Going Gonzo

So I’m trying to write a bit Gonzo – more Hunter S. Thomspon than Muppet – after being inspired by reading Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 which, I might add, is a cracking read. Absurdist humour has always tickled my funny bone in the best way (Q: How long’s a piece of string? A: A bowl of soup this colour) and Thompson at the height of his powers does absurd the best. But it’s actually harder than it looks and even he doesn’t get it right all the time. When he does though, as in describing his wanting to put together an Outrage like releasing 50,000 bats into the Democratic convention centre on the night of Hubert Humphrey’s presidential nomination, which he declines on the grounds that getting the nomination would be punishment enough, Thompson lights up the page like the fourth of July

So it strikes me that Gonzo works best when you’ve actually got something worth writing about – like picking up some hitchhikers who also happen to be part of the Freak Kingdom on the road to Washington just before dawn. In this my own personal Post-University purgatory I don’t have nearly as much to write about that’s actually interesting. So instead, it occurs to me that Thompson has another fall-back in his writing; talking about stuff that really freaks him the fuck out. And there’s a lot of that going round in my world right now.

For starters, to make any kind of objective evaluation of my own chances of procuring employment within my chosen industry (videogames), a highly competitive career path to be sure, I’m much too close to myself to make any kind of objective and rational evaluation of my prospects. People I talk to on twitter say, ‘Quit worrying, idiot, you’re smart enough to get any job’, which is a lovely sentiment and I appreciate the vote of confidence, but they’re not the one trying to overcome a lifetime of stay-at-home complacency and inaction when it comes to employment… and I don’t exactly have an abundance of funds when it comes to cash.

Which reminds me of another thing Thompson loves – short paragraphs. And elipses… I thought that particular habit like nail-biting, dropping them in like pennies in a Christmas pudding, was a more modern practice but apparently not. He also likes to let his sentences run on for a really long time, much longer than normal. In case you missed it, I did it in the first paragraph and it seems to have spectacularly backfired, but that’s what you get for trying to write in the style of a Pro like Thompson. It’s also a tendency that I’ve worked quite hard to circumvent in my own writing (academic at least) since it was pointed out to me earlier in the year that while my sentences made sense to me and managed to articulate complicated points, they were usually impossible to read for anyone else. It kind of annoys me that Thompson does it so well and without making them convoluted and confusing. Overall though, I think my problem was I used commas too much and needed to just stop my sentences more often. It might actually be a good thing that I trained myself out of the habit because now I can do it deliberately and, dare I tempt fate and say, somewhat more properly.

So where was I? (That’s another thing Thompson does endlessly – go off topic and then reign it in again as if he was talking to you on the telephone) Something about breaking into the games industry. Thinking about it, how does anyone ‘break into’ any industry? The obvious answer is that some kind of training is supposed to provide with the foot-in-the-door that you need, but thinking about my soon to be graduated from Music degree… I don’t exactly have a massive stable of bankable skills and I’ve been thinking long and hard recently about how the hell I can convert those skills into finances. I thought about doing some freelance writing; it is supposedly my strength, after all, unless I’m deluding myself; but I have this sneaky suspicion that when I am not being exceedingly lazy and posting at 1 in the morning, I’m capable of producing some solid copy. But hey, words are cheap, right, so what’s my other skill? I can edit and proofread and there’s always (well not at this time of the year, but in a few months time) a market for students that have papers due that could seriously benefit from a quick once-over. I could charge $50 for 20 pages and that would at least pay for my board for the week and stop my parents making me homeless before the new year – I’ve currently paid up till the Saturday before New Years day and I have about $33 left in my bank account[1]. I have another $35 in my wallet, but I suspect that unless I somehow arrange to not leave the house before NYE that I’ll need some of that just to get around.

My God, living is so expensive. Whoever came up with the capitalist idea of actually contributing to society ought to go and jump in front of the nearest locomotive. I write a bloomin' videogame blog that aims to elevate the medium above the general level of “Hey, fuck you, my mum is a classy lady” Xbox live discourse which, I occasionally suspect, may be a noble yet Sisyphean effort. I mean, who even reads me? And who would want to after this ridiculously long-winded and self indulgent… tangent? I can’t blame you for turning off half-way through this piece, it’s really nothing but a blatant rip-off of L.B. Jeffries attempts at emulating the style of Lester Bangs in aid of game criticism. At least he had a point in his writing about games, what have I got? Certainly nothing about game criticism just a pointless whinge about how life is so hard for a middle class white kid who’s house-bound with nothing but the internet and a boxed set of Futurama DVD’s for entertainment.

You know, people I know have said “I would give anything to be able to do nothing, like you”, but what I think they fail to understand is the absolutely soul crippling effect that doing nothing all day has on you. When you do nothing, you become nothing (or you feel like you become nothing) and it’s bloody depressing. Exercise is actually a good cure and I’ve started jogging in the evenings just for something to get my heart racing a bit. Anyway, what friends of mine should understand, before wishing nothing upon yourself, is that it’s really not that great. Sure, it was fantastic to take time off after finishing that thesis I spent the whole year working on but that got old really fast, like in a day or two. I should have actually seen it coming – it always happens and I guess it’s probably inevitable that we put on the rose tinted glasses in the middle of high stress periods. But I could certainly have done a bit more to prepare.

Erm… so let’s bring this to a close. I don’t think I’ll edit this, just whack it up and put it out there – do the authentic Gonzo thing even though I don’t really have a deadline to meet. Feels more raw that way, and hopefully I’ll learn something from it. Might go self medicate or something. Okay, so I lied, I edited it but it really didn’t need much. Maybe I’m a better writer than I think. I should approach some vain Official Australian Xbox magazine or something and get them to feed me games to review and play if only to take my mind off my impending bankruptcy.

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[1]

Okay, so I have a trust fund that my parents set up for me as a kid with a couple grand in it but using that to pay my parents to continue to live under their roof seems either hilariously ironic and appropriate or just pointless, not really sure which.

In which I post my first ever review: Saints Row 2

So this is the first ever review I've done for any outlet, ever. It's not been published yet (will it? who can say.) so I thought I'd share it with my readers if for no reason other than this game is Batshit Effing Insane... if you want to employ Ben for a game review (will accept food or games as payment) feel free to contact me via email or blog comment.

Edit: This review is now live in it's final form here.

Saints Row 2 is set in a parallel universe from our own, in which gun fights and massive explosions are so commonplace as to become everyday for the inhabitants of Stilwater. The police bat nary an eyelid at your antics as you mow down pedestrians in a bulldozer, doing little to stop the brazen killings and wanton destruction. Choose your weapon of mass demolition. Feelin’ gangsta? Dual wield some Desert Eagle types. Feeling a bit in the mood for some Yakuza-style samurai executions? Borrow a sword from a friendly Ronin on a passing motorbike. He’s not a member of the Saints, so it’s okay to murder him. It’s apparently cool.

“What did you expect?”, quips my middle-aged, ‘west coast Latino’ accented protagonist after another kill. Having not played the original Saints Row, I didn’t really know what to expect. I wanted to create some kind of rationale for my female lead character, however, I wanted some pretense of a credible history to help explain why this middle aged woman had gone mad with rage and no longer seemed to identify other human as worthy of receiving their basic human rights. Let’s pretend that her kids were killed and, now that she has nothing to live for, decided to become a gang leader as a 30-something – your standard revenge story, yeah? So anyway, the start of my experience with Saints’ wasn’t a good sign that the rest of the game was going to be ‘all there’, nicely polished to perfection. After exiting the somewhat hit-and-miss character creator at the very start of the game, I was treated to an intro cut-scene with (surprise, fool!) no voice track. Ah, well played Volition - this must be some kind of trick to make it difficult for me because I’m just such a Pro. When it came time to bust out of jail by beating up a single doctor and a few guards, followed I might add by what has to be the worlds easiest/slowest jail-break ever, I didn’t really have any idea what in the world I was doing.

But that turned out to be actually rather okay.

This review is probably in danger of becoming a ‘how I learned to stop worrying about inconsistencies and start loving Saints Row’ review, so allow me to explain. If one were to focus on all of the strange goings on within the world of Saints Row you would have to conclude that, more often than not, it just doesn’t make sense. As in, none at all. Mow down ten to fifteen rival gang members on one street corner and then, inexplicably, there’s another bunch just round the corner, all fresh and ready to have a cap busted in their collective asses. The AI is pretty whacky at times too; I had some pursuers charge blindly off-road after me, only to promptly fall into and get trapped in an empty swimming pool. I’ve also seen retiree’s sitting on their lawns typing on their laptops, while two more laptops protrude at right angles from their thighs. Hmm. Pimps, casually strolling down the street with Yankee-doodle style feathers in their caps (and heavy jackets, in ‘the heat’ no less) turn on passing police cars and beat down their occupants like they were owed money. Double hmm. At a million points throughout this game I could barely restrain fits of hysterical laughter at the strange absurdity of one or other situation. And no one else seems to notice.

So, perhaps inevitably, neither do you. And when you start to accept the inanity of this world, you start to realize that Volition have actually made a really, really decent GTA clone. Granted, it is just a GTA clone – you’ll find little that’s ground-breaking or genre expanding in Saints 2 – however it still manages to be quite fun, even intentionally humorous at times. Much of the situations and dialogue skate the thin line between taking the piss and treating the slaughter of (literally) hundreds of rival gang members somewhat seriously. When one of your Saint brethren, upon seeing a stripper, remarks “Damn those are nice boots!” it’s genuinely quite a funny moment. It’s also hard to tell whether the developers fully appreciated the irony of setting a mission during a funeral – by that point so many others have been slaughtered in your ambitious gang-advancing rampage that caring about the funeral of just one person seems incredibly nihilistic. It’s like mourning the death of a Nazi prison camp guard in the middle of the holocaust – yes they were indeed a person too, but remind me again what the difference was of this person from all the nameless masses that went before, and why you don’t care about any of them? I assume it was supposed to instill some dramatic tension, however it once again comes over as just another ‘WTF???!’ moment, for better or worse. Maybe by this point you’ll be like me and stuck somewhere between genuine horror, and laughing at how hilariously B-grade it has all become. Well actually, who am I kidding, it’s probably deliberately B-grade, and I guess that’s part of its charm. Again, take it too seriously and the flaws really start to show; switch off your brain for a bit and it’s quite passable as fun.

Key to the joy of Saints is that it runs almost constantly at the full 60 frames per second, or near enough to not notice. Even when the police-car you’ve hijacked smashes into some pursuing officers and explodes in a flurry of sparks and the High Def propagation of super-advanced particle systems, the Xbox 360 keeps chugging along. A note should be made about the quality of the world that has been created by Volition – there’s no loading between city sections and generally it presents an adequate level of detail.

Difficulty is rarely an issue. For some select occasions you are given infinite ammunition for your weapons in the interest of being able to kill all those pesky Brotherhood gang-bangers from up town without having to pop into a corner store and buy some more bullets. In the end it hardly matters that there is always more of them than you as generally nothing short of an RPG to the head will kill you. Try standing on a grenade, and watch as the hilarious, Havok powered rag-doll physics kick in. Get blown high into the air, and tumble to the ground. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep on keeping on, like some kind of insane Duracell bunny for videogames. There’s also some pretty neat full-screen effects similar to what you get in Call of Duty 4 when a grenade goes off in your face – it will make your vision and hearing go all dull and fuzzy. Alternatively, get sprayed by a cop with a bottle of mace and watch as your eyes water, distorting the screen into waves. May I suggest you remedy the situation with a prompt shotgun to the face? The guy had it coming, by the way, apparently all the cops in Saints are crooked. There’s a story here about a big corporation having the city in their pocket, etc, etc, nothing particularly experimental is going on, but if you want to ‘stick it to them man’ Saints Row 2 certainly gives you plenty of opportunities to say ‘Fuck You’ to the establishment. One side mission sees you spending some time spraying feces from a septic truck around an area of the city inhabited by corporate high-fliers. Not my favorite mission-type; that spot is reserved for ‘trail blazing’ in which you drive around on a quad-bike, while on fire, blowing up conveniently placed barrels of gasoline, car, people. Yes that really is the type of game this is.

One last thing of note, and actually one of the better aspects of Saints, is the in-game radio (again, unconcernedly riffing on the whole GTA series) which has a bunch of fantastic songs from some genuinely big-name bands. Hot Chip, MGMT, Does it offend you, Yeah? and Panic at the Disco are all on the radio and there’s a bunch more from other styles of music on the reggae, rock and 80’s stations. Quite a surprisingly solid selection however Volition have clearly chosen quality over quantity for Saints, as there’s only about 8 or 10 songs for each station.

Let me sum up the game by using the character creator as an example – it’s really, really great for some things (pimps, ho’s and awesome cornrows) but it is also quite, er, average when it comes to others – specifically any non-black Gangsta that you can make. The Asian fellow that my younger brother sculpted is rather so-so, and my own Latino momma… well let’s just say she doesn’t look much like a momma. So why did they bother including the creator then? I think Volition would have been better served to stick with the GTA style single type of protagonist approach (think Tommy Vercetti in Vice City) or narrow down the choices to a small number of more appropriate characters. Thankfully, like the rest of the game, it gets better and via the magic of in-game plastic surgery you can change anything and everything you didn’t like about your character.

One last addendum: the game is, how shall I put it, “buggy as all hell”. I have heard story after story of glitched up missions, weird behavior generally and a couple of more serious crash bugs. Still, my verdict stands – if you don’t mind some brainless mayhem, Saints might be a game you could learn to love.