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The internet is pretty popular these days, and a lot of people like a lot of different things about it. But in my opinion, the best thing about the internet, other than this, is the way it has liberated us from having to draw our own maps. There was a time when to create a map, I had to draw a crude, not-to-scale scrawl on a piece of paper. I would sketch landmarks like “church” and “tree” and “panhandler,” and cross my fingers that there weren’t two trees or panhandlers along the route to confuse me. (And I mean confuse me in a “where should I turn?” sense, not in a “is that panhandler really blind?” sense, because I’m never confused by that. I can spot blind panhandlers a mile away. It’s how I pay the rent.) But I digress. At least half the point of modernity is not having to draw maps, which is why The Mafat Conspiracy for the NES is no fun.

I enjoyed Bioshock quite a bit, but I have to admit that the hoopla surrounding it is starting to drive me up the wall. I occasionally am exposed to conversations about whether video games can be "art." As a failing musician often surrounded by budding (and broke) artists, I am particularly annoyed by these discussions. I go to enough gallery openings and performance art pieces to know that Eternal Sonata (as bad as it is) has a lot more cultural worth than the sewage that most undereducated gentrifiers put out. When I think of art I think of snoozeworthy noise bands and uncomfortably suggestive self-portraits of short girls, not fun video games like Bioshock.

True to form, us here at videogamesareboring.com have slacked off enough to write a review of this game not only several months after it came out, but a week (or so) after the baseball season is over. In any reasonable world, no one would care about baseball anymore because – as I’ve said before – baseball is mind-numbingly dull, and shouldn’t even be cared about while it’s going on. Yes, this “thinking man’s game” involves so much boring standing around that people have plenty of time to think about other stuff (like why the hell they’re watching people pretend like they’re going to do something), which is why I think baseball needs some radical re-adjustments to entertain the “I want everything now” generation. Fortunately some radical thinkers have already solved this problem. The solution to the boring-ness off baseball is… performance enhancing drugs.

Do you hate commies? I mean, really hate them? And I’m not talking about the “communists” making iPods and Tickle Me Elmos in Guangdong Province, or the “communists” converting Cuba into the premier sex tourism destination in the western hemisphere (after your mom’s bedroom, yo!). I’m talking about the real deal: Russians. Or more precisely…Rush ‘Ns. Now don’t get me wrong: I know no one likes communism any more. But to play Rush ‘N Attack on Xbox Live Arcade you have to really, viscerally loathe them. Any world leader can sit in his air-conditioned office and press the button that starts WWIII, which puts you at a certain emotional remove from the ensuing carnage. But Rush‘N Attack scoffs at this sort of sanitary, technological warfare. This game requires you to kill dozens, hundreds of Soviet footsoldiers with naught but some sort of prison shiv…just knifing them, one after the other, wave after wave, in a fashion that can only be described as workmanlike.

Regular readers of this site are undoubtedly familiar with my basement-dwelling, wanktastic lifestyle. So it may surprise some of you that I occasionally dig myself out of the ground, go to bars, and get drunk. After an evening of talking about how I'm not going to talk to girls, I go home and do what I normally do: Play video games and pretend that I live a meaningful life (actually, not so much that latter part). But this time I'm drunk, so while playing these games I learn things about my drunken abilities that I really should have realized earlier on in my life: I shouldn't drive while drunk (thanks, GTA), I shouldn't command a naval squadron while drunk (thanks Battlestations), I shouldn't play professional football while drunk (Goodell would suspend you anyway). And sometimes I realize that... I am really drunk and I have no idea what's going on. Such was the case with Wartech, although once I sobered up and played it again I still had no idea what was going on.

I like the word "sucker." Aside from the obvious connotations involved with using a word with "suck" in it, I like the way it sounds: the harsh "ck" and snakelike "s" sounds go well with a sarcastic and mocking tone (which, incidentally, is the tone I use most often). I especially like using this word when it relates to other people, and similarly feel extra bad about myself when it is used on me. Unfortunately, though, I can come up with no other word that better describes the way I feel after having bought (!) this game nearly a year after it came out, and after having read countless articles about how awesomely boring it is. And guess what? It's even worse than I had read

If fear evolved to help us avoid danger, then you have to assume that our fears must be largely rational, even if they don’t seem that way at first glance.  Fear of mice might not make much sense today (unless you are a nice, ripe piece of cheese).  But it makes a lot of sense if you’re a barely-upright primate scampering around the savannah trying to stockpile enough berries to keep from starving, and clever mice keep eating your berries.  So I don’t necessarily expect my fears to line up precisely with the things that could actually hurt me.  But why am I so cripplingly afraid of little girls?

As sports go, football is not my most hated sport. But I do have some powerful and deeply ingrained negative associations with the game. My brain is wired to equate “football on tv” with “no one paying attention to Kate.” This “attention deficit disorder” was so severe during my childhood that I ran away from home. But my exodus was cut short when, while doing some reconnaissance work on my former home, I discovered that my football-watching family hadn’t even noticed I had run away. Even though I had left them a farewell note on the floor in the middle of the room.  Sniff.  If I had been a smarter five-year-old, I would have realized that the obvious solution to my problem was to become a professional football player. And I still consider that option to be on the table. But if NES Play Action Football is any indication -- and I have no reason to think it isn’t -- I probably don’t have any natural aptitude for the game..

The Inuit have 100 words for snow. Well, not exactly. Modern linguist who study the Inuit language have trouble coming up with a list of even a dozen words for snow. So why the long standing misconception? It's not exactly an insult (unlike calling an Inuit an Eskimo, a local slight meaning 'eaters of raw flesh'). It's not that we assume that a culture needs scores of terms to describe their habitat (Did you know that the Polynesians have 100 words for Island?) The answer is that people love to exaggerate. One of the first cultural anthropologist to document the Inuit wrote down that they had four words for snow. The next guy says they have 8 words, and the next guy 16. Pretty soon our grade-school textbooks are telling our children that half of their vocabulary refers to frozen water, Inuit girls never rub noses on the first date, and that there are more pie factories in the Arctic Circle than anywhere else in the world. Speaking of the victims of hype, Capcom's Lost Planet:Extreme Conditions is an excellent example. Gamers everywhere were eagerly awaiting the release of what promised to be the best A-List game since Gears of War. What they got was an big production over-the-shoulder shooter with an arguably dryplot line and Previous-Gen game-play.

Many modern reviews of Herzog Zwei start with a discussion of whether this game is or is not the first ever RTS, but since I'm so amazingly original, I'll... oh wait, I guess it's too late. Simply by watching the game, it's pretty obvious that it contains many of the same tropes as our favorite RTS's. It has a top down, bird's eye view, has various units that you give commands to (and which subsequently get lost on their way to places), etc. What it does not have is many other, um, "qualities" that have become associated with the genre. There is no resource hunting, no discernable plot (at least until you win the game), and no construction of buildings. Since I'm not a huge fan of any of those latter attributes, I can't help but wish that more games had aped Herzog, instead of the later, more popular title Dune.