“Good electrocute, green arse.” “Good spam kick, thunderthighs.”
I feel poorly done MS paint drawings always enhance articles; too bad my shitty Mac doesn’t have it. I had to hand draw. I did one that was meant to be funnier of Dhalsim’s extended wibbly arm bitch-slapping Chun Li but it ended up looking like a kid with learning disabilities had tried to line-draw an Escher picture. Excuse me. Anyway.
So this is it, Street Fighter IV. I feel like I should really dig into this game more cynically, but after several attempts, I just can’t. I find Street Fighter too full of joy to care about any flaws that may be around. IGN and Gamespot seem to share my joy, but I am aware that they would give Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare seven out of ten for “wanting to be good”. So I apologise, and appeal to your better natures. You can have at me like you’re Raphael of Soul Calibur II should you want to. (He curiously reminded me of David Bowie.)
Street Fighter always has been a spiritual experience; a fluorescent catharsis. There are those boxers who say when they get in a ring they feel their own humanity; I think a fraction of that feeling comes into play in SF4 when you reach the ultimate humiliation of being Perfected by a series of E. Honda face slaps.
For me, the Street Fighter series is the king of beat-em-ups; Street Fighter has grown up, in my mind at least, into a kind of mythical behemoth of sentimentality. Not only is it a lodestone of my childhood but it’s also a symbol of my generation – a generation who likes to use virtual, neon-coloured stereotypes to beat the crap out of other virtual, neon-coloured stereotypes. If that isn’t pop culture at its best, I don’t know what is. In Japan, ‘natsukashii’ is applied to the playing of old Street Fighters at arcades; it too means ‘sentimental’. The Famicom is also ‘natsukashii’. You can really give it to the Japanese on the getting emotional about videogames thing.
He was more attractive pixellated, sadly
Street Fighter IV retains everything good about what I remember of my childhood button-mashing, and retains a few new characters from Street Fighter’s history after the landmark of SF II. My favourite retention has been the very balance of the game; how responsive, how easy, and at the same time how difficult the game is.
I know that sounds like a huge contradiction, but I think if you’ve played it you may agree. The more you know about this game, the more difficult it gets for you. At the same time, it is so easy to pick up, and so easy to find yourself hoarse from yelling at your opponents all night because you couldn’t bring yourself to get away from the joystick.
There is a moment, in every Street Fighter, when you know that you are going to land the winning blow and earn that sweet slow motion scream of your nemesis. The moment, of course signified by an opponent’s almost entirely depleted health bar, can often be drawn out for more of a thrill if you are good, but for what you might call a ‘casual’ gamer like myself, this moment is often brief but intensely sweet. Sweet and sharp, with a kind of urgency. The Moment can be taken away from you, if you become complacent, but once you see that tiny strip of colour left on their bar, and your play has been solid, you just sort of know that it’s over, and you feel pretty good inside. If only you can keep it together…
That moment is still on show in SF IV, but it has become faster, smoother, and easier to turn the whole fight around. Four has a kind of obvious flow in bouts, where if you have a whole health bar and your opponent has hardly any suddenly they can be beating you down in a winning streak second to none. But then, you can be equally as likely to fight back, and then it’s anyone’s game. I think that’s great games developing. It’s fast, and nice to look at, and the new technicalities hardly seem like chores at all. Rarely do games deliver on looks as well as play. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed playing a game for the game’s sake – perhaps it was Soul Caliber – and that doesn’t look half as shiny. And the KO lines are stupid.
Being Scottish I personally was hysterical over the SF4 level intended to depict a whisky distillery in good old Caledonia; ginger men in tartan dresses move large barrels around whilst sheep look in from the outside. Whilst we do have gingers, whisky, and sheep, I am pretty certain I have never encountered a man in a tartan dress there; and if I do, I may renounce my nationality, become one of the dreaded English and put on a more-English-than-English Gwyneth Paltrow accent. Perhaps in the nine months I have been away the Scottish National Party has started issuing orders that men must wear tartan dresses in distilleries. I also have it on good authority that Scotch Eggs are now currency. But that’s another story. Anyway, thanks Japan. I do love your views on my country, very cute.
On an incidental note, a monumental shift in favourite character has occurred; Chun Li is no longer the master of the Streets – in IV I swapped her in for a (not really that new) newer model, Cammy, who is even more hilariously antsy than the Chun-face. Chun Li still wins for me on II Turbo, but in IV, for some reason Cammy is my lucky number 7. Although she really needs to do something about the costume. It must be inconvenient getting that Brazilian every other day just because you have to fight someone on a street. Perhaps MI6 has a Cammy Bikini Wax earmark fund to keep up appearances. I must organize a fund raiser; our troops in Iraq need boots that don’t melt. And why hasn’t Cammy been dispatched there yet to unleash hell et cetera? Lazy bint.
PS I am now aware that Ryu has become a gay icon. Most of the images of him can be found on gaygamer.net. I am not really surprised, but I’m becoming aware of a kind of possessiveness within myself. Oddsfish. (Word courtesy of Disney’s Peter Pan.)
It’s pretty hard for me to say which games have truly shaped the way I see the medium, but I think it’s safe to say that if Capcom had never existed my interest in games would be a lot more Sims 2 (retarded).
Now, that’s not to say I have anything against people who play Sims 2. I, personally, adored Sims 2 like I adore most every Maxis product, intensely and passionately for about a month, until I’ve learnt all its secrets and got bored of it. If you think about it, that makes Maxis products a bit like a man who looks attractive, plays hard to get, is mysterious and aloof… until you get in bed with him and afterwards he tells you he likes to bite his toenails and that he works at McDonald’s. Sim City 2000 was the one I loved the most passionately, but it felt like once I knew it inside out it would get into bed with me so readily I started to date other games.
If it comes to making Harry Potter costumes, stop playing.
But Capcom! Oh Capcom. Capcom Capcom Capcom. Huh…. Cigarette please. It started with Street Fighter really; like most videogame romances. I remember back in the mists of time I went to play videogames at everyone else’s house because I never had a console (until my little bro decided to buy a Nintendo 64 and I commandeered it for investigative purposes) and this meant that my skills with a controller were significantly handicapped from lack of practice. I tried to deny that I was interested in games because of those terrible social norms that constrain little girls, but every time I went to my friends’ places I could hear their SNES calling to me softly from the TV cabinet. My virgin experience with Street Fighter (I think it was SF II Turbo) was when I went to stay with my grandparents in Belfast and made friends with the girl next door, whose older twin brothers, joy of joys, had a SNES. I was less interested in her than the contents of her living room. I often used to reject her company for the company of her older brothers, who in return used to give me a fix of Street Fighter like it was a hot dose of Northern Irish heroin to the vein.
There was always that guy at the back of the Top Gun level who looked like he was masturbating
The first meeting of myself and Street Fighter sticks in my mind because of the reaction I got when I picked the controller up to play it. I must stress that I had not played anything but Mario up until this point, and although I liked Mario and his various goomba boppings and bunny flappings, I was not very good at maneuvering his tubby little plumber ass anywhere skillfully. But when I started to play Street Fighter, something almost magical happened. I began to win very easily.
This isn’t an article written to brag; in fact, I am never particularly gifted when it comes to games intuition. I personally like that I am bad at FPS, that I need to learn skills when I start to play a new game, that I have two left thumbs. But when I chose Chun Li (Is she some sort of secret cheat character – did everyone know about this and not say anything?!) and started hopping around the place throwing punches and kicking those svelte legs everywhere I found that my two male admirers’ jaws dropped. I made it all the way through to almost complete the game in an afternoon without losing a fight; my female friend fell asleep on the couch. Her older brothers didn’t believe that it was my first time with Street Fighter. They loved me ever after; their younger sister hated me. I carried on oblivious to everyone’s reactions; it’s only now peering back into memory that I see the sibling rivalry and social politics I caused with my little liaisons with Chun Li.
All Chun Li liaisons aside, Capcom have produced games of a truly stunning and interesting variety since. Who would have thought that a game based on the life of a lawyer, made for the Nintendo DS, would ever make any money? Capcom banked on it and made one of the best point and clicks of the videogame generation, Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney. (And what a brilliant name! Rising from the ashes, a lawyer who comes back from the figurative dead to prove himself and his clients ‘right’… Unadulterated genius.) Phoenix’s perpetual professional rival Edgeworth might even make it into my top ten (virtually) screwable videogame hunks. Are you kidding? Have you seen that moody guy’s ruff? He’s getting his own game in May you know.
I have no objection to Mr Edgeworth.
Then there’s Devil May Cry. Dante (besides being also fairly hunky, but a little too hunky so that it feels kind of vulgar to like him) has guns AND a giant anime sword, AND he’s a half demon demon-slayer. You can’t get much more crazy than that premise, but Capcom thought it would work… And it does. You rarely lose the feeling that you are a badass when you are playing it. It’s also ass-rapingly difficult so any of your friends who say they can complete it you can automatically accuse of being a dick. That means you, Tarek you PS3 fanboy dick.
But one of my all time favs has got to be Resident Evil. Not since Day of the Tentacle have such confusing and melodramatic plots been such fun… And it kind of brought to our attention this new genre – Survival Horror. You are in a giant fuck off creepy house with all sorts of gross stuff that wants to kill you… and zombies. And meanwhile, there are some inconveniently obscure puzzles to solve in what I would call a shit scarily, piss-in-pants-inducingly terrifying atmosphere. Oh, I should get through that door. Oh there’s a zombie in the room. Wait a second zombie dude while I push these blocks around the floor and put some jewels in this tiger’s eyes.
Er.... Hello.
I have to admit to coming late to what my circle of friends calls “Res Ded Evil” or simply “Res Ded” because I was never on the Playstation bandwagon. We never had enough money to be on the multiple console bandwagon. I was on the Nintendo bandwagon. Shall I stop talking about bandwagons? Essentially, my obsession started with Resident Evil on the Gamecube, which I am not afraid to admit terrified the crap out of me. It ended with Resident Evil 4, which terrified me less, but which I liked for the fresh look and the horror movie homages. I guess if they hadn’t redone the gameplay a little with Res 4 the main characters still might have the maneuverability of rusty WWI tanks, but I still hold a torch for the way Resident Evil used to be really, paralysingly scary. Most of that scary was created by forcing you to reenter rooms you had already had really (really!) bad experiences in just to get a purile flimsy bit of bollocks to solve a puzzle with (aforementioned tiger eyes). I think every time that door loading screen appeared I cursed the makers of the game loudly, almost with a kind of elated horror.
I can’t wait to play Resident Evil 5 through – I am stranded in no console hell right now, waiting for my chance to play through a truly ridiculous plot. Let me know if you think it’s good. I have to be appraised of the scary moment quota. Next, a review of the new Streetfighter, because I love it and so do you.
Japan is a country where technology and cultural history collide to form a fantastic array of imaginative and fascinating games. Today, a little about the relationship between Japan and games.
Japan is by no means a consistent country, and whilst many people in the west imagine it is some sort of high tech mecca, I have experienced a very different side of Japan. Here in the south of Kyushu, the furthest southern part of mainland Japan (further south is Okinawa), I am so far away from the robots and used underwear vending machines that I rarely get a fix of drive-by technological perversion. It is a shame.
However, gaming is very much alive, even in the poorest prefectures of Japan, and one of the most glorious and obvious indicators of this are the arcades. Where I live, arcades are screaming beeps and flashing lights almost twenty-four hours a day, and are far more prolific and popular than games arcades are back home (I don’t think I’ve seen a single one in Edinburgh outside of the Edinburgh University student union). I imagine that if arcades were around in Scotland like they are in Japan, they would be frequented by paedophiles and drunk homeless men who need a place to sleep. And whilst I don’t really know what a Japanese paedophile looks like (I always imagine British ones to look like John Prescott) I usually feel very safe in an arcade in Japan because they are always busy; a place for serious, contemplative gaming or equally, drunk hilarious competitiveness. I often battle teenage girls high on the sugar content of melon soda at the Taiko drumming games or the Guitar Hero style machines, teenage boys at the beat-em-ups (I always lose), and men my age at driving games (I hold my own occasionally). All life can be found in a Japanese arcade. My favourite local arcade has a 24-hour McDonald’s attached to it, which is a very business-shrewd idea and means that you have to walk past the arcade, and wait outside it, to get a burger. It seems like the two businesses have a symbiotic relationship.
In addition to this, the latest games also get to the arcade very quickly. I remember seeing Street Fighter IV in an arcade in Tokyo extremely early on when Britain hadn’t even got a release date for it yet. I didn’t have the guts to play it because seasoned arcade professionals clutched the joysticks like they were deadly katanas, their K.O. battle scars lit at the back of blood-crazed eyes.
I really stand out in a Japanese arcade; I’m a woman of twenty-three who is taller than the men of my age here. Until recently I had blonde hair and I have blue eyes and a bust Japanese women stare at. People regard me as if I just stepped out of the space ship in Close Encounters when I walk into an arcade. They stop short at communicating in musical notes but they initially seem kind of weirded out that I am there. But the arcade is the perfect place to overcome cultural barriers; everything is based on either fun or competition, and both are available in abundance. Any kind of initial weirdness is ironed out in the gaming process. My favourite thing about the arcades, above all else, is that arcade classics are never shifted out of the door in favour of the latest fashion. Street Fighter II Turbo has pride of place at my local arcade, and I still got it with Chun Li. I don’t got it as much as the Japanese kids who play me, but I still got it…. in the western sense.
The Street Fighter IV stand, Tokyo Game Show 2008
The interesting thing with Japanese gaming culture is that history plays a huge part in what you would think is a forward-looking industry. Japanese history and culture are the focus or inspiration of the content of many games, such as quiet smash hits like Sony’s Ico and Shadow of the Colossus which are inspired by traditional Japanese architecture. Okami also was very obviously inspired by the Japanese art of brush pen writing – a metaphor for the power of the written word in Japanese culture. History and games go hand in hand with each other here, although you would never question the lack of FPS war games (Call Of Duty is a sore point on this side of the ocean).
This relationship between history and the Japanese games industry was recently summed up by a photograph I took at New Year. In Kumamoto Castle, a teenage girl was singlehandedly preserving some Japanese traditional paintings through the omnipresence of the Nintendo DSi lens:
I’ve been off video games for the past few weeks. I had one of those gaming experiences where you start to wonder seriously about whether you’ve wasted days of your life and whether you wouldn’t be a much better person if you swore off video games forever and took up some kind of improving hobby involving classical music.
It all started innocuously enough. I’ve been playing through the updated version of Final Fantasy IV on the DS and bumped into this guy:
You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he’s 10% rabbity cuteness and 90% time-sucking evil. As you might guess from the picture he’s called Namingway. In the original FFIV he was there to allow you to rename your characters (a sensible provision, given that the lead character is called Cecil). As the DS remake involves a fair amount of spoken dialogue in which characters are called by name, Namingway is still in the game but is unable to rename you. This realisation sends him off into a whole subplot in which he has a series of existential crises and keeps changing his occupation and name – Lovingway, Campingway, Jammingway, you get the idea.
My downfall came when Namingway had become Puddingway – a rabbit with a girlfriend who demanded Rainbow Pudding. Rainbow Pudding is an item which certain types of monsters have a 0.4% likelihood of dropping after a fight. That’s less than 1 in 200 and that assumes you’re not having to wade through scores of other useless monsters who are hanging around the same area.
After a couple of evenings of trailing around dungeons I finally won a Rainbow Pudding only to realise on saving the game that I had spent five and a half hours looking for it. Five and a half hours. I could have watched a full version of Hamlet in that time and still had time to go for a Cornetto in the interval. I could have completed a marathon (and, most likely, keeled over directly afterwards). I could have made a full roast dinner with a 10kg turkey. But all I actually achieved was to get a piece of imaginary nonsense for a rabbit in a clearly abusive afters-based relationship.
After a bit of time away from the DS I’ve come to terms with the time I’ve spent on FFIV. It’s time spent doing something I enjoy, so it’s only time wasted if I start beating myself up about it. I have, however, learned two very valuable lessons:
– pudding isn’t something you can just demand from someone else; in fact demanding pudding is grounds for the immediate termination of the relationship.
– eating Cornettos makes whatever you’re doing more like high culture. To avoid this problem in future I will be punctuating my gameplay with Cornettos from here on in.
If you are a gamer, you must have bought this by now. If you haven’t, I assume you are out of the loop, are a girl gamer and have been put off by the male-marketed packaging, or simply do not care for shaving.
Attempting to be serious for a change, I wonder exactly why this is a gamer’s razor, and also at what possible time a gamer finds himself (or herself) thinking, I really need a gamer’s razor. As for the benefits to Gillette, I can only conclude that there is a link between slapping “gamer” on the packaging, and gamers, who have been statistically proven fairly affluent, buying the product.
As if you go to the shops one day, see the label “gamer” on something, and think, “Wait a sec, I’m a gamer! I must buy it!” If they slapped “for Neo Cons” on the packaging after the description “Ice Cream” on Haagen Dazs would Neo Cons be more compelled to buy it? Would it reaffirm their existence? And if they were buying it more, would that not be the most bizarre thing for Republicans to do since increasing big government power?
Of course, it might be implying that you should buy the razor if you play a “game” sport such as tennis. But even that is kind of weird, isn’t it? You can’t market a razor as a specialist product for sports or activities; gaming and tennis have nothing directly to do with being hairless, unless you count those thirteen year olds who play too much Halo all the time. It’s not really a specialist tool unless you are a barber…. or a stripper. On that note, I suggest Gillette LAP DANCE edition, for strippers who need that extra close shave every day. You can put a heroin-chic blonde wearing only her knickers on the front of the package. It will sell like baked goods, slightly warmed.
Parodius on the SNES gives Gillette advice
Admittedly, there have been times where I have thought, man, gamers really need to shave more.
Think three day LAN hookups, or any kind of mass multiplayer gaming taking place in one, dark, room. When you enter the first thing that happens is that a stale sweat, energy drink, and burp aroma drifts into your reluctant nasal passage. The second thing that you notice has to be the temper tantrums of gamers regressing into a childlike state, which if you are lucky result in a shouting match, game-long snide smack-talking or the breaking of peripherals and input devices. Which for me, is the main reason I brave the room in the first place; it is like cultural anthropology, and I am David Attenborough. “And here, see, the young, Lesser-Sighted Gamer has put on his glasses and spied his virtual prey. See now, he will ambush his prey savagely, using only a knife in the back. COD will never be the same for the Lesser-Sighted’s victim. See how the victim writhes in pain, wailing expletives and claiming `haxx0rz`. Watch him total his keyboard in wild rage, whilst the Lesser-Sighted simulates mating with his monitor.”
Then it will hit you that all of the men in the room haven’t bothered shaving for the three days they have been there, and they haven’t showered either. The women (perhaps some Swedish babes and some stray girlfriends), on the other hand, somehow have managed a shower and / or at least a change of clothes and look upbeat compared to the men; they don’t have to shave their faces. Unless they are very feminist gamers (myself). In this situation, how long the LAN has gone on for can be ascertained by the size of the beards, just like you can tell the age of a tree by counting the number of rings inside the trunk. You can also tell the length of a LAN by how many finished boxes of Empire Biscuits and empty bottles of Kick are lying around, from my experience. And for the uninitiated, no Empire Biscuits are not Darth Vader’s favourite LAN snack.
So, perhaps in the event of a ten day LAN (God forbid), Gillette could come to the door and attempt to flog Gamer Razors to the unsuspecting masses, but that’s opportunism, rather than slapping a “gamer” label on something. And anyway, gamers are the least narcissistic section of society; I doubt that male gamers really give a crap that their beard is getting long. You heard me Gillette, I’m saying it’s not going to work. Best bring out that Lap Dancer edition.
PS I would like to thank my friend Thomas for bringing to mind what happens when you do not shave at a LAN. You know who you are, my previously fuzzy ginger friend…
Computers are supposed to get better as time goes on. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that you can fit on a circuit will double every two years. Despite there being laws – rules! – about this I have a PC which, after being moved to different flats and dropped a few times, is now working on its own inverse of Moore’s law. It’s getting progressively stupider, regressing back to the earliest forms of computer, dropping a generation of development every few months. Before Christmas it was just about running Theme Hospital, but even that’s too much for it now. We’re probably at about the level of Pong just now, so I imagine that in a few weeks time it will disappear altogether, possibly drawing the entire world into some reverse technology black hole.
All of which is a roundabout explanation of why I didn’t play the new episodic Sam and Max games when Telltale started bringing them out on PC. I love to both point and click, but devolving technology was standing in my way. For all these reasons it was a happy day when the first series of the Sam and Max games recently came out on the Wii. Point and click adventures work surprisingly well on the Wii (Zack and Wiki being another case in point), but there are a few differences to the PC which take a bit of getting used to. For one, on my giant TV Max is transformed from a small, cute, psychotic rabbit a worryingly large, cute, psychotic rabbit. Also the pointing part of pointing and clicking becomes a little more laboured on the Wii. Picking out tiny areas of the screen with the remote requires a much steadier hand than on the PC and, in my case, a fair bit more shouting at Sam for going the wrong way.
Despite an initially-jarring change in voice actor for Sam, the game’s got all the things you’d want from a Sam and Max game. There’s lots of graphic and ridiculous threats of violence from Max, there’s fantastic bizarre plots (I particularly liked the Mafiosi dressed as giant teddy bears), and, just as Conroy Bumpus provided musical accompaniment for Sam and Max Hit the Road, there are a load of songs, one of which I am seriously considering adding to my list of great songs in games:
Because the release of the game on PC was episodic the Wii game is divided into six mini-stories that are vaguely linked around a story about mind control. The second series was released in full for the PC last year and Telltale are currently working on the third for release in 2009. Over a three year period 18 discrete Sam and Max stories will have been unleashed on the world, which is surely a very good thing. The one bad thing is that the Wii release wasn’t well advertised. In fact, it was so poorly advertised that I had to go to three different game shops before I found one that even knew it had come out. Quite how they are going to justify releasing Series 2 and the upcoming Series 3 on the Wii if no one bought Series 1, I don’t know. They’d better work it out, though, because I now have a large collection of fairly unsavory threats of bunny-perpetrated violence if they don’t. As a final thought on the subject of Sam and Max I would also like to add:
While playing about with the free one-month download of Photoshop which you can get from the Adobe website I rediscovered the type of fun you can have with image manipulation that I may have mentioned before, which I really do find ridiculously entertaining. It goes like this:
1. You take two games.
2. You weld them together, preferably in some way that involves a terrible pun.
3. You run it through Photoshop.
4. You stand back and try to work out whether the resulting game is a monstrous affront to nature or an evolutionary step beyond the two games that have birthed it – a ludo-superior, if you will.
To this end, may I present three games which developers could be exploiting to link different gaming genres, challenge preconceptions and (in at least one instance) annoy the Hell out of gamers if only they had the vision to make it happen.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
+
Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training =
I think this could well be everything you could ever want in a game. You would get to battle gigantic Cthuloid monsters from the dawn of time while also attempting to reduce your brain age. Plus you would be hampered by the fact that your character has had one of those traumatic Jack Bauer lives full of incomprehensible horror, so as your brain age decreases, so does your sanity level. I believe the Sudoku promised on the box – the final boss, a giant Sudoku puzzle with ever changing numbers – should be creepy in a Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 way.
Nintendogs
+
Okami =
Nintendogs is big news. It’s sold over 21 million copies in its different iterations, so apparently people really like fake dogs. More specifically, if the adverts are anything to go by, it’s ladies that love to play Nintendogs as the combination of cute little puppies and special pink girl DSs nullify the scary testoterone power of video games to the point that they’re safe for girls to use. Good to know you’re looking out for us, Nintendo. Anyway just as Ladies Love Cool Nintendogs, all people with taste also loved Okami, meaning there must be a huge market for this as a Wii game. There can be beautiful Okami animation and drawing subgames with the Wii remote and, if Amaterasu will let you, a bit of God-dog belly tickling.
Gears of War
+
Wario Ware =
This could work as a game in which you fight the Locust Horde, one baffling minigame at a time. To be honest, though, I think it would be a disappointment if it was anything other than what the cover promises – Gears of War, but with that corpulent mustachioed moron taking the place of Marcus Fenix. There’d certainly be a bit less emphasis on strategic use of cover than in Gears of War and more on eating garlic and cackling to yourself, but he’d add a bit of colour to the proceedings. The one downside of this yellow and purple utopia is that I imagine you’d spend most of the game wanting or trying to kill Wario. He is very annoying, after all.
So there we have it: the future of games. There’s no need to thank me, developers – you can just put the cheque in the post.
Well, the gauntlet has been thrown. I’m not a Splinter Cell player, but if various dames have (loudly, repeatedly) extolled Sam Fisher’s many *ahem* virtues, then as far as I’m concerned he’s on the list. The question that bothers me is who, other than the ever-lithe Sam Fisher deserves to take his place among the Game Fatale top men? And I have to say, it’s a tough question to answer. While there are a barrel-load of “hot” female games characters in various levelsofundress, I’ve never been too impressed with the pick of guys in games. I imagine that this is because for years the logic ran that the male protaganist, well that’s you, isn’t it? You’re a fourteen year old boy and this is a burly, no-necked version of you that can tear off people’s heads with a snap of his fingers. But not a sexy, burly no-necked version of you because it would be confusing if you were attracted to yourself. As a result, when you look through the roster of male human protagonists, you seem to get the same big interchangeable and decidedly un-hot formula again and again. Thankfully it’s not all like that. There are games where the main guy has a discernible neck and doesn’t look like a Bane-style human tank monstrosity. Very occasionally, he’s also kind of hot. I have a modest example of the oeuvre below.
I’m slightly wary of saying this, as it’s from another game with an unnecessary colon and suffix (which had better not become a requirement of our choices as that way lies madness) but I submit Kyle Hyde from Hotel Dusk: Room 215. If it passed you by it’s a very entertaining monochrome mystery on the DS. What’s he got going for him? Well he’s a noir detective which means he must have some place on this site. He has both lady trouble and a difficult past. He manages to wear a trenchcoat without looking like a flasher. He engaging despite – and possibly because of – being massively rude to pretty much everyone he meets. As if all of this wasn’t enough, he’s animated just like Morten Harket in the video for Take on Me which elicits in me an actual Pavlovian response where I drool slightly when I see it.
I’m entertained to see that Cara’s top choice is a fully-rendered pixel-exact action figure powered by the heat of a million physics engines and that mine is essentially an animated charcoal sketch. Unless one of us is harbouring a mad-on for the blockiness of the old-school NES Link, I’m assuming that any other candidates will fit somewhere between Sam Fisher and Karl Hyde aesthetically.
Posted by Carachan on February 18, 2009 | Permalink
A little while ago, when Game Fatale was just a twinkle in selected sassy dames’ eyes, we discussed the idea of a top twenty sexiest videogame characters list. Of course, we were discussing male characters. I believe the female sex is just as susceptible to a shallow droolfest as much as the next man.
In fact, to demonstrate exactly how juvenile I was going to be in this post, I wish to enlighten you as to some titles I had prepared. Often, in the drunken nights of my first year at university, I would participate in hazy conversations over Teamspeak whilst my then boyfriend would heroically attempt to manipulate Sam Fisher away from ever present Mercenaries despite my cackling in the background. These conversations often landed on the subject of the absurd be-coloned title of Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow, and how you could choose virtually any two words to be post-colon. At the time, we settled on calling Splinter Cell Pizza Thunder (a somewhat lazy nickname, we could have done much better with all of our combined perversity). “Game of Pizza Thunder anyone?” “We can’t play Pizza Thunder, my internet’s fucked.” “Will Pizza Thunder run on this?”
The laziest and most disgustingly bad titles I could think of to do with leering at Fisher’s ass like he’s some sort of piece of meat:
Splinter Cell: Sweet Ass
Splinter Cell: Breakfast Tomorrow
(and its more obvious sister) Splinter Cell: Shagyou Tomorrow
Splinter Cell: I Can See Your Cock In That Suit
I know! I didn’t even retain the P T or C T pattern. I should tell you that I have watched most of imdb’s 20 worst horror movies and they made me laugh instead of cry, just so you get the extent of my finding absolute crap hilarious. Perhaps someone should exchange the colon for a semi-colon on an official document, and do a survey on how many fans it confuses… Juuuuust that extra half-beat less on the punctuation; total freaking panic? In any case, Penny Arcade also found the Pandora Tomorrow title pretty funny too, and came up with some excellent suggestions in my favourite comic strip of all time.
By now, Sam Fisher is all over platforms like a delicious svelte rash. The only one he’s not on is the NES, and they had a hell of a time trying to port Double Agent to the Gamecube (I hear). Good I say, since it gives us oft forgotten lady gamers more ways to perv on him the way male gamers have been perving on Lady Lara for years (although, given, her ass was two pyramids for a while).
If I’ve not made myself clear yet, I am talking about how lean, svelte, sinewy and conveniently third person Sam Fisher is in the early skin-tight Splinter days. What makes Sam so fantastically different from all those other dull male heroes out there is firstly that he is not so beefy as to look like he is composed of horrible over-swollen glands knotted together in a line. As much as I adore fun (and I do, I really do) when I put down the controller after something like Gears of War I feel a bit like I want to bonk some lady on the head and drag her into a cave. And those kinds of heroes are everywhere! I think the punchline to that train of thought is Army of Two, and I don’t even have to finish that joke to have myself chuckling away like a maniac. Oh, all right then, Army of Two is like Hyper-Masculine Gay boxed and put on a shelf, which is certainly not what they intended (Pimp my gun, dahling!). That is what you get when you go down the uber-testosterone path for the gazillionth time.
No, our Sam is all man but in a more compact, intelligent and graceful (dare I say it) package, and a much more realistic hero model compared to the likes of Gears, Doom, and all that other caveman stuff. My next point. Should you get bored of looking at Sam’s kevlar covered thighs (that Pandora Tomorrow bodysuit is like the male equivalent of the tightest little black dress you can find in Harrods) you can always hit a cutscene and have Michael Ironside’s gravelly voice make a genuinely funny quip about the state of world terrorism or a brutal comment that you kind of hope one day someone will say to you before taking you in a manly fashion. And I guess that’s point two: his lines aren’t disgusting, and they are delivered perfectly and professionally by someone who was made for the role. Nothing puts you off fantasising about some virtual bloke like the exchange from Gears of War 2: “I heard there was a shitload of Grubs there sir!” And our hero (just to make him cooler, named ‘Fenix’ instead of the obviously passe correct spelling) replies wittily, “More like ten shitloads.” … The survey says no. Instead, I’d rather have a little of the tongue in cheek, “I’m the good guy here to save your world.” Guard: “I thought I was the good guy.” Sam: “No, no you’re the side with the super secret underground base and I’m the guy who’s trying to break in to the base which makes me the good guy.” Or the aforementioned quip about terrorism. Lambert says in Pandora Tomorrow, “Nobody knows whether he’s a US Agent or a terrorist.” Fisher mumbles, “Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.” Nice. Or, indeed, you could have a little badass if you wanted. Guard: “Who are you?” Sam (emerging from the dark like a tall menacing shadow, bracing the guard’s neck): “The monster in the closet.”
If all that doesn’t get you, there’s still the remaining fact of Sam’s being able to stealth into a building and neck crank everyone in the place into a stupor, fatal or otherwise. He can hack a terminal upside down. He crawls up other men’s similarly svelte, bodysuited curves with a delicate finesse. He’s a political realist, according to Wikipedia. And Wikipedia should know…ish. And I guess there’s the very real fact of his stubble, which features regularly in headshots of the guy. Mmm, virtual stubble. There’s a lot of talk on the superhighway too of Clooney being perfect for the role of Sam – invited, probably by the cheekbone, dark eyes, dark stubble combo, and well, I’m not complaining. If they cast Clooney in the movie, you can be sure I’ll be in the front row, perving at his not so virtual ass.
So, Carrie and Kerry, I propose a motion for Sam Fisher at the top spot. Give me anything you got.
