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:

Worst Things Ever: The 5 Most Egregious Cases Of Intolerance in Comic Books

Superheroes can't always be awesome. While Batman is padding his fists to punch clay monster faces, Peter Parker is still a pizza-delivering virgin. And while Thor is soaking up a Midgard female's genitals with his roaring Nordic penis, Aquaman is still Aquaman.

The Golden and Silver Ages of comic books, which together span from the 1930s all the way to the 70s, gave us some of the world's most treasured cultural icons. Or, if you like, a lineup of mentally unstable ubermensch and hysterical lingerie models using tissue thin premises to spin kick escaped lunatics.

So I've been increasingly wondering what, if anything, comic books have actually ever done for us. For example, no-one I know who claims to like comics books is anywhere near old enough to have lived through those supposed Golden and Silver Ages and barring, what? The first two Burton and Nolan's Batmen, Spiderman 2, Superman 2, the first two Arkham games and arguably a few of the cartoon series, even the comic book garbage of recent memory far outweighs the good.

And taken violently out of context, much as I'm about to do here, these great eras of nerd culture add nothing to the zeitgeist but a pathological distaste of ethnic minorities, women and fat people.

Fatties

Being 'fat' today is much like the medical state of 'alive' except more fun because pizza bagels. To comic writers however, being fat is more like zombieism - a total, all-consuming definition of self and unkillability as a bonus. Let me show you what I mean.

This incredibly unlikely heroine is Miss Etta Candy. Obviously. And in some writer's head she was a quirky companion to the pantless Wonder Woman. To everyone else, her existence was a never-ending chance for the Amazonian superheroine to be a massive, judgemental bitch.

And, surprise! It totally was. 

But if you didn't know any better, you'd think Etta Candy was an advertisement for making your flesh taste like fudge to indulge the space crocodiles that will one day inevitably invade and devour us all. During her long, long tenure as Wonder Woman's official sidekick, she talked about nothing but the fabulousness of sweets and their application in deadly confrontation.

Eat candy: learn krav maga.

Now, I might not know much about the gentlemanly art of hand to hand combat first hand because I absolutely don't. What I do know about is stupid nerd fantasies. So when things like the UFC started and MMA got popular, I was with most people in wishing that some secluded Shaolin monastery would hear about this new fighting tournament and send its best to levitate into the ring and fireball a kickboxer to death. But the sad fact is, most people's experience of fights are drunken slappings outside nightclubs with the all the elegance of a bonobo handjob but less enthusiasm. Which is why it is so especially annoying that all fat people in comic books fight like pretty much everyone does in real life.

Every fat attack in a comic is a desperate launch crotchward. Every submission just sitting on a wriggling villain's chest until he gives up or the authorities arrive. And for a medium dedicated to angsty teenage wish fulfilment, this is a bizarrely realistic stance to take. I mean, it's not malnourished street hoodlums that Etta Candy's smothering with her muffin top, but mostly Nazis and mythological monsters. And any student of history would know that Obese Tantrum Fu and being 90% caramel by volume wasn't how Western civilisation beat either of those things.

Little Boys

It's always important to remember when discussing these more archaic comic books that 'Gay' wouldn't be invented until the late 60s, at least. So a lot of the seemingly grotesque chemistry in these old strips can mostly be attributed to the authors trying to crowbar in role models of a similar age for the main demographic to identify with.

Alright hold up, got to stop you there. Relatable characters is one thing, but pressing your trouserless crotch against a defenceless child in tights is veering more into predatory than paternal territory. Damn. Why is it that the more I think about comic books, the more I'm reminded of organised religion?

Women

Do you dream of writing comic books? Here's a quick tip. When designing your obviously white, male lead, begin by sketching a figure that both mocks the paltry efforts of anabolic steroids and human physiology simultaneously and then squeeze the bulgey result into latex. Sure, that costume is going to reek of salty ape whey and shark hormones, but it'll do the basic job of giving tiny, wheezing introverts something physically impossible to aspire to; and that desperate aspiration means one thing, my friend: nerd money. The cheapest kind of money there is.

Now, I'm not fluent in fake Viking/Renaissance faire wench, but I think this translates as 'Give me your allowance, bullied human child'.

Women on the other hand, are less realistically represented. Since the 80s, they tend to look like four oily grapefruits glued to a lamppost.

We're back to the age-old excuse of wish fulfilment here, which I do get. I understand that this is a primarily young, male demo. I understand wanting to capitalise on the sexual neuroses of that demo. And I understand the implied Brazilians literally all of these women must have, because the reality of pubic hairs weaselling out of their spandex onesies would probably be gross and hard to draw.

But it is not enough to say that women in comic books are portrayed as powerful or in control because they just aren't. It's the female members of the X-Men and Justice League and Super Friends that have the most spectacular emotional break downs and impulse control failures. And I'm including the Incredible Hulk here. Whose superpower is entirely and only that.

That's the legendary mistress of lightning, Storm! Freaking out because she suddenly remembered she's meant to be claustrophobic while battling in an underground chamber that would embarrass most cathedrals for floor space. That doesn't make any flavour of sense. You wouldn't have the chance to have a panic attack there if you genuinely were claustrophobic because you'd have killed yourself and everyone on board when you were squeezed into the cockpit of the Blackbird on the way there.

Asians

Wonder Woman in particular couldn't even approach the concept of not slapping a Jap. I'm not sure it was really her fault. She just couldn't help herself.

And let's not forget that Marvel designed the physical embodiment of everything USA! And they certainly don't have any historical reason to dislike the Japanese.

Pearl Harbour wasn't enough, motherfucker?!

If you're thinking that any of the other Asian races are more tactfully represented, you'd be as predictable as you were transitional, imaginary idiot.

If anything, the depiction of the Chinese is even worse. Eyes get stretched up, teeth get bucked and Rs get dropped with palpable enthusiasm.

Wait, yellow skin gloves? You mean you can masquerade as Asian just by wearing marigolds? If you really were that stupid and racist you'd attack your wife with a bread knife every time you caught her washing up. And what does it say about Batman that he'd be fooled by this mind-blowingly racist 'trick'? Surely this: The last thing Alfred ever heard was "What have you done with my butler, strange Chinaman cleaning my toilet?!"

Blacks

Marvel couldn't trust a black guy with superpowers so an early result of their attempts at capitalising on black youth readers was a man named Luke Cake. Luke was a complicated guy. For one thing, he couldn't magically move things with his mind or own a freeze ray.

Instead, he was perpetually angry but given insanely puritanical censoring laws (which gave rise to absurd bans on words like 'flick' in case the ink on the 'l' and 'i' ran together and it looked like Spiderman was screaming "look out, he's got a fuck knife!") wasn't allowed to swear. So in the end he simply had to spew streams of fabulous nonsense and punctuate his displeasure by putting a heavyweight fist through something inanimate.

Arguably, this demonstrates more stupidity than intolerance on the part of the writers. And if you like, you could explain away everything up to this point with a slovenly lack of cultural research and surrender to clumsy contemporary stereotypes. Up to this point. 

I present, Mr Whitewash Jones:

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. 

That is not ok. Not by any possible metric. There is just no possible excuse you could give for it. Just looking at it and not immediately trying to kill whatever drew it makes you culpable.

FUCK. 

We live in a more sensitive world now. But it's all relative. People whine about political correctness gone mad, so let's hope that when drawing something like this grotesque mockery of the human form today, you're hands would at least know you were wrong for it.