I'm So Sorry Does E3 2015: Part the First

Hello, I'm Will. Head writer, editor and only one of those things of the internet's oldest recorded hate crime, I'm So Sorry. During my long, long, fucking long tenure producing uniqueish content for the internet and descent into mental collapse, I've dreamed of going to E3. To rub shoulders with sweaty, watery-eyed pricks in neck beards and Master Chief t-shirts as they bay and cheer for thirty seconds of footage of Link holding a different coloured sword.

To the un-e-nitiated, E3 (or the Electronic Entertainment Expo) is the annual trade fair for the video game industry. A chance for developers, fans and press from around the world to converge on some LA convention centre and revel in a Bacchanalian orgy of hype-mongering announcements, bare-faced lies and Nintendo trying to find a new way to word that they did indeed make another Mario game.

Surely, E3 encapsulates so much of what is wrong with video game culture. So let's validate the shit out of it by commenting on stuff that happened! At length!

This year, I was not actually in attendance (much like every year) as they don't hand out press passes to people who don't ask for them or entertain an audience that could fit inside a non-Time Lord phonebox (which is incidentally as timely a reference as I deserve given the tardiness of this) but thankfully everyone who was recorded every second of it.

So thanks to Youtube's sterling journalism we can all gather round the fire and enjoy pre-rendered trailers that reflect as much on the actual content of the game as five minutes of gameplay from another, totally different game. Seriously. You could realise five minutes in that you're watching footage from Das Boot and it would still tell you as much. Mercifully, developers sometimes take the opportunity to sprinkle down gifts of actual gameplay footage at E3 so we'll mostly be focusing on that.

These are some of the games we might be playing in the next year or two, maybe even enjoying but I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. That's if the developers don't just bottle it like The Last Guardian.

The Last Guardian
Or, as they should be calling it: At Fucking Last, Guardian

The Last Guardian is a vague adventure game from auteur, critic bait makers Team Ico about friendship, yiffing and a giant griffin-puppy you... interact wiiiittthhh, somehow? To solve environmental puzzles aaannndd... get, places? You want to go? For equally unspecified reasons.

It's very much like the game Team Ico announced in 2009 that the developers just stopped making presumably due to a crippling fear of money and success called The Last Guardi-oh. How awkward.

Yes, I can confirm I'm not above an easy target and language parsing joke routines but in my defence, they started making this game in 2007 and we'd only just gotten over the loss. And now they bring all that blue ball grief back up again? Fine. I'll suck it up. We're only at the first entry. Positivity, ho!

So what's new, Team Ico? What bold new strides have you taken in all the years since you last apologised for delays and we all just gave up hope of ever actually seeing this thing come to light?

So, just the same footage then? The same footage we saw six, repeat six E3s ago? With nothing (a subtle kind of nothing, I'll grant you) added or changed? Neeeooooo. Nope. Still positive. Imperceptible HD dusting aside, if The Last Guardian is even half as valiantly unique and emotionally engaging as Team Ico's last effort, Shadow of the Colossus, this should be a must play! Ahh. Made it. Alright, let the hate flow.

Hitman
Or, as they should be calling it: Hitting On Men When They're At Their Most Vulnerable

Agent 47's still bald and hitting men (and presumably some women too) in a professional capacity. And that's about all I'm prepared to say at this point and every point after. Niiieeeeext!

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Or, as they should be calling it: Deus Ex: Mea Culpa

Previous Deus Ex game Human Revolution was a fairly typical, cyberpunk, corporate conspiracy tale wrapped around an aggressive and uncompromising stealth, action and exploratory gameplay system. Or, if you'd prefer, a game that wasn't in the least bit afraid to bend you over a urinal and pound away at your most sensitive areas with a Shake Weight.

The first we saw of this new adventure in bunghole savagery was a trailer that demonstrated exactly why you don't want Square Enix within ten square miles of your workspace as a game designer. But in a strange way, it was pretty accurate. It showed a whole bunch of new cyber-prosthesis-tricks we might be stashing up our techno-sleeves plus some other bullshit that sounded like someone ad-libbing 'meaning of life in a world with advanced medicine 101' and a giant guy more synthetic enhancement than man with a terrible Russian accent. But I guess I can't blame Square Enix for stupidity. It'd be like blaming a kitten for shredding all your R2-D2 throw pillows. They just don't know any better.

Then Eidos gave us a whole demo showing most of those things. There's apparently a more balanced open combat system this time but the day I believe that will be the same one I return my 'Angsty, Nitpicking Wanker' Loyalty Card. But the new armour skill looks pretty handy, covering returning 'hero' Adam Jensen in glossy black vector art and making him immune to damage briefly.

But enough about all that boring violence let's talk about something central to Deus Ex: humans! And Adam's relationships with the squishy mortals. We didn't get much of a look at them apart from a brief example of one of the series' typical Talking Boss Fights which were like oratory Minesweeper but more luck-based. Other than that there was a pilot who'll presumably be ferrying Jensen around the world despite not liking him for no other perceivable reason than token character conflict which is a shame because there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to dislike Jensen. [Side note: Did Malik (your other pilot) die at the end of the last one? Because I enjoyed her.]

Adam Jensen has the same kind of misplaced self-pity as Kratos or Max Payne and their stubborn refusal to be grateful for anything.

"Boo-hoo, man crossed a line that he wasn't meant to cross and now I can pull a minotaur's horn off and feed it to him or gun down eight favela kids while halfway in and out of a breaking window but why does no-one feel sorry for me?"

I mean, if I was Adam Jensen and woke up on the operating table to find someone'd brought me back from the dead and also grafted sunglasses directly into my face and replaced my arms with swords, the first thing I'd say is:

"Ok, I do remember agreeing to a donor card but not so much signing anything about putting things into my body after I died. What's that? I can turn invisible and punch through walls and shoot a thousand exploding ball bearings out of my armpits? All righty then. I'll let it slide this one time. But if I get killed again, I've got three words for you, Doctor: Vibrating. Laser. Dick."

XCOM 2
Or, as they should be calling it: How To Do Sequels Of Remakes Of Sequels: Vol Unknown

Firaxis Games showed off some different flavours of alien and weaponry including swords because what sci-fi game would be complete without them, eh, Mass Effect? But otherwise it's the same trial, error and combat loss we all know and love from 2012's Enemy Unknown. Which means there'll unavoidably come a time when you have to tearfully put down your favourite sniper like Old Yeller because he got mind controlled by a Sectoid Commander.

Pro tip: Make your inevitable failures potentially and tragically prophetic by naming your starting line of soldiers after your closest friends! Incidentally, that's probably why I always had so much trouble with the last one because you can't fight off an entire alien invasion with only three blokes. Ha! Oh.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Or, as they should be calling it: Bring Me The Head Of Editing. No, bring me the head of the head of editing. What do you mean, why? Because of the film, idiot. I was trying to do a thing. Ah, fine, forget it. Moron. 'S funny. 

There's a fair bit of footage from The Phantom Pain floating around the internet after demonstrations at TGS so go watch those if you care so much. Jeez, fine. Here's a taste.

With such extensive coverage already you'd think there wasn't a whole lot more for Konami to show us at E3 this year so they apparently took that as a sign to dial up the stupid until it was more in line with Kojima's resting, redline idiocy. You know, the kind that led to scenes like tech-savvy kid dropping a bootlog in his hacker pants on an active battlefield. Or Senator Hulk Hogan flipping you the bird from the cockpit of his giant robot spider. Snnnaaaaaakkkkeee!

Introducing, the Metal Gear Walker! A man-sized droid that looks like Chappie robo-impregnated the surprised head of a personnel crane and fits about as naturally and believably in the period and scenario as a fucking luck dragon. Which would incidentally be exactly as noticeable to soviet guards in the dimension everyone except Hideo Kojima lives in.

Soviet Guard 1: "Hey, comradevic. Is there a man hiding on board that extremely armed mech speeding into our compound?"

Soviet Guard 2: "Nyet that I can see, buddyin."

Soviet Guard 1: "Okey-coke, then. Just checking. You know, guardin'. Pays to ask these questions sometimes."

Soviet Guard 2: "I hear that. Because I am in range of you as you make that noise."

Soviet 1: "Ha. Guard joke. Love it. Hey, why are we speaking English?"

Soviet 2: "Ah, suka. I bet we're in a thing."

Soviet 1: "Da. Must be a thing."

Soviet 2: "Would certainly explain the distasteful stereotyping."

OK, I'm done with that.

I suppose the cassette tapes lying around the world you can collect and make your own soundtrack with are more applicable to the timeline than, say, robots, iPhones or witches. But excuse me if half-cyborg, greatest soldier ever (apparently) Big Boss aka Snake aka Jack Bauer jamming to 80s power ballads seems a tad out of character.

Mass Effect: Andromeda
Or, as they should be calling it: Gene Roddenberry's Spacetacular Adventure In Alien Sexing

Bioware said they were pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed Mass Effect 3's multiplayer segment, myself among them. It had this sort of free market of ideas feel despite being absolutely riddled with microtransactions. And if you didn't want to cough up real money but fancied the idea of test driving the game as one of the universe's many, fabulous alien races like Krogan, Asari or Collector, you faced an immense grind of time, limited map variety and missions as routine as a menstruating pocket watch. But. And it's a large, shapely but, it was interesting.

I don't usually give much credit or time to multiplayer features because I like my games to have endings and be winnable but Bioware pumped a lot of effort into it over at least a year after the game's release and is technically the last thing they did with the Mass Effect universe up until now.

And for its drawbacks which, let's be honest, were many and grievous, it showed how naturally varied and deep the game's core mechanics really were when you weren't saddled with boring old human, N7 space marine Commander Shepard. And not just that but how fully and richly they'd populated their world over the course of those three games. The possibilities were positively juicy. And once we'd actually gotten a taste of playing as a Turian, or a Phantom or Kai Leng, we were all just begging for the next in the franchise to let us go Dragon Age a little and choose our own species at least. Mass Effect 3's multiplayer wasn't just a bigger draw than anyone expected, it sired an entire community that saw what Bioware could achieve if given room to spread their wings a little.

So hopes have been high for a while to say the least. Not least, because developers said from the get-go that Shepard would have bugger-all to do with entry number 4. And how did Bioware respond to our excitement of all the colourful possibilities the next game could bring in their fascinating world? With a two minute trailer that showed a human-shaped N7 space marine, holding the same gun we've been using since 2010. It wasn't so much a swing and a miss as a half-hearted paw at a target in a different galaxy several generations down the line. I honestly wanted to cry a little.

But Commander Unnamed was using a different flavour of galaxy map plus, he was wearing this tasteful cashmere collar number so baby steps, I guess. Wait. Jetpack. I meant tasteful jetpack number. And who doesn't love jetpacks? They sure were fun in the multiplayer on the Turian bird monster I fucking want to play as you cockteasing pillocks!

The No Show Award
And the winner is: Persona 5 

We know Atlus are making Persona 5, a game that if even remotely like its true predecessor, will be about as Japanese as its possible to be without being wrapped in seaweed and tentacles.

Whether or not it turns out to be actually good is a question for otaku and slightly less otaku critics but I'm prepared for an RPG with depth and complexity and that unique, melancholy sense of atmosphere the Japanese are so good at when they're not fussing about breakdancing cyborg ninjas and raping schoolgirls.

***

That's all we've got time for today, but check back here soon for the next instalment of Games Coming Out In Future And What We Know About Them if someone boring had been in charge of titling. 

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it'll be up top there. No, all the way up. No. Up. That way. The opposite way you've been scrolling to get here. Actually, you know what? I don't need your kind. Go home. Yes, you. Christ, I feel stupider just for acknowledging you. Is stupid infectious? Stupid question. Of course it is and you're like Typhoid fucking Mary. CLOSE THIS WINDOW BEFORE YOU MAKE ME FORGET MY MOTHER'S FACE.

Thank you. Cretin.

Minor Irritations: The 5 Most Quibbliest Quibbles In Video Gaming

YOU SUCK.

We're always supposed to feel sorry for Elves, aren't we? And how about that for an opening sentence that waves goodbye to majority viewing before they've even pulled up their idiot pants? But seriously. In every fucking game, film and change these fey, pansexual lop-ears are introduced as tragic figures, complaining loudly from their ghettos and tree forts because humans walked in and rebuilt fabulous castles all over their arbitrarily superior architecture. You'd think it was some tortuous metaphor for Christianity's treatment of paganism or in fact, anyone except them but it's probably not. Right?

Did no-one think to ask whether Elven civilisation was really so great when humans conquered it so easily and consistently across so many franchises? I'm guessing no, but speaking of barely thinking and jingoism, here are a few examples of video game issues that itch fervently even in the face of far graver mistakes. 

The RPG: Relative, Pointless, Grab-bagging. 

Where you might have suffered this: Grand Theft Auto, Shadows of the Damned (Yes, I know you haven't heard of it), Call of Duty. 

If there was a video game review swear box for overused terms it would include: 'fluid', 'organic' and in big gold letters at the top maybe underlined a few times: 'RPG elements'. In regular people speak, they mean 'doesn't flow like a river of bricks uphill', 'not completely scripted, empty spectacle' and 'contains some kind of system of character improvement' respectively.

They're all lazy as Sunday as descriptions go but particularly the latter. Because the definition of RPG to me is that the number-crunching takes a higher priority than twitchy, caffeinated reflexes or, as a COD player would call it, skill. You see, all video games are built on numbers. In the same way that a church might be built on a pile of bones. In an action game, like a shooter say, the mathematics might be as simple as 'x bullets + face = zero face'. 

Think of it this way. If you skipped straight to the final mission of name any Battlefield game, it'd be doable no matter what. But if you skipped straight from the opening area of Final Fantasy XII to the final boss, you'd be ground into fucking paste before you'd had your morning coffee. 

In a true RPG, improvement of your character or team or whatever is paramount to success if not the whole damn source of fun in the first place. Asking us to spend in-game bucks or time in minigames or what have you to make some tiny, inconsequential improvement to our gun damage or sprint distance in a game where you could breeze through the singleplayer regardless is just busywork. Although if there was ever a word that defined games like Grand Theft Auto, it's busywork. Or, maybe: "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-Bleuurgghh! Arrggh! Bad decisions!" Not a word. Still true.

The Moral Choice: Dickhead Or Cartoonishly Evil Dickhead?

Where you might have suffered this: Infamous, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dishonored, Splinter Cell. 

Paragon or Renegade? Good or Evil? Handsome or Sweet Laser Scars?

Let me tell you a story. One day, in a universe far, far away, not long enough ago (but for argument's sake let's say early noughties), a massively drunk and self-hating game designer named Bo Vicodin had an idea. Of course, 'ideas' were punishable with twenty lashes in the video game design slave pits but a publisher overseer overheard it at the AI coalface and passed it up the chain. And it went something like this: Instead of offering meaningful options in gameplay, developers could just rewrite half the cutscenes along sickeningly contrived moral lines and make the actual game bit half as long! Genius!

"But, hang on," Bo whimpered from the warg enclosure, hungry jaws already clamped around his atrophied legs and heartily regretting opening his big, fat dicktrap to start with.
"Nobody's going to fall for that. If the game isn't fun to play in the first place, no-one's going to play it all the way through again just to see what the cutscenes are like when the main character's an unlikeable prick or whingeing niceboy. Surely it would make more sense to split the difference and make a character whose at least likeable or at the very least makes sense?"

But his only reply was lasers, now and forever. Blue lasers if you chose the 'good' options, red if 'evil'.

Leaving this Renegade metaphor behind for a moment, moral choice systems do let you leave a slightly more personal mark on a game and cement your identity in it where appropriate. Problem is, it rarely is appropriate. For one thing, there's no such thing as 'evil'. It's all perspective. And imposing a 'bad' ending as a result of playing with a Machiavellian sense of victory at any cost is just going to make most gamers feel like they've suffered an especially protracted 'Game Over'. As if the game's saying:

"Sure, you saved the world or whatever the point of this was, now, would you like to try again but be less of a cunt about it?"

And you know what? Now that you mention it, probably not, game. 

The Map-ular Vision: Sprinting Blind.

Where you might have suffered this: Far Cry, The Witcher. 

LOOK AT THIS AND NOTHING ELSE.

Minimaps are useful like Azealia Banks has a terrifying mouth. You can't focus on anything else and I've been waiting to make that reference since 212. But I was too afraid to. It's like staring down a sassy Saarlac's throat except you just know it would emasculate you on the way down.

In most games focusing excessively on the minimap's not much of an issue. It's like the Batman Arkham games' 'Detective Vision'. There's precious little reason to turn it off beyond aesthetics. Sure you're not paying much attention to the lavishly created world the game artists spent so much time and neglected their kids and marriage for, but in a few select kind of games, making the minimap too useful is a recipe for players' furious, impotent deaths.

Example: Some open-world style games let you jump a hundred feet, powerslide trainlines and float impishly around the map with as much regard for gravity as intact objects full of money. And some will murder you for falling more than a few vertical feet. I've spent more time cursing Isaac Newton in the Witcher 3 than werewolves and that's a game where I've killed so many wraiths that ghosts dare their friends to spend the night at my house. It's a game with miles of open terrain but fangy, clawed death instead of walls. And I've still been killed by more stairwells than mythological monsters.

It's one of those tragic side effects of playing games routinely. Slowly, yet inexorably, all matter moves towards entropy as all game players move towards a state of maximum efficiency. If your game's dodge roll is faster than running, it is just a matter of time before everyone is flailing objective-ward like a single-minded tumble weed. So it is with the minimap. The more useful information it shows: quest-givers, fast-travel markers, enemies, herbs, treasure - the more players are going to fall fatally down pits they never knew were there screaming the injustice of it all. 

The Suicide Commute: Just Kill Me Now. 

Where you might have suffered this: Sleeping Dogs, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, open-world video games too numerous to mention. 

It's a London thing.

Someone very wise once said that a sprawling, open world is only as fun as the method you get around it, because in our tragically boring, dragon-less 'real' world, commuting is one of the most severe causes of stress and anxiety. So in one of Rockstar's more tacitly awful decisions, they said:

"Fuck good sense, this commuting lark is exactly the kind of boredom and frustration we want for Grand Theft, hell, why limit ourselves? Boredom and frustration for all!"

So horrifically lengthy travel time between every fucking mission ended up in Red Dead Redemption too. And all the other developers intent on ripping off the franchise weren't to be outdone.

"Rockstar won't beat us when it comes to terrible decisions!" Proclaimed the makers of Mafia, Watch Dogs, Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs and all the other watery, dead-eyed, crimebox knock-offs.

And that's how we ended up with a thousand games where your involvement as a player is limited to ferrying twats around, wasting millions of collective consumer hours getting stuck in traffic. 

The Impossible Conversation: Because Everyone Hates Being Cut O-

Where you might have suffered this: Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, Dragon Age, The Witcher, video games of all kinds too numerous to mention. 

I get the feeling that this is starting to sound like a one man declaration of war against Rockstar Entertainment, and while I do believe they genuinely lost track of what the word 'fun' means back sometime around Vice City, they're by no means the worst thing to happen to games.

But this isn't meant to be some grand evaluation of gaming development and culture, hell no. We're here to give credit to the pettiest and niggliest of my petty niggles. So here it is:

Sometimes, games will ask you to walk slowly towards an objective with a companion while they talk at you. And sometimes the developers write your companion more dialogue than they have time to say on your stroll, so are cut off as you get you where meant to be going by a cutscene or new stream of dialogue.

Yes, that's it.

Believe me when I say it doesn't sound like much but you only had to read it. I had to find a way to articulate a quibble that perspective would drown without even trying. But try and believe me again when I say that trying to get involved in a game with, let's say more ambient storytelling (mentioning no names!) that this is a special kind of irritation that creeps into your brain to lay its eggs before manifesting in the kind pointless agitation that makes you want to throw a shoe at the screen in the vain hope it'll make the developers less stupid. Mostly because it's so easily avoided. I mean, how hard can it be to time how much dialogue there is against how long it'll take to for you to get where you're going?

It may well be that I have a particular weak spot for this issue because it's conditioned me. I play games for empowerment and escapism. If I wanted to devote my life to a yawning chasm that does not end and cannot be won, I wouldn't be here, furiously and drunkenly typing to myself, I'd be slightly more ruined and 'playing' World of Warcraft. In so much as you can play a second job that you pay to take part in.

The point is, brainwashing is for Blizzard fans but gaming's absurd walking conversations have me slowing to a complete stop as soon as they begin even on the off-chance that I overshoot and miss some dialogue. And sometimes, games throw an ever-so-special sprinkle of bacon bits on the wilted, impotent fury salad that is my life by cutting off the guy's verbal shits to say: "So is your lazy arse coming, or what?" And there is never a microwave brutal enough to do to the game what is in my heart at that moment.

It's not even like its a limited kind of problem, it's fucking everywhere. In almost every game where NPCs add to world building. And that's like saying it's not a problem in games where murder doesn't add to progress. 

My Week In Adventure Game Land

I don't get out much in any sense of the phrase. So when I realised that the most exciting thing to happen to me recently was a renewed interest in yoghurt (because there're only so many times I can watch Terry Crews proclaim that "Terry loves yoghurt" in Brooklyn Nine-Nine before I have to leap off my sofa and testify "Me too!") I proclaimed "fuck it" and decided to try something new. 

Despite video games being the last little blinking ray of joy in an otherwise hollowed and beshitted life and also despite the fact I like to think I know everything about the games worth knowing about, there are definitely gaps in my interest and knowledge. And adventure games are a particularly gaping example. 

They're not to be confused with 'action-adventure' of course, which is the generic label slapped clumsily on clumsy generic games - often movie adaptations - usually typified by bits of shooting or brawling, bits of climbing and bits of stealth all done shittily and bundled together; like that 2013 Star Trek game everyone hated, or the Uncharted franchise if you want to get inflammatory. And I do! 

Yeah, that's right you floppy-haired cretin. 

No, a true-blue adventure game is one that will have almost zero gameplay, but thread a strong narrative through a series of logic puzzles and family-friendly conversations. Christ, that was dry. Why don't we say: 'Fuck-aroundy, puzzle-solvey, talky-talky funtime!'? 

Anyway, I never got into them much. Mostly because I wasn't a PC gamer during the nineties or ever and also if you take the catharsis of extreme violence and 'interactive' part out of the interactive storytelling that makes games what they are (fucking tops), I'd just say: "So I might as well just be watching a eight hour long film then." And then something about how films are for yokels who can't focus on anything longer than 90 minutes and there was some grumbling about how I was sick of all the big-league, hoighty-toighty games getting pushed out before they're finished so they can block up a load of content behind transaction walls but I didn't write it down. I was probably sober. 

But not the last week, ho-no. I've been all up inside adventure gaming and if you want to know how that all went please purchase the 'I'm So Sorry Season Pass*' by throwing your largest available wad of cash money down the nearest accessible drain. 

*Gives you access to [unspecified number] of exciting new articles and strange, schizophrenic feature ideas like a diary where nothing happens at one [financially viable] price! Also, new player skins! Which I collected personally at the nearest bus station! With a flensing knife!

Day 1 -- Grim Fan Fun Go? Almost!

So it's Day 1, and I'm sitting staring at the Playstation Network Store heartily regretting this whole thing. Where the hell do I even start? This is a genre I've been purposely avoiding for actual decades. Why did I even pick adventure games? Good question, past-Will.

So now I'm staring at my shelf at a whole bunch of big-shot hoighty etc PS3 games. Dumb, racist military first-person shooters. Decent System Shock-rip off first-person shooters. Wait, where are the RPGs? I thought I was into those. There aren't many PS4 games since the burglary so what have I gotten since then? The dumbest racistest military shooter available and PS3 remasters, oh fantastic.

I knew there were gaps but this is ridiculous. Where are the stealth games? The horrors, the sports and the strategies? The butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers? And then I realised: they're all crowbarred into the triple-A big dogs as featurettes, aren't they?

Ok, now, if anything I'm even more determined since I actively dislike horror, sports and strategy, so let's keep this simple: What's featured on the home screen? And that's the story of how I came to be downloading Grim Fandango Remastered, probably the most famous and successful OG adventure game of all time, and a screamingly obvious choice by all accounts, if I'd only thought for a single second.

Many, many hours later, I booted up my first new adventure in adventure gaming, set the graphics and controls to 'less shit' and 'slightly less shit' respectively (because this is a remastering, baby, slightly eradicated warts and all) and got going. And an hour later I put the controller down again and had a little cry. 

Day 2 -- Grim, Tortuous Frustration Forever

If you've never heard of Grim Fandango, a marketer would describe it as 'a landmark adventure game from LucasArts with logic puzzles and dark humour'. See this came out in 1998, in the heady golden years of adventure game dominance on PC. 

And believe it or not, this was a time when, in PC circles at least, LucasArts meant 'magical, enthralling and wit-laden video games' instead of 'franchisicide hacked out with a fucking meat cleaver' like it does today. And Grim Fandango was only a year before Jar-Jar Binks and the subsequent sinking of the SS Lucas around Cape Christensen.

So it escaped relatively unmolested by all that and in fact, is one of the critics' easy and artsy choices for 'best games evarr' schtick. It's hard to point at a specific reason people loved this game so much but if you waved roughly in the direction of Tim Schafer, most people would probably agree if not rush up to kiss him on the mouth. Schafer was project lead during development and also worked on Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts and The Monkey Islands. All stellar adventure games. If you say so.

Which is all well and good. But you want to know why it made me cry. You monster.

The answer is that after a paltry hour pottering around Grim Fandango's opening area, I went, head-lowered in shame, to a walkthrough. But as it turned out, that shame was misplaced because up there a few paragraphs ago, where it said 'logic' slightly before the word 'puzzles', it should have read 'incomprehensible trains of batshit lunacy'.

No sane person would assume that an objective like 'find a new sales lead' would involve asking a mardy carnival magician to give you two empty balloons, filling those balloons with packing foam, sending them down the mail pipe system like in Brazil in the hope that they break the mail sorting machine so you can get in and read your competitor's mail. That's about as far from the word 'logic' as I can think of. In fact, I'm inventing a new word to describe Grim Fandango's puzzles: Unlogic. There. Now that reads much better: 'A landmark adventure game from LucasArts with unlogic puzzles and dark humour'.

So we're barely into Day 2 of my adventure game experiment and I'm sat with a walkthrough on my lap in every way like a security blanket, arduously Simon Says-ing my way through. And so, with more patience than brain power, I reach the end of the game's second act, which appropriately, are called years. Because that's what it felt like, get it?

Day 3 -- Year 3, Man City 0


It's Day 3 and Year 3 of Grim Fandango and having slept on it, I realise just what is so truly upsetting about this game. Because I've played bad games and this isn't one of them. I mean, I own Battlefield 4. I don't really have any right to complain about such an artistically lauded game as Grim just because it made me feel stupid. Shit, owning that game makes me just about the worst person imaginable.

But Grim Fandango has done something that hasn't happened in a while: Disappointed me.

I knew full well what I was getting into when I traded legal tender for Watch Dogs. I've only got myself to blame for wasting those few, ineffectual hours of my rapidly shrivelling lifespan. And while we're on the subject, Grand Theft Auto V too. As much as thousands of asset models for civilians or lines of lazy dialogue or acres of useless space thrill me, Rockstar, I won't be back to your house until you've looked up what 'fun' means.

Actually, I think Grim Fandango is the most I've ever been disappointed in a game. For all my big talk of gaps in my knowledge, I downloaded it two days ago knowing full well that it was going to be lousy with unlogic puzzles because people joke about its spurious sense of 'good sense' all the time. I was also aware that this and Day of the Tentacle and The Monkey Islands and other solid LucasArts adventure games are meant to still be funny. I was expecting in a charming, maybe mischievous kind of way. But I was wrong. Because Grim Fandango as well as being the most disappointing game I've ever played, is also far and away the funniest.

Games don't tend to be the best vector for humour (see Sacred 3 for abundant reasons why) but occasionally surprise; like Portal, Deadpool or Saints Row. But I've never played anything as consistently hilarious as Grim Fandango. The writing is bullseye black humour from the word go. The characters have colour and life, ironically, since they're all dead. And the voicing is always convincing. It's an all round pleasure to chat with people in its Aztec-through-neo-noir-filter afterlife. Which is what makes the utter frustration of the gameplay so galling.

Now I'm sitting here looking at the non-sequitur puzzles not as cheeky little challenges to overcome, but towering walls of trial and error separating me from the solid gold storytelling bits I actually want. The conversations with the dismissive secretary you're trying to nail, the alpha sales douchebag, the misanthropic beatniks, the Marxist docker bees, your alcoholic troll driver, the bit where you try and ask an endlessly chatting security guard for her metal detector, the sexy did-no-wrong saint you're also trying to nail whose case starts the whole plot, these are the moments that make this game shine brighter than any polished-to-perfection, committee-designed demographic-bait today.

But the wall is too high. Which is why, five minutes into Year 3, I give up on Grim Fandango. Super great fun though it may be, anything 5% fun by volume won't satisfy. Grim Fandango is an exquisite espresso drowned in whipped cream, chocolate flakes and broken glass.

Day 4 -- Taking Valium like candy Hearts

Day 4 in the adventure game house and the mood is sour. So I couldn't scale the barrier of obtuse, old-school challenge. Why don't we try something new and exciting? Something like Valiant Hearts: The Great War, available now for free for Playstation Plus subscribers. 

Some unspecified time later I was playing and enjoying this wee indie darling. And while I wasn't frustrated any more, I am now miserable. 

Because Valiant Hearts uses real letters from that most depressing of modern conflicts, the First World War, to craft a personal story from the perspective of a small group, in order to maximise personal tragedy when a few of them inevitably die, I'm assuming. 

For one thing, it is refreshing to be playing a military game and not have some dickbag shouting in my ear to go and commit more war crimes. You may be at war here, but you barely kill anyone. Aside from the admittedly frequent setpieces where you blow up a bridge, or house or bellfry or whatever, the worst you'll do as a player is give some Kraut a boff across the bonce with a soup ladle or spade.

This is an adventure game, which means violence isn't your goal, it's some incredibly roundabout solution to move from left to right because as well as budget, we've dropped a dimension since Grim Fandango. Yes, Valiant Hearts is 2D, massively simplifying puzzle structure right off the bat. 

Simple might be the watchword here actually. I just burned through the first chapter with nary a hiccough. 

Day 5 -- All Buggy on the Western Front

The word of the day is 'incongruous'. Especially when you surround madcap racing and errant barrel-dodging to the sound of the can-can with weepy, Private Peaceful, war-is-hell melodrama.

The visuals are charming, with heavily hand-drawn sprites, watercolour backdrops and a dog called Walt, who I call 'Daddy's little cutey' when his AI is working and 'Korean bargain bucket' at all other times. Because, as I progress through a kind of lacklustre tour of WW1 combat and atrocity hotspots, I feel like the technical problems start to outweigh the artistic vision. And also that the art design was separated from the writing by a mile of barbed wire and sinkholes.  

Then I got to Reims forest. Where three puzzle sequences in a row brought the otherwise great pacing to a screeching halt. Not because of my obviously non-existent dumbness, but because objects got stuck in the geometry, dialogue failed to activate and good old sheer stupidity in puzzle design. I know it hasn't been long, but I already want to make up with Grim Fandango. 

Day 6 -- A Big, Rad Wolf

I demoed Telltale's The Wolf Among Us about a year ago and my initial thoughts were: "Conversations that make me feel like I'm constantly missing the 'right response' and quick time events. The feature that is to gameplay what working your fly is to sex - idiotically simple and irrelevant if you're doing it right. Not for me, no Sir." 

But what the hell, I'll give it another go. I can get the whole load of five episodes together on the store. Here's a transcript of my day with it:

"Hahahaha, I burned you good, Mr Toad. Admit it."

"Hmnnnhnn-QTE-bor-fuck me I pulled his whole arm off!" 

"Bllleeeeuuu-what? I don't care if you're at the door, mother. I'm busy. Fabletown isn't going to solve it's hooker-murders it's own self. I'm the Sheriff, dammit!"

Day 7 -- Dire Wolf, not arf!

The Wolf Among Us is the kind of game that's designed from the ground up to be played twice. And while I stayed up last night to finish it, every moment was marred by the fact that I wanted to play it through again as less of complete c-word.

Because this is also the kind of game designed in true Bioware fashion: With every dialogue choice giving you the option of being a simpering goody-goody or a toddler-burning, sacred icon destroying malevolopath, with something very vague in between.

I'm now balls-deep in it again trying to be as nice as I can but it is a credit to the game that I wanted to the first time as well and also that such an approach is difficult. The denizens of Fabletown are richly crafted and totally likeable, even the comically evil ones. And the undercurrent of consequence that influences every decision you make in the game pops up constantly during the five episodes and the last bring all the decisions you made together nicely.

Beyond that conversational adventure game stuff, there's also visceral, impactful violence. Sweet ass pacing. And a hardboiled narrative that would read like LA Confidential conflated with Brothers Grimm and read by Cliff Martinez. And if that's what I can expect of the genre in future then adventure games, you're all right with me. 

Tales of Rad: 6 Excellent But Dying Words

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Tales of Rad. The only internet column series that's more than 20% suicide note by volume.

For some people, language is just a means to trick idiots into sex. But to a select few, it's a fascinating palette of social and political history, radical creativity, furtive rebellion and a gateway to the kind of sex edified people have where you don't scream blasphemies at the vinegar strokes but swap palindromes or numbers that can be be expressed as the sum of two cubes or whatever it is geniuses believe in instead of stupid.

Amazing as it might seem though, people used to make fun of me for my logophilic tendencies. Granted it was mostly my fault for admitting I read Oxford Collins recreationally and using words like 'logophilic' and 'tendencies' but I 'digress'.

Maybe this is something you've encountered as well. Maybe you're one of these strange deviants too. Here's an easy test: Say you're just talking and someone queries what a particular word you used meant and you responded:

"Well, just use the Latin/Greek and work it out."

That means you're a ponce. It's just empirical law. Absolutely anyone who overheard you say that knows beyond reasonable doubt that you're the ponciest ponce to ever ponce past a ponceing parlour in all purple pantaloons. Perpetuating precocious pronunciations. Parapraxis, prolapse, penis, pardon my puerility.

Let me spell it out for you: Words make me rock hard. Here are some of my favourites that don't begin with 'P': Burgundy, lacquer, cataclysm and glub. Anyway, this whole thing was meant to be about words and phrases that've decayed in some way. Losing some of the hilarious, savage or just generically badass connotations or uses that much of our gentle generation might be unaware of. The piteous plebeians. Sorry.

The Excellent: Breech

Firearm terminology has always been a hilarious minefield of inadvertent euphemisms but there's always been something intrinsically sexual about guns anyway. What with the jamming of cylindrical objects into chambers, choke boring and accidental misfires not to mention all the pump action, but the term 'breech' has suffered more than most. Admittedly, it does have a lot to do with buttholes. By which I mean it means and connotes only that.

During day-to-day life, its arguably pretty unlikely you'd come across a phrase like 'breech-loading rifle' if you're not into weirdly specific war movies, but if you're part of 'everyone' then you've come across the word 'breeches' in stuff like Game of Thrones. If you didn't know any better you'd spell it 'britches' or more likely, "b...r - words R fur fags LOL" but that's how its spelt and it just means 'trousers'. Or any kind of material that covers the arse and thighs. Because butts, remember. Stop me if I'm going too fast.

Not all that exciting, I grant you. But 'breech''s association with the butt area led to its adoption by gun makers. And in that context, 'breech-loading weapon' doesn't just denote one of the most powerfully erotic, tripartite phrases I know, but a gun where the bullet or shell is inserted in the rear of the main barrel. And if 'inserting' anything in the 'rear' isn't cool, then absolutely all modern culture has been lying to me as long as I've lived.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Pants

Weirdly, almost all firearms today actually are 'breech-loading', in the sense that the alternative is jamming the missile or whatever down the other end of the barrel, or 'muzzle' if you want to get technical. But now we're balls-deep in paranoid gun-nut technicalities so let's back up. Sure, no-one knows what 'breech' means any which way these days, so let's pick the trouser department.

I didn't come here today to complain about Americans' misuse of my language, but I am here, so might as well. You have a word for underpants. It's underpants. Has the operative word right in there. Trousers are the things that go on top. I mean, you had the choice of breeches, trousers, drawers (one of the progenitors of trousers anyway) and you settled on 'pants'? It descended from 'pantaloons', the only thing less tough than the 19th century dandies and French that we associate them with.

The Excellent: Breach

If you don't mind, I'd like to do a wee quick word association. Ok? I say 'wall', you say Facebook. I know you do. Because, chances are, you're part of everyone. Also, I can hear you through your speakers. Just kidding. I'm hiding in your wall space.

But walls weren't always a place for both attention and regular whores to pollute the social and cultural landscapes; They used to be the only thing standing between you and an entire army of ornery Viking cocks. But we've long since forgotten the golden age of the violent, protracted siege, to the chagrin of historians and people with a fondness for awesome alike. Because when you can drop a thousand white phosphorous bombs on someone you don't like at the flick of a button, it kind of renders ladders and balls a bit obsolete.

That being said, I feel I'm in something of a minority as a penis-ed history graduate in that I had zero interest in military-flavoured history. Because it doesn't matter how much you love the opening of Gladiator, believe me when I say that reading a twice-translated recounting or wild extrapolation from a single rusty arrowhead you dug up in a field, will in no way ever live up to the trouser-tightening elegance of that scene. Seriously. You have no idea how boring war really is, even when it did involve massive balls.

But would the world really be a worse place today if we had a bit more boiling pitch and battering rams and a few less dickheads with delusions of eloquence? Certainly, because I'm not advocating more wars when the ones we already have are so boring. What I am saying is that a breach in Jerusalem's forty-foot walls is something to goddamn post about.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Hull Breach In Sector 7, Captain!

Science-fiction so utterly commandeered the word 'breach' that I'm not even allowed to use it if it violates the prime directive.

Historiography used to be jam-bloody-packed with the word 'breach' in relation to this or that walled city falling to a flood of mighty warriors with swords but today, its nothing but an inconvenience to star travellers. Damn, I miss you, sieges.

[NB: If you were really wondering how differentiated 'breech' and 'breach' really are, the former is Old English by way of our friends the Dutch, and the latter is just French. Interesting, eh? Wait, I'm sure I mean the other thing. Not.]

The Excellent: Grog

I was reminded of how much fun the word 'grog' is recently during my time with the exemplary, if a tad dumb, Arkham Creed love-child, Uruk-hai genocide Shadow of Mordor. Which, as a side note, if you have ten hours to spare and feel you don't have enough gratuitous decapitations in your life, you should absolutely play.

Now it's history time, mate; Whether you like it or not.

Our story begins with a presumably hard-drinking, hard-dicking gentleman by the name of Edward Vernon. 'Cause you know the ladies love a sailo-oh.

Oh. Oh dear.

Well that's kind of ruined the whole thing I was going with. So anyway this guy came up with the idea of watering rum with lemon or lime juice, making it go further and staving off scurvy as a bonus. And he used to wear coats made of grogram, a sort of cord. So there you go.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Bacardi, ho!

I don't want to be contentious, but Bacardi is for pussies and never won't be. Because we all know that real men drink dark and ideally spiced rum while thinking aloud in George Takei's voice about manly things. Like hull breaches, Captain.

Some might say I have an unreasonable image of manhood, but some have never seen me grinding alone to Spandau Ballet's Gold with a thousand times more enthusiasm than I just burned you with, said Bacardi-drinking pussies. So some can shut their fucking mouths.

The Excellent: Eviscerate/Decimate

These two are slightly anomalous in that you're likely to encounter them pretty often, but almost always incorrectly. People know enough to assume that they're both bad, even violent things you'd prefer not happen to you, but not enough to appreciate that they actually have very specific meanings. If you know them, feel free to skip down, clever clogs.

Let's start with evisceration.

It's about as literal words get, structurally. It's pure Latin with the 'e' prefix denoting a negative, in this case 'removal' and 'viscera' means all your squishy stomach parts. So its disembowelment. Specifically and only. Arguably, that's the worst thing ever but decimation manages to be worse somehow.

Bad writers or historians will use 'decimation' synonymously with annihilation or destruction particularly when talking about losing armies or the effect of a televised appearance from Carrie Fisher on a nation's erections.

I'm almost sorry. Good luck with the next one!

In reality, or at least, tedious word nerd land, we're Latin again: Because 'decimation' is a Roman military punishment. When a unit deserted or mutinied and was subjected to it, the group was divided into groups of ten and each drew lots. Not to spoil the ending, but the unlucky man who drew poorly was then executed, usually clubbed to death by the other nine men in his unit. And if you happened to have associated brutal martial punishments with these lads, bear in special mind that the practice of decimation was banned. And anything that could turn the stomachs of people who ate stuffed dormice whole is probably worth avoiding.

So that's decimation. Reducing, sometimes (such as one awesome Dr Who special that totally got it) entire populations by a factor of ten. And you thought maths was evil at school just because trigonometry made you cry.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Devastate

Devastate is a pretty rad alternative as words go, but entirely inadequate compared to these two, uniquely spectacular and horrifying words.

The Excellent: Snollygoster 

Somewhere up there, it clearly says 'dying' not dead words but I'm not one to live by your irrelevant rules, daddy-o, even when they're mine. So snollygoster. A word with the modern cultural usage and significance of a hand-cranked Betamax 8-track player in Sanskrit.

In America's own heartland of Pennsylvania, the settled Germans had themselves a local legend about 'snallygaster', (presumably 'schnell' and 'geist', which would make it a 'quick' 'ghost' if you're not super hot on Kraut-Spiel), some kind of vague monster that preyed on their children and poultry. So, and I'm just guessing here, maybe a wolf? Christ, even a fox could manage that.

Anyway, over the years, that stupid myth gave us the word 'snollygoster', which had transmuted from vague monster but probably just a fox into 'a shrewd person unbound by principle', especially, a politician. Which would then itself fade into obsolescence.

"Boo-hoo" you might say.
"And fuck you" I would say right back: this is a rich, hilarious word that quite neatly sums up a lot of what makes politicians so distasteful. 'Schnell' they may be (teams of writers and PR agents guiding their every word notwithstanding) but you can't argue that politicians aren't like ghosts. They're tissue-thin veneers of marketable wholesomeness stretched over empty dullards. Watching an interview with a British politician is like watching someone throw a cricket ball through closed curtains. There's nothing there to hit.

They're ineffectual, is my point. And also that 'snollygoster' is a word we need now more than ever.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Spin Doctor or Filibuster (maybe)

I considered using Peter Capaldi, foul-mouthed extraordinaire from Ianucci's bullseye political satire, The Thick of It as the face of 'spin doctor', but then I remembered that he is completely fucking rad which is why you were just looking at Pinnochio. But either way, both those supposed synonyms are way off if we're being honest.

A spin doctor is someone like Malcolm Tucker, a shadowy figure behind the scenes, puppet-strings a-jangling. And a filibuster, though fabulous, is too specific. Neither really come close as an alternative to 'snollygoster' and I'm assuming that we're not going with my own suggestion of 'frothing, bug-eyed, self-delusional' so I guess we have a solid conclusion here for once: Our language is storied, beautiful and hilarious and sometimes, like nature, the less fit fall behind. And just like that walking soup mix, the giant tortoise, or sweaty dude in a costume the giant panda, 'snollygoster' is an endangered rarity totally worth saving. So take care of it, pillock.

5 Video Game Enemies From Non-Horror Games That Give Me The Willies

It's 2015, and while we've just got the tip in and its not complaining, let's start as we mean to go on and talk about fear. Because there're twelve gruesome months stretching out ahead of us with nothing good in them but The Witcher 3, possible entry into D'n'D and drugs. And if that isn't scary, I'm not every kind of screwed up and also Pope Beneficent I.

Horror-flavoured video games don't tend to make much sense. Here's why; I play games for, among other things, a sense of empowerment. The kind of control you don't get in life, unless you're a practicing psychopath. So when the barista at Cafe Nero is curt with me, I don't sneak into the back room and lift the day's take from a strongbox with my mad lockpicking skills, slit the guy up from taint to throat and warm my penis in the wound. I go home and play a game where I can do that.

But horror games should be about making you feel helpless and confused in the face of a nebulous, insidious force you don't fully understand, because that's what fear is made of. 

People like Capcom and the makers of films and video games too numerous to mention do not understand this. Because when you introduce zombies as a unhealthy thing to be around, putting a shotgun in the players' hands is only going to undermine that sense of threat. And restricting the amount of ammo you're going to find for it just makes ordinance accountancy the more significant worry. 

Massive, slack-jawed lad holding a tree, right in front of you: The new face of fear.

When your bullet savings account is more concerning than a crazed, chainsaw-wielding murderer with a prolapse for a face, I would say that's a failure at horror.

So I'm not the kind of person thats plays horror games. But it's not like I'm the kind of person that plays games where everything is sunshine and jewels and cartoon pigs and some kind of clash of multiple clans, because that wouldn't make me a person, but an infinitesimal fraction of a dollar sign in the eye of a publisher while he's masturbating to demographic figures.  

Anyway, these are antagonists in games that don't identify as horror, but make me experience fear in a life where I get enough of that at the thought of leaving the house for coffee. 

As seen in Far Cry 3 and 4:

The Far Cry series never really got into its stride until number 3. And then number 4 was just exactly the same game but in the Himalayas. So also good, I guess? It's around this time that the franchise became more about stealthy jungle-Rambo massacres and less GI dog-mutant or Red Cross with guns. And the right kind of stealth too. The kind where if you play your cards right, you are the scariest thing on the island.

When I'm playing this game and you see this man, you are half a second from a lung-full of jungle knife. 

It was the pirates or mercenaries lying awake at night dreading the entitled SoCal douchebag at the other end of the machete rather than the other way around. And these games give you plenty of opportunities to give some South Pacific meth addict a good reason to regret at least one decision he made recently, but is only really half of what the games are about.

The Far Cry worlds are lousy with enemy outposts, drug farms and fortresses but no matter how crammed with ornery dudes and assault rifles, these bits are civilisation compared to the thousands of lethal acres the developers built around them. These are games where you can get your shit wrecked crossing the road. Amongst many, many other things:

And that's one of the main things that makes them so awesome. Because the minute you leave the road and delve into the jungle, the tables turn. You may be the predator in a military base full of heavily armed guards, but out in the wild, you're nothing but six feet of Asian-American meat feast and it never feels fair.

In an autumn forest full of very well-rendered trees, spotting a clouded leopard before it spots you is like trying to find your keys in another pair of jeans in another room in the dark and your keys have teeth. And if you're more than ten strokes out in open water, there is never not a shark behind you.

Tigers are by far the worst though, my (entirely rational) real-life terror of sharks notwithstanding. You can avoid water. But you can't avoid something that may well have been tracking you the second you left your quadbike and is easily more dangerous than a soldier with three foot of body armour in every direction and a flamethrower and is also basically fucking invisible.

Make no mistake: Far Cry is Darwinism in action. Try disagreeing while you're being pooped out the back of a tiger. Doesn't work.

As seen in several Final Fantasy: 

The Japanese don't experience irony like the rest of us, so when we hear of a monster called a 'malboro' they don't understand how we can be surprised that it's not just a cloud of smoke spraying out of a footballer's wife. Oh, wait it's Marlboro? Sorry, I take it back, Japan. I can see how you missed that.

Besides looking like a Sarlacc-squid hybrid, malboros feature all over the Final Fantasy spectrum of games as shitty enemies whose halitosis causes a noxious spray of status effects. To those of you who don't play RPGs because you're too busy having sex and finding closure from life's challenges, a status effect is much like an STI. And getting caught short by a Great Malboro means you're getting blasted with basically every STI known to science at once. So at this point, everyone knows what to do: Scream for a doctor and hope your last fevered words aren't too stupid.

Damn. And it really doesn't look any better post-3D graphics engines. 

As seen in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim:

Skyrim was a masterclass in open-world design. It was also buggy as all hell: riddled with bad writing and acting, technical faults, pointlessly obtuse difficulty spikes and spiders. But, again, totally awesome. It is possibly the ultimate flawed gem. Because for every shopkeeper that floated into the air and got stuck halfway through a wall without shutting up about her goddamn wares, there were hours of organic adventuring fun stretching out as far as the mediocre draw distance could cope with. 

Much like Far Cry, the land of Skyrim was also stuffed with assholes that wanted nothing but your precious Khajiit coat or gold or just didn't like your face or whatever. So you got killed pretty often. Some of the things that killed you were probably just folk trying to feed the families; pretty much everything else that did was ripped off from Tolkien and understandably upset about it. But did they really have to take it out on your sensitive elf skin?

Eh?

So there are trolls and giants and orcs and goblin-flavoured, subterranean terrors and all the rest of it. But there are also monsters copied from other works of fiction! Like spriggans. And dragons obviously. Which for supposedly extinct creatures are worryingly pest-like. 

Hagravens are one of the most dangerous denizens of Skyrim and actually not from Tolkien or Medieval mythology. Because they're Greek. The treacherous sirens are half-woman, half-bird creatures and while they're fairly sexy, mostly, hagravens will have much the same effect on your turgid, fantasy erection as your character: withering magic death and avian ticks. These things are seriously unsexy. Perhaps dangerously so. 

And speaking of dangerous, this is a world where 'dragon' is basically a form of weather. Wait hang on, that might be the best idea I've ever had. Can you imagine the weatherman coming on and saying that? Well you don't need to. And also it's Prince Charles doing it.  

As seen in Mass Effect 3:

If you don't play games, you may be beginning to notice that the creators of some of these beloved products haven't gotten over Tolkien. And you'd be right. Because no-one has. This is why.

The twisted face of evil in the Lord of the Rings is probably the generic orc, because Sauron doesn't have a face. He's a floating eye made of fire. Tolkien knew, that to make something truly awful, you should make it good first. The orcs were elves once, as we all well know if we spent the noughties obsessing over culture instead of socialising. Tortured and mutilated yada yada. Elves are your perfect lifeform: wise, long-lived and suspiciously fey but if you submit them to suffering, become the absolute worst.

This idea, that even the best of us can become savages so easily, is one of the fundamental horror themes. It's why we used to fear zombies. Because they showed us the beast within and how close we are to savagery. Obviously they're not now, because they're everywhere. Today, zombies're just an easy representation of how much we hate each other as humans in an easy, lumbering, mindless package we don't have to feel bad about slaughtering with cricket bats.

The Mass Effect series spent two games building up to one final, desperate struggle against an ancient machine race with a hard-on for the extermination of all sentient life in the galaxy. And the seemingly insurmountable 'Reapers' pull a total Sauron on everyone and mutilate the various alien species into horrible, piping-covered techno monsters. And in equally Tolkienian form, the most intelligent and advanced race become the most awful enemies in the game. And the fact that that race is made up entirely of sexy ladies with a penchant for space stripping is somehow just bacon bits on the terror salad.

Did I mention that they're also magic and bi and a few other things that nerds long for?

As seen in every platform game since 1981 & change:

Bottomless and spiked pits have claimed more gamers' lives than diabetes. If every loss to the diabolical pits was given a funeral, it would take more material than there is in the universe just to make the ink to write GAME OVER on all the gravestones. So many virginities were sacrificed to Super Mario that Nintendo video game landfill sites are haunted and you can't even access them unless you're twice-certified as a necromancer.

My point is, these fucking holes have caused me more problems than, well, regular holes. And if that isn't scary, then I don't know what is. Apart from the obvious: