Recent events have proved that the game portion of gaming is no longer as important as the showing us your tits part. To succeed, a developer must choose one member of the team and sacrifice that brave person's shirt to the gaming public's insatiable appetite for nakedness. Unfortunately, when it comes to nudity, the public demands hot chicks - a scarce resource in an industry staffed almost exclusively by pale, blubbery men. The number of eligible women can be counted on the remaining fingers of a shop teacher's mangled hand: Stevie Case, Corrinne Yu, and Amerika's sweetheart, Sarah Walker. That's it. In other words, unless Ms. Case has some more drastic surgery to rekindle interest in her breasts, such as having eyeballs sewn into the nipples, we're already 1/3 of the way through seeing all of the available boobs. Can the industry survive this impending crisis? I had serious doubts until a very reliable source leaked me some information regarding Ritual Entertainment. Never content to sit idly by in a crisis, unless by crisis you mean game-killing bugs, Ritual is gambling on the fact that it's the breasts themselves that make a game popular and not the hot chick surgically attached to them. To test this theory, management has convinced a member of its all male staff to get implants. How did it work out? I think the results speak for themselves. In today's tit-driven marketplace, FAKK2 cannot fail. Note that I barred out the subject's eyes to protect his identity.

And in this next picture I barred out just one of his eyes to make him look like a pirate:

Click the image to view the mpeg.

In our last update, we quoted Andrew Brazier, who is a designer working on the upcoming title Call of Cthulhu, which is a game based on the famous Trespasser horror universe.  Like all entries in the genre, Call of Cthulhu will feature a "stunning new physics engine" which will take the burden of creating compelling gameplay off the shoulders of mere mortals such as Andrew Brazier and place it squarely into the giant invisible flying hand of God.  In our excitement - not to mention our terror - we overlooked Andrew's planned enhancement to physics:

Water will behave realistically, so objects dropped into
it will float or submerge, depending on their weight.

Though theologians and fat people who fall into pools disagree, I've always felt God made a mistake when he designed the dumb world so that objects dropped into water float or submerge based on their density. 

Do you need more?

When I was a kid, we didn't have Daikatana to kick around.  We had the Micronauts Hyperion.  Micronauts were proto-Transformer robot toys that shot rubber-tipped projectiles with just enough force to propel them about halfway down your throat.  The Hyperion was a Micronauts vehicle that was listed as "Coming Soon!" on every Micronauts box.  My friends and I wanted it in the worst way.  We never got tired of talking about it and drawing pictures of jets attacking it while it crushed stick figures beneath its three massive wheels on its way to a torture chamber.  One day, I showed my friend Jim Ball a new sketch I'd made of the Hyperion chasing Adolf Hitler through Berlin, which I depicted as a series of connected triangles.  Completely unmoved, Jim said "What is that?   The Hy-peepee-mobile?"  And that's when things changed.  I guess we were still excited about the Hyperion, or as it came to be known, the poopoo-cart, baron poop commander, or the poop-tractor, but emotions had run too high for too long and our excitement had turned ugly. 

The Hyperion was eventually released - in Italy.  But by then I was older and the beloved Micronauts of my youth had been replaced by the discovey that Glass Plus makes your head numb if you inhale it. 

And what relevance does any of this have to Daikatana?  Just this: yesterday two new Daikatana screenshots were released.  The link was mailed to me by a man.  That man?  None other than my childhood friend, Jim Ball!  Goodday!

If it was my job to get people excited about Daikatana by releasing screenshots, and I released that screenshot, I'd lose my job.  And if I lose my job, I go back to prison.  So I wouldn't release that screenshot.  But that's just me.  I'm sure marketing people, when they're not daydreaming about their next Snickers bar or resting their overworked dialing finger in the warm, soft cave that is their nose, give lots of thought to these things.  I doctored the photo to make the Gamefan brand more conspicous so that nobody thinks we're in any way responsible for unleashing this awful image. 

In an effort to help the Eidos marketing department, we're going to spend all week analyzing the screenshot.  We'll start by posing this question:  Why is the skeleton wearing a loincloth?  For chrissake.  The confusion may stem from the word 'boner', which might have caused John Romero to believe that there is a bone running through his penis - a bone that would need to be covered up to protect children from catching a lusty eyeful of skeleton dick. 

Here is that famous Matthew Brady Civil War photo showing Abe Lincoln at Shiloh freeing slaves from confederate skeletons.  Normally, this image is significant only because it's the sole existing photograph of the seriously depressed, seriously gay Abraham Lincoln wearing a dress.  I'd like to point out, though, that it clearly shows that skeletons don't have penises and, in combat conditions, don't even wear helmets!  Because their heads are made out of "nature's helmet", bone.  And they don't have brains.

I do this thing.  If I'm watching the Television or listening to the radio and some commentator is talking about someone famous, I'll pretend that they're talking about me.  Jules Asner will say something like "Edward Norton, the smartest, sexiest actor to emerge from the Boston theater scene." and in my head, I'll hear the same thing, only the words "Edward" and "Norton" will be replaced by "erik".  And "Boston" will become "Cleveland" because that makes it more like it's really about me.   Then the piece will be over and wry Steve Kmetco will say, "Thanks Jules, you're one young lady on the move."  And he's talking about me, and I wink and say back to the TV, "thanks Steve, but I'm no lady!"  Why do I do this?  I don't know.  I try not to think about it too much.

Yesterday, our office police scanner was picking up NPR for some reason.  Maybe because of truckers.   Normally, I avoid NPR since I don't really care about what's happening in Israel, but as I was running over to spin the dial and try to find a pit bull attack or some Internal Affairs radio chatter - they're the cops of the cops - I realized that the people on the radio were talking about P.T. Anderson and his new movie Magnolia.  I missed the beginning, so I can only imagine the topic was something like "what would Ehud Barak think about this movie", but they were going on and on about what a genius this Anderson is.  It was perfect for my game, and I quickly fell into a pleasant reverie replacing virtually every proper noun with the word 'erik'.  At some point the discussion switched to Robert Altman and I switched right with it.  Just as I was getting tingly  from the praise being heaped on me, someone said, "I think erik's work is often mindlessly cruel."  That really made me think.  Am I mindlessly cruel?  Could a person like me who, if you replace James Ellroy's name with mine, has been called "One of the great American writers of our time" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review also be mindlessly cruel? 

When I was a kid, I found a little baby bird that had fallen to earth from heaven, I guess.  It was very frail and my friends and I put it in a box and sat around cooing at it and trying to comfort it.  After ten minutes of that, we started to get bored.  One of us sealed the box up and put it in the middle of the street and then we rode our bikes over it.  Looking back, that was pretty cruel.  But we were kids.  More recently, there's everything on the site.  Like this picture of John Romero playing basketball:

I'd like to see him try that move on a normal sized man, or two of those Chinese midgets, one sitting on the other's shoulders.  His only chance would be if the top midget lost his balance and put his hands over the bottom midget's eyes and they spun around in circles then toppled over.  Man, that'd be great.  But mindlessly cruel, I suppose.

At least I'm not alone in my cruelty.  Last week Incite magazine released a movie from Third Law's upcoming game, KISS: Psycho Circus.  The movie opens with this awesome scene:

Is that a big square room with crates?  Nice.  The thing I like about crates is that they're so mysterious.  What's in the crate?   Is it ammo?  Is it health?  It could be either! 

Here's the crates from another angle.  I think that monster is KISS.   It's like spending Christmas with KISS!  It's KISS's turn to open a crate!   "I got ammo!" says KISS, "now let's rock!"

Maybe someone asked Todd McFarlane what monster he thought would be good in a game and he creatively declared "spider!" and everyone was too embarrassed to tell him that there are spiders in every game.  That's my explanation for the spiders.

The movie ends with the entire staff of Third Law peeking out of some crates.  "I'm health!" says one of them and the others laugh, because they're morons.

The "problem" has received so much attention that even Quake fan site Q3center has heard about it.  The news must have caused the editors to wonder, in their nasally white-guy voices, "whazzup wit dat?" because they immediately published an article describing in head-scratching detail how video games are responsible for "the world today... a place of criminal acts and violence." 

It's not until the middle of the article that impassioned but spell-checkerless author Paxed finally gets around to mentioning the central point of his essay:

During the 1970's and 1980's we didn't see such acts as these done by the kids today. They had guns then, and they had bombs then, but they didn't have games such as these we have today, and I feel thats the main reason of all these shootings in schools.

I can imagine Paxed typing that passage, leaning back, resting his hands on his giant belly, and declaring "checkmate" just before rewarding himself for a job well done by stuffing a Snickers bar through his cleft palate and mashing it up with his nubby yellow teeth.  At first glance, his logic does appear unassailable:  In the seventies and eighties the world was composed of two things, guns and bombs, and yet it was an idyllic utopia.  In the nineties, a third element was added, "games such as these we have today," and that's when the troubles began. 

Luckily, I am something of a wiz with the Internet and used it to uncover a possible fourth component of the world:  Darth Maul merchandise.

Etoys.com lists thirty-four children's toys based on this character.  In case you read that wrong, I said thirty-four and children.  Etoys makes no attempt to hide the plaything's true nature.  The description of Jedi Duel Darth Maul with Lightsaber sums it up quite nicely: "Evil personified."   A young child can don the Darth Maul with Mask costume to practice being "Evil, obedient, and tattooed."  Pixelly, realistic-esque killing simulators such as Doom may train kids to use weapons, but do they simultaneously rot their teeth?  Before you accuse me of being an absurd agitator, you might want to consider the Darth Maul Saber Stick - "This replica of Darth Maul's double-bladed, red lightsaber is also a gum dispenser!!!"(italics and most of the exclamation points added - ed.)  Worse yet, try bravely to imagine the corrupting influence of the Darth Maul Spin Pop "Candy with dueling action!"  Internet experts tell us that children are susceptible to only two forms of coercion, candy and torture.  The fact that Hasbro has chosen to train an army of "evil, obedient, and tattooed" adolescent butchers through positive reinforcement and sweets makes it no less insidious.   How many repetitions of the "dueling action"/"candy" cycle does it take to turn a child into a gravity-defying karate killing machine?  Internet experts tell us ten.

The official description of the Darth Maul's Double-Bladed Lightsaber cheerfully incites children to violence with the battle cry of "Happy Jedi Hunting!"  Yes, Jedis are gay, but that doesn't mean they're not human - unless you're a firm believer in any of the world's major religions.  Either way, the message to young people is clear: happiness is killing gays.  Again, unless you're some kind of Christian or Muslim, that's just totally unacceptable.

Which reminds me, forget about Darth Maul and Dylan Klebold anyway, we have a bigger problem.  The world is a shitty place where bad things happen.  Your life, my life, Hell, Brad Pitt's life is nothing more than an extended episode of "When God Attacks 2!"  He'd just as soon fuck you up as make a flower.  That's the way it works, Paxed.  Get used to it.  While you're busy agonizing over Doom's effects on lunatics, God's blithely deciding whether to plant a toothy, hairy tumor way up your colon or just right in your anus.  Try to look on the bright side, after all your hours spent playing Quake and posing your Darth Maul dolls, if you ever get sent back in time to the peaceful and violence-free 1970's, you'll rule the planet with a chubby iron-fist, like Wesley Snipes almost did in Demolition Man. 

Though I'll tell you what:  Polite massacre-free society dodged quite a bullet in the 1970's with the concurrent release of Frustration Ball and the Johnny Seven One Man Army kit.  I don't care what kind of right-wing nutjob you are, youth, frustration, and one-man-army-ism is a recipe for disaster.  It's amazing that we managed to escape that decade without any murdering.