Fleshy Cushions Of Ecstasy

Courtney Love. Greatest fuck of my life. Man, she let me put it anywhere. And those lips! Two fleshy cushions of ecstasy. Poor lass. She was devastated when I decorated our bedroom wall with my brains. Yes, it was a little selfish of me to leave her to raise our child alone. But hey, I was a tormented genius. Suicide was the only way to go. Thing is, dear old Courtney’s never been able to escape my premature death. It looms over her like a black rain cloud. Before you think of Hole, or her tawdry drug addiction, or even those incredible lips, you think of ME. Guilt by association if you will. We are irrevocably entwined in the public consciousness.

Anyway, where exactly am I going with all this I hear you ask? Well, gentle reader, Courtney is the inspiration for this here article. Certain video games also suffer from ‘guilt by association’. Take Crackdown for example. What’s the first thing that springs to mind? Those narcotically addictive agility orbs of course. The core experience of Crackdown - running around a lovely, GTA-esque city taking out gang bosses – is actually the dullest part of the game. It’s those elusive, pulsing orbs that transform a thirty minute gaming session into a five hour binge. A generation of gamers were caught up in the orb snaffling zeitgeist when Crackdown was released in 2007. And they’ve been hooked ever since.

Here are some other ‘guilt by association’ videogames.

Gears of War – Cliff Bleszinski

The Cliffster. Dude Huge. Good ol’ Cliffy B. Whatever you choose to call the irrepressible bell-end, there’s only one game that springs to mind: Gears of War. It’s goons like Bleszinksi that pushed me to suicide. He stands for everything I hate: tireless self-promotion, smug self-satisfaction, self, self, sodding self. I put a shotgun under my chin and pulled the trigger because I hated the thought of my music becoming part of some bland corporate mechanism. Bleszinksi’s too busy fellating himself to notice his decline into self-parody (again with the self). He becomes ever more unbearable with each cheesy publicity shot. Clifford, if you have any decency you’d build a working model of the Lance Assault Rifle and saw off your own head. The game speaks for itself. We don’t need your silly haircut and rubbish t-shirts contaminating every Gears of War press release.


GTA – Murdering Prostitutes

The Grand Theft Auto series is a controversial succession of sandbox games that gift the player an entire city in which to misbehave. It began in 1997 as a cheeky mayhem simulator with a top down, 2D viewpoint and a ZX Spectrum vibe. In 2001, it graduated to 3D and became an unstoppable blockbuster. Few Brits realise these games were made in Scotland: you should be far prouder of this stuff than you are. And yet, without exception, the one thing gamers always mention is the first time they bludgeoned a prostitute to death with a baseball bat.

Red Dead Redemption falls into exactly the same trap. Only this time the player is given a lasso to play with. Go on, admit it. I won’t judge you. It’s just a game after all. One of the first things you tried with your newly acquired lasso was hog-tying the local harlot and splitting her wig with a metal slug.

The Orange Box - Portal

If you don't play games, you're not just missing out, you're willfully ignoring the most rapidly evolving creative medium in human history. And there’s no better example of this dazzling originality than Portal. The game is a description-defying 3D puzzle that folds your sense of spatial awareness in on itself. The mind-boggling mechanics involved in its dimension hopping lunacy are, well, mind-boggling. So much so, in fact, that it completely overshadows the astonishing package that housed it in the first place – The Orange Box. Quite an astounding feat considering the inclusion of Half Life 2, a game widely considered as the best first person shooter since Doom.

-and briefly…

Mortal Kombat – Street Fighter

Crap dismemberment-simulator Mortal Kombat is forever destined to pale unfavourably next to the undisputed king of the beat em up. Talk of Mortal Kombat inevitably leads to how shit it is compared to Street Fighter.

Alan Wake – Convoluted Production Time

Okay, so Duke Nukem Forever wins the award for longest development time – thirteen years and counting. But I’m only talking about games that have actually been released into the public domain, so the Duke is out. Developers Remedy Entertainment took five years to make a game about a man called Alan whose identifying quality is the ability to turn on a torch. It’s no wonder people talk more about the game’s convoluted production time than the game itself.