I’m thinking it’ll be a million times better with some occasional illustrations, so if you’re the artistic type and fancy helping out with a few sketches, please email me.

I don’t make any money out of this site so can’t pay you, but you will of course get full credit and a link back to your own site if you have one, plus my eternal gratitude, which as usual will be expressed using graphic photos of my penis.

I’m hoping to upload the story by the end of next week; I’ll send you what I’ve got if you’re interested.

What was that thing I just fell off?

Oh. It was a wagon.

It’s fucking Fallout’s fault. A few months ago, I saw a compilation of Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics on sale for five pounds. Five pounds, for heck’s sake. That’s basically 0.25 handjobs without the self-loathing and friction burns. How could one resist.

I’d never played any of these titles before and was already feeling the hype of the upcoming Fallout 3, so I wasted no time in buying the games. And then promptly spent the next five months not playing them, because I had suddenly decided to give up gaming forever. For a while, life was good. My fabulous literary articles made me the talk of the town; I was quite the eligible card in the London season, with many a doe-eyed beauty hanging sleepily from my arm. My monocle was sick. Then, without warning, my creative inspiration ran dry, and before you could say “hypocrite”, I was once again hunched before the old flickering screen, spittle flecking my lips, myriad empty dinner bowls festering like porcelain toadstools in the corners of my room. I thought I had quit for good, but something pulled me back in. Something inarguable and utterly inescapable.

And that thing was groin punching.

This is the reason games exist.

Let me elaborate. Fallout is a brilliant RPG set in a post-apocalyptic future, where tired oxen drag caravans made of cloth-covered car skeletons, and the only remaining unit of currency is the bottle cap. The game’s atmosphere is unequalled, but that’s not the thing that hooked me. It’s the targeting system, which allows you to select exactly which of your enemy’s body parts you want to make all hurty. This taps into a deep human need. You know the need I mean. When you’ve woken at 6 AM with the dread of the day already clinging to your limbs; when you’ve slumped into work rain-drenched and broken, and spent the next eight hours getting pooped on by a consortium of morons; when you’ve staggered two miles home with the wind pushed up against your face like a redneck with a grudge, and there’s nothing in the house but beans; when all this happens every damn day, only one thing will make you feel better at the end of it.

Hitting someone really hard in the dick.

…or the udder, if your boss happens to be a) a radioactive mutant two-headed cow, and b) an asshole.

I still consider myself to be a non-gamer, despite the fact that I am about fifteen hours into Fallout with no sign of stopping.  I’m actually finding this to be a positive experience, firstly since I was hitherto unaware of how great I am at living a lie, but also because this highly localised physical violence has given me a new sense of joi de vivre. Come on. You’ve played Fallout. Tell me you sat through your first successful crotch attack without feeling a thrill of affirmation; a sudden epiphany that there are no limits to this universe, nor your potency within it. And for those of you who haven’t played the game yet, let me ask you a question: have you ever clenched your fist, stared at a rat’s junk and dreamed? Well, dream no more, child. Dream no more.

This experience has opened my mind, and for the first time I find myself truly caring about the history of dick-hitting. How did our older, wiser ancestors practice the Art, and can we learn anything from their techniques? Tragically the internet lets us down, with not even a Geocities page devoted to archaic groinal combat. Undaunted, I have decided to create the first entry myself, in the hope that other Crotch Historians will continue in my footsteps.

The Crotch Punch (history of)

Chapter 1: The Bourbon-Lancy cave paintings

A visitor to rural France in search of history could do worse than visit Bourbon-Lancy. This ancient spa town, situated far South of Paris, contains a beautifully preserved Mediaeval walled district that has changed little over the past seven hundred years. Impressive, certainly; yet this gulf of time shrinks to a gnat’s wing when one ventures into the nearby caves, and views the treasures contained therein.

Carved by water from the native limestone, the Bourbon-Lancy Caves were havens for Mesolithic man, who used them as places of ritual and celebration rather than habitation, preferring a more nomadic existence. The soil reveals animal bones (possibly sacrifices), shaped semi-precious gems, and stone tools of primitive yet effective design. But the greatest trove by far is the collection of paintings on the walls of these caves. Sheltered from the elements, these pictorial histories have endured for tens of thousands of years and, Lord willing, will last tens of thousands more.

The imagery is surprisingly delicate, composed of flowing line-drawn figures full of kinetic beauty. In one picture, characters are seen attacking a bison, spears arcing from their bodies in subtly observed parabolas. Other scenes are more intimate: families clustered around a hearth; dogs fighting for scraps; a baby suckling at its mother’s breast.

The most instructive of these images, known to historians as B-L/7, provides a vital clue to the trials of hierarchy in this primitive society. One figure, presumably male, is engaged in a dramatic act of movement, thrusting powerfully with his fist at a second figure, who attempts to dodge. Another illustration follows (possibly the first recorded instance of the comic book format) in which the fist lands a solid blow on the opponent’s upper thigh / lower torso area. Anthropologists believe that the penis and testicles are the target of this assault. In the final “frame” of the series, the victorious figure squats over the head of the loser as he lies in a supine position, and then appears to lower his pelvis onto the figure’s face. What he is doing in this picture is not known. It is, however, clear that a move for social dominance has been attempted and has met with success; at least until the victor receives a crotch punch of his own. Such is the peril of primacy.

Bourbon-Lancy. A place of beauty, mystery, and cockviolence.

What strikes the viewer most is the poignant beauty of this scene. Unlike today’s ugly and functional representations of scrotal assault, these paintings have an emotional directness that belies the supposed primitive nature of their society. One feels a profound sense of continuity; for all our technological advancement, today’s modern crotches are still punched in the same way as those of our ancestors. One wonders how a Mesolithic man would feel, were he to awake miraculously in this era, if you immediately struck him very hard in his glans and / or nutsacks, and then dangled your balls over his face.

Comforted, I should wager.

By the way, I’ve still quit gaming. I’m just a non-gamer who happens to be playing Fallout right now. Anyone arguing with this will receive a special type of physical retaliation; one that has e’er been dear to my heart.

It rhymes with “Scotch Lunch”.

This is so fucking true.

If you make an effort, you can fill real life with all the things you used to love doing in computer games, and you’ll feel a genuine sense of achievement too! So why not put on your Reality Pants and fire up a session of Real Life: The Ultimate Adventure Game.

Remember, this is a feel-good exercise, intended to show you that there’s always a positive way you can look at any situation. So read on, and get ready to smile!

The ability to fly

When I was a gamer, my favourite game was, of course, Microsoft Gannet Simulator. I loved the freedom it gave my imagination as I soared majestically over cliffs and skerries, seas and estuaries, my craw writhing with whitebait that I would later regurgitate into the screeching throats of my young. That was what gaming was all about.

I used to believe that I would never be able to fly in the real world, due to my poor vision and air-rage restraining order. However, I was wrong. Real Life can take you anywhere in the universe, thanks to a little “game” all of us play every night. It’s called dreaming, it doesn’t cost a penny, and we all have them every night.

And every morning, when we wake up into the yawning horror of our wasted lives, we just need to remember that new dreams wait for us, a mere 15 soul-crushing hours away.

Dreams.

Reloading

In games, if you make a mistake, you die in a cloud of flying giblets and are forced to reload. Real Life is kind of like this, but instead of dying, you disappoint your family and irreparably damage your chances of career advancement. You can always reload, though! All it takes is a slide into drug and alcohol abuse, followed by an epiphanic rebirth one drizzly Thursday evening at the Scarborough Evangelist Society. As you sit on the hard wooden schoolchair, sipping your tea and nibbling on your custard cream, Donald (his cardigan grey as the overcast sky) will explain that God has been trying to talk to you all these years; you just didn’t hear him because there were too many laser explosions happening.

You will walk out a changed man, bathed in fuzzy euphoria. You need no longer be afraid. From now on, your life will be filled with an overriding sense of purpose, and you will almost completely convince yourself that there isn’t still a huge, howling hole in the world that can never be filled. So, don’t despair. You can reload.

Fall under a bus and you’re fucked, though.

Teabagging your enemies

The funniest part of online shooters wasn’t the shooting, maiming and slaughtering, although they were pretty darned spiffing. No, it was the humiliation you could bestow upon your enemies after defeating them. This, when you get right down to it, is the sole reason for a man’s existence. In games such as Halo, you could do a crude approximation of a Tea Bag by squatting your character over the corpse of your enemy and allowing your imagination to fill in the gonad-shaped blanks. It didn’t matter that you had no balls; the enemy still knew that he was beaten. He had been teabagged by a metaphor.

The seeming irony of Real Life is that you have balls but no way of using them offensively. Taking them out in public is seen as a crime, and even if you could use them without getting arrested, your years of cloistered game slavery have made you look like an emaciated grasshopper who’s been tortured on a rack. You will never be able to teabag a real person because you are a total, unmitigated loser.

But this is where magazines can help. They are filled to the brim with handsome icons of success: those shining beacons of fucking bastardry who make you feel like an awful failure whenever you look at their beautiful faces. They have achieved so much, and you have achieved so little. But now the tables will turn, because only one of you will end up with your balls on his face. And it’s not you.

Go on, rest those bad boys on George Clooney. Makes you feel an awful lot better, doesn’t it. What computer game lets you achieve actual ball-to-celebrity contact? Why not take it a step further and take clandestine photos of your boss, or the last girl who turned you down with a vague shiver of disgust, and then relax upon them? The great thing about teabagging their photos is that they won’t even know of their own defeat. But you will know.

Thank you, Real Life, for providing a healthy and exciting way to aerate one’s crotch.

Levelling up

Games offer a satisfying sense of progression. The more experience you get, the higher your level becomes, until you are the supremely capable master of your world. But Real Life offers this feature too! You’ll level up every single year - it’s called Getting Older! When you reach the higher levels, you gain access to certain special powers, also known as Responsibilities, and this is where the real depth and complexity of Real Life shows itself. You’ll learn to hone your micro-management skills as you try to balance a mortgage with a fuel-guzzling car, food-guzzling kids and the cash-guzzling prostitute whom you only sleep with because you feel scared and lonely, and you forgot how to talk to your wife years ago.

You’ll also get the chance of promotion, though a well-balanced game knows not to give you too much reward or you’ll grow bored. This why Real Life will usually keep promotions just out of reach, in order to give you something to hope for while you shiver listlessly in your battery cage, your optimism burned to a stub by the corporate machine. Remember to take a break every once in a while! Get up and walk around, stretch those legs.

Upgrading

For many, the real thrill of gaming isn’t even playing the games: it’s lusting perennially after the latest and greatest piece of hardware. Does your PC gradually become outdated, meaning that you can’t run the latest games because it’s too slow? Well, Real Life does the same thing! The older you get, the more of your basic bodily functions will start shutting down, until you become a curiously shrunken sultana of a man, spending your last days pushing a zimmer frame down the street in a perpetual losing race against death!

Death waits to claim his prize. “OLD PEOPLE SMELL LIKE VINEGAR”, he muses.

“Great! But how can I upgrade myself?”, you’re probably asking. Well, the trick is to have kids. After you grow withered and useless and are picked off by one of Real Life’s countless viruses, they will be the Next Gen, ensuring that a tiny part of you is passed down into immortality. Call it a God Mode, if you like.

Except that within two generations, no one alive will ever have heard the sound of your voice.

Also your great-great-grandkids are dicks.

Well, for all those people who feeling down about quitting, unsure as to whether real life offers the same thrill-a-minute excitement as Halo, I hope this has cheered you up and given you the confidence you need to quit gaming for good. Who needs games when you’ve got Real Life!

Meeeeeeee.

EXT. WAREHOUSE.

I chose to do this while working at an insurance company, but any kind of depressing blue-collar office McJob will be fine. At the very least, make sure you have the following:

• 1 internet connection

• 1 powerfully retarded workmate

• 1 or more personality issues which result in outbursts of sarcasm

When these are in place, you’re ready to start. For maximum effect, give this one a couple of years’ preparation by settling deep into your rut of a job and developing a profound resentment toward life and anyone who appears to be enjoying it. Now let’s begin! You’re sitting at your desk, making desultory key-strokes while the long, desperate hours trickle by; then suddenly an email pops into your inbox! Gosh, what could this be? A love letter from an anonymous and perkily-breasted admirer, perhaps?

No, it is in fact an unsolicited email asking for your credit card details! What a surprise!

At this point, it needs to be made clear that you are not a football fan. The idea of you purchasing anything from Manchester City Football Club is laughable to the point of hernia, so there is only one possible explanation for this email: someone is trying to scam you. This makes you angry. Angry enough to vent some serious spleen all over a guy. Now, it’s usually a good rule not to send anything offensive from a work email address; but the exception, surely, is when you’re addressing your email to an amoral spammer who probably has poop in his pants. What harm could a quick, vomitingly offensive reply cause?

With “none whatsoever” echoing incorrectly in your mind, you should work yourself up to such a froth of petty fury that you’re crying tears of pure bile. These scammers, eh. What a bunch of cuntfunnels. You’re going to teach them what happens when they mess with with [forename] Q. [surname].

Sadly I have destroyed the original letter I sent, for reasons which will become obvious, but here is a radically toned-down version you can adapt to your own needs.

Now sit back with a smug smile borne from the certainty of a job well done. Make sure you savour the next 24 blissful, hell-free hours. The next morning, while you are halfway through your pretentious yoghurt flapjack, you’ll receive a call from the company director asking you to come and see him in his office. You will bound down the stairs, puffed up with self-importance, wondering what sensitive task you will be entrusted to perform this time. “[forename],” he will probably say, “we need you to locate Agent Yoplais Granola, who is currently undercover in Colombia, and deliver to him this vitally important car insurance document. The agent is all alone and uninsured. If he were to crash while evading the Hummers of the cocaine lords, he would be liable not just for his own damages… but for theirs.”

It does not play out entirely like this. After beckoning you to sit down, the director says, “so, what do you know about an email sent to Manchester City football club?” At this point, your heart decides to take a break from beating and relax for a few seconds. “…Because I’ve just been contacted by their sales manager,” your boss continues, “to say that one of their employees received an email with your address on it. The email was apparently very offensive. Very offensive indeed.”

At this moment, you are probably casting your mind back through your life, trying to remember if you raped and cooked any endangered animals, because that is the only reason God could possibly hate you this much.

The director gives you a look of murderous calm. “As you know, the company is legally responsible for any messages sent under its name, regardless of their purpose. In other words, it wasn’t just you who sent that email. It was me. It was, in fact, the entire company. So what, exactly, did we say?”

You stall. What else can you do. “I… uh… I thought they were just scammers; you know, criminals”, you say, hoping the director will see the funny side and come back with “well, their football playing ability is certainly criminally bad, oh HAHAHAHA let’s forget this whole thing ever happened”. Instead, he fixes you with the kind of gaze that would make Hitler dirty his dungarees. “The girl who received this email”, he says in a voice like two granite slabs sliding over each other, “is 18 years old, and is very seriously upset. I want you to go away, find the email you sent, and bring it to me, along with a very good explanation of what has just happened.”

Now is a great time to cover your face, because you are so fucking boned that there are dicks protruding from your nose.

Dizzy with terror, you lurch upstairs and express to the office your titanic confusion regarding what has just happened. Why the rubbery Christ would the real MCFC email you asking for your credit card details? You wouldn’t shop there if it was the last tacky merchandise store on Earth. Surely this must be some kind of retarded mistake made by a retard? There is a pause, during which you notice that one of your workmates has just turned the colour of pissed-on snow. To protect his identity, let’s call him That Stupid Cunt. You round on him, death in your eyes. “Oh God, what did you do.”

That Stupid Cunt takes several seconds to respond. “It was… uh… it was my mate’s birthday.”

Yes.

“And he’s a City fan.”

Right.

“So I… uh… thought I’d get him a football.”

With you.

“So I ordered one. That’s all really. Nothing else happened. Except I gave your name and email address because I don’t trust the internet.”

I see.

“Sorry.”

Indeed.

“Didn’t think it would do any harm. Forgot to tell you.”

Mmm-hmm.

“So is everything coolARRRRGLE please let go of my neckhhhhhargglgglargh.”

As the last spark of life twinkles feebly in That Stupid Cunt’s eyes, you suddenly realise what you have to do. You boss wants to see the email, which means he wasn’t sent it by MCFC. This is a miracle. In her shock and anguish, Jocelyn Made-Up-Name must have deleted it. If your boss actually sees this email, you will be screwed faster than you can say Cock Suppository, so you must remove all trace of it right now. You rush to your computer and frantically cleanse every trace of your sent and deleted items, then breathe a huge sigh of relief. If you can play down the severity of the email, you might just be ok.

Ten minutes later, you and That Stupid Cunt sit sheepishly before the director. You have explained the situation, and you’re fairly confident that he buys your story about the email perhaps containing the odd mild profanity, such as “fart” or “boobs”. He muses for a few seconds. “Well, gentlemen, I’m sure you’re aware of how stupid you both are.”

You and The Aforementioned Cunt nod your heads so vigorously that the director draws back a little in alarm.

Eventually he continues. “I should fire you both. But I am going to be forgiving. I’d say a bunch of flowers and a crawling apology to the lady in question should do the trick. I trust you gentlemen will be generous with the bouquet.”

You assure him that you will denude entire rainforests. The resultant bouquet, you promise, will be colourful enough to trigger epileptic fits, and will contain so many scents that anyone smelling it will immediately have an aneurysm. “Then we shall speak no more of the matter,” your eagle-nosed director says, his fingers folded in front of him in classic Blofeld pose. You get up to leave, thanking the Lord your bowels remained tightly clenched through this ordeal.

“Oh,” he says as you turn to leave, “except that you still haven’t shown me the email.”

You silently congratulate yourself on your foresight. “Sorry sir, the email is gone. I habitually clean my sent and deleted items every night, so I’m afraid it was wiped.” Yeah, that should do it. Your boss thinks on this for a moment, then replies “but won’t there still be a copy on the server?”

Aaaaand, it’s toilet time.

You must think faster than you have ever thought before. A dizzying torrent of adrenaline shoots into your brain, slowing the world down until your panicky heartbeat becomes a grim, measured pounding on the doors of hell. Think, dammit. Who is the only person who can retrieve archived emails from the Exchange server? It’s you, you fucking moron. You’re the I.T. guy. How much does your boss know about the computer systems in this place? Can you bluff him? You just don’t know. You have no choice but to try.

“Sorry, but because of space issues, the non-essential folders such as sent and deleted items are cleaned from the server once a month. On the… uh… seventeenth of the month. Which, in quite an astonishing coincidence, was yesterday. Yesterday evening.” Agonising seconds pass. He stares piercingly into your eyes, his whole face voicing a silent, protracted “hmmmmmmmmm”. Eventually he looks down and says, “well. That’s that. Don’t do anything like this again, lads.”

It is not number one on your agenda.

He gestures for you to go away. You leave the room with a wiffling slump of relief and a blow of friendly camaraderie to the back of That Stupid Cunt’s neck. For a second there, you were convinced you would have to play your one and only trump card, but no. Everything was ok. There is now no need to inform your boss that several months ago, you discovered several gigabytes of gay porn on the laptop belonging to the chairman’s son.

You can save that one for when you get caught rogering his wife in the office toilet, which is the only thing more certain to get you sacked than the email you just sent.

A guy animates classic arcade games using household items. The inventiveness here is amazing.

Dude can’t play for shit though.

Yes, the rumours are true. At E3, Sierra finally announced the long-awaited sitcom / sci fi action blaster, Simpsons Versus Predator.

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.

The man is me. And the game is Aliens Versus Predator. And the living room is my mum’s living room.

I mostly game at night. Mostly.

I have loved Aliens since I was old enough to watch it, which was at age eight. Luckily, I had already been desensitised to violence because my sister forced me to watch Nightmare On Elm Street the previous year, so I was not traumatised by the penis-shaped chestmonsters and disturbingly strong female role models. However, I ended up fetishising the film. Every lunchtime I recruited my friends to play Aliens playground games that all bore quite an incredible resemblance to Tick, though I swore at the time that the two were unrelated. I obsessed over every Aliens computer game I could find, including an old classic on the C64, which shat me up even more than the film did, thanks to the moment about halfway through when all the lights go off and all you can do is wander around screaming and then die.

And it looks just as impressive now!

You young whippersnappers have it easy

Games before Doom were hardcore. You weren’t even expected to complete them; the intention was to have you gibbering in impotent fury as your character expired on level 2 for the three-hundred-and-forty-sixth time, and most games achieved this goal with crotch-punching levels of success. When AvP was released in 1999, it recaptured the incredible stress of those old games by denying you the ability to save your games mid-level, not exactly a calming measure when the game was as hard as a cement block covered in tetanus-tipped diamonds.

Admittedly, the game would have been scarier if any of the aliens could move.

The genius of AvP lay in the random nature of the alien encounters. Although the levels were the same every time, the enemies were in a different place each time you played. Additionally, they would respawn at random intervals, meaning that if you just stood still, eventually you would be found and killed. There was never a safe moment, as I memorably learned when I attempted to roll a jazz cigarette and ended up flinging the contents all over the living room floor while a facehugger viciously raped my nose.

Let there not be light

Darkness pervaded the world of AvP. Very few games have played with the absence light so memorably. As a marine you could throw flares to light your way, but these invariably made the shadows more menacing; alternatively you could switch to infra-red, but you were blinded as soon as you fired your gun. Things got even more awesome with the Predator’s vision: one mode allowed you to see aliens, and another humans, but never both at the same time, which was a perfect recipe for Pant Poop Casserole. This was a far more subtle and plausible mechanic than Doom III’s cheap “torch or gun, but not both” trick, and AvP was released five years before this supposedly classic title. It’s a shame that programmers so often fail to learn from the lessons of their forbears due to being a big pile of tards.

In the “Gayliens” mod, the humans glow yellow when they are sexually aroused.

The biggest mindbugger was playing as the Alien itself. Not only did you move like a greased bastard, you also had the ability to walk on walls and ceilings. This could be hideously disorientating, but there was no finer feeling than crouching on the ceiling while a hapless victim walked obliviously beneath, then dropping to the floor behind him and getting blown to pieces by the twatting sentry gun you didn’t even know was there. Did I mention this game was hard?

Brevity is the soul of not making a godawful storyline

The first two Alien films treated the subject matter with a degree of respect, thanks to the well-written scripts. AvP does the same by not having a script. This was a wise move, since the storylines of most games are about as mature as a bitch-fight in a crèche. In AvP, the only speech comes from videos on the TV screens your character walks past, and they’re largely functional, serving only to explain the nature of the level and your ultimate objective. The actors are reasonably skilled and don’t look too ashamed of their choices in life. Not until the Special Edition that is, when the programmers (oh, those cards) replaced the professional actors with themselves. Results were mixed. In the same way that sewage is mixed before being pumped onto Crosby beach. I tried to find these videos to show you, but they have quite rightfully been erased from history.

I was a worrying young man

I played AvP until I knew every cubic centimetre of every level, and then I played it some more, until certain corridors and bulkheads were more familiar to me than my own family. I played it long past the point of fear, not an easy thing when every playthrough was different; eventually I was acing the game while holding the mouse with my toes and typing with my penis. At this point, I lost interest. As did my friends, who no longer wanted to use my computer for some reason.

When I gave away all my games, there was one CD I just had to hold onto. I don’t even plan on playing the game again, but I was just so damn fond of it for so many years that I couldn’t bear to let the game go. I am aware of how flamingly retarded this sentiment is, but on the other hand I AM SMARTGUNNING YOUR FACE I AM SMARTGUNNING YOUR FACE.

And also you’ll be really bored.

Hello, and welcome to the July progress report.

It’s been two months since I started the blog, and three since I gave up games. It’s been suspiciously easy so far, other than a few days when I was quivering with desire to play Diablo 2 again, and this was my own stupid fault for writing two articles about it, back-to-back. However, now that I have a little perspective, I’m realising that quitting games removed one symptom of a deeper problem. And that problem is that I’m a lazy, bone-idle little cockbadger.

Faced with the terrifying prospect of Applying Myself, I’m feeling a strong desire to get addicted to something, anything, and it’s almost irrelevant what it is. Addiction for me is an easy escape from the dull attrition of everyday life, which is why I need to resist it at all costs, and why there’s a perverse sense of pleasure in being bored. It feels like a healthy boredom, if there is such a thing.

Probably not. The longer you stay bored, the less you want to do anything at all, until you start to depress yourself with your own lethargy. Last week, bereft of stimulation, I latched onto Futurama, and I have now watched the whole of series 1 and 5. In an effort to do anything whatsoever, I made it my project to learn how to mimic the voices of every character. So far I have managed two syllables, but what a pair of fucking syllables. If you meet me drunk in a bar and have the misfortune to mention Futurama to me, I will shout the words “….my whaaaa?” loudly in your ear for the next four hours. And you will be quietly impressed.

In order to do the impression correctly, I do of course have to be naked. Even in bars. Especially in bars.

I’m scared of what will happen when the Futurama runs out. Will the boredom overwhelm me? To avoid this terrifying eventuality, I’m preparing a list of alternative time-wasting pastimes so that I don’t find myself at a loose end. Christ forbid I might actually spend my time doing work. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

• Enjoy the crisp, refreshing taste of heroin
• Indulge in restrained pyromania
• Come crawling back to Galaga, despite the way that slut treated me
• Masturbate until a man could toast a marshmallow on my penis

Needs tweaking, admittedly. Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If none of those anti-boredom methods work, my game plan for next month is to hang surreptitiously around Diablo news websites while publicly proclaiming the fact that I’ve given up games for good. I am confident that if I say it loud enough, I will start believing it myself. My girlfriend Betty has been awesome throughout my cold turkey, offering constant support and good humour, so I plan on abusing this by placing all of the responsibility for my mental health on her shoulders and then blaming her if I fall off the wagon. This is an awesome technique which really endears me to people, and I’m sure it will bring us closer as a couple. I’ll let you know how it goes. I may include a handy Dumped-O-Meter to keep you apprised of exactly how dumped I am.

I’m praying I’ll have found a solution to the boredom problem by the time Diablo Fucking Three arrives next year. My attitude towards this game is scaring me a little, because I’m not even seriously considering the chance that I won’t play it. I really don’t know what I should do in the face of DF III, but the sensible answer seems to be to burn my computer and become a Hebridean hermit.

Whore

I don’t get much of a chance to whore out other people’s sites on this blog, so I’m going to take that opportunity now. If you haven’t checked out Fag To Go, Melancholic Goat’s blog, you really should, because it won’t be around for much longer. It’s a scary and hilarious account of his time as a pizza delivery monkey, and the weirdos he encounters are very memorable. He recently quit his job, so there won’t be many more updates. Check it out now before it’s gone.

Also, if you’ve ever been hooked on Oblivion, you will love Living In Oblivion. It’s a blog by the guy who made the excellent Half Life comic Concerned; this time, he’s playing through Oblivion as an NPC, which means no saving, terrible clothes and a diet consisting of carrots and horse plops. The blog is frequently hilarious, especially when he goes to ridiculous lengths to avoid the heroism and excitement that the game tries to force upon him.