Tonight I’m gonna have myself a real good time.
I feel alive and the world it’s turning inside out Yeah!
I’m floating around in ecstasy
So don’t stop me now don’t stop me
‘Cause I’m having a good time having a good time

Note the speaker’s reappropriation of the traditional Greek invocation. He has both acknowledged the poetic tradition by submitting to traditional forms – establishing the time for the “ecstasy” (“tonight”) while simultaneously demanding that the antagonistic “don’t stop me.” The language almost evokes religious subtext, “ecstasy” inevitably brings to mind the personal religious gnosticism that runs through many 13^th and 14^th century texts of this kind. This is reinforced by the speaker’s fundamental change in perspective and feeling: “the world it’s turning inside out Yeah!”

I’m a shooting star leaping through the skies

Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity

Thus begins a series of metaphors describing the speaker’s personal state. This first one is perhaps the most important, as it sets the fundamental mood for the piece. The the speaker feels super-terrestrial, again reinforcing themes of religious ecstasy. It is arguably the most direct of the metaphors in the first verse. But this is immediately subverted by the crypticism of the second line. Naturally, the tiger cannot defy the laws of gravity because of its corporeal nature, and yet it does. In what ways can the tiger defy gravity? By jumping? By releasing its primal energy and “leaping through the skies?” If this is a defiance it is a temporary one at best, though that could be an intentional deconstruction of the metaphor by the author.

I’m a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva
I’m gonna go go go
There’s no stopping me

The second metaphor in the first verse is no easier to interpret. Again we are presented with two opposing images: The race car and Lady Godiva, who of course rode on a horse. The race car (note that it is not addressed by its driver, only the vehicle itself) is presumably being watched by a great audience, whereas Godiva of course had no viewers but the Peeping Tom. In that case, what does that make the audience in this piece but a sort of voyeur? Is it not true that we take a sort of perverted delight in watching another man’s ecstasy as if it were our own? More simply, it could be a commentary on the strained – even combative – audience-artist relationship that runs through popular music of this time (cf. “We Will Rock You”). The artist, in a sympathetic desire to be loved by the people and fulfill their needs in a rescue from an oppressive patriarch (in this case the droll goings-on of life itself), bares himself to all nakedly, simultaneously hoping and yet not-hoping to be seen. In this way we can see that the author is both allusive and elusive. Finally: note the repeated rhythm on “go go go,” a fantastic use of spondee, building up a sense of climax that both excites the audience yet impels them to not interfere with the acts of the speaker.

I’m burning through the skies Yeah!

And finally we break through to the climax of the ecstasy, where the author is totally unburdened by the forces of the Earth or even physics itself. He is at once the Christ, the ubermensch, the Buddha. Conveniently it coincides with a musical climax that corresponded to the reading of this verse.

Two hundred degrees

That’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit

This is not a very warm temperature, especially in Fahrenheit. This could be an intentional contradiction – a continued trend of the author using incongruous terms within his symbology – or a simple scientific misunderstanding. In the latter case we cannot blame the author of this time for having a rudimentary understanding of physics. In the very least it is on par with authors of his time.

I’m trav’ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic man of you

Again, note the author’s use of mixed allusions: the speed of light is already infinitesimally greater than that of the speed of sound, yet he wants to make a “supersonic man out of you.” The metaphor is two-fold: it continues to show the difficulty of explaining religious mystical experience within human language (the contradictory allusion), and it subtly hints at the solidarity of this experience. Where the speaker travels at the speed of light, the audience is only supersonic. We will never experience the same sort of ecstasy as the speaker.

Don’t stop me now I’m having such a good time
I’m having a ball don’t stop me now
If you wanna have a good time just give me a call
Don’t stop me now (‘Cause I’m having a good time)
Don’t stop me now (Yes I’m having a good time)
I don’t want to stop at all

Note the change in mood at this point in the song. We have gone from the mystical-religious-cryptic to the invitational-joyous-celebratory. The speaker takes a more volitional stance (“just give me a call”), and though it is clear our “good time” will never match his due to the radical difference in our empirical circumstances, we are still invited to communally enjoy this experience.

I’m a rocket ship on my way to Mars
On a collision course
I am a satellite I’m out of control

Here the author’s cleverness shines through, playing on the multiple popular understandings that pervaded in the use of the term “satellite” at this time. Of course the satellite can refer to a moon or otherwise orbiting celestial body, but also in the sense of a man-made satellite that transmits radio or television signals. In this one ambiguous term we have a meeting of the natural-astronomical and the constructed-mechanical-digital. Again, the insistence on creating these as dichotomous terms enforces the incomprehensibility of religious experience. It is a “collision course,” not a simple landing. This is a violent conflict, though of course the sexual imagery cannot be ignored. This bridges cleanly into the next metaphor.

I am a sex machine ready to reload
Like an atom bomb about to
Oh oh oh oh oh explode

At this point it should become clear how the author has transformed his metaphor from logical contradiction (car/Godiva) to one of harmonious juxtaposition. The creative act of sex is reconfigured by the energy, violence, and masculinity of the machine gun and the atom bomb. It is the reappropriation of the destructive to the constructive, the man-made to the man-making.

I’m burning through the skies Yeah!
Two hundred degrees
That’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I’m trav’ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic woman out of you

As in traditional song, we have a return of the chorus. It is unchanged, except for the subject of the last line, this time a woman rather than a man. This could be allusive to the author’s universal pan-sexual desire to involve all in his ecstatic experience.

Don’t stop me don’t stop me don’t stop me
Hey hey hey!
Don’t stop me don’t stop me
Ooh ooh ooh (I like it)
Don’t stop me have a good time good time
Don’t stop me don’t stop me
Ooh ooh Alright

This section appears meaningless unless one hears the accompaniment. The speaker “breaks down” the traditional verse-chorus structure, taking a diversion to involve the audience the music making. The guitar and bass stop, leaving only the man-made power of the speaker’s voice and the percussive energy of the drummer to play. The structure of the lyrics at this time is of course a holdover from the traditional African call-and-response form of song-making. We are encouraged at this point to join in on the improvisation, the harmony, and the experience itself. The author has moved from a singular-incomprehensible experience in the beginning of the song to a universal-celebratory one. This sort of repetition continues until the song’s conclusion.

La la la la laaaa
La la la la
La la laa laa laa laaa
La la laa la la la la la laaa hey!!….

Again, this final section means little without the musical accompaniment. The speaker’s voice seems to drift back in a sea of his own reverberation, voice upon voice overlapping in a sort of musical meta-onanism. The tempo has dramatically decreased, and the tone has shifted from one of pure joy to something with a hint longing. It could be a recognition by the part of the author that this sort of ecstasy is temporally-limiting, an experience bound by the a priori conditions of the human existence. It is a haunting, stinging note at the end of a gloriously unrestrained song. It is a fall back to Earth, a fall into time.

But the heart of the matter, I’ve got this Playstation 3 Computer Entertainment System sitting in the living room of the Seabeck house. It looks rather regal (large) sitting there all shiny gathering a thin film of dust underneath the DVD player and cable tuner. That’s not to say I’m not using it! Dust just gets there, you see.  But yes, fat, happy, regal, shiny looking thing. I named it Cornelius, but only after deliberating for ages if I should go with the too-obvious “Winston”. Men like to name their electronics like they would name their genitals. It just sort of goes with the territory. My sister in the other room named her PS3 (won after a heartbreaking BF/GF divorce trial) “short stack,” which is adorable and familiar. Mine had to be somewhat intimidating and yet subservient. See? Just like genitals.

So this thing is shiny, but it needs some HDMI cable-styles going on. The Circuit-City chums claim that there are these different bandwidth of cables that will be better for such and so TVs and such and so hertz frequency refresh rates to which I say PSHAW. I probably went to high school with you, good sir, and you are no expert on things electronic DESPITE what your badge may proclaim. A cable’s a cable’s a cable! I pick up the cheapest thing at Best Buy (still a soul-crushing $40) for the dignity of playing the PS3 in its highest native form of output.

So as I have mentioned several times, it is very very shiny. There are these blu-ray (TM SONY) discs which contain feature-films on them. Very delightful. Oh Wall-E, you’re more human than the people in this movie! There’s something for all of us to learn, I guess.

As for games: I don’t have much. Uncharted is pretty delightful. It’s been said before: but it’s kind of bold for anyone to tout one of their next-gen flagship titles as being just a game about a dude in T-shirt and jeans. No superpowers, no pact with the devil, no mutant symbiote growing out of him. Just a guy who jumps clumsily (no vaulting frome ledge to ledge without using his legs and/or torso) and appears to look scared whenever there’s gunfire on him. For me this is all a very new experience, I don’t play games with dual-analog controls very often, so I kind of look like an A-Team villain as I’m trying to shoot out dudes. Headshots are entirely by accident let me assure you! The game is pretty forgiving, though, and I can always magically regain health behind some well-placed cover instead of being shot to death. It is sort of freaky seeing all these characters and their plastic-y smooth faces in hi-def. I try not to think about just how awkward it all looks and go back to firing off an AK-47 like an idiot. Like I say, it’s not too bad, and it’s got only a couple madness-inducing Quick Time Events by the half-way point that I’m at. There’s plenty of room to mess up, but so far so good.

I’ve also rented Dead Space, which has been a bit of an adventure all in itself. It would be a gross simplification to call it Resident Evil 4 In Space (now with dual-analog controls!) but that is the comparison that I come back to. There’s a couple pointed  (even successful!) attempts at creating a spooky haunted-house-in-space atmosphere, complete with loud clanging and objects rolling on the floor Just To Unnerve You, but it’s so wrapped up in videogame convention that it feels a bit condescending! I mean, I do not need to be told on six different occasions to SHOOT THE LIMBS, and while the inclusion of a holographic UI is a nice replacement for the typical jarring menu screens, it’s more of a placeholder than a solution (why not just never give me a reason to organize my inventory? That’s not the point of the game obviously!) That, and I’m still not sure why every enemy is dropping credits that I can spend at a magical store that can replicate anything I want. Yes, I know we’ve been discussing “Why do X drop Y” since Bread and Slimes in Dragon Quest I, but it still applies. And in this era of increasingly powerful technology and genuine stabs at realism (people can say “FUCK” in videogames now!) it’s all the more jarring. Someone, somewhere on the Dead Space team probably wanted the game to be even more Metroid-like, less segmented (they call the levels Chapters for crissakes) and remove the need for buying things altogether by littering the environment with even more rooms full of goodies. Or at least, that’s my hope.

Pretty marvelous sound design though. Let me just get that out of the way. Some things actually sound like they’re coming from out of nowhere (because they are! Dang thin-air enemy spawns). The sound effects get a little corny sometimes. A few aliens clearly sound like over-processed water garglings and spits. There’s a recurring metallic scratch noise in the Bridge section of the ship that, I swear to God, sounds like someone playing with their zipper with an echo and chorus and delay knob turned all the way to “SPOOOOOOKY”.

The point is: Dead Space is one of those games where you’re more surprised, more spooked out, if something ISN’T trying to jump out and eat your neck, and yet when that thing does jump out, it’s usually not a big enough threat to really sustain fear for too long. I mean, so far in the first third of the game the biggest challenge has come from the unexpected appearance of tiny swarming bug-aliens (“Oh hey I can shake them off WHOOPS TOO MANY ON YOU AT ONCE DEAD”) and the inexplicable and inexcusable inclusion of an asteroid-shooting minigame. This segment is, without a doubt, the most infuriatingly stupid thing the developers could have added to the game. It feels like Goddamn Atari Star Wars in the middle of the game. Imagine if in a film, let’s be specific here, imagine if in the middle of Dark Knight commissioner Gordon calls up Batman and tells him that he has to (MUST) punch this guy in the crotch for four straight minutes as an interrogation technique, and then imagine if the film had the audacity to show us that? We might say that it weakens the characters, that it ruins the integrity of the plot, and we would be damn right.

That’s roughly the problem with all of Dead Space’s levels. It’s a fun house, it’s the game giving a thinly-veiled excuse (the power is out on X level, we need to activate this such and so generator, unclog this blah blah) to make you walk through hallways and watch spooky things happen behind bullet-proof glass (an aside: If you’re going to do seamless Half-Life style narrative where there are no breaks for cutscenes, don’t give me something to look at behind an unbreakable glass screen five times in two hours).

Here’s a thought: throw off the pretenses of being a well-structured action game. Don’t worry about about linear point A to point B travel. Remove the two other support characters entirely. I mean the token black guy is (surprise!) some sort of villain and the token girl is only there to reveal the TBG’s evil scheme. Fuck that. Don’t fake the pretense for a plot if you don’t need one. The protagonist is an engineer right? Shouldn’t he be able to run around and fix things for himself? Good, do that. He already has the magical objective-finding radar system to tell him where to go, so ditch the other characters. Now we’re all alone in (tee-hee!)…. DEAD SPACE. So, we’ve removed those nuisances. Now take out all the enemies. No aliens, no zombies. Keep the atmosphere and basic aesthetic of all the levels. Now make the entire ship you’re trying to repair a seamless well-integrated world (Like I dunno, System Shock 2 or goddamn Metroid Prime, a game that Dead Space should steal from more outright). Next, remove all the in-game stores and upgrades and just stick with maybe six guns and a few very precious health powerups. Alright, now put the enemies back in. But maybe add, tops, two to three enemies in every major zone. Preferably one enemy. One very intelligent, constantly-stalking, very powerful enemy. The player could run around and repair this ship (so they can get home, see) any way they want. They could try and kill the aliens, or not. But make these fuckers SCARY AS HELL, powerful, terrible monsters. It really doesn’t make any sense in the Dead Space we see here for a typical marine-looking guy to go down after one standard-issue Alien Zombie attack whereas the main player can take four or five hits easy without breaking a sweat. Make all the enemies super-deadly, and make each one of them unique. They each require different tactics to kill, some based on weapon-combat, others can be killed with environmental traps or classic Ridley Scott Alien-style “eject into space” nonsense. And cut down the ammo content by about nine-tenths of what we currently have.

So what’s the end result? Something genuinely nerve-racking (one powerful dude is way scarier than a thousand pussy zombie-aliens (see: Metroid Fusion’s other Samus)) with an interesting environment and well-done sound design in a seamless and logically sound game world where the player has a clear objective and the ability to clear it. Right now, Dead Space is a bit of a shambling half-good half-boring and typical mess. With the right amount of game-design balls it could be the next best thing.

Edit: Oh wait, that was a lot of spam. Thanks to the random folks clicking who thought they were getting something informatitve! You are still our largest readerbase!~

I have to admit, I had a bit of a vision when the band started. I mean, my thought was always to stay true to the music. Thin Lizzy had a vision and there was no reason we couldn’t have one either. I was always about having big riffs, singable chorus lines, and themes that any teenager could relate to. I guess the problem these days is I don’t think our intended audience is getting a hold of our music, much less getting the meaning behind what I, I mean WE, do.

There is something primal and resonant about Thin Lizzy. I mean, the way they sing about teenage rebellion and getting into trouble and how the “boys are back in town.” I mean, that’s something any sixteen year old from any given suburb of Detroit can relate to. I just… I don’t think the original message of the band is being conveyed in what we are doing right now.

I’ll grant you that focusing the musical efforts of the group on 8-Bit NSF programming was my idea. It was my original thought to turn all the guitar parts into multi-layered, precisely-crafted triangle waves that would harmonize like a dream on ice. That was all me. It was Jeff’s idea to add the original lyrics on top of that. I didn’t think it was necessary. I mean, Lizzy had such a powerful message that you could understand what they meant beyond the power of words. They were, a-lingual, if you will. The point is: somewhere on the line what was meant to be a faithful tribute to a great and accessible band using free plugins for ACID turned into a (and I shudder to use the word)  hipster-bait nostalgia-thon for drunk teenagers. I mean, is it even possible to feel nostalgia in a 23-year old audience when the music in question hasn’t been popular since 1981? It seems unfair, and frankly, against the band’s original vision (which was of course to raise awareness for the plight of inner city white boys who were in need of become “lady killers” rather than “killed by ladies”).

Look, no one in the band reads this journal, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve jumped the shark before we’ve even jumped the garbage pails. I’ve only done both of the harmonizing guitar parts on “Jailbreak” twice now and it already feels like I’ve betrayed the artistic concience which originally inspired this great music. If you dig around youtube for Thin MIDDy I’m sure you’ll see the performance and understand what I mean. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to Thin Lizzy, and it’s not fair to Leonard Braunheart.

I’m going to have a heart to heart with the band tomorrow night. This madness and debauchery has got to stop.

-LB

Is it on a potato chip? That’s not bad right there.

Is it on a taco? Hey, that fits in pretty well with the rest of the flavors!

Is it on anything else? This tastes kind of rancid!

It’s not because of the go-on-missions-and-smooch-girls thing, that really doesn’t factor in here. If anything the girlfriend system is a byproduct of the school setting and a precursor to GTAIV’s system of relationships. I think dating sims are involved because Bully has a clock.

The protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto games were, from what I can tell, insomniac speed freaks. You could stay up day in and day out, and complete missions from your equally-insomniac heroin-shooting mob bosses until the player got bored or needed to save their game. It sort of works in a GTA game, where we expect the criminals to never sleep and that nefarious deeds can happen at any point in the day. Without having played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and only four awkward car-crashing minutes of Grand Theft Auto IV I will say this: The clock in Grand Theft Auto games doesn’t mean anything. It’s a dial that takes up a modest amount of HUD space in exchange for letting you know when things are going to get dark.

Bully attempts to re-contextualize Grand Theft Auto’s features in a different setting. Machine guns and RPG launchers are turned into non-lethal spud cannons and bottle rocket launchers, though for the most part you’ll just be using a slingshot and prank items like stink bombs and Home Alone-style marbles. Mob bosses become clique leaders, corrupt cops become corrupt teachers and so on and so forth. The game doesn’t try to hide the implications of future criminal activity because of the social environment imposed on the students at Bullworth Academy. It’s actually a rather sympathetic view of delinquent activity: When you put together a bunch ofunmedicatedociopaths and hive-minded students with inept teachers you might get a few bad eggs out of the bunch.

But the clock. See, the clock makes a difference in Bully because your protagonist is only fifteen years old (at least that’s what the final chapter of the game’s main story told me, I had no idea prior). Teenagers are, apparently, not speed-freak mobsters and are incapable of staying up past 2:00 AM without passing out. Passing out means you lose some cash and wake up again in the morning wherever you were that night (or at least that’s how I remembered it, the experience was so harrowing I shan’t ever allow myself to stay up late again). So the game creates an internal schedule. You wake up in the morning, and all of your business has to be done by 2:00 AM, where at which point you should probably return to a bed (conveniently located next to a save point and the character’s wardrobe). Everyone else runs on a schedule too. Teachers and students won’t request missions during their school hours, and nobody will offer missions in the wee hours of the morning. This is where the dating sim thing kicks in.

That’s because Bully is a game that runs primarily on a schedule. You wake up and you have options: take a mission, go to class, earn some money, or explore. Class is a good idea, the bonuses will certainly be useful in taking up your other options. In between classes, you might have just enough time to start a food fight or take up a small money-earning errand, then it’s back to class again or play hooky. Taking on missions takes up time as well, fail once or twice and you’ve likely ran out of time for the entire day. In a way this makes a lot more sense than it ever did in the Grand Theft Auto games. Why would a mob boss allow a failing criminal to come back hour after hour and retry the same task in a single day? There are still holes in the logic (why don’t any of the mission-givers get tired of your ineptitude?) but at the very least giving them a day to breath gives it some internal consistency.

It’s not like failure is going to be a huge issue in Bully anyway, as the entire game is pretty easy. I retried missions all of about ten times, and most of those failures arose from accidentally running over a cop with my bicycle and getting promptly arrested (there are no “accidents” in Bully’s moral code, again with the criminal genesis thing).

So, everything you do in the game is on a schedule. Periodically check back into your room, sleep and return. The pattern is pretty familiar to anybody who has played a pre-Final Fantasy RPG or post-Final Fantasy dating simulation. The gist of it is that you only have a limited set of actions that you can perform in a single day before you’ve used up all of those actions. In RPGs this usually revolved around your health and magic, and at the end of a long grind session you had to return to an inn or whathaveyou and rest. Dating sims applied the same logic, but simplified the actions themselves. One “day” might consist of just one event with a person before the “day” ends and you have to start the process anew. This gameplay hook is in itself pretty gratifying. It creates a rhythm of action-reward-do action a little better-bigger reward-etc. that is inherently addictive. The key to making it good is to make each of those “actions” you take in a “day” substantial. RPGs fail and succeed to whatever extent it feels like your characters grew in stats that day or if the rewards (money, equipment, fancy-pants items) lived up to the work. Persona 3 manages to pull it off pretty effectively, using a transparent take on the dating-sim daily routine while adding in a competent dungeon-crawling element that is intimately linked to whatever you do in the more dating sim-y parts. At night you slay evil hellspawn, and in the day you perform little actions that make your hellspawn beat up the evil hellspawn a bit better (not too much, not too little) each time.

At the heart of it, there’s comparatively just not a lot to do in a game-day of Bully. The classes, in fact, might be the meatiest parts. The minigames involved in each one are just short enough and just challenging enough that the reward feels just right, and unlike the missions your classes aren’t confined to the restrictions of the clock (for the most part), so no matter how long you take in a game of dodgeball it will only be one and a half game-world hours. The missions themselves, by contrast, earn you a little bit of money, some entertaining character interaction/dialogue, and “respect points” that amount to nothing more than “now the assholes that I took the mission from won’t pester me as I walk around town.” Now this wouldn’t really be that big of an issue if the in-game money had any in-game value. I’m racking my brain here and in the nooks and crannies of this game I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but here’s just about everything you can do with cash:

1) Buy clothes
2) Buy haircuts
3) Play carnival games
4) Play arcade games
5) Buy supplies
6) Bribe the occasional kid in a mission

Let’s go in reverse order here. Six is hardly ever an issue, and even if you can’t cough up the tiny amount of money it takes to bribe a kid you could always beat them up in Bully’s delightful The Warriors-style combat engine (which is in all likelihood the highlight of the game). Five is hardly ever an issue, as after completing some of the Chemistry classes you can get every item you could possibly want for free from your dorm room (even the overpowered bottle rocket launchers and potato cannons). Three and four sort of solve themselves: They’re not very fun. The carnival games yield some rewards – more clothes and funny hats – but by their own merit they aren’t very fun.

So that leaves us with character customization. At one point in the third chapter of Bully’s five-act show I had over $500 of game-cash running around from doing missions and the occasional odd-job (lawn-mowing is just as boring in a videogame as it is in real life, it would seem). With nothing to do, I cleaned out the in-game clothing stores of anything that seemed interesting. There were some gems, shirts and hoodies and pants that could make my character look like a thug or a jock or a hipster asshole, even some jackets and shirts that were lifted from the GTAIII and Vice City protagonists. Other than finding ironic and silly ways to dress my lil’ thug with a heart of gold there wasn’t much to do with all that in-game money that the protagonist seems to care about. This blows a hole in the entire game-day structure and makes it infinitely less rewarding to continue your daily tasks. Its not like Bully needed to have customizable player stats or a double-jump move that you could “buy” from a local gym or multiple combat styles that you could train in at a local dojo, just something to make the in-game money mean something. Hell, just copy Final Fantasy 8′s Triple Triad card game or something equally addictive and unrelated to the main plot and you’re set.

Bully fails as a videogame for only being as fun as your conscience will allow it to be. Nothing in Bully is more fun than it sounds (or sometimes as fun). There is no shortage of things to do: starting food fights, riding roller coasters, playing carnival games, shooting assholes with your slingshot, going on a paper route, racing bicycles, playing dodgebgall, whatever. But the amount of fun you’ll have with these activities is likely determined by how cool you thought they were when I listed them right there. There’s not a whole lot of snap or crunch in any of the gameplay of these portions in of themselves. Playing the shooting gallery game at the carnival is less satisfying than the training mode of just about any console FPS, playing dodgeball requires infinitely less thought and skill than a game of Kunio-style Dodgeball on the Neo-Geo, and bike racing is… well that’s actually about as good as any bike racing game will get actually. Your mileage will vary entirely on how cool you think it is to be a teenager rebelliously doing all of these things in a “living, breathing” game world that you actively run around in all the time. In that regard, Bully is more of an RPG than anything that I’ve listed here so far. The more you role-play the protagonist, the more fun you’ll likely be having (because I certainly didn’t have my opinion of food fights change after seeing them in Bully).

Where Bully doesn’t fail is in the dialogue and character interactions themselves. Your classmates and teachers are all ridiculous caricatures with flashes of truth amongst all of the PG-13 character development. Hearing the protagonist’s rival blame his problems on “western civilization” as a whole is relateable, ridiculous, hilarious, and depressing. The way the game skirts around and addresses teenage sexuality with its feminine characters is equal parts Saved By the Bell and “wait did they just imply…” Some of the best dialogue actually comes in the form of conversation snippets that can be heard as you wander around campus. Jocks and preps say dumb and obnoxious ha-ha sorts of things, and your nerds will talk about.. . their moms, I guess, but amidst it all you might hear something about one of the teachers or another character in the game. This is the closest the game comes to doing something really interesting with the videogame medium, by allowing the player to pick up on clues within the environment and through game-player interaction actually develop their own concept of characters and places without being told what to think by any of the other narrative outlets.

These little narrative flourishes (along with that delightful reimagining of 16-bit brawler combat) are probably the high points of the Bully experience. Everything else in the game is a competent (but never excellent) facsimile of activities that sound daring and exciting within the context of the game’s setting but never really deliver on the fun. What this amounts to is a game that features both a panty raid and a sweaty perverted gym teacher, and interacting with the latter is way more interesting than playing the former. How that came to be is sort of incredible in its own right, but a bit of a travesty too.

-Mascot leaves his keys in the car, and unfortunately realizes just after leaving the vehicle. Rather than freak out, mascot continues shopping at Crate and Barrel, determined a solution will reveal itself while shopping.

-Mascot orders an Arnold Palmer at a local restaurant, receives an iced tea instead, then pretty much just lives with it.

-After an understandable misconception, mascot attempts to return regular washing machine soap for a brand that is suitable for front-loading low-energy models. After a forced and awkward conversation with the underpaid teenage help, the mascot is able to get a refund.

-Mascot runs into an old acquaintance at a local garage sale. Mascot is unable to remember exactly how they know this person. School friend? Church member? College party?

People need clothing that can match their rough and tumble lifestyle in these appropriate times. No longer will the average working man be content with a simple leather jacket. That’s why I’m proposing we include spikes, chains, spurs, and hides as additions to all of our leather items. We live in a world now where any given day can include a motorcycle chase, a shootout, and accidental gasoline-siphoning explosions. We need leather that can accentuate the striking and unusual bone structures of our post-apocalyptic female demographic. People not only don’t want normal leather anymore, normal leather is not sufficient. Frankly I think we need to tap in to the rebellious punk vaguely-homoerotic biker gang market and offer cheap, intimidating leather at a low low cost right now. The post-apocalyptic future waits for no one, and if we don’t capture this demographic than one of the three remaining clothing manufacturers on this island will.

I know what you’re thinking, my last schemes for clothing didn’t work out so well. While pre-ripped pre-greased pre-dirtied jeans did manage to capture sales in our target demos, my decision to increase production in cold-weather wear was misguided. I predicted a chilly nuclear winter future, not a gasless global warming future. And for that I apologize from the bottom of my heart. And I think we can all admit that my line shiny spandex tops for neon-lit strip bars turned out better than expected, so all I’m asking is to have a little faith.

Alright, I think that concludes my proposal. If you’ll excuse me I have to go make sure my children don’t get mutilated on the way home from the last elementary school in Australia.

But Parliament, they had a Parliament disc. Some people ask why Parliament songs last for seven minutes or more, and I ask how long does it take for funk to come and go. As long as it pleases is an answer that happens to be correct.

Sometimes there are books at the public library. At the very least you will be well-stocked in Romance novels and 90′s-era self-help books. And Calvin and Hobbes. Most libraries have two of every Calvin and Hobbes book.

Metal Gear Solid 1. I am just behind the times by about 11 years when I say I just beat it.  I guess I’ll agree with some of the points made by James Edwards of Select Button/Action Button fame.  As a series of well-constructed, well-designed, and interesting action/stealth moments it bounces back and forth between mildly entertaining and ground-breakingly stupid. At the time I’m sure stealth gameplay was fascinating. Actually, I don’t have to beat around the bush here: I remember people going batshit insane that Metal Gear Solid featured realistic enemy AI that could spot your footprints in the snow (then forget your footprints twenty seconds later – blame the “genome soldier cloning process”). An action game where killing everything in sight wasn’t always the best option was sort of an amazing and bizarre beast in 1996/7/whatever. Today in the age of Splinter Cells and roadie runs it falls flat on its face in a pretty train wreck. You might even be able to argue (as an apologist) that some of the clunky Zelda-in-a-skinsuit moments sort of encourage stealth in such a way that makes the player’s actions line up with the intended thematics that Kojima went for. You would be stretching thin to say that, but you could.

MGS did succeed in being a narrative and thematic mishmash that simultaneously attempts to be 4th-wall-breaking satire, twisty-turny thriller, a dissection of war mentality, and a nuclear disarmament PSA at the same time. The end product is ultimately flawed but impossible not to appreciate on one level. In freshman year of college my class debated the hell over The Wife of Bath in Geoffery Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Was she a satire of women? A critique of women? A critique of the imagined concepts of women? That we could even argue about if this portrayal was 100% misogynistic was pretty incredible given the reprehensible characterization of most women at the time. That’s kind of how I feel about Metal Gear Solid. That at the end of the day I can argue about it from multiple standpoints and not really be precisely sure what Kojima intended from it all is sort of incredible. I mean, even if the work itself doesn’t succeed entirely at any of the things it appears to set out to do, there’s something to be said for doing so many different things competently. When the Colonel tells Snake to change the controller port on the Playstation or when the DARPA chief tells you to look on the back of the CD case it’s jarring and hilarious, but the pre-credit message about nuclear warhead disposal feels (just as jarring, but) sort of heartfelt.  What anyone is supposed to make of something that campy, brilliant, and stupid (clones of clones of clones that are controlled by what? Okay yeah) baffles me, but the ride is worth it.

New band name added to Listotron:

Tony Stark’s Blue Mullet