Evil in Videogames

Where did it go?


Some times when I play a videogame I want the complete destruction of the world, at my hands alone, to be an option. I want to adopt every orphan, gather them to a massive feast, let rats steal the food and burn the children alive.

Jesus fucking Christ man...

Sick minds aside, I think there are a ton of people who miss needless evil and cruelty in games. 

Before I had any grasp of the English language, or could even read at all, I played videogames, and one of my absolute favourites was, and is to this day, Dungeon Keeper.

Back in the day I would go to a friend's house, and we would destroy the overworld together, or at the very least, we would slap imps around until we were sent outside.

He knows what's coming. Lazy bastard.

What held our attention for so long wasn't just the fact that this was a game, or moving colours on a screen, but the only couple of games where we could really BE the bad guy.

Dungeon Keeper 1&2 was completely unapologetic in every way. As we grew up and learned the language, we discovered the story, and were pleased to see that there was no "This 'good' guy drove us out of our homeland because we were ugly compared to them", "The heroes stole my girlfriend and this entire thing is in actuality a misguided quest for love!", or even the ever disappointing "These so called 'heroes' each represent a mortal sin, and grew evil with time".

GO TO HELL YOU PRISSY-PANTS MOTHERFUCKER!

Extinguish every last piece of your vanquished foe, burn his lands, kill, torture and imprison his forces, recruit their bodies and very souls as mindless cannon fodder for your unstappable army of pure evil destruction!

Even silly things like allegiance couldn't stop your army's insatiable lust for blood and death. Bored forces in Dungeon Keeper would fight between themselves if they weren't given a specific task or something to pummel mercilessly. One unit would spend most of their time in the torture chamber, screaming in delight as they whipped strips of flesh from the body of a captured enemy, or even taking turns torturing each other. They didn't care as long as their entire world was pain and suffering.

Of course she looks like this, what did you expect?

Meanwhile, Fable replaces the evil option with the "evil" option. Note that "evil" in the Fable universe translates to "Insufferable douche" in ours. 

Sure burping in someone's face and laughing like an elementary school bully is an unfriendly thing to do, but it's not evil. It INSPIRES fantastically cruel and merciless beating of the face, but that's a favour to all in the vicinity, not evil. 

Sure you can slaughter the innocent townspeople until you're stricken down by brave guards two days from retirement, but when it looks, sounds and feels like beating a sack of potatoes with a medium sized dildo, it seems so fucking impotent compared to the Dungeon Keeper games, where the announcer sounds like the impossible love-child of Vincent Price and Boris Karloff.

You're a douchebag, mister prince.

After seeing a man being beaten to a pulp, dragged to a torture room and whipped until he caved, and then dragged off to a prison where he would starve to death and either be risen as a mindless skeleton or buried in a haunted graveyard until a vampire sees the astounding amount of death in my dungeon and joins to get a taste, I just can't watch happy townspeople call my minions adorable rapscallions and call myself evil as a result...

The delighted frolicking in fields of grass and pumpkin patches
was the darkest point in this game by far.

Real evil, cruelty and plain unmotivated senseless violence is lacking in modern videogames, and I for one am sick of it!

We have the graphics now, and we have the 18+ ratings. Gaming grew to a point where a game can be considered a piece of art, and the majority of gamers today are over 18. The average age of a modern gamer is 33 for fuck's sake!

So what is stopping us from using those advanced graphics and hefty machine power from ripping people to shreds? Why does every game look like Mortal Kombat for the Snes(No blood without a code)?

In conclusion: 

COME BACK BULLFROG! I LOVE YOU AS HARD AS A MAN CAN LOVE A TALENTED GROUP OF PEOPLE.

The Man in the Mirror

Well there's three people in the mirror
and I'm wondering
which one of them I should choose.

I have never seen myself in the mirror. 

I often look at my reflection, and frankly I quite enjoy it, but it never seems completely honest.

I always seem to strike some pose, and far too often my motives seem to be shielding the reflection, or myself, from my true emotions. 

I even try, and fail, to catch myself by surprise some times. 

I might be innocently grooming, pondering, brushing my teeth, or just spacing out completely, before swiftly staring into my eyes like one does to entertain children who keeps sneaking peeks at you.

I then feel my face shifting, in the milliseconds where everything is still a blur, and see the focused stare of a stranger. 

I thought for a long time the problem might be that my mind was far too aware of my schemes to be caught by surprise, so of course there was only one reasonable option left.

I have to try with an altered mind.

I don't drink with the sole purpose of trying to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, but for the taste, or to have more fun in a social gathering.

I hardly ever drink for self discovery.

I do, however, go to the bathroom quite often, as beer is my poison of choice, and whenever I look up into the mirror I'm greeted by someone who seems as surprised as I am to find someone staring back.

I don't really know why it feels this way, or if anyone else feel the same way, but one thing is absolutely certain.

I will keep looking.

A Tirade About Plastic Surgery

After some thought I've decided that I am against vanity operations, and the reason why might not be what you think.

Just now I was watching some before and after videos on Youtube. Some were about nosejobs, one was a slightly sickening celebration of beautiful people, one was dedicated solely to Mickey Rourke.

This man of amazing facial flexibility has looked like an Asian/Hispanic/Eastern European/vaguely Italian mob boss,  a grandmother, a handsome man, a war torn gladiator, Johnny Handsome, a bowl of porridge poured into a ball sack, and what Bruce Willis would look like if you folded his face seven times and let angry cats unfold it.

"My strange and multi-colored facial hair is my only constant".

Watching his video I thought "Okay, this is back when he was hired for his good looks. This part is from when his looks started to fade, but he still shouldn't have any trouble getting work. This part is post op for sure. He looks like a wedding cake three days after consumption".

As a socialist and the offspring of a parental hippie generation who didn't think they were hippies I have this knee-jerk mental reaction to plastic surgery where I just assume it will always be a disaster. Just please don't ask people like me about re-constructional surgery. We tend to fold when confronted with the dilemma of wanting to improve people's lives, and wanting everyone to remain completely natural looking.
Now girls of my particular political stance might be a little more ambivalent towards the entire situation considering that they artificially improve their looks with make-up every day and thus understand the issue a little better.
(Holy monkey I can rant. Maybe I should go for a career as an angry ranting comedian).

Here comes the part that challenges my view a little bit: After his mangled face traumatizes my screen, his next face pops up, and it looks absolutely amazing!
He got the terror removed from his face, kept the improvements, and restored the originally awesome parts back to their originally awesome state.
This is the part where a die hard believer would say "He still shouldn't have done it. He should just have kept his natural looks", but it's also the part where I, and other people who fear they may have been wrong all these years, say "Huh. That actually looks really great, and there's massive pressure on this man to look good. So maybe it's not all bad."

Jack White is cool, and I needed something to break this wall of text.

However: After the good picture rolled up, another one was right around the corner, and yet again he looked like that really creepy cougar imitating lady. I don't know if the surgery went bad, if he wanted it that way, or just what the hell happened.
He went sort of back and forth for a while, until he couldn't really be repaired, and I don't think anyone really knows what he would look like today without all the surgery. It's a shame really, but at the same time it really, really, really, really made him a perfect choice for The Wrestler.

You want a botox freak with huge muscles, a worn out voice and expired plastic surgery? That's me man.

Like so many vanity surgery posts this seems to have turned out to be a Mickey Rourke post. I could go with Michael Jackson, but come on. He has already been pushed to death, and I don't want to kick a lego-man when he's down.

I looked at some other videos too, and most of them seemed to have one major theme, besides plastic surgery, namely nose-jobs.
Celebrities, actors, people who want to be celebrities, and people who used to be celebrities all seem to have one need in common: Smaller noses.
Some just want the wings clipped a little. Some want to get rid of that bump, some want a smaller bridge, some want their nose to point in another direction, and some just want their entire breathing/temperature stabilizing facial device, (look it up), to be smaller.
Some times small changes made a lot of difference. One guy looked like a clown in the before shot, and the suave, evil twin of James Bond in the after shot, and all he did was make small parts of his nose a little thinner.

"I'm 650$ away from seducing my way into the movie industry"

On the other hand we have Megan Fox, who got praised for her down-to-earth great looks and decided, perhaps out of spite, to grind her face into a disgusting paste and have a surgeon smear it back on her skull.

"Hey Megan, it's Michael. Listen, would you be interested in being the co-star of 'Transformers: Everything ends for seriously this time, I swear. And explosions'. I really need you for this one".

Was that too harsh? Whatever, it's fun.

Back to the issue at hand.
Plastic surgery can go really well, and it can go horrible wrong, like most surgeries really. The thing is that even if the surgery goes perfectly, and the person now has everything they ever wanted in regards to looks. They still often come back to screw everything up.
Nothing is ever perfect. That's a good mentality to have, and accepting that fact might have prevented some of these disasters.
There's always going to be some things you want to tweak, twist and tamper with to improve your looks just a little bit, and as anyone who's used to improving pictures in Photoshop will tell you: It's incredibly easy to go way too far and then go a little further because you wrongly believe you haven't gone far enough.

This is what uncle Danny's vacation photos look like if he loses his reference point. Seriously, over-editing is a very easy mistake to make, even for professionals.

Reason one why I am generally against vanity surgery: It creates a very unrealistic standard, and I don't believe we would see the same flaws in our looks if plastic surgery didn't make it possible to fix those perceived flaws. It "fixes" a problem it helped create.

Reason two why I am generally against vanity surgery: It means that my kind and I have to try a lot harder to stand out in awesomeness.
In the near future, plastic surgery is cheap, perfect, and available to everyone, yet I have a bumpy, sort of long, bulbous, freckled asymmetric nose. I have huge joints on my hands, I have cheeks that makes those annoying folds around my mouth, I have toes that look like fingers, I have a strange face that looks fat from one angle and skinny from a slightly different angle.
Now not only will I have to look like this in a world where super-models are mistaken for their assistants, I will also have to justify why the hell I look this way when I can easily become the übermench in no more than 30 minutes.

Rich Hall declares this block of text too long! After this you should check him out on Youtube.

What do I say then? "I think surgically altering your looks makes people unhappy", but no, because it's the norm these days, and it's very safe too! You'll still be the same, but better looking. Okay then, what about "If I go under the knife people won't know truly know me, but befriend me based on how I look", but won't I still be me? Friends aren't family, you can just ignore the ones you don't like.
I honestly can't find any reason why I would not go under the knife, except that I don't want to.
"AHA!" My stupid mind thinks "That's reason enough. Good for you. Being an individual and all that!", except that it might not be enough at all.
It certainly isn't a good enough to go under the knife now, so why would it be good enough when the operating tables are turned?

If you didn't bother reading the last part I don't blame you. Short version is: I don't want to deal with everyone looking better than me all the time. I'm beautiful by comparison, and the ones that beat me I talk shit about, and I don't want that to change.

Born to be a bum

Not a proper bum freezing outside with ancient jackets on. More like The Dude really.

Money makes the world go to shit, and if you don't want any part in it you can either work hard every single day of your life to stay clear of the systematized slavery, or you can resign as a human and quietly resent the machine you now oil with your blood sweat and tears.
If you fit in with the cogs you're a lucky creature, and that's awesome for you. If you don't fit in, but fit on top of the system then I guess that's awesome for you too isn't it?

What are you so happy about? Asshole

If you don't fit in with the system you so despise, but depend on it, then that fucking sucks. Have fun trying to find motivations when all you want is just one more day in your life when you're not fucking tired. Come join the last living souls with nowhere else to go, let's meet for some coffee. You're buying, I don't have any money. I'll get us some alcohol later.

Project Beard is going strong

Days have slipped past me due to the lovely summer vacation and the loss of a strangely habit-forming laptop, but I'm back and will try to be more regular from now on.
I was supposed to update with pictures every single day after all.

Without further ado I present day 3 of Project Beard:

Stubble has been discovered, strong enough to make noise.

Included my upper lip this time as it grows face-pubes just as much as my chin.
When this project is over I will make a nice little compilation marking every picture by date. Look forward to it AND FEED ME YOUR LOVE!
Seriously, it doesn't feel too good to not have a single comment and have about 2 views to something I'm sacrificing my pretty mug for.

AMC Zombies invade

http://www.sidereel.com/The_Walking_Dead

This my dears, is what the entire internet has been begging for. The pilot is 60 minutes long and the episodes are 44 minutes long. Every single one I have seen so far has been beautiful enough to develop a zombie fetish.

You didn't think that was a joke did you?

This gif btw is from another good show called Bob's Burgers. I'll leave some scrolling room now because that gif is making you dizzy.

Feel better yet?

It's another show on AMC that shows really good quality from a surprising place, but The Walking Dead has a little more background music than Mad Men, and the volume is more standardized, so they might not win as many awards. (Oscar recipe coming in a later post).
The Walking Dead is yet another zombie thing that refuses to call them zombies, but who cares really? There are some spaghetti sounds that leaves you thinking sound editors know nothing of human anatomy, but it's not as prominent as in most horror movies.
To top everything off they, from time to time, use music from, or inspired by, the greatest composer I have ever heard: John Murphy.
I don't want to give anything away, but it's a good show, and you should watch it. And if you have kids they should watch with you. Anything to prepare them for what we all know is coming.

No Mr. Stark, not winter. I'm talking about zombies!

Game of Thrones is also excellent television.

I'm a well of fantastic entertainment, why am I not being used to my full potential?

The few people have spoken

First I would like to apologize for my absence. I was mourning the loss of a computer that was not mine. It was that machine I used to blog, check comments, check statistics, chat on msn, some multi tasking stuff and it served me Simpsons when my computer died for the day. It's back at the school now. Where it belongs I suppose.

I will never forget you lappy. You kept me entertained on the toilet.

On a lighter note: The people have voted, and I have counted the votes three times! The results are in: BEARD POWER!!
Pretty much every day I will take another picture like this one and post on this blog so you can see my progress from freshly shaved to fuzzy fellow.

Wow. My skin is not very clean is it?

As you can see my chin is freshly shaved and moisturized, and I do not have herpes. I'll tag them all with project beard so they'll be easier to find and compare. Maybe I'll even make an album somewhere