Press Start!: Drinking With Video Games and Drug Binges.
Prepare thyself for the newest iteration of Press Start! The column where I puke up the top five things in the gaming world that caught my eye this week. It’s a democratic column, I want your input. Hit the comments box with your findings. True Believers! Gaming scientists!
—-
#1: Drunken NES: A Breathalyzer and 8-Bit Game In One.
This is one of those concoctions that fucking staggers me. It sends me into a spiralling moment of quasi-stoner amazement. Someone had to think up this brilliant piece of minutiae. Imagine this, if you can. Enterprising video game mechanical programming wizards had a dream. Their dream was simple. First, they had to make a breathalyzer out of an original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. No small task! I have it on good authority many a modern day Prometheus has been felled by such a challenge.
Then, they had to craft a video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System – yes I’m typing it out to be awkward – that could interface with this creation. By blowing your disgusting Oats and Hops stink-rot-gut-breath into the cartridge, the game would then calculate the level of your drunken stupor and rate your inebriated ass in 8-Bit glory.
It’s fucking radical.
—-
#2: Uncharted 3’s Villainess Revealed; Wrinkled Old Hottie.
Fuck yeah I like my gaming occasionally in the form of a megaton zillion-dollar production value big blockbuster. Fuck yeah! You disagree. Oh okay! You go have fun shaving in Heavy Rain or playing Limbo and waxing intellectual about how it’s totally ambient and deconstructs the medium and blah, blah, blah. I’m fucking amplified for Uncharted 3. Boom. Can’t wait. I say deliver me from boring fetch quests! I say deliver me from conversation wheels. Just for a bit. Throw me into the comforting bosom of gaming entertainment excess.
And in relation to this excess, this week Naughty Dog revealed the villainess behind Nathan Drake’s woes. Meet Katherine Marlowe. She’s a bit of a hottie for an older women, isn’t she? She’s voiced by Elizabeth Hurley, but she gets me tingling like Helen Mirren. Some cavernous old cleavage and wields power to boot. Is it November 1, yet?
—-
#3: Microsoft Sells A Shitload of Kinects; Gets Punked.
It was an up and down week for our buddy Billy Gates’ company. Though I have to say their good news far outweighs the little bit of hacking righteousness that they were subjected to. You see, when you can lay claim to having the fastest selling electronic device ever, I’m sure everything glows.
This week it was announced that the Microsoft Kinect has sold ten million units. As well, Microsoft has moved ten million Kinect games. Wrap that shit around your brain-piece for a second. Since its release on November 4, 2010 it has averaged 133,333 units sold a day. Fastest device ever. More than your Apple iPhone, iPad, iMac, iThing, iMinimalist Swag.
However, it wasn’t all fucking roses for Microsoft this week! No sir. Hackers cracked the algorithm that generated the seemingly random numbers on the back of MS Points cards. You know, those cards you buy so you can spend the equivalent of $5 on a lightsaber for your avatar. Or so you can download that fucking shitty Dead Space 2 DLC (not that I’m bitter).
Being the benevolent hackers that they were, they used this algorithm to generate over 1 million dollars worth of points. Fantastic! It was short-lived as Microsoft said they killed all those points generated, but still, man! Lock that shit down, Microsoft! I paid good fucking money for my Mass Effect M7 t-shirt for my avatar. No fucking freebies!
—-
#4: Former Druggie Psychologist Calls Gaming The ‘Silent Killer’.
Take a look at those two kids above. Look at them, being trained in the ways of violence and killing. I mean, we all know that gaming is training kids to be silent assassins. However, psychologist Steve Pope launched some seriously soggy verbal diarrhea this week. Pope called gaming the ‘silent killer’, which frankly, means absolutely nothing to me. Is gaming sneaking up on children in the dead of night and murdering them? I didn’t think so. But now my mind has been blown. I need to lock up my fucking consoles. Or wait, are kids dying from playing video games en masse? Sure, there’s those whacky kids in the Starcraft arcade casino cafes or whatever dying from exhaustion.
But druggie-turned-psychologist Steve Pope didn’t stop there. No sir. Did you know that spending “two hours on a game station is equivalent to taking a line of cocaine in the high it produces in the brain”? Yeah, I didn’t either. Pope blathered a lot more without bothering to corroborate any of it with studies.
Fuck Steve Pope and rampant sensationalism. I can’t wait until I teach all my kid his important life lessons through video games. How to be a man? Obviously Call of Duty. The pang of loss and the danger of being incapable of accepting it? Shadow of Colossus. The dangers of free-market enterprising and uncontrolled ‘individualism’? Bioshock.
Boom! Fuck you Steve Pope.
—-
#5: The Fantastic Mr. Star Fox Is Cute; I Hate Myself For Liking It.
I don’t know why, but I feel pretty filthy liking this homage to both Star Fox and Wes Anderson. Perhaps it’s because it exploits all of the throbbing blow-apart tropes that Anderson employs so often. It’s amusing though. What do you want me to say? Where does everyone stand on Wes these days? I get the feeling I’m supposed to not enjoy him anymore. The rubber band has snapped back, and what was once so endearing about him is typical and beaten into paste.
Maybe?
As both an asshole who over thinks everything in a perpetual existential crisis and a fan of Star Fox, seeing that furry fucker questioning his existence was good for me.
—–
What caught your eyes? Hit me.