting games, you might explore a MOBA or an arena shooter. Exploration isn't moving your character toward the horizon, it's enveloping yourself in the game. Understanding it. Much of that comes from a sense of meaningful progression. It’s how and why we get to know them, develop a passion for them, and drive ourselves fucking batshit crazy trying to create them.

Tearing out that support pillar (in SFV's case, the thrill of finding and unlocking extra content) and selling it back to us might present a few problems. Principally that central pillars are, by and large, pretty fucking structurally significant! 

But no, publishers, you still think that's the "old financial model." Pre-online console. Not financially viable. So, by all means, after you sell us the House of Games, be sure to wrap a tow chain around its most important structural component as you leave, then yank the load-bearing fucker right out of the foundation. Just don't feign surprise at our reaction.

Ok, this reference might be too vague... Lethal Weapon 2's on Netflix. Avail yourself.

Game Publisher: "Okie dokie! Here's your pillar! That'll be $39.99!"

Player 1: "You just tore my fucking house down!"

GP: "I'm sorry you feel that way, but this pillar just wasn't ready in time for you to move in! But it's ready now!"

P1: "I just watched you pull it out from under my house with that truck, and walk back over here."

GP: "We value your feedback! Like us on facebook for a $5 voucher toward the purchase of your pillar!"

P1: "What the fuck good is that going to do me at this point?!"

GP: "Well, without it you can't have the "complete house experience."

P1: "I can't possibly have the 'complete house experience!' Having all the parts for a house doesn't mean I have a fucking house!"

GP: "Tell ya what, we'll send somebody over to patch this up for ya!"

P1: "How do you intend to 'patch up' a pile of fucking rocks?!"
GP: "A little bit at a time, randomly, over the course of weeks, months, or years. Some patches may set fire to the rubble-err, 'house experience,' and we may stop patching if it gets too difficult."
P1: "Stop for how long, exactly?"
GP: "Ever!"
P1: " ... Fuck it, I'll do it myself."

GP: "I'm sorry, but patching your own house violates your EULA."

P1: "This is fucking ridiculous ... Hey! What the fuck is this?! I thought this house had 60 bricks per wall? There are only 24!"

GP: "The human eye can only see 24 bricks per wa-"

P1: "AHHHHHH!!!" *MURDERMURDERMURDERSTABMURDER*

That's your business model, game publishers. But you forgot that you live in the god damn house with us.

Shit! Forgot to rip on Capcom: Way to ruin one of my favorite fighting games, you greedy dipshits. See if I let you get your slimey hands on any more of my god damn mon--

Fuckbean.

Teasing Teasers Teased Teasers

I just watched a six second 'teaser trailer teaser' for the next Bourne movie. This is far from the first time this has happened, and it’s not even the most extreme example. That dubious honor goes to The Episode VIII “production begins” teaser. 

But having typed out the words “I just watched a six second teaser trailer teaser,” I’m now forced to face the reality that I’m at least partly responsible for this bullshit (sharing, liking, retweeting, blogging about it), and I’m pretty sure I hate myself. I’ll get back to you.

Based on this trend of teaser trailer teasers, we’re tracking for a teaser teaser teaser tease for Episode IX sometime next week. Just a single drum beat and the roman numeral IX. It’ll hit 20 million views in five minutes, and immediately be followed by hour long trailer analyses from popular YouTubers, who will incessantly pause the four second opus to give you their expert opinion on the featured drum beat and its appearance in a suspiciously large number of scenes featuring Obi-Wan Kenobi. “We’re out of time, but check out part II tomorrow, where we’ll discuss the significance of this font. So hype! [#EpisodeIX][Patreon link]

I can’t speak for the rest of the planet, but this sort of behavior represents a problem I need to address: I’m so obsessed with the "next thing," that I hardly pay attention to the "thing that’s happening right now." It’s so easy to fall behind, talk about something irrelevant, that I’ve become obsessed with the concept of keeping up. Especially considering my decision to “somehow someway one day” make money talking or joking about video games, which just exacerbates the issue. If I post a YouTube video even one day after its subject matter is done trending, no one’s going to watch it. 

Every week is just another meme-laden series of popcorn farts that can’t stay in the public consciousness long enough to have an meaningful conclusions drawn from them. Should I want to pause long enough to really dig into something, I’d better hope the internet train slows down so I can get a good look. Otherwise, too bad. “We’re not talking about that anymore. But they are,” the internet-conductor seems to say, pointing at a group of megafans as they put on horse-blinders and leap from the train. “Have fun! When they land, they just sit down and jerk each other off.”[Fig. 1]

Fig. 1

All I can do is look forward, and hope to catch something on the horizon that’s actually interesting, and not just a tin-can glinting in the sun from atop a landfill. This way I can guess what it is, make assumptions about how it will look when the train actually passes it, and if I’m proven right; BAM! Proper understanding. If I’m wrong? I just wasted my time trying to figure out if there was any inherent worth to a pile of garbage. But with any luck, the rest of you will be looking with me. [#SoPumped][Link to Patreon]

Maybe I should just get off and walk.

Clank Hole

I just finished Ratchet and Clank for PS4, and now there’s a hole inside of me. You know the one. When a book, or movie, or binged TV series ends, and you just don’t know what to do with yourself. Portlandia covered this pretty well:

Luckily for me, Ratchet and Clank’s challenge mode is essentially new game plus, adding weaponry and upping the ante on the cash and prizes gained for searching every nook and cranny of the map for sweet sweet treasure. In this case, bolts and rareitanium, the game’s currency for weapons and their upgrades respectively. So I have an excuse to stay in Ratchet and Clank’s wonderfully realized galaxy a little longer, and save that galaxy on hard mode. The mode of heroes.

Ned: Hero

The prevailing description of Ratchet and Clank has been that it’s like playing a Pixar movie, and that couldn’t be more true. Minus that ubiquitous Pixar moment that crushes your feels into a fine powder, which I can only imagine is then collected by elves so it can be snorted by the Pixar staff to fuel production of their next emotional kick to the nuts. Just gettin fucked up on feels powder... I need more coffee.

Tony: Interim Pixar CFO

But maybe they did plan such a nut-kick... The game ends. That hole I mentioned was very real before I knew there were plenty of legit reasons to play Challenge Mode, and even though that’s given me a 20 hour stay of execution, this game will end. Then what?

Oh SHIIIIIIT!

Thank. Fuck. It would figure that the last game I play on a traditional screen before getting my VR headset is a throwback to everything that has made these games so great. It’s a greatest hits album; a museum of every technique that evolved with the medium since an oscilloscope was turned into a rudimentary tennis game. That Ratchet and Clank is also a reboot of arguably the last great mascot game of my youth isn’t to be understated, as it recalls all the characters that have colored my video game life: Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet and Clank, Gex... Ok, maybe not that last one. If only because he was clearly too cool to hang out with the rest of the Mascot Gaming Crew. 

Gex: Hideja girlfriend, hideja mom.

So while I replay Ratchet and Clank to get one last look at everything before I turn it off, I’m also looking back over an entire lifetime of video games that began when I was 2 and my mother dropped a quarter into Pole Position to keep her absurdly hyperactive child distracted while she checked out at the local Kroger. I could barely reach the steering wheel, but a permanent electrical connection was established in my brain. For good or ill, the damage was done.

I say all of this because 2D gaming on a monitor may one day go the way of the Tiger Handheld. If it does, it won’t be any time soon, or completely, but in either case VR will irrevocably change video games. You can see it when you put on a VR headset, hear it when you listen to VR devs talk about crafting experiences for the medium. The rules, the lessons learned, the core tenants. The past thirty years no longer apply. New rules are being established, priorities are being shifted. 

Once VR is more affordable (I say “more,” because my Vive cost about what my cell phone was worth when it was new) and in the hands of the masses, who’s to say that everything that draws us to video games in the first place won’t simply be better realized with VR? That it’s just a better tool for accomplishing the same set of goals?

That gaping Clank Hole (wait... fuck it, stream of consciousness) left by completion of Ratchet and Clank, or that Portlandia screaming fit I linked you to, or the depression that comes with “The End” is a result of (at least in my case) being forced to leave a world you’d been occupying with your imagination and the help of a few choice tools; Language, pictures, controller, whatever.

As I said, maybe VR will be better at delivering that sense of presence. It’s certainly got a technical advantage. Either way, as long as I can meet my friends inside of my sci-fi goggles, I’m excited to see what happens.

Friends: Because real people are assholes.

DOOMed

Thanks god Ratchet and Clank exists and is fucking amazing. Were it not for that, the particular brand of horrible on offer in the DOOM multiplayer beta might have been the straw that shattered my sanity. Between my Vive not shipping, Scarlett JOHANSSON as Motoko KUSANAGI in Ghost in the Shell, Batman vs. Superman, and FUCKING DOOM, it's a god damn miracle there's not a gif of me naked in the middle of downtown getting tazed by one of those segway cops.

Well, shit. Doom multiplayer is awful.

The open beta is live this weekend on PC, PS4, and XBone, and my god is it a wreck. Again, I’ve let myself get hyped, only to be dumped like I shit myself on prom night.

And what’s bothering me isn’t that the DOOM’s multiplayer is bad (it is), it’s that it’s called Doom (we’re doing caps lock for the remake, lowercase for the OG, because Bethesda did that “name the reboot the same thing” thing.) 

Every trailer, interview, and gameplay demo since it was debuted at E3 has been hammering us over the head with this promise of a return to the fast paced, rocket jumping, arena multiplayer games of yore. The remake of the original Doom theme pounding in the debut trailer, while the screen fills with the blood and metal and Cyberdemons and “fuck you, kill shit” 90s brutality that put the original Doom and Quake on a historical pedestal usually reserved for the likes of Mario and Pong. DOOM’s promotion asserted with such confidence that its primary concern was staying true to form, that it even fooled a cynical, “no preorders under any circumstances” motherfucker like myself. They convinced me (or I convinced myself) that no matter its shortcomings, at least that much would be true. The single player would be Doom, and the multiplayer would, essentially, be Quake. 

And it’s not. Dear god, is it not. A great arena shooter doesn’t have loadouts. DOOM does. A great arena shooter has twitch-freak speed. Black Ops III is faster than DOOM. A great arena shooter embraces verticality, allowing for frenetic, acrobatic ‘splosion-fests. DOOM’s combat happens at ground level. A reality that results in the game’s greatest sin: The rocket jump is a pointless, flacid, dick waggle in the direction of one of the coolest tactics in the history of competitive gaming.

The rocket launcher in Quake III was a swiss army weapon. The old standby. Rocket jump absurdly high in the air, aim at enemies on the ground, shoot at their feet, land, circle strafe while railing spacebar, and 1-3 shots later (depending on your aim and enemy armor level) you’re swimming in giblets. If that ground based enemy was equally skilled, it was time for a brutal aerial ballet. A ballet that also ended in giblets...It was fucking beautiful... I wasn’t really going anywhere with that, I’m just being wistful for the sake of it. And that’s not my fault. They called this game Doom. Invoked legacy and nostalgia in its aesthetics and branding. Pretended to the throne. OFF WITH THEIR HEAD!

I’ve found it impossible to judge this game without that legacy coloring my conclusions, but unfurling the facts makes it fairly obvious that even if I could judge DOOM on its own merits (lack of), said judgement would be harsh. It tried to be both loadout and pick-up focused, two great tastes that have proven time and again they don't taste great together. Even if these oil-and-water setups miraculously emulsified, the result would be rendered mute as soon as the Demon Rune spawned. A pickup that turns one lucky player (lucky being the operative term) into a dual rocket launcher wielding, STUPIDLY over-armored Revenant. This guarantees a huge increase in frags, tipping the game’s tenuous balance so horribly that it falls over and shatters its coccyx.

I take back that last sentence. Not the balance part. Or coccyx cuz that word's hilarious. I take back use of the word “frag.” These aren’t “frags,” they’re “kills.” They’re frags in Doom or Quake. Unreal Tournament 2k4 even merits use of the term. But not DOOM. You haven’t earned the word frag, DOOM!

All of this is bad enough, but there’s something truly horrible that still lurks in the darkest corners of this shit pile: The combat is paper mache. The guns feel weak, the hits barely seem to register, the deaths aren’t gratifying, and in what can only be construed as an effort to drive this "action-rpg bad" combat home, hit points appear over your opponents head with every successful shot. They can be turned off in the option menu, but as they’re on by default, you’ll just be blinding yourself to the obvious. This is a Bethesda game. And for any perceived good brought by that company (I’m no fan, but I can understand the appeal), they’ve never been the best at making the kind of gratifying combat at the core of Doom’s appeal. Wolfenstein was solid, but not a classic, and DOOM is most certainly a backpedal.

I’ve never had my hopes dashed so quickly as with such finality as they were in the time between loading up DOOM and playing my first match. (I didn’t even get into the “arena shooters are at their best in free-for-all, which is absent from the beta” thing.) 

Single player better show up on time, bring beer, and stay late to help clean up, or there’s no way DOOM and I are gonna be friends.

Your Party Chat Invites Scare Me

If you've ever sent me a chat or game invite, I probably ignored it. And fret not, I feel like an asshole. But maybe this will help explain why. Also (unrelated), WHERE'S MY FUCKING VIVE, HTC?! I'M LOSING MY SHIT!

I have a confession to make: I’m socially awkward.

Not in real life. God no. I’m awesome at that. Not for lack of effort though. I grew up in the middle of the woods on a tiny, bridgeless island in South Carolina, with nothing to keep me company but my trusty PS1 and AOL’s Final Fantasy VII chatrooms. As a result of my isolation, cars and computers interested me more than my “image” (I wasn’t even aware of the concept), leaving me to arrive for my first day of high school after a 45 minute, 5am school boat ride with a bowl haircut and a Garfield Trapper Keeper. I assumed people would like me because of my mint condition Marvel Series 2 card collection [Fig. 1] 

Fig. 1's not gonna work, 14-year-old-me! No matter the lack of foxing! No one even knows what that means!

High school was rough.

I spent my twenties learning to be social. Slowly, methodically, and with a little help from ample portions of bravery gravy. [Fig 2.] 

Fig. 2 - Looooots of Fig. 2.

I learned to talk to people. More importantly I learned to listen (occasionally... I’m a little hyperactive), eventually landing a job as a bartender and in the “big city,” [Fig. 3] and cementing myself as a functional adult. Complete with a carefully cultivated image.

Fig. 3 - Ok, not that big, but it's damn sure pretty... And drunk.

Meanwhile, however, the internet was deciding that everybody needed to talk to each other. Like, actually talk. With words. Fucking constantly. The chats and blogs and IM conversations and “gg’s” hastily typed into Unreal Tournament 2k4’s console that had been the balm I rubbed on my social wounds each day had turned to one-way social media conversations and in-game party chats. Which brings us (finally) to my social shortcomings: I’m awful at party chat. I hate it. It reminds me of high school. And not just because of the number of teenagers with whom I frequently find myself sharing a skill level. #MLG #rekt

I get nervous and hide from party chat invites. If I accept, my heart rate increases and my gameplay skills falter. The social armor and weaponry I spent so much time developing is completely useless when I can’t use my image. An image I’ve spent so much time living with, it’s permanently attached to my personality like the Venom Symbiote. In party chat I can’t be myself (whatever that means), the things I say do nothing to define or endear me to others, and I’m generally a complete wreck; I’m fucking 14 again. And much like that socially awkward Ned of yesteryear, my concern isn’t that people won’t like me if they get to know me. It’s that I’ll poorly communicate who I am, leaving people with the wrong impression. My preoccupation with that concern is certainly worth exploring, but not in a stream of consciousness blog written on one cup of coffee.

This problem is in no way mitigated by social gaming having reached its zenith of late. The fun of many games hinges on their social components (DotA2, The Division), minimizing or in many cases eliminating the solo-play experience. This is a concept pushed by publishers and developers, reinforced by the so-saturated-it-will-never-dry let’s play phenomenon, and the maddeningly voyeuristic reality of Twitch and Youtube Gaming. Party chat invites come and go constantly on PS4 and Steam, and I cringe every time I see and subsequently ignore them. “Shit,” I think “I haven’t even said anything and all these people think I’m an asshole...”

At this point I'm left with two options: Play nothing but single-player and solo-multiplayer games, tearing a large portion from the canvas of modern gaming, or suck it up and learn how to be social in a whole new way. Develop new social armor and weaponry. Upgrade it. Level up.

Speaking of armor and weaponry, I’m going to go play the new Ratchet and Clank. Where I can hide from social obligations and be king of blowing up robots. Then probably make a youtube video about Ratchet and Clank, where I can safely edit and modify and reshoot and retake every second of footage. So I can use my image to convey who I am. Wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong impression.

Holy SHIT, this thing's still here?!

Really? Three years since I updated this shit-heap? Fuck you, time! I thought we had a deal! You don't constrict as I age, and I don't mention that weekend in Boca with Einstein... Whatever, fuck you anyway. THEY PEGGED! I have photographic evidence!

No matter. To the point: I haven't updated Stir Fried Gaming in a while for a few reasons. Reasons I will condense into the only sentences worth reading if you're just dyin for s'more Ned... Coincidentally, "Dyin for S'more Ned" is the name of my new album. Only available on Tidal (fuckin TOPICAL HUMOR, AMIRITE?!) Moving on...

Stir Fried Gaming will (in short order) become Stir Fried Thoughts, because I have a fuckton more to talk about than video games, and I'm tired of being hamstrung by the whole "game" thing. It also makes way more sense as a title. Who the fuck would stir fry a video game? I've tried. No amount of soy sauce can save it... Because it's made of plastic. Or, y'know, data if you're like me and dumped physical media in 2012... Long story short; never lick your modem.

Also, as this transition occurs, I'll start uploading my mixed reality and VR enabled YouTube videos to coincide with the launch of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Figuring out how to manage such feats and the time inherent to that process are precisely the reasons I never bothered to publish videos on how bitchy it was to hate the Street Fighter V release, or any of the other Stir Fried Thoughts (haHA!) I've had since February... Thoughts that would have made perfectly tolerable videos.

Service resumes soon, and... fuck it. I'll start updating this cobwebbed blog again. Good warmup if anything. But I'm leaving the banner as-is. A monument to my inability to Photoshop a god damn thing in 2013. Soooo... I suppose I'll see you Monday.

Stop touching that, you'll go blind,
Ned