[intro]
To paraphrase a song by some old dude or something, “Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends.” Indeed, I’m back to assail your mind’s crotch with innumerable kicks to the balls of your cerebral cortex; that is to say, after a long layoff and way too much Smirnoff, I’ve returned to the soapbox I call home to make with the dispensing of vaguely manic knowledge. You know, for the benefit of the world or something like that. So, put on your walking shoes, thinking caps and drinking bibs, because I’m back in the saddle and ready to ride hard. Can you dig it? CAN YOU DIG IT?????23

…let’s get it cracking then.

[rant]
Like rabid demon bees upon the lovable, inexplicably honey-covered face of Winnie the Pooh, game developers feed hungrily upon our minds and pockets once the winter settles down. It seems that as soon as the Sun starts peeking in through the clouds, you’re assaulted with ads for “revolutionary new interactive experiences” and such in your e-mail inbox and on your favorite gaming site (which naturally had better be the ‘Nikki…or else *opens switchblade*). Of course, game retailers follow suit, happily awaiting us all to flood their stores and fling money at them like sexually aroused chimpanzees – that fling money when aroused. February makes its appearance, and you get “Post-Holiday Sale!!!” brochures from your local game conglomerate replacing your usual deliveries of cheap Columbian cocaine and Russian rent-a-brides. March and April swing by, and you get the Easter Bunny expelling eggs and Playstation discs from his fuzzy loveplace at “totally awesome prices!!!1” Now, this isn’t bad or anything; it’s perfectly capitalistic activity, right? Game companies and game shops are doing what they can to make money, and that’s only right. They’ve got to support their burgeoning caffeine and porno habits somehow. Thing is, while the game shops are savaging our pockets with legions of sales and humorously stupid sales clerks falling over themselves to stick you with 96 copies of “Big Bad Deer Hunters With Gun Thingies 14” , the game devs are readying themselves to own you harder in a few months with new ideas. Where? At that wondrous mecca of scantily clad women, disturbing Korean boy-love cell phone puzzle games, and criminally overpriced food – the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 to us gamers.

Yes, E3…the craziest three days in May since that time you ate those mysterious brownies your hippie father left in the kitchen and woke up with several new children in Vegas and an inflatable sheep as your wife. Developers are flying around left and right to come up with new ways to sucker us all into buying more of those sweet, sweet games with our money, as opposed to wasting it on frivolous things like food, child support or immediate medical attention when you stab yourself with a lead pipe accidentally while recreating a famous Schwarzenegger moment from Commando (and we all do that, don’t we? You know…TO LET OFF SOME STEAM). Of course, you know they’re also focus-testing, people-polling, demographic-researching and brainstorming to come up with the “right” ideas to hook us with. However, the enterprising gamer that I am, I decided to do the job for them and come up with ideas to slam on disc for fun and profit. It is, after all, my joystick-given duty to uphold the sanctity of my hobby naturally. Here are a few of my ideas; watch for them to be friggin’ huge in 2004 and 2005. Quality deals like this can only be worthy of one phrase: Totally rad to the max.

-Untitled Mismatched Buddy Game
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Hey man, you failed at the Internet—and at life—yet again. They already make games like this!” But what if our mismatched buddies, instead of being random animals and robots, were sexy lesbian zombie cowboy cops from different countries? It’s perfect. Buddy cop movies are big business; if they weren’t, Chris Tucker and Owen Wilson would be selling me lukewarm tacos and dancing jigs for drug money in New York City, and Sean Connery would have retired to a career of making fun of Alex Trebek rather than doing Bad Company a few years ago. So if buddy cop flicks are awesome, then wouldn’t buddy cop flicks with zombie lesbian cowboys from different countries be even more awesome? You could have them meet at a bar in New Paltz, NY and dance sexy dances, when suddenly New Paltz demagog…erm, mayor, Jason West is kidnapped by evil flaming aliens. Then, they team up to go after the evil alien syndicate and save the mayor. But hilarity would ensue when its discovered that one of the zombie lesbian cops is Chinese and speaks with an accent, and the other one is an obligatorily sassy zombie lesbian African-American from St. Louis who lost her father in a bootleg Gucci handbag bust gone horribly awry. They’d try to kiss each other, but suddenly hunger for brains and eat people—and then they’d make a series of comments leading up to this dialogue:

Zombie Lesbian Chinese Cowboy Cop: “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth???”
Zombie Lesbian African-American Cowboy Cop: “I want snack brains, hobitch!” *snaps fingers*
Both Zombie Lesbian Cowboy Cops: “We must watch Will and Grace and touch each other’s happiest of places! But first, let’s go save the mayor!”
Zombie Lesbian African-American Cowboy Cop: “KHAN!!!!!!!!1”

Combine that with revolutionary play mechanics such as shooting things, driving things, and cowboy-style people-roping; throw in an around-the-world chase and a soundtrack that features Snoop Dogg (because he’s on every soundtrack nowadays), and it’s a license to print money. EA, I’m looking at you on this one. Make it happen!

-Ultra Stereotypical Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots
Game publishers are very much into pushing that elusive envelope. If I were that envelope, I’d be pissed as hell that all these bastards keep shoving me, and I’d stab them in the face with a broken beer bottle. But that’s another story. The point is, game publishers are always looking to shock people with things they’d never expect to see, hear or do in a video game…and what better to do that with than extremely generalized racial and ethnic stereotypes? Okay, so you say they do that all the time. Of course they do…but what if we put them in a ring and allowed such characters to punch the crap out of each others? Now we’re talking. Thrill as gangsta-ish “Black Guy with Wave Cap and G-Unit Necklace” puts down the bulletproof vest and puts on the boxing gloves in a bout versus “Extremely Obese Italian Tenor Guy Carrying Pizza Box”! ‘Ooh’, ‘ahh’ and make other strange guttural noises when “ Generic Asian Bruce Lee-Clone Fighter” throws down in a three-way melee with “Beret-Wearing French Mime” and “Vaguely George Bush-like American Cowboy Man”! See the sparks fly as “Hispanic Woman with Lowrider and Unexplained ‘Jennifer Lopez’ Complex” practices the sweet science with “Pan-Arabic Woman with Veil who Belly Dances, Summons Snakes with Flutes and References Camels in Combat for Absolutely No Good Reason”! It’d be excellent; you could have the ring card girls be uncomfortably buxom, you could have each character use stereotype-appropriate special techniques like “Breakdance Punch” for the black guy and “Super High-Pitched Operatic Shriek and Pizza Slice Combo” for the tenor…and for the finishing touch, you could secure elusive street cred with Michael Buffer acting as the announcer, and Snoop Dogg on the game soundtrack…you know, because he’s on every soundtrack for everything now. Now, I know what you’re saying; this is basically Ready 2 Rumble Boxing. You’d be wrong, however, because when you punch people in the face, their heads pop-up, too. Innovation, baby! This one’s earmarked perfectly for Acclaim, Midway or THQ, since they’ve basically supported their existence by pushing the envelope, albeit it’s usually the one that Rockstar, EA or Capcom already kicked in the brain two years before.


And Then, Ninjas
This one is a high concept game, so it can’t be just any developer that takes this one on. What’s happening here is a perfect fusion of all the things developers and publishers like to do nowadays when cranking games out for profit and profit (and fun, if we’re lucky) – remakes, old-school throwbacks, and erstwhile heroes that come from sandwich shops or hobo colonies. The idea is this: Imagine, if you will, a game that stars a boy from a small town. He works in a sandwich shop that’s run by the citizens of a small and hilariously filthy hobo colony (they even have hobo sticks and hobo knives!). One day, he leaves the store to grab a smoke when suddenly an orb appears. This orb tells him he’s the only one who can save a lost civilization from the evil monkey dictator Chimpanzor, who’s looking to rise from the dead. A sword falls from the sky; the boy picks it up…and then, ninjas. GENIUS. See, it’s a throwback to the old-school NES games that always had ninjas as enemies for the most illogical of reasons. Seriously, did you ever ask yourself why ninjas would capture the President in Bad Dudes? Or why ninjas would attack you in broad daylight outside of McDonald’s-like restaurants, on cruise ships, in warehouses or inside of schoolyards? It’s because ninjas generally rock face en masse, not because they’re easier to animate or for any other good videogaming reason. So, it’ll be the perfect action game—a game filled with nothing but random repeating locales, and then ninjas attack you. Of course, if you punch them then they blink away, leaving behind hams. A game with such a revolutionary concept can’t be taken on by some hack dev house like say, 3D0 or Titus or something. Therefore, I’m thinking it’s got to be a great Japanese developer, preferably Konami, Tecmo or Capcom. Capcom will make any game you ask them if you give them enough incentive (I heard they’ll code anything if you label it Mega Man – they’ll think it’s a sequel); Konami’s got ninjas in every game they’ve ever made short of Winning Eleven Soccer, and Tecmo’s up to their ass with ninjas. I mean, they’ve got so many ninjas that half of them don’t even do ninja crap anymore; they play volleyball and record softcore videos on the side.

As you can see, these ideas are obviously excellence. In fact, they’re so excellent, they attack the necks of other ideas, leave them for dead, move in with their wives, sleep with them, and leave in their Ferraris without calling back. Seriously. Gamers, watch out for these titles in 2004 and 2005; remember, you saw them here first!
[/rant]

Well, that’s the serving of extra-crispy vitriolic verbals for the day; if you've got love for the writing, want to send me hate mail, or feel that deploying a series of pornographic images featuring pizza men and Al Sharpton to my mailbox would be a great way to show me what you thought of this piece, fire me an e-mail and tell me all about it! I’d love to hear from you…I’ll even reply to the coolest non-virused letters. Later days, Nikki soldiers...