Release date: Out Now

Formats: PC, PS3, XBOX 360

Price: £23.99

UK, June 26^th 2009 – God, I love power. It gives me a fat, densely-veined horn. I would piss all over my grandmother if she saluted me in return.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear these words spoken by Hannah Montana, you should buy this game immediately.

Let’s start with a little History. The first American towns were remote islands in a vast sea of wheat, held together by the oppression of their Puritan faith. The Community was all; neighbour told tale on neighbour, and all backs were bowed under the crushing weight of Dogma. With the modern age came the veneer of civilisation, but under the surface of every provincial American town lurks the spectre of fundamentalism; the seed of something great, and dark, and ugly.

This time, the seed has found fruitful soil and grown. It has grown into Hannah Montana.

Child’s Play

In this inspirational kids’ game, based on the 2009 movie by Darren Aronofsky, you play a young and dead-eyed religious fanatic whose dream is to rise from simple Southern schoolgirl to the religious Messiah of her entire town. Along the way you’ll learn important lessons about friends, responsibility, and practical mass suicide techniques.

So come on come on / Point out the unbeliever / Reveal his sin unto the Lord / And let him be purified by fire this day

HM: TM plays like Grand Theft Auto crossed with The Waltons. As you roam, sandbox-style, around your small town (controlled via a sometimes clunky third-person camera), your job is to win over the other inhabitants to your faith with fun song-and-dance routines, coupled with physical violence and the threat of eternal damnation.

Each follower brings revenue, and greater numbers allow you to hire out successively larger venues for your performances. You’ll go from Lord-themed disco all the way up to football stadium, and then who knows… maybe you’ll even take your fans to Heaven itself.

Montana paces her home, deep in thought. Her step-parents have been instructed never to look her in the face.

You Know… For Kids

Although the game features scenes of religious hatred on a huge scale, the designers are ever aware that it’s aimed at a younger audience. For this reason, God is represented by an alpaca.

Father Alpaca, benevolent Lord… and regretful Punisher.

Father Alpaca is also your in-game guide, giving you mission objectives and letting you know when you’re falling short of His Holy Ideal.

Father Alpaca looks on. “Why must I be so hard on myself”, Hannah asks of him. “Because you are dirty, child; dirty in the eyes of the Alpaca.”

This Little Piggy Runs A Book Shop

God is always guiding Hannah, using visions to show her the true way to righteousness. In the game, this is done via the AlpacaCam. It acts as an extra vision mode, activated by the Q key (PC), which allows you to see people the way Montana sees them: as ignorant animals who must be herded… or eaten.

Annie the Grocer is an emu because she hides her head in the sand; she will be easy to control. Her husband Elmore is a pig. He is a man, and filthy, and good only for the slaughter.

This mechanic is a magical way to show children how to break other people down into simple, easily definable stereotypes. That way, they will know whose arguments to ignore in real life.

When persuading new followers, you must select the most appropriate brainwashing method depending on what kind of animal they are. The AlpacaCam gives valuable clues here.

With A Little Help From My Cousins

Words are one thing, but before your commune can really take off, you also need to make sure you can maintain discipline. First, you must select your Cousins. These will be your closest followers and the harbingers of your will, ready to die – and kill – for you. This mechanic is vaguely similar to Black & White, in that you reward the Cousins for appropriate behaviour, and punish them for bad. Spend too little time refining their will to hurt, and they may get soft on you later, costing you valuable prestige, and even allowing usurpers to take your place.

“Show me how you’d do it, Caleb. Show me how you’d twist her head right off. You’re a good boy, Caleb.”

The best way to train your Cousins is to start them slow, on defenceless targets, such as women. Do it right, and no more than a few beatings will be necessary.

Montana takes her two new Cousins on a milk run. This time it’s just talking, but later in the game you can unlock blunt instruments, water boards and Medieval Inquisition relics in order to ensure maximum fealty.

This section of the game is maddeningly addictive, and I often found myself returning to the same victims because they were just so much fun to play through.

The errant emu has now been returned to the flock. If she knows what’s good for her, she will surrender a daily tithe of melons for the glory of the Alpaca.

Sometimes you actually get to control the Cousins directly, in a variety of fun torture-based mini-games which never get boring.

In “Baptism Pool”, you must hold dissenters’ heads under the water until they admit the Truth into their hearts. If a victim drowns, you lose points, and the frogs (your followers) laugh at you. Laughing, always laughing, just like the other kids in your class. Before you showed them.

A Staged Epiphany

But the main focus of the game is the concert. Dressed in a lurid blonde wig designed to appeal to the lowest Aryan denominator (there are no black people in the game, possibly to save on hard-drive space), your task is to lead your followers, or “Alpacolytes”, in song. Depending on your needs, you can choose a song that increases Fervour, leading to new followers, or Hate, useful when there are dissenters in your flock who must be weeded out.

Hateful lyrics are represented by the yellow button, Fervent ones by the blue. At higher detail settings, you can actually make out the froth collecting around your fans’ mouths as they chant your insipid drivel back at you.

“Without the shades and the hair / we are all babies, smooth and pure / so shave the heretic, strip him of clothes / and welcome him, screaming, born again /  from the womb of bloody suffering”

A skillful player will combine Hate and Fervour to create terrified fanatics completely immune to logic, but this takes patience to perfect. On Easy difficulty, you can speed up the process by burning down the town library.

Montana teaches her followers the ways of AlpacaBaiting, the confrontational techniques used to subdue enemies.

We’ve Created A Montana

Let’s forget gameplay for a minute: everyone knows that a game lives or dies purely on its story, and you’ll be glad to know that HM: TM has one of the best.

The game draws heavily on the movie’s dark themes, giving them a cute fluffy twist to delight young children. In a series of animated cut-scenes, you learn that Montana’s parents home-schooled her, using a self-made curriculum of Creationist pamphlets and regular beatings. Montana didn’t need their hugs, anyway; she had her stuffed animals, and she had The Lord. At her first Bible meeting, as Montana stood before the wide-eyed faces and sang ditties of Hellfire, she tasted power, and knew that it was sweet.

Without school to hold her back, the little girl grew up prodigiously fast, unfettered by the lies of literature and Liberalism. She was a prodigy. But she could never be good enough for her parents. Never never never. What did happen to them, anyway?

A secret door in Montanas’s apartment hides her Toys from view. In the boxes are the mummified remains of her parents, and various of their trinkets that Montana cries over when she is alone.

What I love most about the story is the sense of pathos for Montana herself. Underneath the frozen exterior, you are simply scared; scared of the weakness inside you. To overcome weakness, you know that it is necessary to make hard decisions. Sometimes those decisions will be unpopular, and people will not understand. Well, child, you must harden your heart. This is the will of the Alpaca; he has told you in your brain.

Montana rides out. Alone, she is vulnerable. It is a time to cry, and to rail at the inner voices that so jeer and mock. But you must bury your demons deep down. Dissolve their faces in quicklime if necessary.

Endgame

If Hannah cannot find peace, then surely no one else can. Not on this earth, anyway. Montana’s ultimate aim, therefore,  is the most glorious mass suicide the world has ever known. The Rapture. It requires 100,000 followers and a whole lotta nerve gas, so you should expect a good 20 hours of play before you’re ready to crack open the kegs and inhale the acrid scent of victory.

See how the audience cheer, but their faces are blank; soulless. They are now utterly within Montana’s thrall. You currently have 8750 followers and 4 canisters of nerve gas; not quite ready for the Rapture. Keep singin’!

I’ve played to the end, and let me tell you: seeing all those twitching bodies and knowing that you’re responsible is a wonderful feeling, and something that kids everywhere should share.

Multiplayer

There are two multiplayer modes. The first is Band Of Cousins, a Guitar Hero-style playathon in which you and three friends make up Hannah Montana’s backing band. Fail to keep up the Fervour levels, and the other players are given permission to set upon you with their instruments. This is particularly effective with The Wiimote, as each swing is accompanied by appropriate splats and crunches.

If all the Cousins screw up at once, Montana’s “plan” reveals itself in an in-engine cut-scene that frankly should have merited an 18+ rating.

The second and more ambitious multiplayer mode is Siege Of Alpacolyte Farm, an online team game for up to 32 players. One team is led by Hannah, the other by the SWAT leader sent to take her and her sick little coven down. But this is no Counterstrike. As the Alpacolytes, you must find a way to kill all of your own side before the SWAT team can capture anyone alive. You are given a strictly limited number of bullets; enough to fend off the SWATs, if you use them judiciously, but not enough to finish every one of your followers. You must be creative and quick-witted if you want to send them all to the Alpaca before the game is up.

Fire and physics are your friends here.

The SWAT team are just outside the barn. Everyone is indeed waiting in Heaven for the final few followers. But how will you get rid of them? Perhaps the cows can help…

Verdict

Hannah Montana: The Movie is not without its flaws. The Religious Education mini-games are fun, but nothing we haven’t seen in Postal 2, and it does get frustrating having to micro-manage every single beating; some kind of RTS-style automation would have helped here.

Nevertheless, HM:TM is a fun and inspiring story of what one young American is capable of if she puts her mind to it. I love the central message that no matter how stupid you are; no matter how backwards or ill-educated, the power is within you to change the world profoundly for the worse. And that’s a great feeling.

The blurb on the back of the box says it best, really:

“Imagine, if you will, a boot stamping upon a human face forever. Now imagine that you are doing the stamping, and that the boot is pink and covered with kittens.

Welcome, friend. Welcome to the world of Hannah Montana.”

“Let our voice come out from under / and our holy knives shine in the daylight / they will learn to fear us / oh yea, surely they will tremble before the end.”

DUBIOUS REVIEW SCORE: 82%

EXT. WAREHOUSE.

Here is the official press release from Sierra:

Simpsons Versus Predator is a next-gen squad combat game featuring revolutionary 5-way gameplay. In this blistering blend of action and strategy, you command Homer and his squadmates as they take the fight to the Predators’ homeworld. Can this whimsically dysfunctional family defeat the entire Yautja race despite being two-dimensional animated characters with no knowledge of weapons or battle tactics? That… is down to you.

You’d have to be a complete retard not to be excited about this game. It brings together the two greatest groups of characters in the history of fiction: The Yautja, proud hunters from the planet Kjjjrlkjjekkulon 4, who live to kill and kill to live; and the Simpsons, an animated family who are primarily yellow.

Together at last.

Sierra have whetted our appetites with this tantalising excerpt from the novelette included with the game.

———————————————————

Homer crept grimly through the bowels of the Z’krkkakak-class Space Destroyer. Sweat poured from his pallid yellow face and splashed on the bizarre, stupid-looking floor. His family crawled through the darkness behind him, terror haunting their simple, clearly delineated forms. Homer stared skittishly at the shadows that rippled in the haze. Down here in the engine tubes, the heat was so intense that the Yautja’s thermo-vision would be useless. That was what Lisa had assured, and during the terror of the past month, he had learned to trust her judgment. She had saved their asses countless times.

The saber rifle felt alien in his hands. This was because it was an alien weapon, but also because Homer was unused to the world of mortal gunplay. Only a month ago he had been reclining on his sofa, sinking the sixth Duff of the evening, and musing contentedly on how unlikely it was that Springfield would ever be invaded by a race of murderous aliens with faces like sad vaginas. How wrong he had been. How very, very incorrect.

It began the night Milhouse never returned home. Twelve hours later, Santa’s Little Helper was found inside-out, and six hours after that, stuff started blowing up. It was the hottest summer Springfield had ever known. And soon it would become the bloodiest. Everyone knew the legends of the hunters who came during the hottest times, but this was different. This time, they were bent on annihilating every last man, woman, child and family pet, and then selling their heads as novelty ashtrays for the Yautja hoi polloi back home. Shelbyville fell in less than two days, the horrendous sounds of slaughter audible across the plains. Everyone knew that Springfield was next.

And then they came.

In the grim reality of alien invasion, the structure of government quickly broke down, and martial law was the only way to keep order. Barney Gumble took a bullet after being caught looting Moe’s Tavern; his body was hung from the statue of Jebediah Springfield for the sport of the crows. And still the killing continued. These enemies were invisible, deadly, and in no mood to negotiate. After a gory pitched battle in which nine thousand people were exploded by lasers, the terrified remains of the population gathered in Springfield Elementary, where a bitter power struggle ensued between the two prominent factions, one led by Kent Brockman, and the other by Ned Flanders. Skinner was long gone; he had been harpooned to death while trying to defend his mother by firing a Luger indiscriminately into the sky.

Finally Flanders gained the upper hand after a dazzlingly bloody coup. In an effort to assert his dominance, his first act was to tie up the Simpsons and thrust them into the street as human sacrifices to appease the Gods from space. They were captured and kept alive, evidently intended as curiosities to be toyed with by the Yautja elite; but something went wrong somehow, and for some reason they were now free and creeping around the lower decks of the mothership, with revenge in their hearts and bizarre alien weapons in their hands. Even Maggie’s.

It was a really small gun.

———————————————————

I don’t know about you, but I am so excited about this game that I just ejaculated my pelvis. However, I do have some reservations. I’m hoping the designers will keep the story true to the Simpsons universe and not ruin it with a load of off-character dialogue, like they did in recent seasons of the TV show. It’s the character-based humour that people love, not the surreal and zany situations that seem to plague the latest crop of episodes. With this in mind, I’m hoping SvP will smoothly marry the original thoughtful humour of the first four seasons with the pulse-pounding action setpieces and astonishing sci-fi violence that we expect from the Predator universe.

Some released footage does attest to the game’s faithfulness. Each member of the Simpsons has their own special ability which can help in the fight against the Yautja, and these are nicely plausible: Homer throws nuclear donuts, Bart can slow down time with his special Skatewarp skill, and Maggie’s pacifier acts as a subspace transceiver, allowing the team to receive mission updates direct from the president. However, other news is a cause for concern: apparently the Predators are slightly shorter than in the films. This is obviously a serious problem, and I only hope that the developers will listen to the inevitable fan outcry and do the right thing.

Speaking of the fans, it is not too late for you to have your say in how you think this game should be developed. What, in your opinion, does this game need to contain in order to be a classic? If we all join our voices in complaint, surely Sierra will listen.

Dubious Reviews will of course keep you updated about every stage of this game’s development.

So I am going to write my own list of signs that you’re addicted to games, but the big difference with mine is that every entry will be based on my own personal experience; and since I only decided to make this list a week ago, all of the evidence will be from the last seven days. Nothing made up here; oh no. This list is going to fact the shit out of you.

You know you’re addicted to computer games when…

10. You watch a TV program about gibbons.

It is 8pm. You sit down with your burrito omelette and cheap Bohemian lager, and begin to flick idly through the channels. Nothing grabs your attention, but then who should appear but David Attenborough, swamped up to his neck in a writhing morass of gibbons! You bear a great respect for this seasoned television personality, and soon you are lost in contemplation as you gaze at African mangrove monkeys patiently tapping molluscs against tree trunks, and tiny marmosets seizing grasshoppers in the high rainforest canopy.

Feeling guilty? You should. You just proved that you’re addicted to computer games.

9. You cook food featuring harissa paste.

You’ve never bought this aromatic mix of chilli, spices and rose petals before, because each jar has a four-week edibility window and you have no idea what to do with the stuff. But this week, you bought a jar anyway. Why did you do that?

Several days later, you are reaping the dark rewards of your impulse purchase. The warm harissa and egg salad was delicious; almost too delicious. And yesterday, you roasted a chicken after stuffing its skin with harissa and crushed garlic, then your whole family sat around and ate it, like some kind of pagan eating ritual, except using plates and cutlery and basic table manners.

Is there no end to your addiction? Just sit back and think for a minute. How different would your life have been, had you never discovered harissa paste and, by extension, computer games? So different it almost sodomizes the imagination.

8. Your favourite shoes are beginning to fall apart.

This is a classic sign, but it takes a clever man to spot it. Next time you’re putting your shoes on, try turning one of them upside down. Now look at the sole. Does it seem strangely worn, as if by constant friction? I thought so. This is a very serious situation, and it could ultimately result in you throwing those shoes away. And what else will you throw away, before this is all over? The Radiohead t-shirt that shrank in the wash? A broken plate? Your life?

Yeah, it’s pretty scary when you think about it in those terms. Now step slowly back from the edge and walk away. If you don’t look back, you might still be ok.

7. You find yourself enjoying the works of Gustav Holst.

It is a quiet Sunday afternoon. You relax on your bed, the rousing strains of Jupiter circling around your head, stirring the deep pools of beauty inside your heart. Before too long, your imagination soars away from this prison of flesh we call a body, to dance alone in the great void, lit by the twinkling stars. Foolishly, you have been listening to the music of Gustav Holst, a man known almost entirely for his Planet Suite. Holst’s other works are now largely ignored, making him something of a one-hit wonder.

Do you understand now? One hit. That’s all you crave nowadays, isn’t it.

You are a disgrace to your parents.

6. There is a dramatic sea-change in your masturbation style.

It always used to be socks. But now it’s old boxer shorts. Why would you change now, man? You’ve developed a style through years of practice, and only something deeply traumatic would disrupt that. What’s wrong with socks anyway? Why don’t they caress your tender heart in the way they used to? Everyone knows boxer shorts are just cheap sluts; everyone but you, it seems. You used to be better than this. What changed?

So many unanswered questions; questions that weave around your boxer shorts like a bafflingly enigmatic spiderweb. And you know what lurks at the centre of a spider’s web, don’t you.

That’s right. Computer Games.

5. You cannot decide whether you would hump Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer if you were gay.

One is the Spanish hunk with the heart of gold. The other looks like Quentin Tarantino if he was hot and wore cardigans. Both are such fine specimens of manhood that it’s impossible to decide between them, and it’s tearing you apart. You’re not a big screaming fagmosexual, but if you were, would you spread your legs for Nadal’s raw, athletic masculinity, or be bent over by Federer’s smooth charm?

It’s a choice everyone has to make in the end, but not you. Oh no, you just sit on the fence, like you always have. This is why you’ll never find the strength in your soul to give up games.

And get that thought out of your head. You don’t deserve a gay three-way.

4. You accidentally drop your book, but pick it up on exactly the same page you were reading.

Have you ever studied the arcane art of Coincidence? Some say there is no such thing. Others say different stuff. But one thing everyone agrees on: randomly opening a book to the exact page you were just reading is definitely a coincidence. And it has just happened to you.

But there’s more. Picking up the book, you notice that you have for several weeks been reading The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, and it dawns on you that The Orchid Thief is an anagram of something disturbingly relevant to your addiction. Just rearrange those letters a few places, and you end up with a supernaturally accurate summary of a life wasted by games. I’m sure you’ve worked out what it is by now. Ready? Ok, say it with me.

CHIEF HOD HITTER.

I believe this point has been made.

3. Your breakfast muesli tastes like raw porridge.

I mean, it should taste like raw porridge; after all, muesli is nothing but porridge oats with a few chunks of random miscellany hefted in. However, today, it tastes an absolute arseload like raw porridge; much more so than usual, in fact. For any sane, rational mind, this is a clear cause for panic.

Logically there can be only two explanations for this. The first is that computer games have reached their final stage of addiction and are now affecting your very taste buds, causing food to turn to ashes in your mouth. The only food you crave now is pixel food, served on an LCD plate at taste resolutions of 1280×960 upwards. Washed down with gameplay.

The second is that you have changed your brand of muesli, which is in fact what you have done. However, we can safely disregard this possibility.

2. You need a piss at 3AM.

What is it about three in the morning that activates your slash gland? Every night this week, you’ve stumbled from your bed with an awkward, ungainly boner, and sat in frustrated silence while you wait for it to subside so that you can get some blessed relief. Why is this happening? You’re not drinking any more water than usual, and you go to the toilet three times before you turn out the light anyway, though you acknowledge this is a bit weird and you should probably stop.

So why this sudden bout of erect desperation in the darkest hour of the morning? To understand, one must know a little of biology. When one is addicted to something (let’s say, for the sake of argument, computer games), one’s body simultaneously hates it and craves it. In this instance, your body is trying to flush the addiction out of your system via the medium of urine. However, it also lusts after the very same addiction, hence your vast, bulbous Game Erection.

Tragically, this problem will stay with you for the rest of your life. This may not be a comfort to you, but hopefully it will be a lesson to others.

Don’t do games, kids. They’ll only make you piss.

1. You murder more than your usual number of swans.

As you’re doubtless aware, there is only so much time in the day in which one can slaughter waterfowl. The morning is out, because you need time to get ready for work and don’t want to get blood and feathers on your uniform. After work, you just want to go home and zone out in front of the TV. So, realistically, there’s only a small window after dinner and before bedtime when you’re feeling refreshed enough for a spot of swan killing. It’s understandable that you’ll only manage eight or nine per week, and no one thinks any less of you for that.

So why, last week, did you murder over seventy-six of the buggers? Was it the massive amounts of PCP you ingested? Or was it games?

There’s no way for science to know. But your heart knows, and that is a much more reliable indicator in today’s cold modern age.

For me, this recently manifested itself in an intense hatred towards the European microstates: those pitifully tiny countries which exist only to deprive me of a 100% score in online geography quizzes.

These nations are POINTLESS and STUPID, and I am going to prove this to you, concluding each entry with a score reflecting how many of my dicks each of these idiotic principalities can, in fact, eat.

Liechtenstein

Never heard of it.

Tiny Liechtenstein forms the filling of a gay sandwich between Switzerland and Austria, and is the only remaining province of the Holy Roman Empire that once spanned The Entire Wooooooooorld*. Liechtenstein is doubly landlocked, which means that all of the countries that surround it are landlocked as well. For a Liechtensteiner, crabs and periwinkles are but the fevered dreams of a madman.

Just imagine a country where buckets and spades are never ever made of breakable yellow plastic, and all they ever shovel is earth.

I am shivering with disgust.

*this fact is bullshit.

Why I invite it to snack on my wangs

You couldn’t really get a more pointless country. It was created in 1719 solely so that the Austrian Liechtenstein family could have a seat in the Reichstag, and as an indicator of how little Jeff Liechtenstein and his descendants actually gave a poop about their beloved land, none of them even visited it for 120 years after it was created.

Liechtenstein enjoys flaunting its many dusky-eyed beauties.

How has it survived so long?

By being lucky enough not to border Germany. According to the history books, after the Holy Roman Empire collapsed, Liechtenstein avoided being integrated into the re-ordered Germany of the 1870s because “no one could be twatted with the place”.

Dickclusion

I must grudgingly admit that they’ve done one thing worth remembering. After World War II, Liechtenstein granted asylum to a contingent of Russians who had fought on the side of Germany during the war. We English, in contrast, deported all our asylum seekers to Russia, where they were promptly sent to the Gulag and killed. Go Britain.

For this reason, while it remains a howlingly pointless country, I am only going to suggest that Liechtenstein consume two of my manhoods.

San Marino

Name’s vaguely familiar…

San Marino, a minuscule mouthful of the Italian Apennine mountains in Italy, was founded in 301 AD by Saint Marinus of Rab, a Christian bishop fleeing the persecution of Rome. With God’s help, Marinus built a republic that would be an enduring bastion of inspiration to all the world’s repressed peoples. And be five miles wide.

One can only hope all the world’s repressed peoples do not attempt to move there at the same time, or none of them will be able to sit down.

In addition to creating a haven free of religious persecution, Marinus did have a slight ulterior motive for founding the country, since he was also fleeing the persecution of a woman claiming to be his wife. Christian eulogies are somewhat muted on this point.

The head of a Vileda Supermop provides surprisingly good ballistic protection.

Oh, San Marino! The place with the Grand Prix, right?

Uh… no, not really. The San Marino Grand Prix is actually held in Imola, Italy. Obviously. Just like the Indy 500 is held in Milwaukee, and the London Marathon takes place on Mars. Do you know nothing of sport?

Then you have something in common with the Sammarinese, since their national soccer team is ranked joint worst in the entire world. Their international record is one of unmitigated shitstormery, with over 70 defeats and only one victory. Their sense of taste is little better: in the most recent Eurovision Song Contest, San Marino gave its highest score to Great Britain. Which came joint last.

According to Google Image Search, this cat is from San Marino.

How has it survived so long?

Because it is so useful! After all, it pays a whopping 0.002% of UN’s annual fees: that’s £1 for every £50,000 spent. In real terms, when the UN buys a new hummer for delivering aid to war-torn cities, San Marino pays for the fluffy dice.

Speaking of war, San Marino does have one saving grace: they are the only remaining country whose army is equipped with crossbows. Fucking crossbows. Oh, and they’re the oldest uninterrupted republic in the world and have stood unconquered in the name of democracy for 1700 years and their army uses fucking crossbows.

Also, they have two heads of state. San Marino may be pissy, but at least they’ve got one more president than America.

Dickclusion

As much as this country gets on my nerves, the crossbows alone are enough to mollify two fifths of my junk. Yeah, I’m an incurable romantic.

Andorra

Isn’t that a kind of sweater?

If it were, it would be a sweater 2.5 times the size of Washington DC, with room to fit 71,000 people. In other words, the kind of sweater my grandmother would knit. This particular cosy overgarment straddles the mountainous border between France and Spain, where it tries its best to be as inaccessible as possible so that no one can be arsed invading it.

At 18 miles wide, Andorra is the least physically ridiculous of our pocket principalities, but that still doesn’t protect it from the insistent nudging of my scrota, mainly because the place is so pathetic. It’s been around since pre-Roman times and was declared a free state by Charlemagne in the 9^th century, yet it still pays a yearly feudal tribute to France and Spain. Perhaps the reason Andorra has never grown a set of balls is that there simply wouldn’t be room for them.

About.com handily provides a free blank outline of Andorra. This is possibly the most useful JPEG ever created.

Why it craves a deep-filled knob sandwich

If the world were a school, Andorra would be the Invisible Kid who says nothing, has no friends and is never remembered. When WWI ended, the Versailles treaty failed to include Andorra because everyone had forgotten it existed, with the result that Andorra tried to declare war on Germany in 1939 only to discover that it already had.

In 1957 Andorra wisely decided that its army (consisting of 10 people, with a budget of 4 dollars per year for ceremonial blanks) would not be needed by the Allies, and declared a ceasefire. The Allies were not too devastated by this, having already won the war twelve years previously.

Nowadays, Andorra relies on tourism and dirty money to survive. It has notoriously louche tax laws, making it a haven for dodgy businessmen, formula 1 racing drivers, and me when Operation Orphanage is complete.

The Andorra-style sink. The most interesting thing ever to have come out of this country.

How has it survived so long?

Because it may well be a coven of evil. Andorra has zero unemployment, which is an intensely suspicious figure, and to add to the intrigue, National Geographic lists Andorran life expectancy as “N/A”, which raises the distinct possibility that the Andorrans are all gainfully employed as vampires.

The tourism website states that ten million people visit Andorra every year. But it doesn’t say if any of them ever leave.

Yeah, it’s pretty. Pretty FULL OF VAMPIRES.

Dickclusion

I am loath to be over-critical of Andorra, for the very good reason that vampires can fucking fly, and I value my haemoglobin.

Also, you’ve got to love a country that eschews a standing army because France has guaranteed to protect it. Now that is cojones.

Monaco

Ahhhh, that ritzy bachelor pad of continental glamour!

Quite.

Monaco means “single house”, which is a fair summation of the size of the place. This miserly scrap of land hanging off the southeast coast of France is the number one destination for celebrities who need to get drunk while wearing large hats. The Grimaldi family has ruled continuously since 1292, when Francois “The Malicious” led the capture of the rock of Monaco while dressed as a Franciscan monk. His malice probably stemmed from subsequent feelings of inadequacy regarding the size of his kingdom.

Albert, Monaco’s current prince, spends the day bumming around in a nerdy fleece. HAVE SOME SELF-RESPECT, MAN.

The population of Monaco is 32,000, making it the most densely populated country in the world. However, there is surely room in there for an extra dick; perhaps even five.

Why its diet ought to be more penis-centric

The geographical pissyness of this country cannot be overstated. It’s a mere two miles long, and that’s measured from end to end. There are several points where you could walk from France, through Monaco, and right to the sea in a mere two hundred metres. And this is an independent sovereign country we’re talking about, with, like, passports and ‘ting. Plus its lack of standing army means it could be invaded by a gaggle of drunk supermodels using their hats as weapons.

How has it survived so long?

The answer, of course, is greed. Monaco is yet another tax haven, and its most successful industry is its casino, which is notorious for money laundering. Yes, it is becoming abundantly clear why these microstates are still permitted to exist, and it’s not because everyone likes small things because they’re cute.

2006: All the dirty money in Monaco is set alight at once, causing a fire bright enough to illuminate the moon.

But there is a menacing aspect to Monaco too. It’s getting bigger. In the 1970s, land reclamation caused a new province, Fontveille, to rise from the sea like some kind of Soil Kraken, and another ward is scheduled to be reclaimed in 2014. I find this deeply disturbing. Monaco may not have an army, but if it keeps spreading like bacteria across the unwashed chopping board of life, it may not need one. One day we may wake up and see Monaco all around us, beneath us, pressing against our terrified faces.

When that day comes, let us pray the Lord smites Monaco for its presumption.

Dickclusion

Despite my desire to go all-out on this ludicrous little nation, I feel it wise to keep all five of my penises in reserve, for I may one day need them to beat off the encroaching horror of the Monaco Land Mass.

Vatican City

Oh, surely the Vatican can’t be pointless?

Most of the world sees the Vatican as the throbbing nexus of Catholicism; the place where all the big decisions are made about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, whether any more could fit on if they were naked, and how we can simulate this using real women. However, most of the world is WRONG.

To understand why, one must travel back to the mid 1800’s, when Italy was nothing more than a collection of city states. The largest and most powerful of these were the Papal States, which wielded great power and encompassed much of Italy, including Rome. However, in 1870, they were dissolved by King Victor Emmanuel II, who needed more space for his whiskers.

The weight of his hair has aged Victor’s face. At the time of this picture, he is four years old.

The Pope was kept a virtual prisoner for the next 60 years, until God sent an angel to grant him a country of his own. That angel was Benito Mussolini. Not only did he create the Vatican; he also gave it the Swiss Guard, the world’s smallest and gayest military force.

“So tell me, what’s a barfingly ridiculous freak like you doing in a place like this?”

Why it needs to gorge on glans

Because it doesn’t do anything. Almost all church business is actually conducted outside the Vatican: doctrine, coordination of bishops, missionary activities and international diplomacy are all handled by institutions scattered around Rome. The Vatican itself is just a place for the Pope to chill without fools getting all up in his grill.

At 0.7 square miles, Vatican City is smaller than Central Park. Fewer than 800 people live there, and all of them work for the church, so obviously the Vatican can’t have a real economy. It’s kept alive by the donations of Catholics all around the world, and by regular guest spots on Cribs.

And as for it being an island of godliness, not quite. The Vatican has the highest crime rate per head of population anywhere in the world. An unbelievable 87.2% of the population committed civil offences last year. Some might claim this was down to pickpockets targeting tourists, but others shiver at the recollection of pissed bishops fucking shit up on a Friday night.

How has it lasted so long?

The Pope remains the only absolute monarch in Europe, and while he hides behind his wall of solid Swiss gayness, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

The Vatican does have a few cool things going for it, though. Its national bank, for example, has the only ATM in the world whose instructions are entirely in Latin. Also, it’s quite possible that within the walls of the Vatican is a device that can see through time, although it’s equally possible that the man who claims this is a bubbling insaniac.

Dickclusion

I’m sorry, but the Vatican is without a doubt the most pointless country in the world, and neither the Time-View-O-Scope nor the contingent of flamboyantly homosexual soldiers can save it from the full fury of all five of my dicks.

If you would like to read more informative yet wobblingly hilarious historical rants, I recommend Frosty Dog, the history blog by Cracked’s own Mr Gale. This man manages the difficult feat of knowing more than I do about history without being in any way superior to me whatsoever.

I just want to reiterate this point. I am better than Gale.

This list, found at Diablofans.com, tells the story of hell in 600 installments. Intended to catalogue the signs that you are addicted to Blizzard’s popular PC role-playing game Diablo 2, it begins as a light-hearted jibe at addiction, yet quickly becomes a window into the darkness of men’s souls. If you are brave or foolish enough to stare into the abyss, then read on, friend. Read on and despair.

294. You realize that the assassin’s ass is nice

Once again, the immaturity of this list disappoints and astounds me. This is supposed to be a thoughtful and sober exploration of addiction, yet time and time again we creep sordidly back to sex. How sad. This is compounded by the fact that the assassin’s ass is actually not that nice. It’s low-resolution, there aren’t enough frames of animation, and the pallid skin tone may be to some people’s tastes, but certainly not mine.

These people need to get a life.

324. You go to your friend who is black and say “Hey Paladin” (not being racist)

Just to clarify here, the Paladin is the only black character in the game.

326. You paint a red bar on a slab of wood and when you punch someone, you paint black on it to represent a health bar.

Useful, but impractical. To replicate an enemy’s health bar in real life, you would need to hold this piece of wood directly above his head while punching him with your other hand. You would also have to pause after every punch in order to paint some more black on the piece of wood. This would have the following consequences:

• You would lose every fight you ever engaged in, and would become the laughing stock of your school or workplace, derided by all of your teachers, managers and erstwhile friends.

• You would probably get paint on your hand.

Therefore, the person who wrote this entry is either lying about having done this, or he has a really painty hand. Either way, I do not wish to know him.

390. You become president and you give all military swords and shields and make them go to Mt Everest thinking its Harrogath

Rubbish. A president would never be able to re-arm the military in such a dramatic fashion because of the vested financial interests of the arms industry. There is much less money in swords and shields than in high-tech laser bombs of the future, and in addition, it is very likely that existing arms contracts could not be cancelled until their stated tenures were fulfilled.

This entry is extremely immature and shows a disturbing ignorance of modern politics.

392. You are afraid of going outside because you are making cookies and Baal and his minions are outside wanting some

In the un-modded version of the game, Baal does not steal the player’s cookies, preferring instead to cover the world in a swathe of unimaginable evil. Therefore, even if Baal were outside your window, it is unlikely that he would intend to steal your delicious baked goods; he would probably just want to kill you and defecate on your corpse. This faulty logic is dangerous, and it’s what gives gamers a bad name.

Plus Baal doesn’t exist.

414. u drink B-52, Blue Kamikazes, Red Death’s n think your gaining life/mana (they are alcoholic drinks) :nooob

I despise this entry because it reminds me of how old I am, and how young everyone else who plays this game is.

The writer, for example, is fourteen years old, and has only ever been drunk on the contents of his parents’ liquor cabinet. Plus they caught him and grounded him for a month, during which he was unable to play Diablo 2. Two of his characters lapsed, losing him an eBOTD, a SOJ, a HOTO, a full IK, and various other acronyms that are all short for “virgin”.

There’s one upside to being so old, of course, which is that I can buy my own beer, and then I can get drunk and look at porn.

Yeah. That’s right. Not so pathetic now, am I.

421. You think a fat woman walking to the opera in a fur coat is Treehead Woodfist (Brute)

This entry isn’t too egregious on its own; after all, Treehead Woodfist is an eight-foot ogre covered in dense mats of hair, and therefore looks exactly like a fat woman walking to the opera. However, the entry is followed swiftly by this one:

424. You see Oprah Winfrey on T.V. (when she was fat) and immediately you think…She looks like Treehead Woodfist (Brute)

What the hell has this person got against opera?! Not content with dissing anyone who should choose to patronise this fine art form, he now starts laying into a celebrity just because her name sounds similar to the oeuvre he so despises. This man has some serious personal issues; issues that have nothing to do with Treehead Woodfist. Treehead is just a pawn in this sad weirdo’s personal war, and I feel bad for him.

Or is it because Oprah is black? Yeah, Paladin Guy, I know it’s you.

425. When in chemisty class you are making a green liquid and when the glass midget comes in the room you throw it at him/her hoping the liquid will explode and kill the damn fallen.

Oh, so we’re ragging on midgets now as well, are we? Is no creed or race safe from your hate? Well, buddy, I sure hope the green liquid was Créme De Menthe, otherwise you have a serious felony on your hands, and I will not be there to pull your ass out of the fire when it’s time to reap that whirlwind.

450. While riding the subway you mimic the monster sounds (Rakanishu,Brutes, Zombies etc…) and the people around you look at you like wtf is your problem. True story: I did that and this girl was laughing at me. But I got her phone number and alot more from her

Yes, you also got a generous amount of mace followed by a thoughtfully penned restraining order. Seriously, I hate it when people try to pretend as if they have had sex with women. IT IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

Never.

How can you know what you’re doing wrong if they won’t tell you.

457. When you walk on to a busy interstate and say “What do I care, this life is softcore!”

There’s nothing really wrong with this one, but I thought I would mention it because “This Life Is Softcore” is a kickass name for an album.

458. When a dog comes near you and you raise your hand hoping Armegeddon comes down on him and misses you totally… yet follows you around!

Hello Mr Animal Hater, nice to have you back! I thought we’d lost you! Moved onto dogs now, have we? Because all the cows are dead or severely traumatised? Wonderful. Your continued liberty is proof that the legal system does not work.

There are people you can talk to about this, you know. Please, seek help before more innocent ruminants die at your hands.

459). When fighting your friends you say “Time To Die” instead of something childish that you would normally say.

IT IS WRONG TO FIGHT YOUR FRIENDS.

478. You kill your brother because you thought he was Fallen One when he held up his knife (true story, was on CNN few years ago)

This entry is unacceptable. You can’t just post stuff like this without sufficient corroborative evidence. At least provide a link to the CNN story plus the transcript of the court proceedings, otherwise there’s no way your claim can be independently validated.

Show a bit of responsibility here. Young, impressionable people are reading this list while searching for a direction in life.

482. When you see blond girl with big boobs, you run away jus incase they yell at you for being close to them (hence the javazons and wf zons in 1.09 in cow rooms)

Any list point that requires an explanation in parentheses is probably not going to be a success. It’s the same as telling the following joke:

A skeleton walks into a bar and says “I’d like a pint of beer please, and a mop!” He is not a janitor or anything, it’s just that when he drinks the beer, it will just pour on the floor because he has no stomach. I don’t know why he would buy the beer, maybe he was lonely and came to the pub for human interaction.

491. You develop an oblivion knight robot and a time machine, so that you can send it back to medieval times and cause melee knights to die at the hands of one of the most cheapest bastards in diablo 2

This entry is not plausible, because while magical robots are within the grasp of today’s scientists, time machines will not be invented until 2046. I’m afraid this is fact.

They will, however, be invented by an eleven-year-old who is terrified of shaving, so you have that part right.

506. You feel weriod that paladin is black (if so, ur also racist :angry)

Oh god, not Jimmy T. Blackhater again. You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Your frantic backtracking is only digging you further into the sordid rut of racism you have ploughed for yourself. Go polish your Luger, Intolerance Boy.

511. You think by smoking drugz you can increase your strength by 100

I don’t smoke drugs. I smoke FOOLS LIKE YOU.

And banana skins.

523). You think your Barb raped ur Zon.

This wouldn’t happen; although a Barbarian beats an Amazon for size and brute strength, the Amazon’s greater agility would allow her to evade his muscular, oiled grasp, leaving him howling in erect fury.

524). You want to rape ur zon.

This wouldn’t happen either; although I possess more than enough rohypnol for the job, I am unable to administer it to a computer-generated character, and Blizzard currently have no plans for a rape-based expansion pack.

525). You rape an acutal amazon.

Whooooah, Nelly! You know you’re addicted to Diablo because you go back in time and sexually abuse a member of a long-dead society? Surely there must be some other kind of indicator? Such as the fact that you play Diablo all the time?

Regardless, as I said, we all need to wait until 2046.

527) Death comes by your door and you bribe him $450 to respawn at your house

Ludicrous. Everyone knows that Death cannot be bribed. To cheat death, you must beat him at a game of skill, such as Diablo, or its popular sequel, Diablo II.

532: you wonder if the choice came and you had to fight one character class for the sake of your life, who you would choose to battle.

Oh come on. Please grow up a little.

It would obviously be the gayest character, which is the Druid.

538. You play d2 in school and library. You bet your ass I do both, not the at school thing, but my friend is trying to

I’m sorry, there appears to be some confusion in my mind as to what the word “both” means, and this is preventing me from fully understanding your entry. Perhaps you are distracted because you are too busy lying about having friends.

554. You develop a sex tab and you get a porn magazine to increase all skills in this tree (a little mature no?)

No, this is the OPPOSITE of mature.

This is UN-MATURE.

555. You think you already casted Iron Maiden on a bully so you think he will get hurt more than you!….(BIG Mistake)

It’s Poor Bullied Boy again. You never have any luck, do you. No amount of fantasising about spells and curses will mollify one iota the huge, hairy fist that slams into your nose every lunchtime, nor bring back a penny of your stolen dinner money.

If only there were a spell that lets you skip the horror of school, speeding up time until you’re at home again, with Diablo flickering on your monitor, your mug of cocoa steaming in your hands, and Patch, your little Dalmatian puppy, resting his head in your lap.

Don’t be sad, Poor Bullied Boy. Patch still loves you, even if no one else does. And while you were out, he demonstrated his love by taking a huge shit in one of your sneakers.

582. You kill your parents because they could be corrupted

…aaaaaaaaand we say goodbye to our friend, the animal-hating psychopath. After murdering the contents of several fields and lynching all of his neighbourhood pets on the same tree, he finally succumbs to the voices in his head and totals his parents with his father’s rifle before turning the gun upon himself.

You know what the saddest thing is? This was entirely due to his addiction to computer games. If he hadn’t played Diablo so goddamn much, his father wouldn’t have needed to beat him, and his mother wouldn’t have got wasted on Thunderbird every night, allowing his grades and his mental state to deteriorate to the point of disaster.

Thanks a bunch, Diablo.

And Diablofans has made me indignant – nay, ANGRY. This thread, “600 signs you’re addicted to Diablo 2“, promises to be something great, something profound, and yet in the end it comes across as nothing more than a bunch of funny stuff some schoolkids thought up during Chemistry.

The whole thing just reeks of immaturity. By entry 100, gone are the perceptive musings about wool sweaters (they’re actually a kind of aura) and shrimp (they are all thralls of the Dark Lord Duriel), and each entry becomes more and more logically inconsistent, with spelling quality crumbling to some kind of pre-mental cavetard level.

Well, I’m going to make a little list of my own. These are the entries that I find the most egregiously offensive, together with point-by-point rebuttals of their many flaws. When this list is finished, I am going to email it to every single person who contributed a sub-standard submission, in the hope that they will feel really shitty about themselves and their choices in life.

All entries are reprinted verbatim.

You know you’re addicted to Diablo when…

74. You put on various old sweatshirts, hoping one of them will be enigma.

Oh dear. We’re not off to a good start. For people who haven’t played Diablo, Enigma is a special type of armour which has runes stuck to it. Magical runes. Therefore, in real life, you wouldn’t try on a sweatshirt expecting it to be Enigma unless you could very clearly see a bunch of runes sewn into it. Wouldn’t a much more plausible entry be “you ask your mother to sew runes into your favourite sweatshirt”? Or is that too gay?

Grow up.

82. When your mom tells you to clean your room you put it all in your stash

Listen. For starters, I am thirty years old, and unlike you, I am a normal, tidy person who has no problem cleaning his room three times a night and then scrubbing himself until he bleeds. Secondly, the “stash” you mention may be a tardis-like cavern in Diablo, but that little box at the end of your bed is barely big enough to hold your stolen porn magazines and Popeye Y-fronts, never mind the entire contents of your room.

This entry is blatantly fallacious and I move to have it stricken from the list.

116: when you buy items from ebay

Oh come on. At least put some thought into the wording of your submissions rather than dashing them out mid-wank. A little more consideration would have shown you the total ambiguity of this sentence. You’re a Diablo addict because you buy stuff from eBay? What, like combs? Posters of Che Guevara with Kermit The Frog’s face? Awkward cardboard boxes full of staircase banisters? THINK. If you had simply included the word “Diablo” in that sentence, people would have been chuckling ironically to themselves and sighing “yeeaaahhh”. Instead, you have merely filled people’s minds with confusion and a deep sense of ennui.

You are a failure at life.

123. You raise bullies you have beaten to a crap from the dead and they become all black

Bizarre racist overtones aside, the most disturbing thing about this entry is the writer’s clear desperation regarding his bullying problem. Punished daily for his Gollum-esque frailty and substandard personal hygiene, this wretched child tragically dreams of exacting revenge using the powers from his favourite game. But it will never happen. He will continue to be bullied in school; he will be bullied at the office, and he will be bullied by his shrewish wife who regrets the day she ever let him touch her Joyous Cleft. And when this meek, richly-odoured lamb finally makes it to heaven, he will doubtless have his pants wedgied by Jesus while the angels stand around hi-fiving each other.

This entry is too close to home. I read this list to be amused, not to be reminded of what a worthless little crap-cannon I am.

I hate you all.

157. You get a hard on while the game loads.

Ok. No problem with this one.

160. You own Diablo 2 boxers.

Factually impossible, because there are no official Diablo boxers available for purchase. Search as hard as you like. Of course, if you’re enough of a sad loser you can try to make them yourself, but it’s probably impossible to draw a convincing hellbeast with a magic marker; and besides, you’ll end up getting a big black stain on your glans which took fucking months to go away.

161. You write songs about diablo. i did this. i wrote it to the tune of weird al’s parody the saga begins. i also did another one. yea

OH WHERE ARE THESE AURAL DELIGHTS I SIMPLY MUST HEAR THEM

168. You gamble $10,000 at a casino, and you get Ancient Armor

This is so ridiculous that it is making me salivate with disbelief.

In Diablo, you can gamble money in the hope of winning good items, such as the aforementioned armour. However, if you gamble money in real life, all you win is more money. You show me a casino in the real world that gives you ancient armour when you score at roulette, and I will show you a casino that is completely full of shit. Also, you do not have $10,000, because you spend your entire life playing a computer game.

201. You develop mana so that when you use a blowtorch, it burns with your energy power.

I… I don’t even know

210. When something bad happens, you simply say “ng” and walk away.

This entry is invalid, because I actually do this anyway. This is because I am an emotional man-child unable to deal with the problems of everyday life.

214. You jump off the grand canyon just to see if ull reapeir in town.

Those who haven’t played the game may be thinking “what is this ‘reapeir’? Some kind of spell, probably; Christ these people are geeks”. But you would be wrong, about the spell part anyway, because this person is actually attempting to type the word re-appear.

It actually dumbfounds the mind how it is possible to spell something so wrongly. Has the writer seriously never written either appear or re-appear before? I mean, he spells the rest of his sentence perfectly, other than a slight stumble over you’ll, so he’s not a total idiot. The only answer is that despite being fairly literate, there are people in the world who have never read the word re-appear before in their entire lives.

This is a troubling conundrum which I must contemplate further.

221: you run around in your city like a mad man saying diablo is gonna kill us all like he did in tristram!!

OH MAN YEAH I HAVE SEEN THIS HAPPEN SO MANY TIMES AND YOU’RE CERTAINLY NOT CRIPPLINGLY RETARDED!!

223: You invade a cow farm and kill all the cows thinking there Hell Bovine, then when a bull comes, you make a town portal because you fear that killing the bull will make the farm disappear

I’m starting to get sick of these people’s detachment from reality. Ok, so it’s theoretically possible to murder a bunch of cows, providing you’re a sick little man-monster who will get raped in prison for the rest of his adult life. However, and I must stress this again, MAGIC IS NOT REAL. Once you have concluded your horrid little killfestival, you cannot create a town portal, because town portals do not actually exist in the real world, because (at the risk of pressing a sensitive issue) MAGIC IS NOT COCKTHUMPING REAL HOLY BALLS.

No matter how addicted you are to a game, it does not give you the ability to transmogrify into a warlock. Why don’t you stop lying and go back to killing innocent animals, you sick son of a bastard.

232. Your over 30, single, working at Mc.Donalds, and live with your parents.

That’s… I’m… shut the fuck up. I live with my flatmate.

Who plays World Of Warcraft.

270. You kill yourself hoping your corpse will rise up from the dead and kill humans

Bitch, please. This one is clearly bullshit. If the writer did indeed kill himself, how the hell can he be writing this entry? Or is he just making it up? I’m getting really quite angry at people’s insincerity. Write from the heart or don’t write at all.

233. You create a shrine all about Diablo in your closet or attic or whereever.

This is pathetic. You could at least show a bit of enthusiasm for your own verbal diarrhoea. The other entries may be complete gibberish, but at least they’re spoken with conviction; this one, however, just gives up with a final desultory “wherever” that suggests the writer couldn’t even be bothered to see his own idiocy through to the end. I don’t think this man has created a shrine to Diablo at all.

238. You place remote mines into corpses and you press the detenator when someone walks by, creating a nasty corpse explosion

Where the hell do you live?! Some kind of post-apocalyptic helltown that conveniently still has electricity and a stable internet connection? Oh no, wait. You’re that cow-murdering guy again, aren’t you. And you’re writing this on your prison bunk, enjoying a few scant moments of peace while Burly Bill sleeps, satiated, on top of your corpulent buttocks.

Also, it’s “detonator”. If you’re going to slaughter innocent people and animals, at least have the courtesy to spell their death-weapons correctly.

239: You make folders of diablo and go in the city to spread them around so more people play diablo2!

Yes, that certainly is a way of making games more popular! By making folders of things and then giving them to people in cities!

Apparently by 2018, all forms of advertising will be folder-based.

54. You see evil everywhere.

I live in Salford.

Also, the numbering of this entry does not remotely correspond to its place in the list, suggesting that the writer has a total disregard for order and appropriate behaviour. Therefore, I declare his submission null, void, and stupid.

268. You tape and glue sharp glass to your body so that you can have a thorns effect on your attackers or bullies.

Although this might actually be an attractive way of defending against bullies, I can’t believe that it’s a practical solution. The amount of chafing and self-injury would make it more trouble than it’s worth, especially during gym class, where most of the bullying happens. And in the showers afterwards. Where you’re naked and helpless, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Nothing at all.

I… let’s stop for a while. I need to go and do a little crying and stuff. I’ll continue this list on Thursday.

And with that, he stormed out.

Tim hung his head despondently. How could he possibly review a game he knew nothing about? All he had was this bunch of screenshots…

…hmmm. It was utterly retarded, but it might just work.

Metal Gear Solid 4
PS3
£39.99

This is the one we’ve all been waiting for, and you can breathe easy – it’s an absolute severed cock of a game!

The Story

“In the first Metal Gear Solid, he fought the Communists. In the sequel, he fought a race of alien frogs. In part 3, he battled a sentient cybernetic penis, hell-bent on the destruction of the Earth. In the fourth and final episode, his only enemy… is himself.“

If you’ve played the previous Metal Gear games, you’ll be familiar with their blend of action and harrowing psychological drama, and MGS4 continues in the same style. You play Ian Solid, ex-marine turned mercenary, who suffered the tragic loss of his penis and testicles in the Battle of Spastic Gulch. His mind never recovered. In 2032 the government issued him with a set of cybernetic junk (hence his nickname, “Metal Gear” Solid) which worked well until it gained sentience and turned against him in MGS3.

In the stirring intro, Solid lays a thousand flowers at the grave of The Unknown Scrotum.

Ten years later, and Solid is sinking into a slough of drug and alcohol addiction, unable to face life as an emasculated shell of a man. His enemies from previous games are long gone, yet a new mysterious force seems to be assembling at the corners of his vision. Dark, bio-mechanoid creatures stalk the streets, and no one seems to notice or care. Solid realises his time has come again, and decides to end this new threat – with or without the help of his team.

“Dammit Solid, I know what you’re going through. Look at me – you think it’s easy being addicted to wet cigarettes”?

Gameplay

The game is split into two distinct halves. In the first, you control Solid as he battles The Garbage Men, a force intent on turning the whole world brown, city by city. The other half of the game centres on Solid’s old team The Patriots, whose job it is to follow their hallucinating leader around the streets and try to stop him from harming himself or others.

A Garbage Man attacks. Solid’s alcohol-induced hallucinations are both tragic and hilarious.

The gameplay is spiced up by the Happiness Meter, a feature on your HUD that reflects Solid’s mental state. Suicide (and the end of the game) becomes a danger if you don’t keep it above zero. You can do this by killing imagined enemies, scoring alcohol and drugs, or by touching a man’s junk.

“You’ll get your money soon. Just… just let me hold it a minute longer.”

Tough decisions

The other half of the game is played from the perspective of Solid’s team-mates, and this is where the MGS series’ skill for mature and thoughtful characterisation shines. As Dr Elena Sexboobs, you are battling a demon of your own: you love Ian, but he is not the man he once was. Do you have him committed to a nice safe home for gibbering brainmentals, or do you stay by his side and try to guide him back to sanity, knowing that he can never fulfill you as a woman? It’s a choice you, the gamer, will have to make.

In this quicktime event, Elena must play convincingly with Solid’s imaginary child. Miss a skip, and Ian will become enraged.

Your tasks

Ian Solid’s tasks change depending on his level of inebriation. When sober, your main goal is to obtain enough money for alcohol or drugs. You can do this by begging, mugging, or renting your body to the city’s many procedurally generated sailors.

The green squares denote people whom Solid has already hit up for cash.

Once you are happily enmeshed in a narcotic haze, the hallucinations begin. This is the combat section of the game, and it can often grow frustrating as your enemies morph and teleport at will, skittering at the edges of the screen in a way that is simultaneously creepy and deeply annoying. If an enemy “kills” you, Solid dies for real. This is explained by a short cutscene showing Solid choking on his own vomit, his pants encrusted with the shame of his passing.

Worried that he might try to harm himself, Elena replaces Solid’s gun with one that shoots steam.

Another ever-present danger is that Solid will give into depression and attempt to kill himself. As Elena, your job is to command The Patriots to ensure Solid is kept as far away as possible from harmful objects, and that he is only allowed to see and hear happy things.

Elena’s worries are proved valid as Solid attempts to mow down a child. Her pocket money would have bought Scotch.

As Solid, you are given the aforementioned Happiness Meter, which you must keep above zero in order to prevent death. There’s another level of danger, however: fall below 30% and you suffer a Bad Trip, which is extremely disconcerting the first time you see it, unless you’re used to the storm drains in your town disgorging thousands of spider-legged breasts with human mouths.

Shooting an enemy’s crotch temporarily raises Solid’s Happiness Meter.

You are also given tasks to perform in order to foil the plans of The Garbage Men. These tasks are often highly illogical, in keeping with Solid’s sad mental state, and they carry with them a heavy irony: fail the tasks and your happiness meter falls to dangerous levels. Complete them, and you descend deeper into your tragic delirium.

 

Drunk again, Solid’s current mission is to throw up on a man before he falls unconscious.

Graphics

In Solid’s fevered mind, the army of Garbage Men plan to cover the entire world in a layer of powdered excrement. In keeping with this, the game is almost entirely brown, which can get boring after a while. However, the drab environments are more than made up for by Solid’s enemies: play as Elena, and you see everyday objects or creatures, but switch to Solid, and suddenly they morph into twisted monsters from his darkest nightmares.

This is actually a cocker spaniel.

A tangled web of dazzling cleverness

The genius of the game shows itself after you have completed both campaigns and can see the way in which they interlock. For example, in Mission 3, Solid’s goal is to destroy a coven of Garbage Vampires by sprinkling them with special consecrated dust. You only discover later that the dust is merely some sugar given to Solid by Elena, and the vampires are actually cakes.

The man on the left is a cherry-flavoured fondant fancy.

What I love most about MGS4, however, is the poignancy of Solid’s story. Hanging over every moment is the spectre of a huge severed penis; a penis which Solid must one day confront. Depending on your actions as Elena, the game may end in two different ways, but both conclusions are laced with tragedy. Solid must either face the terrifying reality of his barren crotch, or slide ever deeper into madness. Either way, Elena’s loins remain unpenetrated by the man she once loved so dearly. You don’t get that kind of shit in Quake.

“I’ve got you now, you sons of bit- FUCKING STEAM GUN!”

Conclusion

I have never cried while playing a game. Not until MGS4, that is. At the end of this game, I am not ashamed to say that I fell to my knees and wept; I wept for myself, for my penis, and for my planet.

I would award this title 95% were it merely a game, but MGS4 is more than that. It is a beautiful metaphor for the tragic emasculation of humanity in today’s cold, modern age. This game has the courage to stand up and say: The Garbage Men are real, and they are within us all.

This surely merits at least another 9%, don’t you think?

DUBIOUS REVIEW SCORE: 104%