video gays

there is a gap in my life at the moment, a great fucking dearth of entertainment that has previously been filled by the medium of video games. lately the games industry has left me without anything approaching my stringent standards of spectacularity.

I like to kill things. if a video game doesn't involve murder or at least grievous bodily harm then it is probably not worth playing. Driver, if I remember correctly, was ruined by having pedestrians move out of the way of your speeding vehicle regardless of the speed it was travelling. it was also a shit game for a number of other reasons but fuck them, if I can't murder people while driving around in a video game then I may as well go out & get in a real car & not run some people over on real streets.

murder in itself isn't the half of it though. it has to be satisfying to kill things. who gives a fuck if you can destroy thousands of innocent civilians in the blink of an eye? if it looks shit & feels shit to do it then I'm still not going to be impressed by a high body count. Earth Defense Force serves as an example of how an idea (annihilating a myriad giant ants) can be ruined by poor implementation (they all look the same & die the same way). I want to see visceral details, I want eyeballs popping out & skull fragments littering the floor. Gears of War managed to do this pretty well, with the added effect of some really meaty sound effects for just about everything. footsteps sound loud & threatening, guns expel ammunition with satisfying effect & every character screams horribly when it gets set on fire. everything benefits from some decent dismemberment as well. Soldier of Fortune would barely have been worth playing if you didn't have the option (read: obligation) to hack off the limbs of everyone in sight with a great big knife. before or after you shoot them, either's fine. you could even throw the knife & watch it stick in someone's face.

unfortunately for the world of first person shooters there is rarely a game from that perspective that really makes you feel like you're killing things well. you never get to see what your character is doing, only what they see. I want to watch my dude chainsawing some other dude in half, I do not want to watch through a scope as an enemy falls over half a fucking mile away. first person shooters are essentially dead to me until someone shows me something where I feel like I'm murdering people properly. the entire Halo series, for example, is worthless.

anyway, next criterion, some nice split screen multiplayer. if I can't murder things with an equally desensitised friend in the room to laugh along with me then what's the fucking point? Bayonetta was a wonderful piece of video game. it was so ridiculously over the top & brimming with gratuitous violence that the demo made me ejaculate into my underwear & preorder the game online as soon as I'd cleaned myself up. however after playing through the damn thing once I never had any desire to return to it.

you see multiplayer is closely linked with replay value. Resident Evil did well on this, with a bunch of shit you can acquire through playing it lots to (supposedly) make the game easier &/or funner. there were even more than one way to play it with two people! pity the cuntish developers somehow managed to fuck up the "split screen" part of split screen multiplayer by giving you only about a quarter of the fucking screen & leaving the spare bits blank. what the fuck, guys?

now, here's the challenge. find me something to play that incorporates all these factors. all I need is something third person & full of visceral murder with decent multiplayer. can't be too hard, can it?
don't make me wait until Gears of War 3, that's fucking months away.